A Debt of Blood

Her phone buzzed.

She looked at it. The number was the precinct's main dispatch line, which meant someone had decided that three-seventeen in the morning was an appropriate time to give her a new problem.

She answered.

"Reyes."

"Hey, Detective." The dispatcher's voice was apologetic in the practiced way of someone who has learned to deliver bad news gently. "Sorry to wake you."

"I wasn't sleeping."

A beat. "Right. Okay. We've got a floater, came up under the Meridian Street bridge about forty minutes ago. Harbor patrol pulled him. ME's on scene."

Lena was quiet. The Meridian Street bridge. She noted the coincidence without reacting to it - the same intersection where Danny had died was half a block from that bridge - and filed it under the vast category of Things That Don't Mean Anything.

"Why are you calling me? Homicide handles floaters."

"Homicide's got the Velez thing, the Castañeda thing, and Sergeant Morrow is at the hospital. We're thin tonight. Captain Hargrove said to call Major Crimes for the floater, maybe it's nothing, probably a homeless OD or a jumper, just needs someone to sign off."

Lena looked at the file on her table. At the cold coffee. At the badge lying face-down.

"Give me the cross streets," she said.

The bridge was four blocks from her apartment.

She arrived at three-forty-one to find two patrol units, a harbor patrol boat idling under the arch of the bridge with its running lights making watery red and white reflections on the river, and a woman in an ME's windbreaker crouching over a shape on the concrete embankment. The rain had stopped an hour ago but everything still gleamed with it. Lena ducked under the tape, showed her badge to the uniform holding the perimeter - a kid named Galvez who she recognized from the precinct coffee room - and approached.

"Detective Reyes," the ME said without looking up. Her name was Dr. Priya Anand, and she was one of the best medical examiners Lena had ever worked with, which meant she was methodical, unsentimental, and impossible to rush. "I didn't know you were back on homicide."

"I'm not. I'm covering. What do we have?"

"Male, forty to fifty, gunshot - two rounds, both in the chest, close range, probably .45. He's been in the water somewhere between six and ten hours, so call it mid-to-late afternoon entry. Wallet's here." She held up an evidence bag. "Keeps his cards in it. James Keller. Credit card, library card, and a donor card that says he's a universal blood type." She paused. "Relevant given the circumstances."

Lena looked down at the body. The man had been broad-shouldered, well-built. His face was slack in the particular way of the drowned-and-shot, the expression wiped clean, returned to some default human setting. His hands, she noticed, were interesting - thick at the palm, calloused across the knuckles and along the fingers, the kind of hands you got from working with them.

"He's not homeless," Lena said.

Lena leaned in. On the inside of the man's left forearm, just below the elbow, was a tattoo: a small shield design, six-pointed, with what appeared to be a number inside it, though the water and the skin's condition made it hard to read.

"That's a service number," Lena said. "Guys get those when they retire or when they lose somebody. It's a badge tattoo."

Lena straightened up. She looked at the hands again. Not a cop's hands - cops didn't work with their hands like that. Mechanics did. Construction workers. Dockhands.

But the tattoo was real.