My first thought that night: I hate gunshot wounds to the head.
I leaned forward, placing my right foot ahead of the other and bending my right knee so as to hover over the dead man’s face. This was uncomfortable. Still, I didn’t use my gloved hands to balance myself against the red Honda sedan that stood two feet from the body. An old rule from academy days marched through the rear of my memory: “Always keep your hands behind your back when first approaching the crime scene.”
I didn’t need to hear that. I knew it well enough. Still, the rule played along, reminding me that this was my first case in this new city that I barely called home. Better to hear recordings out of the rule book. Rules helped me distance myself from the killing, but not for very long. This exit wound, right through the top of the skull, an inside-out, crumbly, bloody cradlecap topped with disintegrated brain tissue, shortened the distance between the victim and me real quick. But the killing didn’t let the pistol in the man’s hand escape my sight, the first thing that was wrong with this picture.
“Carajo,” I muttered, “what a mess.”
“What’s that you say?” the voice came from one side. It was a southern voice, one of the common twangs I heard throughout Nashville. I looked up at an older man. He crouched next to me. He was the medical examiner. His name escaped me. I hadn’t worked any big case since arriving here from Atlanta four weeks earlier, and up to now had had no need to meet the examiner. The dead man’s doughnut head promised to bring that old guy and me together for awhile.
“Oh. Nothing. Just a Spanish word,” I chuckled, tossing my hair over my shoulder as if catching it on a hook. I sounded embarrassed. It wouldn’t do to translate carajo to a stranger. Bad manners, my mamá would remind me with her scolding voice.
He didn’t respond. For the moment he seemed too preoccupied for introductions. He had sliced a small opening into the victim’s abdomen and was now shoving a digital thermometer into the slit. Then he crouched there, holding the thermometer still. “Gonna be hard to get an accurate reading,” he muttered. “Too much blood gone from that head wound. The bullet must have sliced through the edge of the carotid. The blood pulls away the heat more quickly.” He wrote a note in his pad regarding the incision.
Bulbs burst about us from the two uniform cops who took pictures of the area. They lit up the early morning darkness with their silent flashes. While the doctor pushed the thermometer deeper into the man’s gut, I walked away to look at the car. It was a small Honda, sporty red. The driver’s door was open. The body itself lay in front of the car to the right side. The car straddled two parking places, covering one of the lines with its midsection. It appeared that the victim—if he had been the person driving—had pulled in quickly, paying little attention to the lines of an empty parking lot.
The short, buzzing sounds of an unhooked telephone chirped in the grass. I was surprised no one had noticed that. Perhaps the scene-of-crime technicians had decided to leave the cellular phone there, waiting for Prints to come by and dust it. I shined my handlight into the grass. The thin, new cellular was the type that fits easily in a breast pocket.
Behind me, the M.E. pulled the tiny, thin rod away from the man’s abdomen. He had to stand to hold the thermometer up to a streetlight and read it. He turned away from me momentarily. The man was much taller than I, and skinny.
I wasn’t sure if he wanted to know me or not. He seemed busy, too busy to take time with me. Yet I walked as if I had no place here. I was one of two or three women in the area. Perhaps that was what made me hesitate to take my position—which was the main position—at the crime scene.
Then there was the kill itself. I couldn’t keep my eyes on the wound too long. I had to stand again and take a couple of steps back. Beyond the Honda, in the background of my vision, a large riverboat floated in the Cumberland, its ornate bridge protruding above the flood wall. On the other side of the river stood the black outline of old buildings, a small, antique skyline that had been overshadowed by the new skyscrapers standing on this side of the water.
Two police officers wrapped the area with yellow tape. I kept my hands in the small of my back and walked toward them. They muttered to each other about how strange it was to find a suicide in this part of town. “Right downtown, on River Park, in the middle of the night. Can you figure that?”
I introduced myself as the primary detective. Actually, I was the only detective, but I wasn’t about to tell the uniforms this. One of the cops turned and looked down at me. I could feel his eyes float quickly down my body, which made no sense, considering I wore a long black trenchcoat that covered me from my neck to my ankles. These cold November days demanded such protection. The cop seemed familiar. Then I realized it was his eyes. They had floated over me before, in the hallways of the Main Police Squad downtown. One day the previous week I had walked by. He had looked me up and down, then had whispered to his partner, “Check out the lady in red.”
My mother would not have liked that statement. Yet she would not have scolded the officer for his soft, lewd comment, but would have berated me instead for wearing my favorite color. “Demasiado sexy, hija,” she would have said. “You are giving messages that do not befit a lady.”
As always, she was right. And yet I never had the desire to send lady-like messages. I was a homicide detective, not a damned debutante who waited on her fifteenth birthday at the church doors for the perfect man to come by and sweep her away. I’m Latina, but damned if I’ll be that Latina.
“I’m Detective Romilia Chacón, officer. And you’re …” I looked down at his nameplate and almost chuckled, “Officer Beaver. First name?”
“Henry.”
He didn’t answer.
“One of the other blues tells me you’ve got the notes on this. What can you give me?”
The beaver walked away from me and the tree branch where he had been tying the yellow tape. He approached the car. “Pretty cut and dry. Suicide.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because of the gun in the man’s hand, Detective.” Beaver looked at me with that Some-things-are-just-too-obvious-look. I wanted to give him my Go-screw-yourself-up-the-ass-with-your-own-nightstick look, but decided to turn my attention to the body. He continued, “It’s a forty-five caliber. Once we lift it, we’ll check the numbers to see if he owned it. I got his wallet from him, got his name and address. That’s why they called you, Detective.” His voice was deadpan.
“What’s his name?” I asked, knowing that it was a Spanish name, and ready to see how this gringo cop was going to butcher its pronunciation.
He had to flip through his notebook to read it phonetically, “Diego … uh … Diego Sinus, something like that.”
“Sáenz,” I corrected, looking over his shoulder at the spelling. “Diego Sáenz.” My clipped Salvadoran accent made his very voice sound stupid.
“Yeah. Whatever. Not like we need to practice our Spanish here in Nashville.” He closed his notebook. “Anyway, Prints will dust the weapon and lift it in a minute.”
“His name sounds familiar. What about legal time of death?”
“It’s 3:11 a.m. I arrived here at that time and called it in. I had driven through here an hour earlier, but hadn’t seen the car, so he killed himself sometime after I moved on. I came back around, and here he was.”
“You got an estimated time?”
“You’ll have to ask Doc about that.”
“Right. By the way, what’s Doc’s name?”
“Jacob Callahan.”
Before dismissing him, I asked Beaver for any other information on the victim. He gave me the rundown: Name: Diego Sáenz. Age: Twenty-four. Weight: one hundred sixty-five pounds. Race: Hispanic. Height: five feet, nine inches. Eyes: brown. All of this was from his driver’s license, of course. It told me very little.
“I also found two credit cards on him. VISA Gold and Mastercard Platinum. Oh yeah, also a press card.”
So Sáenz was a reporter. “May I see the card?” I asked Beaver.
He handed it to me. It seemed legit: Sáenz worked for The Cumberland Journal, the second-largest paper in Nashville and the surrounding areas. This wasn’t going to be a commonplace killing among a few drunk migrant workers. I bet my boss McCabe didn’t expect my first case to be a victim who carried around ten grand in plastic money.
I gave the press card back to Beaver. He took a step away, blatantly ignoring any chance of my dismissal, not even remaining by my side for a “Thank you, Officer Beaver.” Maybe he would appreciate “Up yours, Officer Beaver” more. He angered me. But he also emptied a hole in me. I had a sudden urge to call home, wake my mother, and ask her how my son, Sergio, was. She would tell me, of course, that he was asleep, he was fine. Yet she would understand the lack of logic in my phone call, and would assure me that my hijo, my querido, was safe. It would be enough to fill the edges of this hole.
Beaver walked back to his tree branch. He said nothing, though I could hear the other uniform walk up to Beaver and whisper something through a barely controlled, manly giggle. Something about ladies wearing red, perhaps? I had spiked platform shoes back home that could slice their quick erections right down the middle.
I walked back to the body. Dr. Jacob Callahan leaned over Sáenz. He moved his gloved hand over the head, then pulled back, as though he had merely waved the dark air between him and the victim’s wound to clear out an opening where he could see. He wrote notes onto his pad.
I offered a rubber-gloved hand and a fairly large smile to the squatting man. “Excuse my bad manners. Here we are working together, and I haven’t introduced myself yet.”
Callahan stood up. With his full height it looked, from my point of view, like the lone streetlight was just beside his left ear. He gave me his gloved hand. “Jacob Callahan,” he said. “Most call me Doc, even though it’s not a very creative nickname. And you should excuse me,” he said, chuckling. “I got right to work without saying hello. Just wanted to get the temperature. Not good to wait around for that.”
Though it was dark out, I could see parts of his figure. His graying hair was once honey brown. He kept it short. Wrinkles tried to cut into what was once a perfectly smooth, tanned face. Callahan looked very good for his age, even handsome. His jaw was a strong one, and though the years had caused a slight sag in the muscle and skin, the jawline still looked like well-sculptured marble. Doc smiled. It seemed sincere enough. “You’re new in the unit, aren’t you, Detective?”
“Just a few weeks old. A babe to the Nashville scene.”
He liked that, grinning a little more. “Welcome,” he said, motioning his hand like an emcee, back toward Diego Sáenz.
We approached the small car together. “Did you get an ETD?” I asked.
“Yes,” Doc said, his Nashville accent turning to a get-down-to-business quickness that I appreciated, sensing that the elder southerner was ready and willing to work with me. “The loss of blood concerned me. But there was still enough heat in his abdomen to get a reading. Then I compared notes with Officer Beaver. Sáenz’s body had dropped two degrees. With this cold night and the blood loss, I’d say the estimated time of death to be 2:15, 2:30, more or less.”
“That’s pretty accurate.”
“I’ll shoot for the best I can.”
“By the way, what day is today?”
Doc held his watch up to the light. “Let’s see … November second.”
“Ah. El día de los muertos,” I said, mumbling it.
“What’s that, Detective?”
“The Day of the Dead. Yesterday was All Saints’ Day. Today’s All Souls’ Day, or The Day of the Dead.”
“Oh. I see. So you’re a religious person.”
I laughed. “Oh, yeah. I never miss a Christmas or Easter mass.”
The air felt colder. I wrapped my coat tighter around me and leaned over again, staring into the man’s still-intact face. Another uniform cop approached Doc Callahan and gave the examiner a flashlight. “Thanks, son,” Doc said, then flicked the light on and shined it down over my right shoulder. A spark reflected off the victim’s left ear. Sáenz sported a diamond earring. Then the light fell upon the full of the wound. It was too much for me to say anything in either of my languages. I tipped, and almost placed my left fingers on one of the blood spots next to Sáenz. After several seconds of composure—still not enough, as I could feel my voice quiver—I asked, “What do you make of this?”
“Well, lots of suicides stick the barrel in their mouth. That’s usually pretty efficient. They either shoot upwards, at an angle, and blow out their brains like this young fellow appears to have done. Or they shoot straight back, missing much of the brain but destroying their esophagus and the whole upper region of their respiratory track, drowning or bleeding to death. This fellow’s way of doing it worked pretty well. He apparently put the gun underneath his chin, tucking it right up against his Adam’s apple, aiming upward. I’d say the bullet destroyed his sinuses, then cut through the brain, probably slicing up the medulla oblongata before ripping through the cerebral hemisphere and exiting here, between the frontal and parietal bones, right through the coronal suture.”
“So he literally blew his brains out.”
“Exactly.”
One doubt dangled over me. “You think it’s a suicide, then?”
He grinned slightly. “Notice I’ve said the word ‘apparent’ about a dozen times. Though I’m willing to bet it was.”
“Strange area of town to do yourself in.”
“Maybe he liked fishing,” said Doc, motioning to the river, “and they weren’t biting.”
“Then what about the gun in his hand?”
Doc knew exactly what I was referring to. “It’s a sure bet that his was an instantaneous death. His hand muscles were in work at the moment of death. He could have had a cadaveric spasm, which is like a pinch of early, quick rigor mortis. When that happens, the victim’s hands clutch whatever they were holding, permanently.”
I raised my eyebrows, then shined my flashlight over to the body, directly at the hand. Even in the night I could tell that the back of the hand looked somehow stained.
“What are those blotches on his hand?” I asked.
Doc looked over at it. “I’m not sure.” His brow furrowed. “I’ll need to make a note to check that…”
I stood up and looked around, my eyes falling back upon the car. I looked at its driver door. “By the way, was this door open when you got here?”
Beaver, who had walked over to us, answered, “Yeah. It was open. I guess Sáenz left it that way when he got out of it.”
Which means he was in a hurry, I thought. I studied the positions of all the objects. Car parked over two spaces, as if done quickly. Door opened. Body found on the right side of the car, just two feet from the front passenger wheel. Cellular phone found directly to the left of the car, just before the front driver’s wheel. He either dropped the phone while walking over to this side, or flung it behind him once over here. Maybe he flung it the moment he shot himself … but that gun in his hand, it was all wrong.
Doc asked Beaver to help flip the body half-over. “I just want to see if there are any other opening wounds in the dorsal region,” he said. The men turned Sáenz forty-five degrees, resting him on his right arm and pelvis. Though Beaver cradled the right side of Sáenz’s head, the skull tipped slightly, showing me once again the smaller hole in the tuck of his neck and mandible. A bulb flashed almost directly in my face. The cop with the camera had just taken another shot of the body, then moved away. “I don’t see anything … Okay, that’s good. Let’s put him back,” instructed Doc. He and Beaver lowered the dead man onto his back again.
A man and a woman, the ones from Prints, separated and took different parts of the car to dust. The woman took the phone. The man worked on a door handle. He aimed a flashlight from various angles upon the handle, then twirled a fluffy fiberglass brush between his palms. He dipped it into a fine, black powder, then brushed the dust delicately over a print. The woman did the same with the phone.
I asked her for the phone once she was done with it. Cradling it carefully in my right hand, I hit the “redial” button with my left forefinger. The weakened phone barely chirped out three tones: one high and two low. The last two were the same sound.
Nine-one-one.
I walked away to give them more room. Doc followed me. We walked beyond the yellow boundaries of the plastic police line. I pulled the thin, tight rubber gloves from my hands. Doc did not, as if accustomed to functioning most of his day with them on.
“So, you’re not so sure it’s a suicide?” he asked.
“I’m sure it’s not a suicide. This dude was murdered.”
“Really?”
“Yep.” I let my bravado sink in a good five seconds before telling him about the last call Sáenz made. “Why call nine-one-one if you’re ready to kill yourself?”
Doc shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe he was reaching out, looking for anybody to talk with. From his point of view, it was an emergency.”
“Maybe. But I bet those blotches on his hand will tell you differently.”
Doc raised his eyebrows at me. He smiled politely. Then he excused himself. “I’ll have a report for you in a few hours. If you want, I’ll give you a call when it’s done.”
“Great. I’d appreciate it.”
He folded his tall body into a Jaguar and drove away. I turned back to the scene, where Beaver was telling a few of his fellow uniforms to wrap it up because this suicide case would be quickly closed, and they would be leaving the area soon. My pleasantries with Doc ground into hot anxieties as I watched this jerk hand out orders that were mine to give. It was time to show him the size of my spiked heel.