“I’m voting for him being dead before he ended up in here,” Marino said.
“We’ll know a lot more when we get him downtown.”
I straightened up and the rapid-fire light caught the corner of a carton Marino had displaced when he’d fallen. The tail of what looked like the letter Y blazed neon green in the dark.
“Marino,” I said. “Look at this.”
Letter by letter I illuminated words that were French and written by hand. They were about four inches high and an odd boxy shape, as if a mechanical arm had formed them in square strokes. It took me a moment to make out what they said.
“Bon voyage, le laup-garou,” I read.
Marino was leaning over me, his breath in my hair. “What the hell’s a loup-garou?”
“I don’t know.”
I examined the carton carefully. The top of it was soggy, the bottom of it dry.
“Fingerprints? You see any on the box?” Marino asked.
“I’m sure there’re prints all over the place in here,” I replied. “But no, none are popping out.”
“You think whoever wrote this wanted someone to find it .
“Possibly. In some kind of permanent ink that fluoresces. We’ll let fingerprints do their thing. The box goes to the lab, and we need to sweep up some of the hair:on the floor for DNA, if it’s ever needed. Then do photographs and we’re out of here:’
“May as well get the coins while I’m at it,” he said.
“May, as well,” I said, staring toward the container’s opening.
Someone was looking in. He was backlit by bright sunlight and a blue sky and I could not make out who it was.
“Where are the crime-scene techs?” I asked Marino.
“Got no idea.”
!”Goddamn it!” I said.
“Tell me about it,” Marino said.
“We had two homicides last week and things weren’t like this.”
“You didn’t go to the scenes, either, so you don’t know what they were like,” he said, and he was right.
“Someone from my office did. I would know if there was a problem . . ”
“Not if the problem wasn’t obvious, you wouldn’t,” he told me. “And the problem sure as hell wasn’t obvious because this is Anderson’s first case. Now it’s obvious.”
“What?”
“Brand spanking new detective. Hell, maybe she stashed this body in here herself so she’d have something to do.”
“She says you told her to call me.”
“Right. Like I can’t bother, so I dis you, and then you get pissed off at me. She’s a fucking liar,” he said.
An hour later we were done. We walked out of the foulsmelling dark, returning to the warehouse. Anderson stood in the open bay next to ours, talking to a man I recognized as Deputy Chief A1 Carson, head of investigations. I realized it was he whom I had seen at the mouth of the container earlier. I moved past her without a word and greeted him as I looked out to see if the removal service had shown up yet. I was relieved to see two men in jumpsuits standing by their dark blue van. They were talking to Shaw.
“How are you, Al?” I said to Deputy Chief Carson.
He’d been around as long as I had. He was a gentle, quiet man who had grown up on a farm.
“Hangin’ in, Doc” he said. “Looks like we got a mess on our hands.”
“Looks like it,” I agreed.
“I was out and thought I’d drop by to make sure everything’s all right.”
Carson didn’t just “drop by” scenes. He was uptight and looked depressed. Most important, he paid no more attention to Anderson than the rest of us did.
“We’ve got it covered,” Anderson outrageously broke rank and answered Deputy Chief Carson. “I’ve been talking to the port director . . .”
Her voice trailed off when she saw Marino. Or maybe she smelled him first.
“Hey, Pete,” Carson said, cheering up. “What you know, old boy? They got some new dress code in the uniform division I don’t know about?”
“Detective Anderson,” I said to her as she got as far away from Marino as she could. “I need to know who’s working this case. And where are the crime-scene techs? And why did the removal service take so long to get here?”