Several green leaves were floating down the river, slowly dancing with each other to the sluggish melody of the current. A dead twig, snagged in the tangle of last winter's debris on the near bank, created small whirlpools, one of which tugged the party of leaves apart, sending a small one swirling playfully into the stiff fingers of the corpse.
Severn Itago tore his eyes away.
"Some mornings..." he ventured, weakly.
"Yes, sir." Officer Wright, who had driven him there, was carefully polite. Severn barely suppressed an irritated frown, knowing that she must have been thinking that this was, after all, the second body in a week, and his first case, going it solo.
The day hadn't started very auspiciously. It had greeted Severn with a chill drizzle, slicking the dirty streets with cheerless gray, and streaking the sooty panes of his windows. Today was Thursday, and Severn had planned on doing more footwork. There were still more witnesses to interview, from the first body found on Mondray. That one also had been found floating in the river. No wounds, no marks, just dead.
Then JJ had called, with an unhappy frown on his face.
"There's another body in the Tingey," he had announced, without preamble. "Kids saw it floating there on the way to school this morning. The captain has already sent Wright to get you."
Severn had only grunted to acknowledge the message, and shut off the phone without further comment. Captain Belzey still didn't understand why Severn didn't own a private car, and must have been fairly irritated to have to send Wright to play chauffeur. Severn had decided, a couple of years ago, that there was no way he would supplement the taxes he paid the city by providing his own transportation. Until the department saw fit to let him take his staff car home, he would take the train.
Wright had appeared at the door ten minutes later, had stood in the living room, declining an invitation to sit, and watched Severn complete his morning chores. Severn had already been in the shower, and was collecting the fixings for a portable breakfast. He was shuffling around the kitchen, his black and unfashionable shoes untied, his shirt only partly buttoned, and a sloppy gray tie hanging around his neck. The sparse stubble on his cheeks was barely visible in the mirror, and Severn decided to skip his shave.
The drive across town had been quick and uneventful. Severn had eventually turned to Wright. "Where?"
His question was selfexplanatory.
Wright shrugged. "On the open stretch, by Albert's Alley." She had paused only briefly, then, realizing that Severn was trying to picture the scene in his mind, she added, "Four years ago the street collapsed into the river..."
The first body had been found in the Tingey, as well. It had been naked, non-descript, male, without any identifying marks. City sanitation crews shoring up a breach of the river near Claremont School had found it wedged into the submerged closing mechanism of the upriver lock. Severn had been put on the case when the coroner reported the total lack of a cause of death: dead bodies were common, but dead bodies that shouldn't have been dead were still quite rare.
The coroner's report had indicated no evidence of drowning, or any signs of trauma. No metabolical evidence of poisoning, nor any disease processes that could be identified. Severn had a feeling that this new body would match the earlier one in these respects.
Now the second body lay in front of him, pushed face down into the gravel and debris that were the river bank. Its feet were still trailing in the water, and the left arm was outstretched into the current, where the waxy white fingers played tag with leaves.
Severn had already scanned the area with his camera. The river ran parallel to Albert's Alley for a stretch of about four blocks, before it dove out of sight through a six-foot culvert that crossed under Albert's Alley. Where the street had collapsed the river's concrete containment must have cracked, and then washed away, until the weight of the aging pavement above was too much for the crumbling supports, and the whole thing collapsed one spring. The city had to clear most of the rubble away to prevent flooding upstream, but there were no funds to rebuild the street.
Here there was an empty lot, from which the rubble sloped down to the gurgling and oily mess of the Tingey.
Considering that this spot was at least two miles downstream from Monday's body, he didn't think it likely that the scene would hold many clues. In a way, he was quite cheered. He had been dreading the interviews planned for today. The access hatch at Claremont School was in the middle of the street, and police protocol required that he should interview all surrounding establishments, to ascertain if anyone had seen anything. The neighboring businesses were straightforward, simple to dispose of.
"No, sir, I didn't see anything," was the stock answer any sensible citizen would give, and it was all he got from the adults. But the morning and afternoon shifts at Claremont were no fun at all. Kids just weren't sensible.
A slight touch on his shoulder roused him to become aware of the city sanitation crew who were standing behind him, dressed in their orange biohazard suits, ready to drag the body out of the water. One man had a tag on his chest, identifying his name as "Tor."
Severn stepped back, and watched with clinical detachment as Tor and his nameless colleague snagged the bloated body with padded hooks, and proceded to lift the corpse. Dripping black sludge, the body was deposited on a disposable gurney, which was carried to the waiting truck. Severn turned back to the river as the workers began to lash a tarp over their grisly cargo.
A bit of colored flotsam caught his eye, swirling playfully away in the current.
"Do you suppose that was under the body?" he pointed the receding bit of color out to Wright. She shrugged.
"I'll fetch a net, if you like."
Severn grunted assent, nodded by way of emphasis, and began to clamber along the piles of concrete, trying to keep the bit of color in sight. The current was not fast here, spread over several dozen feet of rubble which used to be the street above the river. The bit of color bobbed in and out of the current, pausing for brief moments in a quiet pool, yanked back out to skip past jagged bolders of concrete and rusting rebar, collided with an empty ampule floating in dangerous anonymity, and then slipped out of sight behind another large chunk of concrete.
"Here, sir," Wright called above him, at the top of the bank. As he turned, she tossed a longhandled net down to him. He retrieved it from where it had clattered onto the rubble, and turned back to the river, searching for the bit of color.
It hadn't come out from behind that last chunk, so Severn scrambled over the rubble, searching for a path that would bring him across to where he expected the bit of color to reemerge, without getting his shoes wet. A slippery step or two, and he stood on the chunk, sitting solidly in the muck of the buried riverbed. A small dam of twigs and bits of plastic bags had formed there, and his bit of color was caught in it. Hunkering down, he reached out the net and scooped it up.
Back on the bank, he climbed up to the top and showed his prize to Wright.
"A medpatch," she seemed to grasp the possible significance of the find.
Severn deposited the blue and red patch into a plastic baggy and zipped it shut. Tor's buddy accepted the net.
"I've got the forms in the truck, sir, if you'll fill them out now," the nameless sanitation worker's voice was intimating that it was nearing the end of his shift, and he wasn't likely to get paid any overtime. Severn nodded and proceded to fill out his paperwork, promising Minton's sanitation department that Minton's police department would reimburse them for the use of a truck, which would have to be treated for possible biohazard, a disposable gurney, tarp, and rope, and, oh yes, that net.
"Do these things really get discarded?" he asked Tor as he handed the completed forms to the waiting man.
"I don't know." Tor folded the forms into an envelope and climbed into the truck's cab, joining his waiting coworker.
The truck's powerplant rattled momentarily before the impellers took hold, and spurting grit, the vehicle lurched across the pitted pavement towards the road.
Wright was already in her car, waiting for him. He turned around and gave the river a last look. He felt a bit disappointed in this latest find. Use a medpatch to drug a victim, and get him to breath water after you got what you wanted from him. A body could float in the Tingey for days before being found. But there was the small problem that the earlier body had carried no sign of drugs in it. There might not be any connection, after all.