KILLING TIME Read Online Free PDF Page B

if the cadaver’s presence here might be an undesirable but no less unavoidable fait accompli.
    Dojcsak surveyed the activity around him, acknowledged faces he recognized, familiarized himself with those he didn’t.
    The State Police had arrived earlier and now stood aimlessly about, redundant at this hour, crowd control so early on a Monday morning unnecessary. By dawn they would be gone, leaving the scene in custody of a solitary officer, the rain and a six-inch wide strip of yellow synthetic police tape. In twenty-four hours evidence of murder and the body would be erased. In the neighborhood, life would return to normal with most never having noticed it hadn’t been .
    Referring to the police, Dojcsak asked, “How long have we been on the scene?”
    “An hour, an hour and a half. The Troopers were here by the time I arrived. They’d secured the area. I was on duty when the child was reported missing. Dispatch contacted me after the body was discovered. Call came in around midnight.”
    “You were on call?” Again, Dojcsak knew, but had forgotten.
    “It didn’t get me out of bed, if it’s what you’re asking,” Burke said, as if with his wife pregnant how could it? Sheila was at home, secure in the comfort of her single floor bungalow, the one he struggled so hard to purchase and was now working so hard to pay off.
    Recently, Burke had been forced to replace the tarpaper and shingle roof. When asked by his neighbor, “Made to last twenty, twenty-five years aren’t they?” Burke had replied, “Are we talking about the shingles, or the wife?” in a way calculated to make the man laugh.
    Being summoned by a cranky dispatcher to the crime scene was bad, he thought now, but knowing he would lose his regular Monday and Tuesday off made it worse. Tomorrow, Burke had planned on scoring some pot, driving into Albany with friends, and possibly staying the night. Instinctively, he sniffed at the damp night air; no sign, he decided, of the telltale weed clinging to either his person or his clothes.
    “Sara worked the search till eleven,” he told Dojcsak. “She’s on day shift tomorrow. I told her to go home, get some rest.”
    “Considerate of you,” said Burke. “I’ve left her a message.”
    “Me too, though not much she can do here but get in the way.”
    Burke waited obediently, deferring to rank, allowing Dojcsak an uninterrupted examination of the crime scene. He shivered in the cold damp, thinking under the circumstance this could take all night.
    Dojcsak sensed Burke’s impatience, the rhythmic shift of body weight from left foot to right and back, as if he were cold, had to go to the bathroom, or both. He understood but would not accommodate it. Dojcsak could not be rushed.
    A State Police identification crew was busy collecting what might prove useful, though Dojcsak suspected the rain would have long before washed clean anything of evidentiary value; prints, fibers, hair, or other links that might form a chain connecting a perpetrator to the crime. Still, they searched the alley and had begun canvassing the neighborhood. Photos were being taken, a videotape of the scene secured, swabs, scrapings, distances, and angles measured and collected.
    Twenty yards away, Dojcsak watched a forensic technician kneel to collect debris from the ground with a set of stainless steel tongs. He placed each item separately in an individual plastic bag, like a sandwich sack Dojcsak noted, heavy duty, one that Rena might use to pack his lunch. A second technician dabbed at the brick of the building with a cotton swab, as if she were attempting to obtain a sample.
    When asked, she speculated, “ Blood? Could be, though we won’t know for certain till we get it back to the lab.”
    “The victim?” Dojcsak asked
    “Won’t know till we get it back to the lab,” the technician repeated flatly.
    Was it relevant? In his mind, Dojcsak executed a mental shrug. After all, among an off season population of less than ten