J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

He pauses to let the image sink in.

“And the head?” I ask.

“The decapitation was postmortem. Probably done with a small axe. It took more than one blow-but, see, they all seem to come from the same direction.” He chops his gloved hand in the air, matching his slow-motion strokes to the cuts in the neck. “There’s none of the sawing back and forth you’d get if it were a knife or something like that.”

“So you’re thinking he was tied up?”

“In a chair, maybe, with his wrists secured to the arms. That’s my guess.”

Lorenz stands at the foot of the autopsy table, writing it all down. “And the murder scene could be pretty much anywhere. On the other side of the world, for all we know.”

Once the procedure’s done, Bridger leads us out, stripping off his gloves as he shoulders through the swinging door. He washes up, then runs a damp hand through his regal, prematurely white hair.

“Walk with me,” he says.

We follow him down the stairs and out a side door to the concrete landing designated for smoke breaks. How he can stand it in this humidity, I don’t know. I put my hand to the steel railing and it’s hot enough to scald.

“Here’s what won’t be in the report,” Bridger says, lighting up. He exhales a lungful of smoke before continuing. “Pure speculation on my part, but don’t you think this has a Mexican mafia feel to it? The torture and beheading. Things are going crazy down there.”

“I was thinking of those al-Qaeda videos,” Lorenz says.

“In Houston?” I shake my head. “Anyway, when al-Qaeda cuts your head off, you’re alive to see it happen. They post the video online, too. They don’t drop off the body at the nearest basketball court.” I turn to Bridger. “Neither do the cartels, for that matter. If this was Brownsville or Laredo, then maybe. But who would this guy have to be for them to do him this way, then dump him on our doorstep? There’s no tats on him, so I doubt he’s in a rival gang-and if he’s just an innocent bystander, why carve him up? Why bring him all the way up here?”

“Like I said, just speculation. It could always be some nut job serial killer.”

After a pause, I ask him to rush the DNA lab work.

“Everything is rushed these days, which means nothing is.” He stares at me through a cloud of smoke, pleased with this pronouncement.

We stand around for a bit, soaking up the UV rays and the secondhand carcinogens; then I thank Bridger for the help and get going.

“That wasn’t much,” Lorenz says.

“No. But just to be thorough, let’s check with the Mexican Consulate. Maybe somebody important’s gone missing south of the border. If this is the cartels, they don’t seem to think twice before dusting cops and politicians.”

Lorenz adds yet another task to the end of his lengthening list.

At the Consulado General de México next to I-59, no one seems sure what to do with us at first. We have to explain ourselves to a series of increasingly senior officials until a small, elegant man in a dark suit and gold watch suddenly appears, ushering us into a small, elegant office. From behind the desk he makes a number of phone calls, swiveling his chair so we can only observe him in profile, speaking softly into the receiver.

“I am sorry,” he says finally. “But leave your card with me, Detective, and if I am able to obtain any additional information. .”

Outside, Lorenz pulls at his shirt collar. “Was that the runaround?”

“No,” I tell him. “That was Old World charm.”

We stop for an early lunch, wolfing down burgers at a Five Guys chain under the highway-the default choice for Lorenz unless I beg for a change.

Back downtown we check in on the sixth floor. The daily news has already prompted a respectable quantity of joggers and cyclists who passed through the park yesterday to phone in their details. I glance over the sheets, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary. No one spotted a suspicious-looking man lugging a headless body. Nobody wrote down the license plate of a van with blood dripping out the back door. We’ll have to compile an index of vehicle makes and models, following up any leads we get, but I have a feeling this won’t add up to much. A project for one of our rookie homicide detectives.

Lorenz comes back from the restroom with his tie loosened and his shirtsleeves rolled up.

“I’m gonna go hit up Terry Cavallo,” he says.

“I’ll come along.”

He shakes his head, but doesn’t object.

Cavallo is the raven-haired, dark-eyed beauty of Missing Persons, her mess of exotic curls the result not of Hispanic descent-my first assumption-but Italian, which I should have figured out from her aquiline nose. Her boss, Lt. Wanda Mosser, used to be my boss once upon a time, and a couple of years ago Cavallo and I found ourselves partnering up on a missing persons task force that turned into a homicide investigation. In addition to being easy on the eyes, Cavallo’s a sharp detective, sharp enough for Captain Hedges to notice and offer her a position. But she decided she much preferred hunting the living to avenging the dead.

When we turn up, Cavallo’s in a conference room talking to the parents of a long-missing kid. Through the blinds I see her on the far side of the table, her hair pulled back, her olive-skinned arms exposed by a short-sleeved blouse. At her throat, the flash of the silver cross pendant she always wears. One of her colleagues invites us to wait. After ten minutes, Cavallo ushers the parents out, following them all the way to the security door, maybe even as far as the elevator.

“You think she’s coming back?” Lorenz asks, checking his watch.

“Not if she saw you.”

But she does come back after another minute, briefly staring us down. “The two of you together? This can’t be good.”

“We might surprise you,” I say. “Do you happen to be looking for any unscarred, untattooed, mid-thirties white boys at the moment?”

“When am I not?” She frowns at her own joke, then forces a laugh. “Just kidding. You wanna come to my desk and take a look?”

“Lead the way.”

Maybe she’s still on edge from the conversation with the parents, but there’s something constrained in Cavallo’s voice. The cheap joke, the forced laugh. There’s always been a certain reserve about her, an aloofness-a necessary defense mechanism looking like she does in a shark tank full of red-blooded cops. But we’ve worked together enough for her to drop that around me. In my book, we’re friends. Maybe having Lorenz here with me is ruining the vibe.

“Everything all right?” I ask under my breath.

She brushes the question off. “Everything’s fine.”

The last time I saw Cavallo was months ago, when her husband came back from his last tour in Afghanistan. They threw a party at their new house, which she’d finally managed to unpack. Smiling and brown from the sun, her husband struck me as a great guy. And she hung from his broad shoulder like a schoolgirl showing off her first boyfriend.

Sometimes, though, in the middle of conversation, he’d stare blankly into the distance while she talked. Not looking haunted exactly-he’d volunteered for tour after tour-but like he might still be over there in his mind, like he might go out on patrol once the rest of us had left, his cheeks black with face paint and his.50 caliber Barrett slung for action.

Later in the evening I got Cavallo alone and asked how things were going. She let out a long and satisfied sigh, but then her eyes clouded. “I’m just happy he’s finally home.” Her voice sounded like it did just now when she told me everything was fine.

After Lorenz explains about our John Doe, she sits at her terminal and punches up a couple of files. None of them look like a match. Either they’re too old or the descriptions aren’t right. Cavallo’s missing persons, unlike JD, do have distinguishing marks, tattoos, and other identifiers. Just to be thorough, she digs through the filing cabinets near her cubicle and shows us a few more photos. Nothing.