“Beaver, this is no suicide.”
Though he called me “ma’am” and “Detective,” his voice sounded as if it hissed through a boiling tea kettle.
“I don’t know why you feel you’ve got to say that, Detective. This is a cut-and-dry case, as far as I can see.”
“Yeah, but you’re not the primary, are you? No. You’re a uniform, and that means that I’m in charge here.” Beaver shut up. His silence gave me room. “Look at the gun, Henry. Is there something wrong with that picture for you?”
He stared at Sáenz’s hand. After a good ten-second look, he turned back to me. “No. What’s the matter with it?”
“It’s still in his hand.”
Beaver looked at it again. Though I began to explain, I could see the shadowy light of realization come over his eyes. “If he’s blown his own brains out, don’t you think the shock to the body and the impact of the bullet would have made him drop the gun, maybe even fling it? But it’s still nicely packed between all his fingers.” I, of course, said nothing about Doc’s theory on cadaveric spasm.
“You think someone put it there, after shooting him.”
I nodded my whole head affirmatively. Then I told him about the last number that Sáenz dialed. “Put those two together and you’ve got yourself a complete murder.”
The sun was just coming up. Doc’s forensic workers and two cops were picking up the body and preparing it for transport, leaving only the chalk line as a reminder of Sáenz’s last place on earth. “I think we’ve got to do a more thorough search, Henry. We can take advantage of daylight before the area gets busy with people going to work.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. It didn’t sound so insincere. He walked away from me, instructing some of the others to comb the area. I followed my own advice, and began to wander.
This day was good to us. Though cold, it promised to be a bright, cloudless morning. Yet no matter how welcoming the first moments of dawn were, they still left a murderous edge to the scene. No matter how I looked at it, and no matter at what time of day, I was standing in an area where a man’s head had been mutilated by a piece of lead. Murder was still a new enough concept for me that it ate at my intestines. There were cops who had seen years of homicide, only to build up a callous in their stomach and their brain, smoothing down the callous each night with thick whiskey or drugs. I hadn’t gotten that far down the road yet. There was some consolation in being a rookie.
Still, the new sun helped, for it showed me the difference in tones of the two colors of red in the bricks. First there was the red of olden days, bricks that had been baked one hundred years ago, now placed here as part of a tourist attraction. Then there was the tiny red, those dull, blotty stains that you could mistake for either mud or grime left by an animal or vagabond.
Or they could be bloodstains.
They trailed away from the chalk-picture of Sáenz. I counted four of them. They made a line toward the grove of trees. Daylight now penetrated that small grove. Through the low branches and the trunks of evergreens, I could see the floodwall and, just beyond it, the Cumberland River.
“So you ran,” I spoke to the perp. “You ran, but you didn’t realize that you stepped your shoe into Sáenz’s blood …”
I followed the crimson trail. It disappeared once I got to the grass. “But you left enough of a beeline to show me where you went.” With that, I stopped walking and jogged into the shade of the evergreens.
There was nothing here except more grass. No parking lot nor sidewalks. The city had left this area of the tiny park in a somewhat pristine state, offering tourists a little place to picnic and watch the tops of boats float by. The floodwall blocked a full view of the river. About three blocks away stood another small parking lot. “Maybe you parked down there and made your getaway from there afterwards.”
Stopping to make a mental list of my next steps I leaned against the floodwall. “Better scrape some samples of those stains on the bricks, take them to Doc, verify if they’re Sáenz’s,” I muttered. They could have been the perp’s blood, especially if Sáenz had had a chance to wound the killer before dying. This, at least, could give us the killer’s blood type. I rested my elbow on the floodwall, right next to another stain.
This one was more apparent, as the floodwall’s cement top was white. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to catch my eye. I looked through the grove of trees and back to the Honda parked in the brick lot. The bloody beeline was consistent: the killer had run across the lot, through the grassy grove, and to this wall. I looked over the wall. There was nothing but river.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Did you jump? Ay Dios.” This could mean that our killer was dead, and we’d need to call for a river search, which was a mess of a job to do. For that reason only, I hoped my killer was alive. “But what kind of guy jumps into river water at this time of year?” I remembered how cold it was last night, though it was not freezing.
There was too much here to leave behind. The parking lot offered a line of bloody spots that made a trail. The floodwall gave me another stain, showing me the possible end point. It was the grove of trees and its grass that had yet to give me something.
I got on my hands and knees. In a few seconds I heard the low chuckles of the men who looked at me, wondering what the hell I was doing. Screw them.
Luckily, it had not rained in several days. The ground was dry and soft, almost cushiony with the million pine needles that had fallen through the years. It made for a nice bed where lovers could spread blankets and eat sandwiches and drink wine, where children played while their touring parents from Cincinnati or Davenport sat and drank beer in a hot Nashville summer afternoon. There were samples of those days still here: a cola can ring that had, no doubt, been snapped off by a nervous lover or a kid who wanted to make it into a toy. A wadded paper napkin from McDonald’s underneath the pine needles. Cigarette butts galore, small enough that, while walking through here, you would not notice them until you got on your hands and knees and stared into the needles and counted far too many ends of smokes. Extinguished matches, flipped into the air, only to land in this thick bed. Though clean, the pine needles hid a lot of garbage. Only someone searching, with his head down low, about four inches from the pine-needle bed, would be able to see the tiny filth of the area. Yet I was not judging this; I was searching, and the more trash I saw, the happier I was, for trash meant possible leads. Trash could mean answers. Trash, such as that cellophane piece of wrapping that still had the ribbon used to strip it from a new pack of cigarettes, the one caught between three pine needles, barely flapping in a slight breeze ten inches from my nose, with a very clear smear of bloody print upon it, meant hope.
“Veníte vos,” I said to it. Come to mamá, honey. I pulled a small plastic bag from my coat, opened the bag, and wrapped it over my left gloved hand much like another glove, then reached down and picked up the cigarette-wrapper. With my right hand I lowered the bag from my fingers and closed it over the piece of evidence, careful not to smear the print. “And not only a print, but a big one at that!” I said. “You, hombre, must have very big hands. You also must be very stupid, lighting up after killing someone.” Yet stupidity in killers is always welcome.
Though I continued looking over the grassy, pine-needly area, I was too excited about this cigarette-wrapper print to pay the same careful attention to the remaining ten feet between me and the rim of the parking lot. Yet I did look and saw that the area just around the wrapper had been disturbed, as if someone had either fallen harshly or had wrestled with something or someone.
I brushed my knees and got to work, scraping the bricks and floodwall as carefully as possible, putting each sample of brick and blood mixtures into separate bags, then tagging each bag with basic information: “Stain #1, found approx. five feet from victim, first of five stains.” “Stain #2, found approx. nine feet from victim, second of five stains,” all the way up to the final stain on the floodwall.
I gathered my collection of evidence bags, now filled with scraped stains and a cigarette wrapping, and walked to the car. A strain of adrenaline shoved itself through my limbs, torso, and brain.
Obviously, Beaver had watched me work. His voice was much more conciliatory and curious. “Hey, Detective, what’d you find?”
I barely waved the bags at him. “Evidence, my friend. Evidence of a murder.”