Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

ctly into the corners and did not spill out of the box.

I flipped through the report, scanning for anything interesting; statements, lab reports, background, memos, and so on, all in neat manila folders.

The coroner said it was a gunshot. The entry wound was relatively small, consistent with the type produced by a military or hunting weapon of a caliber in the range of a .257.

It was pretty large for modern military, but R. Cole had jumped on it, commenting that it tended to indicate the shot was fired by an overzealous shopkeeper trying to protect his store.

The problem with that was the exit wound. It looked like it had been made by a high-velocity bowling ball.

I flipped through to the scene report. No slug had been found.

So whatever the weapon, the bullet used was a hunting round. Military rounds are jacketed. They leave neat exit wounds. Hunters use unjacketed lead for maximum expansion. Hunting rounds with a powerful load disintegrate when they hit something solid, like pavement. So there would be a big exit and no slug—exactly what we had here.

And Park didn’t strike me as a hunter somehow.

I filed it away and moved on.

Next came the pictures.

You might expect the pictures from each crime scene to be unique. They’re not. After a while death begins to look the same, whether it’s a grandmother skewered with a bread knife or a roadkill armadillo.

It’s just part of the spiritual downside of being a cop. Sooner or later that piece of you that is revolted and offended by the indignity of death gets turned off and it’s all just scenery, whether it’s an armed robber scragged by a security guard or a Sunday school teacher pulled in seven sections from a blown-up car. It stops bothering you because you could not do your job if every death bothered you the same way.

So you learn to look at death. You learn to look at pictures of death, too. The bodies in these photos never look quite human. The victim is just a lump of cold meat in its own gravy.

I turned to the sheaf of glossies in Hector’s file, not expecting much.

The first shot took my breath away.

Hector was lying on the pavement. He looked incredibly graceful. He lay in an artful heap, almost as though some great painter had posed him there after weeks of sketching and study. His right leg was bent back at an angle too severe for comfort. His left arm was spread wide, beckoning. His right arm lay across his chest.

It was the face that really bothered me. I had never seen anything like it. Hector’s face was peaceful, noble, important somehow. It looked like a romantic death mask from some great leader who had said beautiful things and then been shot down.

I knew this was a shot Ed had spent hours looking at, knew it without even seeing the smudges on the margins. All he had tried to say and been too embarrassed to finish—this picture said it all.

And I thought of what Ed had said about Hector. Cops don’t spend much time with what might have been. They know too much about what is. But looking at the picture of this dead teenager, I could see why Ed was thinking that way. It made me think what if, too—what if Hector really had been able to become all Ed thought he might be?

Homicide pictures hadn’t bothered me since I saw my first set. These were making my head spin.

What got to me was the same thing eating away at Ed Beasley—the thought that this kid might very well have been more important than the rest of us, and that by letting him die quietly like this we were blowing it big-time.

I didn’t have the stomach for computerized forms anymore. But I thumbed through all the stuff anyway. By the end of my rookie year, two of my classmates had been shot by not being thorough. Dull routine is part of the turf.

There were a couple of items that were interesting. But the one that caught my eye was in the crime scene report. It listed a piece of HARDWARE, STEEL, UNIDENTIFIED found on the west edge of the roof.

It was typical of this investigation: UNIDENTIFIED. They had weighed it, measured it, analyzed the composition of the steel—stainless—and they hadn’t figured out what the hell it was. But there was a full page of reports on the thing to prove that the investigation was thorough. Their ass was covered.

I had been looking at an eyebolt in the west edge of the roof when Lin Park’s friends had done the drum solo on my skull. I couldn’t tell from the picture what this thing was, but I wondered at the connection. I made a mental note to check it out and moved on.

What I really wanted to see was the summary. It took me forty minutes but I finally got there.

If you know what to look for and can decipher the convoluted high-tech cop-ese, the summary tells you all you need to know. Not because it gives the whole story from start to finish in too much detail, but because it tells you how the detective in charge was thinking.

Reading between the lines, you can see how much the detectives were allowed to do in a case—how far they could take it, how creative they could be, how much pressure they were under to nail the killer.

And in the summary of Hector’s file the answer was crystal clear: not much.

Nothing written in the file spelled that out. That would be too obvious, and this summary was not obvious, not at all. In its own way it was a masterpiece of political ice-skating.