The big house on Seminole was crowded with police cruisers, medical examiner’s vehicles, and forensic trucks. Danny always got a thrill when he pulled up to a crime scene, a rush that could best be described as happiness. That’s when you knew you had it bad for the job, when you looked at the devastation of evil and saw only the beginning of adventure. In a sense, you became an observer of life, detached from the normal feelings of men. The crime scene was an oasis, a clearing in the clutter of life.
On the ride over, Jim had informed Eric and Danny that a couple had been murdered and that they were going to get the case. The victims were John and Lenora Baker, rich and well connected. The Bakers were millionaires who owned gas stations, McDonald’s franchises, and lots of other shit. They were also close friends with Mayor Crawford and had helped bankroll his election campaign. That’s why Jim had come along. Someone important was dead.
Danny snapped on plastic gloves as he stepped into the house. He was always worried about contaminating a crime scene. When he’d started as a detective, he used to literally shove his hands into his pockets to keep from touching anything accidentally. Today a single smudge or print could win a case, so he took no chances.
The forensic team swarmed around the room. There were twice the number of people as usual. They dusted, looked for samples, and tried to get shoe prints from the floor. They had cleared a path across the big living room. A sheet of plastic ran through the room and up the staircase like a malevolent yellow brick road. But this was not Oz or Kansas. It was a murder scene and somewhere in this former place of safety there were people whose lives had been taken.
Jim veered off to talk to the tech team leader. Danny and Eric walked into the back to check the point of entry. The killer had come in via the rear door, which led into a pantry. The alarm system on the adjacent wall had been neutralized.
“The bastard disabled the alarm like a pro,” said Danny.
“Maybe he’s one of them master burglars,” said Erik.
“He didn’t take anything,” said Danny. “He came to kill.”
“A lot of trouble just to pop somebody,” said Erik.
“All depends on how important the killing is to you,” said Danny. “Remember that lady last year who killed her husband because he was cheating on her with the woman’s own sister? She waited until she got a business trip to China, took a two-day trip into the country to get a rare herb she’d read about. She slowly poisoned her husband for over a year before he died.”
“I remember,” said Erik. “She was cold-blooded. She’d’ve gotten away with the shit, too, but she was so fucked up with guilt that she confessed.”
Danny and Eric watched the techs finish their work then decided to take the plastic road upstairs. When they got back into the living room, Danny saw that Jim had been joined by Tony Hill, the Deputy Chief of Police. Hill was an intense-looking man who was known to have an unfailing sense of duty. He’d killed the former Chief, Bill Fuller, in a shootout when Fuller had gone bad in a murder investigation. Hill and Cole stood next to each other in that way only partners can, like friends and much more.
Tony Hill caught sight of Danny and nodded. Danny acknowledged him and moved on upstairs.
Before he got to the room, Danny smelled it, the pungent odor of something that wafted out of the kill room. Danny and Erik put plastic bags on their feet and walked to the door.
In the master bedroom, forensic techs worked feverishly on the scene. Danny’s eyes focused on what his nose had already confirmed.
The room had been covered in dirt.
The killer had brought a bag of potting soil from the downstairs and tossed it all around the room. He’d done this after the victims were dead, because the bodies had been covered in soil as well.
“What the fuck?” said Erik.
“I smelled it, but I didn’t expect this,” said Danny.
“Is he crazy?” asked Erik almost to himself.
“Maybe he’s smart, making sure it’s not easy for us.”
Danny and Erik walked inside on a path that had been vacuumed through the dirt. All around the room, the techs worked and cleared the dirt at the same time. Danny could feel their frustration as he made his way to the bodies on the bed.
The bodies were still tied up, their hands placed on their chests. The dead couple was black and in their mid-fifties. Their faces were ashen and their bodies bloated and discolored. The wounds that had been inflicted were covered by thick electrical tape to stop the bleeding. There was some blood on the bed, which had seeped through the tape.
Erik scanned the place, taking it all in. He was methodical, and didn’t like to rush into anything.
Danny saw a flash of white from the corner of his eyes. He turned and walked over to the forensic team leader, Fiona Walker, a woman whom he knew from several cases. Fiona was brilliant, dogged in her investigations, and a bit of a smart-ass. He liked her.
Fiona looked at Danny with her pale eyes, which were lodged inside even paler skin. Fiona was an albino, an affliction which she took in stride, but which usually shocked anyone who didn’t know her. Fiona’s albinism was extreme. Her skin was almost translucent, her hair a stark white, and her eyes a color that Danny had never seen. If he’d had to guess, he would have said they were a light gray. She wore tinted glasses because her eyes were light-sensitive, something she called photophobia.
But what Fiona lacked in pigment, she made up for in brilliance. She had solved several major cases in the last two years and had even been asked to consult on a joint task force with the Justice Department a few years ago.
“So what we got?” asked Danny.
“I see dead people,” said Fiona, laughing.
“We noticed that,” said Erik. “What’s with the dirt?”
“Someone’s making my life hell,” said Fiona with anger. “Definitely intentional.”
“Was it meant as a clue or something?” asked Danny.
“How the hell should I know?” said Fiona. “If I had to guess, I’d say all he wanted to do was taint the room before we got here. From my point of view, that’s the scariest damned thing in here. This guy knows my business, the sonofabitch.”
A young black kid in a lab coat started a vacuum and began to vacuum some of the dirt. He moved slowly, carefully, and checked the floor after each stroke.
“That’s Jacob,” said Fiona. “He’s the newest genius who’s come to take my job from me. It was his idea to vacuum all the dirt for analysis. This killer’s already a pain in my ass.”
Danny saw her point. The killer was smart enough to know that the cops would try to get forensic evidence, so he threw dirt all around the room to make it impossible to do so. If anything was found that led to the killer, he’d say it came from the taint.
“So, how’d they get it?” Danny asked.
“They got shot,” said Fiona. “Looks like a small-caliber weapon, probably a .22. Then the sick fuck stopped the bleeding with this.” Fiona showed where the bodies had been taped up over the wounds.
“Why the hell would he do that?” Erik asked, looking at the corpses with growing interest.
“They stayed alive longer,” said Danny.
“Right,” said Fiona. “A bullet tears through vessels and organs and causes bleeding. Body cavities fill up, and the victim drowns in his own fluids. It would take a while. And our boy was clean. No prints, not even foreign fibers as far as we can tell so far, but who the fuck can tell for sure in all this mess?”
Fiona kept talking as Danny tuned her out. He wanted to look at the murder scene and try to get a notion of what had happened. Danny had learned a long time ago that all crime comes from simple human motivations, and could be solved only by the same kind of elementary logic. If you assumed too much complexity in a crime, you could miss the obvious motive.
With this in mind, Danny looked at the faces of the victims. The killer had put gags on them, thick elastic bands with a plastic ball in the middle. But that was not what held his attention. On the sides of their faces, he saw a red mark where the gags had been, only it was wider than the band itself.
“How come these marks are so wide?” Danny asked, cutting off Fiona.
“What?” she said.
“These marks on the sides of their faces, the gags made them, but why are they so damned wide?”
“I’ll be,” said Fiona. “I didn’t notice that. I’d’ve caught it later, though, Mr. Smarty Pants. Maybe they tried to get them off.”
“How?” asked Erik, and pointed to their still bound hands.
“Jesus,” said Fiona. “Don’t be asking me questions, okay? I’m a scientist.”
“Maybe he moved them,” said Danny. But why? he thought to himself.
Danny and Erik left Fiona to her work, promising to call on her after she had some hard scientific data. They walked back down the plastic road to their boss, who was now alone. Jim saw them and waved them over.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” said Jim. “This thing’s gonna hit the front page tomorrow, and the high-society types will be calling city hall trying to find out why these two were killed and if they should mourn or hop a plane to Barbados. We get anything from Fiona and her people?”
“No, sir,” said Danny. “It’s a straight-up whodunit so far.”
“And some sick shit,” Erik added. “This boy’s got to be a psycho.”
“I’m with you,” said Jim, “and you can never predict what a sick fuck will do. Still we have to try to head this off as much as possible.”
“Victims have any family?” asked Erik.
“We’re checking it,” said Jim. “Right now, I got a tip from the Deputy Chief that these two had some bad blood with some other high-enders just a few days ago. I need you two to check it out tomorrow.” Jim gave Danny and Erik the names and an address.
“They know we comin’?” Danny asked.
“Yes,” said Jim. “They’re not suspects, but try to get a lead out of them.” Jim walked off, pulling out his cell phone.
“Political shit,” said Erik.
“Society shit,” Danny added. “Five or six kids get smoked every day and I give a fuck about this?”
They walked out of the house carefully as the tech team kept at it. The plastic covering their shoes was cleared of the dirt they’d tracked, then put back into the room.
It was a fact that a killer always left something behind at the scene of the crime. In the age of microscopic evidence, that was more likely than not.
Danny wondered what the team would find in the mess left by the killer, and if it would lead to anything. Beyond his preliminary thoughts about the case, however, he was deeply troubled by the thought of a killer who was so determined to kill and had the knowledge and foresight to thwart a forensic investigation.