CRIME SCENE NUMBER Two.
At least that was how Decker had designated it in his mind.
It had been an auto repair facility. An unexpected place for a murder. But then again, most everything about a murder was unexpected.
He and Lassiter climbed out of her car, a pale blue four-door Prius with limited legroom, at least for someone as tall as Decker. It was her personal ride. The department didn’t have money in the budget for cars for their detectives, she’d told him on the drive over.
Decker said, “FYI, I saw at least six drug deals going down on the way here.”
“Seven,” replied Lassiter. “You might have missed the soccer mom with the little girl in the rear seat. Mom was getting her pop from the dude at the last traffic light before she dropped her kid off at daycare.”
“And you drove right past?” said Decker.
“If I stopped every drug deal I saw, I wouldn’t have the time to eat, sleep, or use the bathroom. I happen to know the woman. She won’t take the pop now. She’ll do it later, at home, when her hubby is there. He’ll take care of her and the girl.”
“What’s the drug of choice around here?”
“Used to be OxyContin and then fentanyl. Now it’s heroin even though fentanyl is far more potent.”
“Must be impacting your crime rate.”
“People burglarize their neighbor’s house so they can sell the stuff for cash to service their addiction. Or a son embezzles his mom’s bank account to do the same. Or a granny steals from her granddaughter’s piggy bank. It’s seriously demented stuff and happens every day.”
“And heroin is popular because you get a gram of it for about fifty bucks and it’ll last you a lot longer than fentanyl, or OxyContin, which runs about, what, eighty bucks a pill on the street?”
“Hell, you don’t have to buy it on the street anymore. They’ll deliver it right to your house, like pizza. Or they get it from pharmacies or the local Boy Scout troop leader. Or it comes down one of the drug pipelines around here. They crush and snort it, inject it. They even chew on fentanyl patches instead of putting them on their skin to get the pop.”
“Maybe that mark on the dead guy was a fentanyl patch.”
She nodded. “Could be. Our OD rate is up nearly seventy percent from last year. And the last ten cases we’ve investigated have been people over sixty-five. Some people call it ‘Rust Belt Retirement.’”
“I left being a cop in Ohio before the opioid crisis really got going. But even back then we started calling it the zombie apocalypse.”
“It’s why we all carry Narcan with us.”
“To resuscitate an OD?”
Lassiter nodded. “And the city enacted Good Samaritan laws, so you won’t get in trouble if you report an overdose, even if you might be doing drugs as well. The woman we passed? Her husband keeps a Narcan kit at home. Rehab place in town started to give them out. Some say it’s enabling. I say until we get this figured out, it’s better to keep people alive. We got an army of addicts and a twenty-bed rehab center. Tell me how that makes sense. I think the town’s just sick of it. They don’t want to spend tax dollars they don’t have on people they don’t think give a damn. They hear methadone treatment center and think it’s what meth addicts take to get their high and not the drug used to treat that addiction. They don’t want ‘these’ people around them, not coming to grips with the fact that ‘these’ people are often members of their families. So some say let ’em die and good riddance.”
“But not you?”
“It’s hit pretty close to home with me, Decker. So, no, I don’t say good riddance to a human being.”
“Your family?” he asked.
“Not going there,” she replied curtly.
As they reached the door of the repair facility, Decker said, “I take it since Mrs. Martin taught you in Sunday school that you grew up here?”
“I did. Though I went to college in Philly. Criminal justice degree at Temple. Then I came back here, joined the force, was a street cop for four years, passed my exams, became a sergeant, and then moved up to detective.”
“Pretty fast-track for you.”
“I worked my ass off for it.”
“I’m sure you did, more than the guys had to.”
“That’s pretty astute of you, Decker.”
“Did you shut the repair facility down after the crime, or did it close on its own?”
“The guy who ran it hit the state lottery for about six hundred thousand and got the hell out of here.”
“You got a key?”
She pulled one from her pocket and unlocked the front door.
There was a small reception area, and beyond that, through a wall of glass interrupted by a door, Decker could see three service bays.
“Okay, take me through step by step.”
“We got a call about a possible break-in. Uniforms responded. They found the bodies.”
“Who called it in?”
“Anonymous. We tried to trace it but couldn’t.”
“That’s unusual, because most people don’t carry untraceable phones. Where did you find the bodies?”
She led him into the service bay area.
“Vic number one was found in the grease pit of this service bay.” She pointed down in the hole.
“Cause of death?”
“A gunshot wound to the head sealed the deal.”
“ID?”
“Michael Swanson. Black guy, early thirties. Low-level street dealer. Started his career right out of high school. He’d been arrested before on petty stuff. Did some short stints twice in the local lockup. But nothing too serious. Last address we had for him was an apartment on the outskirts of town. Very low-rent district.”
“The second body?”
She led him over to a machine that was used to lift engine blocks out of vehicles.
“He was found wrapped in chains and hanging from this.”
“Cause of death?”
“Same as Swanson. But he had a mark branded into his forehead.”
“What sort of mark?”
“You ready for this?”
“I guess.”
“It was a flame, but it was turned upside down.”
“A torch, you mean? That’s the symbol of the Greek god of death, Thanatos.”
Lassiter’s jaw slackened. “How did you know that?”
“I read a book once. With pictures. Who was he?”
“Bradley Costa. White, age thirty-five. He was a fairly recent transfer here. Worked at Baronville National Bank. A senior vice president.”
“Pretty big title for a guy in his thirties.”
“He came here from Wall Street and had a lot of experience. Those types don’t show up here every day. He was described as a real go-getter.”
“Any connection to Swanson?”
“Not that we can prove. He might have been a customer of Swanson’s. Wouldn’t be the first time a banker did drugs. And because of Costa’s line of work, money laundering or some other financial shenanigans come to mind. But we couldn’t get any traction on that angle either. And I don’t think Swanson generated enough cash to need a money launderer.”
“And yet both had their lives ended in this place,” said Decker, looking around the space. “How did they get here?”
“We don’t know. Costa didn’t have any family that we know of, but his boss at the bank reported him missing. No one reported Swanson missing. I guess he moved in circles where he went missing a lot. Definitely out of the mainstream.”
“The mainstream as it used to be,” corrected Decker.
“Right.”
“Any useful trace?”
“No prints. No spent cartridges. No tossed cigarette with DNA on it. Only blood belonged to the vics.”
“And we’re sure they were killed here?”
“Blood spatters say yes. And the ME said there was enough blood present to account for the shots and the bleed-outs to have occurred here.”
“Was it the same ME I met today?”
“Yeah, Charlie Duncan. Why?”
Decker didn’t answer.
She said, “And what did you mean that he should take some courses, or get out of the business of autopsies altogether? Do you think he was wrong on the time-of-death call?”
“I know that he missed two big inconsistencies.” He turned to her. “But then you and your partner missed them too.”
“Like what?” she said defensively.
“A body in a dank basement that’s been dead longer than twenty hours and in full rigor is going to have a lot more than a few flies and a few unhatched eggs on it. Blowflies can locate a dead body and arrive within minutes of the death. The body hanging upstairs had no blowflies on it that I could see. The one in the basement only had a few. Each blowfly can lay over two hundred eggs, and those eggs hatch within eight to twenty-four hours into first-stage maggots. That’s what I meant when I told the first officer on the scene that what I had observed was forensically impossible. A stiff corpse with only minimal insect infestation and not a single egg hatched? Your ME should have seen that right away. But he just focused on the rigor and not the entomology, lack of body decomp, and core temp factors. And he just assumed that his instrument was out of whack with the core temp instead of digging deeper to see why the body would be that cold, namely below ambient temperature. A competent ME has to look at the total package. Everything impacts everything else. Otherwise, you screw up and a bad guy gets to walk.”
Lassiter looked taken aback by his comment. “O-kay,” she said slowly. “I get where you’re coming from. But the bodies were found inside. Wouldn’t that have made a difference with the flies?”
“It can. But you’d be surprised at the places blowflies can get into. And here we had an empty house with an old basement probably filled with cracks and holes. Trust me, they would’ve gotten to it if the body had been there for twenty hours or longer.”
“What was the second inconsistency?”
“Hypostasis, otherwise known as livor mortis. Once the heart stops pumping and the internal body decomposition commences, vessels get porous and the blood reacts solely to gravity and heads for the lowest spot. With a guy hanging that means he’ll have blood collecting in his fingertips, earlobes, and feet. He might even have a death erection.”
“What? A death erection?”
“Because when you die vertically, the blood also pools in the groin. Like a balloon filling up with water. Heart’s no longer circulating, so there’s no way for the blood to leave the spot once it gets there. In the morgue when I checked out the body of the guy hanging, the staining was on his back. That means he didn’t die by being strung up and left there for twenty hours.”
“Then he might have been killed elsewhere and brought to the house?”
Decker nodded. “Your ME didn’t mention anything about the livor mortis inconsistency. He either didn’t know about it or he just flat out screwed up.”
“I’ll have to go back and check with him.”
“Good luck on that. So, why kill them here?”
“It was abandoned. It had grease pits. Equipment to hang someone.”
“I was actually thinking about a broader question.”
“What’s that?”
“Why Baronville?”