Bad Wolf Chronicles, Books 1-3 Page 5

  “Next place up the road. Start all over.”

  They climbed back into the car. She keyed the ignition. “Thanks for giving me a hand with this.”

  “No problem.” He squared up another handful of flyers. “Shouldn't your partner be doing this with you?”

  “You'd think.”

  CHERYL lived out near Tabor Park in a pretty colonial with blue trim and a front garden of native plants. Gallagher wheeled into the driveway, bopped the horn once and watched the windows for movement.

  He drummed his fingers on the wheel, waiting. Cheryl was going to make him ring the bell, he knew it. He has to drop everything and rush over here but she's gonna make him wait? He hated this, this stupid brinkmanship that just came naturally with shared parenting.

  Hell with it. He climbed out of the truck, having forfeited his pride a long time ago. The front door opened just as he strode up the stone pathway. His daughter stepped outside.

  Amy Gallagher was sixteen years old. She looked a lot like her mom but you could still see a little of her old man in there-- there, in the angry lines stitching up her forehead as she dragged a lumpy hockey bag behind her.

  Gallagher took the bag from her and tossed it into the back. Amy hauled her backpack across her knees and Gallagher reversed out of the driveway. The front door closed without a glimpse of Cheryl.

  Gallagher turned out of the neighborhood and glanced at his daughter. He knew by the set of her mouth and the crossed arms she wasn't going to speak first. Another contest. He simply didn't have the energy for it anymore, so he spoke up. “You want to tell me what happened or do I gotta ease into it with small talk?”

  Amy watched the street, houses blurring past through the rain-speckled window. “Neither,” she said. Trying to abort the chitchat with her tone.

  “Okay.”

  Silence filled up the cab and rain dotted the windshield again.

  He caved. “You hungry?”

  “Sorta.” She finally looked at him, grateful for the change in topic. “House of Pancakes?”

  He smiled. Shrugged an affirmative and took the next left.

  RASPBERRY pancakes with whipped cream. Eggs, toast and bacon. They sat near the window and he asked about school. She said it was fine. The school could have burned to the ground in an apocalyptic fire and her answer would have been the same. Fine.

  “How's basketball?” Amy played small forward.

  Amy swirled a hunk of pancake in the syrup. “I got a game coming up.”

  “I know. You working the drills like we practiced?”

  “Yeah. Sorta. I got pummeled last game by this bigass dyke.”

  “You gotta work on your Spidey sense. Keep your eye on the action but be aware of the bruisers looking to take your head off.” He mopped up the egg yolk with his toast. “So what were you and mom fighting about?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Everything.”

  “That narrows it down.”

  “She's always riding me about homework and stuff. Like I don't have enough stress right now. You know what she's like.”

  “Yeah.” He pushed his plate away. “But we both know that you goof off if someone isn't on you. Right?”

  “Whatever.”

  Whatever. He wished he could take a pair of scissors and cut that word from her vocabulary forever. Gallagher had to remind himself to mind his temper every time he heard it. He leaned in and squared up with her eyes. Meaning business. “What else? Come on, out with it.”

  “I dunno. It's Greg too. He's such a drip.”

  Greg was Cheryl's boyfriend. He was a drip, but he couldn't officially agree with his kid on that one. Play nice. Cheryl seemed happy with him. “What about him?”

  “He's always on mom's side. About everything.”

  “He has to be. That's how it works.” He patted her hand. “Listen, I know mom can be tough but she's not wrong. It just comes out wrong sometimes. Go easy on her, huh?”

  The word “whatever” was ready to spill from her lips but Amy checked herself. Instead she slurped her milkshake through the straw and switched gears. “I saw in the paper that that Gunwold guy got sentenced to twenty-five years. Good job.”

  Gunwold was a braindead waste who shot holes into his friend and his friend's woman over a bullshit amount of money. Gallagher worked the case hard and came down on the little bastard like a ton of bricks. That was three years ago. The sentencing came down last week.

  “I didn't have anything to do with his sentencing.”

  “But that was your case. Cheers.”

  They got back in the truck and the starter squealed. It did that when it rained. Amy buckled up. “What are you working on now?”

  The kid was always asking about work, wanting to know the gruesome details and petty motives. He used to take pride in that. How many kids are actually interested in what their old man does for a living? He even thought his daughter was interested in law enforcement, the apple rolling not too far from the tree, but that wasn't the case. She liked sharing the gory bits with her friends. Like celebrity gossip, it was fun to speculate. A pack of Nancy Drews solving cases through hearsay and a teenager's understanding of psychology.

  There were only two kinds of murders he told her about now, of which both had moved out of his influence on their path to righteous justice or complete farce. Cases that had finally gone to trial or those that the D.A. claimed he couldn't convict and thus dismissed. Sensitive cases too, involving a child, he kept mum about. But that never stopped the kid from trying. Amy read the crime section religiously, trying to guess which new murders her dad was working. It was a game.

  “Nothing much,” he said and they rode quietly all the way home. After the divorce, Gallagher had settled for the typical dad schedule of weekends and holidays. His work schedule was too erratic for anything else. How he hated it, slowly eroding from father to distant relative with his own kid. So when Amy turned thirteen, they changed up the schedule. Two weeks at mom's and two weeks at dad's. Amy was a responsible kid and Gallagher knew she'd be fine if he came home late. His partner, his boss, hell the whole detail knew that when it was his two weeks with his daughter, he had to be home by dinner time. The other guys ragged him about it but never got in his way. Half of them were already divorced and of the ones still married, half of those were hurtling blind toward divorce court too.

  Crossing Fremont Street, Amy said, “I got some movies for us to watch. Borrowed them off Stella's dad. He's got, like, every western ever made.”

  “Have I met him?”

  “Twice.” She pulled a handful of DVDs from her backpack. “I got the kind you like, too. Violence, crude language and nudity.”

  Gallagher silently thanked God his daughter had moved past her phase of watching musicals. If he had to sit through Grease one more time, he was gonna put a bullet through his head.

  REGGIE pulled back the curtain and looked outside. His was a small room inside a boarding house and he had been here for two months. Reggie wasn't his real name, it was just the one he told people here. He was happy with the boarding house. It suited his needs. He figured he'd be safe here for a few months at least unless something came up.

  Something came up.

  A news item on the radio, half heard down in the common room. He told the other guys to shut up but he'd already missed it. He gave Perkins a dollar to go to the corner and get a newspaper for him. Reggie took it up to his room and locked the door. The news item said very little. A woman's body found near the river, the poor condition of her remains. The name was being withheld until family could be notified. Good luck with that, he thought.

  Reggie would have to move. He was already hiding from the law, as were half the men in here. The rooming house was a good place for that but it wouldn't be enough now. Something more than the cops was looking for him and his stink was all over this place. It wouldn't be long before it tracked him here.

  Reggie felt a tickle in his throat and swallowed, trying to stifle the cough. Di
dn't work. His cheeks blew out in a coughing jag that left him winded and blind. Reggie was a sick man and the task of diving even further underground might kill him.

  8

  LARA MENDES DROVE to work early to get a jump on the day. She packed a hastily made lunch in the kitchen fridge and watched the shift change. The graveyard shift was logging off and looking drained, shooting the shit with the detectives stumbling in for the day shift. The night shift was hell on the body but everybody did their rotation with a minimal amount of bellyaching and cursing. The transition was the worst, switching from days to nights and then back again. It left you foggy for days and Lara hated it. She said hello to the night crew and got ribbed a good deal about being the latest cherry on the team. Detective Latimer, whom she initially pegged to be an asshole, was chatty and friendly in his exhaustion. Bingham, the impossibly good-looking one, was grouchy and withdrawn.

  Gallagher was a no-show, his desk unoccupied, but she'd expected that. What she hadn't expected was to find Robertson's desk cleared off and his cabinets free of everything but the open cases. Her own box of personal stuff, the one she'd left abandoned on the floor, was sitting square on the now emptied and spotless desktop.

  A note clung to the box, scrawled in Lieutenant Vogel's peculiar script: Settle in, get to work.

  Yes sir.

  She organized her things but left her private stuff in the box. She wanted to update the case file on the Riley woman but had little to add to it. No word from the M.E., the toxicology and trace reports still pending. The results of yesterday's canvassing could be summed up in one word-- nada. She called up the Missing Persons file to see if anyone had reported Elizabeth Riley's disappearance but nothing materialized there. She drummed her nails on the desk, wondering how to proceed next.

  Shortly after ten a call came in about a shooting out at Northeast 40th and Sandy. Rowe and Varadero picked it up, signed a car out of the garage and left. Things settled back down and Lara glared at Gallagher's empty chair. She tried the number she had for him but his cell was unavailable. How the hell could he have his phone off on a Wednesday morning?

  She thought about the attack on Riley that ended her life. The idea of being devoured by dogs churned her guts. She hated dogs, always had, and the notion of dying that way went beyond revolting. But it led to an idea. Drawing up two windows on her computer, she searched through incident reports and 911 calls with the same query. Dog attacks. There was a man on SE Franklin, mauled by his own pit bull. A woman on Quimby bitten by her neighbor's Rottweiler. Two men severely injured by dogs at a suspected dog fighting pit up in NoPo. Nothing unusual stood out in the reports, all incidents involving one or two dogs and nothing approaching the ferocity of the attack on the Riley woman. She kept digging, working through the current year and deep into the previous year. She ate her lunch over her keyboard, still sifting data, but found nothing.

  She gave up, rubbed her eyes and tried her partner's number again. It rang this time. Click. “Gallagher.”

  “Hey, it's Detective Mendes.” The partner you abandoned, remember? “You coming in to work today?”

  “I am working. What's up?”

  “I've worked every dead-end I can think of,” she said. “Did you find anything at the victim's apartment?”

  “Zip. No personal phone book, no computer, practically no mail. No names of friends or family. I don't think she'd been living at that shithole very long.”

  “Did you get all the other tenants? Someone must have known her.”

  “Nobody knows her. That's the usual response when a cop knocks on your door but these braindeads were being honest. This woman kept to herself.”

  “Let's canvass her neighborhood. Do every door within a five-block radius.”

  “Recruit another uniform to give you a hand. Let me know what you find.”

  Lara looked at the phone like it smelled bad. “No. You come help. You're the primary, remember?”

  “I'm busy. Keep me posted.”

  The guy just hung up. Lara slammed the phone down and ground her teeth. Screw this. She swiveled back to the keyboard and drew up a fresh document on department letterhead. She addressed it to Lieutenant Vogel, keyed down a few lines and wrote out an official request for a new partner.

  NO uniformed officers were available so Lara hit the streets alone with a stack of fresh police flyers and knocked her knuckles raw. Working her way out in a circle from the dead woman's apartment block, Lara disturbed every door to find out no one knew the woman in the picture. She got lucky at the corner Kwiki-Mart where the guy behind the counter recognized the face on the police flyer. The deceased woman smoked Marlboro’s, bought two packs every time. That's it, the extent of the clerk's knowledge. Wow, Lara told herself on the way out. What a significant break in the case.

  Sweet Hearts was a shitty bar four blocks from the vic's shitty apartment complex. Dimly lit with two TV screens and four daytime drinkers. Lara went to the bar and roused the woman working the taps from the paperback she was reading. Sliding the flyer across the bar, she went into the same preamble about the woman in the photograph. The bartender surprised Lara by admitting she knew her. When Lara told her the woman was deceased, the bartender dropped the flyer like it was contaminated. “She's dead?”

  Lara dug out her notepad and a pen. The barkeep told her how the woman, Elizabeth Riley, came in almost every afternoon and always left before the place got busy with the happy hour crowd. She never said much. She came in, nursed a couple of glasses of draft and went home. Sometimes she'd curse at the TV or scratch away at lottery cards. Twice, the bartender remembered, she had complained about her ex-husband.

  Lara latched onto that tiny piece of information. Elizabeth Riley was divorced?

  The bartender had little to offer beyond that. The woman had grumbled about the divorce and how she had been screwed over by her ex but that was all. No names or details, just surly curses, then the woman would sink back into silence, muttering into her glass.

  Lara slid her card across the bar and asked the woman to call if she remembered anything else. She posted the flyer on a wall near the restrooms and left.

  LIKE before, a background check on Elizabeth Riley turned up nothing. There was no record of marriage or divorce. In fact, apart from the driver's license, there was no record of Elizabeth Riley at all. No social security number, no employment records. How was that even possible?

  The rest of the day was spent on the phone, being transferred from department to department, trying to get answers. She got nowhere. She remained on hold through the shift change and finally gave up when the city departments closed down for the day.

  Detective James LaBayer buzzed her desk on his way home, asked if she was making out all right. LaBayer was a veteran homicide man with one of the best career closure rates in the detail. He had an easy smile and a warmth about him that made everyone want to be his friend. Even the bad guys.

  His day had been busy with a stabbing in North Portland. Some poor bastard got punctured twenty-two times in a dispute over drug money. LaBayer and his partner simply followed the blood drops down the alley and into an empty loading dock. The suspect was hunkered down lighting a bowl with blood still on his hands.

  “That's what you call a dunker. Easy close.” LaBayer looked over the paperwork on her desk. He knew the facts of her case, the mutilated remains. Everyone knew, it was that gruesome. “Now, what you got, Mendes,” he said, “is a stone-cold whodunit.”

  “Can't argue with you,” Lara said, smiling at him. “It's a dead weight that won't budge.”

  “There ought to be a rule about drawing your first homicide. I'm not saying every newbie should be handed a dunker but nobody deserves to pull a horror show like this the first jump out of the gate.”

  Lara loved LaBayer. He was like the favorite uncle in this weird family of cops. When he asked how she was getting along with her partner, she lied and said everything was fine. LaBayer knew Gallagher and knew she was lying but h
e didn't call her on it. Complaining about one's partner was unseemly and a sure way to bring scorn from every other body on the shop floor. She had seen Kopzyck do it just after starting in Sex Crimes and the haranguing he'd gotten for it was cruel and relentless.

  LaBayer knew she wouldn't make the same mistake but left the door open a little. “Gallagher can be a real pill. You want to talk, just drop by. Alright?”

  Lara packed up her things, wishing she had been partnered with LaBayer instead of Mister Personality. On the drive home she thought of amending the request she'd drafted for a new partner, asking specifically to be partnered up with Detective James LaBayer. So what if he already had a partner? Maybe the Lieutenant would see the wisdom in switching the lineup. She'd sleep on it.

  Driving back into work the next morning, Lara decided to do just that. It could backfire on her but any fallout from that couldn't be any worse than her situation now. Her plan to redraft the request was backburnered by a jigsaw piece waiting at her desk. A phone message from a city clerk she'd talked to yesterday. He had an answer to why Elizabeth Riley had no official history prior to June of 2008. The woman had changed her name and somewhere along the chain of paperwork, the records to her previous name had been lost. Misplaced, misfiled and chewed up in the creaky machinery of an outdated system. Sorry, the clerk said. Click.

  9

  DECLERK WALKED. GALLAGHER spit when he heard the news, deciding then and there to just kill the son of a bitch.

  After he blubbered out his sob story to Lara Mendes, DeClerk got smart and lawyered up. No more questions. The lawyer made him recant and claim it was made under duress. The D.A. screamed at Gallagher over the phone, declaring it to be a shit case with shit evidence. Gallagher told him he was a lightweight and promised to break his legs with a hammer next time he saw him. It was all bluster. Gallagher knew how skittish juries were— skittish and stupid. To convince a jury of the shitbag's peers, you had to catch the bastard with a smoking gun and extract a full confession. Anything less, no matter how compelling, just would not sway those twelve bodies in the box. Add to that the insistence on DNA and fiber analysis they all wanted to hear. The pretty TV cops put away a creep a week with nothing more than a single pubic hair, these people in the jury box wanted the same here.