ago. He’d gone to enough of them to know that the bodies would still be there, as if he needed to see another body. The immediate area would be cordoned off by the responding officers, so you weren’t going to beat them before the yellow tape went up and get some kind of close-up and personal view. And if friends and neighbors and possible eyewitnesses were what you were after, they’d all still be hanging around, at least the ones willing to talk or wanting to be quoted.
He climbed the pedestrian stairway of the Andrews Avenue Bridge. From the top he could see a television news truck already pulled up onto the sidewalk three blocks to the south. When he got down and made it within a block of the rear entrance of the seven-story jail, he slowed and started observing. Camera guys were up against the chain-link gate to the sally port, trying to get shots through the wire mesh. They would consider themselves lucky if they could get a telephoto of a blood pool or, even better, a shot of the medical examiner guys picking up the body and loading it into their black van. The newspaper’s camera guys would be doing the same, afraid somebody else might get a shot they didn’t have even though they knew no photo editor was going to put fresh blood on the front page. But better to be safe and get the gore shot than have some boss ask you why you didn’t get it.
Bridge traffic going north was backed up, the omnipresent rubberneckers slowing to see what they could see and tell everybody at the office when they got in. Nowadays, they’d probably call it in on their cell phones: Hey, Jody, I’m down on Andrews and there’s a bunch of cops and television guys. What’s up? Did you hear anything? I mean, wow, the traffic, ya know? It was the electronic version of the backyard fence, instant and without boundaries.
Oh, and Jody? Tell the boss I’m gonna be late, OK?
As Nick approached the growing bubble of press, he recognized the TV reporters from Channels 7 and 10. They had done lots of crime scenes together over the years. It was a fraternity of odd undertakers.
“Matt. How’s it goin’?” Nick said to the Channel 10 guy.
“Hey, Nick,” he answered, nodding in the direction of the gate. “They got somebody down at the bottom of the steps to the back door. Gotta guess that it’s a prisoner or they wouldn’t still be standing around letting the body lie there.”
Nick looked around and found the Daily News photographer. She was on one knee at the far edge of the fence, a camera body up to her face. He walked over to join her.
“Hi, Susan.”
“Figured you’d be here,” she said, not bothering to look away from her viewfinder.
Nick bent down. From her vantage point he could see a long lump shrouded with a yellow sheet at the base of the staircase. He always wondered why they used bright yellow, making it obvious to anyone and everyone that a corpse was lying there. It stuck out, a happy color surrounded by the dark green and blue of uniforms and gray concrete and black van. While the camera guys focused on that, Nick stood up and began searching the faces of the officers, trying to recognize someone he knew, someone he could call later to get an inside edge on information.
A couple of the jail guards were standing together off to the side, smoking, either as a nerve salve or just taking advantage of an unscheduled break from the inside. Four uniformed road deputies were huddled near the still-opened back doors of a detention transport van. Nick knew that the vans usually carried anywhere from two to eight prisoners from the city jails around the county or from state prisons when an inmate needed to show up for court. The main downtown courthouse was right next door, attached by an elevated walkway. It made it easier and quicker to transport defendants back and forth to hearings and legal appearances.
At first Nick found it odd that no one was at the top of the steps guarding the door.
“Anybody been in or out of the door?” he asked Susan.
“Not since I got here,” she said, standing up. “Maybe they’re afraid of it.”
Nick gave her a quizzical look. He’d been on assignment with Susan before. She was very good. Once they had responded as a team to a