“Warnings from the Black Hand.”
Alicia laughed. “Unfortunately not. All I saw were circulars and catalogs and other junk. I bagged it, it’s in my trunk.”
“How long is a while since she’d been seen?”
“Neighbor thought at least a week but she doesn’t really pay attention to comings and goings. Since it was an elderly living alone, Dispatch sent two of ours—Santos and Meade, they’re in that first Oreo whenever you want them. No answer to their door-knock so they came back here.”
She swung her arm toward a shallow strip of yard enclosed by block walls. No trees or shrubs, just a clothesline on rusted metal posts, the rope limp and filthy.
Milo looked at the back door. White and warped and set with a high fanlight window.
Alicia said, “Same thing there, so they checked that out.”
“That” was the garage. A single-car structure with old-fashioned barn doors painted deep green and left open, revealing a floor-to-ceiling hoard.
Cardboard cartons were stacked to the rafters, as were black garbage bags stuffed to corpulence. Bound stacks of browned newspapers and an assortment of flimsy luggage created additional towers. A collection of rusty bicycles had been stacked into a tenuous minaret. Four grubby mattresses stored vertically pushed against random pieces of scrap wood and an equally unstable pile of transparent plastic bags crammed with matted clothing.
The only object privileged with breathing room was a chipped white deep-freeze on the right wall, plugged in and chugging. Alicia walked to it. “Ready?”
Milo said, “Do it.”
“Here we go. Again.” Biting her lip, she lifted the freezer lid with apparent tenderness.
Inside was another oversized plastic bag. Unlike the garment receptacles, this one was clouded to translucence by condensation, ice flecks, and brownish-red smears.
The contents blurred, like something preserved in aspic, but still visible.
Two scrawny, gray-white human arms had been severed from the gray-white torso on which they’d been placed. The limbs were folded across each other in a cruel parody of stubbornness. Both legs were bent under at the knees but appeared intact. Same for the sunken-cheeked face topped with long, wispy white hair that stared up at us with a gaping toothless mouth and inert black eyes.
Milo turned away.
Alicia shook her head. “Yeah, it’s horrific. Meade threw up over in a corner of the yard and Santos held it in but was feeling sick when I got here and embarrassed by it. She’s new, maybe she feels she needs to prove herself.”
“Getting sick just proves she’s human.”
“That’s what I told her.”
Milo returned his attention to the frozen body, leaning in, careful not to touch anything. “Looks like the arms were cut off pretty cleanly. I can see dismembering in order to fit someone inside. But she’s small and bending the legs did the trick so why bother?”
Alicia said, “Some kind of sick message?”
Both of them looked atme.
I examined the white porcelain front of the deep-freeze, then the sides. Plenty of nicks and dents but no blood. I saidso.
Alicia said, “Nothing I can see.”
“What led Meade and Santos to open it?”
“It wasn’t any great deduction, it was just there so Santos flipped the lid. She didn’t expect to find anything.”
Milo said, “Good reason to feel sick. Victim’s the occupant?”
“Haven’t verified it yet but the age and dimensions fit.” She pulled out her pad. “Five-two, a hundred pounds. Seventy-two years old, poor thing. Who woulddothat?”
Milo produced his pad. “Name?”
“Martha Joline Matthias.”
