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

Friday, 8 a. m.

“Well, that’s less than helpful,” Maggie said of the snow.

The white flakes drifted lazily downward, landing on the frozen grass, the bare limbs of the large trees, the bloodstains sprinkled across the worn stones and the very stiff body of a young man who had not dressed well for the weather. Yet exposure hadn’t killed him—he had been dead long before his body froze.

From the deep red stain blossoming from the center of his chest, Maggie Gardiner assumed a gunshot—or shots—had been the likely cause of death. Something had penetrated his internal systems to leak his lifeblood out across his white shirt and over the stones beneath him, which marked, coincidentally, a grave. But Maggie didn’t say so; declaring cause of death was a pathologist’s job and she worked as a forensic specialist. Her job would be to find the evidence around said death in order to help her colleagues at the police department determine who had walked away from this boy’s last encounter.

Which would be more difficult to do with each passing moment as the snow slowly covered up the body, the blood, and all her evidence.

She had arrived at the scene immediately before the assigned detectives, and now felt them standing on either side of her, Jack Renner to her right and Thomas Riley to her left. Renner, tall, only a bit dark and not so handsome, and his partner, distinctly shorter but lighter in both coloring and personality. And her, an inch shorter than Riley and nearly half his body weight, pale with deep brown hair falling past her shoulders, no gun, no badge, a civilian employee in a department of sworn officers. A uniformed patrol officer hovered somewhere among the graves as well. They made a somber and all too familiar tableau. A frigid breeze lifted her hair, chilled her neck, and moved on.

“A dead guy in a cemetery,” Riley said. “That’s—what’s the word?”

“Weird?” Maggie suggested.

“I was going to say redundant.” He took a step closer to the body and she spread out both arms like a railroad crossing, stopping both detectives. It wouldn’t hold them for long, she knew.

She crouched, looking not at the body but the ground around it, finally poking the ground with a latex-gloved finger.

“Shoe prints?” Jack asked.

She answered with disappointment. The canopy of trees in the cemetery kept the grass sparse, and if the man had been killed during a thaw there might be nice prints in the Ohio clay-mud. But the ground had been frozen much too solid for the killer’s feet to create prints. At least she didn’t have to pour casts, always a chore in any kind of weather, but especially in snow where the reaction as the cast hardened created warmth and melted the print. A forensic Catch-22.

The cops took this as an all-clear and moved closer to the body. So did she. The patrolman stayed where he was. He had already strung yellow crime scene tape across the now-opened gates at either end of the cemetery and the high stone walls protected the rest. Crowd control at an inner-city cemetery on a snowy weekday didn’t present much of a problem. Outside those walls, office buildings towered over the scene, only half a mile from the Public Square. Cars hummed along the surrounding streets, calm now that the morning rush hour had ended. She could work in relative, if chilly, peace.

Maggie observed their young victim. He lay facing the sky, eyes unable to shut against the precipitation. He wore jeans, a T-shirt, and a satin jacket that would have been at home inside a disco circa 1985, with thin padding unlikely to be much protection against Cleveland weather in mid-December. Maggie put his age at about twenty-five. He had brown hair, brown eyes, and a deeper hue to his skin even with the pallor of death over it, possibly mixed-race. His hair was cut short, no apparent piercings or tattoos that she could see.

“Any ID?” Riley asked. “Wallet? Phone?”

She patted his pockets—empty—and they couldn’t turn him over to examine any rear pockets until the Medical Examiner’s investigator arrived.

But under the open jacket he wore a white badge pinned to his shirt. It had rounded edges and red letters which said only “Evan.” A streak of red dots crossed right over the v and continued along the shirt. Maggie noted some round stains on his chest and abdomen, and an irregular blotch over his collarbone.

Riley said, “So somebody shot him—”

“I’m not so sure. See those drops? Round spots imply blood fell on him when he was already laid out. I don’t know why a gun would be that bloody when it wasn’t close enough to leave a jagged hole or the powdery soot of fouling. Unlikely that enough tissue would get on the barrel to drip off later.”

Jack had followed her reasoning. “So you think it’s a stab wound?”

“That is my guess, but I can’t be positive either way. Autopsy will tell. But a stab wound would make more sense, if the killer stood here for a second while blood dripped off the weapon and caused those spots. They didn’t come from the victim’s hands—they’re clean.”

“So the killer waited,” Jack said. “Making sure he was dead.”

He ought to know, Maggie thought.

She said, “No injury to our victim’s hands. Either he can’t throw much of a punch, or he was swinging a weapon himself and the killer took it away with him, or this was a blitz attack. He didn’t even have time to put a hand up and feel his own wounds.”

Jack looked around. “So the guy walked out of here with a bloody weapon.”

“Or not,” Riley said. “We’ll have to check those cans at the exits.”

The patrolman had been checking his social media but listening as well, because he immediately put the phone away. “Me?”

“Lift the lid off, but don’t touch anything inside.” As the young man walked off, Riley said, “If it’s not there we’ll have to search the whole grounds. Lucky for us it’s not a big cemetery.”

Maggie continued her usual crime scene examination. She took close-up photos of the victim’s hands, without moving them. His right lay palm up, his left palm down. As she had noted, no torn nails, no bruising, no bloodstains. They seemed in fairly good shape, the skin smooth—whatever the guy did for a living probably didn’t involve heavy manual labor. They were bare, something she never understood since she pulled her gloves out of the closet as soon as the temperature dipped below sixty, and wished she could get them out of her pocket now—even two layers of her thin latex gloves didn’t begin to insulate against the chill.

Riley said, as if thinking out loud, “We should check the entire cemetery anyway. This guy was probably walking home from work or from the bar, and somebody saw a target. There could be homeless camping in here—handy stone walls to hide behind, nice and dark at night, not a place that cops or pedestrians would be scoping out on a regular basis.”

Maggie said, “In winter? I’d think they’d want to be near a steam grate, or up against the window of an occupied building. I can’t imagine anything colder than a cemetery in winter.”

“Yeah, the only people around have zero body warmth.” Riley chuckled at his own joke. “But break into one of those little mausoleums and you could probably start a small fire without anyone noticing. Or maybe your standard mugger saw this guy taking a nice, isolated shortcut . . . it would have had to be before this place closed, though, or our victim couldn’t have gotten in. Unless they both jumped the fence.”

Maggie took in the victim’s pants and shoes, free of scrapes. But then the cemetery had the high stone wall only on its two long sides. The east and west walls consisted of a shorter iron fence. The young man looked agile enough, especially if he found something to climb on first to allow him to clear the spiky finial at the top of each picket.

Jack walked around the large headstone behind where the victim lay and alerted her to the slim wallet lying up against the back of the stone, protruding from the gathering snow. After Maggie photographed it in place, Jack gloved up and opened it. Riley, knees creaking, crouched to scatter the snow with one hand to look for any other clues that might be steadily disappearing from view.

The wallet stayed slim because it contained almost nothing. “No DL, no credit cards, and certainly no money,” Jack grumbled, checking all its compartments. Something fell as he did so, and Maggie caught it before it hit the ground. A dark green plastic key card, the magnetic strip clearly visible.

“Credit card?” Jack asked.

She turned it over, showing him that it was blank on both sides. No numbers, no name, only the ghost image, in lighter green, of a scowling face wearing a horned hat.

“A Viking?” Jack asked.

“Cleveland State,” Maggie said.

“Their football team?”

“Basketball. They don’t have a football team.”

“Are you sure? About the school?”

She didn’t take offense at the query. He knew her well enough to know she wasn’t exactly the biggest sports fan in the world. If that were the only thing he knew about her, things would be so much less complicated.

“I went there. Green is their color, too. This must be some sort of student ID card.”

Riley straightened up and looked around at the whitening landscape. “I don’t see anything else. I’d feel a lot better if we could have a sudden, miraculous thaw right about now. Who knows what else is out here?”

Jack dug a few scraps of paper with unlabeled phone numbers and the business card for two area tech stores out of the wallet, then dropped the whole bundle into a paper bag Maggie held out. They would have to follow up those leads later, unless they were lucky and the guy had an ID card in his back pocket.

Maggie could see a mugger taking the cash and credit cards but, assuming the guy had one, why the driver’s license? “Maybe the mugger resembles the dead boy enough to keep the DL in case he needed it to use the credit card, or cards?”

Jack said, “Risky. We could check surveillance videos wherever the cards have been used in the past, say, twelve hours . . . of course that’s if we knew the guy’s name.”

“Maybe that’s why he took the driver’s license.”

Riley said, “Your average mugger isn’t that smart. Trust me on that.”

She did. “So our killer is either really smart or really dumb.”

“Or this guy didn’t carry any identification,” Jack said.

Maggie shivered. She couldn’t stop thinking about her last visit to the Erie Street Cemetery. She had first entered Jack Renner’s orbit that day, eight months and a lifetime ago. The gravesites had been dampened with spring grass and the body of a young girl. Trafficked, abused, murdered, and disposed of.

Jack hadn’t killed the girl, of course. But a day later he killed the man who’d killed her. Maggie had discovered that and done nothing about it. Then Maggie had made her own violent decision and her life had not been the same since.

No one—besides Jack, of course—knew that. But not even he knew that she still woke up every morning wondering how long she could carry this burden before she broke under the weight, told someone—anyone—the truth, and created an opening for both her and Jack at the nearest jail. She had not spoken to anyone about this perfect storm of threat and guilt. Not her friends, not her only sibling, not the assigned department-ordered psychologist. Not even Jack.

Not yet, anyway.

She studied his face, wondering if any of these thoughts churned in his head, whether he made the connection between their first case together and this one. Wondering if they had come full circle, wondering if her period of crazy had ended, if she might be ready to go back to being the person she’d been before.

The uniformed patrol officer interrupted her thoughts. He hadn’t seen anything of any interest in either garbage can, at least not on the surface. “What’s on top don’t look fresh, either . . . I doubt this place gets a lot of traffic in the winter. I mean, you can check, but if you ask me, your weapon isn’t buried in there.”

“Duly noted,” Jack said. “Thank you.”

“No problem. At least I’m not in the middle of a cluster in some apartment building with psycho moms threatening to beat my ass, like, say, my shift yesterday. Much rather be out here with my nose going numb and—hey, you know who this is?”

The two cops and Maggie gave the young cop their full attention. Riley said, “What? You know our victim?”

“No, not him. Whose grave he’s lying on.”

Disappointed, Maggie tried to read the large stone looming up from the snow, but the elements of too many years had worn down the surface. Then she noticed, for the first time, that the slab the victim sprawled across had broken and slightly separated, with grass springing up in the cracks as if they were flagstones. “Somebody famous?” she asked, to be polite, since the two detectives showed no interest.

“Chief Joc-O-sot.”

She squinted. Indeed, the raised letters of the broken slab spelled that out in a line above the victim’s head.

“He was an Indian chief in the Black Hawk War.”

Now Riley did show some interest. “What the hell was the Black Hawk War?”

“I have no idea, but it sounds cool, don’t it? He wasn’t actually from Cleveland. He came here with some friend of his and became sort of a media darling. Queen Victoria had his portrait painted when he visited her in England.” Now that all three of his companions stared at him, he explained, “My kid had to do a history report on this cemetery.”

“Ah,” Maggie said.

He spoke more quickly, recognizing short attention spans when he found them. “Supposedly he haunts this area. The trip to England aggravated an old wound, and he was trying to get to his old home to be buried with his tribe, but only made it back to Cleveland before dying. So his spirit doesn’t really want to be here. Supposedly.”

“I doubt a ghost gutted this guy,” Riley said.

“Doesn’t have to be the Indian,” the cop mused aloud. “This cemetery used to be a lot bigger, but when downtown real estate needed to expand, they moved a bunch of graves. Might have ticked off a lot of spirits. Like in Poltergeist.”

Riley argued, “No, in the movie they built over the graves. Here, as long as they actually moved them it should be cool.”

“Tell that to the ghosts.”

“If you guys are finished discussing the supernatural,” Jack said, “I see the ME is here.”

The Medical Examiner’s Office investigator, a middle-aged man with very dark skin and zero body fat, prodded the body but discovered no new insights. Maggie helped him turn the now-stiff corpse over, but the back pockets were as empty as the front. No phone, no further items, no ID. The jacket similarly held nothing of interest.

“The body snatchers are going to be a while,” he told them. “They’re stuck at a four-car pileup at Dead Man’s Curve.”

“Bunch of fatalities?” Riley asked.

“No, but traffic’s backed up for two miles and they’re looking for an exit.”

Riley groaned as if this inefficiency were a personal affront and turned to Jack. “Why don’t you see if CSU can tell us anything about that swipe card? I’ll stand here and freeze my toes to Popsicles and hear more about Chief Jackspit.”

“Joc-O-sot,” the patrol officer corrected.

“I’ll go with you,” Maggie said.

Both cops stared at her.

She said, “Cleveland State’s a sprawling campus. It takes a half hour of wandering around to find anything if you’re not familiar with it. It’s only two blocks away.” They didn’t seem convinced, but she added firmly, “Let’s go,” and began to walk.

After fifteen or twenty feet, Jack glanced back to make sure they were out of earshot, “What was all that about?”

Maggie said, “We need to talk.”