DECKER!”
Decker had just passed by the Murder House when the person called out.
It was Kate Kemper. She was standing in the front doorway.
Decker stopped and turned to look at her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, coming toward him.
“Just out for a walk,” he said.
She checked her watch. “And your walk just happens to take you past here at four o’clock in the morning?”
She came to stand in front of him, while he looked over her shoulder at the house.
“Just itching to get back inside there, aren’t you?” she said.
He focused on her. “Wouldn’t you be too, if you were me?”
She looked at his sticking-up hair. “I meant to ask you about your hairdo when we first met, but I figured maybe it was just the way you wore it.”
“I had a head injury.”
“How’d you get that?”
“An exploding trailer.”
She gaped. “What? How did that happen?”
“We were checking out a mobile home trailer when someone decided to turn it into an oven with me and my partner inside. We got out before we got barbecued, but the thing went boom when the propane tank ignited, and part of the boom hit me in the head.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“Not yet. But I’m working on it. I take it personally when someone tries to kill me.”
“I would too.” She studied him. “I checked you out since our last meeting. The Bureau speaks incredibly highly of you.”
“Uh-huh. Find anything interesting inside?”
She cocked her head. “Not into flattery?”
“I never really saw its value.”
“Okay,” she said, looking at him appraisingly. “I guess the answer to your question depends on how you define ‘interesting.’”
“How would you define it?”
“How about forensically? The ME got back to us with some more information. Care to hear it?”
“I didn’t think you wanted us involved.”
“I just said things had to run through me.”
“I’m listening.”
“The man in the basement overdosed on carfentanil. It’s an anesthetic used for large animals, like elephants. It’s about the strongest commercial opiate out there. The Russians use it as a weapon of assassination.”
“That would account for the foam on his lips.”
Kemper smiled strangely at this, but continued, “The guy you found hanging died by strangulation.”
“But it couldn’t be from the hanging.”
Kemper hiked her eyebrows. “So you knew that already?”
Decker nodded. “And I hope you’re not relying on the local ME, because he also royally screwed up the time of death. I know more about forensics than he does.”
Kemper looked at him curiously. “How do you know he screwed up the TOD?”
“He completely missed obvious red flags in the evidence. And by your look, you know that to be the case. So tell me what else you found.”
“How do you know I found out anything else?”
“Because you strike me as someone who likes to do things her way, and not rely on the locals to spoon-feed you information.”
She smiled. “I’m beginning to see another side of you, Decker.”
“I’ve got a lot of them. So what did you learn?”
“You’re right. I brought in my own medical examiner. She looked over the bodies and the test results and came to certain conclusions that were not exactly in line with the local ME’s results. But let me hear your analysis of the TOD first.”
“Rigor starts about two hours after death, beginning in the small muscles, face, neck, and moves outward to the larger muscle groups in the body’s extremities. The process then reverses itself. Full rigor is typically reached around twelve to eighteen hours after death. The body can remain stiff for a similar time range. Then rigor begins to reverse and completely resolves itself after anywhere from thirty-six to forty-eight hours, depending on certain factors, including environmental, and the body eventually becomes flaccid.” He paused before continuing. “Now, let’s apply that here. Vics dead twenty hours or longer in an abandoned house and one of them in a moldy basement? They’d be covered in insects and eggs, along with the beginnings of body decomp. And the limbs of the guy in the basement didn’t feel stiff in the way that people in rigor usually do. They were off somehow, at least to my touch. And they were way too cold for the ambient temp of that place. The ME should have seen that from his core temp test, but he just assumed his thermometer was broken.”
Kemper was nodding the whole time he was talking. “Now let me tell you what my person thinks. She thinks the vics were killed around the time the local ME thought, but under a very different scenario.” She stopped and studied him. “Care to think how that’s possible, taking into account what you know?”
He looked at the house again and said slowly, as though thinking out loud, “The only thing that would explain the facts is if they were killed somewhere else twenty hours or more before they were discovered by me, and kept in extremely cold conditions in an enclosed container, like a freezer, so the bodies wouldn’t commence undergoing rigor and the insects couldn’t get to them. Once the bodies were taken out of that enclosed environment the process of rigor would begin. And that would also account for why the local ME’s body temp gauge was throwing off wacky numbers, and also the peculiar stiffness of the limbs. It wouldn’t be due to the chemical reaction of dead muscles in rigor, but a frozen body thawing out. And the blowflies detect dead bodies based on things like scents from the corpse’s release of fluid and gases. If the bodies were frozen, that might have inhibited those scents from being released. And if the bodies were only there for a short while, the insect infestation wouldn’t have been all that much, which matches the facts of the crime scene.” He paused. “But if that was the case there wouldn’t have been foam on the guy’s lips. It would have long since disappeared.”
“Not if they placed a concocted residue there when they laid the body out, because they knew the tox tests would show the drugs in his system and that the foaming would probably be present if he’d just been left there right after he died.”
“Does your ME think the bodies were moved after death?”
“She knows at least one of them was. The livor mortis staining showed that.”
“The guy hanging, right?” Decker nodded. “I saw that the staining was on his back. No way that could have happened if he’d been strung up and left there.”
“Exactly what my ME said,” noted Kemper. “And there were actually two sets of ligature marks. The local ME either missed that or just didn’t note or understand the difference. The marks made by the rope were clearly done postmortem.”
“So whoever did this was sweating the details and maybe hoping for a less than crackerjack medical examiner doing the posts. And they almost got their wish. How’d your person figure the freezer scenario?”
“It was really the only way to explain the forensic inconsistencies. And there was evidence of an abrasion on the shoulder of one of the vics.”
“We saw that. They were speculating it might have been from a medical patch of some kind.”
“My ME believes it was a freezer burn on the skin from where it was left exposed. She said she was pretty certain it occurred postmortem. But she made a point of telling me that her TOD was a guess, really, because if the bodies were placed in a freezer right after death and then put in that house, that precludes making an accurate calculation for the time of death.”
“So whoever did this wanted to make sure that we would not be able to show precisely when the guys really died.”
“And by doing that they take away a key tool of any homicide investigation.”
“Alibis or a lack thereof become pretty much meaningless,” said Decker thoughtfully.
“Exactly.”
“The bodies had to be transported here at some point, relatively close to the time that I discovered them. There was no deep freezer in that house, so the bodies were kept on ice somewhere else before being brought here.”
“You said you heard a car?”
“I did. I also heard a noise.”
“What kind of noise?”
“It was more like a series of sounds. Scraping and clunks.”
“Nothing else?”
“A plane flying over. Other than that, nothing. So how does someone carry two corpses into that house and no one sees a thing?”
“Well, I understand there aren’t many people left in this neighborhood.”
“But the killers couldn’t be sure a car wouldn’t drive down the street. Or someone wouldn’t look out their window. I mean, it only takes one pair of eyes.” He fell silent for a moment. “Now, do you want to tell me what your men were doing here? And why they were undercover? If they were hanging out with a bad crowd, I think we can narrow our list of suspects, especially in a place like this.”
She pursed her lips and stared at him. “This goes no farther.”
“No farther,” repeated Decker.
“Will Beatty and Doug Smith, they were the two dead men in that house. Beatty was in the basement. Smith was the one hanging.”
“And they worked undercover for the DEA?”
“Yes and no,” was her surprising reply.
“How exactly is that possible?” asked Decker.
“They did work undercover for us. And then they went rogue.”
“How do you know they went rogue? Maybe their cover just got blown.”
“We entertained that possibility until something happened to disabuse us of that notion.”
“What was that?”
“They were working with a guy named Randy Haas.”
“Was he DEA too?”
“No. He was a bad guy who we had on a short leash feeding us info. He was working with Beatty and Smith. If he screwed us, he was going to prison for life.”
“What happened with Haas?”
“He was given a fatal dose of morphine. But with his dying breath, he pointed the finger at Beatty and Smith as his killers.”
“Did he say why?”
“No. Just that it was them.”
“Why would they kill him?”
“Don’t know.”
“And you believe Haas’s statement?”
“Dying declaration. What reason would he have to lie? And on top of that we’d been unable to get hold of Beatty or Smith.”
“Whoever killed Beatty and Smith knew they were cops. They dressed one as a cop and poured pig’s blood around the other one.”
“But the fact is, they’d gone over to the dark side.”
“Well, some folks just aren’t very forgiving,” said Decker. “Especially those already on the dark side.”