Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(4)
There was a slight wind. It made them pull their collars up and huddle down inside their coats. Over their shoulders they carried their poles, the party looking like some late-twentieth-century version of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher out for a little fishing and partying. And just like Mark Twain’s heroes, they ran into trouble.
Fifty feet in front of them was something wrapped up in a blanket. They stopped. Del thought it looked like a body. Dee thought it was a deer or a dog. They continued hiking but stopped when they got to it.
Bobby kicked out and struck it with his foot. His face turned a ghostly pallor when he realized he had kicked someone’s leg. They all freaked and ran back to the van. When they got there, they discussed what to do. Bobby and Del decided to go back and check to make sure they weren’t crazy.
They weren’t. They wound up gazing down at a body. They ran back, found a phone, and dialed 911.
“And that’s all I know,” Bobby concluded.
That all jibed with what Shanlian knew.
“Thanks for your statement,” Shanlian said. “If we need you, we’ll call you.”
He watched as the dazed young man wound his way through the room, tightly packed with desks and chairs and detectives on phones, and disappeared down the stairs at the far end.
“Kevin.”
Shanlian looked up. It was Melki. While Shanlian had been conducting the interview with Locke, Melki had called the restaurant South Boulevard Station in Auburn Hills. He discovered that a waitress named Nancy Billiter had not shown up for work the previous night. She was usually a punctual person, so the restaurant manager was worried.
The manager supplied a description of Nancy Billiter. It matched that of the “Jane Doe” discovered in the park in Flint.
Shanlian and Melki felt a bit cocky. Who could blame them? They’d just beaten the odds. It wasn’t very often you could establish the identity in a body dump case with a few phone calls, but it looked like they had. But as quickly as he’d gone up, Shanlian came down.
He knew that the body was only the beginning. Its discovery was just the end of a long set of circumstances that led to murder. Where it really got interesting was the discovery of the killer and, hopefully, the motive. Motive isn’t necessary to convict, but it sure helps the jury convict the bad guy if they can understand why the crime was committed.
There was, of course, no guarantee there would be a trial. Or, an accused. District attorneys don’t like to talk about it, lest the voting populace kicks them out of office, but the fact is that every day in America, the perfect crime is committed. Many killers are never identified and are free to kill again.
Shanlian and his partner, Melki, knew all this. No cop likes to admit that a bad guy can outwit him or her and get away with murder, but they all know it happens. Shanlian just hoped that this wouldn’t be one of those times.
Shanlian and Melki bundled into their topcoats. They got into their unmarked Ford Taurus and headed south on Interstate 75. Their destination was the Detroit suburb of Auburn Hills. Shanlian gazed out into the night that had seemed to fall so fast in late afternoon.
He wasn’t thinking that someplace out there in the towns where lights were just coming on to illuminate the encroaching darkness there was a bullet with his name on it. Sure, once in a while there was that mortal chance of encountering a murderer who was packing and who decided he didn’t want to be taken in to face a trial and a life sentence, who pulls that weapon and fires. Like anytime he went into the field, Shanlian just hoped that no one would be firing any weapons.
No, what he was really concerned about, what he was really thinking about, was the case itself.
The biggest danger to a homicide cop was that the job would seep through that barrier he’d built up in his brain between his professional and personal life. What was to be feared on a regular basis was not the murderer’s bullets but the grief of the loved ones the victim left behind; it was not the knife of the murderer but the rage behind the blade, the anger that propelled the crime and caused a human being to abandon all civilized behavior and instead resort to deadly force.
Grief, rage, anger. It was only so long, only so many years of visiting crime scenes, before the brain went toxic from it all.
Kevin Shanlian and Chuck Melki got to the Auburn Hills Police Department at 6:50 P.M. They had called earlier to say they were coming down and working a murder case. Since it was still not clear who would have venue in the case—because no one yet knew where the suspected victim Nancy Billiter had died—Detective Scott Edwards of the Auburn Hills Police Department had been assigned to the case.
“Look, I have a contact at South Boulevard Station,” he told Shanlian and Melki. “I already called over there.”
Edwards had gone ahead and questioned the people over at the restaurant and found out Billiter’s last-known address and her physical description.
“She matches the victim,” he said simply.
He had also gotten a list of her relatives.
“Okay, let’s go over to the restaurant,” said Shanlian. “We still need a positive ID.”
They drove through the wind and cold, through the air filled with moisture coming off Lake Michigan. The car’s heater wasn’t the greatest in the world; the cold air seemed to go right through them, chilling their bones. But when they got to South Boulevard Station a few minutes later, they found it warm and comfortable inside.