Heaven, INC: Chapter 31: WHAT BODY?

NORCESTOR AVENUE
MARKET PARK
11:18 A.M. PDT

THEY WERE BARELY out of the mobile command headquarters before Al was complaining. At this point, Pope couldn’t really object.

“The mendacity of it,” Al was saying. “Lying’s what they do, how they operate. They comment, ‘What a nice day’, I gotta step outside to check the sky.”

Before Pope could respond, Stephanie McKimbelroy was calling.

Stephanie saying, “Chief? Listen, I’m down here off St. Angela and I’ve got this woman saying an UNSUB matching Christian Ducroix’s description was in her backyard last night just after three in the morning.”

She explained one Mrs. Harold T. Washington had heard dogs start barking and got up, thinking perhaps her husband was home from the late shift. Said when she turned on the porch light, she found a naked white man stealing her husband’s pants and shirt off the line. “Last thing she said she saw,” Stephanie said, “is Ducroix hightailing it down the alley. Said it wasn’t more than a minute later a car came blowing by, thinks maybe it was a Cadillac.”

Instructing Stephanie to continue canvassing the neighborhood, he called Sykes, with his team south of Stephanie’s down St. Angela, but Sykes reported no witness hits.

With Rose holed up inside the mobile command center with Chucho and another half-dozen potential virus exposures they’d rounded up the last couple hours, Pope got a call from Captain David Decker, saying why didn’t he come up and check out the body.

“What body?” Pope asked.

To which Decker replied, “I’m hoping you can tell me.”