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WASHINGTON, D.C.—MEDICAL Examiner’s Office
Detective McGee pulled into a parking space outside of the Department of Forensic Sciences. The building housed several divisions of the Metropolitan PD, including the Firearms and Fingerprint Examination Division, DNA Laboratory, and the Forensic Sciences Services division. They were there for an eleven o’clock appointment with Deputy Medical Examiner, Dr. Henry Butterfield. The building in front of them was a modern D.C. architecture. Wide and high, cream marble, stone, slate, black metal window frames, and black handrails along a handicap ramp leading to the entrance.
“I love this place,” Detective McGee said to her partner, hopping out of the car. She threw on her sunglasses.
“Always gloom and doom despite the sun shining brightly,” Detective Bald Eagle said, shielding her eyes from the sun. “What do you think we’ll learn? Anything to get us closer to the suspect?”
“I hope so. Any additional details will help. I really want to know why those two men were naked in the bedroom with a wife steps away,” Detective McGee replied, approaching the reception desk.
They announced their business and was told to wait for Dr. Butterfield’s assistant to scoop them from the lobby.
__________
Dr. Henry Butterfield had reported to his office to autopsy Chief Weston at five a.m. He had been to the crime scene, recorded the position of the bodies found, and took a preliminary survey of the deceased. He was pleased with the forensics unit and responding MPD officer’s ability to record and preserve the scene and bodies. Upon settling at his desk, he e-mailed the head of the forensics division and the captain of the police district, congratulating them on doing a fine job too assure they’d nab the killer.
Afterward he got into clean scrubs, surgical mask, washed his hands, gloved-up, and started reviewing the judge’s body and the male found at the scene in the Weston’s bedroom. The man dressed in the judge’s gown was fortunate to have to died swiftly. He was in possession of a gavel, and looking at the justice’s buttocks Dr. Butterfield learned where the gavel had been put to use, possibly before the arrival of the killer. He had withdrawn one unit of whole blood from both victims and was waiting on in-house toxicology results to be returned.
He had begun preparing recorded notes of his autopsy findings some hours later when the lab’s phone rang. A technician informed him that the detectives were there to meet with him. He had met them on Twenty-eight street, N.W. in Georgetown, and was struck by how handsome the women were. They were ingrained in his memory.
When the tech ushered the detectives into his office, Dr. Butterfield was behind his desk flipping through papers in a folder he had prepared for the detectives; a parting gift. Dr. Butterfield was in his sixties, pure white and gray hair, albino complexion, tall, emaciated, with coffee-tinted teeth.
The sounds of their voices and the scent of their presence mesmerized him. He stood and shook both women’s hands. Soft. Delicate. Warm.
“Delighted. Please sit down,” the doctor said, smiling.
“Thank you,” Detective McGee said, having a seat. She sat a recorder in her lap and pressed record. “Just to memorialize our conversation. This not a deposition and will not be used in any legal proceeding.”
“Will not or cannot?” he asked. “In Washington, there is a difference.”
“Cannot,” she replied, shrugging with a sarcastic grin on her face.
“Just checking. The autopsy isn’t complete by any stretch, but I’ve made findings that may aid your pursuit of the killer. Surely, I want to get the perpetrator captured forthwith.”
Both women nodded. They were there for the meat and potatoes and didn’t need the doctor’s wish list.
“Can we see the body?” Detective Bald Eagle said, removing her sunglasses to look the doctor in the eyes. She adored death.
“Sure, but let’s discuss some things that are odd,” he said, scanning the contents of the folder that he had prepared for them. He pushed it across his desk towards to McGee. She appeared to be the lead detective. He didn’t know for sure, but the recorder’s presence gave it away. “Opening to the first page. You’ll see the results of instant toxicology and serology tests. Of course, the full screen will be back in about a month. We found no cocaine or alcohol in Weston’s body, but he had ingested cannabinoids prior to his death.”
“No coke, but smoking weed?” McGee asked, frowning.
“Well, sources of cannabinoids are marijuana or hemp, but that’s not my concern. It wasn’t smoked. It’s a usual material to ingest.”
“Hmmm.”
“As you know a nude man was found in the judge’s bedroom,” the doctor said, raising his eyebrows. “Perhaps our judge who opposed the legalization of gay marriage was gay himself.”
“Smokescreen, huh? Masking his own sexuality. Fraud.” Detective Bald Eagle was shaking her head.
“Don’t be so mean,” Detective McGee said. “Continue doctor.”
“Both men tested positive for H.I.V., but that status does not, in any way, change my option that blunt force trauma to the head was what killed the judge.”
The detectives looked at each other.
Detective McGee asked, “I know the autopsy isn’t complete, but are you asserting with a reasonable degree of medical certainty that he died from the injuries we’ve seen on the scene?”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Let’s go look at the body. There are a few interesting things,” he added, rubbing his hands together. Pure excitement on his face. Ah, the joy of dead bodies.
A moment later, they stood in front of a death refrigerator and the doctor pulled out the slab where the judge rested with a y-shaped incision in his chest. A tag dangled from his big toe, his morgue driver’s license card. Gone was all of his fancy credentials and his color—his caramel complexion had blanched. His chest was cut open starting at the shoulders, meeting in between his sagging chest, and then sliced to his pelvis forming the Y. A severely bruised face surrounded dead eyes that stared up at them. And the judge’s penis was gone.
“Should his eyes still be open?” Detective Bald Eagle asked.
“Nope,” the doctor said, slipping on gloves and shutting them. “There we go. Photographic slides of his pupils were taken to depict the judge’s statement for a potential jury.”
“His last photo shoot.”
“Precisely,” the doctor said. “Judge Percy Weston endured multiplied blunt force injuries to the head, neck, torso, and upper extremities. Four laceration or tears to the top and left eye, multiple fractures to the skull that penetrated his brain. A fracture of the spine, and a fracture of the hyoid bone.” He took a breath.
“And what might that be? Hyoid bone?”
“The horseshoe-shaped bone that sits in the upper part of the neck. It’s an injury consistent with a strangulation. However, the cause of death was not strangulation in this case.”
“But he was strangled?”
“Yes, and nearly decapitated undoubtedly inflicted by the du-rag wrapped tightly around his neck.”
“Du-rag?” Astonished.
The doctor nodded, facing Detective McGee. “The other injuries are consistent with what would have been caused by the hammer found at the scene. It’s unlikely that any other possible weapons recovered at the scene caused these blunt force injuries.”
“Must have been a lot of force?”
“Significant force indeed, but not for these,” the doctor said, signaling for an assistant to join them. Dr. Butterfield’s assistant pressed eight-by-ten photographs into his huge hands. They were pictures of the judge’s ass. “Someone was being spanked with a gavel. Presumably, by Dorian Jackson since he was found with the gavel in hand.”
The detectives looked at the judge’s rear end which was riddled with two-inch round circles with the initials “PW” in the center of them.
“I’m thinking the perp walked in on a sexual fantasy being fulfilled,” Detective McGee said. “That’s why Dorian was in the robe. Perhaps that part wasn’t staged?”
“Hence, the seeming crime of passion that has taken place. I mean the killer had a gun, but killed them with a hammer,” Bald Eagle said.
“I’d say your guy is huge,” the doctor added.
Detective Bald Eagle reasoned that, “The judge was gay, the wife knew it, allowed it. Maybe they were just married because in the US certainly a Supreme Court judge cannot get divorced. That would require a reason and normally an immoral reason and God knows an immoral person cannot sit on the highest court. Perhaps this wasn’t a political kill. Or they were having a threesome. Or this all stagecraft.”
“To be or not to be,” the doctor said, smiling. He covered the corpse with a white sheet, and said, “All of this is off the record until I send you and the AUSA—who’s been begging for me to get this done—a copy of my completed findings.”
“AUSA?”
“Yes, the case has been assigned to Shai Brown. You didn’t know?”
“Yes,” Detective Bald Eagle said, lying.