Free The Graving Dock by Gabriel Cohen

cautioned; he didn’t want any extra shoeprints on the mulch beside the path.
    The Caucasian was curled in a fetal position. When Alvarez gently pushed him onto his back, the body moved easily—the low temperatures might have inhibited rigor mortis, or perhaps it hadn’t had time to set in yet. The man looked older than Jack had first guessed, a handsome guy who kept himself in shape. Alvarez moved the hands aside; the doctor had been clutching at a bullet wound in his chest, and there was another one at the top of his right thigh. Jack noted a pair of headphones around the neck; he pulled out a ballpoint pen and used it to draw the cord away from the body. It was not attached to any device.
    The other body, the one in the down jacket, lay stretched out. He wore a stocking do-rag, half pulled down over his face. In his bare left hand he clutched a semiautomatic pistol, a Mac-9; it smelled of cordite. Jack noted a hole in the chest of the down jacket: a glimpse of white feathers soaked with red. Under the brown nylon of the kid’s do-rag, Jack noticed the glint of a little silver cuff on the right ear. Peering into the kid’s slackly open mouth, he noted a gold cap on one of the front teeth. Kids were sometimes smart enough to bring throw-away clothes when they did a crime, but they tended to hang on to their jewelry. Ah, vanitas …He made a mental memo to run these identifiers through a computer database when he returned to the task force office.
    He knelt down between the bodies, steadying himself with his fingertips pressed against the cold asphalt. The sweet, metallic odor of blood rose up to him and he shivered, blinked. Saw a basement room in Red Hook, a bullet-ravaged man lying on a concrete floor a few feet away, gasping out his last few breaths…
    Hermelinda Vargas turned to one of the pathologists. “How many wounds do we have?”
    “Just the three you see, I think.” It was often possible to miss a hole, given the rough conditions out of doors; the autopsy would tell for sure.
    Jack pulled himself out of his momentary mental lapse—thankfully the others didn’t seem to have noticed. He stood up and checked out the blood spatter on the asphalt and the leaves. The way it had broken up into small drops indicated the force of the gunshots; they were elongated, with tails that pointed away from the source. What was surprising was that both sets pointed in the same direction, up the trail.
    Jack pointed to the headphone cord. “Did you find a Walkman or anything?”
    The pathologist shook his head.
    Jack turned to Alvarez. “We’ve got more casings than wounds, huh?”
    The Crime Scene man nodded at the five little plastic stands his team had set up next to ejected cartridge casings. “Yeah. And it looks like they all came from a Nine.” All five had been found on the left side of the path, from the kid with the gun’s perspective, which was odd, because semiautomatic casings normally ejected six to eight feet to the right behind the shooter.
    Jack and his detective colleagues spent another ten minutes quizzing the pathologists and the Crime Scene crew. Then he turned to the local detective, to show deference to the owner of the case. “What do you think?”
    Halpern glanced up and down the path. “This is looking pretty screwy. At first you think, okay, this is a mugging gone bad. But there’s only one gun here, so how did the kid get hit? In theory, I guess he could have killed the other guy and then turned the gun on himself, but there’s no burn marks or stippling on the wounds.” That indicated that the gunshots had come from a distance of more than eighteen inches.
    Linda Vargas scratched her nose. “I don’t mean to get all politically correct here, gentlemen, but let’s not jump to conclusions about who’s the perp.”
    Halpern frowned. “What do you mean?”
    “Look, just because we’ve got a black kid wearing a do-rag, let’s not assume he was the one who brought the gun to the