I looked out the end of the barn, nervous that Landry would come rolling in, even though I knew better. He would be a long time at the scene. There would be no sense of urgency to go through the victim’s apartment. The first priority was to find evidence where the body had been dumped. A shoe print, a cigarette butt, a weapon, a used condom, something dropped by the perpetrator.
Landry was lead on the case. He would stay there and oversee every detail. And he would have to deal with the press, because the news crews, like bloodhounds, would have picked up on the scent of death by now and beat it out there.
Still, I hurried back upstairs and replaced the bills. The copies I folded and tucked inside the waistband of my pants.
The crunch of tires on the crushed-shell drive drew me to the window-the farrier come to replace a thrown shoe. The delivery truck from Gold Coast Feed rolled in behind him.
The world kept turning. That fact always seemed cruel to me. There was no moment of silent respect for the dead, other than within the minds of those she left behind.
Chapter 5
“What a fucking mess,” Landry muttered as he watched the ME’s people load the various pieces of the girl into a body bag. Everyone was sweating and swatting at flies. It had to be eighty-five degrees, with wet-blanket humidity. His hands were sweating inside the latex gloves he wore.
A floater, a dump job, no crime scene, and Estes was involved.
“Why was she here?” Weiss asked with an edge to his voice.
“‘Cause somebody dumped her here,” Landry said, purposely misconstruing the detective’s question. Weiss was a pain in the ass, always with the chip on his overly developed shoulder. The guy spent so much time in the gym his arms stuck out from his sides like he was a blow-up doll.
“I meant Estes. What was she doing here?”
“She found the body. Turns out the DB was someone she worked with.”
“Yeah? How do we know she didn’t do it?”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“I don’t like her being around,” Weiss announced.
“She didn’t ask to find someone she knows dead in a canal.”
“She’ll be a problem.”
Landry said nothing. Weiss was right. Elena would be a problem. She wouldn’t stand back and let the detectives do their job. She knew their job. She’d done it herself, and she’d been good at it. Irina was someone she’d worked with every day. She was going to take the girl’s murder personally. She was probably doing something she shouldn’t be doing on Irina’s behalf at that very minute.
Frustrating, maddening, difficult, attitude up to here. It pissed him off no end that he wanted to be with her. Had wanted-past tense. That was over. Thank God they had been discreet. No one in the SO knew (at least not for a fact) they’d been seeing each other, therefore no one knew they’d split.
“Did she call you?” Weiss asked. “You weren’t up. I was up. Why didn’t I get the call?”
Landry rolled his eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake. You have a bug up your ass because you didn’t catch this case? We got no murder scene, no evidence, no witness, no suspect, a dead body mutilated by an alligator. Say the word, Weiss. You can have this gem. And you can deal with Estes too. She’ll be so glad to cooperate with you, I’m sure.”
“I don’t want it,” Weiss said. “I’m just saying. The call didn’t come through the channels.”
“Well, you go tell the teacher on me,” Landry said sarcastically, as he went toward an evidence tech making a mold of the shoe print Elena had pointed out to him along the bank.
“Why’d she call you?”
Landry looked over at him. “What’s the matter with you? She called me because she knows me. If you found a friend of yours dead-assuming you have any-who would you call? You’d call someone you know. You wouldn’t take your chances on getting the first incompetent moron up on the board.”
Weiss puffed up. “Are you calling me incompetent?”
“I’m calling you a pain in the ass. Just shut up for once and get your mind on the job. Jesus, you act like some jealous woman.”
The shoe print. Landry looked down at it. Maybe it belonged to their perp. Maybe it belonged to some redneck who dumped his used motor oil into the water a week ago. It didn’t tell them anything, didn’t give them anything to go on. The only good it would do to have the cast would be once they had a suspect and could get a warrant to look in the guy’s closet.
“Looks like a boot,” the evidence tech said without looking up. “A work boot. Round toe. Blundstones or something like that with a medium-deep tread.”
“Are you doing the tire tracks?” Such as they were. A few ridges in the powdered shell along the other side of the canal. A stiff wind would blow them away.
“Grant is on her way. She’s better with the fragile ones.”
Landry jammed his hands at his waist and looked around. They had stretched the yellow tape across the road from his car to the bank. Behind the barrier was a bottleneck of white-and-green county cruisers, unmarked sedans, the ME’s van. News vans had rolled in to further choke off the only way in or out of this backwater shit hole.
The reporters swooped in on a death scene almost as fast as the buzzards and were just as hungry and noisy. A corpse to feed on? Their favorite fodder. They didn’t get that many in the Wellington environs, though the statistic climbed a little each year. The area was growing fast. Construction was constant. And with the influx of people came an increase in every kind of problem, including crime.
“The natives are getting restless,” Weiss said, nodding at the growing crowd.
“Fuck ‘em.”
“Hey, Landry,” another of the detectives called from farther up the bank and back into the scrub. “Got something here. A purse.”
The bag was small, cylindrical, gold encrusted with rhinestones.
Landry snapped a photo of it with his digital camera. The crime-scene photographer took half a dozen shots from varying heights and angles. One of the crime-scene guys took measurements from the purse to where the body was found, and from the purse to the boot print.
When the evidence marker went down to mark the spot, Landry picked the purse up and opened it. A cherry-red lip gloss, a compact, an American Express gold card, three twenties, two condoms.
“Guess we can rule out robbery as a motive,” Weiss said, loudly enough to catch the attention of a reporter or two on the other side of the canal.
Landry gave him a look. “Girls don’t get dumped in canals because they carry too much cash.”
“I’m just saying.”
Weiss was always just saying. The man never had a thought cross his mind that didn’t fall out of his mouth.
“There’s no driver’s license,” Landry said. “No cell phone.”
“Haitians have been stealing cell phones,” Weiss said. “They’ve got a racket going. My brother-in-law got a bill from Verizon that was twenty-seven pages long. Calls to Zimbabwe, the Ukraine, all over the world. The farthest he ever called was his mother in Astoria, Queens.
“So maybe some Haitians followed her out of a club, grabbed her…”
Landry tuned him out. Another couple of sentences and Weiss would be into his theory that Castro was behind the influx of criminal types from the islands to South Florida. Maybe he was, but Landry didn’t want to hear about it. He had to deal in the present, the here and now, the corpse du jour. The anti-crime unit could worry about Castro.
He opened a little zippered compartment in the purse. Inside was a foreign-looking coin. The girl was Russian. It was probably something from the old country to bring her luck.
The ME’s people came past with the body bag.
So much for that theory.