Read Bodies in Winter for Free Online Page B

Lodge’s skull, then ricocheted back to split his flesh from the inside.
    â€˜So what?’ I asked.
    Adele’s hand swept over the street behind us. ‘All that brass, it’s too extravagant. You close your eyes, you see a pair of coked-up kids pulling the trigger with their eyes closed. You see gang kids. But from in here, it looks like a professional hit. It looks like the perps were cool, calm and collected.’
    â€˜That mean you think the TEC-9s were overkill?’
    She nodded twice, then squatted down beside me. ‘Like the Toyota double-parked beneath the El, the weapon left behind, Lodge’s nice clean room and the car being stolen a week in advance.’ She paused briefly before adding, ‘And the widow’s tale.’
    Like I’ve already said, Adele was nothing if not meticulous.
    In quick succession, we released the body and conferred with Officer Aveda and Sgt Gutierrez. Aveda’s diligent efforts had turned up two additional witnesses. Each of them, attracted by the gunfire, had seen the red car as the shooters made their escape. But no identifications were forthcoming. The men in the car were still wearing their ski masks.
    We found Gutierrez inside the CSU van, along with his assistants. They were chomping on slices of pizza.
    â€˜Same old same old,’ Gutierrez told me. ‘We’ll put the evidence in the pipe, see what shakes out.’
    â€˜That mean you didn’t find the perps’ wallets while we were gone?’
    â€˜â€™Fraid not, but we collected enough blood to keep the lab rats busy for the next two months.’
    Gutierrez was referring to the very faint hope that some of the blood evidence had been contributed by one or both of the perps.
    â€˜I’m not holdin’ my breath,’ I told him, ‘any more than I’m expecting fingerprints to show up when you dust that Toyota. But I do appreciate the effort.’
    To my left, the morgue attendants were hoisting David Lodge onto an unzipped body bag. Protected by the cold from the onset of rigor mortis, his limbs were surprisingly supple. Lodge was a big man, well over six feet, and at first I was sure the attendants were going to drop him. But they finally made an effort that brought his sagging butt off the ground far enough to clear the edges of the body bag.
    Both men sighed audibly when they let the body down. The three minutes of work they’d done for their three hours of pay had exhausted them. Nevertheless, their timing was exquisite. The first reporters arrived as they zipped up the body bag. The reporters were met by Aveda and his partner, Jake Pearlman, who kept them at bay long enough for David Lodge to be loaded into the morgue wagon. And long enough for me and my partner to get away without so much as a ‘No comment.’
    There were chores to be done. The first of these was accomplished by Adele who examined the contents of Lodge’s wallet on the ride back to the house. She found twenty-two dollars in bills, a photo ID issued by the Department of Correctional Services, an appointment card for a one o’clock meeting with Parole Officer Paris Blake. She also found a photo of Ellen Lodge taken at least fifteen years before. Ellen was posed on a strip of sand, her back to a roiling ocean, an attractive young woman with a sassy smile.
    Our basic plan was to complete as much paperwork as possible before we returned in the evening to re-canvas the neighborhood. A numbered complaint, called a UF-61, would have to be generated first, then each of the interviews written up on supplementary complaint forms, called DD-5s. The complaint number on the UF-61 would forever identify the case file. This was important because it had become clear that Adele and I were going to need the case file for the homicide Lodge committed almost seven years before. Though the file had long ago been swept from the Eight-Three to an archive maintained by the Property Clerk