“Murder?” Debbie Ann echoed. “Are you sure? Are you in any danger? Maybe you should go back inside the church.”
“Could be just attempted murder. I’m going to see if the guy’s still alive. Can you send an ambulance? And should you maybe notify my dad?”
“That’s a yes to both,” she said. “The ambulance should be there a few minutes behind Horace, and one way or another, we can use Dr. Langslow.” Dad was both a semi-retired physician and the local medical examiner. “Stay on the line until Horace gets there.”
I took another quick glance around to make sure no one was lurking in the nearby shrubbery or behind one of the weathered tombstones. Then I stepped inside. I started to grope for the light switch that, because of the stained glass panels flanking the door, was inconveniently located a couple of feet to right of the entrance. Then I stopped myself. The intruder could have left fingerprints. I turned my phone so I could use its edge to flip the light switch. Nothing happened. I flicked the switch up and down a few more times, even though I knew it was useless. Annoying that all the bulbs in both fixtures were burned out. I made a mental note to have a few sharp words with the church custodian. Then I opened my phone’s flashlight app and used its tiny beam to scan my surroundings.
The crypt was ten feet wide and burrowed twenty feet into the side of the hill, so even adding my phone’s illumination to the shaft of light coming from the fallen flashlight didn’t do much to improve visibility, although the foot-square polished granite panels covering the walls did reflect the light a little. Still, I could barely see the doorway in the back wall—actually a fake doorway, intended to be replaced with a real door, if and when Trinity decided to expand the crypt.
But the victim wasn’t that far back. He lay facedown on the flagstone floor about a third of the way along the room’s length. His head, with its pool of what was certainly blood, was closest to me. One arm curled slightly above it in what seemed like a protective gesture, while the other lay at his side. From the way his legs were sprawled, I deduced that he’d been knocked down while making a break for the door.
I knelt at his side, trying to avoid the blood, and reached for his wrist.
“No pulse,” I said over the phone. I turned its little beam onto the victim’s head and quickly flicked it away again. “And he’s got a nasty head wound, and there’s a fair amount of blood here, but the wound’s not bleeding much at the moment, which I’m pretty sure is a bad sign.”
I took several deep breaths and looked away. Yes, I was the daughter of a doctor—a doctor who was also a lifelong crime fiction reader and, for the last several years, the local medical examiner. Thanks to Dad’s peculiar ideas of suitable dinner table conversation, it would take something pretty awful to shake me. This was pretty awful. In my effort to focus, just for few moments, on anything other than the head wound, I noticed that apparently the floor sloped toward the back of the crypt. The blood from the victim’s head had run down the lines of grout between the paving stones and was pooling at the base of the fake door. I wasn’t sure staring at the pool of blood was any better than looking at the victim.
The victim. I was trying not to call him “the dead guy,” even though I was pretty sure it was accurate. Or would be long before the ambulance got here. It would be nice to know his name. And having something to do always calmed my nerves.
So even though I realized that every footprint I made potentially complicated Horace’s job when he switched roles from deputy on patrol to Caerphilly’s one-man forensic department, I took a couple of cautious steps to where I could peer down and see the victim’s face.
“It’s Mr. Hagley,” I said to Debbie Ann. “The victim, I mean.”
“Junius Hagley?”
“That’s right.” Junius Hagley, who up until forty-five minutes ago had been one of the loud voices coming from the vestry meeting. One of the Muttering Misogynists. I hoped Mother and all her fellow vestry members were alibied. They were sure to be high on the chief’s list of suspects. Although if the list included everyone who wasn’t fond of Mr. Hagley, it would be a long one.
“Look, whoever did it is gone,” I said. “Not long gone, though, so maybe you could tell some of those officers heading this way to keep their eyes open for suspicious characters.”
“Already done,” she said. “Although I’m not sure what to tell them to look for.”
“Yeah.” I glanced around to make sure no one was nearby. “‘Be on the lookout for someone heading away from Trinity Episcopal’ isn’t terribly useful, is it?”
“And that’s assuming he’s headed away,” Debbie Ann said. “And not circling back to get rid of a potential witness. Stay on the line until Horace gets there.”
“Will do. Although if whoever did this has any brains, they’ll know I’m useless as a witness and they’re better off not returning to the scene of the crime.” I said that last bit rather loudly, in case the intruder was still lurking outside in the bushes.
“Criminals aren’t noted for their brainpower,” Debbie Ann said. “Just stay on the line. The chief’s headed your way, too.”
“I’ll be glad to see him.” Since Chief Burke was also a retired Baltimore homicide detective, he usually took charge of major crime investigations himself.
From my new vantage point, I noticed something else. Around Mr. Hagley’s head, a scattering of dirt and rocks littered the normally smooth, clean stone floor
No, not dirt and rocks. Human ashes—cremains, as Maudie Morton at the funeral home would say—and broken bits of at least one of the polished granite panels that normally covered the niches. Farther off I saw shards of china. Fragments of glass. A bronze urn with a big dent in its base. Another urn lying on its side. A granite panel broken into three or four pieces. A rectangular bronze plaque that had fallen off the panel—with a little more light I could have read the occupant’s name and dates. Another largely intact panel with the bronze plaque still attached.
I flicked my phone’s light up and ran it along the closest wall. Here and there gaping holes interrupted the wall’s otherwise regular expanse of granite squares, with or without bronze plaques. I counted … three … no, four niches that had been opened up by prying off the front panels. One still held a bronze urn that had been tipped over on its side. The others were empty. An inspection of the opposite wall revealed two more vandalized niches.
And at the foot of the second wall I spotted something else that didn’t belong—a crowbar. The light was too dim to see if it was bloodstained, but Horace would be testing that. And I didn’t have to look back at Mr. Hagley’s head to tell—
“Meg?”
I jumped. Even though I’d been absently tracking the gradual approach of the sirens, Horace’s arrival caught me by surprise.
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Murder victim,” I said, pointing my phone’s light at Mr. Hagley. I shifted it over to the crowbar. “Possible murder weapon. You’ll find my sneaker tracks beside him, where I stooped to take his pulse, and here. You going to kick me out now?” I was actually itching to call Michael, to let him know what was happening before he heard about it from someone else.
“Maybe you should stay with me until some of the other officers have checked the premises, in case whoever did this is still lurking around,” Horace said. “Stand in the doorway and let me know if you see anything suspicious.”
“Can do.”
“And can you turn on the lights?” he asked. “Unless there’s a particular reason you were creeping around in the dark.”
“The bulbs are burned out,” I said.
Horace took the flashlight from his belt, turned it on, and trained it on first one overhead fixture, then the other.
“The bulbs are broken,” he said. “Be interesting to know if the killer did this or if they were already out.”
“If the killer did it, won’t you find glass?”
“We’d also find glass if the bulb had been broken days ago.”
“But it wasn’t,” I said. “With Robyn out, Mother gives the church a white-glove inspection almost every day. I’m pretty sure she did it earlier this evening, before the vestry meeting. If she’d found broken glass in here, she’d have told me.”
“Could be.”
He sounded dubious. Did he doubt Mother’s attention to detail?
“And then there’s the fact that there was light coming from here earlier,” I added. “A lot brighter than that thing.” I gestured to the fallen flashlight. “So unless the killer had an awesomely high-powered flashlight…”
“He broke the bulbs, then. Wonder why.”
“The switch can be hard to find if you don’t already know where it is.”
He nodded, obviously filing away the information. He turned his flashlight on the body and whistled when he saw the head wound.
While Horace studied the crime scene with his trained forensic eyes, I tapped out a message to Michael. It took me a couple of tries to come up with wording that wouldn’t bring him racing to make sure I was okay.
“Don’t wait up,” my final draft began. “I’m fine, but I found a body. Junius Hagley. Horace is here with me. Dad and the chief are on their way. They’ll probably want to pick my brains before I leave.”
Michael’s answer came back so quickly that I suspected he’d started to worry and was watching his phone.
“You’re sure you’re fine? Rose Noire and Rob are here, so I could head over there.”
“I’m fine, and with any luck I’ll be on my way before you could even get here.”
I wasn’t actually that optimistic about an early departure, but I didn’t want to worry him. And I didn’t want him losing sleep over this. He had a busy day of classes and rehearsals tomorrow.
“OK,” he texted back. “What happened to Hagley—heart attack? Stroke?”
“Crowbar,” I texted back. “Homicide.”
He didn’t text back right away. I was about to put the phone away when his reply flashed onto my screen.
“Why do our local murderers always manage to commit their crimes when you’re around?”
“Dunno,” I tapped back. “Maybe the International Brotherhood of Thugs and Assassins insists.”
“LOL. Could be, if your dad got to them. Well, at least he’ll be happy.” True enough—few things excited Dad as much as an opportunity to be involved in a real-life murder investigation. “Stay safe. Love you!”
I replied in kind and then tucked my phone in my pocket.
“There’s no place like home,” I said under my breath. Then I turned back to see what Horace was up to.