J Bertrand - Back on Murder

I can sense a load of bad karma coming my way. To balance the accounts, I call Mitch Geiger again. I leave another message.

The moment I put my phone away, it starts to ring. The caller id displays Lorenz’s name.

“You’re not going to answer that?” Cavallo asks.

“I better not. It could only mean trouble.”

She sniffs. “Then I’m sorry for dragging you out here.”

“What do you mean? I wanted to come. And listen, you can just give me the swab and I’ll take it from here. I have a contact at the ME’s office who can process it for me – ”

“This isn’t your case,” she says quietly. “It’s mine. I’ll handle it from here.”

I try arguing the point, but she’s solid, and not going to be worn down. Whatever she heard or inferred, whatever thought process my interaction with Wanda set off, Cavallo’s determined to have her way.

“I can get it done fast,” I say.

She laughs. “Believe me, nobody has more priority right now than we do.”

“So you’ll follow up quick? I need the result as soon as possible.”

She gives me a cloudy look, so cloudy I’m afraid to ask what’s going on behind it. My phone starts ringing again.

I switch the ringer off.

The back wall of Mitch Geiger’s office features a network of stick-pinned mug shots and surveillance photos, some of them labeled and connected by lines but most marked with circles and question marks. Layered over them, frayed adhesive notes covered in ink. The display could be the work of an enterprising narcotics sergeant trying to map the local landscape. Then again, it could pass for evidence of a psychotic break, the kind of thing you find in the retrofitted garage of a perfectly average neighbor, along with the butcher knives and the stack of severed limbs.

Either way, it sparks my interest in Geiger. Unfortunately, he’s not at home. Eight in the morning isn’t the best time to find the narcs up and at it.

“You know where your sergeant is?” I ask a nearby stoner in a denim vest. If it weren’t for the badge around his neck, I’d assume he escaped from lockup. He scratches his head something furious, then smiles behind his brush-like mustache. Even if he did know, he might not share. In my jacket and tie I’m obviously Homicide. We might as well be wearing gang colors. When you work murder, you assume everybody who doesn’t wishes they could. We’re the first string, and murder is the big show. But a certain type of police sees Narcotics in the same light. There’s no accounting for taste.

For good measure I give Geiger’s mobile number a ring before leaving. By now I could recite the man’s recorded greeting from memory. No point in leaving another message. I’ve done what I can on this one for now.

En route to my desk I’m intercepted by a sullen twenty-year-old in tactical cargo pants and an hpd polo shirt, who waylays me just outside the elevator. He introduces himself as Edgar Castro from the crime lab, claiming to recognize me from the Morales scene, though I don’t remember him.

“I’ve been trying to get through to Detective Lorenz,” he says, “but he’s not returning my calls.”

As much as I sympathize after this morning’s fruitless errand, there’s a tribal imperative to observe. Crime-scene technicians can’t expect to have homicide detectives at their beck and call. The food chain runs in the reverse direction.

“He’s got his hands full at the moment,” I say.

He brandishes a shiny-covered report. “So can I leave this with you, then?”

“You wanna tell me what it is?”

So he starts explaining, turning the pages as he goes. “It’s actually pretty interesting. The victim in the hallway, the one sticking halfway out the bathroom? Hector Diaz -?”

“Little Hector,” I say, remembering what the girl across the street had called him.

“Originally, we thought he must have been leaning through the door pretty far, because he was hit three times in the side. Right here.” He uses his fingertips to indicate holes above his left kidney and between the ribs. “But I had a hard time making sense of that. I mean, if somebody’s taking a shot at you, and you’re returning fire, do you turn your flank toward them like that? For a right-hander like him, that’s not the best use of cover.”

I wonder if Castro’s ever been in a firefight, or for that matter any kind of fight. Making best use of cover, that’s a lesson they don’t teach on the streets.

“So I went back to the scene,” he says, “and took a harder look. The bathroom window is busted open – that’s on the original report – but it looks like it happened a while back. No loose glass on the floor or anything like that. So nobody paid much mind. But when I went outside and started looking through the shrubs, I recovered a 9mm shell casing.”

“Just the one?”

“Maybe the shooter collected the rest of his brass.”

“So you’re saying Little Hector was shot from outside?”

He nods. “What must have happened is, he was holding them off from the bathroom door, so they sent someone outside to… you know, flank his position.” He makes a gun out of his fingers and jams it through an imaginary window. “That would make sense of the angles. He was crouched in the doorway, firing down the hall, when suddenly he starts taking fire from the window.”

The report includes a three-dimensional computer rendering of the action, one stick figure outside the window with red lines streaming out of his stick pistol, intersecting the torso of another stick figure in the wire-frame doorway.

“That’s a pretty sophisticated move, don’t you think? For gang-bangers? The guy with the shotgun must have kept Diaz engaged while they sent the other one outside. That’s fire and maneuver, isn’t it? Basic tactics.”

The cynic in me wants to squash Castro’s enthusiasm, but the kid has a point. In a standoff like this, I’d expect the players to empty their clips and get out of there. Under fire, tunnel vision kicks in. Most people don’t think much beyond the immediate threat. So if this crew managed to improvise on the go, I’m impressed.

Then again, they might have left a driver on the street, and maybe he noticed flashes in the bathroom window and went up to investigate, pumping a couple of rounds through the conveniently busted glass.

“I’ll look this over,” I tell him, tucking the report under my arm. “Good work, Castro.”

He grins ear to ear, making me wonder how long ago his braces came off.

I catch up to Lorenz in Bascombe’s office, and all at once I realize I’ve been outplayed. The two of them sit listening to a third man, hardly acknowledging my arrival. Ginger-haired, with deeply furrowed cheeks and a handlebar mustache, I’m betting this is the elusive Mitch Geiger. His voice trails off when he notices me. Bascombe snaps his head my way, hawkishly predatory.

“Just sit down and listen.” He points with a talon-like finger.

I sink into a chair in the corner.

“Should I recap?” Geiger asks in a scratchy rumble of a voice.

After a nod from Bascombe, the narcotics sergeant repeats what I already know from the folder Lorenz passed along yesterday. There are rumors on the street about an independent crew hitting stash houses, disrupting the flow of product. Some of the gangs are using the hits as an excuse for drive-bys – not that they’ve ever needed one.

“But it’s not about one gang putting pressure on another,” Geiger says. “I’ve been mapping it all out, trying to connect the various dots. This crew is no respecter of persons. They’re hitting everybody in Southwest, and not just the low-hanging fruit, either.”

Lorenz leans forward, looking very serious. “Is there some kind of modus operandi with these guys? Something their jobs have in common?”