Hide (Detective Harriet Foster #1)(7)

“You got nothing to say to that shit?” He cocked his head toward the hecklers.

Foster swept her eyes along the bridge, watching the faces of those who considered her the enemy, knowing full well how the high-profile police shootings and racially tinged arrests had gotten them here, how they had galvanized the us-versus-them battle lines. Most of the heat she could understand; some she even endorsed. No good cop stood for a bad one. So why was Lonergan, the self-proclaimed “old-school cop,” taking the heckling as a personal affront? She had her theories.

“No,” she said, then walked away from him.

A dead body found on the Riverwalk was unusual. Occasionally, there would be a mugging reported down here, some tourist asked to “break yourself” and hand over their wallet by an opportunist who could smell the cluelessness on them. Or there would be a drowning—some blitzed, overgrown frat boy who had tottered out of a bar at 2:00 a.m. and into the river, too drunk to save himself.

The Mag Mile was just up a level, with its high-end shops dotted along the popular ten-block stretch of prime real estate—Nordstrom, the Apple Store, Saks, the iconic Water Tower farther north, and the pricey high-rise mall that sprouted up across the street from it. The exclusivity extended down here to the Riverwalk, too—the multimillion-dollar mixed-use project combining trendy riverside bars and restaurants with public art displays, pedestrian paths, and stone steps for lounging as the water taxis and tour boats slid past under the series of bascule bridges.

Foster eyed one of the tour boats moored beside a canvas overhang and signs announcing the hours of operation and cost per passenger. The promise of festiveness was incongruent to the grim reason they’d been called here. The yellow crime scene tape marking the outer perimeter had a female patrol officer standing at it, but Foster and Lonergan moved through, their stars hanging from chain necklaces around their necks. Foster’s attention slid to a bird-thin white woman in neon-pink running gear crying on a bench a few yards away. Another female PO stood beside her, trying to calm her down. Foster noted, not for the first time during her career, that women were often charged with these duties—guarding the perimeter and comforting frightened children and distraught women. “You gals are better at it,” she’d had a male sergeant once tell her. “It’s the estrogen.” She’d bristled, then, and though things were better today, there were still those bosses, predominantly male, who made it standard practice to consider gender when assigning tasks.

“Okay. What we got?” Lonergan dug into his pocket and plucked out a package of Juicy Fruit, then popped a stick into his mouth.

Foster watched as the PO straightened up and consulted her notebook. Foster’s eyes flicked over the gold nameplate on the officer’s uniform blouse. Hernandez. It didn’t appear Hernandez had been on the job long. She still looked fresh, clear eyed, eager. Foster knew it was only a matter of time before the streets changed that. The scarring and jadedness were accumulative, years in the making, and inevitable.

“Elyse Pratt, thirty-eight, lives across the river in Marina Towers. Out for her morning run. She’s running east at about zero seven thirty hours, clears the bridge, gets to about the kayak rental hut there when she sees the leaves piled up over by the fence, then the foot sticking out. She loses it and runs. That’s when she sees the young man with blood on his jacket. Her screaming got everyone’s attention up top there. When we arrived, she was a mess. We couldn’t get anything else out of her.”

The three of them glanced over at the weeping woman. “She been doing that the whole time?” Lonergan asked.

Hernandez nodded. “Not every day you jog up on a body.”

He frowned, looking around. “And the second body? Where’s it at?”

“He wasn’t dead, just out of it. Black male. No obvious signs of injury. We checked his pocket for ID, found his driver’s license. He’s Keith Ainsley, nineteen. We also found an NU student ID on him. There was a little blood on his jacket, like I said, but we didn’t find a weapon. He’s been transported to Northwestern. Where we found him is taped off, as you can see.”

“Drunk? High? What?” Lonergan asked.

“I didn’t smell alcohol on him, but we couldn’t rouse him. Could be a medical issue. Could be drugs. We don’t know.”

“Did Pratt call it in, Hernandez?” Foster asked.

The PO gave her a slight smile and a nod, her dark eyes meeting Foster’s. “She couldn’t manage it, she told us.” She referred again to her notes. “A passerby on the bridge, a William Sims, heard her and made the call at zero seven thirty-six. He reported he heard her yell, ‘They’re dead. They’re dead.’ He looked over the side, saw her on her knees, and called it in. Then, of course, that drew the crowd you see up there now. A couple others called in, too, after that, but we were already rolling by then.”

Foster looked up at the bridge. “Nobody saw anyone else but her? No one running away? Not Ainsley?”

Hernandez shook her head. “You can’t see the body from up there or where Ainsley was laying unless you’re halfway down the steps or standing down here on the path. All anyone saw was Pratt screaming her head off.”

Foster glanced over at the second cordon, the area at the base of the steps where Ainsley had been found. It was just a few yards from the spot where Pratt had discovered the pile of leaves. She nodded at the PO. “Thanks. We’ll be back to talk to her in a bit.”