Every Kind of Wicked. Lisa Black
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awful! What happened? Car accident?”
Jack made his voice sympathetic but ignored her question. “We need to know the name and address associated with this card.”
“But I can’t tell you that—I mean, the cards are usually made up at each individual facility. They, um, they would know who lives there . . . but I might, should, be able to tell you the building.”
“That would be really helpful,” Jack said, perhaps too sweetly. Maggie gave him an odd look; the girl gulped and swiped the card though a reader tucked behind the desk.
Then she told him that that card belonged to the Domain at Cleveland, two blocks away.
“Thank you,” Jack said.
“It’s a neat old building,” she sniffed, handing the card back. “It used to be a YMCA.”
“Very interesting,” he offered.
“Built in, like, eighteen hundred something.”
“Thank you,” Maggie told her.
“Have a nice day,” the girl said, inconsolable, and went to hunt up a tissue. Jack and Maggie plunged back into the frigid winter air.
“I think we ruined that poor girl’s day,” Jack commented. Anything to keep the conversation away from Maggie’s ex-husband and his potential damage.
“Might not be a bad thing,” she said, which surprised him. At his look she added, “Everyone can use the occasional reminder that life is short.”
He hoped this meditation on mortality did not stem from a lack of confidence in their future, but figured it was merely Maggie being sensible. People who work around death a great deal tend to lose the sentimentality and increase the respect. She pointed to the building they sought, looming through the falling snow at East 22nd and Prospect.
The girl at the desk had known her stuff. Built in 1889, the structure had once been the city’s YMCA, those letters still engraved in the stone frontispiece. More interesting to Jack, it stood only one block from the Erie Street Cemetery. It could explain why the victim hadn’t been dressed for a longer trek through the cold. He might have been making a beer run or returning from a meal out . . . though the name tag indicated a part-time job.
A clean, tailored lobby included a door labeled OFFICE, and their luck held. The tiny space held one occupant, a wisp of a young woman with pink tips on her brown hair and too many piercings to count. She didn’t bat an eye when Jack produced his badge and handed her the key card. Without a word she swiped it through another reader, then stared at the minuscule screen for so long, he thought it had malfunctioned.
“Does the card belong here?” he finally prompted.
“Yeah.”
“Great. Whose room is it?”
She switched her gaze to him. “I think that’s confidential.”
“I think you’re wrong. Your resident is dead, and we need to identify him.”
She said nothing, still trying mightily to reconcile her responsibility to protect a fellow student from The Man with any legal ramifications said Man might lower on her, first, and her facility second. It took Jack painting a picture of this poor dead boy ending up in an unmarked grave, plus two phone calls to a supervisor, but she finally consented to give Jack a name: Evan Harding. Also his unit number, the better to fill in a search warrant with because there was no way she was going to let him enter the apartment without one. Whether the stipulation came from her or her supervisor didn’t matter. Jack had figured he would need to get a warrant, so he may as well drop off Maggie and pick up his partner first.
They returned to the Erie Street Cemetery, moving fast to stay warm. The body snatchers—officially the “ambulance crew” although everyone they picked up would be well past the point where medical attention could help—had finally been freed from the traffic snarl and were loading the white body bag onto a gurney.
“Have a nice walk?” Riley smirked. He, along with the rest of the department, believed the official story that Jack and Maggie were dating. He even tried to help Jack along where he could, with subtle prompts meant to steer him into proper boyfriend behavior, because Riley was a kindly man and a loyal partner. So much so that Jack felt much more guilty about deceiving him than Jack could ever feel about dispatching violent criminals into the next life.
“Yes,” Jack said to him now. “Thanks.”
Chapter 3
Friday, 8:48 a. m.
On the other side of the Cuyahoga River, perhaps three miles from where Jack and Maggie stood, Rick Gardiner turned up his collar against the wind off the lake and sniffed the air. They stood outside in the alley between the market and the river, but odors seemed to escape even through the market’s brick walls. A rime of gusting snow covered everything in a thin, unbroken layer, including the corpse. “What is that smell?”
“Dead body?” his partner suggested.
“No. I think it’s sauerkraut. I could go for a hot dog with kraut. And a little mustard.” In the winter months the West Side Market worked as a skeleton of its summer persona, but the few stalls open did manage a brisk business during lunchtime. The place always made Rick think of the 1920s scenes from The Godfather; shopping in old-world streets full of carts and vendors and fresh fruits and sausages.
Will Dembrowski, tall and wiry, pointed out that they had eaten breakfast only an hour before.
“Don’t matter. Hot dogs are like popcorn. You smell it, you gotta have it.”
“You want a tube of mystery meat in your stomach, no problem. But what about this guy?”
Rick looked down past his own slight paunch at the body of the dead man. Straggly dirty-blond beard, straggly dirty-blond hair, skin and features that appeared to be a mix of several different racial categories, clothes that hadn’t been laundered in a month covered with a worn puffy parka. “What about him? The needle still in his arm pretty much says it all.”
Will could not deny that the needle pretty much did say it all. There were no obvious injuries, no disturbance to the ensemble other than the rolled-up sleeve. The man had apparently been sitting on an overturned plastic milk crate, maybe leaning up against a surprisingly solid tower of empty wooden boxes that had once held vegetables. A weathered label on the side showed some sort of beet or turnip or whatever—Rick had never been particularly interested in vegetables unless they were deep fried in tempura. And usually not even then.
Under an overhang and between the boxes and the brick wall, the spot felt surprisingly cozy despite the December weather. None of the boxes seemed out of place, the milk crate squarely flush, two sheets of plywood still propped on their short ends against the brick. If a fight to the death had occurred there, it had been expertly cleaned up. Most likely this was exactly what it looked like: a victim who took one gram too many of an illegal drug and died a lonely death.
The Medical Examiner’s investigator had declined to respond, reserving their limited manpower for less open-and-shut situations. Because of that, the two cops were free to check the pockets and move the body.
Rick put on latex gloves for this. He didn’t like touching dead people, or dead people’s stuff, and especially dead homeless people’s stuff. His nose wrinkled just to flip the coat open. “Bet he didn’t smell too good when he was alive . . . certainly not now.”
Will said, “That’s one helpful thing about the cold. Everything about this would be worse in August. Not only him but old food, rotten meat. Bugs.”
Rick pulled the pockets open, gingerly searching the insides, wary of open syringes or needles. “You’re one of those friggin’ optimistic people, aren’t you?”
“Guess so.”
“I hate that.”
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