Read Online Retirement Plan by Martha Miller - Free Book Online Page B

photos?”
    Rachel nodded.
    “Then give me a hand, let’s roll him over.”
    There was mud on his face, what was left of it. He was exposed from the waist down.          
    “How you doin’ down there?” Henry called from above.
    Morgan shaded her eyes and squinted up at him. “Did anyone look for a casing?”
    “Aw, they’ve searched up here and got nothing. I didn’t want to push it because the ground is so soft, they could mess up our evidence.”
    “Good thinking. What about the kids?”
    “I talked to them—got IDs. They didn’t see nothing. Just the guy’s ass shining up at them.”
    “Were they down here?”
    “They told the uniform they weren’t.”
    “Get someone busy making casts of the footprints we can find—all of them.”
    Henry nodded, then pointed downriver. “See that over there? It’s a boat dock, with a bait shop beyond that.”
    “You think the shot came from that direction?”
    Henry sighed. “He would have been silhouetted in the light from behind. Would make an easier target.”
    “We’ll need help getting him back up there.” Morgan turned to Rachel and asked if she’d called body pickup.
    “Waiting for you.”
    “Go ahead then.”
    Rachel ripped off her rubber gloves and pulled her cell phone off her belt.
    Morgan heard male voices and looked up again. A uniform was talking to Henry.  She called to him, “What’s up?”
    Henry turned her direction and said, “We’ve found the guy’s shirt and his wallet.  He wasn’t robbed. Money’s still there—a hundred and thirty-three dollars.”
    “Any ID?”
    “Yeah, just a minute.” Henry turned and said something to the uniform. Then he called down to her. “Looks like his name is Jon Woods. Calumet City, Illinois.”
    “What the hell is he doing here?” Morgan asked.
    The question was rhetorical, but Henry shrugged and shook his head. “We also got blood spatter up here.”
    So the tech had been right. He would have been standing with his back to the river, his shirt off, and his pants down—that is, if the shooter had been up on high ground too. She looked downstream. She could see the boat dock. A shooter could have gotten him in his sights from there. In fact, the exit wound, large as it was, might indicate that the shooter was positioned below the vic. Morgan called to Henry, “Is anybody running the name?”
    “Working on it.”
    Morgan turned to Rachel and said, “Stay with him until body pickup gets here.”
    “That’s my job.”
    “I’ll make sure a couple of uniforms stick around to help get the body up the bank.”
    “I think we’ll manage, but thanks.”
    “Anything else?
    “There’s some lividity and rigor has started. Probably happened over two hours ago. I’ll know more when we get him back to the morgue.”
    Morgan nodded. She could hear Henry in the distance as she started walking downstream toward the bait shop and the dock that jutted out over the glistening water.          

    *

    With gray cement-block walls and a smooth concrete floor that had been swept and mopped to a shine, the crowded, brightly lit room contained a marriage of bad odors. The most prominent were cooked cabbage, cigarette smoke, and stale sweat—and of course the random dirty diaper. People sat at cheap red picnic tables, some in silence and others talking quietly. This day two babies were crying. Usually at least one baby screamed through the whole hour. About a half-dozen dark-skinned children ran between the red tables laughing and shouting. Ruby lit her third cigarette off the end of her second as she sat alone at a table, watched the locked door, and waited.
    Sophie was half-an-hour late. Ruby had convinced herself that Sophie wasn’t coming, and she felt like a fool sitting alone. In the seven years Ruby had been incarcerated, her mother hadn’t as much as sent a Christmas card, but Sophie, though she’d never visited, had written several times, and she sometimes sent a little