Special Victims.
“Lovely,” he said. “Who is he?”
“Carl Joseph Janovic. Twenty-four years old. Moved in about three months ago. Landlady thought it was important to let us know he’s a high-octane butt pilot.”
“Looks like somebody was afraid to fly.” Blackburn stared at the dark wounds and the blood, which had splattered just about every surface within a three-foot radius. He sighed. “Why do I always get stuck with the nasty ones?”
“Because nobody likes you.”
Blackburn shot her a look and Kat threw her hands up. “Don’t kill the messenger. Just ask Carmody.”
“Carmody can kiss my ass,” Blackburn said, then offered just enough of a smile to let her know he was kidding. Which he wasn’t.
Truth be told, Blackburn had never been a particularly popular addition to the unit, a fact he attributed to his unbridled insensitivity and severe lack of social skills.
His ex-partner, Susan Carmody, an uptight Republican Goldilocks who was more suited to a career with FOX News than a detective squad, seemed to take offense to his occasional remarks about her rear end — which, Republican or not, was quite formidable.
Blackburn had grown up with four older brothers, in a household where such lapses of decorum were not only encouraged, but served as a measure of your masculinity.
So could she really blame him?
Apparently so. Six months after they partnered up, Carmody stopped just short of filing a grievance against him and transfered to Homicide. Rumor had it she was already screwing a White Shirt and was up for promotion. Seemed she had no trouble using the rear end she didn’t want Blackburn making remarks about, but that was neither here nor there.
Bottom line, the unit was short a body and he was an army of one right now. And when it came down to it, that was just fine by him. That way, he didn’t have to spend every ten seconds wondering whether he was properly navigating the battlefield of political correctness.
Besides, Blackburn wasn’t here to win a popularity contest. All he wanted to do was work the case and make a collar.
He looked at the body again. “I can already see this one’s gonna be loads of fun. You got a cigarette on you?”
“I thought you quit.”
“A temporary solution to a long-term problem.”
“Uh-huh,” Kat said. “You know what they say, don’t you?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s just an oral fixation.”
Blackburn grinned. “You speaking from experience?”
She rolled her eyes. “Why don’t you chew on a carrot or something.”
“You got a carrot on you?”
Pendergast shook her head, stifled a smile. “You’re too much, Detective.” Starting back across the courtyard, she said, “I’m gonna go give Hogan a hand.”
Blackburn watched her go, his eyes fixed on what was, without a doubt, another formidable rear end.
Careful, big guy.
Sometimes they bite.
Determining time of death was a science that Blackburn had no real interest in understanding.
Oh, he had learned the basics: body temperature, corneal cloudiness, potassium leak rate, parasite infestation, but anything beyond that was a foreign language to him and he’d never been good at geek. All he was interested in was the final determination, and preferred to be spared a detailed road map of how the medical examiner got there.
Some might say that made him a lousy investigator. And who knows? Maybe they’d be right. But Blackburn had proven more than once that he wasn’t all that concerned with what some might say. He’d cleared enough cases to shut most of them up.
The assistant M.E. assigned to the case, a chisel-jawed Swede named Mats Hansen, was something of a wiz at pinpointing time of death. He usually proffered a guess right there at the scene that, more often than not, proved to be accurate.
“So what do you say, Mats? What’s the magic number?”
Hansen was crouched over the body, staring intently at Janovic’s bloody chest. “This one’s pretty fresh. I’d say two hours, give or take.”
Blackburn checked his watch. “So… what? Around midnight?”
“Glad to know you can subtract.”
The world was full of wiseasses.
“I wouldn’t want to second-guess anybody here, but is it safe to assume he was stabbed to death?”
“Cardio-respiratory arrest is more likely,” Hansen said, then smiled. “Caused, of course, by the stabbing.”
Comedians, too.
“Thanks for the clarification. What kind of weapon are we looking for?”
Hansen leaned in for a closer look at one of the puncture wounds. “A single-edged blade,” he said. “I’m guessing a steak knife, about half an inch wide. We’ve got six fairly forceful hits to the chest and abdomen. At least two of them pierced the breastbone, probably ruptured the heart.”
“Wonderful,” Blackburn said. “He didn’t happen to spell the killer’s name in his own blood, did he?”
Hansen, being infinitely more adept at social niceties than Blackburn, chuckled politely and said, “Sorry, Agatha, no such luck. My guess is he was dead after the first hit. The rest were just for good measure. A lot of rage there. And check out the hands and forearms.”
Blackburn looked. “No defense wounds.”
Hansen nodded. “Happened so fast he didn’t have time to react. No sign of forced entry or a struggle of any kind. Front security gate wasn’t touched. This guy knew his attacker.” He gestured to a crimson smear on the floor. “And it looks like we have a partial footprint.”
“Oh?” Blackburn crouched down, studying the smear, but couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Or heels or toes, for that matter.
“And when I say foot,” Hansen continued, “I mean barefoot. Whoever left it wasn’t wearing shoes, and it’s most likely a woman.”
Blackburn stared at the smear a moment longer, wondering if Hansen had quit smoking too, because you’d have to consume a whole shitload of carrots to see all that.
But if Hansen was right, then the rather obvious theory that had been percolating in Blackburn’s brain — that this had been the work of a jilted gay lover — had just fallen victim to a busted pilot light.
Hansen launched into his usual disclaimer about providing a more definitive analysis once he got back to the lab, but Blackburn tuned him out. If the murder happened around midnight, then one of the other tenants might’ve been awake and seen something useful, like Cinderella fleeing the scene without her slippers.
Who knows, maybe he’d get lucky with this one. Not that he and Luck were on speaking terms, but you never knew.
No sooner had he thought this than his cell phone rang.
It was Kat Pendergast. “I’ve got two words for you and I think you’re gonna like them.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense too long.”
“Naked lady,” Kat said.
Blackburn paused. “There’s a couple ways I could respond to that. What exactly does it mean?”
“I just got a call from dispatch. Seems a cab driver almost ran down a naked woman about two blocks from here on The Avenue. She’s covered with blood.”
Blackburn felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “You gotta be kidding me.”
“I kid you not,” Kat said. “And when the cabbie stopped to help her? She tried to stab him.”
3
Solomon and Clarence weren’t having much luck finding Myra. They tried the usual haunts: the strip mall that held a Rite-Aid drugstore, a Von’s supermarket, a fast-food Chinese joint, and a Taco Bell. Then they checked the 24-hour laundromat behind it, where a lot of folks gathered to get warm on chilly nights like this one.