J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

Gazing down at the victim, Bascombe’s voice is hushed. “Okay, so look. This goes without saying, but I want you both to put everything else on the back burner. We’re working this and this only until I say otherwise, and any resources you need, you bring them to me and I’ll make it happen. Nobody drops a body on our back porch and goes on about his business. That’s not how we roll, all right?”

He wanders off once the pep talk is done. Ordinarily it would be Captain Hedges giving the speech, but the captain’s been distracted of late, spending more and more time shut up in his office, working the phones. Even now, he’s here without being here, bending the assistant chief’s ear in an effort to impress, to look like what he hasn’t been in a couple of months: in charge.

But I can’t worry about Hedges now.

“We’ve got our work cut out for us, Jerry,” I say. “It’s not like our squad is brimming with experience at the moment. If we leave anything important to somebody else, odds are it won’t get done right. So you and me, we’ve got to follow up on everything. If one of us doesn’t sign off, then it didn’t happen.”

“You’re preachin’ to the choir, man. I don’t trust these new kids any farther than I can throw ’em.”

I nod, feeling the same way, but not without appreciating the irony. A couple of years ago, Jerry himself was a Homicide cherry, a high flyer from the outside who still couldn’t be trusted to add two and two at a murder scene. He’d come in thinking he would soon be running the place, even gunned for my job at first. Then he crashed and burned, had a kid, put on some pounds, and watched his hairline start to recede. Now he’s all right. He has to be. A lot of the veterans on the squad have moved on.

Mack Ordway finally retired, after threatening for years to do it, finishing the night of the party with a Bushmills in one hand and a Jameson in the other, declaring his love for all men and the end of every grudge. He slept for a week after that, then started up a blog to post photos from his fishing excursions on the Gulf. Then José Aguilar, my sometime partner, a quiet and efficient detective with a pockmarked, expressionless face, got pulled into some drug task-force work, where he impressed the right people and was headhunted by the DEA.

He calls me sometimes just to brag about their budget, which seems to have no bottom.

As Ordway and Aguilar left us, new detectives joined the squad, until one day I looked out over my cubicle wall and realized I was the old man of the unit. Bascombe started treating me like it, too, not wanting anything important to go without my say-so. And I’d taken an unlikely shine to Jerry Lorenz, who just about knew what he was doing these days, except when he didn’t.

“What happened to you anyway, March?” he asks. “You go for a swim?”

“In heat like this,” I tell him, “a man’s gotta keep cool.”

Behind the driver’s seat, the pain shifts into my left thigh, just above the knee. It feels like a nerve, a thin, taut strap of numbness running up the leg, around the hip, and into my spine. No matter how I sit, the pain’s still there, only it moves sometimes like it’s determined not to be pinpointed. Inside the glove box there’s a bottle of generic ibuprofen. Jerry shakes a couple of pills into my hand and I down them with bottled water.

“Better?” he asks.

“Not yet.”

JD, which is Jerry’s nickname for our John Doe, will be transported, sampled, and run through the system. It could take some time to get anything back, assuming there’s anything to get. If there’s no criminal record, no government work or military service in his background, then JD might elude us for a while. We’ve kept others in cold storage for years without being able to name them-and they reached us with head and hands intact, dental work, fingerprints, every option open. JD didn’t even have the courtesy to pick up any unusual tattoos or scars before meeting his end. He won’t be easy to identify.

“We can cobble together a physical description of sorts,” I say. “Maybe there’s a missing white guy of approximately six feet and we’re already looking for him. Theresa Cavallo would know about that.”

“I’ll give her a call,” Jerry says.

“Let me do that. We’re pretty close. She might check a little harder for me than she would for you.”

“What are you talking about? Terry’s one of my biggest fans.”

“Fine, you do it.” My leg flares up on me again. “But tell her I’m the one who’s asking, just in case you’re wrong about the size of your fan club.”

He flips his notebook open in his lap and scrawls a new item at the end of the list he’s been making. The past couple of months we’ve settled into a kind of rhythm. I make the assignments and Jerry does the legwork whenever I let him. He functions well with a little direction. Left to himself, he can’t always think what to do next.

If Missing Persons doesn’t have an open case on JD, then we’ll be stuck waiting for a DNA match. Since the Houston Police Department’s DNA section tends to be overwhelmed and still somewhat embattled after years of public controversy, results can be slow in coming. And when they do come, I prefer if the case is important to have them double-checked, usually with the help of my brother-in-law Dr. Alan Bridger over at the medical examiner’s office. Since Bascombe said to pull out the stops, I ask Jerry to add this to his list, as well.

“So I don’t forget,” I tell him. “But I’m the one who’ll make that call. Maybe you’re right about Cavallo, but I know for a fact that Bridger thinks you’re an idiot.”

“You know for a fact.”

“That’s right,” I say. “’Cause all he knows is what I tell him.”

Jerry laughs and puts the notepad away. A certain amount of ribbing is good for him. Makes him feel like he’s worth the effort.

It’s almost midnight and the streets downtown are relatively empty apart from the occasional car heading home late and the occasional homeless guy pushing a cart along the sidewalk. Jerry leans against the passenger door, silent, and I gaze up at the forest of skyscrapers overhead, thinking about my ill-judged leap across the gully, my pointless ramble through the pines. I may be the old man of my homicide squad, but I am not an old man. Just middle-aged, a few years shy of fifty. But my throbbing leg tells a different story. You are old, Roland March, far too old to find yourself-how does the saying go?

In a dark wood wandering.

Operating on two cups of coffee and three hours of sleep, I meet Lorenz outside the medical examiner’s office at half past eight. He already looks haggard, his brow damp with sweat. The June sun crouches on the horizon, bringing the blacktop to a boil, and as we cross the lot the heat radiates up through the soles of my shoes. My leg, still sore from last night, drags a little. On principle I’m fighting the urge to limp.

Bridger quizzes us for a few minutes in his office before the autopsy begins. Lorenz fields most of the questions, consulting his notes when in doubt. Once he’s satisfied, Bridger leads us down the hall, where one of his many assistants is already prepping our John Doe.

It takes a couple of hours, with Bridger working slowly, methodically, making crisp clinical observations, occasionally translating them into layman’s terms for our benefit. He keeps hedging on time of death, noting signs that the body was kept on ice. This means it could have been transported from some distance, and as long as a week after the killing.

“There are a lot of variables,” he says.

On cause of death he’s much more precise. Pausing over the open chest cavity after removing the heart for examination, he declares that our thirty-something victim died of cardiac arrest, probably brought on by torture. There are ligature marks on the wrists, he points out, as if the victim strained mightily against the bonds as his hands were sliced up.