Unprotected from the assault of cold rain that seemed to materialize from nothing in the yellow domes of streetlights above his head, Detective Teddy Ambrose walked around the blue apartment dumpster and felt his insides twist: everything above the equator of his navel clockwise, everything below it in the opposite direction.
He tried to remember what his life had been like yesterday, just hours ago, before this shift began. His wife was pregnant with their second, but they hadn’t told anyone; the two of them glowed from their shared happy secret. If he could finagle a way around the department’s residency requirements, they were thinking about renting out the two-flat he’d inherited from his parents and moving to a bungalow in the suburbs. In the meantime, he and another cop, a guy he’d been through academy with, were ready with the down payment on a boat in Belmont Harbor.
Yesterday, as he’d driven up Grand Avenue toward Area Five headquarters, through the wet curtains of an all-day storm, he’d thought of the dozen closed murders he had credited to his name. He had so few open cases he had been likely to draw the next call. That was fine with him. Bring it on. His luck had been amazing of late: the pregnant teen who turned in her ex for clubbing his brother with an anchor and dumping his body in the lake; the hit-and-run who’d left just about the most costly paint flecks in the history of painted Porsches on the victim’s artificial leg; the carpenter who abandoned a screwdriver engraved with his own initials in the eye socket of his wife’s lover. The night before at Dante’s Tavern, Ambrose had boasted to his fellow cops that there was a point at which luck had to be considered destiny, and the number of cases Ambrose and his partner, Ian Cook, had sent to the D.A. in the last six months was surely on the verge of qualifying.
“You’ll jinx us.” Ian laughed.
The phone rang at 1:47 this morning with word of a female body discovered under a dumpster in a North Avenue alley. And when the evidence technician met their car with an umbrella and recounted the meager evidence at the scene, his partner spat angrily into a garbage can.
“You jinxed us, Brosie. I told ya you’d jinx us.”
Ambrose knelt beside the dumpster and turned his head. The victim’s hand was brown and stiff and cupped as if it were a wax demonstration for the proper fingering of a two-seam fastball. The hand was at the end of a brown arm and the arm disappeared behind the wheeled coaster of the dumpster. Still in a crouch, Ambrose took two sliding steps away and flattened his body, stomach down, against the wet concrete, letting the beam of his flashlight follow his panning eyes. The brown arm was connected to a shoulder, and the shoulder was connected to a torso, and at the top of it all was a head. A blue-and-tan dress had been torn almost from her body. There was something unnatural about the pose.
The concrete was raised in the middle of the alley, and the whole area sloped slightly to the east. A river of rainwater washed around the body, carrying away blood and hair and transferred skin cells and depositing them in a drain twenty yards on, along with Ambrose’s near-perfect clearance record.
“A fucking whodunit.” Ian scowled as his partner pushed himself to his feet and brushed pebbles from his dark blue slicker. “An honest-to-Jesus whodunit.”
“We don’t know that, man,” Ambrose said in his least assuring tone. They would find out who this girl was and if she had a husband or a boyfriend. If she was messed up with drugs. They would talk to her friends. Find out where she’d last been seen. But even if those queries presented them with a good suspect, say an asshole boyfriend with a weak alibi and a history of threatening behavior, the assistant state’s attorney wouldn’t be happy about the lack of physical evidence. Crime scene technicians had become expert at collecting even the smallest traces of DNA, and juries had become accustomed to seeing a genetic comparison between the perpetrator and the accused. Defense attorneys routinely cited a lack of DNA evidence as constituting reasonable doubt all by itself. Frequently juries agreed. The increasingly sophisticated science of DNA made the dumb criminals easier to catch and the smart ones (or the lucky ones) that much harder.
Reading his own twisted guts, Ambrose worried this case might be on his desk for a long, long time.