Baby Boy hadn’t been dead more than an hour, but his face had already taken on that greenish gray pallor. The EMTs had cut the shirt around the stab wound. Three-inch vertical slit up the belly, gaping at the edges.
She sketched the wound and slipped the pad back into her purse. She was stepping away when a photographer behind her announced, “I want to make sure my lighting was okay.” He moved in, lost his balance, fell on his ass. Slid feetfirst into the blood pool.
His camera landed on the asphalt and rattled ominously, but that wasn’t Petra ’s concern.
Crimson splotches and speckles decorated her pants. Both trouser legs ruined.
The photographer lay there, stunned. Petra did nothing to help him, muttered something sharp that widened his eyes and everyone else’s.
She stamped away from the scene.
Her own damn fault, going for color.
3
Petra worked the case hard, doing all the usual procedural things as well as researching Baby Boy Lee on the Internet. Soon, she felt immersed in her victim’s world, wondered what it had been like to be Edgar Ray Lee.
The bluesman had started out upper-middle class, the only child of two professors at Emory University in Atlanta. Ten years as a child prodigy on violin and cello had ended when Edgar’s teenage rebellion aimed him at guitar and landed him on a Greyhound to Chicago, where he found a whole new lifestyle: Living on the streets and in borrowed cribs, sitting in with the Butterfield Blues Band, Albert Lee, B. B. King, and any other genius who happened to be passing through. Developing his chops but picking up bad habits.
The older musicians recognized the chubby kid’s talent right away, and one of them gave him the nickname that stuck.
Baby Boy spent two decades scratching a living as a sessions sideman and a bar-band front man, endured big promises that petered, cut records that went nowhere, finally recorded a top-40 hit with a Southern band called Junior Biscuit. The song, penned, sung and guitar-riffed by the big man, was a gut-wrenching lament entitled “A Cold Heart”- the very same ditty Baby Boy had played moments before his death.