It was raining hard now, and streets were treacherous with cars moving at imprudent rates of speed with their headlights on. I supposed many people were headed to shopping malls, and it occurred to me that I had done little to prepare for Christmas.
The grocery store on Patterson Avenue was just ahead on our left. I could not remember its former name, and signs had been removed, leaving nothing but a bare brick shell with a number of windows boarded up. The space it occupied was poorly lit, and I suspected the police would not have bothered to check behind the building at all were there not a row of businesses to the left of it. I counted five of them: pharmacy, shoe repair, dry cleaner, hardware store, and Italian restaurant, all closed and deserted the night Eddie Heath was driven here and left for dead.
“Do you recall why this grocery store went out of business?” I asked.
“About the same time a bunch of other places did. When the war started in the Persian Gulf,” Marino said.
He cut through an alleyway, the high beams of his headlights licking brick walls and rocking when the unpaved ground got rough. Behind the store a chainlink fence separated an apron of cracked asphalt from a wooded area stirring darkly in the wind. Through the limbs of bare trees I could see streetlights in the distance and the illuminated sign for a Burger King.
Marino parked, headlights boring into a brown Dumpster cancerous with blistered paint and rust, beads of water running down its sides. Raindrops smacked against glass and drummed the roof, and dispatchers were busy dispatching cars to the scenes of accidents.
Marino pushed his hands against the steering wheel and hunched his shoulders. He massaged the back of his neck. “Christ, I’m getting old,” he complained. “I got a rain slicker in the trunk.”
“You need it more than I do. I won’t melt,” I said, opening my door.
Marino fetched his navy blue police raincoat and I turned my collar up to my ears. The rain stung my face and coldly tapped the top of my head. Almost instantly, my ears started getting numb. The Dumpster was near the fence, at the outer limits of the pavement, perhaps twenty yards from the back of the grocery store. I noted that the Dumpster opened from the top, not the side.
“Was the door to the Dumpster open or shut when the police got here?” I asked Marino.
“Shut.”
The hood of his raincoat made it difficult for him to look at me without turning his upper body. “You notice there’s nothing to step up on.”
He shone a flashlight around the Dumpster. “Also, it was empty. Not a damn thing in it except rust and the carcass of a rat big enough to saddle up and ride.”
“Can you lift the door?”
“Only a couple inches. Most of the ones made like this have a latch on either side. If you’re tall enough, you can lift the lid a couple inches and slide your hand down along the edge, continuing to raise the lid by bumping the latches in place a little at a time. Eventually you can get it open far enough to stuff a bag of trash inside. Problem is, the latches on this one don’t catch. You’d have to open the lid all the way and let it flop over on the other side, and no way you’re going to do that unless you climb up on something.”
“You’re what? Six-one or two?”
“Yeah. If I can’t open the Dumpster, he couldn’t either. The favorite theory at the moment is he carried the body out of the car and leaned it up against the Dumpster while he tried to open the door – the same way you put a bag of garbage down for a minute to free your hands. When he can’t get the door open, he hauls ass, leaving the kid and his crap right here on the pavement.”
“He could have dragged him back there in the woods.”
“There’s a fence.”
“It’s not very high, maybe five feet high,” I pointed out. “At the very least, he could have left the body behind the Dumpster. As it was, if you drove back here, the body was in plain sight.”