Two tough-looking, muscular black men stood outside one of the rooms, arguing with a uniformed officer. Leaving, they nearly ran into Dodds. They wore hoodies and very baggy pants, the mainstream gang attire that Will’s own son favored. The shorter of the two chewed on a toothpick. They wore blue do-rags, signs that they were Mount Auburn Boyz, friends of the kid shot the night the doctor was murdered. Now he lay in that hospital room, three doors down from Will, unable to move his arms or legs. Dodds knew they were “representing” with hand signals and slang, but merely gave a look of bored contempt. They gave him the typical dead-eyes expression, before sidling down the hall in an oscillating pimp roll, sweeping past Will. “Monkey five-oh,” one of the bangers said to the other.
“What’s the deal?” Will asked the uniform, a petite young woman who recognized him. “I thought he tried to shoot a cop. Why isn’t he in the jail unit?”
“They haven’t charged him. He was just in the crossfire, and now maybe he’ll tell us who the real bad guys were. I’m just here to make sure some of his buddies don’t try to keep that from happening.”
Will nodded and wheeled to watch Dodds. He knew that Dodds liked to walk a crime scene, sometimes repeatedly, always slowly. Now the big man moved leisurely down the neuro-rehab unit. It might make no sense to an outsider, even to many cops. But Dodds always had his way of things. They had made a good team once, Dodds seeming plodding and distracted, Will garrulous and focused. That was part of Dodds’ camouflage and also how his mind worked. He would have done his slow move with the nurse, with everyone he interviewed for this case. The long pauses between questions, only to pause an even longer time after the subject had answered. What could his silence mean, they wondered? Dodds was a master. So, too, with his “homicide stroll,” as Will called it. Dodds would walk a scene, keeping his opinions to himself until later. It was interesting he was working alone on this case.
Will could still see Dodds walking that day in Mount Adams. Theresa Chambers had been discovered murdered in her house. Borders and Dodds, the primaries. She had been splayed on the floor, totally nude, with vicious slash marks on her arms, legs, face, breasts. It didn’t take the medical examiner to know she had died from a deep cut to the throat, but that had only come after the other wounds had been delivered. Her ring finger had been cut off, probably as she had been dying. Her clothes had been neatly folded and there was no sign of a break-in. Will had watched from the porch as Dodds had ambled down the street, into the little sidewalk between the houses, back to the alley. Theresa Chambers, who had been separated from her husband, Bud Chambers, a Cincinnati cop, who had no alibi for that night. Theresa Chambers, who was the first. But they couldn’t know that then. All Will knew on that first spring morning was that Dodds’ homicide stroll had been especially unhurried.
