The Drop Zone Read online

  He studied them all, searching for and finding the one that had jumped out at him the last time he was here, the one that had stripped his nerves raw. Large block letters: “FUCK YOU DAD. -KATY.”

  He passed through an archway with a sliding door that had jumped its rusted iron rail and lay caved and twisted on the floor. This room was smaller, and the light beam reached from wall to wall. It was even more filthy and littered with torn mattresses, broken bottles, and empty food cans. He inhaled dampness and rot and the stink of abandonment. He kicked through a decade of dust, shooing shadows against the walls and seeing where a campfire had been fuelled with baseboards, with door and window frames.

  Again he hollered, “Hello! You wanted to tell me something. You said midnight, the Drop Zone.”

  He stepped through plaster and rubble. Stumbled again. Cursed under his breath at something other than his misstep. Then he played the light down a long hallway to a closed door. Again he hesitated before advancing, threatened by the narrowness of the hallway and by the spongy, saggy look of the floor.

  He reached the closed door and leaned against the jamb, sweaty faced, heaving for breath. He tried the door but it was swollen and crusted shut. He doubted anyone had been beyond it in years. Then he stepped back and shouldered it, riding the rusted hinges into the room.

  A mountain of bricks and mortar confronted him. The ceiling drooped from the inward collapse of the far wall. Through the opening, he saw city lights twinkling in the wake of an outbound container ship. For a moment or two, he watched the ship glide toward the harbour mouth, almost wishing he could hire on and just sail away.

  Then he turned and swept the room with his flashlight, wondering about the 911 call, about the anxiety in the voice and the direct reference to a body on Airport Road. And he wondered why the no show. Who the hell was she?

  He checked his watch again: 12:16 a.m. Then he pulled out his cell phone. As he dialed Danny’s number and waited for the message, he played the 911 call in his head and rummaged through the caller’s words: What they did. Tee fie. Body.

  He heard the beep and said, “You didn’t miss much, pal. I’ll tell you about it.”

  Then, just in case he had heard the time wrong, he found a flat chunk of mortared bricks to sit out the hour, suddenly wishing he had brought Johnnie Walker along for the wait. Then he settled himself and flicked off the light to let the darkness have its way with his thoughts.

  Peterson was two beers deep at a dive with no closing time, the Drop Zone still bile in his throat. Alone, yet sitting among diehards at the bar — them talking and him not listening. His eyes were on a nearby table, where a drunk was sorting change. Another drunk at the same table had passed out, his arms outstretched, his mouth leaking drool onto the chipped laminate tabletop.

  The bald bartender took Peterson’s empty and returned a few moments later with a refill. He saw the badge when Peterson reached for his wallet. The bartender nodded and retreated down the bar, fingering Peterson for another off-duty cop drowning his thoughts and measuring his life by the wet rings on the polished oak.

  Then a guy who was all elbows and knees, with short grey hair and wrinkled shirt and pants that hung from his thin frame, entered the pub. He caught Peterson’s eye and head-signalled to a table at the back where the light was low. Peterson ordered another draft and carried it and his own beer to the table.

  “Long time,” the guy said, offering Peterson a broad smile as a handshake. The smile ran cracks across the guy’s leathery face.

  Peterson nodded and returned the smile. He passed the guy the draft. “You losing weight?”

  “Since I was twelve. Lose any more and they’ll mark me absent. So what’s it been, Peterson, two years at least?”

  “Must be.”

  “Sorry about your wife.”

  Peterson flinched, but he knew the words were genuine.

  “I heard it’s taking its toll,” the guy said.

  “The grapevine never stops.”

  “Not for you and not for me.”

  “And what’s it telling the Bone Man now.”

  The Bone Man took a gulp of beer. “You’re getting even rougher than you used to be, sometimes with people you used to like.”

  Peterson’s face softened and he started to say something, but the Bone Man held up his hand like a traffic cop.

  “No excuses, Peterson, not with the Bone Man. I buried one too. Took it out on my son.”

  “You make up?”

  “We get along,” the Bone Man sighed.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Community college, studying computers. Imagine that, a dumb alley rat like me with a kid going to college.”

  “Not too dumb.”

  “You don’t think?”

  “You’ve been odd-jobbing how long?”

  “All my life,” the Bone Man said.

  “No government handouts. No warrants. And I doubt you ever been shafted.”

  The Bone Man shrugged. “Not enough to worry about.”

  “Probably picking up the kid’s tab.”

  “Some of it.”

  “You think that’s a dumb guy’s life?”

  Again the Bone Man shrugged.

  “We see the same thing from different sides of the street, Bony Walker. Thanks for thinking about my wife.”

  They each settled into silence and into their beers. Then Bony said, “So what brings you out to see me?”

  “An anonymous 911 call,” Peterson said, “about the Airport Road body. Girl’s voice from a cell phone at a busy intersection. She threw a name — at least I think it was a name: Tee Fie.”

  “Tee Fie?”

  “Something like that. I think the caller knows who did it and wanted to spill, but … I don’t know, afraid I think.”

  “A hooker? Junkie?”

  “Could be. She mentioned the Drop Zone. Said a time, midnight. I thought she wanted to meet, but she never showed.”

  “Not much to ask around about.”

  “Asking too much might make someone jumpy. I thought you might just keep an ear open.”

  “Two ears for you.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Nothing. You did plenty for me already.”

  Peterson’s cell phone rang and he cringed before he realized the ring tone was “Auld Lang Syne,” his cop ring.

  “Peterson,” he said.

  “Central Dispatch,” a woman’s voice said. “We have a possible homicide in St. Jude’s Roman Catholic Church, on Westphal Street.”

  “I’m short one partner,” Peterson said.

  “Detective Little booked in half an hour ago,” the dispatcher said. “He’ll be at the church.”

  Peterson grumbled, hung up, and pushed what was left of his beer to the centre of the table.

  “Must be important,” Bony said.

  “Homicide at St. Jude’s.”

  “You like doing this?” Bony asked before draining his beer.

  Peterson let it go.

  Peterson drove with his head on a swivel, searching through the chase lights and flashing signs that blistered both sides of the Strip, a six-lane through the commercial section of a rundown neighbourhood. He passed one joint after another: pizza, falafel, souvalaki, then a dollar store, porn store, empty lot, used-car lot, realtor, barber, gas bar, pawn shop, then more of the same. The Strip was churning with sleaze. Prostitutes with blank eyes hustling the corners, and pipeheads and brick-faced buyers hounding the sidewalks like ants on a sugar cube.

  Peterson slowed past a cluster of half a dozen cars in a strip-mall parking lot, each car a mini-mart for self-abuse, with sellers operating from open trunks or from open windows on the passenger side. Muscle on the driveways screened the flow of customers like security guards at a Walmart.

  Useless to crac
k down, he thought. Bust them, jail them, hide the key where the sun don’t shine, and they still wouldn’t go away. Others would take their places. Need and greed, the free market system.

  Peterson hung a left and drove into the tangle of side streets bordered by shabby track housing and dilapidated high rises. He turned into the empty lot at a closed elementary school and parked beside a blacktop basketball court, where T-shirted teens were still going two-on-two in a streetlight’s dull glow. They must be better off here than home, Peterson thought, and clicked on the dome light. He checked his haggard face in the rear-view to see if his eyes were as bloodshot as they felt. Then he reached for mints in the glove box, popped one, and dug into the back seat for a tan cloth bag containing blue forensic booties and latex gloves. He took what he needed, climbed from the car, and walked half a block to St. Jude’s Roman Catholic Church.

  The heavy front door squealed on its thick iron hinges. In the vestibule, he hesitated before the holy water font, remembering a habit that now grated against his frame of mind. He slipped booties on his feet, pulled on gloves, and entered the nave.

  The church smelled of burnt offerings. The light was dim and moody from the flicker of devotional candles in metal racks set before statues of the Blessed Virgin and of St. Jude reaching down a hand to help lost souls.

  As Peterson walked down the centre aisle, the shadows, the candles, the hint of beeswax, and the lingering smell of incense insinuated an urge to pray. He ignored it and dug his hands into his jacket pockets.

  Detective Corporal Danny Little, still dressed for a night on the town in a brown bomber jacket and loosened tie, stood beneath the vigil light. He was looking down at Janet Crouse, who was squatting at the centre of the transept before a circle of votive candles. Danny saw Peterson and pounded up the aisle to meet him.

  “Drunk or sober?” Danny asked. His voice was thick, his tongue digging out the words.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not to me,” Danny said. “You want me to do this?”

  “I’m good,” Peterson said.

  “Your last message said I didn’t miss much.”

  “Stood up.”

  Danny laughed. “That’s better than being shot down. But don’t ask.”

  Peterson fingered his partner’s tie. “She must have left in a hurry.”

  “What’d I just say?” A sheepish grin. “I ask you to leave it and what’d you do?”

  “You’re going to tell me anyway, you might as well do it now.”

  Danny frowned then tossed it like he didn’t care. “So what’s with the Drop Zone? You chasing ghosts?”

  Peterson offered a tight smile.

  Danny caught it. “Was the caller definitely a woman?”

  “A girl,” Peterson said.

  “And she knows something about the Airport Road?”

  “I think she does.”

  “But unwilling to show up and tell us what it is.”

  “You know what they say about cold feet,” Peterson said. “Maybe she had a reason.”

  Danny looked back at the altar. “You sure you want to do this?”

  Peterson nodded. “Who’s dead?”

  “Old priest got whacked from behind,” Danny said and led Peterson down to the transept, where Peterson sidled into the front pew and saw that inside the circle of candles the letter Alpha was pasted to the floor.

  “Whoever did this cut it from the altar cloth and stuck it down with blood,” Janet Crouse said, sweeping her flashlight beam over the altar to show the ragged hole in the green cloth.

  Crouse worked forensics. She was a big-boned woman with big hips who wore her long dark hair coiled and pinned on the back of her head like a cinnamon bun. She wore blue coveralls, blue booties, and latex gloves.

  Danny Little asked Peterson, “Any idea what it means?”

  “Book of Revelations,” Peterson said. “God said, ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ the beginning and the end.”

  Crouse looked up with a quizzical expression.

  Peterson shrugged. “Altar boy.”

  “You!” Crouse cried. She almost laughed.

  “My mother wanted a priest, my father a lawyer.”

  “So they end up with a cop. Some compromise,” Danny scoffed.

  Peterson gestured to Crouse’s flashlight. “No bright lights?”

  “They’re on their way from the suburbs,” Crouse said and held the flashlight under her chin, angled upward to make herself look ghoulish. “Double murder out there. Looks like the husband did his wife and then himself. Busy night.”

  Peterson shook his head. “Where’s the body?”

  Crouse struggled to her feet and led him up the steps and across the altar, avoiding the small orange plastic pyramids that marked blood splotches and bloody footprints. They entered the sacristy.

  Peterson closed his eyes to settle himself. Then he looked down at the body lying in a large pool of blood. He looked away, swallowed to hold down the claw in his stomach, and then looked back.

  The dead man wore a black cassock. He was lying on his front, his head turned to one side, and appeared to be in his late sixties or early seventies; grey haired, of slender build.

  “Smashed skull,” Crouse said. “Someone was angry.”

  Peterson nodded. “Died where he fell?”

  “Pretty much,” Crouse answered. “It looks like he was moving forward when he was clubbed from behind. Then hit a few more times.”

  Off Peterson’s questioning look, she added, “All on the right side.”

  “Parish priest?”

  “Father Andre Boutilier,” Danny said. “He shares the rectory next door with Father Ronny — Ronny Eisner. Father Andre worked this parish and St. Patrick’s; Father Ronny worked St. John’s and St. Martha’s across town.”

  “Who found the body?” Peterson asked.

  “Father Ronny,” Danny said. “He’s in the rectory.”

  Peterson turned to Crouse. “How soon for a post-mortem?”

  “Take a number,” she grouched.

  “New federal crime bill,” Danny said. “Forensic tests go to Ottawa.”

  Peterson looked around the sacristy. There was a clothes tree hung with a long white alb and green vestments for daily mass. Beside it stood a small table holding a silver finger bowl and glass cruets for holy water and wine. Running the length of the opposite wall was a built-in cupboard with a grey laminate countertop, and on this were a breviary and a gold-plated chalice, paten, and ciborium.

  Peterson stepped around the body to the counter and lifted the lid on the ciborium. It was empty. Then he fingered the top, where some adornment had been broken off.

  “I thought the same thing,” Danny said. “Someone killing the priest for the Holy Eucharist. But that thing’s a dust collector.”

  Peterson’s eyes again swept the room and landed on a tall staff hung with a banner used in religious processions. The crimson pennant bore the depiction of a lamb and a cross, and the motto “By This Sign Conquer.”

  Peterson retraced his steps around the body and went over to the flagstaff. By the discoloration on the floor where the tripod base had been standing for years, he noticed it had moved. Then he looked closely at its brass top.

  “It’s blood,” Crouse confirmed.

  Peterson nodded. He pretended to grab the flagstaff and use it to strike forward.

  “That’s my guess as well,” Crouse said. “The murderer hit him from behind, then stood over him and swung a few more times.”

  “Why would the killer set it back down almost exactly where he had grabbed it from?” Peterson asked. “Self control? Shock? Overcome with guilt?”

  “Maybe the killer just likes things neat and tidy,” Crouse said.

  “What’s out front?” Peterson asked.

  Crouse le
d them from the sacristy. As the three walked over to the candlelit statue of the Blessed Virgin, the four-member forensics team came in through the front doors. Crouse left Peterson and Danny to direct the team to the body in the sacristy. When she returned, Peterson was staring at the blackened face of the Blessed Virgin.

  “Someone burned a prayer book and wet the ashes with holy water to smudge it like that,” Crouse explained. “And someone left that bundle at the statue’s feet.”

  Peterson stepped in to get a closer look. It was a bundle of cloth cinched with a string to form what appeared to be a head. “A rag doll?”

  “Looks like it,” Crouse said. “The cloth is still damp. Someone soaked it in water.”

  “Or baptized it,” Peterson said. He followed the Virgin’s downward gaze to the vigil lights surrounding the letter Alpha and a small pool of blood on the floor at the statue’s feet.

  “The priest’s?” Peterson asked Crouse, gesturing with his head toward the sacristy.

  “We’ll know when we analyze it. There’s something else.”

  She led Danny and Peterson to the baptismal font. On the floor beside it was a pool of blood-spotted liquid.

  “I’ll confirm it in the lab, but my first thought was amniotic fluid.”

  Peterson stroked his brown hair. His eyes narrowed as he looked back toward the pool of blood, thinking it through, questioning his own conclusion. “Someone gave birth?”

  “I’m not sure,” Crouse said, uncomfortable with the evidence. She walked back to the circle of votive candles and the pool of blood on the floor before the statue of the Blessed Virgin. “There’s lots of blood but no placenta, no traces of a fetus.”

  Peterson looked beyond Crouse to the altar and to the crucifix that towered over it. “It’s a ritual of some kind. She gave birth or maybe just pretended to with the rag doll. Maybe dunked it in the baptismal font. A make-believe sacrifice or a real one?”