Dry Heat Read Online Free PDF Page B

way,” she barked, and squared her shoulders against me. “I’m not taking the shitwork while you play professor.”
    “This isn’t—”
    “I’ve dealt with sexism my whole career, Mapstone. So don’t think you can pat me on the head, tell me I have pretty legs, and send me on my way.”
    “I—”
    She drilled an index finger my way. “If you want to be part of this case, you have to step up and do the real work, just like me.”
    She stalked off toward the elevator, pausing to toss her head at the door into the great sexist’s office. She said, “Coming?”

Chapter Five
    I followed her down the curving, Spanish tile staircase, feeling more amused than annoyed. Amused in a lethargic way. I was still wrung out from my time in Portland, and this case just didn’t make me feel territorial about who would discover the connection between a homeless man and a missing FBI badge. Maybe it was diminishing testosterone—I sure didn’t feel that in other ways. Maybe I was growing a little bored playing cop, as Dan Milton had wondered about me before he died.
    My task with Kate that morning seemed like a fool’s errand, but that was why I had never made it in the law enforcement bureaucracy. I didn’t understand the importance of process. Of appearing to do something. Maybe I would get credit as a good team player, “handling” Kate Vare, as Peralta put it. I would try it for a while, at least. But it seemed like a lousy way to make progress. We didn’t have a good photo of the dead man—the morgue shots definitely didn’t make him look “so lifelike, so at peace.” A bloated corpse face stared out at us. As for the jacket, it was standard-issue Levi’s, very faded and authentically “distressed.” Even beneath the heavy clear plastic of the evidence bag, the jacket felt vermin-infested.
    “We can take my car,” Vare said.
    “My legs won’t fold into those Cavaliers,” I said. “Let’s take mine.”
    Across the front seat of the big Oldsmobile, Kate was halfway into the next county. So there was no need to force small talk as we made the rounds of the beleaguered shelters and social service agencies that clustered in unwanted, homely buildings on the fringes of downtown. A plan to build a multimillion-dollar campus for the homeless had been discussed for years but nothing ever seemed to happen. Pearl Buck wrote that the test of a civilization was the way it cared for its most helpless members. Phoenix didn’t read Pearl Buck.
    The social workers either got along with cops or they didn’t. The cynical and jaded ones did. But cops were part of their daily landscape. There to stop a fight. There to find a suspect. We were just two more cops wanting something. The whitewashed walls, government-issue furniture, and unpleasant smells took me back to the few years in the ’70s when I worked as a patrol deputy. Not much seemed to have changed. We were all just factory workers in the giant human meat grinder where society’s front line intersected with a big city’s underclass.
    “Do you know how many people come through here every day?” demanded a male social worker with a ponytail and a pharaoh beard. “We’ve been over capacity for something like twenty years. Nobody gives a shit.”
    Nobody seemed to recognize the person in the Polaroid. “This guy looks dead,” one shelter staffer observed. Because I read the newspaper, I knew the city’s hardcore homeless numbered 3,000, and some estimates were much higher. So identifying our corpse wasn’t going to be easy. But then we caught what might be a break. At a food bank on Third Avenue, someone remembered a middle-aged Anglo guy who always wore a Levi’s jacket, even on the hottest day. He was one of the local alcoholic indigents they called “the home guard.” Maybe the guy’s name was Weed.
    “That’s worse than nothing,” Kate said. “Just a nickname. All these transients have nicknames and aliases.”
    “Maybe it’s proper name,” I