demonstrated before others in the department.
However, he still didn’t know why the hell she had come back.
¦
At four o’clock that afternoon, across town at the Hall of Justice, the question had not been answered so much as submerged beneath the complexities of the case.
“So,” Hawkin stretched out in his chair and tried to rub the tiredness from the back of his neck. The coffee hadn’t helped much. “Have you managed to make any sense of this mess?” He might have been referring to the case in general, or to the unruly drift of papers covering the desk’s surface, which now included roughly transcribed interviews, printouts of arrest records for the people involved, as well as the records from the earlier dog incident. This last report had been couched in phrases that made clear what the two investigating officers had thought of their odd case, wandering as it did between a recognition of its absurdity and downright sarcasm at the waste of their time. The recorded interview with the dog’s owner had been perfunctory and less than helpful, and Hawkin’s interview with the officer involved had stopped short of scathing only because he knew that his own reaction would have been much the same as the younger man’s.
“A bit, but we have to find this man Erasmus. He organized the cremation of the dog last month, though everyone was quite clear—those who were clear, that is, if you know what I mean—that he wasn’t here this time. They seem to have decided that what was good enough for the dog was good enough for the dog’s owner. Crime Scene’s going back tonight to check the whole area with Luminol, but it looks like one patch of blood that bled slowly and stopped with death rather than blood pouring out from, say, a knife wound. Could have been shot, but Luis, one of the men who found him, said his head looked bashed. And of course we know what happened to every loose stick in the whole damned park. Sorry? Oh, yes, I’ll have another cup, thanks.
“Where was I?” Kate thumbed through her notes a moment. “Okay, who found the body. Harry Radovich and Luis Ortiz both claim they saw him first, but they were together, and their stories mesh—though Harry’s is a little clearer in the details. They saw his kit abandoned behind a bench at about six p.m., went looking for him, and found him. You saw the place, about three hundred yards from where they tried to burn him this morning. At first they thought he was asleep, lying facedown, slightly tilted onto his right side, under that tree with the branches that touch the ground. They were worried, seeing him lying on the ground just in his clothes, and thought he might be sick, this flu that’s going around. So they shook his legs, got no response, pushed their way in and turned him on his back. There was dried blood covering the right side of his head and face, his eyeballs were slightly sunken and dry- looking, the corneas cloudy, his facial skin dark with no blanching under pressure, and he was getting pretty stiff in his upper body.”
“A couple of drunks told you all that?” asked Hawkin, turning from the coffee machine to look at her in astonishment.
“Luis was a medic in Vietnam for three years,- he knows what a dead body looks like.”
“So you think his judgment’s good on this?”
“Large grain of salt, but he swears he didn’t get truly smashed until after finding the body, and he seems shaky now but sober. His testimony is worth keeping in mind, that’s all, until we hear the postmortem results.”
“Which probably won’t tell us much about time of death unless the stomach contents are good.”
“Any idea when they’ll do the postmortem?”
“First thing in the morning.”
“Good,” she said evenly, as if talking about the arrival of a tidy packet of information instead of the participation in an ordeal of burned flesh and the smell of power saws cutting through bone.
“Meanwhile, though,” he said, “what are we talking here? Middle-aged alcoholic on a night just above freezing, how many hours to rigor?”
“John didn’t drink. They all agree on that. Or use drugs.”
“Okay. So assuming they recognize liver mortis when they see it, which I doubt, that’d put it, oh, say some time before noon on Tuesday morning. Just as a guideline to get us started.”
“I agree, though I’d lean to the later end of that. His body looked on the thin side.”
As Hawkin had studiously avoided any close examination of the remains, he couldn’t argue.
“Any of them have a last name for him, any ID?” he asked.
“Nope. They just knew him as John.”
“Theophilus’s owner.”
“Who?”
“The dog. Means ‘one who loves God,” I think.“
“What is this, a mission to the homeless? Lover of God and Brother Erasmus. Batty names.” Kate snorted.
“Erasmus was a philosopher, wasn’t he? Wrote
“I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, this Erasmus is across the Bay somewhere, Berkeley or Oakland, not due back until Sunday, and they were afraid the body would smell, so they didn’t wait for him to get back. Just hauled in every scrap of wood they could find, shoved his body on, added a few bottles of various flammable liquids, and lighted it. With prayers, read by Wilhemena and one of the men. Rigor mortis may have been beginning to wear off, by the way, at six this morning. His head was floppy when they moved him onto the woodpile.”
“Right. Let’s hang on to Harry, Luis, and Wilhemena, at least until we get the postmortem report to give us a cause of death. Charge them with improper disposal of a body, interfering with an investigation, whatever you like. The rest of them can go. And we might as well go, too. There’s not much more we can do until the results come in, except find the good Brother Erasmus. You want to do that?”
“Tonight?”
“Tomorrow. I’ll take the postmortem.”
How interesting, Hawkin thought. I’ve only worked with Martinelli for a total of a few weeks, and most of that was months ago, but I can still read her face. She’s trying to decide if she should insist on taking the shit job, to prove herself capable. No, can’t quite do it. Can’t quite admit she’s relieved that I took it, either.
Kate was still wrestling with gratitude when Hawkin’s phone rang.
“Hawkin,” he said, and listened for a minute. “I am.” Another longish pause, then: “Sure, bring her up.” He hung up and looked at Kate. “There’s a homeless woman downstairs, came in with information on the cremation.”
¦
THREE
¦
The woman who entered a few minutes later wasn’t quite what Kate had expected. She was quite tidy, for one thing, her graying hair gathered into a snug bun at the nape of her neck,- her eyes darted nervously about, but they were clear, and her spine was straight. She wore the inevitable eclectic jumble, long skirt with trouser cuffs underneath, blouse, vest, knitted shawl, and rings on five fingers, but she wrapped her clothes around her with dignity and sat without hesitation in the chair Hawkin indicated. Kate turned another chair around to the desk and took out her pen. Hawkin looked down at the paper he’d just been given and then up at her, a smile of singular sweetness on his rugged face.
“Your name is Beatrice?” he asked, giving the name two syllables.
“Beatrice,” she corrected, giving it the Italian four.
“Any last name?”
“Not for many years.”
“What was it then?”
“The men downstairs asked me that, too.”
“And you didn’t give it to them.”
“I was not impressed by the manners of your police department.”
“I apologize for them. Their youth does not excuse them.”
She studied him thoughtfully.
“Forgive them,- for they know not what they do. That’s what Brother Erasmus would say, I suppose.”
“Who is this Brother Erasmus?” he asked her.
