by EH Reinhard
“One of their own?” Reynolds asked.
“The blood isn’t from anyone here,” I said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I followed the blood from the back door of the club, through the club’s parking lot and toward the railroad tracks.
“I lost it,” I said.
“I got it here,” Rick said, aiming the beam of a flashlight down on the weeds leading up to the tracks themselves. “Here,” he said and held the flashlight out toward me.
I took the light and kept it pointed down on the area.
Rick took his camera, hanging from a strap around his neck, and snapped a photo.
We continued walking and following the blood trail. Rick stopped and snapped photos every couple of feet. We crossed the tracks, walked through a shallow ditch, and stepped to the parking lot on the far side.
I looked up at the old warehouse building filled with loading doors that sat a football field away across the blacktop. A couple of random lights on poles lit the area. The far right side of the lot had some tree overhang near a fence. “This place looks like some kind of trucking company depot,” I said.
Rick grunted a response and snapped a photo of where the blood began on the parking lot. We walked another thirty yards to the right, toward the fence, until Rick stopped.
“That’s it,” he said. “The blood stops here. There’s a bit of a puddle and then nothing.” He snapped another photo and let his camera hang from his neck.
We stood directly in the darkest patch of the parking lot under a tree overhang that blocked most of the light being cast across the rest of the lot.
“So this is where they must have parked,” I said.
“Yeah.” Rick pulled off his latex gloves, balled them up, and stuffed them into the pocket of his blue forensics jacket. His hand came back out with a pack of cigarettes. He pulled out a smoke and lit it.
“Thought you were doing the electronic thing?” I asked.
“Nah, I gave it a shot. I just couldn’t do it. Plus, who the hell knows what you’re smoking in those things.” He took a deep drag and blew the smoke from his nose. Rick held his cigarette up in his hand and admired it. “At least with these, I know what I’m smoking and getting. Tobacco, nicotine, and tasty, tasty carcinogens.” He took another puff. “Okay, so we have a nice little dark place to park, where we probably watched the building over there and then loaded our dead guy to leave.”
I handed him his flashlight back. “So you think one of our guys was definitely dead. Is it the amount of blood?” I asked.
“Yeah, but it’s not just that. Take away the blood on the carpet inside, and the height of the faint spatter on the wall, and I’d still say the guy was deceased. And took a head shot. It’s the blood trail. It’s completely uniform. A straight line, with a bit of a zag, every few feet from our scene inside of the building to here. If our guy was shot and leaving under his own power, we’d have pools, starts and stops, a trail of drips and drops and puddles. That’s not what we have. The injured person was being carried and consistently bleeding the entire time.” Rick took another drag of his cigarette. “A couple other things to further the head shot theory. Hell, I even think I know how the person was being carried.”
I motioned for him to continue.
Rick ashed his cigarette. “There’s no walk-through of the blood. Meaning that whatever appendage was bleeding was out of the footsteps of the person doing the carrying. Now if you were holding someone like this…” Rick held his arms out in front of himself, palms up as if he were carrying someone. “You’d be walking through their blood if they were shot anywhere but the head or lower leg. Yet if they were face up, their head would be elevated and wouldn’t account for the amount of blood we see. I’d say our guy was being carried over someone’s shoulders, probably in some kind of fireman’s carry, with his head lower than his midsection. The only variations we have in the trail are at the back door, where if you were carrying someone, you’d have to swing sideways, and the weave in the trail which would be from the stride of the person doing the carrying.”
“So we’re going to be looking for another body somewhere?”
“Pretty damn certain,” Rick said. He pointed his chin back toward the club. “Let’s head back. I want to show you a couple things with our garbage can guy and then get back inside. I’m freezing my ass off out here.”
“Sure.”
Rick put out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe and put the butt in his pocket as to not contaminate our crime scene, I figured. We walked back toward the building. Rick made a right near the back door for the dumpsters and clicked his flashlight back on.
“So what are we thinking with this one?” I asked.
“Guessing he was probably our first. Killed at the back door and dragged over here,” Rick said. He knelt next to the body. I did the same. “Here, look,” Rick said. He lifted the guy’s pant legs, and both toes of his shoes were worn on the tips. “Guys probably grabbed his arms and just heaved him back out of view over here. Pockets have been gone through, which I’m sure you saw.”
“What do you think on the COD?” I asked.
“Well, he got thumped in the head here with something. Two times with the same thing. You can kind of see the overlapping marks of the same object here.” Rick pointed at the area on the upper part of the man’s face and forehead. “The long oval shape, to me, looks like it could have been a stock of a rifle. The scrapes, I’m betting, were from him being facedown on the blacktop. More on that in a second. Neither of those are what killed him, though. One second,” Rick said. He handed me the flashlight and pulled out a pair of fresh latex gloves from his pocket. Rick pulled them over his hands.
“What? Do you have a box of those in your jacket pocket or what?” I asked.
“Got to be prepared,” Rick said.
I held the light on him while he slid his hands under the man’s right shoulder.
“So I wanted to roll him onto his side to get a better look at the bruising to the back of his neck and see if he had any other injuries to his back,” Rick said. “A big guy like this and he could have had a knife wound or maybe even a GSW to the back and we wouldn’t be able to see if it didn’t exit. So I go to roll him, and I get this. Watch his head and neck.”
Rick lifted on the man’s shoulder.
“Geez, Rick,” I said. I watched as a bone pushed out on the skin of the guy’s neck—the bone being his spine. The back of the guy’s head remained on the ground while his body moved. “Shit. Maybe more of a heads-up next time.”
Rick looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
“Poor choice of words, but you know what I mean.”
Rick lowered the man’s shoulder back to the blacktop. “Neck snapped, obviously. We’ll have to get Ed’s take on it when he shows up to remove the bodies, but with the scrapes to the face, I’d say there was a good chance that he was facedown and someone struck him with something, maybe a bat or again with the butt of a rifle to the back of the neck.”
“Or just stomped down on it.”
“That could do it too. Either way, broken neck,” Rick said.
“You called Ed?” I asked.
“He should be here soon, I’d think.”
Rick stood, and I clicked off the light.
“Let’s head in,” Rick said.
We walked to the back door and minded the blood on the tile as we entered the building.
I paused at the keys in the open door leading down the hall to the office and got my face close for a better look. “Honda keys,” I said, standing back up.
“I saw them but didn’t want to do anything with them until I could get them printed.” Rick pointed through the doorway and down the hall to the office but didn’t head in that direction. “You saw the kicked-in door?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to try to see if I can get any kind of shoe print or impression,” Rick said.
I nodded but said nothing.
&nb
sp; “I wanted to show you this, though.” Rick waved for me to follow, past the hall that contained our office and into the club itself. He made a right, walked past the stage, and then made another right down a short hall. He walked through a pair of black swinging doors that were propped open, and he continued forward. I stopped and looked to my right at the long, skinny, rectangular room filled with individual stations. Each three-foot-wide area had a chair tucked under the flat surface, like a desk arrangement. The back wall of each station was a lighted mirror, though the lights were out. I spotted a random assortment of wigs, robes, and brightly colored lacy undergarments. A bank of lockers stood against the far wall.
“This isn’t what I wanted to show you,” Rick said. “Back here.” He continued walking.
I followed Rick to an office at the back. Glass windows rose from waist height to the ceiling. Through the windows inside of the room, I could see Rob snapping photos near a group of four computer monitors. We walked through the open doorway into the office.
Rob wore a forensics jacket that matched Rick’s, plus another three or four sizes—3XL was a good bet.
I took in the small office. An L-shaped desk sat in the back of the room, a single rolling office chair before it. On the desk’s surface was a group of four twenty-some-inch computer monitors. Miscellaneous papers and office supplies littered the surface of the desk, broken up only by a single keyboard. I looked around the rest of the room—a calendar hanging from a nail on the wall, with black X’s over the days that had passed, a pair of file cabinets, and a printer on a small rolling cart. All standard office fare.
“I got all our photos. I’m going to start with the printing in a second,” Rob said. He covered his mouth as he yawned.
I imagined Rick had woken him to come to the scene.
“Sure,” Rick said. “Here, Kane, this is what I wanted to show you.” Rick waved me closer to him into the office and pointed at a shelf below the desk. A ball of seven or eight wires hung from a void in some dust. On the floor directly below where Rick had pointed were a couple of random pieces of broken plastic and what looked like part of a green circuit board.
“What are we looking at here?” I asked.
“The computer or hard drive or whatever ran these computers is gone,” Rick said. “The debris on the floor looks to be from whatever it was. Smashed and then just taken is my guess.”
“Hard drive,” Rob said. “I was just down on my hands and knees, taking photos. We have a corner of a piece of plastic with a brand and model number on it. I did a quick search online with my phone. It’s from a video security hard drive. Nothing fancy. Seemed pretty common.”
I let out a deep breath. “So our guys got the footage of whatever happened here?”
“Looks like it,” Rick said. “All right. Let me go walk you through the main office quick so we can get to printing and collecting.”
I nodded and followed Rick from the room.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
David sat in the back of the van, next to Tim’s body. Brad had just pulled up to the carport of their rented house. The home, twenty miles northeast of the city, was just a bit over twelve hundred square feet. The house sat to the front of a five-acre parcel of land. The back part of the property held twelve trailers—all rented. The owner of the house, trailers, and land was an old friend of David. David looked up from counting the money in the back of the van to see Brad click off the ignition.
“Are we pulling this thing in the carport and putting the tarp on it?” Brad asked.
“Just wait,” David said. He looked back down at the money and continued counting.
“How the hell did it happen?” Brad asked. “Tim? How did Solomon shoot him?”
David spoke without looking up. “Solomon opened the safe and must have pulled a gun from inside. I don’t know. They had their backs toward me. The next thing I know, Solomon has a gun to his head and then smoked him. Point blank. One shot. Then he turned at me with the pistol, and I put him down,” David said. “It was real quick. Maybe Tim looked away or something and got himself shot.”
“But why would he let Solomon open the safe and then stick his hand inside?” Brad asked.
“Shit, I don’t know. Like I said, I couldn’t really see exactly what was going on. Their backs were blocking me from getting a good look.”
“It just seems weird,” Brad said.
“He should have just shot Solomon the second he opened the safe door,” David said. “That’s definitely what he should have done. He would have been alive right now if he did. I don’t know. Nothing we can do about it now.”
“What the hell are we going to do with his body?” Brad asked.
Chris sat in the passenger seat with one of his feet up on the dash. “We have to get rid of him somehow. And the sooner the better.”
David looked up briefly. “Dig a hole and dump him in it,” he said. He finished his counting. “Looks like about a little over a hundred grand,” he said.
“We only have a couple hours before it’s daylight,” Brad said. “We need to be doing something other than just sitting here.”
David stuffed all the money back into the bag. “Let’s get the money and guns inside the house, then we’ll give the van a good wipe down—inside of the door handles, shifter, blinker and wiper stalks, windows, dash, seat belts, the works. Make sure there isn’t a print of his inside this thing. Then we move on to dealing with the blood.”
“Why don’t we just dump this piece of shit? Torch it,” Chris said. “Leave his body in it and light it on fire. I mean, do we really need it anymore?”
David was quiet, in thought. The van, which was stolen and under the cover of a tarp when not in use, was no longer necessary. Whatever they had to do before they left town could be managed with Chris’s truck, or either Brad or David’s own personal cars.
“Yeah, I’m fine with getting rid of it,” David said. “May as well leave the body in here too. We’ll drive north a little bit, find a spot, and light it up. One of us will follow with another car.”
David pulled open the sliding door and stepped out holding the bag of money.
Chris stepped from the passenger side door.
“Grab the bag of guns and gear,” David said.
Chris did, heaving it over and around Tim’s body, probably so as not to get blood on it.
Brad jumped out of the driver’s door and came up behind David and Chris as they neared the front door of the house. “What are we going to do with his car?”
“Um,” David said. “Shit, I didn’t think about that.” David rummaged for his keys in his pocket, found the one for the front door of the house, and stuck it in the lock. They entered.
David stopped in the middle of the living room and set the money down on the coffee table. He ran his hand over the top of his bald head and cracked his neck from one side to the other. “Damn. Do you know where he lives?” he asked.
“I was at his apartment right after he got out. I guess he moved in with that girl he’s been talking to, though. Not sure where she lives.”
David focused on Brad. “What do you think Tim has said to that girlfriend of his?”
Brad shrugged. “I doubt anything.”
“Do you know her?” David asked.
“I saw her once or twice right when they started dating,” Brad said. “He said she worked at a hospital or something. Nights.”
“Could she ID you?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. I doubt she even remembers me. I’m not sure what, if anything, Tim ever said to her about what he was actually doing.”
“Are those his keys?” David asked. He pointed at a set on the coffee table.
“Not mine,” Brad said.
Chris shook his head.
David scooped up the keys from the table and walked from the living room back outside. He went straight to Tim’s body in the van and rifled through his pockets—nothing. David slid the van door closed and walked to Tim’s ten-year-old V
olkswagen parked in the grass in front of the house. He clicked the button to unlock the doors and got in on the passenger side. His hands went straight for the glove box. David opened the compartment, and a small light lit the interior. A wallet sat right on top of a stack of papers and the car’s owner’s manual. David snatched the wallet up and flipped it open. He took a quick glance at Tim’s driver’s license and then pulled out the money, which he stuffed into his pocket.
David walked back into the house. “Is this where he lived that you remember?” David pulled the driver’s license from the clear plastic holder in the wallet and passed it to Brad.
Brad gave it a look and shook his head. “No. He was over by Brandon in the apartment. That address on the ID is only a few minutes from Solomon’s club. Probably why he knew the area so well.”
“Okay,” David said. He pulled out the money that he got from Tim’s wallet and fanned it out—fifty-eight bucks. David tucked the eighteen dollars into his pocket and gave Brad and Chris each a twenty.
“What’s this?” Chris asked.
“Honor among thieves. That was in Tim’s wallet.” David took in a big breath and let it out. “Okay. You guys are going to go and torch the van and his body. I’m going to stop in over at Tim’s house. I’ll dump his car off there and find a lift back.”
“Why are you taking it there?” Brad asked. “You aren’t planning on killing his girl, are you?”
“Do you think that I need to?” David asked.
Brad said nothing.
David shook his head. “No, I’m not going there for that. His car at the house means when he gets reported missing, they have one less thing to look for—a car that could lead back to here and us. If his car is there, they’ll think he disappeared from his house or was picked up. Aside from that, I’m going inside and getting our money.”
Brad gave him a confused look.