Beyond the Spectrum

by G. W. BOILEAU

  “That bad, huh?” I asked.

  “A goddamn mess.”

  “Like the garage?”

  “Yeah, like the garage. Only there’s two in there.” He poked a thumb over his shoulder. “The shopkeeper and some big guy.”

  “How long you been here?”

  “Not long. Five. CSU isn’t far away.”

  I nodded, then grabbed some gloves off one of the uniforms, snapped them on and made my way in.

  The pawnshop wasn’t like the ones on the TV. By that I mean the large and organized type, respectable as much as a pawnshop can be. This one was small and disorganized, cluttered with suspect secondhand goods. The kind of shop you generally stay clear of unless you’ve got something to sell which doesn’t belong to you.

  Bikes and lawnmowers crowded the floor space, while the walls were covered with hanging electric guitars. The endless shelves were stacked with all the usual pawnshop stuff: power tools, video games, speakers, car stereos. It smelled like an old man’s garage. That and something else.

  God, why did I eat the gas station hotdog?

  The counter was toward the back of the shop, with a glass top and front, filled with jewelry and knives. Lying on the floor in front of it was a man.

  He was big. At least six foot six. He was wearing black fatigues, only he’d removed his jacket and now wore an oversized khaki sweater. His nose was swollen and his dark eyes were blank and lifeless. He had a buzz cut and a square jaw.

  It was him. The guy who kicked my ass in Stuart’s townhouse. I was sure of it. Same size. Same shape. And the nose clinched it.

  It looked like someone had stuck a chain saw into his stomach. Made a mess of his insides. He had bled out and was lying in a pool of blood the size of a small rug. The wound was beyond gruesome, his broken spine visible in the chaos of torn muscles and shredded organs. The pooling blood in the wound was almost black. It churned my stomach. I swallowed and tasted mustard.

  “Any ID?” I asked.

  “Nope. Nothing,” said Romero.

  “Not even a set of keys?”

  “Nope.”

  I stepped around the counter.

  The shopkeeper had been done like Nicholas Hartmann. His body had crumpled beneath him like a puppet that had had its strings cut, and a short-barreled revolver lay limp in his hand.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “What the hell’s going on around here?” asked Romero, his hand on the back of his neck, forcing himself to look at the shopkeeper’s body.

  “I don’t know, but hopefully that helps more than last time.” I pointed to the camera situated in the corner of the room. “Where’s the head?” I asked, not entirely sure I wanted to know.

  “Come on, I’ll show you,” he said reluctantly, pulling out his small LED flashlight.

  I followed him through a black curtain that led to a long narrow hallway.

  “Lights are all busted up,” he said, pointing the flashlight at the floor. “Here,” he said about halfway up. “I guess that’s it. At least what’s left of it.”

  It was another revolting mound of horror. Only this time there was a hearing aid and a mouth plate wired with two teeth, spaced like a ten-pin bowling split.

  I grimaced. “What in the hell?”

  “Come with me.” Romero gestured me to follow him down the corridor and led me to a room no bigger than a closet. Inside was a filing cabinet, and on top sat a lockbox for a PVR surveillance system. Cables ran out the back of the PVR box, up the wall, and disappeared through a jagged sawed-out hole in the ceiling drywall.

  “The lockbox is open, but it’s all there. Come on. There’s more.”

  I followed him into a dark windowless room at the back of the building. Glass crunched under my boots. Romero pointed his flashlight. “It’s from the broken bulb.”

  The beam shone across a wall of gunmetal-gray safety deposit boxes. A box left of center was broken open. Whatever had buried itself into the giant man’s stomach had done the same to the metal door. The steel was peeled back, like a banana skin.

  We got up for a closer look and Romero pointed the flashlight inside.

  “Empty,” I said.

  “Yep, empty. You see this?” He pointed the beam at the lock.

  “Still intact.”

  “Yep.” He waved the light over the bent metal. “That’s jaws-of-life stuff right there. You can’t just do that with a hammer and some muscle. Check it out.” He pointed the beam at the top corner of the room, revealing a camera identical to the one in the front of the shop.

  “Weird,” I said.

  “You think?”

  “I mean, you kill a guy under a surveillance camera, and you don’t destroy the evidence?”

  “Beats me. Maybe the killer got spooked? Ran off?”

  “You seen the ledger book yet?”

  “For the boxes?” He shook his head.

  I took note of the deposit box number by reading in between the lines, then walked back into the shop. I found the ledger in a cupboard behind the counter, next to an empty handgun holster.

  I opened the book, flipped through the pages until I found the most recent entries. I ran a gloved finger down the page of box numbers and their respective renters, stopping on number thirty-three. I slid my finger across the line. In blue ink it read, Collected, and next to it was a date and signature. It was today’s date and it was signed by an S. Arnold.

  “It looks like Arnold emptied his safety deposit box,” I said, looking up. “My guess is after he left his place, he came here and collected. Shortly afterwards, someone else turned up. Only they didn’t get what they were after because Stuart had already cleaned house.”

  “So Arnold isn’t the killer?” asked Romero.

  “No,” I said. “That’s for sure now.” I shut the book.

  “Whoever it is, they’re definitely sick in the head,” he said, glancing over the bodies.

  At that moment the CSU team walked in, led by the short wiry man named Bobby.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “Rough day,” I said. “Is Calloway coming?”

  “She’s still working on the Hartmann guy. Holy shit, what the hell happened here?”

  “Do me a favor, Bobby, doggy-bag the surveillance box from the room in the hall. I’ll take it to go.”

  “Sure thing, Blake.” He put down his toolbox and immediately got to work.

  “You finish up here with the paperwork,” I told Romero. “Hey, did you find anything at Nicholas’s house?”

  “Nope. Turns out he did have a partner. A boyfriend named Diego. Let’s just say he didn’t take the news well. Ever heard a grown man scream? When I asked to take a look around, he demanded a warrant and started slapping at me to get out.”

  “When you’re done here, get Schultz to write up a warrant. While you’re at it, get one written up for Arnold’s place, too.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Down to the crime lab. Get a look at this surveillance recording. While I’m there I’ll drop in on Calloway, see if she has anything.”

  Chris looked back over at the big guy with the hole in his stomach, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. “Hey, Blake, what do you think is going on here? I mean, what would’ve done that to his stomach?”

  “I don’t know. But whatever’s going on, it’s still in play. So we act fast and we act smart, got it?”

  “Yeah. Sure thing.”

  “You just worry about those warrants.”

  Bobby stepped through the curtain with the black box in both hands.

  “Ready to go, boss.”

  “Thanks, Bobby.” I took it off him, then had one more look at the six foot six dead guy—at his broken nose and lifeless eyes, then I turned and left.

  EIGHT

  The drive to the crime lab gave me time to think, and time to recover from the scene. The mind is a strange thing. It sees something truly awful, and instead of filing it away in a dark place to be forgotten, it replays it
on an endless nauseating loop. The big guy’s guts were on instant replay, the gruesome sight playing over and over, the white spinal bones peeking out of the black well of blood and guts and torn muscle.

  I rolled down the window and breathed in the cool air, a few deep breaths in and out.

  Stuart Arnold. The guy was everywhere. He was involved. He knew what was going on, no doubt about that. But where was the asshole?

  I wondered what was in the deposit box. Was it cash, or something else? Something to do with the project, maybe.

  The big guy flashed up once again. Lifeless and gruesome. And only a short time before I had been wrestling with him in Stuart’s bathroom. The encounter had left me feeling uneasy. The guy was strong. He’d kicked my ass, and now he was dead, and it didn’t even look like he’d put up a fight. How had someone killed him so easily? Was there someone out there bigger than he was, toting around a chain saw? Chopping off heads, throwing them in a sack? Santa Claus wearing a hockey mask came to mind.

  Why had the big guy turned up at the pawnshop anyway? What was he looking for?

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. Nothing was making any sense. It was all just one big mess, just like his guts. One big, god-awful mess.

  I changed lanes and spotted a car in the mirror. A silver car a hundred yards back. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but my sudden sense of vulnerability was making me paranoid. I’d seen a similar car parked across the road at the pawnshop.

  I took the next right, pulled in front of a parked car, and kept my eyes on the mirror.

  A late-model silver Lincoln with dark-tinted windows turned onto the road. It was moving slow at first. Then as it passed, it suddenly sped up, as if whoever inside knew they’d been made. I took down the plate and made a call.

  “Traffic Investigations,” came a woman’s voice.

  “Hi, Pam, it’s Blake. I need you to run a plate for me.”

  The Santa Clara Crime Laboratory was a modern building positioned in the northwest corner of a block dedicated to the Santa Clara judicial system. Four floors of forensics and evidence-based research. The entrance was set in a corner wall of glass which spanned the height of the building, and branched off into horizontal lanes of streamlined windows.

  I climbed the stairs to the first floor and entered the computer forensic unit. Aaron, as his badge indicated, met me at the entrance. He was a tall guy with a receding hairline, size twenty shoes and a fluff of hair which bounced as he walked.

  “Hey, can I help you?” he asked.

  “Detective Gamble,” I said. “Need someone to take a look at this ASAP.” I held out the PVR box, wrapped up in plastic.

  “I can do that. I’ll need to fill out the paperwork, though, and run a write blocker to make sure I don’t erase anything.” He took it off my hands.

  “How long?”

  “Half hour or so?” He said it like a question.

  “I’ll be back then.”

  I left Aaron to do his thing, then headed to the fourth floor via the elevator. I passed down a long corridor into the forensics wing and spoke with an attractive young intern, getting her to show me through to Calloway.

  “I was wondering when you’d show up.” Calloway’s speckled eyes smiled behind the face shield as she approached.

  “It’s been a busy day,” I told her. “Just had two more DBs.”

  “I heard. Any luck with the investigation?”

  “Tech’s going through the footage downstairs. Hopefully have our perp caught in the act.”

  I got into the full set of PPE: gloves, Tyvek coveralls, face mask, and booties. Then I followed Calloway into the examination room, where Nicholas Hartmann’s headless body was laid out on a stainless steel table, chest open.

  “I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” she said, walking around to stand on one side of the table as I joined her on the other.

  “What can you tell me?”

  “Nothing conclusive,” she said. “You know how it is. It’ll take a week to get test results back, longer for some, shorter for others.”

  “Okay.”

  “The gunshot wounds killed him. The vast majority of the blood had left the body before the head was removed.”

  “How long between him getting shot and losing his head, you think?”

  “At least an hour,” she said.

  “An hour? The guy in the surveillance tape leaves straight after Nicholas goes in. He shoots him, he leaves. So where’s the damn head?”

  “I don’t know,” said Calloway, shrugging. “Guess he wasn’t the one who cut the head off.”

  I thought about that. “Okay, what else?”

  She reached to the wall counter behind her and grabbed a sample container. She handed it to me and it rattled. “Two bullet fragments,” she said.

  I held them up, looking at the compressed slugs. “Pretty good shape.”

  “They’ll have to pass through our expert down in ballistics, but if you look carefully, there’s marks along the sides.”

  “Suppressor?” I asked.

  “That’s my guess. The bullet slows down as it passes through the wipes of the suppressor, leaving marks along the way. The reduced speed would also explain the lack of breakup. But again—”

  “Yeah, I know,” I interrupted. “Ballistics. What else you got?”

  “The missing head is interesting.”

  “You mean apart from the fact that it’s gone?”

  Even behind the mask I could see the flat look she gave me.

  “I mean there’s something odd about the way it was done. Look, see here.” Calloway used a pinkie finger to point to the neckline, where the head was separated from the body. “The skin isn’t cut clean. It’s almost torn. Whatever was used passed through the neck, causing trauma to the skin and muscle tissue, breaking the spinal column.”

  “What sort of weapon you thinking?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe the blunt side of sword, maybe a very blunt axe. Something like that. Whatever it was, the impact was quite significant.”

  “How d’you figure?”

  “Because it was done in a single pass. See here.” Her finger traced the neckline. “The trauma is uniform across the entire separation. It wasn’t hacked at by a blade. Have you ever seen one of those terrorist beheading videos?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said.

  “Then you remember it isn’t like a Samurai sword in the movies. There’s a lot of muscle and tendons and bone in the neck. There’s cutting and hacking.”

  “So someone with a lot of strength, then?”

  She nodded, taking me in. “Oh, and that flower you found, one of the interns says it’s . . .” She grabbed a Post-it note off the top of a clipboard. “Leontopodium alpinum. Commonly referred to as Edelweiss. Not confirmed, though.”

  “Edelweiss?” I asked.

  “The hills are alive,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “You know, The Sound of Music?”

  “Never seen it.”

  “Seriously?” she asked. “Edelweiss is a mountain flower. Men climb the dangerous rocky Alps of Austria to bring it back to profess their love.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  She cackled. “Forget it.”

  “What about the remains of the head?”

  “Very unusual. You’ll have to wait for results on that one. I’m still baffled by the missing skull. It’s got me stumped.”

  “So if the skull didn’t dissolve, where the hell is it, then?”

  “If I had to guess, and I’m just speculating here,” she said, moving away from the table toward the door, “I’d say whoever removed this man’s head somehow removed the organic matter, then took the skull with them.”

  “A trophy?” I asked, following her.

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  I had briefly considered that already. Serial killers were known to take trophies from their victims. Reliving the crime extends the fantasy. A lock of hair, shoes, jewelry, underwea
r, photographs. It’s all been done before.

  “Ted Bundy,” said Calloway. “He kept heads.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The shopkeeper’s head was taken as well. You could be right.”

  We left the room and removed our face masks. Calloway put her hands on her hips as she stood and spoke to me. “What I don’t understand is how the organic matter was separated from the skull so quickly. I can’t think of anything that could do that.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. The whole thing is kooky as hell.”

  “Shit, Blake, what happened to your head?”

  “Huh?” I absently moved a hand to the cut. “Oh, it’s nothing.”

  “Nothing, my ass. That thing is gaping.”

  “It’ll have to wait.”

  “What happened?” She moved closer and pushed my hair out of the way, inspecting it with her thumbs.

  “Some dead guy pistol-whipped me.”

  She frowned.

  “He was alive at the time.”

  “It needs stitches.”

  “It can wait. I don’t have time for hospital visits.”

  “No. It can’t. It’ll get infected. Come with me.” She grabbed my sleeve and pulled me into one of the examination rooms. “Sit.”

  “On the dead person table?”

  She eyed me. I jumped up on the edge of the table, then she went about opening cupboards, pulling out gauze and bandages and a sterilized sealed packet containing a needle and thread. Then she loaded it all into a kidney dish and placed it down beside me on the table.

  “Jesus, Blake. You need to take better care of yourself.” She tore open a Betadine antiseptic sachet.

  “You too, huh?”

  She gave me a stern look. The kind of look a mother gives a disobedient child. Then she began rubbing the antiseptic wipe over the wound.

  I winced. “Terry was asking me if I was okay. Terry.”

  “Maybe he cares about you,” she said.

  I didn’t reply, just sat there and watched her get the needle ready. “Have you thought about talking to anyone?” she asked gently.

  “I don’t need to talk to anybody. I’m fine.”

  “Blake, I’ve known you for a long time now. I can tell something’s wrong.”