Canals Read online

  CANALS

  By Everett Powers

  Copyright 2011 Everett Powers

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Chapter 1

  The water was liquid ice, the current fast. Slick cement walls offered no hand hold, no crack to jam a fingertip in. Still, he clawed at the wall with his one remaining hand until his fingernails tore off, streaking the cement red.

  May in California’s San Joaquin Valley meant miles of irrigation canals running at maximum capacity, rushing ice-cold runoff from the Sierra Mountains to parched Valley fields. The injured man had worked around the canals all his adult life and knew how dangerous they could be, how difficult they were to climb out of.

  The current sucked him under again. He fought his way to the surface and sucked in fresh air, a final gasp. He’d lost so much blood his brain was shutting down.

  The canal pulled him under for the last time, and he sputtered a feeble cry for help that no one heard. As the canal took him, he didn’t think of his wife or children; he worried about his truck. He had left the engine running and would lose his job if someone took it.

  Detective Daniel Lawless kicked a rock into the canal, scuffing his shoe, and stared up at the cloudless, pale-blue sky. Looking at the dead was never fun, but it rarely upset his stomach like this, like a punch in the gut.

  The Valley wasn’t Murder Capital of the world but he’d seen plenty of dead bodies in the thirteen years since he made detective. He’d seen men who’d caught the full force of a shot gun blast from five feet, men who’d been stabbed, women beaten to death by jilted or drugged lovers. The worst were car accident victims: heads split open, dashboards splattered with guts, blood everywhere, and the screaming of the living trapped in twisted, burning metal.

  He was no rookie, so it bothered him that this corpse, pulled from the canal not thirty minutes ago, affected him like this.

  The victim had obviously been injured in a farm accident, or some trauma involving large machinery; an arm and much of his chest had been torn off. No, cut off.

  He looked back at the victim, and his stomach flipped.

  Despite the rural location, farm country five miles east of Modesto, a crowd had gathered; he guestimated sixteen, mostly Hispanic field hands on their way to work when the collection of law enforcement vehicles and personnel lured them in like crows to road kill. A couple of farmers and a rancher, as curious as their workers, were also loitering, staring, shifting from foot to foot.

  The group hummed and half the gawkers babbled into cell phones.

  “Idiots,” Lawless said. He looked around and saw Deputies Randy McCain and Jon Cruff, muscle-bound and dull-witted, attracted to law enforcement because it allowed them to bully and carry guns on their hip, in plain view.

  “Hey,” he yelled at McCain. “Get rid of this crowd. They’re starting to piss me off.”

  “Gottcha, Detective,” McCain said. He tapped Cruff on the arm and they scowled at the small group of watchers. With a nod and a hand gesture, one went east, the other west. They barked and nipped at the crowd, like sheepdogs working a flock, until everyone was gone.

  Lawless walked to where the coroner’s people were finishing processing the body. They’d finished the work of collecting and photographing evidence and had placed the corpse in an unzipped body bag. One of workers, a short guy, looked like Lawless felt. He kept himself away from the body, rearranging tools in the truck, writing on a clipboard. Busywork. The other one, tall and thin, stood over the corpse and stared with fascination.

  “Looks like he’s ready to go,” Lawless told the tall man, who didn’t move. The shorter one dropped his clipboard and jumped into action, saying, “Let’s go, Phil.”

  The first officer to respond to the call that morning had been deputy Sandra Jensen, an ambitious twenty-something-year-old with a face that didn’t need make up, hypnotic green eyes, and dirty-blond hair she kept short, but never masculine. She was taller than most women, about five-nine, and had a shape even a starchy uniform couldn’t hide. Lawless had seen her use her looks to her advantage, turning belligerence into compliance without resorting to her nightstick. It was her eyes, there was something about her eyes...

  Deputy Jensen spoke Spanish, which was fortunate because the man who found the body didn’t speak English, or at least claimed he didn’t.

  Jensen spoke to the man in Spanish, but the guy wasn’t listening; he was watching the men from the coroner’s office fold the victim’s one arm into the bag, transfixed.

  A pain shot through Lawless’s gut.

  He tapped Jensen on the shoulder, not too gently, and said, “Deputy, if you could get him to pay attention for a minute, I’d like to make sure I have everything straight. While it’s still fresh.”

  His tone caught her attention and she turned to him, brows raised. He wore a tan suit that looked like it had spent the night on the floor, a necktie pulled loose, and his shirt was unbuttoned at the top as if it was three in the afternoon instead of nine in the morning. His brown eyes were rimmed red, like drinker’s eyes, his hair barely combed.

  She said something to the guy in Spanish. After a few seconds, he muttered something back and they had a brief conversation. Lawless waited for a translation that never came.

  Frustrated, he looked away. McCain and Cruff, having dispensed the crowd, were talking with the crime scene photographer. The three men stood in a triangle in the official bullshitting posture — arms crossed, back on their heels, heads tilted — and blew some of the taxpayer’s money, discussing who knows what. Baseball. Trucks. Maybe women.

  Lawless considered yelling at them to get back to work, but the thought made his stomach churn.

  After the body bag disappeared into the coroner’s truck, Lawless said to Jensen, “So, Mr. Rodriguez says he was here at about seven and was doing something with an irrigation gate?”

  “Right,” she replied. “He said it was their time for water and it’s his job to irrigate the fields. He had just opened the gate when he noticed the Modesto Irrigation District truck on the road, and— ”

  “And it caught his eye because?” Lawless cut in, rolling a hand in the air to hurry her along.

  She frowned and said, “The engine was still running, but he didn’t see anyone around the truck.”

  “Why would he care?”

  She frowned some more. “He says he knows a couple of the guys who work for the MID ditchtenders and he thought he might get to talk to one of his friends. So he looks in the truck, doesn’t see anyone, and calls out.”

  “By then he’s walked down this way a little,” Lawless said, pointing to the side of the canal they were standing on, “and when he turns back toward the truck, he looks into the canal and sees a hand sticking up out of the water, up against the pipes there.”

  A grille made of four-inch stainless steel pipes was bolted over the opening of the canal, where the water disappeared under the road. It slanted away from the roadway at a forty-five-degree angle and was there to keep large debris — tree branches, tires, animals, or, in this case, a dead man — out of the tunnel.

  “Correct. He just sees a hand and part of an arm, but the rest of the body’s under water.” Jensen crossed her arms over her chest.

  “He thinks maybe the guy just fell in and needs help, so he climbs down there,” Lawless pointed to a ten foot plank attached to the grille, two feet below the roadway, “and reaches for the guy’s hand.”

  “Right,” Jensen said. “But when he pulls enough of the bod
y out of the water to see that the other arm is missing— ”

  “He freaks.”

  “He gets scared and drops the body back into the canal. He pulls out his cell phone and calls his boss, who tells him to dial 9 1 1.”

  “You get here about a quarter to eight, determine the victim’s most likely dead— ”

  “Obviously dead,” she corrected him, getting some attitude.

  Lawless continued. “You call for the rescue team, they get here at about eight-thirty and pull him out: he’s dead. Did anyone look for the missing arm?”

  “Yeah, we looked,” she said. “We looked hard, but no one found anything. We poked around the grille with rescue poles, looked in the fields, in his truck ... Nothing. We thought maybe his arm could have gotten through the grille and floated downstream, but when we realized it had a shoulder attached to it, and probably even some of the guy’s chest, we thought, no way.”

  “So no one looked downstream?” Lawless pushed.

  “We didn’t think it was important enough to go running off right then, not with a crowd starting to gather,” Jensen said, placing her hands on her hips, squaring off.

  Lawless sighed. “Ask the guy if he knows how far it is before the canal goes under another road. Please,” he added, taking note of her defensive posture.

  She asked: a mile or two.

  Lawless barked at McCain, “I want you guys to follow this canal down to the next road. See if you can find the guy’s arm. One of you needs to walk, it’s only a mile or two.”

  The deputies left. The photographer, bullshitting buddies now gone, told Lawless he would have prints and a CD on his desk by the end of the day and took off.

  “Gotta love digital photography,” Lawless said to himself.

  The worker said something to Jensen. “He wants to know if he can get back to work,” she translated.

  “Yeah, sure. Let him go. You got his numbers?”

  Jensen and the worker spoke briefly and she gave him her card. She said gracias and the man took off, looking relieved to get away from the canal.

  After a few moments, Jensen said to Lawless, “What do you think happened to him? I’ve seen farm accidents, guys that got hands or arms torn off or smashed, but none of them looked anything like this. You can tell when a body part is pulled off. You know, the meat’s ragged where it’s been ripped off and there’s stringy stuff hanging out, nerves or tendons or whatever. And smashed is smashed. This wasn’t smashed or ripped.”

  Lawless thought about it and nodded, then scratched the back of his head and looked at his shoes, a reflex. He saw the scuff mark on his right shoe, remembered kicking the rock, and felt a pang of regret. He rubbed his toe on the back of his pant leg and inspected it again. A little better, but he would have to polish it out that night, maybe at lunch if there was time.

  She repeated, “What do you think happened?”

  “Hell if I know. Hopefully the coroner can tell us something.” He folded his notebook and jammed it into his back pocket.

  Jensen looked at Lawless for several seconds before saying, “Is something wrong, Detective? You seem ... upset, not yourself. You’re usually not so ... impatient.”

  Lawless involuntarily reached for his stomach, then opened his mouth to tell her to mind her own business when instead he heard himself say, “I haven’t been sleeping well lately, and my stomach’s not feeling too good. Maybe something I ate.”

  “You see a doctor?”

  They made eye contact and he immediately felt himself being drawn into the most beautiful emerald green eyes he’d ever seen. He was unable to look away.

  “No. No doctor,” he mumbled.

  He wanted to tell her why he hadn’t gone to the doctor, how none of them seemed to give a damn anymore now that they were hmo slaves, how he hated it when they started looking at their expensive watches thirty seconds after walking into the exam room, the very exam room he’d been waiting in practically buck naked for forty minutes, freezing. But it seemed trivial to him, right then, while caught in her eyes.

  Instead, he apologized. “Sorry if I got a little testy. Didn’t mean anything by it.” Then he added, again not knowing why, “I’ve also been having nightmares.”

  Suddenly he understood how deputy Jensen could get information out of a witness or a confession from a suspect when McCain and Cruff had failed, with their muscles and intimidation. Once they looked into her eyes, she had them.

  “What kind of nightmares?”

  He finally broke eye contact, and stared into the dark canal water. “I don’t remember exactly what happens, but it’s one of those dreams where you feel something’s coming for you, but you never make it to the end of the dream to see what it is. Or maybe you do, but you can’t remember anything when you wake up. You can feel it, though, sense it, and you know it’s something terrible.”

  “You had the dream last night?”

  “Yeah. Every night this week.”

  “You can’t remember anything about it, like why you’re being chased?”

  “Nothing. I wake up with the sheets knotted around my legs and it’s all there, the whole dream.” He looked off into a field, trying to remember. “Then, when I see I’m really in my bed and not wherever I was in the dream, it just ... vanishes. Five seconds later I can’t remember a thing.”

  She said, “Sheesh. I don’t think I even dream.”

  The conversation died.

  He knew one thing he would not tell her, though: this was not the first time he’d had a recurring dream, nor was it the second. He’d had many, and things he dreamt about more than once or twice had a way of coming true.

  He also wouldn’t tell her he often had feelings or premonitions, separate from the dreams, sometimes about work. In fact, he’d solved several difficult murder cases by following up on premonitions. When asked how he’d gotten the critical lead, he’d said it was instinct. No one questioned him further, as if cops had instincts they could follow when there wasn’t any evidence.

  While the premonition thing intrigued him, he enjoyed solving tough cases, the dreams frightened him.

  As if on cue, his stomach gurgled and hitched.

  “Well,” he said, after a long silence, “I’m sure you’ve got something important to do, and I’ve got to look around here some more...”

  “Actually, I don’t have anything important going on,” she replied, looking at him. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to stay and see how you work this kind of thing up.”

  He opened his mouth to tell her no thanks, but instead found himself saying, “Suit yourself. Maybe one of us will figure this out.” Does anyone ever tell her no?

  He said, “I suppose we have to assume this wasn’t a farm accident if that’s his work truck. Plus, I don’t see any farm equipment. So, let’s say someone, or some group, killed him. What would we expect to find?”

  “With a wound like that, there’d be blood everywhere.”

  She paced the canal bank, studying the ground. After a minute she said, “But there’s no blood anywhere.”

  Lawless had already looked. “Right. If he were attacked here, by the canal, and then dumped into the water, we should see blood. Tons of it. But like you said, there isn’t any.”

  “Must be a dump site then.”

  He caught her attention and pointed at the victim’s truck. “Oh,” she said. “Right. If that’s his truck it’s probably not a dump site.”

  Lawless nodded and said, “What do you make of this?” He pointed to a series of red streaks on the cement canal wall, above the water line.

  She got on her hands and knees and looked. “Could be blood.”

  Lawless walked fifteen feet up the canal and said, “They start back here, but they’re faint. They don’t get darker and thicker until where you’re at. I think he was alive when he went into the canal and tried to claw his way out. There’s only one set of marks and the way they’re spaced out suggests he only had one arm when he was trying to climb out. That
means he lost the arm before he went into the water. I checked his hand and his fingers do look badly scraped.”

  She shook her head. “Still, where’s the blood?”

  He nodded again and said, “If someone killed him here, they did a good job of covering their tracks.”

  He pulled a small Zip-Lock baggie out of a jacket pocket, removed a Q-Tip, collected a sample of the blood on the canal wall and said, “Did you see if the photographer shot these? I don’t remember saying anything to him.”

  “No. I wasn’t paying attention to what he was shooting.”

  Lawless pulled a small digital camera, no bigger than a deck of cards, out of a pocket and snapped ten images of the marks from different angles. He then crossed to the other side of the canal and shot another ten images with the zoom.

  They met by the bridge, watched the water disappear under the road while they thought.

  He asked, “What do you think happened?”

  She shook her head.

  His stomach gurgled. “Whatever happened, happened right here. That’s about the only thing I’m sure of.”

  He took a roll of Tums out of his pocket, popped one in his mouth, and continued. “We can rule out him being chucked into the water from here because he couldn’t have swam upstream and made those marks on the canal wall if he only had one arm. Assuming he made them, of course.”

  She nodded and added, “So whatever happened to him, happened upstream of the marks.”

  “That’s how I see it.”

  After a moment, she said, “Where do you go from here, Detective?”

  “Hope the coroner can tell us more about the cause of death. Maybe there’s some evidence on the wound, something the canal didn’t wash away.”

  She dug her keys out of her pocket. “Well, I guess I better get going. Thanks for letting me work this up with you.”

  “Thanks for staying, Deputy.” He wanted to say her input had been helpful, but didn’t feel it had.

  She smiled and said “See ’ya.”

  He watched her walk to her car, appreciating the view, but knew that’s all he would ever get to appreciate of hers; he was forty-one, soft and doughy, and out of shape; his suits were off-the-rack polyester-blends from JC Penneys or Sears, ill-fitting clearance-rack stuff; his brown hair got combed once in the morning but was on its own the rest of the day. He knew he didn’t have the looks to attract a young, good-looking woman like Sandra Jensen, and since he was about nine hundred and fifty thousand short of being a millionaire, he didn’t bother trying.