She looked at the digital clock flashing time and temperature on the bank up the street. Only 6:18. More and more of her shifts were starting like this. The downturn in the economy had hit everyone, and in her personal observation, whether it was the city cutbacks in policing or merely the sort of economy that fueled crime—or both—Detective Heat was meeting more corpses these days. She didn’t need Diane Sawyer to break out the crime stats for her to know that if the body count wasn’t up, the rate was at least quickening its pace.
But no matter what the statistics, the victims meant something to her, one at a time. Nikki Heat had promised herself never to become a volume dealer in homicides. It wasn’t in her makeup and it wasn’t in her experience.
Her own loss almost ten years ago had shredded her insides, yet in between the scar tissue that formed there after her mother’s murder, there still sprung shoots of empathy. Her precinct skipper, Captain Montrose, told her once that that was what made her his best detective. All things considered, she’d rather have gotten there without the pain, but someone else dealt those cards, and there she was, early on an otherwise beautiful October morning, to feel the raw nerve again.
Nikki observed her personal ritual, a brief reflection for the victim, forging her own connection to the case in light of her own victimhood and, especially, to honor her mom. It took her all of five seconds. But it made her feel ready.
She got out of the car and went to work.
Detective Heat ducked under the yellow tape at an opening in the trash heap and stopped short, startled to see herself staring up from the cover of a discarded issue of a First Press magazine poking out of a garbage bag, between an egg carton and a stained pillow. God, she hated that pose, one foot up on her chair in the precinct bull pen, arms folded, her Sig Sauer holstered on her hip beside her shield. And that awful headline:
CRIME WAVE
MEETS
HEAT WAVE
At least someone had the good sense to trash it, she thought, and moved on to join her two detectives, Raley and Ochoa, inside the perimeter.
The partners, affectionately team-nicknamed “Roach,” had already been working the scene and greeted her. “Morning, Detective,” they said almost in unison.
“Morning, Detectives.”
Raley looked at her and said, “I’d offer you a coffee, but I see you’ve already worn yours.”
“Hilarious. You should host your own morning show,” she said. “What do we have here?” Heat made her own visual survey as Ochoa filled her in on the vic. He was a male Hispanic, thirty to thirty-five, dressed in worker’s clothes, lying faceup in a pile of garbage bags on the sidewalk. He had ghastly flesh tearing and bite marks on the soft underside of his neck. More on his gut where his T-shirt was ripped away.
Nikki flashed on her coyote and turned to the ME. “What are all these bite marks?”
“Postmortem is my guess,” said the medical examiner. “See the wounds on the hands and forearms?” He indicated the victim’s open palms draped at his sides. “Those weren’t caused by animal bites. Those are defense wounds from an edge weapon. I say knife or box cutter. But if he’d been alive when the dog got to him, he’d have bites on his hands, which he doesn’t. And take a look at this.” He knelt beside the body, and Heat dropped to a squat beside him as he used a gloved finger to indicate a piercing of the man’s shirt.
“Stab wound,” Nikki said.
“We’ll know for sure after the autopsy, but I bet that’s our COD. The dog was probably just a scavenger working the trash.” He paused. “Oh, and Detective Heat?”
“Yes?” She studied him, wondering what other information he had for her.
“I enjoyed your article in this month’s First Press immensely. Kudos.”
A knot formed in Nikki’s stomach, but she said thanks and rose up, moving quickly away to stand with Raley and Ochoa. “Any ID?”
Ochoa said, “Negative. No wallet, no ID.”
“Uniforms are canvassing the block,” said Detective Raley.
“Good. Any eyewitnesses?”
Raley said, “Not yet.”