All White Girls. Michael Bracken
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nodded to Mrs. Stegmann and her obese white poodle as he climbed into the van, then he brought the engine to life and backed out of his parking space. When he pulled into traffic, Rickenbacher pointed the van toward the bus station downtown. One of the two file folders on the passenger seat contained the material he’d obtained from Mr. Johnson’s office the night before. In the other were a dozen copies of Katherine’s graduation photo. He would show Katherine’s photograph around and see if anyone remembered a nervous young blonde from downstate Illinois stepping off a bus six weeks earlier.
And who might have met her or picked her up.
* * * *
Less than a mile away, someone had turned a hotel room into a Jackson Pollock abstract using only red. Blood red.
Inside the room, officers from the Mobile Crime Scene Unit finished photographing the scene, then called the Emergency Medical Technicians back in to remove the body.
In the hall just outside, a greasy little man stood with Lieutenant Castellano, twitching nervously. “Rosalinda didn’t come in today, that’s why I was cleaning the rooms. I told her if she misses work one more time I’ll fire her. That’s what I’ll do if she ever comes back. Fire her. I’ll bet she doesn’t even have a green card. I’ll bet—”
The Lieutenant lightly touched the manager’s bony shoulder, silencing him. The little man swallowed hard, then pushed his hair off his forehead with one gnarled hand and waited for the Lieutenant’s question.
“You touch anything?”
“Just the door when I opened it. It was 11:30. Check-out’s at 11:00 but the Do Not Disturb sign was still hanging from the door. I knocked and when nobody answered, I used my pass key to open the door. The drapes were pulled shut so I turned on the light. I didn’t see her. I just saw the blood.” He pushed his hair away from his face again. “I saw all the blood and then I turned and I saw her on the bed and—”
“You touched the light switch?”
“Yeah, I turned on the light.”
“You touch anything else?”
“Nothing. I swear it. I didn’t touch nothing.”
Two Emergency Medical Technicians wheeled a stretcher out of the room, a full body bag its only occupant. The Grafenberg Hotel’s manager turned away, almost gagging when he realized what the body bag contained.
“What did you do then?”
“I backed up, backed right out of the room and pulled the door closed.”
“Closed?”
“It wouldn’t do for the other guests to see something like that.”
“Then?”
“I dialed 911.”
“From where?”
“My office. I went straight to my office and dialed 911 and I waited in the lobby until a cop showed up. I took him directly to the room and then I got the hell out of the way like he told me to.”
Both men were silent for a moment, then Lieutenant Castellano asked, “Who rented the room?”
“I don’t know. He said his name was Marky D. Sod. That’s how he registered.”
“Did he show you any identification?”
“I didn’t ask. Why would I ask? He paid cash up front. Most people do when they come here.”
“Do you know who the Marquis de Sade is?”
“Should I?”
The Lieutenant shrugged, then dismissed the nervous little man and stepped into the hotel room where a pair of officers from the Mobile Crime Scene Unit used tongs and tweezers to slip various bits of potential evidence into individual evidence bags, each one labeled like leftovers from a particularly messy holiday gathering. Someone had forced open the room’s only window and had propped it up with a Gideon’s Bible. Air moved slowly through the opening but a dying city’s smog smelled little better than one woman’s death and the Lieutenant covered his mouth with his fist and coughed into it.
“Anything?” the Lieutenant asked the taller officer as he leaned against the dresser, his hands at his side, the palm and two fingers of his right hand pressed against the wood.
“Partials on the night stand and all over the bathroom. Lots of fluids, apparently seminal.”
“We got a cause of death?”
“Multiple stab wounds to the abdomen and torso, defensive cuts on the dorsal side of her arms where she tried to defend herself. You’ll have to wait for the M.E.’s report to confirm what I’ve just told you.”
“Of course,” Castellano said. “Where’d she die?”
“On the bed. There’s no evidence that the body had been moved after death. There’s lividity in her back, buttocks, and the backs of her legs. The sheets and the mattress are blood-soaked and, despite the condition of the room, there’s nothing to indicate that the body was transported.”
The shorter officer looked up and saw where the Lieutenant’s hand rested. “Lieutenant,” he said, “we haven’t dusted there yet.”
Castellano jerked his hand away from the dresser. “Sorry.”
* * * *
At 6’4,” Rickenbacher appeared inconspicuous only in a big and tall men’s shop; at the bus station he towered over the ticket takers and the bag ladies. He used this advantage to extract answers from even the most reluctant potential witness. Even so, none could identify the girl in the photo he repeatedly displayed for their examination.
“When you say she come through here?” A stringy black man the color and texture of a raisin squinted at the photo, his brow furrowed in concentration. The seventeen-year-old blonde in the photo had since turned eighteen, but to the man holding the photo it didn’t matter. He saw a young white woman wearing her best beige blouse. It had been buttoned demurely, revealing no hint of cleavage. She also wore a pair of gold chains around her neck, each bearing a tiny gold cross that nestled in the valley of cloth between her breasts. Her wavy blonde hair had been sun-bleached the color of honey and it cascaded loosely over her shoulders, ending nearly halfway down her back. Her pale blue eyes sparkled and the corners of her lips were pulled up in a coy smile as if she’d remembered the punchline to her favorite joke just as the photographer captured her image on film.
“Month ago,” Rickenbacher prompted.
“She pretty. Real pretty.” The black man looked up. “Lotsa pretty girls come through here.”
“Yeah. This one?”
Shaking his head, the black man returned the photo to Rickenbacher. He’d crumpled the edge and Rickenbacher carefully smoothed the photo as he listened.
“She come through here, I never see her.”
Rickenbacher nodded his thanks and moved on.
A moment later a uniformed police officer stopped him. “You’ve been asking a lot of questions, bothering a lot of people.”
Rickenbacher pushed the baseball cap back on his head and waited.
The cop touched Rickenbacher’s forearm, unwilling to make a scene when he had no backup, but wanting to encourage the bigger man to cooperate. “I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
Rickenbacher’s gaze slowly swept the interior of the bus depot, taking in the flatulent old women huddled under layers of Goodwill clothing, the young Puerto Rican pushing a broom across the broken tile as he bounced to music only he heard through the headphones of a Walkman radio, and the trio of adolescent Marines laughing at each other’s scatological jokes as they awaited their Greyhound limo back to camp. Then he walked with the officer toward the glass doors at the southern end of the building.
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