Illegal Alien Read online

  Then I had an idea.

  “Hey, Leah!” I called. “Do you mind asking your neighbors if they saw one of the drivers leave? We’re missing one.”

  “No problem.” She hurried across her yard toward the house next door, where a woman stood with a squirming toddler on her shoulder.

  “Missing one?” one of the EMTs asked as he approached. I knew a lot of them from my time as a beat cop, but I didn’t remember this guy. He had a baby face, though he looked around the scene with a calm, capable air. His partner was petite and carrot-haired.

  I briefed them on the basics.

  “The driver in the SUV’s gone, and I couldn’t get a pulse on the sedan driver. No indication that any other passengers were on board in either vehicle. I’m having a hard time believing that the SUV fellow ran. I was on scene within sixty seconds, I’d say. Plus, there are no tracks, and he would have been pretty shaken. It looks like a head on crash at speed. You don’t go scampering off like a gazelle after something like that. If he’s out there, he’s hurt bad.”

  As I talked, they checked on the passenger in the sedan, but I knew it was a useless endeavor. That guy wasn’t going to dance the mambo ever again. Although he looked like he was of Indian descent, so perhaps he’d been more of a Bollywood fan. Either way, it was a pity. Premature death always was.

  “Thanks for the info,” said Baby Face, pulling out a clipboard. “Let us know if you find the other one.”

  “Will do.”

  I kept walking my ever-widening circles as more responders appeared and began doing their respective things. It was a relief to see an FD truck among them; they’d be able to do more for the burning car than Leah’s pitiful extinguisher had. I recruited a few responders for my search. I kept thinking about what it would be like to have been thrown from the site of a crash, unable to call for help for some reason. The driver could still be out here somewhere, and I was going to keep looking until I was satisfied he wasn’t out there dying in the slush.

  I rubbed at my chin thoughtfully. Where else could he have gone? There were no footprints in the yards nearby. If he’d gone down the street, someone would certainly have seen him, but Leah hadn’t come back to report any eyewitness sightings, which I was sure she would have done if there was anything to report.

  Then I realized that I was rubbing my face with the hand I’d cut and then smeared around in the liquid—possibly blood—in the SUV. That more than anything demonstrated how strange the situation was. The disappearance of that driver had really thrown me off my game; I was usually a stickler for safety procedures. I looked down at my hand. Good news was that most of the gunk had already rubbed off except for a few dark smears between my fingers and a red line where I’d scratched myself. The cut on my finger wasn’t half as bad as I’d thought. The wound appeared to have already closed. Frankly, I was surprised it had bled so much, looking at it now. I’ve had worse papercuts.

  “Hey, Vorkink!”

  One of the newly arriving cops called me over. I knew him in passing but couldn’t remember his name. Either way, I’d be glad to pass the scene over to the Responding Officer in Charge, who’d take the lead on the cleanup since I was off duty; maybe they could solve the mystery of the missing driver. I’d done my job here. Now all I had to do was quit obsessing over the loose threads, which was always easier said than done.

  CHAPTER 4

  As a police detective, some of my days were full of excitement and adrenaline, the kind of days I lived for and dreaded at the same time. I’d never been an adrenaline junkie—it wasn’t why I got into this business—but I couldn’t deny that it was a heady job. Arresting Demetrious White and working that car crash gave me a high that made it hard to sleep. Not because I felt particularly threatened during either situation, but because of the necessity for constant vigilance. In the middle of those things, I had to be ready for a threat to pop up at any time. It always took a while for the adrenaline to bleed off.

  Compared to that excitement, the next morning was practically sopophoric. I could barely keep my eyes open as I watched grainy security footage on the computer at my desk. Two days earlier, some shitstain had beaten a homeless Iraq vet, took all his meager belongings, and left him for dead in an alleyway downtown. Of course I did my best on every case, but I wanted to get this perp in a bad way. I wasn’t particularly close to anyone who had served, but crimes against veterans really made me steam.

  Now the vet was in the hospital, and the docs had started talking brain damage atop all the other crap this poor guy already had to deal with. He deserved better than my half-asleep ass.

  I paused the footage and stretched. I needed a break, so I grabbed my mug and filled it at the community pot. Dropped my quarter into the kitty. Everyone in the Crimes Against Persons unit ponied up for some decent brew, because the swill the government provided would strip the paint off your car. I kept a roll of quarters in my desk and was happy to pay my share if it meant my daily caffeine didn’t come with a side of ulcers.

  The coffee scalded my tongue. I took the steaming cup with me and walked the stairs to the lab. Maybe the scrapings we took from under the vet’s nails had turned up something. At the very least, I could get a line on when the analysis would be done, and I also wanted to bend someone’s ear about my pending ballistics test for a domestic violence case. I’d been waiting for almost two months for one of the techs to shoot a bullet into some foam so we could prove it matched the round we recovered from a wall. It wasn’t exactly rocket science; the techs did this kind of thing all the time. Sure, I knew they were backed up and understaffed—pretty much par for the course these days—but my patience had limits.

  The lab bustled with activity when I arrived, which came part and parcel with that whole backed up and understaffed thing. After a few unsuccessful attempts at trying to get someone to help me, I parked myself by the printer, sipping tentatively at my scalding coffee. One of the techs would print something soon, and then I would spring like a tiger in wait for her prey. A pleasantly caffeinated tiger who was grateful for an excuse to stop watching grainy security footage for a little while.

  About halfway through the coffee, the printer started spitting out a ballistics report. The ancient machine hissed and chattered as it printed, because there seemed to be a law that anything brought into this building wasn’t permitted to work correctly. The print quality was good—I knew that from the many lab reports I’d gotten over the years—but the machine was abnormally loud. Would have driven me nuts if I’d had to deal with it on a daily basis.

  Just my luck. Sheila Focht came over to retrieve the report as I collected it from the print tray. Sheila was the chief lab tech—motivated, meticulous, and dogged in her pursuit of the truth. If you had a difficult question you needed answered, you wanted Sheila. If you wanted to shoot the shit, you did not. Tragically, she’d been born without a personality.

  “Here’s your report.” I held the paper out to her. “But I’ll only give it to you if you smile.”

  She bared her teeth. I couldn’t tell if it was a real smile or if she was faking. I’d never seen the real one before.

  “Thank you,” she said, monotone. “What do you need?”

  “I’m looking for results on the fingernail scrapings off Lieutenant Hendershot and those ballistic reports from the Soh case. Also, I’m looking for someone to be my partner at Drag Queen Bingo. Can you help me with any of those things?”

  “The fingernail scrapings will be ready by the end of day. These are your ballistic reports right here. And I don’t play bingo,” she replied. Then she thrust the newly printed papers right back into my greedy little hands.

  I tucked them under one arm. “Thanks. So what do you do if you don’t play bingo? With your free time, I mean. Are you a runner? You look like you’d tear up a marathon.”

  Sheila was stringy and brown like old beef jerky. Ronda and I had a pool going. My money was on long-distance runner, but Ronda had bet that Sheila was secretly a mummy. I felt like my odds were pretty good to win.

  She shrugged. “I run. Especially when things are chasing me.”

  It seemed like a joke, but I wasn’t sure whether I should laugh or not. She didn’t laugh or even bare her teeth this time. On general principle, I don’t pussyfoot around, but for some reason, I always found myself doing it with Sheila. Partly because she was the best tech we had, but something more too. The woman unsettled me. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, either. It was considered a rite of passage in the unit to have to work with her on a case, and Ronda and I had sat around late at night many a time, speculating over whether or not Sheila’s entire persona was an act. Sometimes I wondered if she was secretly laughing at all of us behind our backs.

  “Well, nice talking to you,” I said.

  I didn’t really mean it, but Sheila had managed to trigger my nice-reflex. That was a bummer after I’d worked so hard to suppress it. My mother had been one of those nice-at-all-costs types, and that just didn’t fly in the force. I’d had enough trouble getting taken seriously as a female in this business as it was.

  At least I’d gotten my ballistics out of the deal. I gave Sheila a nod of farewell and decided to grab another cup of coffee on my way back to my desk. Just before I pushed my way through the door, Sheila called my name.

  “Hey, Vorkink! I just thought of something,” she said.

  “Yeah?” I turned around, inquisitive. “What is it?”

  “You saw that car crash yesterday, right?”

  “Yeah, I was first on the scene. The Murphys live just a few doors down, and we had knitting club that night.”

  I winced. Every time the words “knitting club” left my mouth, it was like a knife to the guts. I kept saying we should at least call it “
Stitch and Bitch” to avoid sounding like such old ladies, but none of us sewed, and I couldn’t handle the inaccuracy.

  Sheila didn’t seem to notice, or if she did, she didn’t have enough personality to care. She forged on. “I’ve been looking at the pictures, and I cannot figure out how that guy walked away without leaving any blood trail. No trace evidence at all. And based on the photos and measurements they gave me, he should have been crushed by the console. Is that what it looked like to you?”

  I leaned against the wall and nodded. “Yeah, something doesn’t add up, but it felt like a pretty cut and dried vehicular manslaughter case otherwise. Pick up any handy fingerprints?”

  “Not a one. Not even a smeary partial. The guy must have been wearing gloves.”

  “Damn. Any luck tracking him via his license plates?”

  “The SUV was stolen early that morning. And based on the computer models, we’re looking at more than vehicular manslaughter. Looks like our SUV driver sped up and swerved to hit the sedan on purpose.”

  “Reeeeeally?” I asked, drawing the word out thoughtfully. “That’s interesting.”

  “I was thinking the only way the driver could have gotten out of that seat unscathed was if he was a little person, but I’m still not thrilled with that explanation.”

  “Can’t be. No accessibility equipment in the car.” I waited to see if she was going to ask anything else, but it seemed like Sheila had gotten whatever she wanted out of the conversation. “Okay, then. I’d best get back to…wait a minute. Who’s assigned to that case? The car crash, I mean.”

  “I don’t think it’s been assigned yet. The captain asked me to run the basics so he could decide whether or not to open a full investigation. It was weird enough that it caught my attention.”

  “And so you moved it to the front of the line.”

  I smiled a little. I probably would have done the same thing. Besides, I couldn’t be too upset since my analyses were moving along nicely.

  “Yeah. So?” she asked, a mite defensively.

  “Nothing. I think I’m going to talk to Scorsone about this one. Looks like they’re calling it a simple hit-and-run, but I think there might be more to it. If you come up with a good theory to explain the magical missing driver, let me know?”

  She agreed, but somehow it didn’t feel like enough. Sometimes cases grabbed me and didn’t let go, and this was one of those times. What had happened wasn’t physically possible, and I wasn’t about to let it go until I’d unraveled the mystery. Annoying stubbornness was always one of my strong suits.

  CHAPTER 5

  Back at my desk in the rowdy detective bullpen, I added the ballistics test to my files on an ongoing domestic violence case and sent the whole thing over to the DA in the hopes that we might finally be able to prosecute. Then I went back to my security footage. As important as it was, I still had a hard time focusing. The noise in the bullpen was part of it. I didn’t know whose brilliant idea it was to put the average detective bureau into one big room, but I hated them with gusto. Our bullpen was full to the brim with desks and cops, chatter and body odor. I’d managed to finagle a corner spot for Ronda and I, but it hadn’t helped much, especially after they moved the coffee pot and diverted all the caffeine traffic right past my little personal oasis. The chaos of the room made it hard to concentrate, and mining video footage was already one of my least favorite tasks.

  I understood why the video quality on these things was so poor—on the continuum between quality and quantity, they’d definitely gone for quantity—but that understanding didn’t make the eye strain magically go away. It just made me less likely to cuss at the people responsible. Frequent breaks would help keep the headaches associated with staring at a static-filled, focus-impaired screen to a relative minimum, so I settled into my usual routine. Fifteen minutes of video followed by a five-minute break. Repeat until done.

  In my first fifteen minutes, I managed to get through about eleven actual minutes of video, since I’d had to rewind and replay a section where a pair of guys walked past the pile of plastic bags my victim had cocooned himself in. The angle of the video wasn’t the best, and it made it difficult to tell if one of them had tripped over him or not. It looked like they might have made contact. They’d walked away after that, but there was always the chance that the encounter had pissed them off, and they’d come back later on—drunk or high, maybe—to make him pay. I wasn’t convinced, but I made a note of the timestamp so I could come back to it later if nothing else panned out.

  When my break finally rolled around, I leaned back in my chair, stretching the kinks out of my neck. Ronda had sat down at her semi-tidy desk opposite me some time in the last few minutes, and I hadn’t even noticed. She perched there, looking at me expectantly. I cocked an eyebrow at her.

  “Are you going to stare at me all day, or do you plan on getting some work done any time soon?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’m working,” she said. “Harder than you, from the looks of things. Just had a meeting with Garcia over at the DA’s office. They have a few more loose ends they want us to tie up on the Lawrence kidnapping.”

  “Damn. It’s like the case that never ends. The guy did it. It shouldn’t take six months to build a case when the bastard confessed.” I sighed. “Need me to do anything?”

  “Nah, I got it, lazybones. Although I guess you get a pass after last night. What the hell happened? I heard all kinds of rumors in the elevator.”

  “Really?” If anything, my eyebrow went higher.

  “I may have exaggerated a bit. But you did work that collision, right? The one with the missing driver?”

  “Funny you should ask, because I just had an interesting conversation about that with Sheila in the lab.”

  Ronda put her hands to her mouth in mock surprise. “You had an interesting conversation with Sheila? Did she tell you where her tomb is buried?”

  “I still can’t believe you put actual money on the mummy theory. If that isn’t a betting fail, I don’t know what is.”

  “It was a dollar. I think I can stand to lose it. So what did Mrs. Tutankhamen have to say?”

  I ran through the basics in a fairly succinct manner, reserving my own opinions as best as I could. It’s hard to get an unbiased response out of someone if you make your own thoughts known from the get-go, especially when you’re the superior officer. By this time, I trusted Ronda not to blow sunshine up my skirt, but sometimes these reactions can be unconscious. I really wanted to know what she thought. Frankly, I wasn’t sure what I believed myself.

  When I was done, she said, “That’s strange, all right.” She leaned back in her chair, mimicking my own stance and propping her feet up on the desk. She wore sensible flats, almost twin to my own. For some reason, we always ended up like this when we brainstormed. Both of us with our feet up, staring at the ceiling. Maybe we were too distracted by the need to talk smack the moment we saw each other and had to look at a neutral object in order to make any progress. Whatever the reason, it worked. After a thoughtful minute or two, she added, “It seems like there should be some logical explanation, doesn’t there? If your driver had gone out intending to hit the fellow in the sedan, he might have been somehow ready for the impact. Protected from it.”

  “Murder by car? That’s not the most logical choice for a premeditated killing. Much easier to shoot him. Stab him. Throttle him…the list goes on and on.”

  “Remind me not to piss you off,” she said, deadpan.

  “Don’t piss me off,” I replied.

  “Nice.” Another pause. “But maybe that’s the point. Perhaps this is one of those murders where the killer tries to make it not look like a murder. Figures he’ll get away with it because only a stupid person would try to commit a deliberate crime in such a stupid way.”

  “Planned by someone who watches too many police investigation shows. God, I hope not. I’d lose some of my remaining faith in humanity, and it’s already pretty low.”

  “If that’s the case, how would they have done it?”

  “Well…” I said. “The driver would have to shield himself from the impact, like you said. Sheila said there’s no trace evidence from the windshield, but it looks like the driver struck his head on it and then speed walked away before I could get a good look at him and without leaving any prints in the snow. So…maybe he was wearing some kind of magical head wrap that provides a liquid barrier and protects from blunt force trauma and makes it possible for him to fly.