down?”
“Don’t touch anything, okay?”
April moved away from the chair and changed tack. “What do you do for a living, Mr. Hadgens?”
“Huh?”
“I asked how you support yourself.”
“I, uh, freelance—I’m a writer.”
“Oh, yeah? What kind of writing do you do?”
He stared at the chair. She figured the stuff was there.
“I’m working on a novel.”
“No kidding.” She didn’t see a typewriter. “When was the last time you saw Maggie?”
“I don’t know. Long time. Months, maybe years. I lose track of time.”
“I bet you do. You want to tell me about Maggie’s other friends? She have a boyfriend?”
“No way. Maggie was lunchmeat.”
Okay. “Mr. Hadgens, where were you last Saturday?”
“Nowhere near Maggie Wheeler. I can tell you that. I don’t go to the West Side.”
“Thanks.” April moved toward the door. She didn’t think Hadgens was telling her the whole truth, or even half the truth. Guy was a druggie and a liar. No point in pursuing the subject now. She’d try him again later.
It stuck in her mind that he had described Maggie as lunchmeat. Nice. The girl was dead. Why make such a point of her lack of attractiveness in the distant past when he claimed to have known her and they went to the same school? Was the real story the reverse—that he liked Maggie Wheeler a lot and got rejected by her? Did he go visit her in the boutique last Saturday, have a fight with her, and fix her up for all time? April tried that scenario out, played it through as she descended the grimy stairs to the street.
Nah, this guy didn’t look organized enough to do all that with the dress many sizes too big and the makeup on the victim’s face. That was really weird stuff. This guy looked whack, but not particularly weird. Still, he wasn’t telling the truth. Maybe he didn’t do it, but had some idea who did.
Out on the street the temperature was climbing steadily. It had to be close to eighty-five. April decided to go over to the police labs on Twentieth Street and find out what Sanchez was up to.
19
Hey, Mike, whatcha got?” Fernando Ducci, known as Duke, finished the last of a Snickers bar and tossed the wrapper into his wastebasket. At eleven o’clock in the morning, it was his third candy bar of the day. He wore a blue shirt with a white collar of the kind Captain Higgins liked, the sleeves rolled all the way down and buttoned. His dark blue tie was Italian silk. There was no shoulder holster on his person. Duke did not like to carry. He kept his gun in his locker. With his smooth round face and thick black hair, he looked more like an aging choirboy than a cop in the hair and fiber section of the police labs.
“Stuff from the M.E.’s office.” Mike Sanchez dropped the brown cardboard box on Ducci’s desk.
Ducci looked past him toward the door. “Hey, where’s the pretty one? She avoiding me, or what?”
“She’s out.”
“I’m hurt. I want the stuff from her. We like continuity around here.”
“Yeah, well, I’m continuity. I could have just let them put this shit on the shelf and forgotten it like everybody else. You’re always saying you want everything in the beginning. Well, here’s everything.”
“Ah, well.” Ducci tapped on the box. “Hey, go ahead, keep me guessing. What case are we talking about?”
“Same as yesterday. Boutique thing.”
“Oh, and here I thought something else came up. Shit, why can’t you guys get your act together and give it all to me at once?” He knew damn well why they couldn’t, but liked to annoy.
Ducci was a man who hadn’t gone outside for the last twenty years. He had a slide collection of every kind of dirt, asphalt, stone, fiber, head hair, pubic hair, leaf, pine cone, bird feather, tree bark, grass he’d ever come across. He’d analyzed so many things from so many cases, working over the years in so many departments in the labs, he now believed he could tell what park a grass stain on a pair of pants came from, and what activity the wearer was engaged in when he got it. Some people said he had a bit of an ego problem.
Before Mike tossed the box on it, Ducci’s desk had already been piled high with folders, odds and ends, boxes of slides, relics of various sorts. Now it was definitely overburdened. Ducci looked around for another place to dump the box, debated putting it on Bryan’s desk for a little while just to piss him off when he came in. Right next to his in the long, narrow room with windows across the other side, Bryan’s desk was clear.
Ducci thought Bryan was a real asshole, kept everything so goddamned neat, no one could ever find anything he worked on. Ducci was the brilliant one, and Bryan was always complaining, saying he couldn’t work in the same room with such a pig. Judy, who was a scientist and not a cop, was the mediating agent on the hair and fiber team. But she wasn’t there. She was on vacation in a canoe somewhere in Wisconsin.
Mike pointed at Ducci’s other chair. It had a pile of papers with a skull on top of it. Some of the teeth in the skull were missing. The ones remaining indicated quite a lot of tooth decay and no visits to an orthodontist.
“Mind if I sit down?” he asked.
“Hey, no problem.”
Ducci stepped around some debris from another case he was working and removed the pile of stuff from the chair. He placed it on the empty chair in front of Bryan’s desk. Bryan used the phone in there, but most of the time he worked in another lab. Hair and Fiber had three desks and three sets of shelves in it, all facing the wall opposite the windows. The tile walls and floor were sea green.
In the old days, when there were fewer people in the police labs, there had been just one desk to an office. Now with three, it was hard to get around, hard to make calls, hard to think. And even with three, they didn’t have anywhere near enough people for the workload.
Ducci had a whole lot of complaints about the system. Every case in the city that had hair and fiber evidence came through this lab. Coordination between detectives and the scientists was not so great. A lot of things got messed up. Ducci had fantasies of a different setup, police labs with only scientists and absolutely no police at all.
He himself was a cop who had found his calling by accident in college. After six years of writing parking tickets and getting two degrees at night, he discovered he liked science. When he was asked if he wanted to go into the labs, he jumped at the chance. Though of exactly the same mold, his office mate, Francis X. Bryan, was not, Ducci believed, cut of the same high-quality cloth as himself. Bryan wore his gun all the time and was still more cop than scientist. Ducci had fantasies of forcing him back to the streets, where he had started as a foot patrolman. Now he scowled at Sanchez, thinking of Francis.
“Want some coffee? Tastes like shit, but it’s better than nothing.”
“No thanks, I’ve tasted it.” Sanchez sank into the cleared chair.
“So?” Ducci rubbed his stomach as if he were some kind of Buddha, or had acid indigestion. “So tell me about this little present. What is it?”
“Take a guess. You got everything from the scene yesterday. This is the stuff from the body. You should thank me. Not everybody would go over there first thing in the morning and bring it to you.”
“True.” Many detectives didn’t have the time or temperament to collect evidence and take it through the obstacle course correctly so that when the time came to go to court the case would hold. Sanchez did. So did his girlfriend, April Woo. “Stick around.”
Ducci opened the flaps on the box. A printed dress with wild purple and red flowers all over it, not even bagged, spilled out.
“Shit, what’d they do, toss it around the table, guessin’ what mighta happened?” He noted the label, size fourteen, and shook his head. “How many people touch this?”
Mike shrugged. “Can’t tell you that. Four, maybe five.”
Ducci sifted through the rest of the stuff, all paper bags meticulously labeled. He looked at some of the labels—
