“How did it get on his table so fast?”
“I asked him that and made a smart remark about it must be a holiday if he’s already up to this patient, but he didn’t seem to appreciate it.”
“Well, that’s nothing new either.” Rodney hopped up to his feet. “I’ll come with you.”
“You got anything else to do at the same time?”
“Go back over the crime scene,” he replied, with a shrug. “A couple statements that I wouldn’t mind going over.”
“Locals?”
“Some people saw something a couple blocks away.”
“A couple blocks away?” She frowned as they walked out of the office. She looked longingly at the cup of coffee sitting and cooling on her desk.
He stopped her, pointing at the coffee. “Look. You can have a few minutes to drink it, if you want.” She hesitated, and he said, “Stop. You know this isn’t just about getting to the bottom of it. It’s also about not killing ourselves in the process.” She shot him a look, and he nodded. “Think about it. We won’t be doing the victim any good if we get there out of sorts. It won’t be any picnic to see that again. Best that we’re calm, collected, and pulled together. And, for you, that means, grab your damn coffee.”
She walked back to her desk, picked it up, and had several sips. Her computer wasn’t even on yet. She looked around at the bullpen. “Where are the others?”
“Two were in with the sergeant,” Rodney noted quietly.
“Problems?”
“No. One needs some personal time off. One’s trying to arrange some holidays. Owen was in, and then he headed out to talk to a couple constables, doing some of the canvassing last night.”
“On the same case?”
Rodney nodded. “He’s the one who phoned in to say that somebody a couple blocks away had heard and seen something suspicious.”
She shook her head. “Why a couple blocks away?”
He pulled out his phone, looked up the statement he wanted, and replied, “There was a pickup rumbling around the streets, going around the block several times, as if looking for something. He noted it because of a funky tarp in the back—something rolled up.”
“So you’re thinking it might have been the body in the back?”
“That’s what Owen was wondering. Anyway, he went down to talk with our witness this morning before work and confirmed the model of the vehicle. It was an old Chevy with a rusted-out muffler, so it was making more noise than it needed to. A pickup bed with no liner, unless it was a sprayed-on black one, and then a bright green tarp in the back.”
“We found no tarp at the scene,” she murmured.
“And the Chevy was black, with a little bit of white trim around the rims.”
“So, old rims?”
“It could have been. It’s hard to say. They could have just been dirty. They could have been white rims and just really muddy.”
She nodded. “And then what? He comes down to this area, starts running around, looking at things, looking for a place to dump a body maybe?”
“That’s what Owen was wondering.”
“Where is he now?”
“Remember the case we had last week? The one with a couple rocks thrown off one of the bridges and hitting a pedestrian down below?” he asked. “He got a line on that one.”
“That pedestrian didn’t die, did she?”
“No, but she was a friend of his.”
“Ah, it’s funny how friends completely change everything.”