Exactly how should a homicide detective walk off of a crime scene he's just been thrown out of? Too fast, stomping off like a runway model, would shout an unmistakable, "My pride is injured and I shit on you all," to any lingering bosses—and the brass were lingering, no doubt about it. Too slow, head down like a whipped dog, said, "I deserve every bit of the profound humiliation you've just given me." John had no desire to telegraph that, either.
He opted to pretend he'd forgotten something in the car, and made himself unclench his teeth and saunter on past, as if his pen really had run out of ink or he really did need a clean pair of rubber gloves, and his chance to solve a very important case—and pay his debt to the man who had put him in the position to do so in the first place—hadn't just been taken away by none other than the Richmond City Chief of Police.
The scene around him crawled with yet more police. With all the dark blue uniforms and dark suits, his formerly quiet little clearing on the shore was starting to resemble a kicked anthill.
Six fresh patrol officers thundered down the path, slowing to cross its rocky shoulder. John glimpsed his old patrol sergeant, who glanced at him and cut his eyes away. Voices shouted over voices as Sarge directed patrol where to string up more yellow tape, and where to move four other newsmen with notepads who'd materialized out of the gloom.
"Can you tell us the identity of the victim?"
"Is there any suggestion of a motive?"
"Gentlemen, our media liaison will respond to all questions, if you all will follow us."
Ever since—while working as part of a street narcotics team—John had taken an evening course in homicide investigation that Pride had taught, he'd had his moments of fantasizing being the primary in a major, major case like this. But his former daydreams of acing a case like this one, directing the investigation, making a reputation as good as Pride's, felt small now. Traitorous, even, when the victim was Pride.
The new bodies split into two rivers of uniformed ants, streaming in opposite directions, as John strode down the path. Two gleaming dark sedans stopped right in the middle of the path and disgorged two men each. One pair wore ATF jackets; the other wore the familiar yellow letters: FBI. They marched past John on their way to the brass as if he weren't there. The patrol officers surrounded their quarries and swept the four newspapermen up the hill like prized morsels back to the anthill. Up the path six more officers surrounded three news cameras and three TV reporters.
But John had worked one other case this big, and he knew that you didn't have to be the primary to crack it. You only had to dig deep enough in the right places. Phone records was a plum assignment, one that often outed a murderer. If John could get himself off the island.
Instead, he found himself wilting along with the uniformed recruits, sweltering in the Richmond humidity and the misty drizzle. The tinny whine of a mosquito right in his ear sent involuntary shivers down his back. At least he could send the recruits to climb the steep paths all the way to the hilly top of the island.
The path to the eastern end of the island wound out of the cool forest and left the rapids behind. It crossed a wide expanse of grass under the Lee Bridge, where people came down off the foot bridge and turned right to go to the river, then passed an outside john and the doggie rest area, buzzing with flies, to head into the woods on the other side of the Lee Bridge.
The path grew skinny, twisted, more sandy and veined with tree roots; it led through woods that grew taller and closer, until it emerged to a strange sight. On this side of the river, untouched marshland sent serpentine tree trunks and tall reeds and cattails out to meet the water. Geese honked and great blue herons flew overhead. The trail might have actually emerged centuries back, into those Civil War and Indian times the tourist placards told about.
Then, across the water, so close you could almost skip a rock there, downtown rose to meet the sky. The Dominion Power building, the Federal Reserve, the big hotels, the bank towers, and MeadWestvaco turned the opposite shore into solid cityscape and, at twilight, a twinkling light show.
It was something to see any time but now. Now the drizzle shrouded the city in gray, and the detail had to leave the path and beat its way through the woods and underbrush to do a thorough job. In another park, about three miles down on the other side of the river, tiny beaten trails led through the tangle of reeds to clearings where the homeless sat on plastic crates, smoked dope, and even built campfires, and you would never find them unless you looked. A strangled girl's body—someone John's girlfriend Lizzie knew—had been dumped there last year, and no one had found her for three weeks.
And it was John's job to look. He could hardly wait to climb around the old VEPCO plant at the south end of the island. As if anyone who knew anything would really still be here.
Wishing he had a backpack full of mosquito repellent, John left the path and trudged into the woods.
***
After a humid and fruitless search, John whipped through the warrant he'd need for Pride's home phone records. He could skip that step for his cell phone—it was a department-issued phone.
He hurried back from the magistrate, eager to get started. As he cracked the squad room door open, he heard, "I can't believe he crawled that far." Detective Trish Newsome, the other woman in homicide, had tears in her voice. John heard her blowing her nose. "A collapsed lung, and bleeding out at the same time? Oh, my God."
"Well, he was in good shape," Detective Solly James, another old-timer, said. A long pause, then he added, "Sarge wasn't any fat doughnut-eater." Solly was nearing sixty and retiring in two months. The same could not be said for him. "This shooter was someone he knew. One round through the arm and into the chest. Looks like he was anticipating a bullet-proof vest."
"Well, he's not military, and he's probably not law enforcement," Mike Little said, having fought in the Persian Gulf himself. "If he were, he'd have taken a cold-bore shot. At eye-level—snaps the cervical spine." He had his two fingers up in front of his eyes, demonstrating, as John pushed the door open and walked in.
Savonn and Mike were typing reports, chairs half-turned toward each other as if they were jabbering away at the same time. Trish Newsome and Solly huddled up with them, cardboard boxes on their laps.
Trish sat, staring into space, then she blinked and reached into her box. "Wait a minute, who'd Arlene give the book?"
Solly peered into his box and pawed through it. "No appointment book in here. I'm doing the checkbook and the mail. Who wants the email contacts?"
"I can do that," said John.
Everyone but Savonn turned and peered over at John, presenting a solid wall of shoulders. Savonn kept his attention on Trish.
"Arlene left his appointment book in the office. We've got that with the past and present cases." Finally he turned to John with a sad half-smile. "Yo, Lazy Boy. You get anything?"
The nickname smarted. It wasn't John's fault that he'd cleared two more murders than Savonn so far this year, off slam-dunk easy cases. It was luck of the draw. "Several hundred mosquito bites, that's about it. But you guys must've got something."
Mike swung around in the big orthopedic back chair he'd purchased and hauled up to the squad room himself. "Yeah, the blood coagulated on the rock, and the shooter left us a message."
Mike reached over Trish's shoulder, holding a digital camera. John took it and peered down at a photo of three short words scrawled in the blood trail with a finger: Ja ja ja.
A year of high school Spanish told John the j's were pronounced as h's. "'Ha, ha, ha.᾽ He knew he was shooting a cop, and he wanted to rub our noses in it."
"You know it," said Mike. "Fuck if he's getting away with this."
Savonn said, "Anybody going over calls and contacts needs to pay close attention to any Latino names. The person who wrote this was wearing fabric gloves and crime scene picked up a couple of fibers. There's some marks on the ground, over in the trees where they fired from, where they were picking up their shell casings, couple of fibers there, too. The dog followed them down to the shore and the trail ended."
John noticed Trish scowling at him as Savonn spoke.
Mike said, "We're thinking they had a boat tied up there to exit the scene."
"Which means they could have parked anywhere," Solly said, and took a sip of coffee. "We'd've had an easier time if they'd used the access bridge."
"We need to canvass every parking lot downstream now, and again tonight around midnight," Savonn said. "Those townhouses that overlook the river, too, and anybody who works at the Dominion Power building down there during the night." Then he shook his head. "Jesus. I keep expecting him to walk in here and ask why we're not out there already."
"Give me the email stuff, I can do that," said John. It might jive with the phone records.
"I think Arlene's got something she wants you in the office to do." Savonn sounded clueless about what it was. "Stick around."
It wasn't like this crowd to refuse help with paperwork. John lowered himself into his desk chair. "Whatever you think, Savonn," he said.
John waited until the others checked their gear and shrugged into suit jackets before he grabbed Mike by the arm.
"Mike, what the hell is going on?" he whispered.
"What?"
"You heard me. Savonn doesn't know I've got the phone records, and he doesn't want me doing the email? And I get this weird vibe from everybody but you?"
Mike glanced around at the rest of the squad. "Well, Johnny..." he whispered. Then he jerked his head in the direction of the door.
The men's room on the floor was often occupied; when he and Mike wanted to have a private conversation, they had taken to using the broom closet next door to it instead. John felt eyes on his back as they walked out.
Mike led the way and pulled the dangling string to turn on the closet's one bare light bulb. Then he fixed John with an indignant green stare.
"You got the phone records?"
"Arlene," said John, and bulldozed ahead. "Tell me. Are they trying to keep me out of this case?" He spread his hands, flapping his arms in frustration.
"Johnny..." Mike looked behind him at the wall.
"One word will do, Mike."
"Well, in a word..." Mike's eyes flickered to John's, then away. "Yeah."
"Okay. Why?"
Mike dropped his forehead into his hand and his fair skin pinkened. "Jesus, John. Don't make me say it. Everybody knows you sort of stuck close to the boss. I mean, nobody on our team thinks like this, but..."
"But what?"
"Well, some guys think you're sort of a...sort of a brown-noser. The boss pulled strings to get you here. I mean, I was in plainclothes for six years before I got a shot at transferring here." Mike looked at him and half-shrugged one shoulder.
And you hadn't "really" earned it. John knew the words Mike wasn't saying.
Pride had been lead detective on the other big case John had worked, had pulled him from the street team to work it. Upon realizing that some of his veteran detectives were not forthcoming with help that John should have been able to expect, Sarge had undertaken a lot of the rookie-training duties himself; that experience was one reason John had gone out of his own way to help Mike out this year. But John had busted his butt these two years, and he had hoped that his record here had quelled some of those old doubts. He'd had a streak of easy cases for a while now, but still, he had hoped that Savonn and Arlene, at least, thought better of him than that.
"Mike." John lowered his voice. "Please tell me they aren't acting like this because they think I'm involved."
Mike held both palms up in front of him. "Arlene didn't say that," he said. "I don't think she thinks that. None of us think that."
"But she was told it," John prodded.
Mike held his hands up again. "I don't know," he said. "But you could get that impression. If you wanted."
John sank back against the wall. "Holy fuck."
***
He sat at his desk, almost going cross-eyed from pages of small print.
Finally a name jumped out at him: G. Evan Clay, calling Pride at home. John knew the name but had never seen the guy. The G stood for George. A confidential informant of Pride's from the days before he took command of the squad.
The calls went all the way back through every page of phone records John had, here and there. Three in the last three days; Pride had called Clay, too, twice. The first three digits of Clay's number indicated it was a cell phone. What was Pride doing letting a CI call him at home?
Clay wasn't a Hispanic name, but if John knew about the j and the h, anybody else who knew Latinos or had a year of high school Spanish did, too. Perhaps the shooter had written it to throw them off track. Clay wasn't even local to Richmond; he was from the projects in Newport News, closer to where John himself had grown up. What was he even doing here?
Perhaps he should ask him. John glanced over his shoulder at the door to the boss's office. Previously sealed in yellow tape, it now stood firmly closed. Inside, Arlene was sifting through Pride's belongings with Sergeant Drentell from one of the other detective squads.
John checked his watch: almost three p.m. God help him, he'd probably have to spend the night with Ma, but he could make Hampton PD before five, traffic permitting, and scare up some known associates of Clay's, a current photo of the guy perhaps, and maybe even Clay himself. John got up, donned his suit jacket, and headed for the parking garage.