| |
The Powell files were sent over late that afternoon accompanied by a note from Dystal, saying he had talked to Mooney and Lapierre again and they would be expecting to hear from Haydon. Haydon sat in the library and read them through, underlining a point here and there, making a note in the margins about a cross reference or an item he wanted to go back to later. Lapierre had done the introduction, scene summary, and coroner’s report; Mooney had interviewed the wit nesses. There was very little to add to what Dystal had already told him.
When he was through reading, Haydon went to the stereo and put on a selection of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier.” He took the box of crime scene photographs and began spreading them over the refectory table. He first arranged them in a sequence that he imagined was a possible scenario for the narrative of the murder. It was a complicated scene. The blood that had spilled on the floor had been stepped in and tracked around by whoever had done the killing, or by someone there at the time or shortly thereafter. It would be some time, if ever, before the lab technicians would be able to determine which footprints going in which direction had been laid over the top of the others and thereby establish a sequence of movement.
After studying several of these scenarios, Haydon arranged the photographs in groups of perspectives: all the shots taken from the door, all the shots taken from the sink where the body was found, all those taken from the side of the room where the tape editing machine sat and where most of the blood had splattered, with the exception of the gore in and around the sink. It seemed probable that the initial attack had taken place while Powell had been editing tape. There was, however, no tape in the editor.
There were more than a dozen photographs of the footprints in the blood and of the splatters on various portions of the walls and the equipment. They had also videotaped the scene. Haydon took the cassette into the television room and slipped it into the recorder. There was static, HPD identification signals, and then the scene shots. The camera moved from the outside door of the laboratory into the room and began panning from the left side where the editing machine sat. Haydon was glad they had had at least that much foresight. The camera made a complete circle of the room back to the door, and then the cameraman advanced to the body and made a similar sweep, starting at the door again and going to the editing machine, which was now on the right, and around to the door again. One last complete pan was made from the editing machine itself, starting at the door and going clockwise.
Haydon returned to the library and sat down at one end of the refectory table with the diagram Lapierre had drawn of the scene. The main door to the lab where Powell had worked and died opened off an inner hallway within the Langer complex. It was not a large room, and the sinks where Powell’s body was found were not even used by him in his video work. They were actually used as secondary facilities for the larger still photography lab next door, to which there was access through a second door at one end of the sinks. In Lapierre’s drawing the hallway entrance was at six o’clock, the editing machine at eight, the door into the larger photography lab at ten, and Powell’s body was in the sink at one. From one to six was a wall of counter space with supply shelves above. The bloody footprints crisscrossed each other roughly around the center of the room and then ended in a pile of paper towels about five feet in front of the hallway door. A single trace was found right on the threshold, but beyond that the killer had walked out with clean feet.
There was a coroner’s report with Dr. Harl Vanstraten’s signature. According to the report, Powell had died of the throat wound, not of the several penetrations in the thoracic region. Any of those, however, would have proven fatal in time. The postmortem showed no traces of drugs, though there was some alcohol in the blood. Powell had been a heavy smoker. He had prostatitis. He would have needed triple heart bypass surgery in another fifteen years, if not sooner, and his liver had been exposed to too much alcohol. He had a very fine tattoo of an oversized Phthirus pubis (Vanstraten would not call it a crab louse) just where his pubic hair started in his right groin. Very funny story behind that, no doubt. He had only one testicle. Probably a not so funny story. Whatever Wayne Powell had been in life, he made an only mildly interesting cadaver.
Haydon noted that Vanstraten had put the approximate time of death at two o’clock in the morning. He put the coroner’s report aside and picked up Mooney’s interviews.
Raymond Tease, the director of the photography department of Langer Media, had found the body. He had come in a little after eight o’clock on Thursday morning and opened the still photography lab. After checking for messages on his desk, he put water in the coffee machine to let it start heating and then went out into the hall and walked down to the snack area to get a quick cup from the vending machine. He stopped and chatted with the receptionist a minute and started back to the lab. On his way he decided to check and see if Powell was in and found him. He slammed the door shut and ran back to the receptionist’s desk just as Mr. Langer was walking in.
The three of them went back to the lab, and the receptionist and Tease stood at the door while Langer carefully entered the room to check Powell’s vital signs. When he came out, he stationed Tease at the door to keep anyone from going in and had the receptionist call the police.
The receptionist corroborated Tease’s story and had nothing else to add. She had been the one to open the offices that morning and hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.
William D. Langer also corroborated the sequence of events and added his efforts to keep the discovery as quiet as possible by keeping it from the others who came in that morning, at least until the police could arrive. Mooney had added notes of his own regarding the extent to which Langer had gone throughout that morning to keep the excitement and publicity to a minimum.
There had been brief follow up interviews with Tease and Langer, and with a girl named Patricia Beamon who had worked with Tease and Powell in the photo section. Another girl, Alice Parnas, had also worked with Beamon and the others, but she was not helpful and was reluctant to talk at all. The follow up stories were just as Dystal had recapped them. He had omitted nothing of significance. However, there were additional points Haydon wanted to pursue, and he began making notes. He organized the questions under the names of the persons he wanted to interview and arranged the names alphabetically.
And then there was the question of Jennifer Quinn. Mooney and Lapierre were still trying to find her, and there was a stakeout of Powell’s house in case she returned. They were supposed to call him immediately.
Haydon leaned back in his chair and looked at the pile of research on the table. Bach’s clavier had fallen silent long ago, and the light coming in through the French doors had lost its white intensity and given way to the muted tones of late afternoon. The color photographs of Wayne Powell’s violent denouement were scattered before him, their bright tones of violence fading with the weakening light.
As he looked at the jumble of grisly photographs, it occurred to Haydon that there was something beyond the stealing of life that made homicide repugnant. Perhaps an even crueler aspect of the act was that of the murderer’s intrusion into the victim’s death. Nothing in life was more intrinsically intimate, more privately sacred, than the process of dying. By imposing his involvement in this process, the murderer forever violated that privacy and forced the victim to participate in the brutal degradation of his own passing. In the frenetic, searing moments of killing, the most intimate act of man’s existence was made a garish spectacle and thereby tragically debased by the red ferocity of violence. Haydon thought about that as he turned out the lights and wondered why Powell was in the sink.