Captured in Death, page 14
“Even here in Roxboro?”
“No town is too small for one or two gangs. That might be all they can support, but one or two—you really need two; a single gang can’t survive in a vacuum—yeah. Even if it is just a few members. They like to swagger around, bully citizens. Pretend they’re tough and independent. James Dean syndrome.”
Kenzie chuckled at the reference to the cultural icon from Rebel Without a Cause. The kids today probably had no idea who James Dean was, but they still needed something to rebel against. Still needed to fight for dominance. In a poor neighborhood like the one Emily lived in, it was vital to have something to fight against and fight for.
“So do you know which gang uses red bandanas around here?”
“Yeah, there are a couple of small gangs, and I know one of them wears red. I’ll get details from someone who knows the situation a bit better. And in answer to your question, the robbery wasn’t necessarily a gang action, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it was perpetrated by gang members or was used to fund gang activities.”
“But they weren’t wearing colors when they did it?”
“That would make things a bit too easy for the detectives investigating it. They’re not completely stupid, these kids.”
“We think that the girl who started circulating the picture of the murdered man was a member of the same gang.”
“Oh?”
“She was wearing the bandana when we saw her the first time. We thought—or I thought—it was just a fashion statement. Zachary was the one who put the two bandanas together to come up with the theory that they are both members of the same gang. We went back to the school to talk to her today to see if we could get the name of the John Doe from her. But she was gone. The group of friends she hangs out with, who are not all gang members, said that she hadn’t been around much since we talked to them.”
“What day was that?”
“It was Tuesday that we talked to them before. And then this morning. They weren’t sure if they had seen her since then.”
“Do you have a name? We’ll look into it. Drop by her house and talk to her folks. See what’s been going on with her.”
“We actually…. dropped by there this morning already. Her mom was home; doesn’t know when she saw her daughter last.”
“Is she a missing person?”
“I wouldn’t say so. Not that her mom has reported missing, anyway. She said that they don’t see much of each other. Mom works shift. The girl—Emily Cross is her name—has missed a lot of school. Sounds like she doesn’t get there very often. I have the address and phone number. I’ll text them to you,”
“You got them from her friends?” Campbell raised an eyebrow in disbelief.
“Well… let’s just say that we managed to get them when we went by the school to talk to her friends.”
Campbell coughed into his fist, laughing. “Okay, let’s go with that,” he agreed. “Zachary was with you?”
“How did you guess?”
“Well, the first clue is saying ‘we’ but, even without that, I would still have guessed. He has a remarkable talent for getting information out of people.”
“He knows some people over there. Apparently, he got the previous principal busted.”
“Ah, yes. That was a nasty case that did not endear the school administrators to the parents and community.”
Kenzie thought of how Zachary had not only gotten the information from Principal Lakes, but had also managed to draw out the “loser” kids that Emily hung out with, holding back information and making them ask him about it, instead of the other way around. He knew people.
“He’s a talented private investigator,” she agreed.
“So, with all of that, I suppose I don’t need to tell you the dead man’s identity.”
“Do you know who he is?” Kenzie asked eagerly. “We didn’t manage to get a name. He’s older than the school kids and, if they knew who he was, they weren’t telling. Emily’s mom said that Emily didn’t have any boyfriends and she doesn’t know who her friends are.”
“Always nice to have such involved parents,” Campbell said dryly.
“I don’t think it’s entirely her fault. I think she would like to do more. But it is tough when she’s not home at the same time. Single parenting. Shift work. Teenagers. It’s a pretty difficult scenario.”
Campbell nodded. “Thank goodness for my own parents and their stability,” he said simply.
“Were you ever a rebellious teen?”
“When we played cops and robbers, I was always the cop.”
“Ah.” Kenzie nodded. “So you didn’t struggle to figure out what direction you wanted to go. This was always your end game.”
“Pretty much, yeah. So I was careful not to do anything as a teenager that might disqualify me from being able to serve as a law enforcement officer. That helped to keep me on the straight and narrow. No drugs. No arrests.”
“And you have a name for our John Doe?” Kenzie brought the conversation back to the critical revelation. She hated having unidentified bodies in the morgue. Every body had a name. Every body should be identified. She didn’t like anyone going to potter’s field without a name. Even if they went unclaimed, they shouldn’t go unidentified.
29
Your victim’s name is Trevor Mercer.”
Kenzie immediately wrote it down on the pad next to her and pulled up the file on the computer to substitute Trevor Mercer for John Doe.
“Great! How was he identified?”
“Fingerprints. Not a great match. Not enough index points to be sure of the ID, but enough to get a pop on the system to check it out. Comparing the initial picture to his driver’s license. Showing his next of kin a sanitized photo. They’re going to give us DNA and dental records to verify.”
“Perfect,” Kenzie nodded. With all of those things, they could be sure they had the right man, even with the advanced state of decomposition. She had retrieved enough DNA for the lab to profile, and his dental work was entirely intact. No baseball bat or bullet to the teeth. She had already done the X-rays needed for the comparison, once they tracked down the last dentist that Mercer had gone to.
“So who was he?” she asked. “He must have a record if you got a hit on fingerprints.”
“Just low-level stuff, no felonies. And he was only ever arrested or convicted in Ohio.”
“Ohio! Well, he was a little way from home. Is that where his family is?”
“Yes. He got in some trouble as a teen. Got himself out of there, ran away to New York. Ended up in Vermont.” Campbell shrugged, spreading his hands apart. “Don’t ask me how or why. So we’re trying to track his movements now in Vermont, but there isn’t a lot. He stayed below the radar.”
“Maybe he had a cousin or friend in Vermont.”
“Probably. There is not a big draw for criminals to come from New York to Vermont. Retired couples, maybe. People who want to run B&Bs or take over a family maple operation. But criminals?”
Kenzie nodded her agreement. She saw enough crime, working for the medical examiner’s office, but it was mostly local. Some cartels from other countries. But it wasn’t somewhere that usually drew much interest from petty criminals in nearby states. Unless they were trying to escape something. Start over again.
“And do you know if he was in the gang? The one you were talking about that wears red?”
“I will be looking into it. The bandana is a good lead. It’s hard to know who is in what gangs when the criminals don’t advertise it.”
“He wasn’t the owner of the gun?”
“Not originally. But it has gone through several hands since it was registered, and it is pretty hard to say whether he ever owned it or not. These guys tend not to register the transfers.”
“Well, someone should talk to them about that,” Kenzie teased.
“Yes. I’m sure if they realized it was their civic duty, they wouldn’t be so negligent.”
Kenzie laughed. “Well, I hope this helps you figure out what happened to him. I’m very relieved to have a name. I don’t like them to be unidentified.”
“I’m sure his family will be grateful to know what happened to him, too. Maybe not happy about what happened to him or about the state of the remains when we found him, but at least they won’t have to spend decades wondering whatever happened to them.”
Kenzie reported Campbell’s findings to Zachary when she took a break for lunch. He listened to the details and was happy to hear that Campbell had agreed that Emily and Mercer were members of the same gang and would follow up about it.
“We’re getting closer,” he said, pleased. “Or rather, you’re getting closer. The police are getting closer. They’ll be able to figure out where he was and what happened to him if they keep digging. The main work—identifying him and the connection between him and Rhys’s school—has been done.”
“I hope that they can work it all out. I still don’t understand why Emily would circulate his picture to her friends and acquaintances at school.”
“Maybe it was… some kind of memorial. Making sure that he wouldn’t be forgotten. The more people she got it to, the more of a ‘legend’ he would become. He would leave a footprint. A legacy. Instead of being a nameless, faceless guy the local gang had just offed, he became… a face they would remember, anyway.”
“Still nameless.”
“As far as we know. Maybe when she started to circulate it, it included his name. But later in the process, the name wasn’t forwarded to Rhys, or the message that contained his name was erased, but Rhys managed to save the photograph. But even nameless, he would still be remembered.”
Kenzie nodded in agreement. “And for someone like Rhys… that picture is imprinted on his memory forever. He will never forget it.”
“Oh, Rhys.”
Kenzie could tell from the tone of his voice that he had just remembered something.
“Yes? Rhys what?”
“He was discharged today. He’s back home.”
“Oh!” Kenzie felt some of the tension go out of her. She hadn’t been aware that she had been holding herself so stiff. “That’s good to hear. I’m very glad about that.”
“Yeah. It’s always better to be at home than the psych ward. When you’re feeling well enough to be home, I mean.”
“Of course. I knew what you meant. Sometimes the hospital is a necessity. I’m glad that he’s recovered enough that he and Vera and the doctors all feel like he can be home now.”
“Me too. I might go over to see him this afternoon. Take him a burger or something and just chill at home where he is comfortable.”
“That sounds good. You should.”
“I think I will,” Zachary agreed. “I’m not being very productive today. I keep starting on other things, but I don’t get anywhere. Keep thinking about Emily and Rhys.”
Kenzie could understand that. She was feeling somewhat distracted herself. At least the Mercer case was actually something she was supposed to be working on, so she could obsess over it and still be considered to be doing her work.
“I’ll see you tonight. We’ll do the movie thing, maybe go out for supper, and you can tell me how Rhys is.”
30
They had a good evening. Kenzie was glad to get away from work and to try to put all of her files to the side for a while. She worked hard at the office and, when she left, it was time to hang up her scalpel and spend time with Zachary or do other things she needed to. She wanted to be fully present in those other things, not with half of her brain working on her medical examiner work, while the other half tried to keep up with her social or personal life.
She remembered how much Walter had focused on his work when she was a child. There was no escaping it. When the Senate was in session, he was away all the time, dealing with bills that should pass and those that shouldn’t, wining and dining politicians, developing his strategies and constantly obsessed with achieving his ends. On those rare occasions he was home and spent time with his family, he always brought up his work, what he was doing, what frustrations he was dealing with. Everything there was to know about whatever cause he was working on. Sometimes, it was exciting, and Kenzie was interested in seeing how he worked things out, fascinated with the complex processes he worked through, with how much knowledge he had to have to perform his job. He made everything seem exciting and important.
But over the years, she had learned that everything was not exciting and important. Bills that were defeated kept popping up again and again in later sessions, under other names and sponsors. Bills that passed did not change the world as Walter had promised they would. The world moved slowly. The frenetic pace at which Walter had tried to get everything done didn’t mean anything. The pace did not continue once a bill was passed. It was in someone else’s bailiwick then, and changes happened slowly and gradually. What passed in one session might become too bloated and bogged down to go anywhere. Or it might be reversed again in the next session.
She didn’t want to be like her father. She wanted to give the people in her life enough of her time and intention to know they were important and brought her joy.
So she deliberately put all work concerns aside for the night and just enjoyed her time with Zachary.
They had a good visit, watched an action movie that both of them liked, and spent a little quiet time before bed to unwind and make sure that they were ready for sleep.
Kenzie woke up with a start. Someone was shaking her arm and, as she awoke she realized her phone was ringing. Not the loud ring tone of a call-out, but the muted buzzing of her phone vibrating against the side table.
Kenzie grunted and tried to say something coherent to Zachary, the person who had obviously been shaking her. She fumbled with her phone, pulled it off of the charge cord, and held it up to her ear while trying to swipe the slider on.
“Hello?”
“Is this… the medical examiner? It’s Clarissa.”
Kenzie blinked hard, trying to wake herself up and make the connections.
“Clarissa?” she repeated.
“You said call you about Emily and anything we knew about her.”
Kenzie sat up in bed, trying to make sense of the girl’s voice on the other end of the call.
“Clarissa… about Emily.”
“Yes,” the girl said impatiently. “You said to call you.”
“Yeah. I’m glad you did. You just caught me off guard. I’m sorry. I’m just getting my thoughts in order now.”
“Emily knew him. The guy who died. Who was shot.”
“Yes, I know she did. And she was the one who took his picture and started circulating it around, too, wasn’t she?”
“Maybe. I guess so.”
“They were both in the same gang together?”
“I don’t know if it is a gang,” Clarissa temporized.
“Well, it isn’t a social club.”
Clarissa laughed weakly at that. “Well… I don’t know. A lot of these guys call themselves clubs now, instead of gangs.”
“I don’t care what they call themselves. As long as we can figure out how Emily and Trevor Mercer were involved with each other and sort out what went wrong.”
“You know his name?”
“Yes. Maybe you were hoping that you would be the one to tell me that. If you were, then thank you for at least calling to tell me that part. But there are a lot of other details that are still missing from the picture.”
“Trevor… she didn’t even call him that. She called him by his last name. Mercer.”
“Did she talk about him a lot?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes she talked about him. Sometimes, she didn’t want to talk about anything to do with the gang. She just pretended that they didn’t even exist.”
“Was she involved in… the criminal aspects of the gang? Or was it just another family to hang out with?”
“I guess they were like a family,” Clarissa agreed. Kenzie rubbed her eyes, trying to remember what she knew about Clarissa and what the girl looked like. She had been one of the crowd. White face, blond, kind of tangled hair, if Kenzie were remembering the right girl. Young looking. But they all looked young. She couldn’t believe how young the teenagers looked now that she was older.
When she was that age, she had figured she was no different from an adult. She’d been mature, but that didn’t mean she made all the right choices. Clarissa was racking up her mistakes. Skipping school. Doing whatever the “losers” who hung out together did. She knew her friend was involved in a gang, even if she wasn’t herself. She had known about the dead man and yet had lied to Kenzie and Zachary when they had asked if she knew who he was and who had started circulating the picture. Everything she had done had shown that she wasn’t ready for adult responsibility yet.
Then again, not all adults were ready for it, either.
Kenzie drew in a long breath and let it out. “So you called me, Clarissa. What did you want to tell me? Other than Mercer’s name and the fact that they were in a gang together. Because I already knew all of that.”
“You didn’t know it earlier,” Clarissa sounded pouty.
“No. But things can move fast in an investigation. That’s why you should tell us everything you know when we first ask, so we can get out ahead of the ball instead of playing catch-up the whole time.”
“Yeah… well, Emily wouldn’t want me to be telling you all of this stuff. But I figured… I don’t want her to get hurt. I’m worried. She’s not answering any messages. I thought… she would be back. We could talk. She could tell me what I should or shouldn’t say. I could tell her to talk to you about it, because you could help her. But… I don’t know what’s happened.”
“When was the last time you heard from her?”
“I’m not sure. Wednesday or Thursday.”
“Did she tell you what was going on? Anything about why Mercer was killed? Why she was sharing his picture with everyone?”
