“It could have been worse,” Detective Sanchez said. “The body could have been in the water for several days. I hate it when they’re partially decomposed.”
The detectives stood on the deck of the old conference center, a rambling two-story, wood-frame structure that had been the original Satori facility. Stretched out before them on a sun-bleached picnic table was the partially clothed body of Malcolm Eastwick. They knew it was Eastwick because they’d studied the picture on the driver’s license, found in the leather wallet in his back pocket.
“Looks pretty clear that he died from a head injury,” Dan O’Malley said. The right half of Eastwick’s face had been compressed by the impact of landing on rocks at the bottom of a nearby cliff. “That’s about all we know. We don’t know what happened or where it happened.”
“When Bruno Oliver gets here, perhaps he can tell us when it happened.”
O’Malley used a gloved hand to lift Eastwick’s head off the table. “The skin’s pliant enough that it probably happened within the last twenty-four hours.”
“Which means last night, because no one saw anything until this morning when they looked off this deck and saw the body on the beach below.”
O’Malley lowered the head to the table and used one gloved finger to close Eastwick’s open eye. “There’s no telling when your friend Bruno is going to get here.” O’Malley turned to Laura. “Bruno is very sharp, but strange. He won’t look me in the eye.”
“That’s because he doesn’t know you. He’s on the spectrum.”
“What’s the spectrum?”
“Technically it’s called the Autism-Spectrum-Disorder.”
“But he can do his job.”
“Of course, Bruno is very intelligent. He just has difficulty in social situations. The better he knows you, the more typical his behavior is.”
“You seem to know a lot about Bruno, Sanchez.”
“I’ve known him all my life. I went to school with his sister, Eunice.”
O’Malley looked out at the choppy Pacific Ocean. “Do me a favor, Laura, and go down to the beach and see if you can find anything. Chances are there’s nothing, but you might get lucky and find where he hit the rocks.”
“Sure thing, Sarge.” Sanchez was happy to get away from the smell of Eastwick’s body, a combination of the odor of mothballs and rotten eggs. She walked off the deck, circled the front of the old conference center, and headed down the well-kept path to the beach. For the last ten yards she had to scramble down the remains of the staircase which had been compromised by wave action. Reaching the small, sandy beach she tried, without success, to determine where the body had come ashore.
The beach ended after twenty yards and Detective Sanchez began to clamber north, over wet rocks, some packed with barnacles and others smooth. After fifteen minutes she’d moved to a spot directly under the westernmost overhang of the conference center deck. Sanchez defined a search perimeter and methodically examined it. There were several dark marks that might have been blood, but nothing that looked like flesh or brain particles. Gulls probably got them, she thought.
The Detective was about to abandon the search when she spotted a white cloth trapped between two rocks, three feet below the perimeter floor. She lay flat on the uneven wet surface, extended her gloved right hand into the crevice, and snared the item with two fingers.
Sanchez held up a silk handkerchief bearing the monogram, “ME.”