New Hope for the Dead Read Free Page A

the dead man’s neck. “I don’t know what these are. They could be thumb marks or love bites.”
    “When I was in school,” Hoke said, smiling, “we called ’em hickeys. That’s what we used to do in junior high in Riviera Beach. Two of us guys would grab a girl in the hall between classes, usually some stuck-up girl. While one guy held her, the other guy would suck a couple of splotches onto her neck. Then”—Hoke laughed—”when the girlwent home, it was her problem to explain to her parents how she got ’em.”
    “I don’t get it.” Sanchez appeared to be genuinely puzzled. “Why would you do something like that?”
    “For fun.” Hoke shrugged. “We were young, and it seemed like a fun thing to do to some stuck-up girl.”
    “Nothing like that ever happened at Shenandoah Junior High here in Miami. Not that I know of, anyway. I saw girls with hickeys at Southwest High, but I don’t think any of them were put there by force.”
    “You Latin girls lead a sheltered life. But the point I’m trying to make is, these marks look like hickeys to me.”
    “Maybe so. From the smile on his face, he died happy.”
    “That’s not a smile, that’s a rictus. A lot of people who aren’t happy to die grin like that.”
    “I know, Sergeant, I know. Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t joke about it.”
    “Don’t apologize, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know how to talk to you sometimes.”
    “Why not try talking to me like I’m your partner,” Ellita said, compressing her lips. “And I didn’t like that crack about my sheltered life, either. Growing up in Miami and eight years in the department, I don’t even know what sheltered means. I realize I’m still inexperienced in homicide work but I’ve been a cop for a long time.”
    “Okay, partner.” Hoke grinned. “What’s this look like to you?”
    “This is just an overdose, isn’t it?”
    “It looks that way.” Hoke closed his fingers and made tight fists, reaching for something that wasn’t there. He crossed to the closet. A pair of faded jeans and a white, not very clean, short-sleeved
guayabera
were draped over the closet door. Hoke went through the pockets of the shirt and pants and found three pennies, a wallet, and a folder of Holiday Inn matches. He added these items to the Baggie and then looked at the top of the dresser against the wall. There was no suicide note in the room, either on the cardtable or on the dresser, but there were two twenties and a ten on the dresser top.
    Hoke pointed at the money without touching it. “See this? Amateurs. Our two fellow police officers left fifty bucks. A professional thief would’ve taken all of it. But an amateur, for some reason, hardly ever takes it all. It’s like the last cookie in the jar. If there’d been twenty-two bucks on the dresser, they’d have left two.”
    Hoke added the bills to the stack of hundreds and handed the money to Sanchez. “Later on, when you write the report, lock all this dough in my desk. I’ll get it back to Mrs. Hickey later.”
    The top dresser drawer contained some clean shorts and T-shirts, and a half-dozen pairs of socks. The other drawers were empty except for dust. The narrow closet held a dark blue polyester suit, still in its plastic bag from the cleaners, two blue work shirts, and one white button-down shirt on hangers. There were no neckties. There were no letters or other personal possessions. The only clue to the dead man’s activities was the book of matches from the Holiday Inn—but there were two dozen Holiday Inns in the Greater Miami area, with two more under construction.
    Hoke was puzzled. If there had been a suicide note, Mrs. Hickey could have found it and flushed it down the John. That happened frequently. A family almost always thought there was a stigma of some kind to a suicide, as if they, in some way, would be blamed. But this didn’t look like a suicide. This kid, with a thousand bucks and more heroin to shoot up with when he awoke,