Free Every Brilliant Eye by Loren D. Estleman Page A

included another uniform, flat-nosed with flinty threads glittering in a thick horseshoe moustache, a round-faced Oriental I recognized from the coroner’s office in jeans and an orange zip-front jacket, and a black plainclothesman in the regulation three-piece suit that went like hell with his brilliantined hair and ducktail. The light shone blue off his high pompadour. They were watching a pair of white-coated morgue attendants in gas masks carefully separating a bundle of rags from a settling of wet newspapers and bloated cardboard cartons against the drugstore’s block foundation. A hand stuck out of the rags, its fingers fanned out stiff like spokes from a wheel. A cloud of flies boiled over the debris.
    “Don’t expect lightning to strike on this one,” the Oriental was saying. “We’re going to have to go in with masks and decontam suits, and when we’re finished cause of death will be as good as a guess.”
    “I already know cause of death.” The black detective leaked smoke out the side of his mouth. “Lateral laceration of the carotid, left to right, probably from behind, victim bled out in minutes. Just like the others. What do you figure, three weeks?”
    “About that. You could’ve passed within two feet every day for the first couple of weeks and not noticed it in all that junk. After that you could hardly avoid it.”
    “Neighborhood dogs led us to this one,” put in the uniform.
    “Sergeant Grice?”
    The detective turned my way and my stomach scaled my ribs. His right cheek was a map of sharp broken creases like crumpled cellophane. The last time I had seen that burn scar, the face that wore it had been in the path of my flying fist. He was the undercover cop I’d knocked out in the blind pig on Clairmount a month before.
    He said, “Who’s asking?”
    He hadn’t recognized me. I did some business with the ash on my cigarette. Covering up. “My name’s Walker,” I said. “I’m a private investigator on a missing person case. They told me at headquarters you caught the squeal on the Blankenship suicide this morning.”
    “He the missing person?”
    “It takes some telling. Can we go someplace where we can’t see the air we’re breathing?”
    “That’s the first sensible suggestion I’ve heard since I got on this detail.”
    The white coats had managed to scoop the body into a zipper bag and were transferring it onto a collapsed stretcher. We headed uphill, trailing the uniform and the medical examiner. The atmosphere got sweeter by degrees. As we walked I told Grice about the clippings in Barry’s file folder. He listened with his eyes on the ground.
    “Blankenship snuffed himself, all right,” he said. “Just because I’m fresh off a year and a half on Vice don’t mean I can’t see the pattern. He had a busted marriage and at forty-eight he was washed out as a cop. Maybe your man just likes to collect newsprint.”
    “I have to wonder why Blankenship walked two years shy of a full pension.”
    “Burnout. The Fourteenth is a war zone.”
    “He could’ve put in for transfer.”
    Grice took a last drag and snapped away his butt. We were at street level. The detective with the hat and moustache was standing by the unmarked car with the uniform who had left just as I reached the parking area, comparing complexions. Grice said, “Maybe getting in your twenty is like climbing a mountain. The last two feet are the hardest. His record is so clean it hurts your eyes. Prints on the gun were his and the lab says he’d fired a gun recently. His wife’s staying with her sister in Grand Rapids and has been for the past week. And I’m pulling a double shift like it’s loaded with rocks. I don’t feel like crawling into anyone else’s head. Especially when he don’t have one no more.”
    “Where’s it go from here, I.A.D.?”
    “It don’t go. Internal Affairs don’t bother itself with civilians, which is what he was since January. The gun he used was his own, although it