Free Blood Line by Rex Burns Page A

pursued by Homicide Detective Maurice Golding, Wager has stated his intention to participate in the search for his relative’s alleged killer or killers.
    Chief Thomas Doyle, head of the Crimes Against Persons Division, which is the home of the Homicide section, has said that although the department has no established policy relating to cases being assigned to officers who happen to be relatives of victims of crime, perhaps the issue should be assessed to prevent undue exercise of police powers by any officer personally involved with a victim.
    A longtime homicide detective, Wager is well known throughout the department for receiving occasional warnings for being short-tempered and occasionally overbearing in his relentless pursuit of alleged murderers, although his superiors have rated his work as acceptable. Chief Doyle stated that “The department would not want to compromise the legal standing of any case by having its investigator subject to personal bias of a nonprofessional nature.”
    Detective Wager refused to be interviewed by this reporter, citing family grief as his grounds for non-cooperation. However, Detective Golding stated that efforts to solve the murder are proceeding apace and that progress was expected soon. The energetic and well-respected detective in his mid-thirties also stated that the police would appreciate any help from anyone who might have witnessed the death or who might have information about the killing. …
    The article went on to describe Julio’s job at DIA as well as the death of his father. Then it mentioned Wager’s shock and anger at the irony of a murder in his own family, and worried about the possibility that a police officer’s desire for personal revenge might distract him from solving the murders of other, less well connected citizens such as the late John Erle Hocks, a case to which Wager had been assigned. This victim’s alleged killer or killers were still unapprehended, and reputedly Hocks’s death was the start of a gang war. It ended with the statement that apparently no one in Denver, not even a minion of the law, was isolated from the flood of alleged gang violence that was flaming almost uncontrolled through the metropolitan area. A trailer line said, “Tomorrow: The Possibility of Open Gang Warfare Erupting in Denver.”
    Wager guessed that if Big Ron didn’t start one soon, Gargan would have to.
    He made the call from a public telephone outside a Burger King on East Colfax. As he listened to the ring, his eyes, of their own will, focused on the scar in the brick wall where a glancing bullet had chipped out a shallow hole. It was a ragged oblong about two and a half inches at the widest and maybe a quarter-inch deep—the bullet had knocked off the brick’s glossy surface to leave its grainy insides open to the weather. The Anthony shooting, six—five?—years ago: a stickup gone wrong and two dead. The rough surface of the broken brick was now almost as grimy as the smoother brick around it, and you had to know what you were looking for to spot it. Wager figured it said something about his job that he remembered where so many of the city’s scars were. And maybe something about his life, too. Which, by God, Gargan for all his fancy words didn’t know one damn thing about.
    A bored-sounding voice finally answered, and Wager asked for Fat Willy.
    “Who wants him?”
    Always the same question in the same slow drawl, and, even before noon on a Monday, the clack of pool balls in the background. Probably a game still in progress from last Saturday night. “Gabe.”
    “I see if he’s around.”
    A minute or two later came the lurching wheeze of Willy’s voice. “Heyo, my man.”
    “How much you pay your secretary to be a bartender, too?”
    “He get a little something, just like everybody else.” A half-grunted chuckle. “Everybody want something, even you, or you wouldn’t be talking now.”
    “You got that right. I need some information.”
    “Right