Sarah Cortez - Houston Noir

“I called the dive team on the way here,” said Waters, shaking me from my thoughts. “Gets us a head start.”

The woman was on her back. Her dark hair covered her face. She was clothed in a torn pink dress that clung to her body in a way that would have been unflattering on a breathing woman.

Waters planted his hands on his hips and faced me. “So,” he said, “I don’t know if they told you this when you applied for the posting or when they interviewed you, but in homicide, we split the duties. One of us takes the scene, the other takes witnesses. What do you want?”

“Scene.”

Waters pursed his lips. “All right, I’ll talk to the jogger.”

He slopped over to the thin man. A uniformed sergeant wearing a wrinkled vinyl poncho waved me to the body. Angry raindrops slapped the bayou with a growing intensity. I stepped close to the sergeant.

“You the new guy?” he asked.

I knuckled water from the corners of my eyes and nodded. “New to homicide.”

“Crime scene folks are on their way,” he said.

I thanked him and moved past him to the body. Her stomach was bloated under the dress in a way that made her appear pregnant, almost. Her skin was grayish green, and something had nibbled at her bottom lip and hanging tongue.

The skin was loose at her fingers and on her feet. There was the beginning of a scar on her left shoulder — a small, partially healed burn in the shape of an X. There was a two-foot length of orange rope tied around her right ankle. The rope was knotted at one end, torn and frayed at the other.

Her neck was a different color than the rest of her mottled body: varying shades of purple, concentrated in a thick line that ran across her throat.

I pulled a wet notepad from my coat pocket, made some rudimentary notes, and pressed myself to my feet. Waters was standing behind me.

“Not much from the jogger,” he said. “We’ll have to canvas the apartments across the bayou for witnesses or surveillance cameras.”

I wiped my nose with the back of my hand and looked at the dim outline of multistory buildings through the curtain of rain. They stood watch over the bayou. A couple of the windows glowed yellow from the lights inside; rich people living above the muck, warm and comfortable in their castles. They never flooded. They never waded against the current of rising water, holding their lives above their heads in trash bags.

“She’s a hooker,” I told him. “Probably trafficked.”

Waters’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”

I pointed to the wound on her shoulder. “That’s a brand. There’s a group that runs a house off of White Chapel. It’s industrial and they have one of the buildings there. Maybe a block east of the Southwest Freeway. There’s a cantina in the front, girls in the back. All of them have those marks on their shoulders. We keep busting them. Doesn’t matter. They find a way.”

Like the bayous.

Waters rolled his eyes. “Lucky SOB.”

A sharp breeze swirled around us, whistling against the frame of the bridge and sending a chill from my neck to my lower back. I shivered and pulled the soaked jacket collar against my neck.

“How so?” I asked.

“You call scene,” he said, “and in five minutes you’ve got good information on who she was, who the perp might be, where we go for leads. It’s almost like you handpicked it.”

Almost.

Waters’s phone chirped against his hip. He wiped the screen with his thumb and answered the call. While he talked, I stepped back to the body and examined the rope at her foot.

The knot was good. It was a bowline, the type of knot that held its shape and didn’t shrink or expand. The other end, the frayed end, was ragged. It probably rubbed back and forth against something sharp until it gave way. The killer couldn’t have anticipated that. The local weatherman hadn’t accounted for three days of nonstop rain, the most since four feet fell in four days during Harvey. That storm was the stain you couldn’t wipe clean.

Waters slid his phone back onto his hip and crouched next to me. “CSU pulled up,” he said. “They’ll start snapping pictures, taking videos. They’ll do all the measuring. You think we need to expand the scene?”

I shook my head. “Nah. She didn’t drown. At least not here. She’s got ligature marks on her neck. She was dumped upstream. The killer didn’t think she’d break loose. We’re not going to find anything here.”

“I agree,” said Waters. “Good call. Once CSU is finished, they’ll call the medical examiner. They’ll send a team to finish up here. Then she’ll go to the morgue.”

“Then we get out of the rain?”

Waters chuckled. “Something like that. Hey,” he said, thumping me on my arm, “since it’s your first case, you get to buy me coffee.”

“Sure,” I said. “Coffee. Beer. Jack. Whatever you want.”

“I like you already, Druitt.”

Delete. My favorite key on the computer is delete. It erases all my mistakes. There should be a delete key in life, something that helps hide from the rest of the world the things you’ve done but regret. Something that masks the errors with your real intent.

I was holding down they key, racing the cursor back to the left side of the screen, when Waters sidled up to my desk. It was three thirty in the morning on Friday.

He toasted me with his cup of coffee, the Styrofoam stained brown at its edges. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “You need to go to Lake Charles and gamble, brother. Your luck is ridiculous.”

I’d been to Lake Charles. I’d gambled there. I’d lost.

“What?” I said. “I’m almost finished with the rep—”

“We got somebody who knows our girl. Says she saw her Monday night.”

“I thought we weren’t heading over to White Chapel until after we have cause of death,” I said. “Then going there with a warrant. Don’t want to blow our wad needlessly. Right?”

Waters sat on the edge of my desk and drew a sip of the coffee. He was slurping what had to be his fourth cup. “We didn’t go. She came to us.”

“What’s her story?”

Waters smacked his lips and set the coffee cup on my desk. “Got picked up in a sweep,” he said. “Had a scar on her arm. Mentioned White Chapel to the arresting officer. Buddy of mine downstairs tipped me. I had her moved for a Q-and-A.”

I saved my unfinished report and followed Waters to the elevator. We rode it to the floor where we do interrogations, talk to witnesses, and argue about the designated hitter and instant replay.

The woman was waiting for us in a small room with gray walls and a rectangular two-way mirror. She was rocking back and forth in her chair, one knee bouncing up and down. She was picking at her cuticles with her teeth. She had stringy brown hair that looked wet even though it probably wasn’t. There was a faded tattoo of Betty Boop above her left shoulder blade. On her arm, there was a thick X-shaped scar.

I stood off to the side and let Waters start the conversation. He spun a chair around and straddled it, leaning on the back with his forearms.

“My name’s Bill,” he said. “This is my partner John. I heard your name is Annie. I also heard that you know about a girl who went missing. One of your friends.”

The woman stopped chewing on her finger but kept it in her mouth. Her red-tinged eyes danced back and forth between the two of us, seemingly unable to focus on either. Her pupils were dilated.

“You high?” I asked.

The woman pulled her finger from her mouth and sat on her hands. She curled her lower lip between her teeth and bit down.

Waters gave a disapproving glance. I guess this wasn’t how we were supposed to start. He softened his voice and tried to hold the woman’s gaze. “You’re not going to get in trouble. We really just need your help.”