Corus and the Case of the Chaos

by Mark Hazard

  The bank manager was a broad shouldered man with a stuffy, snobbish demeanor. This man owned a sailboat. Corus would bet his life on it. The name, Ashleigh Badcocke was printed on the diplomas and degrees framed and hanging on his walls.

  “Well, obviously we didn’t get enough,” Corus said.

  “Miles was beloved here,” the bank manager reiterated. “There just isn’t much to say.”

  Corus held his field pad in one hand. On its open page, he had the only two leads he could conceive of: The check-out records at Skokim Pass and a rehashing of things with the deceased Miles Griffins’ co-workers at Pacific Trust. Both leads were as weak as the legs of a baby gazelle.

  “Normally, we’d come in here with a team of five or six investigators and get all your statements,” Corus said.

  “And that you did. Almost a year ago.”

  “Well, I’m only one guy. They don’t send me back unless there are things that have gone unsaid. Things that need to be said.”

  Badcocke shifted and crossed his legs behind his desk. He tapped his thumb on his leg. “What is it that needs to be said?”

  “Someone here was doing something illegal. I don’t know what, but since we are in a bank, I’m gonna take a giant leap of faith and say it had to do with money, the moving or storing of it.”

  “Do you have proof of these allegations?” Badcocke asked with haughty indignance.

  “What part of England are you from Mr. Badcocke?”

  “I…well…Brighton, originally.” Mr. Badcocke’s mouth kept moving in an attempt to give voice to his shock. “How did you know? I’ve been here since I was a child. They tell me I don’t have an accent.”

  “That’s not important.”

  Seriously, it was like none of these goons had ever heard of Google.

  “Do you maintain UK citizenship?”

  Badcocke paused a moment before making a small, uncertain flourish with his hand. “Yes, I do.”

  “Have you ever been to Europe in a banking capacity?”

  “No, only to see family.”

  “Are your family bankers?”

  “No.”

  Perhaps Mr. Badcocke’s were humble beginnings.

  “What part of Brighton did you grow up in?”

  “Southwick.”

  “Refresh my memory, is that to the east or west of the River Adur?”

  “West…no east.”

  “Which is it Mr. Badcocke?”

  “East. It’s east of the river.”

  “Mr. Badcocke. I don’t take kindly to people lying to the authorities, especially to me.”

  Mr. Badcocke’s temples glistened with a fine layer of sweat. Nothing like a spur of the moment geography quiz to make grown men quaver.

  “Maybe your nice little constables over in England with their nice little ticket books don’t mind getting a line of shit fed to them. Maybe they like getting talked to like they’re stupid assholes.”

  Bullying was one of the lower forms of police investigation, but Corus was desperate. It would have to do for now.

  “I didn’t mean disrespect.”

  “I know people don’t like cops coming and getting up in their lives. Fair enough. But a family was murdered, Mr. Badcocke. Are you going to help the murderers or help me?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “It couldn’t possibly be more simple.”

  Badcocke uncrossed his legs and slumped forward onto his desk, defeated.

  “Miles was a good man. He was the best kind of man. Salt of the Earth.” Badcocke stared blankly at the desk calendar on which his elbows rested. “I just don’t want his reputation to be tarnished. It’s not right to do ill to the dead. I believe that.”

  Corus leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “What would tarnish his reputation?”

  “No, I didn’t mean it like that. I never knew Miles to do anything below board. I’m just afraid you will…complicate his legacy.”

  “Mr. Badcocke. There are shit cops who just want to throw things around and file reports. I’m not one of them. I walked around Miles’ dead body. I saw his children, his wife, what was done to them. I assure you my aim is to help Miles. If he was involved in something, don’t you think he’d be the first one to help us, now that he sees what it all came to?”

  Ashleigh Badcocke breathed in and out, then again. “Very well, if you come back tomorrow, I’ll introduce you to one of his closest co-workers, and we’ll have an honest chat about it.”

  NINE

  The King County Medical Examiner’s office sat four or five blocks away from HQ in downtown Seattle, part of the larger Harborview Medical Center complex. Corus found the office of Wilhelmina Pooche, M.D. and knocked twice on the open door.

  “Entrez-vous,” a tinny voice said.

  Corus stepped around some boxes to the desk. Behind a pile of papers and manila folders on the desk sat Dr. Wilhelmina Pooche. She was less than five foot, and round. Her face was wrinkled and her hair was a mottled black and grey. She looked up at Corus with one eye squinting.

  “What what?”

  “Hi Willy. I need a favor.”

  “What favor? What what?”

  “Can you help me go over that Skokim Pass murder?”

  “You don’t solve it yet?”

  “No. That’s why I’m here.”

  “I did my reports. Now I have more reports to do.” She waved a stubby hand at the wash of papers.

  “I read the reports, Willy. I need your eye on them. The human touch.”

  “What what? You don’t touch them. No one touches my cadavers.”

  “No one is touching your dead bodies, Willy.” Corus held up both hands. “I just meant I need your full interpretation, in person.”

  People rarely accused Corus of being a people person, but Willy made him feel positively social. He figured she would be odd even without the language barrier.

  Corus produced a white paper baggie of chocolate covered cherries that he’d acquired in Tukwila. Dr. Pooche took it, opened it and stuck her whole face in the bag. She inhaled three short sniffs and made an expression between a snarl and a smile.

  “Okay. We go.”

  Wilhelmina led Corus to another room filled only with file cabinets. A lonely computer workstation sat in the corner by the door.

  “You been called in to help with any more of those cop dramas?”

  “What what?”

  “That bullshit crime scene television show that’s on like five times a week. The spin-off in Seattle…”

  “Oh, that.” Dr. Pooche shrugged. “I tell them the truth. They go with their wrong version. I get a check.”

  “Is it good money? Maybe I’ll help out.”

  “You get a hundred bucks for a phone call, usually. Sometimes more if you go to the location.”

  Wilhelmina found the cabinet she was looking for and opened the top drawer. She had to stand on her toes to see the labels on the files, but quickly found the file marked Griffin/Skokim Pass/13.

  “Not bad money,” Corus said. “You got a little racket going Willy.”

  “Perhaps. Maybe I go buy boat.”

  “Do you like boats?”

  “No. But men like boats. I like men.”

  Corus laughed. “Willy, you little minx.”

  “Or I buy many figurine.”

  “What kind?”

  “Cat.”

  Corus nodded. “Sure.”

  He went back to the computer workstation by the door and pushed the monitor and keyboard to the edge.

  “So take me through the basics again. I need to start over from scratch.”

  Dr. Pooche followed him and laid out the four different reports. The first three pages of each held diagrams of human bodies at different angles, upon which Wilhelmina had made marks and notes.

  “The woman. One entry wound in abdomen. No exit. Bullet hit spine at the tenth thoracic vertebra and fragmented. One fragment found under skin by a rib, one lodged in colon, many
more in soft tissue of back. One entry wound through top of right ear, exit below left side of jaw. Moribund. Stomach contents indicate last meal approximately six hours before. Blood alcohol .06. No other toxicity.”

  “Okay, the man.”

  Dr. Pooche picked up the report for Miles Griffin and adjusted her glasses. She described Miles’ two bullets to the chest. One passed through him, breaking a rib on the way in and out and piercing his left lung. One bullet disintegrated upon impact, carving out an apple sized hole where his left nipple had been. “This most likely was moribund without the head wound,” Wilhelmina said. “The left ventricle was damaged most severe.”

  She continued with the younger boy, Joseph. The bullet that had passed through his upper arm tore through his aorta and lodged against his right scapula. The other hit him in the bottom of the ribs, turned and exited beneath his right shoulder.

  “So the mother might have lived without the headshot.”

  “Most likely, but paralyzed.”

  “And the older boy?”

  “You saw it for yourself, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was a single gunshot wound. I think it entered just above the left eye, but I cannot be certain because the eye socket was obliterated and I could not find a beveling.”

  “The beveling?”

  “This is like the shape of the bone where a bullet enters the skull. Usually tells me direction of travel, but here there was too much trauma at the point of impact.”

  Corus studied the reports and asked a few questions, but all he learned was some technical jargon about minutiae, nothing that told him any more about who might have done this.

  “What about the father? Had he been drinking too?”

  Willy squinted over Miles Griffin’s report. Her bottom lip bobbed up and down unconsciously as she searched. “Blood alcohol was .09. No other toxicity. Had not eaten in at least 10-12 hours.”

  “And the boys? Had they eaten?”

  “Yes. Let me see…” Dr. Pooche flipped pages. “Yes. Approximately six hours, like the mother.”

  “Can you tell what they had eaten?”

  “I could have at the time, but it would have required labs that no one asked for.”

  “Do you remember anything?”

  “After six hours, little is left in the stomach.”

  “Anything Willy.” Corus pinched the bridge of his nose. “Anything.”

  “I think…” Dr. Pooche hesitated. “I think, maybe, I saw lettuce.”

  “Lettuce?”

  She adjusted her glasses with her small, thick fingers. “Yes, lettuce. Little bit.”

  TEN

  Corus sat cross-legged on the floor of basement level B, storage room F-2, surrounded with papers, crime scene photos, and copies of the medical examiner’s reports. Chu knocked on the open door.

  Corus motioned him inside. “Close the door.”

  “Why? There’s no one down here?”

  “Just do it.”

  “You know, I’m the boss. You really should be coming up to see me.”

  “That was the whole point of this room, L-T. So I wouldn’t have to be around the moron division.”

  “How do you like the room? I think they used to store armory supplies in here. Thought you’d like the scent of gun oil.”

  “Come here and look at this.” Corus slid a crime scene photo away from the pile, and turned it toward Chu. “You see here.” He pointed at a broken window. “The round that killed the older boy. We figured he was standing when shot, because of the height of the spot where it went through the window after.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “Well, so…”

  “So?” Chu shook his head.

  “I got nothing.” Corus dropped the photo. “Dammit.”

  “Still?”

  “I feel like I’m at the edges of something, like I’m at a party with acquaintances but I can’t recall any of their names.”

  “You haven’t found anything so far?”

  “Bits and pieces maybe. Jim likes the ‘two shooter’ theory. Thinks we should look at organized crime since kids were involved.”

  “Makes sense.” Chu bent a knee to get closer to the array of evidence. “Any luck at the bank?”

  “I put a little bit of a scare into the manager.”

  “What did you use? The Brain Splitter? The Montevideo Shuffle? That thing where you guess what kind of porn they watch?”

  Corus smoothed a bent corner on the photo. “I used Google.”

  “Google?”

  “Yeah. I couldn’t be sure I’d be able to work him au naturel so I came in prepared. Good thing too, because I couldn’t find my…”

  “Special place?”

  “My what?” Corus shook his head. “Jesus…”

  “Your secret mind laser?”

  Corus jutted up his lower lip in thought. “Maybe that’s more like it.”

  “Your groove?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Anyhow, he seemed to be willing to cooperate. I’ll go back tomorrow and see what he has for me.”

  “Hey, so how was acupuncture?”

  “It was ok.”

  “Eugene’s pretty cool, huh.”

  “He’s pretty massive. When he gets a treatment I bet they have to use fence posts for needles.”

  “He says you’re going back.”

  “So?”

  “Good for you.” Chu slapped him in the shoulder. “You’re growing.”

  “I’m desperate.”

  Chu cocked his head. “Really? What are you desperate for? I didn’t think you needed anything or anyone.”

  “I need my job.”

  “What do you need money for?”

  “Still paying off Karen’s lawyer fees, for one, but that’s not it. I need this job. Didn’t quite realize how much.”

  “So while you are still mortal, and don’t have your mojo, how are you going to solve this case?”

  “The same way an addict stays sober. Admit my weakness and take it one day at a time.”

  “You should come over to the house tonight for movie night. We’re watching Wendy’s favorite.”

  Corus looked over and cocked an eyebrow. “Mulan?”

  “Ha-Ha. You so, so funny,” Chu said in an overdone Chinese accent, before reverting to his normal, enthusiastic voice. “No, man. How Stella Got Her Groove Back!”

  Corus narrowed his eyes at Chu. “How Stella Got Her Groove Back?”

  “Yeah,” Chu said.

  “Groove?” Corus cocked an eyebrow. “

  “Yeah. Ok. Groove. So sue me. It might be inspirational.”

  “How is watching Angela Bassett get freaky with Taye Diggs gonna solve my problems?”

  “So, you’ve seen it!”

  “There is no way that’s anyone’s favorite movie,” Corus said.

  “Are you kidding? Angela Bassett’s arms are to die for. She’s where Michelle Obama got the inspiration.”

  “One day, Chu, you and I are going to have a long talk.”

  “You? A long talk? I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  Corus picked up a photo of a brass casing from a 5.56 mm round. He looked at it, turning the photo right and left. Then he returned to the picture he had first shown Chu. He examined it for a moment and shuffled photos around until he spotted a close-up of the bullet hole in the window. The hole was the size of a quarter, and surrounded by a dense spidering and a few long cracks radiating outward.

  “Chu, we need to see a man about a bullet.”

  The King County Sheriff’s department, despite employing over a thousand people and policing two thousand square miles of Seattle’s suburbs and environs, did not have a crime lab or a forensics team. Investigators were trained in the fundamentals of evidence collection and forensic analysis, but lacked the tools and resources every weeknight cop show implied they had.

  The expectations of the public had increased enormously with the success of forensic entertainment. If a si
de mirror of a car was clipped in the night, a citizen often expected you to whip out a tool bag, take some atomic evidence back to some lab, cross-reference a database and have the perpetrator in custody by lunchtime. Of course, these high hopes only led to disappointment and further loss of faith in the police. However, when the nature of a piece of evidence was such that a major case hung upon it, and the investigator didn’t have the tools or expertise to analyze it properly, there was one place an investigator could go for help.

  The Washington State Crime Lab had five locations: Spokane, Vancouver, Marysville, Tacoma and Seattle. When Corus had worked on his first shooting murder with Jim Cummins ten years ago, Jim had turned south on I-5 away from Seattle. Corus asked the veteran detective why they weren’t going to the lab in Seattle. It was the biggest, after all, and it was where investigators received most of their forensic training.

  Jim answered, “The best butcher is usually the one who lives closest to the slaughterhouse.”

  Chu wrinkled up his nose. “Ah, it stinks, here.”

  “It’s not as bad as it used to be,” Corus said. “The smell anyways.”

  They passed a green highway sign that read,

  NOW ENTERING TACOMA

  Pop. 198, 397

  Chu waved two fingers in front of himself. “Tacoma…You will never find such a wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”

  “What?”

  “It’s from Star Wars. Nevermind. This place just gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

  “They were doing a decent job attracting the yuppies back before the housing bubble,” Corus said.

  However, the bubble had burst. The city’s renovation budget dried up and efforts at reclaiming the city from poverty, crime and general decay stalled. Though its crime rates had dropped since 2000, they were still twice the national average. Tacoma remained as ever a city highly segmented by wealth and race. Bad for civic life, but good for sharpening Washington State’s best kept forensic secret, the Tacoma ballistics lab.

  “Darn yuppies,” Chu said, with genuine anger in his voice. “Gentrifying everything and making our own houses too expensive for us hood rats to buy or pay taxes on. Why can’t you all just commute from Maple Valley like the rest of the rich white people.”