Cutting Loose, page 5
"Inverted, head downmost, by the look of it, hands by her sides, which is why they're just visible. Fingertips pointing upwards. Flesh is saponified."
"Anaerobic hydrolysis," said Nolan, a skinny technician in his twenties whose hair was teased upward as though he were in a strong wind.
"Right there," said Mack, "maybe the sole of a foot."
"And possibly silk, there by the wrist," said Nolan, pointing. "Some kind of motif on it."
“We’ve finger-printed the Krugers,” said Mack. “So’s to eliminate them when we look at what we lift here.”
"Sure. Is there a maker’s mark on it? A stamp?”
“Nope. The metal is bare. Maybe the guy used paint stripper to remove any identification.” Mack pointed at an abraded area on the lid. “And maybe he used a grinder there to remove a stamp. I decided to remove the lid completely, Emmett. There’s still enough solder left for that to be checked.”
“Sure. Maybe we can run down the manufacturer from its style and configuration.”
“Yeah. It’s too soon, right now, to surmise how long she’s been in there. Maybe it was way before the barrel wound up here. We need some ball-park estimate before we can start looking at missing persons.”
“Right.”
“Scenario—guy kills his wife or girlfriend. Likely it’s sexually motivated, not money. He couldn’t collect insurance if the body was missing. Or it’s some guy who . . . just likes killing.”
Emmett nodded. “How soon can JD get on this?"
"Three days, give or take," said Nolan. "He's stacked up. Slew of suicides. And, yeah, accident in an abattoir—worker fell into a meat grinder." He permitted himself a slow smile. "There'll be some of that guy in your chicken nuggets."
"So," said Emmett. "The people the Krugers bought from."
"A couple in their forties at the time, Jay and Chloris Gottfried," said Mack. "I've called it in, we're running them down. Though—why would they leave it? Which means, maybe, some third party."
"Sure. Show me where the barrel was placed originally."
They walked into the garage and Mack pointed at the circle of clean concrete where the barrel had stood.
"Never moved it till today. Never had cause to. Tucked out of the way there in that recess. Kruger kept his tool-box on it."
"Uh huh."
"The Gottfrieds had apparently cleaned up pretty well before they left but there were a few items still here in the garage. The Krugers got rid of the rest of the stuff, but the barrel, it was heavy—so, they just kind of let it be. It was there, but no big deal."
"Sure."
"Finally, today, the barrel got their attention. And ours. So, we need to talk to the Gottfrieds."
"Do the Krugers know much about them?"
"The husband said he was in finance. Which means anything you want it to mean."
"Yeah. Okay, Mack. Thanks."
Outside, Kruger met his eye, and Emmett walked over to him. "Sir—"
"Ranger, ask anything you want."
"Thank you, sir. Your cooperation is appreciated. We see a lot of folks who take the other view. I'd like you to talk me through it. The whole thing. Start at the top."
Just then, Emmett noticed the medic who was treating Mrs. Kruger walk over, and he stood aside for a moment.
"Mr. Kruger, sir, your wife will be fine now,” said the medic. “Maybe we can walk her inside. It'll be cooler and she can lay down."
"Of course," said Kruger. "Let's all go inside."
"Really," said Mrs. Kruger as she entered the house between the medic and her husband. "I'm quite embarrassed to have made such a fuss."
"Hon," said Kruger. "It's fine."
"There's a hundred and one ways," said the medic, "to react to something on this scale."
"Well, thank you for being so understanding. Land sakes, whatever's in that injection is just wonderful."
Her husband laughed, and they entered the living room, which had polished wooden floors, a scattering of Turkish rugs, nineteenth-century furniture, and a couple of landscapes in gilt frames.
"My favorite chair over there will do just fine."
"You bet, ma'am," said the medic, and they eased her into it.
"Why, I'm feeling like a baby, being petted like this."
“Mrs. Kruger, I’ve called your doctor. He’s up to speed. Anything you need, give him a call.”
“I’m floating.”
“That’s good.”
“Hon,” said Kruger, “I’m going to talk with Ranger Capps.”
“You all just carry on.” Then a jolt of emotion shot through her; she touched her face and said, “That poor darling . . .”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Emmett, then, after a moment, Kruger led him to a study paneled with dark wainscoting, and they sat.
“I’ve got to say,” said Kruger. “It shocks the hell out of me—that there’s a murder victim right there in my garage. Just there, all this time. Man! And we’re walking around, doing stuff, living our lives. And a body, right there. My God.”
“I hear you, sir.”
“I guess you’re used to all this. But to us—well, believe me, I understand my wife’s reaction.”
“Sure. There’s another world out there, Mr. Kruger, and it’s not pretty. Most folks, praise be, don’t come in contact with it. But that other world—sir, I guess it’s our job—to look into it, make sense of what’s unthinkable to regular folks.”
“It makes you wonder what is real, what’s just surface.”
“Sir, it’s all real. Let’s go back some. The Gottfrieds. Buying this house.”
“That was six years ago. We’d come south, way south, from Spokane. Looking for a fresh start—and a change from those northern winters. I got a job lecturing in economics at Beresford College. ”
“How did you light on this place?”
“Right. March of ’77. It was a private sale. We’d askedpeople we knew down here to call us if something looked likely. One of them—he lectures at Beresford—said this place was coming up, if we were quick we might be first in line. We got in touch, flew down. Clinched it pretty fast. The Gottfrieds were nice folks. It was all easy as pie.”
“That person who mentioned this place . . .”
“Chuck Mead.”
“Did he know the Gottfrieds?”
“No. Just heard the couple living here was fixing to sell. So he took a drive by. Struck him as just what we wanted, called me.”
“Have you any reason now, knowing what’s happened, to rethink your impressions of the Gottfrieds?”
“Honestly, no.”
“Okay. Do something for me, sir. Don’t get in touch with them about this.”
“Lord, no. I wouldn’t step on your toes.”
“I appreciate it. So, let me ask about the garage. Did you see the metal barrel the first time you looked around?”
“Their belongings were still here. . . . I wouldn’t have noticed it.”
“Sure. And subsequent visits?”
“They assured us the place would be clear on the day we moved in. I was a little miffed to see the garage wasn’t totally empty. I was aware of the barrel then, for the first time.”
“And when did they move out?”
“March 4. They called us on that day to say they’d gone —that was a tad early. We were scheduled to take possession on the 7th.”
“And it was on the 7th you saw the barrel?”
“Right.”
“So there’s a three-day window.”
“Yes. . . .”
“And the other pieces that were left, where are they?”
“They’re long gone. You’re going to ask what they were, and all I can say is it was regular stuff, nothing to raise any eyebrows, or I’d have remembered. A box of records, I believe. Things like that. I put it all in the trunk of my car and took it to the dump.”
“Is there access to the garage from the house?”
“Sure. Come look.”
A door in the immaculate kitchen gave into the garage.
“Were these floor tiles there back then?”
“Yes, they were. Oh, I get it. Was the barrel moved through this door?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Pretty tough, I’m guessing. The width of the door. And the tiles being unmarked. Don’t know if you could get a dolley through there with a barrel on it.”
“Right. Let’s step through, sir.”
Beyond the garage, heat-haze quivered on the forecourt. Colors were starkly bright. A straggle of local people stood beyond the police tape. Inside the garage, the shade disappeared for a second in a camera flash.
“Dan,” said Emmett. “When you’re done here, grab me a shot or two in the kitchen.”
“You bet.”
Mack stood waiting by the barrel.
“Okay,” said Emmett, walking into the light. “Let’s move it.”
Emmett, back at his desk, started the murder book and made sure those traces were in place for the Gottfrieds, then asked Mack for background data on the Krugers, even though they seemed to be law-abiding citizens. JD, the Medical Examiner, had returned his call to say he would move Emmett’s Jane Doe up one day to Thursday. Emmett had also decided to run traces on missing persons, starting three months before the barrel was opened, even though, as Mack had said, she could have been killed long before. Just past 3 o‘clock, Mack told him the Gottfrieds had been traced; they lived now in Selma, Alabama, were at present on vacation in Italy, and were due back in six days.
Emmett had a full docket. Until the Gottfrieds returned, and until JD started work, there was a limit to what he could do, so he caught up with the Gillis case—an apparent suicide that relatives were questioning—and, also, a death by shooting of a customer who had just left a Diner. He did not like to take work home, but the Weiss file needed his attention, and he owed Buck Soto a favor or two.
Eighteen months earlier, Emmett had led an investigation that resulted in the death of a cartel boss named Gila Estrada, who had crossed the border into the U.S. to see his daughter, who was dying in a clinic. Emmett had not known which clinic of many was the one in question, so a large operation was set up to cover them all. A week after Estrada’s death, a Ranger named Gus Corbin phoned Emmett to say that the clinic he had raided, in Maplin, had produced something that had been needling him; among the patients was a middle-aged man who looked familiar, but who was listed as an Arthur Regis, a name he did not recognize.
“Emmett—I woke up last night, 3 o’clock, knowing who it was—Al Weiss.”
Emmett laughed. “My, my.”
“Inguinal hernia.”
“Genuine?”
“Yeah, I spoke with a nurse at the time. I mean—nothing to do with Estrada. It’s just serendipity.”
“Hernias—are they painful?”
“We can but hope. Down there by his Johnson. So, he’s there under a new name. Maybe he’s fixed himself some false papers. So, what’s that about? And I’m thinking—yeah, he made himself unavailable when we were looking at that fire.”
“Worth tracking him, just to see what he’s up to. Look, Gus, I’m suspended right now, pending this IA investigation.”
“Sure, but I thought I’d give you a heads up on it.”
“Thanks. Buck will like this. Have a word with him.”
Emmett was reassigned shortly after that conversation, even though he was cleared of any wrongdoing in Estrada’s death. The owner of the clinic near which Estrada had died reluctantly confirmed Emmett’s account, as did a missing witness named Tono Bermúdez, who was found in Juarez by the Federales. Captain Buck Soto gave the Weiss case to Corbin, and Emmett settled into his new posting in Masonville.
He had wondered if his reassignment was a result of internal politics; the media had been persistently critical of what they saw as his use of excessive force, and Estrada had certainly died in ghoulish circumstances. Silence from the brass after his exoneration had concerned him, but he felt his record was solid enough to see him through, and he trusted Soto enough to believe he had no trouble in that quarter, so he accepted his reassignment without complaint.
Many law-enforcement officers go through their whole career without discharging a firearm, and Emmett had had no cause to do so in his new posting, for which he was grateful. His face had been in the media too much, and its current absence suited him well.
Sitting at home after dinner, a glass of bourbon beside him, he opened the Weiss file: he had a couple of hours before the Carson show.
Emmett had found it hard to take Weiss seriously from the beginning. He first came on the radar one night when a police officer in Sefton, cruising a neighborhood after reports of a disturbance, saw him running from a suburban house without his pants. A foot chase ensued, ending when the cop tackled Weiss in a bed of primulas. A teenager pushed open an upstairs window, took a flash photo of the scene, and earned a few dollars when it was published in the Masonville Gazette. The cop was quoted as saying, “Al doesn’t run like a sinner. He needs to work out.”
Weiss, shaped like a seal and balding, was an unlikely Romeo. Though there was no charge, that picture meant every police officer within fifty miles knew who he was. After that, he seemed to keep featuring in minor misdemeanors―traffic violations and the like―until finally he was seen in the vicinity of a fire in a factory of which he was co-owner. No evidence was found against him, and the insurers, after a lot of foot-dragging, paid on the policy. The money did not seem to matter to his wife, though, because she had tired of his peccadilloes and left town.
Weiss had finally become, in police parlance, a douchebag, one of the army of hustlers they had to keep an eye on. His career after that continued its downward trajectory; before Emmett was reassigned, he had interviewed Weiss over an allegation of rigging slot-machines in an arcade he owned, which in itself was a minor matter, but Captain Buck Soto thought it was a way into another investigation, that of money laundering. Emmett found Weiss engaging company, and they established a certain rapport across the divide of crime: like a lot of hustlers, Weiss had a way with him. The investigation, though, never bore fruit, and Emmett had not given him another thought until Soto’s call on Saturday.
He flipped through the file, sipping his bourbon. It was more of the same; the only difference was that a possible death was involved; a business partner, one James Luke Collis, had gone missing after a debt to Weiss had gone unpaid for eighteen months. They had backed amusement arcades that had higher overheads than expected, and Collis was reluctant to pay up. Weiss was obliged to cover the extra costs, and began proceedings to claim full ownership owing to breach of contract. Collis made clear he would contest the case, and three weeks later he went missing.
It was a couple of months later that Weiss checked into that clinic under the name of Arthur Regis. Why had he established a second identity, when he was still maintaining his real identity as well? Perhaps he was planning an exit strategy for future use. Soto enclosed a private note to Emmett in the file saying they should sit on that information until they needed it.
Emmett sighed. When would these scuzzballs learn? So be it: he would go visit with Weiss and try to learn if he had bent a crowbar over his old pal’s head.
Later, watching Carson with a second glass of bourbon, he remembered he had to buy a birthday present for his mother, and made a note on a pad. Emmett saw himself as an escapee: he came from a background that he thought of, in his early days, as white trash. His father was a small-time criminal who tried to go straight, and more or less succeeded, until his relatively early death, and his mother was an alcoholic. He would look around at people his parents knew and think to himself that this was not his life: this was not what the future held for him. There was something else: he had that knowledge deep inside himself that he was special and that, whatever happened, it would not be what he saw around himself in that dreamless neighborhood.
If he had come from a wealthy background, his horizons would perhaps have been wider, but to him, then, as a kid, the only thing that seemed different to his usual life was the sleek, polished, police cars that would occasionally cruise those streets like some outside power whose job was to remove whatever that was deficient, to create a world that was not the world he knew. He would see his father fighting his fate, and would wonder about the police’s role: were they there just to remove the human trash, no more than glorified garbage collectors? Was his father on some kind of list?
TV taught him another lesson. Aged seven, he discovered programs like Highway Patrol that showed the police fighting the good fight and attempting to introduce something other than violence―an idea, perhaps, of how life should be. Broderick Crawford, in his fedora and double-breasted suit, taking no nonsense, arrested the bad guys with no doubts as to where his duty lay. Emmett was captivated and finally understood. As an adult, he would smile at those notions he held as a youngster. Reality, compromised and dirty, told another story, but he would never, in those later years, completely deny that idea he had formed of the police as a way of making life better for everyone.
Another world emerged as he grew to maturity, one that held different ideas. Everything he had been taught was turned upside down, and he recognized that, in the new dispensation, he was the enemy. It was many years later, in 1970, when he was a cop on the beat, that he watched news footage of the shootings at Kent State University. That seemed a culmination of the seething discontent of the preceding years: four students were dead, and there was no justification for it. Could not Americans protest at injustice without being shot?
He found himself in the difficult position of both deploring the shootings and yet thinking the students were a pain in the neck; but you do not get shot for being a pain in the neck―at least, not in America. He had never had doubts about his own opinions, in spite of this new landscape, but he recognized the ambiguities that presented themselves to police officers. In an earlier generation, the police had been strike-breakers. They could not be a new incarnation of that. A gap had opened in society that was never to be closed: the dissension was to echo down the decades, and part of a cop’s job, he recognized, was to swim in those waters.
