Every Kind of Wicked. Lisa Black
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somewhere among the graves as well. They made a somber and all too familiar tableau. A frigid breeze lifted her hair, chilled her neck, and moved on.
“A dead guy in a cemetery,” Riley said. “That’s—what’s the word?”
“Weird?” Maggie suggested.
“I was going to say redundant.” He took a step closer to the body and she spread out both arms like a railroad crossing, stopping both detectives. It wouldn’t hold them for long, she knew.
She crouched, looking not at the body but the ground around it, finally poking the ground with a latex-gloved finger.
“Shoe prints?” Jack asked.
She answered with disappointment. The canopy of trees in the cemetery kept the grass sparse, and if the man had been killed during a thaw there might be nice prints in the Ohio clay-mud. But the ground had been frozen much too solid for the killer’s feet to create prints. At least she didn’t have to pour casts, always a chore in any kind of weather, but especially in snow where the reaction as the cast hardened created warmth and melted the print. A forensic Catch-22.
The cops took this as an all-clear and moved closer to the body. So did she. The patrolman stayed where he was. He had already strung yellow crime scene tape across the now-opened gates at either end of the cemetery and the high stone walls protected the rest. Crowd control at an inner-city cemetery on a snowy weekday didn’t present much of a problem. Outside those walls, office buildings towered over the scene, only half a mile from the Public Square. Cars hummed along the surrounding streets, calm now that the morning rush hour had ended. She could work in relative, if chilly, peace.
Maggie observed their young victim. He lay facing the sky, eyes unable to shut against the precipitation. He wore jeans, a T-shirt, and a satin jacket that would have been at home inside a disco circa 1985, with thin padding unlikely to be much protection against Cleveland weather in mid-December. Maggie put his age at about twenty-five. He had brown hair, brown eyes, and a deeper hue to his skin even with the pallor of death over it, possibly mixed-race. His hair was cut short, no apparent piercings or tattoos that she could see.
“Any ID?” Riley asked. “Wallet? Phone?”
She patted his pockets—empty—and they couldn’t turn him over to examine any rear pockets until the Medical Examiner’s investigator arrived.
But under the open jacket he wore a white badge pinned to his shirt. It had rounded edges and red letters which said only “Evan.” A streak of red dots crossed right over the v and continued along the shirt. Maggie noted some round stains on his chest and abdomen, and an irregular blotch over his collarbone.
Riley said, “So somebody shot him—”
“I’m not so sure. See those drops? Round spots imply blood fell on him when he was already laid out. I don’t know why a gun would be that bloody when it wasn’t close enough to leave a jagged hole or the powdery soot of fouling. Unlikely that enough tissue would get on the barrel to drip off later.”
Jack had followed her reasoning. “So you think it’s a stab wound?”
“That is my guess, but I can’t be positive either way. Autopsy will tell. But a stab wound would make more sense, if the killer stood here for a second while blood dripped off the weapon and caused those spots. They didn’t come from the victim’s hands—they’re clean.”
“So the killer waited,” Jack said. “Making sure he was dead.”
He ought to know, Maggie thought.
She said, “No injury to our victim’s hands. Either he can’t throw much of a punch, or he was swinging a weapon himself and the killer took it away with him, or this was a blitz attack. He didn’t even have time to put a hand up and feel his own wounds.”
Jack looked around. “So the guy walked out of here with a bloody weapon.”
“Or not,” Riley said. “We’ll have to check those cans at the exits.”
The patrolman had been checking his social media but listening as well, because he immediately put the phone away. “Me?”
“Lift the lid off, but don’t touch anything inside.” As the young man walked off, Riley said, “If it’s not there we’ll have to search the whole grounds. Lucky for us it’s not a big cemetery.”
Maggie continued her usual crime scene examination. She took close-up photos of the victim’s hands, without moving them. His right lay palm up, his left palm down. As she had noted, no torn nails, no bruising, no bloodstains. They seemed in fairly good shape, the skin smooth—whatever the guy did for a living probably didn’t involve heavy manual labor. They were bare, something she never understood since she pulled her gloves out of the closet as soon as the temperature dipped below sixty, and wished she could get them out of her pocket now—even two layers of her thin latex gloves didn’t begin to insulate against the chill.
Riley said, as if thinking out loud, “We should check the entire cemetery anyway. This guy was probably walking home from work or from the bar, and somebody saw a target. There could be homeless camping in here—handy stone walls to hide behind, nice and dark at night, not a place that cops or pedestrians would be scoping out on a regular basis.”
Maggie said, “In winter? I’d think they’d want to be near a steam grate, or up against the window of an occupied building. I can’t imagine anything colder than a cemetery in winter.”
“Yeah, the only people around have zero body warmth.” Riley chuckled at his own joke. “But break into one of those little mausoleums and you could probably start a small fire without anyone noticing. Or maybe your standard mugger saw this guy taking a nice, isolated shortcut . . . it would have had to be before this place closed, though, or our victim couldn’t have gotten in. Unless they both jumped the fence.”
Maggie took in the victim’s pants and shoes, free of scrapes. But then the cemetery had the high stone wall only on its two long sides. The east and west walls consisted of a shorter iron fence. The young man looked agile enough, especially if he found something to climb on first to allow him to clear the spiky finial at the top of each picket.
Jack walked around the large headstone behind where the victim lay and alerted her to the slim wallet lying up against the back of the stone, protruding from the gathering snow. After Maggie photographed it in place, Jack gloved up and opened it. Riley, knees creaking, crouched to scatter the snow with one hand to look for any other clues that might be steadily disappearing from view.
The wallet stayed slim because it contained almost nothing. “No DL, no credit cards, and certainly no money,” Jack grumbled, checking all its compartments. Something fell as he did so, and Maggie caught it before it hit the ground. A dark green plastic key card, the magnetic strip clearly visible.
“Credit card?” Jack asked.
She turned it over, showing him that it was blank on both sides. No numbers, no name, only the ghost image, in lighter green, of a scowling face wearing a horned hat.
“A Viking?” Jack asked.
“Cleveland State,” Maggie said.
“Their football team?”
“Basketball. They don’t have a football team.”
“Are you sure? About the school?”
She didn’t take offense at the query. He knew her well enough to know she wasn’t exactly the biggest sports fan in the world. If that were the only thing he knew about her, things would be so much less complicated.
“I went there. Green is their color, too. This must be some sort of student ID card.”
Riley straightened up and looked around at the whitening landscape. “I don’t see anything else. I’d feel a lot better if we could have a sudden, miraculous thaw right about now. Who knows what else is out here?”
Jack dug a few scraps of paper with unlabeled