When No One Is Watching. Natalie Charles
16
Ten months after Lena Perez vanished, a woman’s body was found along the banks of the Charles River. The call woke Lieutenant Gray Bartlett an hour before his alarm was scheduled to go off.
“I don’t want to speak too soon, but it looks like it could be the work of Valentine,” the sergeant said. Gray didn’t need to hear anything more. Valentine meant his case, his killer. Another dead body bringing down his stats.
He rolled out of bed and staggered to his feet, sweeping his palm forehead to chin and back again before stumbling to the kitchen. One of these days he would feel as though he lived here, in this bare-walled shell of an apartment. He stood in his boxer shorts in the center of his kitchen, gulping the thick remains of yesterday’s coffee and passing his gaze across the empty countertops and the sparse table-and-chair set. He tossed his mug into the sink.
The first forty-eight hours were crucial. After that the likelihood of solving this crime went down precipitously. Gray had set the mental timer already, wondering how many hours he was behind. Had the crime occurred two days ago? Five hours ago? He was out the door, showered and shaved, in less than ten minutes. Not quite the timing he’d been able to keep when he was in the military, but Boston P.D. wasn’t the Marines.
Traffic into the city was light. The entire city felt emptier now that colleges had cleared out for the summer. He made the drive in record time and pulled his vehicle into line behind a string of squad cars parked against a hill overlooking the Charles. At the top of the embankment stood a crowd of people craning their necks like geese to glimpse the carnage. The responding officers had strung yellow police tape widely, blocking off the cement stairs that led down the embankment to the river, and closer to the scene, joggers were being redirected. They were looking backwards, too.
It’s the stuff of nightmares, folks. Keep jogging.
A young officer stood in front of the steps leading to the scene, blocking his entry. “Sir, this is a crime scene. You’re going to have to keep moving along.”
There was a time when Gray might have taken such a statement as an affront to his authority, but somewhere along the years, he’d become accustomed to it, and then he’d stopped caring altogether. It was a perk of the job that he was able to dress in plain clothes—today, jeans and a black polo shirt. No need for a uniform when you spent your workday sifting through crime scenes and interviewing junkie witnesses, but the plain-clothes policy backfired when the endless stream of new kids didn’t know who the hell he was. He reached into his back pocket and flashed his credentials. The officer immediately stepped to the side.
“Sorry, Lieutenant,” he mumbled, lifting the crime scene tape to allow Gray entry to the stairs.
The young officer’s face was fat with youth, but lots of seasoned officers still looked fresh out of the academy. What identified this kid as a rookie were his blue eyes: wide and restless with unfamiliar fear. Gray had seen eyes like that at almost every crime scene he’d ever encountered. They were the eyes of disillusionment.
“Officer Hodges,” Gray read from his name tag. “You’re one of the responding officers?”
“Me and Officer Neill,” he replied. His cheeks were flushed and sweaty, and he glanced uneasily toward the bottom of the stairs as if he didn’t quite believe this was happening.
“First on the scene.” Gray pulled his shoulders back as he eyed the young officer. “You lose your breakfast?”
“Sir?” The kid’s wide eyes snapped back to meet his. “No. No, sir.”
“Then you did better than me when I saw my first body.”
“Lieutenant!”
The shout came from the bottom of the embankment, where Gray observed Officer Jude Langley waving to him. Gray brushed past the young officer without offering a condescending pat on the arm, dipping below the crime scene tape to walk the steps to the scene below. “Officer Langley,” he said as he reached the bottom stair.
“Sir. Sorry it’s so early.”
Sometimes Gray had to remind himself that Langley was a Worcester native. He acted more like some transplant from a region of the country where people still said please, thank you and sorry. He liked Langley. The kid pulled long hours and didn’t give him lip. But if he had one criticism, it was that he was too nice. Someone would take advantage of that.
“Unless you put the vic there, you have nothing to apologize for.” Gray accepted the pair of latex gloves the officer held out to him. “What’s the story?”
“A jogger found her. ME’s on the scene, but nothing’s been moved.”
Gray nodded, slipped the gloves on his hands and approached the small crowd gathered ten yards away. The medical examiner was crouched beside the body, but he rose when he saw the lieutenant. Gray had worked Homicide long enough to know all of the MEs, their strengths and shortcomings, which ones played well in front of a jury, and which ones came across as deader than the bodies they carved. Dr. Jonah McCarthy was one of the doctors whose blood still ran warm. In Gray’s opinion, he was one of the best.
“Doc.” Gray nodded to him in solemn greeting. He never made pleasantries at a death scene.
“Good to see you, Lieutenant.” He sighed and crouched down beside the body again. “Young female, probably early to mid-twenties.” Right down to business.
Around them the crime scene unit continued its work. Outdoor crime scenes were exposed to animals, insects and weather. The dead might have all the time in the world, but the living had to move quickly to avoid losing evidence.
Gray squinted at the body from behind his sunglasses. The early summer morning was already promising to be scorching, and the sun rippled across the water like flashes of silverfish. She was lying in the grass, her toes pointed toward the shore as if sunbathing. It didn’t take a medical degree to see that the woman had met a violent end delivered by the edge of a knife. It didn’t take a law degree to know that he was looking at a murder, not a homicide.
“I thought she was pulled from the river?” The vic’s hair and clothing were dry, and her features didn’t carry the characteristic bloat of floaters.
“No, although the body is slightly damp, probably from condensation,” McCarthy said. “She hasn’t been here long, either.” He gently pried open an exposed wound on the vic’s arm. “Temperature’s been above ninety degrees for three days now, and no blowfly larvae. They’re just starting to find her.” As if on cue, a fly landed on her cheek.
Gray crouched next to the doctor, trying not to reel at the stench of death and grateful he’d received the call before breakfast. The victim’s face was frozen in a grimace, and her limbs appeared stiff. “The body’s in full rigor?”
“Yes. She was most likely killed sometime overnight.”
“Dumped here early this morning,” Officer Langley said, pointing to the earth. “No blood on the ground.”
Gray frowned and surveyed the surrounding area. “Have you been able to