“I just came from the morgue, you know, where reality’s laid out and carved up? Bet you’ve never been there. Maybe they’ll let you watch someday.
What a good story that would be, right? A man not old enough to be your daddy. Red hair, hundred and ninety-seven pounds. Guess what his hobby was. ”
Brazil released West’s arm. He groped for words but didn’t have any.
“Backgammon, photography. He wrote the newsletter for his church, wife’s dying of cancer. They got two kids, one grown, other a freshman at UNC. Anything else you want to know about him? Or is Mr. Parsons nothing but a story to you? Little words on paper?”
Brazil was visibly shaken. He started walking off to his old BMW as the Honda in the Mental Health parking lot burned and he no longer cared. West wasn’t going to let him off so easy. She grabbed his arm.
“Get your goddamn hands off me,” Brazil said. He jerked his arm free, unlocked his car door, and got in.
“You screwed me, Andy,” West told him.
Brazil cranked the engine, and squealed out of the parking deck. West returned to the LEG and didn’t go straight to investigations because she had a few of her own. She stopped off at the Records Room, where women in their own special uniforms ruled the world. West really had to court these girls, especially Wanda, who weighed somewhere between two-fifty and three hundred pounds and could type a hundred and five words a minute. If West needed a record or to send a missing- person report off to NCIC, Wanda was either a hero or hell on earth, depending on when she was fed last. West brought in a bucket of KFC once a month, and sometimes Girl Scout or Christmas cookies, depending on what was in season. West approached the counter, and whistled at Wanda, who loved West. Wanda secretly wished she was a detective and worked for the deputy chief.
“Need your help,” West said, and her police belt was making her lower back ache, as usual.
Wanda scowled at a name West had scribbled on a slip of paper.
“Lord have mercy,” she said, shaking her head.
“If I don’t remember that like it was yesterday.”
West couldn’t be certain, but thought Wanda had gained more weight.
God help her. Wanda took up two lanes of traffic.
“You sit on down.” Wanda pointed with her chin, as if she were Chinese.
“I’ll get the microfilm.”
While Wanda’s minions typed, stacked, and racked, West went through microfilm. She had her glasses on and was hurt by what she saw when she got to old articles about Brazil’s father. His name, too, was Andrew, but people had called him Drew. He had been a cop here when West was a rookie. She had forgotten all about him, and had never made the connection. Christ, but now that she was looking at it, the tragedy came back to her and somehow put Brazil’s life in focus.
Drew Brazil was a thirty-six-year-old robbery detective when he made a traffic stop in an unmarked car. He was shot close range in the chest, and died instantly. West took a long time looking at articles, and staring at his picture. She headed upstairs to her division and pulled the case, which no one had looked at in a decade, because it had been exceptionally cleared, and the dirtbag was still on death row. Drew Brazil was handsome. In one photograph, he wore a leather bomber jacket that West had seen before.
The scene photographs clubbed her somewhere in her chest. He was dead in the street, on his back, staring up at the sun on a spring Sunday morning. The. 45 caliber bullet had almost ripped his heart in half, and in autopsy photographs, Odom had two thick fingers through the hole to demonstrate. This was something young Andy Brazil need never see, and West had no intention of talking to him ever again.
Chapter Five.
Brazil was looking up articles, too, in the Observer file room. It was amazing how little had been written about Virginia West over the years. He scrolled through small stories, and black and white photographs taken back in a day when her hair was long and pinned up under her police hat. She had been the first female selected as rookie of the year, and this impressed him quite a lot.