Chapter One Satkunananthan Sasmal would have been the first to admit he'd had worse nights working the midnight shift at his Uncle's Valero station. For example, there'd been a night last summer that had started out with such promise. Eight drunken girls, on their way home from clubbing at the beach, had piled out of a stretch limo at 4 A.M. They flirted with him before piling into the station's bathroom and regurgitating their night's activities across all four walls, the floor, and--somehow--the ceiling. For Satku, that had killed the mood. Then there was the old lady who fell asleep while driving and plowed into the first island. Satkunananthan barely hit the kill switch on pump #3 before diving out of the car's path. The woman rolled down her window and asked him to fill her tank. Regular. Cash. Then there was that time he had been robbed at gunpoint. And the other time he had been robbed at knifepoint. And the other time he had been robbed at spatula-point. In his defense, it had been one of those long-handled metal barbecue spatulas. And there was last night, when Satkunananthan Sasmal was murdered. West Windsor police officers Michelle Wu and Niket Patel stood several yards apart, trying to avoid contaminating a crime scene they had already completely contaminated. This was new territory for the pair. The small New Jersey town hadn't seen a murder in over thirty years, and that had been a scorned wife hitting her husband over the head with a microwave oven. The patrol officers had six years on the job between them, with Michelle Wu having logged five years and four months of that. Repulsed and attracted, she had tried to both look and not look at the corpse, and the strain of getting her eyes to move in different directions had given her a headache. Or perhaps it was watching Patel wrestle with the yellow police tape as he tried to stretch it across the entrance to the station that was causing her head to throb. She faced Rt. 571, where the entrance and exit horseshoed in from and back out to the four-lane highway. Morning traffic had started to pick up. It was 6:35 a.m. Dispatch had received an anonymous call ten minutes earlier. The caller had fled the scene. Michelle hoped Detectives Rossi and Garmin would arrive. First interesting thing to happen in the West Windsor-Plainsboro area since Orson Welles had chosen Grover's Mill Pond as the landing site for an alien spacecraft eighty years ago, and Garmin refused to budge from his routine of getting a bagel and coffee before showing up to any morning call. Niket continued to struggle with the tape. Michelle sighed and turned her attention to Satkunananthan. His head resembled a watermelon that had been broken on one side, but that was still less horrific than the sight of Niket simulating autoerotic asphyxiation with the perimeter tape. The victim lay flat on his back. He had landed an inch from the concrete lip of the second island, closest to the building. The gas nozzle lay two feet from his hand. Blood had spattered across pump #4. The digital display on the pump was cracked. The bullet had likely gone clean through Satkunananthan's skull and lodged in the pump. A large stain had dried across the front of the victim's pants. There was a smudged wet spot where his body had fallen, but it hadn't rained last night. She looked around. No visible drink containers or cups were in sight. Shielding her eyes from the glare of the rising sun, Michelle studied the small brick structure behind her. It had a locked utility door entrance in the center. On either side of the door stood a soda machine and an ice machine. The lone bathroom was around the corner on the right side of the building. She spotted five bullet strikes. Three of them had dug into the brick. One had hit the soda machine and one had dented the left metal door of the ice machine. She stepped around Satkunananthan Sasmal's body. She looked over the spray of shots. The murderer was no marksman. Scared kid? First robbery? "Michelle," Niket called. He was standing by the Rt. 571 entrance to the station, dumbfounded. "What should I anchor it to? There's nothing here." He was a sweet kid, but he was an idiot. As much a diversity-hire as she had been, Niket Patel joined the force after a prolonged outcry by the sizable Indian community of West Windsor about a lack of representation in the department. Years earlier, she had been hired as the department's first Asian-American police officer, who also just happened to be the daughter of West Windsor's Mayor. Mom/Mayor had vehemently tried to derail Michelle's hiring, but Chief Bennett Dobeck had rallied to her side. Michelle was under no illusion he had supported her because he thought she would make a good cop or because he gave two shits about having an Asian-American woman on the force. He did it to piss Mom/Mayor off. "Wrap it around the entrance-only sign and then run it to the traffic light pole on that corner," Michelle called out. "That's like thirty yards," he said. "Yes, it is," she replied. Niket sloughed his way over to the sign and wrapped the tape around it without calamity. As he started to walk back across the one-way entrance, a blue Honda Odyssey mini-van barreled into the station, nearly running him down. The car rushed past Wu, almost clipping their parked patrol car. The mini-van screeched to a halt in front of the battered Hyundai parked to the side of the building, which Michelle had assumed was Sasmal's car. She started towards the Odyssey when the driver's door flung open with such ferocity that she almost reached for her sidearm. In what seemed like painfully slow motion, a woman slid out of the open door as if the car was oozing an egg yolk. Her legs popped out first, short and stubby, then she slid her body down and out of the seat. As much bowling ball as human, her feet wiggled until they touched the ground. She was short, five-foot threeish, with an unkempt hive of thick curly dark hair. Her brown eyes were huge, and-Michelle had no other word for it-feral. She waddled as much as walked. The woman was more pregnant than any woman Michelle had ever seen in her life and, quite possibly, more pregnant than any woman had ever been in the history of human civilization. If Michelle had to guess, she would have estimated the woman was about to give birth to a college sophomore. From inside the car, Michelle heard the unholy wailing of several children. They were simultaneously shrieking, shouting, and crying. To Michelle, blissfully childless, that van door sounded like a portal into Hell. She identified four distinct banshee wails. And this woman was pregnant with a fifth? The mini-van was a rolling advertisement for Ortho. "Ruth!" the woman yelled. "Elijah! Stop shouting at each other! Right now!" Ruth and Elijah ignored their mother completely. The woman deftly ignored their ignoring of her and switched to a preternaturally soft voice. "Sarah, can you please stop yelling, honey?" What Michelle assumed was Sarah's high-pitched voice continued shouting from the van's second row, "But Sadie's going to pee! Sadie's going to pee!" "Screaming isn't going to make her not have to pee!" the woman responded, just as loudly as her daughter had. Then, in a bi-polar shift worthy of a theatre actor, she cooed, "Sadie, sweetie, hold it in. We'll use the bathroom here." Michelle took tentative steps towards the van. She stopped. Niket's hopeless, bewildered shrug offered no help. Michelle sucked in some air. She had enough experience with the privileged castes of West Windsor, white, brown, yellow, or plaid, to know her next few seconds would be joyless. "Ma'am," she said. "You can't be here." The woman turned from the car, holding out a crying little girl in her hands like Mufassa holding Simba in front of the rising sun. The child wore a bright blue Elmo t-shirt and nothing else. "She has to pee," the woman shouted. "The bathroom is locked," said Michelle. "Ma'am-this-this is a crime scene." With the dangling child still wailing, the woman scanned her surroundings. For the first time she noticed that it was, indeed, a crime scene. She saw the bullet strikes on the building. She glanced over her shoulder towards Niket, who somehow stumbled over the tape while trying to turn away from her gaze. But in actuality, the woman was looking past him, sizing up the access into and out of the station. Through a patient study of the scene, she absorbed her surroundings. Then finally, carefully, she looked at Satkunananthan. She noted the wet stain in front of his prone form and on his pants. She sized up the blood spatters on the gas pump. Neither the child's crying, nor her other children shouting from inside the van seemed to faze the woman. She was seeing... what , wondered Michelle? "Ma'am?" Michelle said, to no response. Then more forcefully, "Ma'am...?" The woman's attention snapped back to the present. "She has to pee," is all the pregnant woman said with a now-eerie calm. Michelle had no idea how to respond. "Uhm... yes... I'm pretty sure the bathroom's locked. And-uhm- " Hitching a thumb to Sasmal's body, "-I think he has the key." The woman processed that. The child's crying suddenly stopped. The silence was surprising. Then, still held aloft in her mother's hands, the child started to pee. Michelle watched as the jet stream splattered all over the blacktop in front of her. Just when she thought the child had finished, a more powerful secondary surge shot out from between her spindly legs. To avoid getting peed on, she had to backpedal. "This is a crime scene!" Michelle said angrily. The pregnant woman said nothing. The child peed like a racehorse. She was the Secretariat of urination. Finally, the stream trickled to a drip. Michelle said, "I could arrest you for contaminating a crime scene." "In that case, you'd have to arrest yourself first," replied the woman. She abruptly turned her back on Patrol Officer Wu to put the child back into the car. "Excuse me?" Michelle said. "This isn't a crime scene," said the woman, "it's a joke." "Ex cuse me?" Michelle repeated, this time with a cracked squeal that she immediately regretted. Seemingly without oxygen in her lungs, the remarkably pregnant woman said, "You should have parked your squad car blocking one of the entrances. That would have prevented your tire treads from contaminating any potential evidence all around you. Once you realized the victim was dead, you shouldn't have stepped anywhere within a fifteen-foot diameter of the body until your detectives arrived. You're not wearing shoe covers, so your soles might have deposited minute traces of particles from anywhere you had stepped tonight and/or lint from inside your patrol car around this entire area, which means any potential particles and/or lint and/or residue left by the killer and/or the killer's automobile is now contaminated. I don't see a notebook or a pen in your hand, which would indicate you haven't been taking notes. As first on the scene, you should have been. But I guess I could forgive that, since you have your cell phone out taking pictures of the blood spatters on the pump before they trickled any further or dried up, because you know that could help inform the calculation of the bullet's trajectories and/or time of death-oh, wait-your cell phone is in your pocket, so you haven't been doing that, either! Now it'll be harder to identify the exact direction the shots were fired from and more accurately calculate the time of death." Michelle blinked as she took this in. "Who the hell are you, lady?" Pregnant or not, Michelle wanted to kick this woman's ass. The two things that prevented her from doing so was professional decorum and the fact the stubby incubator was totally right. Before getting into her car, the woman said, "Oh and one last thing, you also let a foreign vehicle drive across your crime scene and then didn't stop a small child from taking a massive-and I really do mean impressively massive-piss all over the potential path the killer's car took to enter the station. The acid in the urine will affect the analysis of those tire marks from where the killer drove away." Michelle looked around. "What tire marks?" She looked down around her feet and saw only some smudges. Had she stepped all over the tire marks? She heard the van's automatic car door close and looked up, "Wait!" After two tries at stretching the straps over her belly, the woman finally fastened her seat belt. The disdain in her eyes softened slightly. The woman lowered the window. "Let me give you a freebie," she said. "From the angle of the bullet strikes, the shooter had likely stepped out of his car when the shots were fired." The woman rolled up the window and, without a second look, backed into a sharp k-turn. She blew past Niket and out the wrong way through the entrance, hanging a right into traffic before the light changed, driving west down Rt. 571. Michelle and Niket locked eyes. "What the hell was that?" she asked. Niket shrugged his shoulders. Chapter Two Andrea Stern drove down Abbington Lane faster than she should have. It was a self-contained, U-shaped residential block with less than twenty houses on it, a rarity for the McMansion developments of the area. She jerked the Odyssey on to her driveway. The bumper scraped the driveway's heavily-pitched apron. She pressed the remote attached to the visor several times in rapid succession, but had to brake hard when the garage door wouldn't open. The remote needed new batteries. "Push it slowly and hold it down, mom," said Ruth, drawing "mom" out in an annoyed rollercoaster drone. Mooooommm did as her oldest daughter suggested. The door opened. Catching Ruth's smug grin in the rearview mirror, Andrea dreaded her daughter reaching puberty. The only thing that made Andrea's present-day misery tolerable was knowing how much more miserable she would be in a few years. She stopped the car in the junk-cluttered garage. Any weekend now, Jeff would be sure to clean it. Ruth and Elijah rushed between the middle row seats past their younger sisters and opened the sliding doors. "Dibs on the swings! Dibs on the swings!" they said simultaneously and repeatedly. Whining, Sarah and Sadie struggled against their belts in their respective booster and safety seats. Excerpted from Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
