Drake Tyler stared at the old dog and a pulse beat in his brain. Tampa PD swarmed around the dumpster along with the flies and it was 102 degrees in the shade. Another headache. Another body. He felt his black t-shirt stick to him. He had been a homicide detective for eight years. He walked up on the crime scene, a dumpster behind a shitty bar on Ybor City’s 7th Avenue, and his eyes—ice blue and heavy-lidded—focused momentarily on the old, disoriented mutt in the road. There was a quality of exhaustion to them both.
The hand of a Hispanic male hung limply over a Big Mac container. His head was cocked at a weird angle, cradled by trash, and staring with a blank expectancy at the sky. The rest of his body was immersed in garbage. The smell implied the victim had been dead and baking in the heat for at least 24 hours. Tomorrow he would have been picked up by the sanitation department and nobody would have known. He might have gone to the landfill and rotted anonymously had a fry cook not noticed the ungodly stench during his cigarette break.
The ID techs were there with cameras. One of them joked about getting a Cuban sandwich at the Columbia Restaurant, and another one said, “Yeah, I got a Cuban in this dumpster up to his neck in groceries,” and the first one said, “Well fuck, that wasn’t the kind of Cuban I was talking about.”
Drake Tyler would chew on an Excedrin if he had to on his way to the medical examiner’s office. The throbbing in his head was a warning sign. Soon he might start to suffer double vision. Every muscle in his neck and upper back hurt. After he left the scene on 7th Avenue, he thought to himself that he was relieved every time the body was male, or even an adult. The past had a way of creeping up on him like that right before he heard the specifics from dispatch or saw whatever body he had come to see. He had promised his Uncle Leo he would call his doctor again if the headaches worsened. This one threatened to rip him in half. He hit “contacts” on his cell and within hours he was there, in Dr. Bernstein’s office, the little white beam shining in his retina.
In high school, there had been an accident. Drake was 16 and the truck behind him landed on him like an anvil, crushing his compact car and trapping him inside. He had to be removed by the “jaws of life.” The car had been sawed in half and there he was, down in the floor space by the gas pedal and brake, his right eye cut badly and his head injury serious enough to erase some long-term memory forever. He had not been wearing a safety belt. If he had, he would have been dead.
Even so, the paramedics who removed him so that Bay Flight could helicopter him to emergency surgery weren’t sure he would live. Since then a small web of white scars was featured on his right temple. It didn’t hurt his extraordinary good looks, only added a kind of ruggedness to a boyish grin and piercing gaze. Drake Tyler had a smooth, quiet voice and skin that turned golden in 30 minutes. He usually wore a dark, stubbly close shave haircut and, on weekends, a 5 o’clock shadow. The blondeness of his childhood was long gone, as were any delusions about just what human beings were capable of.
Sometimes what happened to Lindsay seemed like it happened a thousand years ago and sometimes it seemed like it happened yesterday. What it never felt like was that it happened to somebody else.