Killing Zone Read Free

unremarkable fact of one more car pulling to the curb, they probably noticed nothing. But they would have to be asked. Every door facing the street in this block would be knocked on by either Wager or Stubbs. And, if they were lucky, somebody might have seen something.
1748 Hours
    He was finishing up his end of the row when the Cadaver Removal Service’s black van pulled out from the cluster of marked and unmarked police cars and started for the morgue at Denver General. The woman he talked to leaned against the door frame behind a patched screen and balanced a round-eyed baby on her hip as she shook her head. A new fluff of cotton, pinned to the rusty screen like a bright, clean wish, waggled in the slight wind from the hot street in an effort to frighten the flies. She and Wager watched the van drive past; the baby watched Wager.
    “No, Officer, I wasn’t paying no attention to that place. Not until all the police cars come. Kids, they’re always playing over there, you know. But I didn’t notice nobody around it.”
    She hadn’t heard anything like a shot, either—“except what was on TV.” Wager thanked her and wrote another “Heard Nothing” on the Neighborhood Investigation Results form and turned back toward the cluster of automobiles that still crowded the curbs near the site. The forensics team had not left yet. The photographer would be shooting the ground where the body had lain; the others would be measuring and taping the distances to any and all foreign objects found in the area; labeling samples of soils, grasses, seeds from the bushes; taking spoonfuls of bloody soil; sifting the dirt from where the body lay back along the most likely path to the curb. It was the familiar and time-consuming attempt to gather trace and fugitive evidence before it was too late. And, as Adamo said, with a death as important as this one, things would be done by the book—not for thoroughness’ sake, but to cover ass. Wager expected the forensics people to take twice as much time as they did with the usual homicide, and he wasn’t surprised that their familiar cars were still there.
    The other cars were familiar, too: blue-and-whites of the district’s Patrol and Traffic Control; the plain brown car of the medical examiner, who was just pulling away after pronouncing the corpse dead; the lieutenant’s unmarked white car; and now the brightly marked station wagons and vans of the television crews and the tiny economy cars that the newspapers gave their people.
    “Any luck?” Stubbs sprinted through the gap in the avenue’s traffic and pulled heavily beside Wager. He grimaced as he spit out his gum and unwrapped another stick. “Jesus, I wish I had some water to rinse out my mouth.”
    That was one of the reasons homicide detectives tried not to puke. “No luck at all. How about you?”
    “A possible on the car. A late-model Lincoln Continental—the kind with the spare-tire-hump molded into the trunk. Dark. Blue or black, possibly dark brown. It was there a little after eleven.”
    “The witness see anybody?”
    “Just the car. She was up with a sick kid and when she looked out again, maybe an hour later, it was gone.” Stubbs eyed the apartments across the street and then the weedy lot. “If that was the killer, he took a big chance. There are a hell of a lot more private places than this.”
    Wager thought so, too. Somebody took a chance that big because it was the only chance they had. “I think they were in a hurry.”
    “Speaking of which,” said Stubbs, “we better be, too. The lieutenant’s getting a little red in the face.”
    Every newsroom in the city monitored the police band and heard the lieutenant tell Stubbs he was coming to the crime scene. So the reporters had come, too; and even this far away and over the noise of passing cars, Wager could hear the garbled squawk of shouted questions.
    Stubbs pushed ahead, his wide buttocks wagging slightly as he cut between the heaving shoulders and