A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,27

few tree trunks took shape. A clump of saw palmetto. A squat bunker of gray concrete with a single black window.

“This is where we found the last body,” she said, reaching down to grab a long-handled flashlight and her riot baton. “Take a look?” she said.

It wasn’t really a question as she popped open the door. I got out and as I walked around she closed and locked the car, leaving the spotlight on. I followed her into the brush.

“The report came in on a pay phone back up near the dealer’s corner. First time that line has been dialed to the police station. Patrol and a rescue responded. Girl had been dead eight, ten hours.”

I was watching Richards’s feet, following in her tracks, wishing for a flashlight of my own.

“She was ID’ed through fingerprints. We had her on file for some minor possession charges, loitering. She was basically a heroin addict. Her sister kept kicking her out and taking her back in.”

Richards unsnapped the holster of her 9mm as we approached the bunker, stepped around the wall and found the doorway. Inside the squad car’s spotlight painted a square on the wall opposite the window. I stepped in and the stench hit my nose and made my eyes water. It had been a while, but the reek of stale sweat, rotting food and wet mold was not unlike some corners I’d had to stick my head in down in the Philadelphia subway tunnels. Richards’s flashlight beam sprayed across the walls and into all four corners and then settled on the mattress.

“They found her face up, skirt pulled up and top pulled down around her waist, just like the others. This one had fresh bruises on her ankle and one wrist.”

“Toxicology?”

“She was high but the twist in her neck and the bruises around her throat were so obvious they knew before the M.E. got here she’d had her windpipe crushed.”

Around our feet there were half a dozen empty plastic lighters strewn among the trash. Pipers, I thought. When I was a young cop my Philadelphia sergeant had been standing with me at a magistrate’s walk-through at the roundhouse and he grabbed the shackled hand of a guy in line and twisted his thumb up for me to see.

“Bic thumb,” he called the clubbed and thickly callused digit. “From spinning the lighter so many times trying to keep the crack lit.”

I reached out and pushed Richards’s light back to the mattress. Stains and burn marks and ripped fabric where the rats had gnawed holes.

“You guys ever consider taking this thing to the lab for a DNA sampling?”

“Jesus, Max. You want to type every scumball and user in a fifteen-block radius? They’re all in there somewhere,” she said. “A defense attorney would have a field day.”

She had a point.

We got back to the car and she unlocked and switched off the spot, started the engine and kicked the A.C. up.

“That was the third of the most recent ones,” she said, reaching into her back seat and bringing out a bottle of water. Then she reached back again to get a thermos.

“Coffee?”

“You’re a mind reader.”

“Doesn’t take much,” she said and I watched her take a drink and then continue.

“The victim before that was in a stand of bushes near the overpass. One before that was in an abandoned press box at the high school. All the crime scenes were places that the addicts know and use. But nobody’s come forward with credible information, even the confidential informants looking for a few bucks.”

“Maybe even they’re afraid,” I offered, pouring the coffee into the plastic top of the thermos.

She was staring out into the orange glow on the pavement ahead.

“They’re never more afraid than they are hungry.”

We cruised the area for another hour, down a handful of alleys, up behind an old style drive-in theater where movies were flashing away on three different giant screens and along a street that she called the border. Even in the dark you could see that on one side of the street were modest but well kept homes, trimmed grass, planted palms and nice sedans in the drives. It was, Richards said, a neighborhood where middle-class blacks had come together to make a stand and a community. On the other side of the street were the scrub-and-dirt yards, the lot with two broken cars alongside the drive, the open lot with a pile of discarded sofas and trash.

“Don’t ask me how you get from one side to the other,”