The Fallen

by David Baldacci

  Decker said, “FYI, I saw at least six drug deals going down on the way here.”

  “Seven,” replied Lassiter. “You might have missed the soccer mom with the little girl in the rear seat. Mom was getting her pop from the dude at the last traffic light before she dropped her kid off at daycare.”

  “And you drove right past?” said Decker.

  “If I stopped every drug deal I saw, I wouldn’t have the time to eat, sleep, or use the bathroom. I happen to know the woman. She won’t take the pop now. She’ll do it later, at home, when her hubby is there. He’ll take care of her and the girl.”

  “What’s the drug of choice around here?”

  “Used to be OxyContin and then fentanyl. Now it’s heroin even though fentanyl is far more potent.”

  “Must be impacting your crime rate.”

  “People burglarize their neighbor’s house so they can sell the stuff for cash to service their addiction. Or a son embezzles his mom’s bank account to do the same. Or a granny steals from her granddaughter’s piggy bank. It’s seriously demented stuff and happens every day.”

  “And heroin is popular because you get a gram of it for about fifty bucks and it’ll last you a lot longer than fentanyl, or OxyContin, which runs about, what, eighty bucks a pill on the street?”

  “Hell, you don’t have to buy it on the street anymore. They’ll deliver it right to your house, like pizza. Or they get it from pharmacies or the local Boy Scout troop leader. Or it comes down one of the drug pipelines around here. They crush and snort it, inject it. They even chew on fentanyl patches instead of putting them on their skin to get the pop.”

  “Maybe that mark on the dead guy was a fentanyl patch.”

  She nodded. “Could be. Our OD rate is up nearly seventy percent from last year. And the last ten cases we’ve investigated have been people over sixty-five. Some people call it ‘Rust Belt Retirement.’”

  “I left being a cop in Ohio before the opioid crisis really got going. But even back then we started calling it the zombie apocalypse.”

  “It’s why we all carry Narcan with us.”

  “To resuscitate an OD?”

  Lassiter nodded. “And the city enacted Good Samaritan laws, so you won’t get in trouble if you report an overdose, even if you might be doing drugs as well. The woman we passed? Her husband keeps a Narcan kit at home. Rehab place in town started to give them out. Some say it’s enabling. I say until we get this figured out, it’s better to keep people alive. We got an army of addicts and a twenty-bed rehab center. Tell me how that makes sense. I think the town’s just sick of it. They don’t want to spend tax dollars they don’t have on people they don’t think give a damn. They hear methadone treatment center and think it’s what meth addicts take to get their high and not the drug used to treat that addiction. They don’t want ‘these’ people around them, not coming to grips with the fact that ‘these’ people are often members of their families. So some say let ’em die and good riddance.”

  “But not you?”

  “It’s hit pretty close to home with me, Decker. So, no, I don’t say good riddance to a human being.”

  “Your family?” he asked.

  “Not going there,” she replied curtly.

  As they reached the door of the repair facility, Decker said, “I take it since Mrs. Martin taught you in Sunday school that you grew up here?”

  “I did. Though I went to college in Philly. Criminal justice degree at Temple. Then I came back here, joined the force, was a street cop for four years, passed my exams, became a sergeant, and then moved up to detective.”

  “Pretty fast-track for you.”

  “I worked my ass off for it.”

  “I’m sure you did, more than the guys had to.”

  “That’s pretty astute of you, Decker.”

  “Did you shut the repair facility down after the crime, or did it close on its own?”

  “The guy who ran it hit the state lottery for about six hundred thousand and got the hell out of here.”

  “You got a key?”

  She pulled one from her pocket and unlocked the front door.

  There was a small reception area, and beyond that, through a wall of glass interrupted by a door, Decker could see three service bays.

  “Okay, take me through step by step.”

  “We got a call about a possible break-in. Uniforms responded. They found the bodies.”

  “Who called it in?”

  “Anonymous. We tried to trace it but couldn’t.”

  “That’s unusual, because most people don’t carry untraceable phones. Where did you find the bodies?”

  She led him into the service bay area.

  “Vic number one was found in the grease pit of this service bay.” She pointed down in the hole.

  “Cause of death?”

  “A gunshot wound to the head sealed the deal.”

  “ID?”

  “Michael Swanson. Black guy, early thirties. Low-level street dealer. Started his career right out of high school. He’d been arrested before on petty stuff. Did some short stints twice in the local lockup. But nothing too serious. Last address we had for him was an apartment on the outskirts of town. Very low-rent district.”

  “The second body?”

  She led him over to a machine that was used to lift engine blocks out of vehicles.

  “He was found wrapped in chains and hanging from this.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “Same as Swanson. But he had a mark branded into his forehead.”

  “What sort of mark?”

  “You ready for this?”

  “I guess.”

  “It was a flame, but it was turned upside down.”

  “A torch, you mean? That’s the symbol of the Greek god of death, Thanatos.”

  Lassiter’s jaw slackened. “How did you know that?”

  “I read a book once. With pictures. Who was he?”

  “Bradley Costa. White, age thirty-five. He was a fairly recent transfer here. Worked at Baronville National Bank. A senior vice president.”

  “Pretty big title for a guy in his thirties.”

  “He came here from Wall Street and had a lot of experience. Those types don’t show up here every day. He was described as a real go-getter.”

  “Any connection to Swanson?”

  “Not that we can prove. He might have been a customer of Swanson’s. Wouldn’t be the first time a banker did drugs. And because of Costa’s line of work, money laundering or some other financial shenanigans come to mind. But we couldn’t get any traction on that angle either. And I don’t think Swanson generated enough cash to need a money launderer.”

  “And yet both had their lives ended in this place,” said Decker, looking around the space. “How did they get here?”

  “We don’t know. Costa didn’t have any family that we know of, but his boss at the bank reported him missing. No one reported Swanson missing. I guess he moved in circles where he went missing a lot. Definitely out of the mainstream.”

  “The mainstream as it used to be,” corrected Decker.

  “Right.”

  “Any useful trace?”

  “No prints. No spent cartridges. No tossed cigarette with DNA on it. Only blood belonged to the vics.”

  “And we’re sure they were killed here?”

  “Blood spatters say yes. And the ME said there was enough blood present to account for the shots and the bleed-outs to have occurred here.”

  “Was it the same ME I met today?”

  “Yeah, Charlie Duncan. Why?”

  Decker didn’t answer.

  She said, “And what did you mean that he should take some courses, or get out of the business of autopsies altogether? Do you think he was wrong on the time-of-death call?”

  “I know that he missed two big inconsistencies.” He turned to her. “But then you and your partner missed them too.”

  “Like what?” she said defensively.

  “A body
in a dank basement that’s been dead longer than twenty hours and in full rigor is going to have a lot more than a few flies and a few unhatched eggs on it. Blowflies can locate a dead body and arrive within minutes of the death. The body hanging upstairs had no blowflies on it that I could see. The one in the basement only had a few. Each blowfly can lay over two hundred eggs, and those eggs hatch within eight to twenty-four hours into first-stage maggots. That’s what I meant when I told the first officer on the scene that what I had observed was forensically impossible. A stiff corpse with only minimal insect infestation and not a single egg hatched? Your ME should have seen that right away. But he just focused on the rigor and not the entomology, lack of body decomp, and core temp factors. And he just assumed that his instrument was out of whack with the core temp instead of digging deeper to see why the body would be that cold, namely below ambient temperature. A competent ME has to look at the total package. Everything impacts everything else. Otherwise, you screw up and a bad guy gets to walk.”

  Lassiter looked taken aback by his comment. “O-kay,” she said slowly. “I get where you’re coming from. But the bodies were found inside. Wouldn’t that have made a difference with the flies?”

  “It can. But you’d be surprised at the places blowflies can get into. And here we had an empty house with an old basement probably filled with cracks and holes. Trust me, they would’ve gotten to it if the body had been there for twenty hours or longer.”

  “What was the second inconsistency?”

  “Hypostasis, otherwise known as livor mortis. Once the heart stops pumping and the internal body decomposition commences, vessels get porous and the blood reacts solely to gravity and heads for the lowest spot. With a guy hanging that means he’ll have blood collecting in his fingertips, earlobes, and feet. He might even have a death erection.”

  “What? A death erection?”

  “Because when you die vertically, the blood also pools in the groin. Like a balloon filling up with water. Heart’s no longer circulating, so there’s no way for the blood to leave the spot once it gets there. In the morgue when I checked out the body of the guy hanging, the staining was on his back. That means he didn’t die by being strung up and left there for twenty hours.”

  “Then he might have been killed elsewhere and brought to the house?”

  Decker nodded. “Your ME didn’t mention anything about the livor mortis inconsistency. He either didn’t know about it or he just flat out screwed up.”

  “I’ll have to go back and check with him.”

  “Good luck on that. So, why kill them here?”

  “It was abandoned. It had grease pits. Equipment to hang someone.”

  “I was actually thinking about a broader question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why Baronville?”

  Chapter 9

  TWO PEOPLE AT a dining room table shotgunned to death.

  That’s what Green had just told Jamison.

  Talk about a last meal.

  They were in a house that seemed much like the residence where they had found the two dead men.

  “Damnedest thing I’d ever seen,” said Green as he chewed his gum. “Sitting right there, and bam. They both died instantly, the ME said. Close quarters with a shotgun usually has that effect.”

  “Did the vics live here?”

  “Not as far as we know. No one lived here legally. The bank owned it too, like the other place.”

  “Any connection between the two people?”

  Green consulted his official notebook. “None that we could run down. Different walks of life. No known ties.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “Joyce Tanner was white and fifty-three years old. She worked at JC Penney before it closed. She was unemployed at the time of her death. She was divorced with no kids. Her ex left the area a long time ago. We’re still trying to track him down, but there’s no basis right now to believe he had anything to do with it. Toby Babbot was white and forty years old, on disability because of a work-related injury.”

  “Babbot have any family?”

  “Never married, no kids that we could find.”

  “Were they from Baronville?”

  “No. Babbot moved here from Pittsburgh about six years ago and worked at a plant building air-conditioning units. Plant closed down. Then he did some miscellaneous work.”

  “And Tanner?”

  “Her parents were killed in a car accident in Connecticut. She came here to live with her aunt and uncle about forty years ago. They raised her here and then they died too. Natural causes,” he added.

  “Any idea how the pair ended up here?”

  “No. We canvassed the neighborhood after it happened. But you can see for yourself, there aren’t that many folks around who could have seen something. So we got no leads at all.”

  “Were they eating dinner when it happened?”

  “No. It was like they were made to sit in the chairs and then they were shot.”

  “Anything else about the deaths that was curious?” asked Jamison.

  Green pointed to the wall that still bore the bloodstains from the homicide. “Their killer wrote something there with a Sharpie. We cut it out and collected it as evidence.”

  “What?”

  “A Bible verse.”

  “Which one?”

  “Not one of the well-known ones. I’m a good Methodist. Go to church every Sunday. And I still had to look it up.”

  Green glanced down at his notebook and flipped through some pages. “Slaves, accept the authority of your masters, with all deference. For it is to your credit if being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly.”

  He closed his notebook and looked up at Jamison.

  Jamison said promptly, “It’s from the First Epistle of Peter, two-eighteen.”

  Green looked at her in surprise. “That’s right. How did you know that?”

  “My favorite uncle was a minister. I helped him teach Sunday school. He got me to read the Bible backward and forward. He was also a respected religious scholar and introduced me to a lot of writing and arguments on the subject.”

  “So, can you put on your religious scholar hat and give me some context on the verse?”

  “Peter was imprisoned and beaten for his beliefs. So he might have been talking about keeping his own faith through that terrible experience. And there were a lot of slaves back then. It might have been a justification for keeping slaves and trying to tamp down any sign of insurrection. I mean, if God says it’s okay?” She frowned. “Pretty diabolical, actually.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Many religious scholars don’t believe that Peter even wrote that epistle.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the writing indicated an advanced knowledge of the Greek language and a scholarly background in philosophy that Peter simply didn’t have. And widespread persecution of Christians didn’t commence until long after Peter’s death.”

  Green smiled. “Well, you’re a fount of knowledge. Thanks.”

  However, Jamison frowned again. “But I don’t see how that gets us any further along with the case unless you have any slave rings operating around here.”

  “It could be that it’s a warning. Cross us and this will happen to you. But killing people who didn’t even know each other and have no demonstrable connection? I don’t get that. It could just be random, I guess.”

  Jamison mulled this over. “Look, Baronville isn’t exactly a huge metropolis. Yet you have three separate crime scenes occurring very close together involving a pair of victims at each. Here there’s a cryptic Bible verse written on the wall. Then there’s animal blood at the crime scene we stumbled onto. What about the place where Decker and your partner are now?”

  “A guy had a death mark on his forehead,” said Green. “I guess that counts as weird.”

  “My point is, I can’t believe that all these murders are not connected somehow. I really think we’re dealing
with one killer, or one set of killers, Detective.”

  Green sighed resignedly. “Great. Serial killings in Baronville. The town is trying to get back on its feet and this crap is going to hit the national pipeline at some point and make it a lot harder for us to attract people here.”

  “You ever think about calling in reinforcements? State police?”

  “Frankly, they’ve got their hands full. We’re not the only town with problems. And state budgets have shrunk.” He paused. “Decker sounds like he’s good at this, though.”

  “He’s the best I’ve ever seen. I think he’s the best the FBI has ever seen.”

  “Well, then maybe we have a chance. Despite a few biting comments he’s made, Decker seems easy enough to work with.”

  “Oh, just give it time,” said Jamison, hiding a smile.

  Chapter 10

  NOT HUNGRY?”

  Jamison stared across the table in the restaurant where she and Decker were eating dinner. They had each filled the other in on the respective crime scenes they had visited that day. And he had also told her that Lassiter was going to brief Green on Decker’s doubts about the ME’s time-of-death determination.

  Decker, who had been picking at his meal, which had prompted Jamison’s query, set down his knife and fork and picked up his glass of beer.

  “Six murders,” he said. “People with no clear connections. No obvious similarities, but maybe they’re still all part of the same jigsaw puzzle.”

  “And we have to somehow make those pieces fit,” said Jamison, who had put down her fork and knife too. She had chosen a glass of merlot over beer. She picked it up and took a sip.

  “And if they don’t?” he said.

  She set her wine down and fiddled with her napkin. “But I told Green that I think these cases have to be connected. I mean, six weird murders in a place like this? What are the odds of them not being connected? Which means the two we found are tied to the other four.”

  “But we don’t seem to be making much progress.”