‘Where the hell are we, Jed?’ Governor Feuer restrained himself from raising his voice.
‘There’s a lot of detours, sir,’ Jed replied. ‘From funerals, I guess.’
‘I don’t see any funerals or any sign of them.’
‘Not on this street, no sir.’
‘In fact, I haven’t seen another car,’ the governor said testily.
‘This is for through traffic, sir.’
‘Through traffic? Through to where? There is no through. There’s only one way in and out of the cemetery. If you went through, you’d end up in the James River.’
‘What I meant, sir, was that this isn’t a funeral route,’ Jed explained, slowing down a bit.
‘For God’s sake, Jed.’ The governor lost his cool. There’s no such thing as a funeral route in a cemetery. The cars go where the person’s being buried. You don’t bury people along routes. We’re lost.’
‘Not at all, sir.’
‘Turn around. Let’s go back,’ Governor Feuer said as a cop and a little kid suddenly flowed past his right window.
Governor Feuer turned around in his seat, staring out the back window at a uniformed officer and a boy dressed like the Bulls. They were walking slowly and unsteadily, as if their legs would go out from under them any minute.
‘Stop the car!’ Governor Feuer ordered.
Jed slammed on the brakes, sending newspapers sliding across the carpeted floor.
The scene behind Kmart was slowing down and thinning out. The medical examiner’s van was en route to the morgue where Ruby Sink would be autopsied later this day, and uniformed officers had begun to scatter, returning to the streets.
Detectives sought out witnesses and Miss Sink’s next of kin while the media tried to get there first. The fire department was long gone, leaving West and two crime-scene technicians to finish up.
So far, dozens of latent prints in addition to the three nine-millimeter cartridge cases had been recovered from inside the car, which soon would be carried off in a flatbed truck for further processing by forensic scientists in the shelter of a bay. Eventually, firing pin impressions would be scanned into ATF’s computer system to determine if they matched those recovered from other crimes.
Prints would be run through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System known as AFIS. Hairs, blood and fibers would go to DNA and the trace evidence labs.
‘We need to get this out of the sun, or the blood and any other biological evidence are going to start decomposing really fast,’ West said to crime-scene technician Alice Bates, who was taking photographs of the inside of the Chevy Celebrity.
‘We’ve got it covered,’ Bates said.
A second technician named Bonita Wills was focusing on the scattered contents of the victim’s pocketbook that were strewn on the floor of the passenger’s side. West leaned inside the open driver’s door to look, her suit jacket brushing against the frame.
‘Oh great,’ she muttered as she tried to brush black fingerprint powder off her jacket.
West studied blood spatter on the rearview mirror, on the roof near it, the drips on the steering wheel and the pool of coagulating blood on the passenger’s seat. When she had first arrived at the scene, Miss Sink had been slumped over on her right side, her head on the passenger’s seat. There were blood spatters on her forearms and elbows and the roof above the driver’s seat, and all this gave West a depressing picture.
It appeared that Ruby Sink had been sitting behind the wheel, elbows raised, hands under something, perhaps her face, when she had been shot execution style. Then the killer had climbed out of the car, and Miss Sink’s body had slumped over on the passenger’s seat where she had bled very briefly before dying.
‘The bastard,’ West said. ‘Doing that in front of a baby. For two hundred fucking bucks. Goddamn son of a bitch.’
‘Don’t touch anything,’ Wills warned her, as if West had sat behind a desk all her life.
West checked her temper. She was tired of being treated like an interloper, like an idiot, when it hadn’t been so long ago that she was regarded with respect and even friendliness by a department a lot bigger and better than this one.