Marker of Faith

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 4

The dirty sedan, police lights strobing in the dented grill, rolled to a gentle stop behind an idling ambulance. The whirling patterns of their combined lights danced on the overhead columns of the Evanston Bridge, making the morbid scene appear rather festive. John pulled the keys from the ignition, and looking over at his partner and best friend, Dave Macken, he shrugged as part of their pre-case ritual before the task of cataloguing another murder. The man gave a thumbs-up in return.

Out of the corner of his eye John saw the number of people already gathered under the bridge: cops, crime scene techs, various documenters of death like he and Dave, all roused from what might have been a nice morning at home. Portsmouth was a small town on the edge of bigger towns on the edges of cities, but the place had its own share of crime; more so during the meth boom. Small towns were perfect for hiding in plain sight, and theft, vice, and homicides were starting to drag the lowlifes out of the shadows. It seemed it was always the same, late night or early morning, death could really put a damper on his day. John loved his job and hated it equally.

He also slept horribly the night before.

A nightmare, maybe? The dream quickly faded, and he shrugged it off with a grin at his partner.

"Hey, Dave, it's Saturday morning. Doesn't anybody watch cartoons anymore?" John asked as he climbed out of his car.

Dave stopped, and just looked at him.

"John, where do you come up with this stuff?" he asked as he heaved his hulking frame out of the passenger side. Dave only had four inches of height on John, but he looked like a linebacker, and with a deep rumbling voice to match. He was handsome; in low light he looked like a husky, greying version of Denzel Washington, a fact about which John loved to tease.

Dave reached back into the car and grabbed his coffee cup. "I mean, what sociopathic, psychotic serial killer do you know of who said the voices of Bugs Bunny or Yosemite Sam told him to KILL, KILL, KILL?"

John grinned and shrugged his shoulders. He always waited for Dave to come around the side of the car before turning to view a dead body, another timeworn ritual that would allow both their eyes to take in the scene at once. The Medical Examiner, Manuel Rodriguez, wasn't there yet but there were plenty of uniforms milling around, tracking blood and God only knew what else around the body.

"Hey, Mickey," Dave called out to one of the paramedics on the scene. "What, no goon squad to oversee?"

The local press was not his favorite institution. John was amazed at the speed with which the local goop scoopers, as Dave called them for their fascination with especially bloody murders, could descend on a crime scene.

"Nope. This one went out code 27 urgent for a reason. You'll see why," Mickey answered as he pulled a big plastic tarp out of the back of his ambulance. He looked shaken. "It's a DRT."

"DRT, dead right there, huh? Must be nasty for Mickey to be spooked," John said to Dave over the roof of the car as he walked around. "Let's check out the cartoons' competition. I heard this one's pretty meaty." He nudged his partner and walked towards the half-assed tape job around the body.

The smell hit him first. Reminiscent of liver and canned fish left out in the summer sun all day, yet somehow worse, it rolled over him and hung in his nostrils like oil-soaked cotton balls. John scrunched up his nose as another noxious wave hit. It contained the familiar coppery tang of blood he knew too well from years on Homicide.

Is that rotten eggs, too? John rubbed his nose and looked over at Dave. They found very dead bodies before; bodies that were hidden, bodies that no one missed, no one realized the victims had died so they just sat for weeks in their houses, apartments, even an R.V. once. None of them smelled like this, though. He felt light headed and queasy, and faltered in his footsteps at the same time reaching for a concrete column for support.