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Halifax, June 8
11:10 a.m.
“Smell that?” asked Sergeant Malone.
Detective Audra Price sniffed the air as she crossed the rear parking lot with a notebook and Tyvek booties in her hands. She could smell it, even at a good distance from the apartment’s open doorway. Sickly sweet with a hint of rusty copper, the odor rode a current of air, crawled over her face and up through her nostrils. Blood. Lots of it and not fresh either. Definitely several hours old.
She wondered what carnage awaited her. What circumstances had provoked someone to act as judge, jury, and executioner? And Audra knew the motives would be absurd. They always were. People murdered others for the stupidest of reasons.
A first-floor apartment window captured her reflection like a photograph, a slender woman of forty-one with level blue eyes, olive skin, and curly blonde hair with balayage highlights. She wore a conservative blouse and slacks, and carried herself with swift, athletic movements, the result of twenty years of exercise—running or cycling in the early morning, gyms at night. Her gold badge was clipped beside her belt buckle. A digital camera dangled from a strap around her neck.
Malone handed her the sign-in form attached to a clipboard. Audra tucked the notebook and booties under her arm and timed into the scene. Gave the clipboard back to him when she finished.
“How bad is it in there?” she asked.
Malone breathed in deeply, once, and exhaled. “God-awful bad.”
Audra looked up at him, and Malone nodded.
“Yep,” he said. “Incredibly violent.”
At sixty-two, Malone had the hard-boiled demeanor of someone who’d seen more of society’s underbelly than he wanted to. He was tall, with a hawkish face that seldom changed expression even on the happiest of days. His scalp glistened through his crew cut.
Audra opened her notebook to a blank page, clicked the top of her pen, and wrote: 1276 Queen St. Apt. 4. TOA – 11:10 am. Cloudy. Temp. 15°C
“Who’s the victim?” she asked.
“Todd Dory.”
“Dory?” Audra paused at the name. “Sounds familiar.”
“He’s been in the news recently. Has a rap sheet a mile long.”
“Caucasian?”
“Yes. Twenty-six years old.”
Audra wrote down the details. “Does he live here?”
“He did.”
“Alone?”
“According to the brief statement we got from the girlfriend, yes.”
“What’s her name?”
“Wendy Drummond.”
“Did she find the body?”
Malone hitched up the holster side of his gun belt. “She did.”
“Where’s she now?”
“They took her to the QE2 for shock.”
“Did they get a statement?”
“I don’t believe so.”
Pausing, Audra looked up from the page. “Oh.” She closed the notebook and hooked her pen on the cover. “I guess I’ll talk to her later.”
She stepped away and gave the scene a full sweep with her eyes. The murder had occurred in a two-story row house on Queen Street. Half the building was painted green with red trim, the other half purple with yellow trim. Barrier tape encircled the property to keep everyone out. Two uniformed officers IDed anyone wanting through.
Audra could hear the sounds of the city around her—engines revving and slowing, car doors shutting, fading chatter of people walking on the sidewalks.
She noted two compost bins and a Dumpster pushed against the chain-link fence at the far corner of the parking lot. On the right side, a picket fence divided the property from Atlantic News, a magazine store on the corner of Morris Street.
In the surrounding buildings, a smattering of figures stood at windows with their cell phones held up to the glass. Very soon, images and videos of the murder scene would be uploaded to the Internet. Another person’s brutal death laid out on display for the voyeuristic world to see.
Audra looked off to the parking lot of the Mary Queen of Scots Inn next door, where a crowd of onlookers had gathered. She took in each face, many young and multicultural. Close by, a clump of newspeople set up cameras.
She walked back over to Malone and pointed her chin to the onlookers. “Let’s get a plainclothes officer to mingle with the crowd,” she said. “See if anyone’s talking.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Malone keyed his shoulder mike, speaking into it in hushed tones. A voice answered back over his radio, “Copy that. Someone will be there in ten.”
Audra gave Malone a thumbs-up. “Has Coulter been notified?”
“He’s on the way.”
“Good.”
Audra clicked on her camera and made a 360-degree turn with it, taking pictures of the neighboring buildings, the row house, the driveway beside it, the parking lot, the license plates of three cars parked by the back fence, the faces on the civilian side of the barrier tape.
A slight breeze lifted her curls as Audra approached the row house. Five feet outside the apartment, she noticed a puddle of vomit on the asphalt. She stopped and aimed her camera at it.
“That would be the girlfriend’s,” Malone called out to her.
Audra turned and threw him a smile. “Okay. I gotcha.”
She snapped off a couple of shots, then continued toward the scene. When she reached the stoop outside the first-floor apartment, the smell of blood grew stronger. Audra saw the Ident crew busy at work—Harvey Doucette applying a light coat of aluminum dust over the outside doorknob and Jim Lucas shooting away with his camera. Both men wore full Tyvek coveralls with attached hood and boots. HEPA respirators covered their mouths and noses.
Audra slipped the booties on over her shoes. Tugging a pair of latex gloves from a front pocket, she pulled them onto her hands.
“Is it safe to come in?” she asked the men.
Harvey looked over his shoulder at her, a brush poised in one hand, an oval palette containing a small amount of powder in the other. Sweat gleamed on his forehead. Audra knew all too well how hot those coveralls could get.
“Just keep to the outer perimeter of the kitchen,” Harvey said, his voice muffled by the respirator. “Left side.”
“Want a mask, Detective?” Jim asked.
“If you have a spare.”
“I have a few.” The hulking man dropped to a squat at his equipment case and took out a HEPA respirator. He tossed it over to Audra.
“Thank you, Jim.”
She positioned the respirator on her face and stretched the elastic straps over the back of her head, watching Harvey take a puffer bulb to blow off excess powder from the doorknob.
“Got a couple partials,” he said. “Good ridge detail.”
Jim leaned in and shot photos of the revealed prints.
“Hopefully they belong to the suspect,” Audra said.
Jim turned his head slightly toward her. “We can always hope.”
Audra examined the doorframe and the edge of the door for pry marks in the wood. Didn’t find any. She then scooched past the men and stepped into the kitchen, surveying it with a slow roll of her head left to right. As her gaze settled on that part of the room where the murder had occurred, a sharp exhalation rushed out of her mouth. Malone wasn’t kidding when he’d called it God-awful. It had the look of an explosion of rage, and the contrast of blood against the white of the kitchen made the scene jaw dropping.
Linear patterns of blood spatter ran up the south wall over the ceiling toward the north wall by the back door and then back again. Someone had swung a bloody weapon repeatedly. Possibly a tire iron, a bat, or even a pipe.
Audra could only see the victim’s right foot and part of a leg on the floor by the kitchen table. The table itself blocked the rest of him. Off to the left, a pale lump of flesh lay on the floor by the refrigerator. Audra swallowed when she realized it looked like a human ear.
Blood had flowed from the body and formed a large pool in the middle of the floor. The outer edges looked to be separated from the serum, and the blood was dark and crystallizing in the shallower areas of the pool.
Audra snapped off several photos with her camera. She inspected the rest of the floor for any footwear impressions from the suspect. Clean. Someone had been careful.
Instead of moving in directly to view the body, Audra first looked around, noting details. The place was small and dirty, but not unbearably so. The ceiling light shone above one of those square discount shades that had become a graveyard for several flies. Print dust coated the light switch by the back door where Jim and Harvey worked away. Beside that, a drawn roller shade closed off the view of the rear parking lot.
Audra’s gaze moved over the eight empty beer cans on the kitchen counter, the two glasses in a sink full of dirty plates and utensils, the three chairs pushed in against the kitchen table. Nothing seemed to be rummaged through. The drawers were intact. The cupboard doors were closed. No food looked like it was being prepared prior to the murder.
A doorway on each end of the south wall opened into other rooms. Audra glanced into the dark room on the left and saw shadows and shapes of what she believed to be a sofa, a television atop a stand. In the one on the right, the shape of a bed, a dresser. Daylight highlighted the edges of another drawn blind.
Audra moved deeper into the kitchen, keeping close to the left wall, and as she laid eyes on the body, her stomach knotted in anxious tension. Throughout her five years in homicide, she’d been forced to take what she saw in stride, to distance herself from the murder and mayhem man imposed on his fellow man. She’d marveled at the countless ways people chose to murder one another, heard all the inexplicable reasons no one of sound mind or judgment could even fathom.
Then came those rare occasions such as this, one that would set the bar even higher and sear the memory like a branding iron.
Audra found herself staring not at the mangled body of Todd Dory face up on the floor but at the axe stuck in his head. An unusual weapon of choice to say the least. On closer inspection, Audra realized it wasn’t your common chopping or splitting axe found in every hardware store, it was one of those pick-head axes used by Fire & Rescue and demolition crews. Definitely a specialty item, and with any luck the manufacturer had a short list of buyers in the area.
The axe had a wooden handle, and someone had written a word in black marker on the side of it. At first, Audra couldn’t make it out, then she realized the word was upside down. She tilted her head to see it.
“Corpse,” she whispered to herself.
