Endangered Species by Rex Burns Read Free Book Online Page B

sale again for a long time, and then this guy Marshall moved in.”
    “Can you tell me what he looked like?”
    He shrugged. “Brown hair, brown eyes. A lot taller than me—I’m five eight. Slender. Healthy-looking, you know. Not skinny. No beard or mustache.”
    “Did anyone else live there?”
    “Sometimes—guests, maybe. I don’t remember any mail for other names at that address, but I did see other people there sometimes.”
    “Can you describe them?”
    He shook his head. “Not really. I saw a girl get the mail from the box a few days ago.” He explained, “I deliver one side of the block and then go down the other. She was on the porch taking the letters from the mailbox when I came back down.”
    “Can you describe her at all?”
    “Young. Nice legs. She was wearing these white shorts cut real high and had on a top that showed her middle. Light hair, light brown, maybe dark blond. Straight. Down past her shoulders in back.”
    “Did you see her face?”
    “No.” He gazed away toward the room’s corner and smiled. “What I did see looked good. Nice tan all over.”
    If she was the same one, her tan was a lot darker now. “Do you remember anyone else who stayed there?”
    “I didn’t really see them. I’d come up on the porch and put the letters in the box, and I’d see some shadows on the other side of the screen door. Sometimes Marshall would come out and hand me a letter or take the mail. Most of the time I’d leave it in the box.”
    “Do you remember any of the addresses? Where Marshall’s mail came from, where he was sending it to?”
    Another shake of the head. “He got a few packages—small ones, you know. I think some of them were from L.A., but I couldn’t swear to that. Some magazines. Where he sent stuff to, I can’t remember. What I do is take the outgoing and put it all together until I get back here. Then I sort it. So I wouldn’t know which was his unless I read the return addresses. And, man, I got too much work for that.”
    The mailman’s pledge talked about rain and snow and dark of night; fire was another thing. “Did you have any deliveries for that address today?”
    He looked through a small stack of undeliverable mail. “Just some third-class stuff to ‘Occupant’ and this catalogue.” Morris handed over a magazine-size mailer for survival gear and war surplus equipment. “Nothing first class.”
    “Will you give me a call if anything comes in?”
    “Sure. But if it’s first class, I think you got to have a warrant to open it. You know, federal regulations.”
    Wager didn’t know, but he could guess. He asked, “Would you be willing to come down to police headquarters and work with the artist?”
    Morris wasn’t all that willing. “When? And how long’s it going to take?”
    “It won’t take long,” Wager lied. “We could do it now. I’ll drive you down and bring you right back.”
    The man glanced at the wall clock. “See what the super says.”
    The super said yes, and Wager escorted the man downtown. Like a lot of civilians, once he got settled in the car he started asking questions about police work and telling war stories about cops he’d known and crimes he’d heard about. He was still talking as they glided down the ramp and past the security gate.
    “Jeez—you guys park right under the police building?”
    “Yeah.” Wager pulled into a slot near the elevators. In the dim light on the other side of the cavernous garage, a metal clanging drew the mailman’s attention to a passageway fenced in heavy wire mesh. A pair of prisoners in county orange were being guided by a sheriff’s officer to the lockup.
    “That’s the jail? Right over there?”
    “That’s one of them.” He steered the man’s elbow. “This way, Mr. Morris.”
    They rose up to the third floor, and Wager led the mailman down the gray carpet of the hallway past display cases holding homemade weapons, police badges from different eras of Denver history, photographs