The pale blue face that stared back at me should have been beautiful-full lips, high cheekbones. She should have had transient blue eyes the color of a Siberian winter sky, but the small fish and other creatures that lived in the canal had begun to feed on them. More of Mother Nature’s handiwork: a death mask from horror movie.
Over the years that I had been a street cop and a narcotics detective, I had seen many bodies. I had looked down into the lifeless aces of countless corpses. I had learned not to think of them as people. The essence of the person was gone. What remained was evidence of a crime. Something to be processed and cataloged.
I couldn’t do that as I stared at this face. I couldn’t detach, couldn’t shut down my mind as it flashed images of her alive. I could hear her voice-insolent, dismissive, Russian. I could see her walk across the stable yard-lithe, lazy, elegant, like a cheetah.
Her name was Irina Markova. I had worked side by side with her for more than a year.
“Elena… Elena… Elena…”
It registered somewhere in the back of my mind that someone,vas trying to speak to me, but it sounded as if the voice were coning from very far away.
A firm hand rested on my shoulder.
“Elena. Are you all right?”
Landry.
“No,” I said, moving away from his touch.
I fought to stand and prayed not to fall as I walked away. But my legs gave out within a few steps and I went down on my hands and knees. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, and yet my stomach heaved and I vomited and choked.
Panic gripped me by the throat-as much from my fear of my own emotions as from what I had seen or from fear of aspirating my own vomit and dying. I wanted to run away from my feelings. I wanted to bolt and run, just as Arli had bolted and run away with me earlier, bringing me to this terrible place.
“Elena.”
Landry’s voice was in my ear. His arm came around my shoulders, offering strength and security. I didn’t want those things from him. I didn’t want anything from him. I didn’t want him seeing me this way-weak, vulnerable, out of control.
We had been lovers off and on for the last year. He had decided he wanted more. I had decided I wanted nothing. Less than ten hours previous, I had pushed him away with both hands, too strong to need him-or so I claimed. I didn’t feel very strong now.
“Hey, take it easy,” he said quietly. “Just try to breathe slowly.”
I pushed at him, wriggled away from him, got to my feet again. I tried to say something-I don’t know what. The sounds coming from me weren’t words. I put my hands over my face, trying to hold myself together.
“It’s Irina,” I said, fighting to regulate my breathing.
“Irina? Irina from Sean’s?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he murmured. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything,” I whispered. “Please.”
“Elena, you should sit down.”
He told one of the deputies to call in a crime-scene unit and ushered me not to my car but to his. I sat down sideways in the passenger seat, bent over my knees, my hands cradling my head.
“You want something to drink?”
“Yeah. Vodka rocks with a twist.”
“I have water.”
He handed me a bottle. I rinsed my mouth out.
“Do you have a cigarette?” I asked, not because I was a smoker per se but because I had been and, like a lot of cops I knew- Landry included-had never entirely abandoned the bad habit.
“Look in the glove compartment.”
It gave my trembling hands something to do, my mind something small to focus on. It forced me to breathe slowly or choke.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
I took a deep pull on the smoke and exhaled as if I was blowing at candles on a birthday cake, forcing every last bit of air from my lungs.
“Saturday. Late afternoon. She was anxious to go. I offered to ed the horses and take care of night check.”
Unlike myself, Irina had an active social life. Where it took place and with whom I didn’t know, but I had often seen her leave her apartment above the stables dressed for trouble.
“Where was she going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where might she go?”
I didn’t have the strength to shrug. “Maybe Players or Galipette. maybe clubbing. Clematis Street.”
“Do you know her friends?”
“No. I imagine they were mostly other grooms, other Russians.”
“Boyfriend?”
“If she had one, she didn’t bring him to the farm. She kept her business to herself.”
That was one thing I had always liked about her. Irina didn’t burden those around her with raunchy details of her sex life, or who she had seen, or who she had done.
“Has her mood been any different lately?”
I tried a weak laugh. “No. She’s been churlish and arrogant, like always.”
Not sought-after qualities in a groom, but I had never really minded her moods. God knew I made her look like an angel. She had opinions and wasn’t shy about voicing them. I respected that, and she was damn good at her job, even if she did sometimes act like she was in forced labor in a Siberian gulag.
Do you want me to take you home?“ Landry asked.
“No. I’m staying.”
“Elena-”
“I’m staying.” I put out the cigarette on the running board of the car and dropped the butt into the ashtray.
I figured he would try to stop me, but he stepped back as I got out of the car.
“Do you know anything about her family?”
“No. I doubt Sean does either. It would never occur to him to ask.”
“She wasn’t a member of the taxpaying club?”
I gave him a look.
Undocumented aliens made up a large part of the workforce in the South Florida horse business. They migrated to Wellington every winter, just like the owners and trainers of the five or six thousand horses brought here to compete in some of the biggest, richest equestrian events in the world.
From January to April the town’s population tripled, with everything from billionaires to barely-getting-bys. The main show grounds-Palm Beach Polo and Equestrian Club-was a multinational melting pot. Nigerians worked security, Haitians emptied the trash cans, Mexicans and Guatemalans mucked the stalls. Once a year the INS would make a sweep through the show grounds, scattering illegal aliens like rats being run out of a tenement.
“You know I’m going to call this in and people are going to come out here,” Landry said.
By people he meant detectives from the sheriff’s office-not my biggest fan club, despite the fact that I had been one of them. I had also gotten one of them killed in a drug raid three years prior. A bad decision-against orders, of course-a couple of twitchy meth dealers, a recipe for disaster.
I had not escaped unscathed physically or mentally, but I hadn’t died either, and there were cops who would never forgive me for that.
“I found the body,” I said. “Like it or not.”
Not, I thought. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to know a person who had become a corpse ravaged by an alligator. But somehow this trouble had managed to find me, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Life’s a bitch, and then you die. Some sooner than others.
Chapter 4
Murder victims are afforded very little dignity at the scene where their bodies are found. Someone finds them, is horrified by the sight of them, calls the cops. Uniformed officers show up, then detectives, then a crime-scene unit with a photographer, someone dusting for fingerprints, someone measuring the distances between items at the scene. The coroner’s investigator arrives, examines the body, turns it over, looks for everything from lividity to exit wounds to maggots.
By necessity, the people who work these scenes-and have worked hundreds before, and will work hundreds more-aren’t able to allow themselves to acknowledge (not openly, at least) the victim as someone’s child, mother, brother, lover. Whoever this person might have been in life, they are no one as they lie there while the scene is being processed. Only when the investigation begins in earnest do they come back to life in the minds of these people as father, sister, husband, friend.