Part 7 (1/2)

”At least that many.”

”What did they tell you? They must have told you something.”

”They don't know anything yet. I'm still on the way there. Garwin is the sergeant on the scene right now. I talked to him for about thirty seconds on the phone, but he's swamped. All I know is that Ram's chest was ripped open. Garwin thinks somebody used a rib spreader to open him up, but that hasn't been confirmed.”

Anderson shook his head. He and Chuck and Bobby Cantrell had been friends since the Academy. Back then, Keith and Chuck had just been kids. No life experience whatsoever. But Bobby, he'd been in the Marines for five years. He was tough. He was the guy you didn't f.u.c.k with. Keith had been on more than a few calls where everything went wrong and there had been times when he wondered if he was going to make it out alive. And then he'd seen Bobby ”Ram” Cantrell come running through the door and it was like a calm radiant confidence had suddenly flooded into the room. Bobby was like that, the rock, the one you wanted at your back. He couldn't be dead.

”Where am I going?” he asked Levy.

”The Morgan Rollins Iron Works. You know it?”

”Yeah,” Anderson said, still feeling like he was floating, like his head was in a haze he couldn't shake loose. ”I know it.”

”I'm just now getting on the road,” Levy said. ”I've got, I don't know, about an hour or so before I get there from out here.”

Levy lived on ten acres way out in Fredericksburg, an hour's drive north of San Antonio, out in the Hill Country. An hour to get from there to the far East Side of San Antonio sounded optimistic.

”Okay,” Anderson said. He took a moment to steady himself. ”All right. I'll meet you there.”

Anderson hung up the phone and sat there on the side of the bed, one hand touching his wife's arm, his mind a confused jumble of grief and confusion and anger. He ran a hand through his thinning gray hair and tried to clear his head. An awful lot was going to depend on his ability to focus here in the next few hours. He had to be sharp.

But his thoughts just wouldn't fall in line.

He was too numb for that.

Margie put her arms around him and he put his around her. They stayed that way for nearly a minute, neither of them speaking.

She finally broke the silence.

”I need to call Jenny. I've got to talk to her. Tell her we're here for her. She'll need someone there with her.”

He started to object and thought better of it. The Department had very set procedures for handling next of kin notifications when officers were involved. It would start with two uniformed sergeants from the Crisis Response Unit delivering the initial bad news. Then, over the next few hours, the wife-it was almost always the wife-would get visits from counselors and the Police Officers a.s.sociation president and even members of the Command Staff. His first instinct was to tell Margie that Jenny Cantrell would have enough people there with her, but a voice in his head silenced that. Margie and Jenny Cantrell were best friends. It had been Jenny, after all, who introduced them. He could no more keep his wife from Jenny's side now than he could turn back time to before this call landed in his lap. And with all the administrative visits that Jenny Cantrell was going to have to endure over the next few hours, maybe Margie could help.

Anderson simply nodded.

She sniffled and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. ”I'll go make us some coffee,” she said.

He went into the bathroom and wet his face and hair at the sink. He dressed quickly, then slipped back into the blue golf s.h.i.+rt and jeans he had just put in the dirty clothes hamper Keith stared at himself in the mirror for a moment, then went to work.

A fleet of marked Patrol units and Evidence units and unmarked supervisor cars were parked inside the gate. Beyond them, closer to the main part of the factory, Anderson could see eight EMS wagons and more Patrol vehicles parked in the gra.s.s. The factory itself looked like Dresden at the end of World War II, rubble everywhere, the moon-silvered ruins of walls and smokestacks thrown up against greasy-looking clouds.

And the night was hot.

Anderson felt the heat on his face almost as soon as he stepped out of his car. He took off his favorite gray sweater-his Mr. Rogers sweater, as the younger detectives in Homicide called it-and tossed it on the pa.s.senger seat. From the south entrance he had a view of the superstructure straight ahead and the other part of the factory to his left. He had no idea what that part was called, but to Anderson it looked like a bowl of spaghetti, catwalks and ramps and pipes leading every which way. Most of the police and EMS personnel were there, so he went that way, too.

A uniformed officer gave him a tired, almost bored look, but when he saw the gold emblem on Anderson's s.h.i.+rt he straightened up and pointed and said, ”Over there, sir.”

Anderson gave him a nod and walked into the thick of things.

There were people everywhere, spotlights s.h.i.+ning into the superstructure and the adjacent catwalks. Anderson stared at the wreckage of the factory with all its twisted metal and the skeins of orange dust streaking across the broken asphalt that had once been a parking lot. It's not real, he tried to tell himself, though he had no illusions about that. It was all too real. So d.a.m.n real it made his head spin.

A camera flash went off on the second level and Anderson glanced up at it. Another flash went off and in the moment that the flash lit the scene, Anderson could see the body of a junkie on his back on the catwalk, one knee bent, pointed up in the air, one hand sagged over the belly, the head craned back, the mouth open, and a gory hole in the chest area.

Jesus, he thought. What am I gonna tell Jenny Cantrell about this?

There were still a few EMS technicians coming and going from the maze of catwalks at the edge of the scene. Special lanes had been marked off for them in order to minimize contamination with the crime scene, but Anderson was pretty sure plenty of valuable evidence had been trampled underfoot nonetheless. Despite all the training, all the reminders, it happened at every crime scene.

He watched the EMS guys lugging their orange and white tackle boxes out of the structure, most of them looking down at the ground in front of them with weary, haunted eyes, and he thought, When you see those guys looking like that, you know it's bad.

”Hey Keith!”

Anderson turned toward the voice. It belonged to Deputy Chief Robert Allen. If he'd been awakened in the middle of a sound sleep by an urgent phone call, as Anderson suspected he had, it didn't show on him. His iron gray hair was perfect, and his suit hung on his still athletic frame with sartorial precision.

Anderson walked over to him and shook hands. ”How are you, sir?” he said to Allen.

”I'm all right, Keith. I'm sorry about Ram.”

”Thank you, sir.”

”Have you gotten a chance to see inside yet?” Allen asked.

”No sir.”

”It's...” he trailed off, shaking his head. ”So far EMS has p.r.o.nounced forty-five dead. That includes Ram and Herrera. They tell me they found three sh.e.l.l casings from Ram's gun. At least he got to fight back. I have a bad feeling this one's going to be hanging over our heads for a long time to come.”

Anderson had been thinking the same thing. Later, when all the patrol officers were gone and their reports filed, and the evidence technicians had processed the scene and submitted their evidence for testing, and the junkies were all interviewed, it would be Anderson's job to go through the mountain of paperwork and forensic testing reports and autopsies and photographs and videos and statements and try to find the through line that connected them-the one cohesive answer, the thread, explaining how and why something like this could possibly happen. He would have help, of course, because every member of the Homicide Unit's Murder Squad worked on each and every case, doing whatever was needed to move the case along towards a successful resolution. But in the end, the weight of coming up with that explanation was squarely on his shoulders, and no one else's. And, of course, he still had thirty other murder cases open. He'd have to work those at the same time.

Anderson chewed on his bottom lip, a nervous habit. When he looked back at Allen, Allen curled one corner of his mouth into a sort of smile. ”You know,” Allen said, ”if you hadn't drawn this case, I think I would have ordered Levy to a.s.sign it to you.”

That surprised Anderson. He had half-expected to have the case taken from him and a.s.signed to somebody else, simply because of his personal involvement with the victim. ”Why's that, sir?”

”There's a lot riding on this, Keith. An awful lot. You know that, of course, but I want you to know that I would have ordered you back here from a European vacation if I'd had to. You're the one I want on this. You're the one I need on this. Do you understand?”

”Yes sir,” he said. ”I understand you loud and clear.”

The last of the EMS crews were walking back across the barricades, and Anderson happened to overhear a technician who had been inside saying that the whole place was crawling with fleas.

”f.u.c.king gross is what it was,” the man's partner said. ”I looked down and saw those little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds all over my pants.”

Fleas? Anderson thought. Oh great.

As a boot patrolman, he'd made a burglary call where a woman told him somebody had broken into the shed behind her house. Anderson went into the yard to investigate. He walked around the shed in knee high gra.s.s, examining the busted lock on the door, when he felt an itch in his crotch. He looked down to scratch himself, and saw fleas all over his pant legs. They made it look like he had spilled pepper on himself. Fleas gave him the s.h.i.+vers ever since.