Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

So, no, the decision wasn’t hard. Killing Byers and getting away with it? That was the difficult part. Primo knew the police would investigate a dead councilman with great vigor. He had to make sure none of the suspicion would land on his doorstep.

At least officially, there was no relationship between the two men. Primo had always been careful to ensure there was no paper trail that could tie them together. Any investigator looking for one would only bump into Primo’s seemingly unconnected archipelago of LLCs, none of which led directly to the man himself, and to campaign contributions that would have appeared to come from all over. Primo used aliases for everything. Even Byers didn’t know Primo’s legal name.

The real danger, Primo knew, was Byers’s penchant for blabbery. The man was a human leak, incapable of keeping his mouth shut. What if he told someone about his arrangement with Primo? What if there was something in Byers’s personal files? What if he’d told his little whore everything during their pillow talk? It could get messy.

Primo had to make sure there were no loose ends.

After turning onto Avenue P, I drove slowly past a sprawling auto body shop, an impound lot, a small fabricating plant-the industrial underbelly of America. About midway down, Nancy told me, “Turn right.”

“Anything you say, sweetheart,” I said.

I half expected Nancy to reply “Don’t patronize me, dear,” but she stayed quiet as a gate swung upward and I entered the green and white wonderland that was Enterprise’s off-airport facility.

Inside was a jumbled chaos of official vehicles, marked and unmarked, from Newark police to New Jersey State Police to FBI-a circus of men in dark-colored windbreakers. It was tough to tell if there was a ringmaster for all the madness. From an outsider’s perspective, it just looked like a lot of people with short haircuts running around trying to look important.

I couldn’t imagine what they were all doing there. Properly deployed, it was enough law enforcement manpower to tackle at least two dozen unsolved murders. Instead, they were all focused on one lousy councilman.

Following the lines that told me where to return my car, I pulled to a stop under an awning at the direction of a very distracted man in a puffy jacket that had CHECK-IN in block letters on the back. He kept looking at the vast parking lot to his left where, about two football fields away, all the short haircuts were focusing their attention. With his handheld computer, he scanned a bar code on the back driver’s side window. If it seemed odd to him someone would return a car a mere half hour into the rental, he didn’t say anything about it. Of course, that might be because he never actually looked at me.

“Shuttle to the airport is that way,” he said, tearing off a receipt and waving vaguely toward the main building.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the receipt and making a show of walking in the proper direction until I was out of his line of sight, when I began making my way back toward the parking lot.

Dressed in my black peacoat, dark pants, and rubber-soled dress shoes-and with my own short haircut-I looked coplike enough that no one was stopping me. That was the nice thing about so many different agencies being out here: everyone would just assume I belonged to someone else.

Plus, there was something about the news helicopters overhead-there were now three of them-that added to the general sense of mayhem. I could have been leading around a tiger tied to a piece of dental floss and I’m not sure anyone would have given me a second glance.

As I got closer, I saw most of the action was buzzing around a red Ford Taurus. The parking spots around it had been cleared out and an ambulance, lights still flashing, was parked nearby. That meant the councilman’s corpse was still on the premises, perhaps still in the car.

I kept walking toward it and got to within about twenty yards, where a perimeter of yellow crime scene tape had been erected. I thought about ducking under it-inasmuch as no one had stopped me so far-but didn’t want to risk it just yet. So I went over to a huddle of guys, all of them black or Latino, dressed in jackets that said either CHECK-IN or CLEANING on the back. There seemed to be one guy in the middle who was commanding the floor, so I went over to eavesdrop.

Except as soon as they became aware of my presence, they all turned and looked at me.

“Hey, fellas,” I said.

Several of them nodded, then one of the cleaning guys eyed me and asked, “You a cop or something?”

I could guess the typical car cleaner at the Newark Airport Enterprise facility was probably making about $8.85 an hour and might have had a run-in or two with the law that left him unfond of those sworn to protect it. So I smiled and said, “Not exactly. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner . I’m probably not supposed to be here. So keep it quiet, okay?”

The cleaners grinned, happy to keep my secret and eager to help.

“He’s in the red car over there, the senator or whatever,” one of the check-in guys said. “He’s still in there. They haven’t moved him yet.”

“Really,” I said.

“Eddie is the one here who found him,” another said, pointing to the guy who had been in the middle of the scrum when I came up-a short, weathered-looking Latino.

“No kidding,” I said. Eddie smiled proudly at me, showing off a mouth at least three teeth short of a full deck. I stuck out my hand: “Carter Ross.”

“Hey,” he said, not bothering to take his glove off as we shook.

“What’s your name?”

“Oh, Eddie … I mean Edgar … Perez … but they call me Eddie,” he said.

Eddie Perez grinned again. There hadn’t been a lot of visits to the dentist in his past, but he sure seemed friendly.

“So what time did you find him?” I asked.

“Man, I don’t know, it was like six … six-thirty … My shift start at six, you know? And it was at least an hour in, so like … seven … seven-thirty. I don’t know. Yeah, seven-thirty … eight.”

Well. That was precise.

“And what, he was just sitting in one of the cars?”

“Yeah, man, I was doing Row Q, you know, going through, making sure there wasn’t no trash, making sure they got the gas in them, you know? And I get to this one car and I can tell someone left something in the trunk because it’s riding low back there.”

“Tell him about the roast beef sandwich,” one of them prompted.

“Yeah, yeah, man,” Eddie said. “I went around to the trunk and it smelled a little bit, you know? Like you leave a roast beef sandwich in the car for a couple days and it starts to smell, you know? And people, they do this all the time. The check-in guys are supposed to inspect the trunks, but sometimes they get busy, you know?”

“Right, sure,” I said, like I had ample experience cleaning gamy roast beef sandwiches out of rental cars.

“And, man, I open up the trunk thinking I’m going to find someone’s suitcase and a sandwich or something. And there’s this guy all curled up in there, where the, uhh … you know, the thing…”

“The spare tire?” I asked.

“Yeah, man, where the spare tire is supposed to be. Except it wasn’t no spare tire in there, it was this guy.”

“Tell him about the nails,” another one said.

“Yeah, man, he had these nails sticking out his whole body, you know?” Eddie said.

“Nails?”

“Yeah, it was like someone took a nail gun or something and went bam, bam, bam, bam. There had to be like twenty, thirty, fifty nails in him, you know?”

I immediately got the image of Windy Byers, his corpse riddled with metal spikes, curled up in the wheel well.