Every Kind of Wicked (A Gardiner and Renner Novel Book 6)
Every Kind of Wicked: Chapter 21

She had screamed, though she could not recall it later on, and did not recognize Riley’s gentle description of the sound she had made as “scaring the shit” out of every man there. Jack had been at her side in an instant, defying physical laws, but she had asked—demanded, actually—that Denny guard the window and keep anyone else from so much as breathing too close to it.

Then she had been down the stairs at a pace tailor-made to break ankles, and out the side entrance door to size up the dumpster and how to get inside it, moving around to survey the area for a ladder, a discarded chair, even milk crates, anything to—

“Maggie,” Jack said, catching her by the shoulders. “Stop. We’ll get him out.”

“No.” He thought she wasn’t thinking clearly, but she was. Too clearly. The killer had obviously pitched him out the second-floor window. Rick was a fully grown man with more than a few extra pounds, so that would have been much less work, not to mention faster and less exposed, than trying to lug him down a flight of steps and out to a vehicle or, worse, getting caught inside the elevator with a dead body. But once in the dumpster the killer might have climbed inside as well to try to cover the body, hide it from the roofers and the second-floor residents who found the dumpster placement such a handy setup for trash removal. So there could be fingerprints, trace evidence, left on the edges of the container, on items inside, though how to distinguish something left by the killer from something tossed in by a tenant or customer . . . and how to remove Rick’s body and any evidence left with him when he lay on a shifting, unsteady medium of trash and old shingles….

Something pricked her skin and she glanced down, only to realize it was the cold, frostbite searching for a toehold on her bare forearms.

“Maggie,” Jack said again.

She turned to him, well aware that she had to be looking at the primary suspect in the murder of her ex. But that didn’t explain Jennifer, and so she rejected the idea. Despite this faith in him, she could hear that the timbre of her voice had fallen a few degrees below the outside temps and didn’t care. “Find me a ladder.”

* * *

Denny got her to come back inside by assigning her the window to process. She could not oversee the examination of the dumpster and the body, he said. She was personally involved, giving any defense attorney a wedge with which to rip the investigation to shreds. She accepted this reasoning, because, of course, she was being utterly reasonable.

The two men working on the roof were only too happy to provide ladders, and offered ropes, winches or scaffolds as well. It gave them a reason to come inside, take a break, and drink hot beverages in the tea shop. They had the mistaken impression that the cops would want to search the roof area in case “the dead guy” had fallen from there, but neither Maggie nor the detectives believed the killer dragged Rick’s body up a flight of steps to stage a fall when the hallway window seemed so much more convenient. Besides, the door to the roof had been locked by the landlord after the workers knocked off early on Friday, and now showed no signs of tampering. But the roofers were happy to loan their ladder and stay inside to drink hot caffeine all the same.

Maggie used every forensic trick she had in her kit to process the hallway window, oblique light, alternate light, black powder, magnetic powder, Amido Black. A child or two had squished tiny palms all over the pane, and either a child or an adult had pressed their nose to the glass a number of times, but the killer had not left her a usable print. Nor did she find any hairs or fibers caught on the frame, the wood worn too smooth for that.

Before all of that, though, she had noticed a spray of powder on the sill, too uniformly white for dust, too fine for about anything else. It might be some kind of cleanser . . . maybe building staff used scouring powder on the glass at some point. Or some mom had backed into the window with her diaper bag, producing a puff of baby powder onto the surface. Or their killer overdid the talcum . . . did people even use talcum powder anymore? Could one even purchase it? Since she thought it extremely unlikely the killer had cleaned the window, diapered a baby, or retained extremely old-fashioned habits of personal hygiene, she didn’t expect it to be a helpful clue. But she lifted the powder with a piece of tape, folded the tape back on itself, and stored it in an envelope.

Because she was being thorough, logical, and completely reasonable. Under control, professional, and calm. She thought of nothing but preserving the scene, finding the evidence, collecting the evidence, and following where it might lead. Only that.

Even though everyone kept looking at her as if she had two heads, both of which might burst into peals of hysteria at any moment.

What was one supposed to feel at the death of an ex-spouse? Surely not abject grief—after all, you divorced them because you didn’t love them. If the breakup had been outrageously painful or involved actions too extreme to ever be forgiven, she might feel elation, or triumph, or simply relief. But sorrow, sadness, just as you would for any other acquaintance—she couldn’t honestly use the word friend, because even if they had never married they wouldn’t have been friends, not with so many areas of conflicting attitudes and beliefs—whose life had been cut short unexpectedly.

But what about relief? A touch of that would be understandable, she thought, for any divorced person. Now the spouse would never demand entry back into one’s life, now children or other family or even mutual friends would no longer be caught in between the two of them, now those awkward encounters in hallways or offices or grocery stores would no longer occur. A simple fact: there were definite advantages to the death of an ex-spouse. A fact that no one, anywhere, would ever say out loud.

Someone up the hallway opened their door, then shut it again. It penetrated her senses that the same thing had happened about ten minutes earlier. It further penetrated that tenants had probably begun to wonder why icy drafts flowed under their inner doors, and that she could shut the window now, instead of staring down at Rick’s unseeing face and the nearly comic efforts of the detectives to securely place a ladder so Denny could get inside the dumpster without either falling or disturbing any possible evidence on the edge of same.

She might not feel grief at Rick’s death, but she still felt obligation. She had still been married to him once, no matter how it had ended. His life, health, and happiness had for a while been her responsibility. He not found a replacement for her since then, so….

Okay, perhaps she was not being 100 percent logical.

But human beings cherish loyalty, perhaps above all else. Nothing could be as important as our connections to each other; without it, why bother being human? Rick was here, he was dead, and he had no one else. Therefore, like it or not, she must step in to protect his interests.

And he would definitely have been interested in finding out who killed him.

It hit her now that her determination to help would be expected. He had been more than her ex-husband. He had been a cop. His death in the line of duty could make national news. The force would be galvanized, all other crimes in the city immediately went to the back seat. Memorials would be established, ceremonies would be held. She would be expected to be front and center, somber and angry. The slightest show of disinterest in Rick’s murder and she would feel the disapproval of every man in blue like a wave of prickly heat, pervasive and inescapable.

So it was okay that she couldn’t make herself turn away from his body, even as it slowly disassembled, moving farther and farther from this earthly realm. She would not abandon him. Even if they’d barely been on civil terms. Even if, were the situation reversed, he might not feel any particular obligation to guide her to her own funeral. Even if he would have found some reason to believe that any demise of hers would be due, somehow, in some way, to her own doing. But she was made of different stuff, and she would not abandon him.

Denny found a place to enter the dumpster and climbed up the ladder with his camera in one hand. Riley kept one hand on the ladder. Rick’s partner, Will, arrived, his skin under a stocking cap more pale than the temperature warranted. The two patrol officers strung up crime scene tape, maybe more to keep the inevitable media presence at a distance than to secure the scene, seeing as the dumpster below was the entire scene. Jack stood to one side, chin tilted upward, watching her in the open window as if he could guess her thoughts, every single conflicted one of them.

Or he might be wondering why she had stood there until her teeth chattered.

She needed to close the window.

She needed to close a lot of things.

Monday, 11:30 a.m.

Well, Jack thought, he no longer had to fear Rick Gardiner. Now he only needed to very much fear his ex-wife.

Maggie was in turmoil. She might not be shouting or physically bouncing off the walls, but all the same he knew he had never seen her this completely freaked out since he had shot the man who had been trying to rape her.

He had suggested she go back to the lab; that suggestion, unsurprisingly, didn’t even warrant a reply. It might not have been an improvement anyway—without the distraction of a crime scene and the constant murmur of the cops assuming they knew exactly who had done this, Maggie might begin to think things through. And those thoughts would quickly lead her to the conclusion that the one person with the motive, ability, and opportunity galore to murder her ex-husband was, of course, Jack. The rest of the police force might now be mobilizing to locate, arrest, and maybe shoot on sight one Marlon Toner, but Maggie would make different assumptions.

She would assume that Jack had much more to fear from Rick’s investigations than Jack had let on, which was true. Rick may have told Jack of his plan to re-interview Jennifer Toner here, with the first floor empty and dark after business hours and traffic on the streets minimal on a frigid evening. Jack could have offered to come along since Will had already left for the weekend. Jack might have seen an opportunity to remove the last challenge to his identity in the city of Cleveland—excepting Maggie herself—and taken it.

She might reason exactly that way.

He consoled himself that she would then have to come up against one question: If Jack killed Rick with malice aforethought and for purely practical reasons, then why was Jennifer dead ?

Maggie had to know that even if he could get himself to murder a fellow police officer, someone whose worst crime might be a slack work ethic tinged with misogyny, Jack couldn’t possibly slaughter an innocent, caring woman like Jennifer Toner. If Rick posed that serious of a threat, Jack could simply leave town, disappear, and slip into a new identity somewhere else, what he’d been promising to do for months.

And yet you’re still here, a voice in his head pointed out. Yes, Maggie would have to come up against that wall in her theory of Jack as Rick’s killer. If she didn’t, he wouldn’t hesitate to bring it up . . . as soon as they had a private moment, which had not yet occurred.

He looked up again. At least she had closed the damn window.

Jack watched Denny climb back down from the dumpster, pull off his latex gloves, and trade them for leather ones to warm up his fingers for a few minutes. The captain, the head of homicide arrived, ineffectual as ever, as well as the real head of homicide, detective Patty Wildwind with her talent for organizing, coordinating, and inspiring. The cops grouped at the interior end of the scene, as far from the street, the media, and the public as they could get. The chief of police would be showing up shortly and the Channel 15 van had already secured a good spot along the road, sending their camera up a short crane to get a view of the entire lot.

But next to the dumpster, Denny spoke to Jack, explaining things Jack didn’t need to know, almost certainly because he believed Jack and Maggie were an item and thus he got special treatment. Unnecessary, of course, but Jack appreciated the thought. “Footing is less than secure in there, as you can imagine. The shingles are nice and heavy, solid, unlike garbage bags, but they can slide around. Normally I wouldn’t even think to process the edge of the bin, since it’s filthy, snow-covered, and there’s no reason to think the killer ever touched it. But since it’s a cop—”

“Yes,” Jack said. “Since it’s a cop.” All sorts of things would be different about this investigation because of that.

“Not to mention Maggie’s . . . you’ll keep an eye on her,” he said to Jack, halfway between a question and a statement. “Right? She’ll . . . um . . . need you.”

“Yes,” Jack said again, because he didn’t know what else to say. Because the last thing Maggie Gardiner needed, had ever needed, was Jack.

He felt Denny watching him. But then the forensics supervisor went back to the crime scene, not bothering to keep the sigh out of his voice when he said, “We’ll have to empty the whole thing, after we remove the bo—him. It’s supposed to be there for the roofers to use but there’s a few garbage bags in there as well. We’ll have to open them.”

“Sure,” Jack said, forcing himself to be amiable, to be—human. “In case the killer cleaned up after himself.”

“Yes. And we’ll have to pull out each and every shingle down to the bottom, in case the killer dropped something when he threw the bo—him—out of the window. An ID card would be nice. Dog tags. Driver’s license. Isn’t there a way to open these things from the side?”

“That latch,” Jack pointed out, and they continued to discuss the most effective way to open and empty a dumpster of its heavy, bulky, dirty contents, while the CPD chief arrived and made a statement to the media. Denny pondered aloud whether to retrieve Rick’s body by lifting him over the edge or to open the side and begin removing contents until the body lowered by default. Which would cause more disruption to the crime scene, meaning not only the body but its immediate surroundings? Though the final decision would be up to the Medical Examiner’s office—it was, Jack saw, quite a knotty problem. The dead could cause problems for the living in an infinite number of ways.

“They’ll probably want to take him over the edge,” Maggie said, nearly causing Jack to give an unmanly start at her materialization between them. He had no idea how long she might have been there, as silent as the snow. “Excavation would take too long and risk him slipping off the pile or something.”

Denny agreed in a somber tone. “They’re on their way. I tried SPR along the top edges, but no prints. Other than that, there’s nothing we can do until we get him out of there. And the powers that be want him transported as soon as possible.”

“Transported,” Jack thought, sounded so much more positive than “removed.”And they wanted it ASAP because no one wants the bodies of dead cops lingering on the television screen. That would only fan the inevitable firestorm of comments on social media, on the street, in print, comments of horror, glee, condemnation, celebration and from every corner, outrage. The last thing the city, the entire planet, needed was yet more outrage.

Riley approached, after giving Maggie a sweeping, searching glance of assessment; Jack knew this came from a place of kindness, but it still came off as if he had judged her degree of radioactivity and how close he could safely get without risking a burn. Then he followed this up with a look for Jack, one Jack might as well get used to because he’d no doubt see it often in the coming days: that look of you’re the man in her life—do something!

So Jack put his arm around her shoulders, temporarily bewildering her and failing to visibly satisfy Riley, who sniffed and said, “I don’t know how he did it, but the chief—the chief, not our chief—got them to agree to turn the cameras off when we remove . . . him. Whether we can trust them or not, that remains to be seen.”

“I have to tell his parents,” Maggie said, her voice turning scratchy with panic as this thought occurred to her. “Right now. They can’t see this on the news. I should go there, tell them in person.”

“Already done,” Jack told her. “The Dayton police were dispatched to make notification.” Meaning the cops would go to the house to tell Rick’s mother and father that their child had been murdered. They would bring a Victim’s Advocate with them, a kindly, sympathetic person who would help them through the first few hours of questions, arrangements, and contacting other family members and friends.

“Strangers? They can’t be told this by strangers, someone they don’t know.” Maggie obviously pictured her former in-laws receiving the news, and quivered under Jack’s arm as if her knees might give out. He tightened his grip and told her quietly that it was better they heard it in person, from people trained to deal with such situations and who knew all the avenues of help available, even if they weren’t personally acquainted.

“It’s a three-hour drive at least,” Denny added. “More in this weather. You couldn’t make it there before they heard it through other channels.”

She accepted this but didn’t appear satisfied. She would not be satisfied by anyone’s performance in this situation, Jack knew. Not the detectives’, not his, and definitely not her own.

The Medical Examiner’s investigator arrived, followed by the “ambulance crew.” The investigator agreed with Denny’s evaluation and they climbed back into the steel box, out of sight to everyone except birds and the second-floor window, where a young mother and her two children were watching the activity with wide eyes. Why the woman thought staring at a dead body might be an educational opportunity for her toddler and the toddler’s older brother . . . Jack hoped she got fingerprint powder all over her clothes.

Everything took longer when a police officer had died. Not because there was more to do than any other homicide, but because no one wanted to make a mistake or be seen to give less than 200 percent. The ME investigator took copious pictures and whispered a tome’s worth of notes into an app on his phone—so much easier than trying to write with freezing ink and freezing fingers and in the snow, which had once again begun to fall.

But nature provided a limit to how many i’s and t’s they could dot and cross. Lingering became impossible when the temperature hovered below five. Maggie shivered no matter how close Jack held her, and he thought his fingers might fall off later along with both ears and the tip of his nose. The investigator wrapped up his investigations much more quickly than anyone expected, including the body snatchers who had been staying warm inside their van. They wasted no time in climbing up and inside the bin, carting a body bag with loops of mesh straps at intervals all around, so that it could be carried between several people, as pallbearers carry a coffin. The two men, with Denny and the investigator, managed to hoist the corpse over the side without actually falling out themselves. Jack had no idea how they did it.

Cops stood ready on the ground to bear the weight the rest of the way. Jack found himself in a paroxysm of indecision. Should he show solidarity with his fellow officers and shoulder some of the burden? Would that be considered insincere since he hadn’t even liked the guy and now dated—they thought—his ex? Would staying by Maggie’s side be the higher duty? For once he truly needed the advice of his de facto life coach: Riley.

He turned to his partner, who said, “Let’s go.”

Jack let his arm fall from Maggie’s shoulders, and walked with Riley to the group of officers. They all reached upward, palms open and flat, as the men inside the box lowered the bag as best they could. Body bags were always transported flat, to maintain the corpse as close to their original position as possible. But since the men inside the dumpster couldn’t walk on air, the bag had to be held at its ends like a hammock. Jack grabbed a strap, held it up until the other ones were grasped so they could lower the whole bag at the same time. It wasn’t only to preserve evidence. It was to preserve dignity.

Truthfully, they tried hard to preserve that for each and every victim, but today they would be especially cognizant.

Once on the ground, with the dumpster on one side and a phalanx of cops forming a protective barrier from the media and other prying eyes on the other three, the investigator zipped the bag open. Cameras clicked, the investigator’s and Denny’s.

Rick wore the same clothes she’d seen him in on Friday, black denim pants, scuffed brown leather athletic shoes, and a lightweight maroon parka zipped to the collarbones. Only a tiny red stain on the parka, middle front, gave any indication of how he died.

“What killed him?” someone in the group asked.

Denny stated the obvious: “There’s no signs of a struggle. No injuries to the hands or face.”

“Clothing intact,” the ME investigator added.

Someone crouched next to the body reached out a latexed hand and pushed at the parka’s cuff. “His watch and ring are still here.” Jack realized it was Maggie, examining her ex-husband’s murdered corpse. Her arm was steady but her voice trembled ever so slightly.

The investigator must have decided that decorum might be all well and good but they had neither the time nor the climate for it, and began to unzip the parka.

“Wait,” Maggie said. Everyone froze. She said, “Wait, wait, wait,” and bustled off, the men behind her parting instantly to create a path. No one else moved. They waited.

She returned with clear tape to press on Rick’s maroon parka, at his left shoulder. She muttered something about powder.

Denny peered. “Are you sure that’s not snow?”

“Too fine.”

She folded the tape in on itself, then dropped it into an envelope. The investigator finished unzipping Rick’s parka.

Underneath his coat Rick wore a long-sleeve polo shirt with a T-shirt showing beneath it. More pictures, this time of the clear wound to Rick’s center mass.

“Shot,” someone behind Jack said. Will stood by Rick’s head, one hand at his mouth, and said nothing.

“Bullet wound?” Maggie asked.

The investigator pulled Rick’s shirt and T-shirt out of his belt to reveal the pale, rounded belly. “It’s a circular hole. Smallish caliber.”

Maggie folded the parka back and together they found the corresponding hole in it. Without the small bloodstain it would be easily lost in the puffy folds of the coat, the slight protrusion of fiberfill stuffing hidden by the dusting of snow.

Maggie said, “So he still had his coat on. Badge and gun right here on his belt.”

“He didn’t see it coming,” the investigator said.

Denny, also crouching, mused aloud: “He didn’t have a clue. For whatever reason, he did not feel threatened.”

“Neither did Jennifer Toner,” Maggie pointed out.

“Who leaves a gun?” one of the cops mused aloud.

“Too risky to be caught with a cop’s gun,” theorized another.

“How come nobody in this building heard a gunshot?”

“How come nobody noticed a body getting thrown out a window?”

Someone else found this wording a little cold and hissed Dude! at the speaker. Rick Gardiner was not, would never be, “a body.” He was a cop. He would not be put in the same category as all the other homicide victims they investigated.

The man from the ME’s tried to heft Rick onto one side—not an easy task, so Maggie and Denny helped. Jack wondered what it must feel like to hold on to your ex-spouse’s hip so an investigator can check their back for an exit wound. The guy had to be as cold as a Popsicle. Nearly forty-eight hours . . . he must have been frozen solid, or rigor mortis had been slowed by the low temperatures. He’d have to ask—

Maggie stood up, nearly knocking into the men crowding behind her. Jack followed her gaze.

The tenants had indeed taken advantage of the dumpster’s presence and two strands of sauce-covered spaghetti had adhered to the back of Rick’s head, frozen to his short hair, one end curled over his ear. This final indignity broke the back of Maggie’s resolve. A strangled sob escaped her lips, both a cry and a whisper.

“That’s it,” Denny said, with enough resolve for the two of them. He turned to Jack. “Get her out of here.”

Jack put one arm around her shoulders and pulled her from the scene. She let him.

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