Quicksand Page 10

  “Excellent. You get to type up the report, then.”

  * * *

  “See?” she said, after both Wansbrough and Burton had stepped out. She waited for Ben to tuck his phone into his pocket. “See what you get yourself into?”

  “Nora, I don’t mind typing up a report if it means I get to spend time with you.”

  “That would make more of an impression on me if we weren’t talking about going to the morgue.”

  “Do you spook?” he asked.

  “Mmmm. Let’s just say my thick skin is a little slow in growing.”

  “Alright. I’ll tell you what helped me.”

  “What’s that?”

  He gave a half bow, gesturing that she should leave the office first. As she reluctantly passed by him into the hall, he said, “I stopped looking at the bodies for, like, their wounds and stuff. I just think of them as people who have problems and need my help. They’re just stuck in the morgue until I can fix what’s wrong.”

  Ben started for the elevator, but Nora motioned toward the stairs. “Come on, it’s healthier. So you don’t have to shoot the people who are in better shape than you.”

  He sighed. “Only for you, Nora.”

  She returned the conversation to its track. “Is that why you joined up?” she asked, falling into step next to him on the stairs. “You’re someone who fixes things?”

  Calder thought for a moment. “I don’t know, it just seemed right for me. I was really good at science in school.”

  “A nerd!”

  “I knew the jock in you would say something about that.…”

  She laughed out loud.

  “I knew a lot about drugs…”

  “As a user?” she interrupted, only half-joking.

  “Noooo. Well, not much…” Then he grinned lopsidedly. “Not enough to disqualify me from working here, anyway. No, I went to the Bronx High School of Science. So, public school, right, so I just found out all I needed to know about drugs. And then I studied chemical engineering at City College,” he said, “but I figured out pretty quick I didn’t want to hang out in the lab all my life.”

  “And the FBI…”

  “Looked like a good place to be a badass and get to shoot guns.”

  “Nice,” she said, tsking a bit.

  “No, look, Nora. Seriously, I saw some scary things. Back then, the drug trade had New York City as the distribution center for Colombian drug traffickers. I saw what street distributors did to the neighborhoods, and I saw what users did to themselves. I…”

  Nora looked at him, aware that he was having difficulty saying something. “What is it?” she asked gently.

  He riveted his eyes on the stairs as he descended, then continued. “I had a girlfriend. She had a coke problem that became a crack problem. It ended our relationship. She’s … still in rehab, and this is four years later.”

  “Ben, I’m so sorry—”

  He cut her off, “So if you want to know, yeah, I wanted to fix that. Still do.”

  Nora didn’t know what to say. Suddenly she was jealous, she realized, as she imagined Ben with this unknown woman, as she imagined him aching over her and wanting her whole again. The pain of it made her furious with herself.

  Watt seemed overly glad to see them. “Hey, guys!” he almost called out lightly, giving Nora the sense he got too few living visitors a day.

  “How’s our victim?” asked Ben.

  “Which one?” retorted Watt.

  “Latest,” Ben clarified.

  “Still unidentifiable,” Watt answered, leading them past two of his team members who were bent over the corpse of an elderly white male. Nora noticed for the first time the red-haired young woman in her twenties who seemed to be collecting bullets from the body. She had clear, porcelain features, and her ponytail bobbed as she worked. Nora wondered how much say Monty had in the hiring of his crew.

  On the other side of a dividing curtain they stopped at an autopsy table.

  Nora steeled herself to look again at that mutilated body. The pallor of the skin had taken on a grayish color, except where her wounds gaped open. Nora’s gaze lingered on the victim’s long, thin fingers, noting what looked like ink stains in addition to a lot of dirt. “You ran her prints?”

  He nodded. “Turned up nothing. No records, no nothing.”

  “Immigrant?” Nora asked.

  “If she is, she’s not one who entered the country legally.”

  “First generation, maybe,” Calder was saying. “Rape?”

  Watt shook his head. “She wasn’t raped. In fact, she’s a virgin.”

  Nora looked up. “That rules out being one of Dewayne’s gang prostitutes.”

  Ben nodded. “What do we know about her wounds?”

  Watt flipped open his laptop and walked them through the scenario he was proposing using a computer schema illustrating an assailant sitting on the victim’s back and then slitting her throat from behind. “You can’t inflict a wound like that unless it’s from behind. The chipping angles on the trachea suggest that she’d been flipped onto her stomach with someone maybe straddling her from behind, lifting her head—possibly by the hair.”

  Nora and Ben peered in to stare at the screen.

  Watt continued. “But, backtrack a little—the other wounds, body and eye, were probably made first. Then the throat was cut to finish her off.”

  Nora shivered.

  He flipped to the next screen. “For those other wounds, she would have been lying down at the time on a carpet—there are tons of fibers under her nails. I’m doing trace analysis of her wounds to see if I can find any rust traces from the knife blades. I didn’t find any rope marks, but I did find bruising. So I assume someone else was holding her down—” he gestured again at the screen for illustration. “There are hairline fractures in each radius bone, as though she were struggling and had her arms smashed down to hold them still.”

  “So, you’re saying she was stabbed multiple times while lying down, and then flipped over to have her throat slit?” Ben asked.

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Watt answered. “It’s a theory, but I think it’s consistent with the information we have so far.”

  “Are you thinking she was maybe wrapped in the same carpet she was killed on?”

  Watt was nodding. “Yes, that’s exactly what I think. There were bits of lime and lye under her nails as well, fingers and toes. Typical of area basements. And one more thing—we found a tire print in the muck yesterday: BFGoodrich Rugged Terrain T/As.”

  “SUV?”

  “Yep. Something big. And heavy.”

  Nora and Ben both nodded. Then Ben said, “Look, Monty…”

  “Yeah, I know. I heard that Dewayne Fulton is pleading not guilty to the murder-rape. I made a jpeg for you of what the weapon has to be, man. You have to take it from there.” Watt walked over to his printer and retrieved a photo of the knife. “Hunting knife, eight and a half inches, weighing about six, six and a half ounces. You can buy it at any Cabela’s or Sports Mania in the country. Or online.”

  “Shit,” Ben murmured.

  “I did check the Baker girl’s wounds for rust, or trace particles that might have been on the blade. They’re all clean—like, laboratory clean.”

  “Meaning?” Nora asked.

  “I’m willing to bet it’s a new blade. Maybe even purchased just for this kill.”

  Nora and Ben looked at each other. “Less sleep, more investigatin’,” Nora said.

  Ben nodded somberly. “Good work, Monty. We’d better go.” They thanked him, then headed out of the swinging metal doors just as two other agents walked in. It seemed to Nora that the other two looked just as irritable and anxious as she and Ben felt.

  Ben pulled out his keys. “Let me take you home, Nora. It’s been a long day. And it’s cold.”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I’ll run home, I need the exercise.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her, a half smile on his lips. “You ran to
work this morning.”

  “What? How did you—?”

  “Your hair was still wet when I came in the office. I could smell the shampoo.”

  “Okay, you sound like a stalker. I’m not getting in any car with you,” she said, unable to suppress a smile.

  “Oh, come on, we’ll talk about our caseload the whole way.”

  Nora peeked into her backpack to make sure she had everything she needed, then followed Ben to the parking garage, where he made his way to his slightly dented Ford.

  “So when do you get the big black Suburban?” she asked.

  “You know,” he said indignantly, “I’ve been asking everyone that, and no one will give me a straight answer.”

  She settled into the passenger seat and strapped on her seat belt, then asked, “How did that poor woman wind up brutally murdered like that?”

  “Muslim woman,” Calder corrected. “Maybe she’s not so random? How about terror? She knows something? Saw something, hence the eyes being cut out.”

  “That’s dramatic, but possible,” Nora admitted, as they passed by the garage attendant’s booth. Then suddenly, she said. “Hey, you didn’t just connect her to terror because of my Muslim theory, did you?”

  He pointed innocently at his chest. “Who, me?”

  She shook her head, unsmiling. “You are such a racist!”

  He held out his hand, stopping her. “Nora. It’s a possibility. We’d be stupid to overlook it, and I know we’re not stupid. We need to ID this body.”

  She knew he was right, but she didn’t like the turn the conversation had taken.

  As they turned on to Market Street, he said in a conciliatory tone, “Look, let’s get something to eat on the way.”

  Nora gaped at him. “That’s completely outrageous. Were you just in the same room with me and the dead body? How can food even cross your mind?”

  “Come on, Nora. You have to eat. It’s part of the thick skin thing.”

  She shook her head in silence.

  Ben continued, “There’s a cart that sells cheesesteaks almost as good as Geno’s.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You don’t eat cheesesteaks? No way.”

  “Way. I only eat halal meat. Like, Muslim kosher.”

  He took this in. “So … no cheesesteaks?”

  She nodded slowly. “I’ve never had a cheesesteak.”

  “And you’re actually from here?”

  She nodded again.

  “You do know that people come here—from foreign countries, even!—to eat the cheesesteaks?”

  “Yes, and I’ve lived in Philly my whole life. What can I tell you, I’m a hopeless case. Better give up while you still can.”

  His phone flashed to life; it was Burton. Ben hit speaker. “I just got a call—we’ve found two JBM up in Strawberry Mansion.”

  “Off their turf. They must be running scared. Address?”

  “Thirty-third and Diamond. Crack house.”

  “My favorite!” said Ben. He glanced at Nora. “You in, Officer Khalil?”

  She grinned. “I saw what the toddlers did to you guys in Kingsessing. I will never knowingly let you run after anyone without me again.”

  “My hero,” Ben said. “Got a vest?”

  She shook her head. “In my locker,” she said, waving a hand eastward to indicate the field office.

  “Extra Kevlar for the resident speed demon, please,” he said, loud enough for Eric to hear.

  “Okay,” came Burton’s reply. “Fifteen minutes. Meet up at the playground.”

  They assembled at Mander playground. She saw Jacobs and Lin, as well as the two sheriff’s officers—who were apparently only good at showing up for raids—and two junior agents whom Nora had only met briefly. Nora slipped on the vest and the Safe Streets Task Force windbreaker.

  Burton drove up in his Jeep, locked it with the remote, and with only a perfunctory greeting presented them with a printout from Google Maps of the row house they would be attempting to enter and two full-page mug shots. The male had shaved his head, the better to display the upside-down crown with intersecting pitchforks tattooed onto the flesh of his scalp. The female had leaden eyes haloed by a mass of short dreadlocks. “The kids we’re looking for are Tyreek Perkins—known as ‘Grapevine’—and Rita Ross, also called ‘Rox’ or ‘Roxie.’ Tyreek did time with Dewayne when he went in for his last meth bust. Rita is one of the JBM first girl members—in it almost as long as Dewayne himself. In and out of rehab three times. Did time at the juvenile detention center back when it was still on the parkway.”

  “Which means she’s definitely not a juvenile anymore,” Ben said.

  “She’s Nora’s age,” Eric said, in a tone that seemed a bit snide to Nora, but she felt like her heart was thumping too quickly to allow her to call him on it.

  Ben added, “And she knows a lot about the JBM’s drug supply lines. It would be great if we don’t shoot her.”

  Agent Lin said, “Listen, it’ll be dark soon, and this building is kind of a death trap. Everyone will need to take extra precautions.”

  Nora peered at the picture, poring over the façade of the row house. It was of peeling, beige-painted brick. The two ground-floor windows were boarded over. The second-floor bay window hovered so precariously above the front door that it looked suicidal to stand at the doorstep.

  “There’s no street access to the backyard, so a few of us should come up Natrona Street, here, in order to seal off the back,” Lin was saying.

  Ben said, “Nora, maybe you should go with Eric and Agent Lin. Based on our last encounter, I think the first instinct is to run out of the back. And we don’t know how many more are in there.”

  Nora nodded.

  “John will be sorry he missed all the fun,” Ben said, checking the ammo clip in his Glock.

  “Brokenhearted, I’m sure,” Nora replied, doing the same, then tucking the gun back into its holster at her back.

  The leaves of Fairmount Park cradled the last remnants of daylight as the nine agents reentered their vehicles and headed back toward 33rd Street. As they waited at the stoplight, Nora looked out of her window and found a little boy staring at her, his hand clutching that of his older sister who was shepherding him home from the playground. Nora gave him a smile, but he only stared at her, his round eyes wide.

  “I guess we’re not a very subtle-looking crew…” she murmured to Ben.

  He smiled his lopsided smile. “I love twinning with you. I’m thinking argyle sweaters for Christmas.”

  “Eid,” she corrected him.

  “Eid,” he conceded, as he guided the car across the intersection.

  “Try not to shoot anyone, Ben,” she said.

  “Come on, Nora. I hardly ever shoot anyone on Mondays,” he answered.

  She exited the car and found Burton and Lin, both of whom broke into a run up Natrona Street to the thin corridor leading to the backside of the grim strip of row houses. The last easily decipherable sound she heard was Ben pounding on the door, announcing them, “Federal officers!”

  The backyard of the ramshackle row house was mined with pieces of mangled metal and broken glass. It exploded into activity as bodies came charging out of the row house. Lin and Burton waved her on; those fleeing were not Grapevine and Rox. She and Burton reached the back door simultaneously.

  “I’ll cover you,” she said, pausing at the door frame and drawing her weapon.

  Burton nodded and darted in, as Nora fought to make out figures and faces in the dimness of the building’s interior. The back door was just off a grimy kitchen, and Nora’s eyes fell immediately on a bearded white man with long, greasy hair. He sat on one of the sections of the floor that still retained its flowered linoleum tile, gazing up at them in a drugged haze, immobile, seeing them and not seeing them. The stench of the house tore into Nora’s mouth and nose—human waste and rotting garbage and what could only have been vomit.

  Above them, she heard the thumping of feet and shri
eks; there were at least three others in the building aside from the band of agents. Chest heaving, weapon sweeping across the shadowy rooms, she trailed Burton as he darted from room to room on the ground floor. In the squalid living room he shouted, “Clear!” almost immediately. But as he entered what was once a dining room, he stopped short; a figure had darted through a door that led either to a closet or a basement. He turned back, met Nora’s eyes, and motioned for her to follow.

  Lin pounded up the stairs to join Ben and Jacobs in trying to subdue the crashes of breaking furniture and the unabating eruptions of profanity. Burton had opened the door off the dining room to find the basement, and, after confirming there was no electricity by flicking the light switch on and off several times, he was signaling to Nora to follow him down. She remained on the top step and trained her gun on the stairwell, covering him as he began to descend. Burton was almost to the bottom when they both heard the shattering of a windowpane. The sound came from inside and outside simultaneously, and Nora realized that it was the sound of someone kicking through a basement window to escape into the backyard.

  “I’m in pursuit!” she shouted down to Burton.

  “Go, go, go!” he cried, turning to run back up the stairs.

  Nora raced out into the cool twilight, and saw Rita Ross’s crown of dreadlocks retreating down the alley and out onto Natrona Street. Nora navigated the perilous stretch of yard and then darted out onto the street, just in time to see Rita vanish between two houses heading toward Douglass and 33rd beyond. Nora pounded across the pavement, her eyes riveted on Rita Ross, who was fast—very, very fast. It had been a while since Nora had had any serious running competition, and she found that all of her senses had sprung to life. Suddenly the air she was sucking into her lungs was sharp and bright, and it made her eyes water slightly; she narrowed them to keep Rita in her sights. She could imagine for a moment that the gun in her hand was a relay baton; she found a burst of speed and was flying. She vaguely registered the shouts of bystanders from their porches. She was close now, but Rita had darted into the traffic on 33rd Street and then into the park.

  Let it be deserted, let it be deserted … Nora prayed, terrified of traumatizing a little kid. But she raced past empty swing sets with relief. And then they were passing the basketball courts, and Rita Ross was starting to turn, and Nora could see the blade in her hand, and the fury in her eyes at being outrun; Nora shoved her piece into the holster at the small of her back, and barreled into Rita at full speed. Both women went sprawling onto the cool, wet grass of the field. Laying beneath her, Rita tried to slash at Nora with the blade, but Nora slammed her wrist against the ground, then flipped her over, pinning her arms before she could even gasp for breath.