Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  As the electronic lock on the cell door clicked, Daniels pulled it open and the smell of wet copper rushed out and filled our nostrils. Taking a step inside the cell, he reached over to his left and reconnected the disabled light.

  The lights inside the cells in G-dorm consisted of small halogen tubes with white plexiglass covers. The covers were held in place by four recessed screws—the heads of which were round and had a small flange hanging down. Using part of the cylinder of a large ink pen that had been cut to fit the opening, inmates often unscrewed the covers to disable the lights or hide contraband behind them.

  There was no contraband in Justin’s. The concealment in this instance had been the cell itself—the cover simply removed, the light merely disabled.

  “Picked a hell of a time to be sober,” he said.

  My eyes darted around the room, unable to find focus, my mind rejecting the images they were sending. I had seen my share of crime scenes, but I had never gotten used to them, and I had never seen anything like this. I took a step back and looked away for a moment. And that’s when what I had just seen finally registered.

  On the floor inside the cell looked to be most of the blood from Justin Menge’s body. It was dark maroon and black with pale yellow around the edges. But it was just his blood. His body was beneath the covers on the lower of the two metal bunks that hung from the pale gray cinder block wall, the gaping wound on his neck partially visible.

  The sheet and blanket surrounding the body had very little blood on them compared to everything else—not soaked in blood like I expected them to be. Most of the blood was on the floor.

  “The body and the blood,” I said.

  Daniels’s eyes grew wide as he looked over at me. “Just like the fuckin’ flyer. His body’s in one place and his blood’s in another.”

  We were both quiet a moment, the fact that the horror we were witnessing had been foretold sinking in more forcefully, and I wondered what I was going to tell Paula.

  “The flyer,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Doesn’t strike me as a suicide note.”

  “Oh,” he said, nodding absently. “You’re right.” He shook his head, the lines in his face and forehead deepening. “Fuck.”

  I looked around the cell again. There were faint sprays and splatters, but none were heavy or concentrated on anything. “There’s no real arterial spray.”

  He quickly looked at all four walls. “It’s as if he was just drained.”

  “This much blood,” I said, “you’d think something’s got to have arterial spray on it. I bet the murderer’s shirt is covered with it.”

  He glanced down for a moment and took a deep breath.

  I followed his gaze. The outline of Menge’s body was faint, but visible in the blood covering the cell floor. And there was something else.

  “Look at that,” he said, nodding toward two shoe prints in the blood. “You’re right. Not suicide after all.”

  Looking at the nearly perfect set of boot prints before the outline of the body in the tacky substance, I realized that some of the blood had already begun to clot. Yet a lot of it had not. It didn’t make sense.

  “What if his throat was cut while he was laying face down on the floor?” Daniels said. “All the subsequent blood could be covering the bulk of the spray and splatter patterns.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him and nodded. “That could be it.”

  “How the hell did he get from the floor to the bed?”

  I looked at him, wondering if I had misunderstood what he meant. It seemed so obvious to me. “The murderer must have moved him.”

  He was distracted, genuinely perplexed, and didn’t answer right away. “Huh? Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  “Though it was risky as hell to wait here while most of the blood drained from his body,” I added.

  He nodded, still staring down, his eyes shifting back and forth between the body and the blood.

  “We’ve got to get FDLE in here to process this as quickly as we can,” I said, thinking that the rate at which the blood was drying would help them to establish time of death more accurately.

  “I’ve already called them. They’re on the way,” he said, “but it’ll be at least another hour.”

  I shook my head and frowned.

  “How can the blanket only have smears on it?”

  Stepping over the blood and pulling back the covers with his gloved hand, he exposed the pale, purplish body of Justin Menge.

  Except for a few patches of blood, the sheets were clean.

  He ran his glove along the sheet beside the body. “Just smears.”

  Unlike the sheets, Justin’s shirt was saturated with blood.

  “Lift his shirt up a little, would you?” I asked.

  He did.

  Beneath the smears of blood on his skin, the front of Justin’s body was deep purple. Daniels then rolled him over. In contrast to his stomach, his back was nearly the color of the sheet.

  “Lividity,” I noted aloud.

  “Yeah,” Daniels said. “Killed face down on the floor, then left there a while before being placed on his back on the bed.”

  I nodded. “But how was there enough time?”

  Daniels then made another noise that sounded like a distressed grunt.

  “What is it?”

  “No weapon,” Daniels said.

  I quickly took in the rest of the cell.

  “What’s that?”

  I moved over to the right side of the cell and carefully lifted the blood-stained inmate uniform wadded up in the front corner. Stretching it out revealed that it was smeared, not soaked with blood, and that it belonged to Menge.

  “No arterial spray on it,” he said. “Killer must’ve used it to clean up—maybe to dry off after he washed up in the sink.”

  I nodded, and returned the uniform to its original spot.

  When I glanced back at Menge, I noticed that the label on the shirt he was wearing had been ripped off, leaving a blue square with far less blood on it than the rest of the uniform. It looked like a small rectangular stencil that had been spray painted with blood.

  “His name tag’s been ripped off,” I said. “After he was killed.”

  A white label with the inmate’s name, DC number, and bunk assignment was sewn on every inmate uniform at the institution.

  “It’s right there.” He pointed to Menge’s plastic ID badge lying on the bed beside him.

  In addition to the label sewn onto their uniform, inmates were required to wear a photo ID badge through a loop in their shirt or on the lapel of their jacket.

  “Not the ID badge, but the name label sewn on his uniform. It’s missing. But the ID badge is strange, too.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “It only has traces of blood on it.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Presumably the label is covered with it,” I continued, “and it’s missing.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I thought you meant something else. I’ve already noted that.”

  He sounded defensive, as if he didn’t know what I meant, but wasn’t willing to ask, and for a moment the old Tom Daniels was back.

  “The yell we heard when we were talkin’ to Potter,” he said, “think that’s when it happened?”

  I shrugged. “It didn’t sound like that kind of yell—not a scream or a cry for help. We were so on edge about the flyer, we’d’ve come running if it were a scream.”

  “You’re right. It was definitely a yell, not a scream. At the time I thought it was just the usual inmate outburst.”

  “Still,” I said, “we should’ve checked it out.”

  He frowned and nodded.

  Closing my eyes for a moment, I took in a shallow breath through my mouth, trying not to smell the blood any more than I had to. I wasn’t sure why, but I was finding this more difficult than I usually did. It was probably a complex mixture of things—like the shock and horror of the excessive viole
nce and bloodletting, the fact that Justin, every bit the sensitive, talented artist, seemed far more vulnerable than most inmates, that I had told his sister I would check on him, and the fact that I had been warned, had been so close when it happened, and was still unable to prevent it.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said.

  “None of this does.”

  “Good point.”

  Carefully turning Menge’s head, Daniels examined the enormous gash in his neck. As he moved the head, what had to be the last of Menge’s blood oozed out of the gaping red and black wound.

  “Doesn’t look self-inflicted,” I said.

  We fell silent a moment, the raw violence of the situation resting heavily upon us, and I realized I had not said a prayer for Justin Menge nor mourned his death. I closed my eyes and briefly prayed for him and his family, especially Paula. The mourning would have to come later.

  When I opened my eyes, Daniels was shaking his head, and I could tell something awful was dawning on him.

  “What is it?”

  “My case. There goes my whole fruckin’ case against Martinez.” He looked over at me, eyes blazing. “I know you’re thinking about Menge and I should be too, but, dammit, I was so close.”

  “I understand. I’m sorry.”

  The more he seemed to think about it, the more it registered, the more disconsolate he became.

  “I can’t catch my breath,” he said, his voice trembling, his hands shaking. “Do you know how many hours I’ve put in on this thing? How bad I wanted to get the bastard?”

  I nodded. “You’ll find another way.”

  He waved it off with a blood-covered gloved hand and looked away. He stood there quietly for a moment, staring at nothing, while I moved over and began looking through Menge’s things.

  Next to a black plastic comb on the stainless steel sink sat a small travel-size tube of toothpaste with the cap off, a blob of white oozing out of it. Next to it was a new bar of PRIDE soap.

  The top bunk didn’t have a mattress, and several books and notepads were stacked on it. Among the books was Catechism of the Catholic Church, Ceremonies of the Modern Roman Rite, The Road Less Traveled, A History of Art, a Bible, and a few paperback mystery and romance novels. Next to the notepads, several dozen drawings Justin had done were in small stacks grouped by periods: impressionists, post-impressionists, cubists, post-modernists, abstract expressionists.

  Daniels moved over beside me and began thumbing through the notepads.

  Lifting the lid of his footlocker, I squatted down beside it, and began carefully sifting through its contents. There wasn’t much to see—a couple of bags of chips, two Butterfingers, socks, underwear, some personal hygiene products, some family photographs, and the colored pencils and sketch pads he used in lieu of the paints and canvases that were considered contraband. One thing I couldn’t be sure about was his uniforms. One was on him, one wadded up in the corner, but I’d expect to see at least one more folded with his other things. He may just have had two. Some inmates did. Others had several. It’d be difficult to find out how many he actually had.

  “There a notebook in there?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s not up here either.”

  “What?”

  “Pad he used for his journal and statement against Martinez. It’s gone. It was here earlier. I saw it.” He shook his head. “Dammit. That fuckin’ little . . .”

  “You think Martinez...”

  “Who else? I don’t know how he did it. Still can’t figure out how it was done, but yeah, I’d say he should top our suspect list.”

  Our? Was that just habit? Was he referring to the department? Or was he saying I would be involved in his investigation?

  We were silent a moment, while I looked around one last time and thought about how it might have been done. Daniels continued to shake his head, seemingly on the verge of tears.

  On the pale gray cinder block wall between the bunks, each dangling by a small strip of stolen Scotch tape, hung two different drawings of La Grenouillere.

  In 1868, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir had set up their easels side by side and painted the frog pond or La Grenouillere with quite disparate results. Justin Menge had recreated them both with amazing accuracy, especially considering he was limited to a medium-size pack of colored pencils. He had lavished such care on them, risked so much to display them.

  “Seen enough?” Daniels asked.

  “One more thing.”

  Stepping over to the body, I Carefully lifted Justin’s shirt, and used my gloved index finger to press the purple patches on his lower stomach. The area beneath my finger turned white. When I moved my finger the discoloration returned.

  “Blanching,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “If he was killed the moment he came back into the dorm, how long’s he been dead?”

  He looked at his watch. “Over an hour and a half now.”

  I shook my head. “The blanching, lividity, and rate of blood clot just don’t add up.”

  “None of this shit makes any sense. Maybe crime scene can tell us what the fuck’s goin’ on.”

  5

  Within an hour, the crime scene crew had arrived, and I stood back and watched as a FDLE technician snapped pictures, the brilliant flash washing out all color in the cell, turning crimson to pink and white. The crime was so surreal, the capturing of it so dramatic, that I half expected to hear the whine of the old flash bulbs, as if mourning the images they were illuminating.

  While a female technician gathered evidence and put each piece into its own plastic or paper bag or envelope—depending on what it was and if it had blood on it—a male technician examined the doorjamb and lock mechanism for toolmarks. When the scene had been completely photographed, the blood splatter patterns were examined and sketches of the entire scene were drawn to scale.

  “Obviously, I want your help with this thing,” Daniels said.

  Obviously? He had never wanted it before.

  I thought about how weary I was, how spiritually unwell. I knew being involved in a homicide investigation, even in a limited way, would only make things worse. I knew all this, yet I couldn’t resist.

  “You’re a good investigator,” he continued, “and I need someone who can move around inside here among the inmates and the staff. No one does it better. Plus, you were here. You saw the whole thing go down. You willing?”

  “What about FDLE?”

  “My investigation. They’re assisting. I know I’ve been a real pain in the ass when we’ve worked together before, but I’m different now. Hell, I’m sober.”

  I thought about Paula Menge and how I’d waited too long to do what she’d asked me to do. Thought about Justin and the progress he’d been making—how abruptly all his work had been cut short.

  I nodded.

  “I’ll clear it with the warden. Anybody gives you any shit, you let me know.”

  “Everybody’s pretty used to it by now . . . though we do have a new colonel.”

  “I’ll break it down for him.”

  I cringed inside. He certainly had the authority. What concerned me was his approach. When this was over, he’d return to Central Office and I’d be left to deal with all the people he had angered and offended.

  “Now that that’s settled,” he said, “let’s talk to the two fuck-ups in charge down here.”

  He had Potter and Pitts brought down to us so that we could observe the crime scene being processed while we talked to them.

  Michael Pitts was in every way Billy Joe Potter’s opposite. He was smart, alert, caring. Whereas Potter was short and dumpy, Pitts was tall and lean, Potter soft and pale, Pitts hard and dark. In contrast to Potter’s ill-fitting and wrinkled uniform, Pitts’s crisp and clean uniform looked as if it had been tailor-made for him.

  “What the hell happened here tonight?” Daniels asked.

  “That’s what we’d like to know,” Potter said. “This ain’t our fa
ult. We’re short handed. We do the best we can. A hard job that pays shit. Nobody can blame us.”

  “I damn sure can,” Daniels said. “So shut the fuck up and answer my questions. I don’t give a good goddam who your family is.”

  Daniels leaned into Potter, daring him to respond. When he looked down, Daniels said, “Now walk me through exactly what happened from the time Menge returned from his visit.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pitts said. “I’d just completed count in quads one and three and was returning to the wicker to call it in to the control room, when Officer Stanley arrived back at the dorm with an inmate. I sent him to quad two and returned to the wicker where I called in the count and buzzed his cell door open.”

  “I still don’t see how this coulda happened, anyway,” Potter said. “I mean we all saw him go in the cell and it was locked when we found him. Can any of you explain that? It couldn’t’ve happened.”

  “Okay, Potter,” Daniels said, “that’s what I’ll put in my report. This murder couldn’t’ve happened.”

  “Well, I’m just saying—”

  “Well, don’t. Just shut the fuck up.”

  The FDLE agents in and around the cell stopped what they were doing and looked at Daniels. Potter shut up.

  “Please continue, Officer Pitts,” Daniels said. “What happened next?”

  “Well, after I buzzed Sobel into his cell. I logged in count and movement—”

  “Menge,” Daniels said.

  “Sir?”

  “You mean Menge,” he said. “You said you buzzed Sobel in, but you meant Menge.”

  “I thought it was Sobel,” he said. “Sorry. They look a lot alike.”

  Behind Pitts and Potter, the two FDLE agents working inside the cell were gathering trace evidence with tweezers and putting it into tiny coin envelopes and plastic bags. Outside the cell, three other agents were busy labeling and tagging each item of evidence that had been recovered.

  “That’s what happens when you’re married long enough,” Potter said. “You start to look alike. Those two butt-fucks have been together longer than me and my old lady.”