Monday 9:58 P.M.
In the car Fenwick said, “Which one of us is the pawn of Satan?”
“I’m the gay guy.”
“I tell the worst jokes.”
“Maybe Dante missed one of the circles of hell,” Turner suggested.
“Which one?”
“The one where they have you on a loop telling the wrist joke. That would make you the pawn, king, and queen of Satan.”
“Does being a pawn of Satan come with health benefits? Maybe if it had a dental plan, I’d sign up.”
“You’ll have to ask Drake, or I suppose you could Google pawn of Satan. Or maybe pawns of Satan have their own web site, pawnsofsatan.com.”
“Everybody has a goddamn website. Do I get special powers being a pawn of Satan?”
“Depends on how much chocolate you eat that day.”
“I can eat a lot of chocolate.”
“You know,” Turner said, “this whole pawn of Satan thing could become a recurring theme.”
“Call it a motif,” Fenwick said. “That sounds classier.”
“It all sounds like crap.”
“Does that mean our kids are spawn of Satan?” Fenwick asked.
Turner groaned.
Fenwick added, “I’ve never been a pawn of Satan.”
“You’ve never been a pawn of anything. Except Madge.”
“Madge is queen.”
“Got that right.”
They sat in their parked car for a few moments in silence, then Turner said, “Let’s go to the crime scene.”
“For what?”
“I want to see what they saw. I want to see what Kappel was looking at when he was walking to his date with death. I want to see the problems the killers faced or didn’t face. I don’t have enough of a sense of place.”
They grabbed sandwiches at Millie’s. It was nearly ten when they got to the scene. They sat in the car and finished eating.
After his last bite, Fenwick said, “None of the streetlights are working.”
“Random chance or the bad guys put them out?”
Fenwick knew he wasn’t really expecting an answer. They were speculating, sharing observations. At times, such moments led to insights that helped solve a case.
Fenwick slurped the last of his diet soda, wiped his hands on his pants, and got out of the car. Turner grabbed a couple of heavy duty Maglites from the trunk.
They removed the crime scene tape from the gate and entered the junkyard. They walked to the far end. Turner shut off his light. Fenwick followed suit with his.
The ambient light of the city did not give them enough light to see their way.
“They had flashlights,” Turner said. “Something else to carry along with the baseball bat, and if they were carrying Kappel.”
Fenwick nodded agreement. “Kind of clumsy, if you’ve got a finite amount of time, especially if Kappel was struggling.”
“And the ME said he hadn’t found drugs.”
Still with flashlights off, they stepped into the undergrowth. A few feet in, Turner stopped, pulled out his phone. “Not enough light from this really to help them.”
“A herd of bad guys with phones out, carrying a baseball bat, moving along in some way with a person they were going to kill?”
Turner switched his flashlight back on. The path was now clear. “Okay, it was dark. They either stumbled along or had some way of lighting the scene.” Simple summary, but they were stuck with the basics, which often enough led to the obvious that solved a crime. Except when it didn’t. The ground squished under their feet from the rain earlier in the day.
After about five steps, Turner stopped. “Who could see these lights? How did they know someone wouldn’t see them and ask questions? Call the police?”
He had Fenwick stand where they were on the path with his light on and went back to the junkyard gate. From there he could see nothing. He walked slowly in. Once he passed the mass of junk, he began to see a glow. When he got next to Fenwick, he turned on his light, but aimed it toward the ground. Fenwick followed suit.
“Okay,” Turner said, “if they were smart and careful, unless someone was watching, no one would notice anything.”
Fenwick said, “If we presume they were professionals, they’d be smart enough not to be having a laser light show in here.”
They found the scene of the crime. They stood next to where the body had been and turned off the Maglites. First they looked. The clouds had parted and the few stars you could see in the city made their feeble attempt to shed light. No outside light penetrated here. It wasn’t absolute dark, nothing outdoors in a major city really could be pitch black, midnight dark.
Fenwick asked, “Was this enough light to kill him?” Another rhetorical observation.
Turner shut his eyes. He heard the soft lapping of the river, distant sounds of the city. The wind rustled the leaves in the trees and undergrowth. He heard a few drops of today’s rain disturbed from their places on the leaves hit the ground.
He opened his eyes again. They tried using just one of the lights with the beam aimed to the ground. “It would be enough,” Fenwick said.
“Yeah,” Turner agreed. “They didn’t need enough light for brain surgery, just enough to bash his head in.” He put his still-on flashlight on the ground under the clump of densest vegetation about seven feet away. He aimed it back toward where they’d come. He stepped to the bank of the river. “They could aim it like that and no one would notice. No flashing lights. No dancing lights that might draw someone’s attention.” Looking across the river, neither of them saw any place lit up that would draw a person’s eye.
Fenwick said, “No killers returning to the scene to recover an accidentally lost clue.”
“We don’t get enough of those.”
“Have we ever had any?”
With their Maglites they examined the area around where the body had been. The examination in this light added nothing to what they’d learned in the daylight.
Fenwick said, “We could try frantically waving our lights around and see if anybody notices.”
“Yeah, in this day and age, everything is caught on some kind of camera.”
“No cameras here.”
Turner shone his light onto the river water. Other than more dark black, he got nothing. They left.
At Area Ten, Turner found an email on his computer from Jeanne D’Amato confirming her earlier diagnosis that the documents they’d gotten from the Cardinal were useless.
He and Fenwick did some paperwork, updated the spreadsheet, and called it a night.