Killing Zone by Rex Burns Read Free Book Online Page B

Division’s so shorthanded they didn’t want to let me have those two yesterday.” He looked glum. “I know what they’re going to say about posting a twenty-four-hour on her house.”
    Interoffice cooperation was the lieutenant’s worry; catching the murderer was Wager’s. He settled against the molded-plastic chair and sketched some organization to his morning while Wolfard talked mostly to himself. First the call to Motor Vehicles for the trace on Green’s car. Then Green’s associates: the furniture store, the City Council offices. Get the lab people’s report on the crime scene. Forensic’s report on Green’s clothes and body. The afternoon would be for any leads turned up. And sometime early he should work in Green’s brother.
    “Well”—Wolfard swiveled back—“they won’t argue with the chief. And I’m certain he’ll say we should put some officers over there, right? Any idea when that pathology report’s coming through?”
    “The abstract’s on its way this morning. I went over the preliminary last night.” From the corner of his eye, Wager saw Stubbs’s round face turn his way. “The cause of death was the shot in the head. The doc can only guess whether he was killed somewhere else. If the body was moved, it was within forty-five minutes of death.”
    “He can only guess?”
    Wager shrugged. “He won’t even go into court with that.”
    “Is it possible that we are dealing with a racist killing?”
    “That phone call’s the only motive so far, Lieutenant.”
    Wolfard tapped a sharp pencil against the wooden box that held a stack of blank memo sheets ready for use. It was that kind of desk, an orderly arrangement of papers with reference works placed at carefully measured distances, the most-used closest to the chair. Wager wondered if the man spent as much time working as he did getting ready for work. “Something like that could explode the whole black community. We could be right back in the sixties and seventies.” Wolfard’s pencil drew a series of precisely interlocked boxes on a blank memo sheet. He peeled off the sheet and folded it carefully before placing it in the wastebasket. “Are you sure that’s the only motive?”
    Wager had never met a saint, let alone investigated the murder of one; and he guessed that Green was as human as anyone else and as liable as anyone else to making enemies. But racism was the only motive so far. “We haven’t had a chance to find out if there might be other motives, because all we’ve been doing is sitting here scratching our ass.”
    The man flushed and his pale eyes hardened as he stared at Wager’s blank face. “Then why don’t you just get off your ass and start working?”
    On the way down the hall, Stubbs murmured, “Jeez, you really gave it to him.”
    “He wanted us to sit there and hold his hand.” The anger that had lunged out from that ill-defined place in the back of his skull was slow to ebb, fired by another sleepless night and by the waste of his time at Wolfard’s pleasure. “He’s pulling the pay and he’s got the rank. By God, he should do his own work.”
    “He’s as new as I am in Homicide.”
    “Then he should know enough to let me do mine.”
    Stubbs fell silent as they passed the receptionist’s desk where the civilian woman nodded and smiled, her ears alert to anything they said. In the elevator, just before they reached the basement, he asked, “What time’d you quit last night?”
    “I don’t know. Nine or ten.”
    Stubbs watched the light jump across the numbers to B-2. “Does Doyle want us to put in all that overtime?”
    “I don’t claim overtime.”
    “You don’t? You put in a sixteen-hour day just for the hell of it?”
    “It’s the way I see the job. A lot of people see it that way.” And it was something Stubbs shouldn’t have to ask. If he wanted eight hours a day, five days a week, he should be a civilian. Or go back into uniform where a sly cop could manage to wrap up his