Ron spoke to two of the task force detectives and assigned them the job of interviewing the witness. “Let’s make sure he tells us everything he knows and that he’s not hiding anything.”
“We’re on it. But he’s probably clean if he was just walking up.”
“Most likely. And so far, you haven’t found anything else?”
The officer shook his head. “No, sir. We have no signs that there was any sort of altercation or that he was pushed. CSI unit’s already here. They’re upstairs now. They might know something else by now.”
Ron thought for a second, then he turned to the ME. “You see anything on the body that looks suspicious?”
She shook her head. “Not so far. Nothing that jumps out.”
“Very funny,” Ron said.
She chuckled. “Old joke. Let me just say that based on a very early first impression, I don’t see anything that looks like the guy’s been in a fight.” She shined a bright flashlight on his neck, then on his wrists. “No ligature marks, nothing like that. ’Course it’s kind of hard to tell because of the massive impact trauma injuries when he hit the sidewalk here. If he had some kind of head injury, it’d be pretty hard to distinguish from the trauma of the fall. But I’ll know more when I get him to the morgue.”
Ron nodded. “Thanks.” He took a last look around. “Alright, guys, let’s go upstairs and check out his apartment.”
Bannister’s apartment was on the top floor of the five-story walk-up. “What’d I tell you,” Yoshi said, breathing hard as we stepped off the fourth flight of stairs. “No friggin’ elevator; unit on the top floor.” We paused outside the door to Bannister’s apartment where we each slipped on pairs of blue rubber gloves and booties. Safely attired, we walked past the uniformed officer guarding the door and went inside. Three detectives from the CSI unit were inside, gathering evidence.
“Hey, Barry,” Ron said to a studious-looking man with a clipboard. “What have you got?”
The lead CSI detective, a thin man in his late forties, looked up and, seeing Ron, smiled. “Hi, Ron. Good to see you.” He turned and looked around the apartment quickly before refocusing on Ron. “Not much here—at least not so far, anyway. I’ve got two people up on the roof. That’s where he went off. But inside here? Nothing.”
“No struggle?”
“Nope. Nothing apparent. Place is clean. Matter of fact, judging by the age of the stuff in the refrigerator, I’d say it hasn’t even been lived in for a while.”
Ron nodded. “Yeah—that’s consistent with what we’re thinking. We don’t think he’s been staying here.”
“And I hear the guy was a murder suspect?”
Ron nodded. “Yeah. His girlfriend was strangled this past Monday, and we’re thinking he might have had something to do with it. In fact, there’s a reasonable chance he might have been involved with the Sophie Thoms murder a few months back too.”
“No shit? Guess that would explain why your task force is here in full force,” Barry said.
“Exactly. Funny thing is, I talked to this guy Bannister last night. He was supposed to come to the station for questioning an hour ago. We were all over at the office waiting—had nearly our whole crew there.” Ron looked around the apartment. “Looks like he decided to come here first. Obviously, he never showed up downtown. Now we know why.”
“Sorry about that.”
Ron shrugged. “Shit happens—especially on this case. But do me a favor and be especially alert for anything that looks suspicious, anything that might tie this guy to either of those other murders.”
“You say his girlfriend was strangled?”
Ron nodded. “Yeah.”
“And Sophie Thoms was strangled too, as I recall.”
“That’s right.”
Barry looked at him. “So you might be interested in this rope we found, then?” He reached down and picked up a clear plastic evidence bag with a coil of thin, gray rope inside.
Ron’s eyes widened. “Hell yeah, we would.” He held the bag up and studied the rope. “Have a look at this.” He passed it to Yoshi.
Yoshi held the bag up, and we all stared at the rope. “That looks like the exact same type of rope that we found on Judie Lawton,” Yoshi said.
“Sure does,” Ron said.
Yoshi handed me the bag, and I was immediately struck by how light the rope was. “Damn—this stuff doesn’t weigh anything, does it?”
“It’s pretty light, and I’ll bet it’s way strong too,” Barry said. “It’s not a natural fiber; it’s some kind of synthetic. We’ll get it in the lab and figure out what it is. Might be useful to you.”
“Soon as you can,” Ron said. “We’d appreciate it.” I handed the bag back to Barry.
I turned and looked at the rest of the apartment. The furnishings, along with the apartment itself, were old and well-worn. Still, the place was neat and clean, apparently well cared for. It certainly didn’t look like any kind of dive. And Barry was right—everything looked to be in its proper place. Nothing appeared to be broken or damaged, nothing was missing.
I walked over and examined the front door. “Doesn’t look like any signs of forced entry,” I said.
“I agree,” Barry called out, “but I’ll bet you guys find this interesting.” We walked over to the dining room table where he was standing. “Have a look at this.”
There were two stacks of mail on the table. One looked like typical junk mail, the other looked like more important stuff: utility bills, that sort of thing.
“Look at the postmark dates,” Barry said.
“Okay to touch?” I asked.
“Yeah, go ahead,” Barry said. “Just keep ’em in the same order.”
I picked up the top letter in one of the stacks. The date was October 25—just two days ago. “It was just like this?” I said. “Stacked and sorted just like this.”
“Just like that. We haven’t moved it.”
I looked at the stacks. “Well, somebody’s been bringing the mail in and going through it. And this stuff is only a couple days old.”
“Had to have been Bannister,” Ron said.
“But why would he risk doing that?” Toni asked. “Or even more odd, if he planned to kill himself, why bother?”
“Who knows?” Ron said. “Maybe he was waiting for something. Or maybe he wanted to get his affairs in order.”
“You mean before he jumped?”
“Before he turned himself in,” I said.
“He could have also done it because he was planning to jump,” Barry said. “I’ve seen that lots of times. People get screwed up in the head and want to kill themselves, but they don’t want to leave a mess for their relatives. So before they go, they pay off bills, clean things up, do the laundry—that sort of thing.”
“I’ve seen that too,” Ron said. “There’s something about the finality of—”
“Yo! Detective Levine!” one of the CSI detectives working in the bathroom called out.
“Yeah?” Barry said.
“Got something you need to see.”
Barry turned and walked over to the bathroom. With his back to us, he said, “That’s interesting.”
“What?” Ron said, impatiently. “What is it?”
Barry turned around. He was holding a blue plastic bag. He removed the black binder clip holding the bag shut and opened it to look inside. “It looks like cocaine to me.” He looked up. “We’ll Scott test it here, and then we’ll check it out in the lab.”
“I’ll bet we can already tell you what it is,” Ron said. Toni and I both knew what he meant. The blue plastic bag was an identical match to the half-pound bag we found in Judie Lawton’s apartment. “If it’s what I think it is, I’m guessing it’s cocaine, high-grade, about 60 percent pure.”
When we’d finished examining Bannister’s apartment, Barry led us back to the hallway and up the utility stairs to the roof. Stepping outside, I saw that the rain, which had been falling most of the day, had started up again
. The building’s roof was flat, perhaps one hundred feet long on the street side and maybe just a little more than that in depth. Small puddles formed here and there.
The building had apparently been retrofitted for central heating and cooling—HVAC machinery was located next to the doorway we’d just stepped through. Ventilation turbines and plumbing vent pipes poked through the roof at seemingly random intervals. A low parapet wall, perhaps two feet high, completely surrounded the roof, I suppose to shield the machinery and the plumbing from view from the neighboring buildings. Two CSI detectives had strung an extension cord to a portable light where they were working near the parapet at the front of the building—where Bannister had jumped. We walked over and joined them.
“Hey, guys. Anything new?” Barry asked when we reached them.
“Yeah,” the detective said. “It started raining again.”
“Other than that.”
“Oh. Well, in that case, no, nothing new.”
Barry chuckled. “Okay. Explain to the homicide detectives here what you’re seeing.”
“Alright,” the man said. “First thing, as you can see, the roof is flat. A lot of these little mid-rise buildings were built around the time of the World’s Fair back in the late fifties, and they have a similar roof style. My dad was a roofer, and he used to call this a built-up roof. That means it’s got layers of roofing paper and asphalt emulsion built up and then sealed with an emulsifier. Then, the whole thing gets a coating of this pea gravel you see down here.” He nudged the gravel with his shoe. “The gravel’s supposed to protect the roof from UV rays. Not that we have many of those up here, but whatever.” He leaned over and scratched at the damp gravel. “If the roof was old, this gravel would have been pushed and shoved and kicked all over the damn place through the years, and it wouldn’t be much use to us. Kind of like one of those old-fashioned Etch A Sketch things that’s been used and hasn’t been cleared off. But since the roof here looks like it was redone within the last couple of years, the gravel is still relatively undisturbed. We might be able to use it to get a bit of the story of what happened here.”
“First off, we can see what it’s not saying. There don’t appear to be any dramatic scuff marks or displacement marks that you’d probably see if there’d been a fight up here. In a scuffle, people kick and scrape the ground a lot. Unless someone noticed the scuff marks and fixed them later, the gravel would be moved, and we’d probably see more exposed roof material than we do. But we don’t see that here. Based on that, I’m saying that there was probably no struggle up here. On the other hand, you can see right over here where the gravel is displaced a little, kind of flattened out.” He pointed to a place where the gravel looked compressed.
“Looks like someone was sitting down there,” I said.
“That’s exactly what we think too. We think that’s where the vic sat down and removed his shoes and socks. And he left them right there.” He stepped aside and pointed, and we saw a pair of sneakers placed side by side. A sock was stuffed neatly into the top of each shoe. A small yellow CSI marker with the number 3 was placed alongside the shoes, to be used for reference in the photographs that had undoubtedly already been taken.
“He left them like this?” Ron asked.
The detective nodded. “Yep. Just like this. Classic suicide behavior with jumpers. We see it a lot.”
Ron nodded his head. “Strange, but true.” He looked at the shoes, then he walked over to the edge and looked down. “So it looks like this is the spot—where he went over?”
“Right about there, yep. Landed right down there where you see him.” I looked over the edge and saw Bannister’s body sixty feet below us on the sidewalk.
I scanned the whole area. “And you checked the rest of the roof?”
“We have. We’ve done a pretty thorough search of the whole roof, looking for anything that might be suspicious. We didn’t find anything though.”
I nodded. “It’s pretty dark up here. Will you be coming back in the daylight?”
“Oh yeah. We’ll be back in the morning to do a follow—up. It’s our standard procedure. But we like to make sure we do our initial assessment as soon as we know about the crime scene so that we can avoid as much contamination as possible—even if it means doing it at night.” He looked up. “In the rain.”
I nodded. This was the same way I had been taught.
I walked over to the edge and carefully looked down. “Let me ask you, if someone jumps from this high, are the falls always fatal?”
He thought for a minute. “Five floors? Fifty-sixty feet? I don’t know for sure, that’s probably a better question for the ME. But if you pressed me, I’d have to say the answer is probably. Maybe not always, but most of the time, probably so. I imagine it depends a lot on what you run into when you land. ’Course our vic didn’t get any help in that area because he landed on a concrete sidewalk. Not much give.”
I nodded. “How fast do you think he was going when he hit?”
He shrugged. “I’d say probably forty, maybe fifty miles per hour. Something like that.”
“Don’t matter,” Ron said. “You know what they say. It ain’t the speed, is it, Yosh?”
“Nope,” Yoshi said. “It’s the TDS.”
“TDS?” Toni said, walking right into it again.
Yoshi nodded. “Terminal Deceleration Syndrome. Gets ’em every time.”
We finished up on the roof and made our way back downstairs, where the ME staff was still working to release the body to the coroner. The rain was falling steadily now. The sidewalks glistened and reflected red, then blue with the lights from the patrol cars. Each brilliant flash from the ME’s camera illuminated the scene and seemed to freeze Bannister’s body in a grotesque death-pose, arms and legs splayed to the side, eyes half-open, a dark pool of blood beneath his head reflecting the light.
I watched for a minute, lost in thought, almost mesmerized by the sights and sounds until Ron walked over and joined me. “Well, hell. I just love it when a case solves itself,” he said, happily.
I turned to look at him for a second. For me, things had happened pretty fast in the last couple days, and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it yet—I was going to need a little more processing time to sort through all the events. Other than the incontrovertible fact that a man who had not long ago been alive was now lying here stone-cold dead right in front of me, I had no conclusions. Then again, I didn’t want to be rude, so I just nodded. “Yeah.” I said. “I suppose that would be nice, wouldn’t it.”
PART 2
Chapter 17
WE NEEDED A BREAK TO CLEAR our heads, so Toni and I took Sunday off. We drove over to Lake Crescent in the Olympic National Park and just hung out. I went for a long run, and afterward I sat in a camp chair and played my guitar. Toni alternated between reading a novel and dozing off and on. Mostly, we were just quiet, thinking about the case—so many unanswered questions.
Monday morning, we went to work, rested and determined to come up with answers. Unfortunately, things were not clearer. One day passed, then another, then another, and pretty soon, the whole week flew past in a blur. For about the fourth time, we went over all the evidence looking for something—anything—that would either corroborate or refute the case against Josh Bannister. We went through phone records looking for evidence of phone calls to or from Bannister, interviews that might shed some light on a drug transaction, financial records, photographs—everything SPD had. By the time the weekend rolled around, though, we still had the same murky lack of understanding as when we started: physical evidence saying one thing; what little we could find about Bannister’s background saying something else. Our main suspect was dead, and I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad.
In theory, the case was solved—that was the police position, anyway. I didn’t know what to believe—I’ll grant that what actual evidence there was tended to support the notion that Bannister was the guy. But to my mind, I wasn’t sure there was enough to
reach a definitive conclusion. For her part, Toni didn’t have any doubts at all. Her intuition told her that Bannister was being set up and somebody was about to get away with murder.
In any case, when she hired us last month, Cecilia paid us for three weeks through November 9—this Friday. After that, she either needed to extend our contract, or we were off. Business economics 101.
“Look at you,” Toni said to Kenny when he walked into our staff meeting the following Monday. “No more nose pack.” Kenny’d just gotten back from an early appointment at the doctor’s office where he’d had his bandage removed.
Kenny smiled. “That’s right. I’m back in business.”
“Good. You’re going back to Krav Maga, right?” I asked.
He nodded. “I am. I’m not going to let one little mistake mess things up for me.”
“Good for you,” Toni said.
Doc suddenly leaned over and stared at Kenny, then he turned around and looked at me. He turned back and we both stared at Kenny’s nose.
“What?” Kenny said. “What’s wrong?”
Doc tilted his head, then I followed suit.
“It’s just . . .” I said, holding my hands a few inches apart then shifting them to a small angle from straight up and down.
Doc nodded. “I think maybe it’s a little . . .”
Toni looked at Doc, then at me, then she caught on. “Stop it! You two stop it right now.” We froze, then straightened up.
Kenny looked at her, questions in his eyes.
“Your nose is fine,” she said, reassuring him. “These idiots are acting like children. Don’t listen to them.”
Kenny looked back at us, and Doc and I both tilted our heads again. I lifted my hands again, then we both started laughing.
“Ha, ha. Very funny, you fuckers,” he said. “I owe you.”
We were interrupted when the phone rang. Caller ID: Ron Bergstrom. I put him on speakerphone.
“Hey, guys. The lab got the sample tests back on the rope this morning,” he said without preamble.
Mona Lisa Eyes (Danny Logan Mystery #4) Page 21