Keep Them Close(5)

I will let the rest of summer pass. I will be grateful for the bullet I dodged and tolerant of my cheating husband until the fall, when we say goodbye to our son, Grayson, off to college in New York.

Then I will decide what to do with Finley and our train wreck of a marriage. I will decide when to end it. I will decide how to end it. And I will decide how much it will hurt.





Ten Months Later


April 4, 2026





4


Louise

Sergeant Louise Pratt pulls her coat tight against the morning wind, asking herself why she still puts up with the gray and cold midwestern weather, but knowing the answer, as she approaches the sorting facility on the south end of Grace Park. The air outside reeks of sour trash and diesel fuel.

Even on a Saturday morning, LSK Ventures, nestled behind a strip of warehouses, hums with a low mechanical rumble, the buzz of workers, the whines and clanks of machinery. She passes under an open-air hangar, her badge on a lanyard around her neck. The intense overhead lighting seems redundant with the natural light, but it’s their electricity bill, not hers. She walks along segregated piles of splintered wood, scrap metal, crushed cardboard.

Her partner, George Sarkisian, beat her here but, good egg that he is, waits by the yellow tape. He probably drove, unlike Louise, who only lives five blocks away. They make quite a pair, she and “Cutty,” as she calls him—Cutty Sark, the whiskey. Cutty clears six feet and is up to 225, while Louise has to look up to see five feet. She likes to say she makes up for her height with a head of poofy gray curls and a big attitude.

A uniformed officer lifts the yellow tape for them, a young man who was in diapers when she kicked in doors as a rookie in Chicago. She’s seen him before. Marzullo or something.

“Detectives,” he says too formally, but appropriately so as a newbie on the force. “Jimmy Nardulli. I’m the responding.”

Right, that’s it—Nardulli.

“Morning, Jimmy. This is Sergeant Sarkisian. You can call him ‘Cutty’ or ‘Sark’ but not George. You can call me Lou.”

“Lou? Oh, I’m sorry—”

“Not because I’m a lieutenant,” she says. “My name’s Louise. Call me Lou. And take a breath, Jimmy. Is this your first homicide?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“All right, you’re on, kid. Show us the way.”

“Bay Four,” he says, leading them. “Workers found him when they were separating construction debris.”

Bay Four is cordoned off near the back of the hangar. A massive dumpster, forest green in color but in need of a paint job, is opened on one side like a drawbridge, but moved back from the conveyor line. As they get closer, the odor transitions from sour to outright putrid.

“Who called it in?” she asks.

“Facility supervisor. One of the workers noticed something off when the contents got dumped into the sorter. Stopped everything.”

“Good,” she says. “Don’t let them restart until we say so.”

A pair of CSU techs are crouched near the corpse, lying on tattered drop cloths with standard-looking paint stains, ripped pieces of duct tape on each end.

“He was wrapped in the drop cloths?” asks Cutty.

“Yes, sir.”

Louise gives the techies their space but leans over for a look. The deceased is a white male, around forty. Big guy, over six feet, solidly put together. Shirtless, wearing off-white chino trousers. No shoes. Socks are charcoal with polka dots bearing the brand name Ferragamo.

Wedding ring, she also notes.

There is bruising by the sternum, surrounding a puncture wound. His body is loose, flaccid; rigor mortis has passed. The facial features are sunken, his skin bluish-gray in color, mouth slacked open, eyes half closed. There’s a little bloating, not necessarily as much as she’d expect, but that tells her something right there. The man has probably spent most of his tenure as a corpse outdoors, with ambient temps in the thirties and forties, significantly slowing decomposition.

He’s been dead about three days, her guess, though she’ll wait for the M.E.

“ID?” Cutty asks, running his hand over his balding head.

“No,” says Nardulli. “No wallet, no phone. But we ran it through Missing Persons.”

“Any likelies?”

“One. A Finley Brice. Reported missing yesterday. Lives in Grace Village. One of the beautiful people.”

Louise smirks. Lifelong residents of Grace Park, in her experience, do not always have the nicest things to say about the people in their more affluent sister town of Grace Village.

“All right,” she says. “Hey, Money, what are we thinking for a weapon?”

“Oh, hey, Lou,” says Monique, the lead on the crime scene unit, looking over her shoulder. “Something thin. Ice pick, letter opener, gardening stake, something like that.”

“Mmm-hmm. And…no blood trail?”

“Nope. He’s been dead a while. The fatal wound, you figure the weapon corked it all inside. And gravity helped. All the lividity’s on the posterior.”

Meaning he spent most of his time, while dead, on his back. Louise walks over to the dumpster, just partially full. “Did we trace this load?”

Officer Nardulli flips through his notes. “Jobsite north of here, Grace Park. Picked up yesterday evening.”