David Hosp: Among Thieves

Word was, though, that she was difficult to work with. Since joining the detective squad, she’d churned through five partners. Those inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt claimed that her intensity burned partners out. Those less charitable said it was because she couldn’t be trusted, and without trust there could be no real partnership. Whatever the reason, she was working alone when Stone was bumped up to homicide. He’d been told the arrangement was on a trial basis, but had been given no indication when the trial would end or by what criteria he would be judged. He was a team player, so he kept his mouth shut. At the very least, he figured, he could learn something riding with someone who had a seventy-five percent clear rate, no matter for how short a time.

“You got the address?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

He didn’t need the address; he’d grown up in Southie. Never left there, in fact. When he was growing up, the Body Shop had been a landmark. The sign that hung from the grimy, low-slung stucco building read “Murphy’s Car Body and Engine Repair,” but it was known to everyone in the neighborhood simply as the Body Shop. It was located on an oversized lot fringed with knee-high weeds, set back from the street, in an area that drew little traffic. That hardly mattered, though-no one ever took their cars there anyway. A mechanic was on the premises during the daytime to keep appearances up, but anyone looking to have a car repaired was invariably told that all of the appointments were booked. The only auto-body work performed there took place at night, and few of the cars that found their way into the garage emerged again in one piece.

Notwithstanding the lack of legitimate automotive services offered, the place usually buzzed during the day. Murphy, a leader in what remained of the loosely affiliated Irish-American gangs, kept his office in the back, running his crews and brokering a tenuous peace among those in the neighborhood who operated on the wrong side of the law.

The place was humming with activity as Stone guided the car into the driveway, though not with its normal daily business. The driveway was crammed with BPD squad cars and crime scene units. Yellow tape was strewn loosely around the entire complex, and a patrolman had to lift one of the banners strung across the entryway to allow the detectives’ car in.

“You think this is the start of another war?” Stone asked as he eased the Lincoln around to the back of the lot.

“Don’t know,” Sanchez replied. “Been a long time since the last one, and things have been outta whack since Whitey took off. If it is another war, it’s gonna get ugly.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. He remembered the times when he was a boy and he’d heard whispers about the wars that went on between the rival gangs back in the sixties and seventies. They had seemed at the time like mythic, almost heroic battles. Later he came to understand that they were more like scraps between vicious animals.

“You grew up here, right?” Sanchez asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did you know him?”

“Murphy?” Stone thought about his answer. “Everyone knew him. He was one of Whitey’s guys back in the day. He had a rep as being nicer than most, but still dangerous. You ever deal with him?”

Sanchez shook her head. “Not really. I watched him get grilled after a bust back in the nineties, but that’s it.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought he was smart. One of the smartest I’ve seen.” She opened the door and slid out of the car; Stone did the same. She looked around the front of the building. A young man from the coroner’s office was leaning against his van, a gurney at his side. Piled loosely on top of the rolling stretcher were two empty black vinyl body bags. “Not smart enough, I guess.”

She started walking toward the doorway and Stone fell in just behind her. As he walked, it dawned on him that the exchange was the longest conversation they’d had since they’d become partners.

The stench in the Body Shop was overpowering. It was a warm day for April in Boston, and the aluminum-lined building seemed to trap the heat. Sanchez could feel the sting of oil and gasoline in her nostrils, but the odors were swallowed up in the sickly sweet aroma of death and decay. It smelled like rotten meat boiled in sour milk and honey. She clenched her jaw so as not to betray her nausea. She’d been on the force long enough to understand the double standard-men could show their disgust at a crime scene, but for women it was viewed as a sign of weakness.

“Any word on the time of death?” she asked Stone as they walked through the front-counter section, past a couple of uniformed officers acting as bored sentries, and back around into the garage bays.

“Doc thinks Saturday. No time yet, and even the day’s an estimate until they get the bodies back to the lab to run some tests.”

“Smells like Saturday,” she said.

“Smells like shit,” he said. He coughed and put a hand to his face.

“Found this morning?”

Stone nodded. “Place was closed yesterday, and no one was around. They were supposed to be closed today, too, for Patriots’ Day, but one of the mechanics stopped by to do some work on his own car and found them.”

She threw a quick look at her partner. He was young and good-looking in an overmuscled, athletic sort of way-the kind of a man whose neck strained against his collar, and who developed a five o’clock shadow as he pulled away from the sink after shaving. His hair was thick and dark and his brow jutted forth just a little more than necessary. His accent chopped his hard consonants and slid through his “r”s in a manner characteristic of lifelong Bostonians from working-class neighborhoods. She’d worked with men like him before. The jury was still out on him, as far as she was concerned. She’d be disappointed in the end, she was sure-she always was. It had become such a predictable pattern that she now thought of a “partner” merely as an obstacle to be negotiated as she focused on getting the job done.

As they approached the back of the building, toward the bays where the cars were dismantled, a uniformed sergeant in his early fifties broke free from a group of officers and strode to meet them. She reached into her pocket and fished out her badge, holding it up for the sergeant.

He nodded to her. “Detective,” he said. He looked at Stone and said nothing.

“Sergeant…” Sanchez scanned her memory and the tag on the front of the man’s shirt for a name, “McAfee.” She squinted at him. “We’ve worked together before.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “Two years ago.”

“Right. The Darvos case.”

“That’s correct, ma’am.”

She said nothing more about it. “What have we got?”

“Nothing good. You just missed the doc, but he said he’ll be in the office writing up some notes later if you want to talk. He’s gonna do the autopsies once we get the bodies to him this afternoon. He got a good first look, but we put the bodies back the way we found them. I figured you’d want to see them the way they were found.”

She nodded. “Good.” She looked around the room and noticed a tall black man in the corner talking on a cell phone. He was dressed in a dark blue suit, white shirt, and a dark tie. He was wearing sunglasses. “Feds got a line on this?” she asked.

McAfee looked over his shoulder and grunted in distaste. “Yeah. He showed up about ten minutes after we got here. Don’t know how he found out about it.”

“What’s he been doing?”

“Just looking. We haven’t let him touch anything, but I didn’t know whether we could kick him out. He’s got a badge.”

She nodded and walked toward the man. He saw her coming and closed his phone. As she got nearer, he took off his glasses. “Detective?” he said.