I heard someone say once that death was a terminal adventure. The comment came back to me as I stared at the dead body, fifteen feet ahead of me, lying faceup in a half-frozen puddle.
“What do you make of it?” Bill Rashleigh stood next to me, hands in pockets, stifling shivers. It was mid-April and Chicago was having a cold spell. I couldn’t remember when Chicago wasn’t having a cold spell.
“Whoever killed him is an antisocial prick,” I snapped. I wasn’t in a mood to talk, not even to my partner. I watched our senior technician going through the forensic protocol and wondered why Sammy flicked his brush over the victim’s face. Hell, he couldn’t be dusting it for prints. The most feasible method for lifting fingerprints off human skin involved applying cyanoacrylate vapors to a patch of skin for a few minutes. Only then a technician would use the standard black magnetic powder to develop prints. Blowing vapors on skin required a fan and other equipment that had to be plugged into wall receptacles. It wasn’t a field method. The process needed a forensic lab. Maybe I was just seeing things. Three hours of crying over one’s financial state and only three hours of sleep would certainly wreck one’s eyes—and reason.
It was still dark in spite of the two LED lamps trained on the crime scene. The shadows cast by the bumper-mounted police lights covered everything like a blanket, exaggerating the outlines of cars and whatever equipment our forensics team had brought along. The photographer’s flash was frying my retinas with its incessant blinking. “It’s not a robbery.”
“I’m sure his next of kin will be happy to hear that,” I said. I shouldn’t snicker as much as I did these days but when you’d been at it for the better part of fifteen years, snickering just came…like gray hair.
“You all right, Carly?”
“Swell, Bill, just swell.”
“I thought it would be another domestic bashing. That’s all we get these days when the call comes in the middle of the night—and from Park Ridge too.” He sounded pleased it had turned out to be a young male, well dressed and definitely not robbed, not even his briefcase was taken.
“It’s six a.m. and something’s telling me that soon enough we’ll be wishing it were a domestic bashing.” I sighed. We were in the middle of nowhere, though still well inside the apron of Chicago’s suburbs. We stood on a strip of undeveloped land in Park Ridge, presently used as an unpaved parking lot, mostly for commuter parking.
“Speaking of Park Ridge.” I moved my head a little, because that was all you needed to do to survey the City of Park Ridge, one of the many postage-stamp Chicago suburbs. “Don’t they have their own police department? The last time I checked, our districts were back there, where the sun is about to rise. Aren’t we just a tad outside of our jurisdiction?”
“They called us.”
“That’s mighty neighborly of them, but don’t they have their own black-and-white crowd to look after their residents’ welfare?”.
