Page 1 of The Evening Wolves

1

A broken jaw of Christmas lights sagged ahead of Emery Hazard, and he stepped gingerly over a fallen strand. Leaves, wet and slimy, made the sidewalk treacherous underfoot. A siren in the distance. A door slamming. The wind a wolf at his heels. Not a night for a private detective to be out in the cold, much less a nineteen-year-old girl.

Ahead, the dark funnel of the street ran until it dissolved. It was barely half past six, and he was in a city with millions. But it was winter, and on this block, half of the streetlights were dead. Maybe one house in three showed a scrap of yellow where curtains failed to seal a window adequately. It was late for this kind of work, which was better done in the daylight—among other reasons, because people in the camps tended to go to sleep once the sun went down. But he wanted to finish the job and go home, and so he kept walking. Not for the first time, he checked the revolver holstered under his arm.

The homeless encampment took shape gradually: a jumbled geometry of shadows at first, and then, by degrees, discrete shapes. A pallet leaning at a drunken angle. Plastic tarps rustling when a winter wind moved through them and made them billow. Armchairs lashed together with bungee cords. One improvised wall had been made from a pair of bifold doors. Cardboard, of course, the flattened boxes bending with moisture.

Encampment was a grandiose word, Emery decided, for a space that couldn’t have held more than a dozen people. The camp was on an empty lot in one of the inner Kansas City neighborhoods. On the next street, strip malls held massage parlors and tattoo artists and payday loan stores. Go a block in the other direction and you’d find tire yards and a Dollar General and a walk-in clinic with security grating over the windows and about a million signs that said WE DO NOT HAVE OPIOIDS. A hundred years ago, the Italianate brick homes here, with their mansard roofs and redbrick walls, had held the city’s well-to-do. Fifty years ago, they’d been less desirable as people with money fled to subdivisions and developments farther out. Thirty years ago, they’d been slated for urban renovation, only the money had mysteriously disappeared. Emery stepped over a used condom and thought maybe they should just clear everyone out and light a match. At least then people would be warm.

Huddled amidst the makeshift structures of the camp were a few tents, and at the curb, a Ford E-350, thirty years old minimum, with powder blue stripes and flat tires. Many of the camps Emery had visited over the day had been similar—a mixture of types of shelter. Like everyone else, people who were homeless had a pecking order. He ignored the van for now and turned toward the cluster of tents and shanties.

Pushing back his coat, he cleared the Blackhawk under his arm. The cold pressed against his chest. He called in a low voice, “Deanna?”

In some ways, Deanna Vance might have been considered lucky—or, at least, luckier than many people. She was alive, for one reason. For another, she had a family who cared for her. Parents who, until recently, sent her money. The last time, to a Western Union fifteen blocks from here. They’d known about her drug use. They hadn’t known where she was staying. When Emery had asked, her mother had said, With a friend, the way some people talked about Santa Claus.

As he moved into the encampment, he left the sidewalk behind. Instead of leaves, he now had to navigate a path trampled into the snow, which had melted and frozen again, and he went slowly to keep his balance. The stink of smoke met him—an acrid, unclean smell that suggested whatever they’d been burning had been soaked in chemicals. Pressure-treated lumber, maybe. Or some sort of synthetic. When the breeze bellied the tarps again, plastic rustling, he caught a whiff of soiled bodies, a hint of shit. Among the shanties, the darkness thickened, and he worked a flashlight out of his pocket and turned it on. “Deanna?”

“Fuck off!” a man’s voice barked back at him from a jumble of fruit crates.

Emery kept moving. The beam from his flashlight showed him the garbage littering the snow: flattened foam cups, an airplane bottle of Fireball, an empty pack of USA Gold, its cellophane unspooling to catch the light.

The wind picked up again. Emery’s ears stung. The tip of his nose. He blinked his eyes clear. How cold was it? The weather had been predicted to be in the 20s for tonight, but when the wind picked up…

“Deanna,” he called as he stepped over a lone, detached bicycle wheel.

The sound of a zipper came, and Emery shot his light in that direction. A man poked his head out of a tent. He had to be in his fifties, his face lined and puffy under graying stubble, and unless Emery missed his guess, his glasses were bifocals. He wore a Bass Pro hat, and then a hood pulled up over the hat. He stared at Emery for a long moment. Then he pointed in the direction Emery had been going and said, “She’s at the end.”

Emery nodded.

The man stared a little longer. Maybe it was a threat or a warning. Maybe it was simply curiosity. Maybe he’d been hitting his substance of choice.

When nothing more came, Emery continued in the direction he’d been walking. He glanced back once and, even in the dark, could make out the man’s head as a silhouette against the dark.

The tent at the end of the row was striped red and gray, and the beam of the flashlight penetrated the thin shell enough to suggest shadows on the other side. A two-tier shopping cart was tied to one tentpole, the top basket filled with a carry-on roller bag, the lower basket jammed with loose clothing. Plastic totes were stacked next to the cart; the topmost’s lid was broken, and inside lay what appeared to be nothing more than junk: wadded-up newspaper, a clear vinyl toiletry bag, a coaxial cable, more bungee cords.

Emery stood to one side of the tent’s flap and asked, “Deanna?”

No reply.

He shifted a little farther to the side and called again. After thirty seconds, he gripped one of the poles and jostled the tent. In a louder voice, he said, “I’m looking for Deanna Vance.”

“Shut up,” the first man called from far off, “or I’m going to shut you up!”

Emery counted to thirty again. He unzipped the tent, and the sound seemed unnaturally loud in the stillness. He braced himself for sudden movement, for outraged shouts, for drug-fueled confusion and rage. But nothing came.

She was too pale, dirty hair spilling over one cloudy eye, blueness at her lips. Then he registered the dirty water bottles piled around her, the improvised pallet of clothing, a sleeping bag twisted around her waist. The smell of loose bowels was stronger here, enough to make him rear back, draw in a lungful of the relatively cleaner air, the sharpness of it catching in his throat.

Before anything else, he drew on a pair of disposable gloves. Then he checked her pulse. Nothing. She was cold, and rigor had set in. Or perhaps, in this weather, her body was literally frozen. He would leave that to a forensic pathologist.

He found her purse, a glossy black thing that reminded him of patent leather shoes his mother had bought for him when he’d been a child. For church. It was split on one side, and the clasp had broken. No license. No ID of any kind. No cash. A tampon, a clump of dirty tissues, a stub of lipstick that she hadn’t used recently, if she had used it at all. A nearly empty bottle of hand sanitizer. He returned it all to the purse and set it next to her. Scabs marked one side of her face. No bruising that he could see. No visible wounds. No petechiae to indicate strangulation, although again, that would be a decision for the pathologist. No needles, no empty baggies. She was nineteen, and he thought she had died from the cold, alone, in the dark. He noticed distantly that the sirens had stopped.

The sound of a zipper came from behind Emery, then heavy breathing, footsteps. When he turned, it was the man in the Bass Pro hat. Over the hoodie, he wore a satin Royals jacket, and where his jeans rode up, Emery saw at least two layers of socks. He looked past Emery into the tent and shivered, his shoulders riding up.

“Did you know her?” Emery asked.

The man shrugged.

“Did you hear anything tonight? See anything?”

---