John Lescroart - A Plague of Secrets

By the time the first cops had arrived, there had been no question that Dylan Vogler was completely and absolutely dead-no hint of a pulse, the skin just warm to the touch, his eyes wide open and unresponsive to light or other stimulation. Nevertheless, the first responding squad car cops got some EMTs down to pronounce him. The photographer took a couple of dozen photos, memorializing the scene, before anyone else touched the body at all.

Behind Bracco and Schiff the three-person crime-scene investigation unit under Lennard Faro continued scouring the alley and its environs for evidence, although within the first minutes they’d already called Faro over to identify and bag as evidence a.40-caliber semiautomatic Glock pistol that had recently been fired and a brass bullet casing that probably went with it. After watching them poking around and letting the assistant coroner and the photographer finish, at long last Bracco got to the body.

The first thing he did was take off Vogler’s light blue backpack so he could turn the body over and look at where the shot or shots had entered. He then turned the backpack over to verify the location of the bullet hole. And there it was, high up in the fabric adjacent to where the slug had exited Vogler’s body, surrounded with the bloom of blood that Bracco had expected and failed to see around the hole in the stucco. After he flipped the backpack over and saw the corresponding exit hole on the other side, he sat back and turned to his partner, squatting next to him.

“I love opening presents.” Bracco undid the clasp, pulled the top up, and held it open.

“Well, look at that,” Schiff said.

“I am.” The pack was filled to about the two-thirds mark with sandwich-size baggies of marijuana. Bracco removed one of them, opened it, smelled it again, and passed it over to his partner. “What I don’t get,” he said, “is why they didn’t take this.”

“Maybe they didn’t know it was in there,” Schiff said.

“They definitely didn’t know it was in there,” Bracco said. “They couldn’t have known about this much weed and just left it. That’d skew my whole worldview.”

Someone tapped him on his shoulder, and Bracco half turned. “Sorry, Inspector,” Banks said, “but the wife’s here.”

Nodding, Bracco sighed, then straightened up. “Hide that backpack,” he said to Schiff. “We don’t know nothing about no stinking backpacks.”

“Got it,” his partner replied.

Debra Schiff dropped the backpack onto the asphalt out of sight behind Banks’s squad car. Turning around, she saw that her partner had already gone over to greet the widow, who was standing just inside the crime-scene tape next to one of the uniformed officers.

From Schiff’s distance the woman appeared young and very pretty. Her shoulder-length black hair, still wet-her morning shower?-framed a face of pale beauty, with wide dark eyes, strong cheekbones, red lips. She wore a long-sleeved 49er T-shirt tucked into her jeans, but the blousy shirt camouflaged neither her breasts nor her tiny waist.

Coming closer, though, Schiff saw something else around the eyes too-a swelling that might be from the crying but might have another source. And under the swelling did she discern a faint yellowish cast to the skin? An ancient, or not-so-ancient, bruise?

“I can see that it’s him from here,” she was saying to Bracco. Her left hand-no wedding band-was at her mouth now. “I don’t know if I can… if I need to go any closer.”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Vogler.” Schiff inserted herself into the conversation, identifying herself and laying a hand on Bracco’s shoulder.

“I’m not Mrs. Vogler.” The woman corrected her right away. “My name is Jansey Ticknor. We’re not married. Weren’t married. But just call me Jansey, okay?” Her shoulders sagged. “God.”

Schiff wanted to get her away from her immediate reaction. “My partner mentioned a child when he talked to you.”

Ms. Ticknor nodded. “My son, Ben. He’s with our boarder. He’s fine.” Her eyes went back to the body. “My God, how did this happen?”

“We don’t know yet, ma’am,” Bracco said. “We did find a gun. Did your husband own a gun?”

Jansey Ticknor blinked into the sun for a moment. “He couldn’t.”

“He couldn’t? Why was that?” Schiff asked.

Jansey’s face went flat. She looked from one inspector to the other. “He served some time in jail when he was younger.”

“What for?” Bracco asked.

She shrugged. “He was a driver in a robbery. It was the only time he ever did anything like that. Anyway… he went to prison. So, no, he couldn’t have a gun.”

Schiff threw a quick look at Bracco. There was a real difference, they both knew, between going to jail, which meant the city and county lockup downtown, and spending time in prison. Prison was hard time, and in San Francisco, the probation capital of the Western world, time in the joint argued strongly against Jansey’s description that it had been the only wrongdoing of Dylan Vogler’s life.

“Jansey,” Schiff asked, “did you see Dylan before he went to work this morning?”

“No, he got up early with Ben, our boy. He lets me sleep in on weekends sometimes.” The body over on the asphalt drew her gaze again.

Bracco spoke up. “Did Dylan have any enemies that you know of? Somebody who was mad at him?”

“Not really, no. I guess it’s possible, but he didn’t have any power. He just ran this coffee shop. There wasn’t any drama in his life.”

“Maybe he fired somebody recently?” Schiff suggested. “Something like that.”

“No. The staff, it’s like only ten people or so and they’ve all been here forever.” She shook her head, dismissing the thought. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t about his job, I’m sure.” Her eyes went to the doorway. “Maybe somebody robbed him.”

“His wallet was on him,” Bracco said. “Cell phone. No sign of robbery.”

“Maybe they were going to take his stuff and something scared them away.”

“That’s possible,” Schiff said.

“What stuff?” Bracco asked.

She closed her mouth, pursed her lips, and shifted to her other foot. “I don’t know. What you said, his wallet and cell phone. Like that.”

Bracco kept it low-key. “He didn’t have anything else particularly worth stealing that you know of that maybe wouldn’t be obvious to us? A watch, maybe?”

“I don’t think so, no.” She turned her head back toward the body. “You can’t just leave him lying there.”

“We won’t, Jansey,” Schiff said. “The coroner’s ready to take him to the morgue as soon as we release him.” Lowering her voice, she moved in closer. “It might save you a difficult trip downtown if you wanted to give us a positive identification now. I’d be right next to you, if you think you can handle it.”

Jansey was biting her lower lip and eventually nodded, putting her arm in Schiff’s. “Don’t let go of me,” she said, “in case I fall down or faint or something. Please.”

“I got you.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

With BBW closed up, Schiff told her partner she’d meet him at a place she loved that had been serving breakfasts on Irving Street just west of Nineteenth Avenue for about eighty years. She and Bracco had been partnered up for only about six months and still had favorite haunts that the other didn’t know.

As usual, the place was packed; but also as usual, they moved the customers along right smartly. So the wait for Schiff’s table wasn’t more than ten minutes. She’d just had her first sip of coffee when Bracco came in, caught her eye over the other patrons, and threaded his way over to her. When he sat down, she lowered her cup. “What took you?”