Murder, Mayhem & a Fine Man

by Claudia Mair Burney

  Fine. I knew all about suicides. How hard could it be? I’d give the man one competent, professional insight. Five minutes. Show him what I’m made of, then get the heck out of there and never see those delicious brown eyes of his again.

  I said a silent prayer. Lord, let me help in some way, however small.

  With that simple prayer, the trouble began.

  Chapter

  Two

  ON THE PORCH I could smell death lurking. Rotting flesh is a stench you can almost feel. It claws like a predator, violating the senses. My eyes watered. I swallowed hard, trying not to gag. I began to sweat, as if my pores wanted to throw off the foulness that covered me like a shroud.

  Only five minutes. One useful insight.

  Jazz turned to me.

  “You know that Scripture that says, ‘We are fearfully and wonderfully made’?”

  I nodded.

  “That smell is the ‘fearfully’ part.”

  My mouth tried to make all the appropriate movements for a smile, but it didn’t quite succeed. My feet refused to go forward. We hadn’t stepped inside the house yet, and I could tell he’d already counted me among the carnage.

  Jazz reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, circular tin. He unscrewed the lid, revealing an ointment of some kind. He swiped some of the mixture onto his index finger and smeared it under his nose. In that swift motion, I caught the scent of peppermint, eucalyptus, and rosemary. I’d smelled this on Carly before. He held the tin out to me, and I dabbed a bit of the aromatic blend under my nose. It felt cool and stung a little.

  “It helps,” he said. “Some people use Vicks VapoRub, but I like this better. It’s also great on dry skin.” He flashed his childlike grin, and the kindness in his face soothed my jangled nerves. “I turned Carly on to this stuff.”

  That had better be all he turned her on to.

  I chastised myself for the stab of jealousy.

  “You don’t have to go in,” he said, probably having seen my expression change. Thank goodness he didn’t know the real reason.

  “It’s okay.” I could do this.

  A uniformed officer manning the door greeted us. He looked about twelve years old.

  “Officer Daniels, this is Dr. Amanda Brown.”

  The young, ruddy blond had the chunky build of a football player who doesn’t play much ball anymore. He seemed weary, yet eager to please Jazz. He looked at us, and I could almost see him drawing an inaccurate conclusion. “Lieutenant Brown, I’m sorry to interrupt you enjoying an evening with your wife.”

  Jazz smiled—another slow, easy dazzler—directed at me first and then at Officer Daniels. He removed his hand from my back. “Dr. Brown is not my wife.”

  Hmmph. I felt oddly disappointed. For one psychotic moment I really wanted to be his wife. I had to wonder if turning thirty-five made me vulnerable to some temporary midlife, no-man mental illness not yet classified in the DSM-IV.

  Daniels blanched, reddened, then swore. “Sorry, sir. When you said Brown…and the two of you look so nice together and all…I mean you look nice, not particularly together, but…”

  “It’s okay, Daniels,” Jazz said. “Dr. Brown is a forensic psychologist. She’s going to have a look at the scene.”

  “It’s bad in there; the heat made ’em ripen fast,” he said, his embarrassment faded by the sobering reality just inside the door. “Other than me and the ME who just went in, it’s all clear. Richards has the back of the house covered, and the Crime Scene Unit should be here to process the joint in a sec.”

  Jazz thanked the officer and then moved closer to the door. He stopped just outside it, reached into his suit-jacket pocket, removed a pair of latex gloves, and pulled them on. He looked at me. “Are you ready?”

  I went momentarily mute and nodded.

  “Usually I’m a gentleman, but I’d better go in first.”

  He stepped inside, and I followed.

  I’d had fantasies about what I would be like at a crime scene: My sharp, clinical eyes would take in every detail, my dazzling brain cataloging and calculating. Everyone would grow quiet, awaiting my brilliant assessment, and I would deliver—solving the crime, saving the day.

  Only that’s not how it happened. First, the entire extent of my criminology knowledge took a leave of absence. I felt like a woman who had been the perfect Lamaze student, then forgot all the breathing exercises the moment the first contraction hit.

  Once inside I processed the images before me as square pixels of random information. It was as if my mind were downloading digital photos without a high-speed connection. Shoe. Man’s shoe. Foot in shoe. Another. A thin leg in black trousers. Another. Broad, bony chest in red polo shirt. Arm. Arm. Skin color wrong. Bluish. Back locked in an arch.

  Carly crouched over the man on the floor. She ran her glove-sheathed hand down his rounded spine. “The bowed back is opisthotonus. Poor guy had spasms that caused the large muscles of his back to contract. In a case like this, rigor mortis sets in immediately. They’ve been dead about twenty-four hours.” She coughed and wrinkled her nose.

  “Seizure?” Jazz asked.

  “Spasms like a violent reaction to strychnine would cause. Look at the blue coloring and the face,” she said, nearly touching his lips.

  I looked at the young man’s face. Lord, have mercy—his mouth was stretched into a broad, teeth-baring grin. “He looks like he’s smiling,” I said, stating the obvious. The image etched itself into my memory. His eyes were wide milky protrusions with a swirl of blue in the center. Dark brown hair fell carelessly across his forehead.

  “Risus sardonicus. The death smile.”

  I imagined the spasms Carly had described and could almost feel his suffering. My heart pounded so hard I thought it would explode. In that moment I knew what the psalmist meant when he spoke of the valley of the shadow of death. I stood there now, and it scared me.

  Carly lifted the man’s arm. The part closest to the ground had purpled. “Lividity,” she said to Jazz. “Doesn’t look like he’s been moved.” She turned her attention back to her exam.

  I took a deep breath. Only one more body to see. This one lay on the couch, bent into the same unnatural pose. His face frozen in the same deathly grimace. This time everything processed faster in my head. Like the first man, he appeared to be in his late twenties to early thirties. He was somebody’s child, somebody’s friend, a person Jesus loved. I shut my eyes. Prayer came fast, and tumbled out of my mouth unbidden: “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation…”

  Rote memory. A prayer I’d learned as a child at my great-grandmother’s knee, emerging like unexpected grace. I guess Jazz liked the idea of a praying psychologist more than I’d realized. Before I could finish my prayer, he stood in front of me. His hands cradled my elbows. We prayed in unison: “…but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.”

  His voice caressed me. “Let me take you outside, Bell. You can come back a little later if you want to. The Crime Scene Unit just arrived. They’ll need to start collecting evidence.”

  “Uh.” My arms flailed about as I searched my mind for something sensible to say. Speech had abandoned me, but apparently crime scenes inspired my finest gesticulations. My left leg began to shake uncontrollably. I started blinking hard, and tears spilled from my eyes. I couldn’t think past the prayer. I couldn’t breathe for the suffocating smell.

  What happened here?

  I had a gnawing sense that we’d stumbled upon something more than a willing suicide. I could feel Death crouching nearby, having snatched two. The room felt all wrong. Something bad—not just suicide bad—had gone down. It sickened me in a wave of cold and nausea.

  I became vaguely aware of the small group of men and women wandering into the room—real crime-sce
ne investigators—unglamorous and preoccupied. Two men with camera equipment began to take photographs of the scene from every angle imaginable.

  My body trembled. I tightened the red shawl around my arms. Jazz’s strong arms enveloped me.

  “You’re getting cold.”

  I rested my head on his chest.

  Carly ignored me while she worked, as if she saw me hugged up with a strange man at a crime scene every day. Activity buzzed around us, but he didn’t let me go. He tried to avert my attention. “Talk to me.” When he spoke, I felt the rumble of his voice against my face. “What’s your favorite color?”

  “Purple. At least, it was before I saw that guy’s arm.”

  He drew away from me and took a long look at my red dress. “You should consider changing it to red.” He pulled me back into his arms. “What’s your favorite Scripture?”

  Another welcome diversion.

  “The Ninety-first Psalm. In The Message.”

  He rubbed my back, and, my goodness, it would have felt rather cozy if I could have just shaken the horror threatening to engulf me. The sound of his voice became my anchor. “I like that one, too. What does it say in The Message?”

  “Verse fourteen says, ‘“If you’ll hold on to me for dear life,” says God, “I’ll get you out of any trouble.”’”

  “Do you do that?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “You hold on to God like you’re holding on to me?”

  “I try to.”

  His chuckle rumbled in my ear.

  We stood that way until my heart beat in sync with the steady thump of his, drumming against my ear.

  Camera lights flashed in a small storm around us.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Um-hmm.”

  I couldn’t very well stay in his arms all night—well, I could, but he had work to do. Besides, the time had come for me to show him what I’m made of.

  I reluctantly pulled away from his warmth. For a moment I watched my sister across the room, now examining the victim on the couch and dictating notes into a digital voice recorder. Her image mirrored something solid and reliable to me. I thought of Ma Brown, daughter of Aimee, a slave woman, who gifted her child with stories—of beatings, of rape, of being greased and sold on an auction block, and also of finding freedom by following the North Star. I tried to take courage from the praying matriarch of my family, long gone home to her Jesus. Her likeness remained in my sister and me.

  I’m not as strong as you, Ma. I’m not even as strong as Carly.

  Then the small still voice inside me whispered, Yes you are.

  The voice surged through my body, and I knew, as I know the back of my freckled hand, that if Ma Brown could hear me from heaven, she’d say, “Call on Jesus.”

  So I bowed my head in reverence and called, Jesus. Oh, dear God, sweet Jesus.

  I felt my great-grandmother’s strength surge within me, and I pulled it around me like a quilt. Jazz lifted my face with his hand. In his gesture I felt my great-grandmother’s Jesus comfort me, stilling my quaking body with a touch from this beautiful man who had stopped working to pray with me.

  “Lieutenant,” I said, “I’ve been in this house before.”

  Chapter

  Three

  LIEUTENANT JAZZ BROWN raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been here? Do tell.”

  “Just a sec.”

  I stood rooted to the spot, taking in the room. The plain dácor had a stripped-down, ascetic feel to it.

  It didn’t look like this before.

  White walls, old paint. Nail punctures pocked the surface. The pictures or posters once adorning the walls were now gone. A simple, flat basket—nearly as wide as an end table—lay on the floor in the center of the living room near the dead man. Big, plain floor pillows—the kind that one would get for a dorm room—rested on the worn green shag carpet.

  I turned my attention to the area just beyond the bodies. A small bookcase with three shelves held a few books. I tiptoed over to it and crouched. A worn Gideon’s Bible leaned against a paperback Webster’s student dictionary. Next to them stood a thin, black three-ring binder with the name “Gabriel” labeled on the one-inch spine. Six spiral-bound notebooks were stacked in a neat pile next to it.

  I called out to my sister, who was now thoroughly engaged in examining the second victim. “Carly, you said something about strychnine, right? You’re sure they were poisoned?”

  “Can’t say for certain till we get them back to the morgue and do a tox screen, but it looks like it to me.”

  “A suicide?”

  She shrugged. “It’s possible.”

  I looked at Jazz. “What’s your first impression?”

  “I’ve been a detective for too long to trust impressions. I’m like Joe Friday. Just the facts, ma’am.”

  “And what are the facts?”

  Jazz prowled the room like a stealth lion, careful not to disturb evidence. “No cups or glasses by the bodies or in the sink,” he said. “No syringes. No pill bottles. No suicide note.” He stopped his perpetual motion and closed his eyes briefly. “Johnson,” he said to one of the CSIs, a woman hovering over the body on the floor, “make sure they scour this house for poison. Anything these guys could have ingested.”

  When he finished barking orders, he came back over to me, reached out a hand, and helped me up from my crouching position. Again, I felt sparks. He briefly locked eyes with me and his fair skin betrayed him; a blush spread across his cheek.

  Jazz looked relieved when another brother—six feet two inches of dreadlocked, cocoa brown fineness—walked up to us. Jazz shifted his attention, thank God, to the man wearing a navy blue Windbreaker that said “CSU Forensics.” Where does the city of Detroit get these guys? I wondered if the Wayne County Jail was hiring. I needed to work with cute guys.

  Cocoa Brown Hottie greeted Jazz with a complicated handshake that black men do effortlessly. Women would have to take Soul Handshake 101 to master it.

  “Hook me up, Souldier. I’m looking for strychnine. Be ruthless,” Jazz said to his comrade.

  “No doubt, Lieutenant,” he said. They finished with another variation of the handshake, and the man he called Souldier turned to face me.

  Jazz introduced us. “This is my boy, Souldier, with an S-OU-L. He’s the shift supervisor for our crime-scene investigators. You’d like him, Bell. He’s a dedicated Christian.”

  “Blame my mother,” Souldier said. “That old Pentecostal song ‘I’m a Soldier in the Army of the Lord’ got to me when I was knee-high to a grasshopper.”

  Jazz was right. I did like him. Then again, what woman with eyes wouldn’t? I thrust out my hand to shake his.

  “I’m Amanda Brown.”

  “Brown?” Souldier shot a quizzical look at Jazz.

  “She’s Carly’s sister, a forensic psychologist.”

  Souldier laughed. “Oh, okay. I have to keep an eye on Jazzy. He’d pull a fast one on a brother.”

  “But enough about me,” Jazz said, silencing any more commentary that would clarify what the handsome CSI supervisor meant. They’d piqued my curiosity, but the two of them created such a pretty distraction that I didn’t bother to ask for details. Besides, I needed to spill my guts about why I’d been in this house before I spilled them in another, less productive way.

  “I think I came to a Bible study here.”

  Souldier excused himself and joined his team, now busy setting numbered markers by the bodies and taking more pictures. A woman working with a portable ultraviolet light illuminated fibers on the floor pillows barely noticeable to the naked eye. They worked with solemn efficiency.

  Jazz Brown studied me with greater interest. “Do you recognize the deceased?”

  “No. It had to be years ago that I visited, and the people I met were alive.”

  He gave me a half smile. “Your five minutes are up, Dr. Brown. Any other observations?”

  “While I wouldn’t rule out suicide just yet, I’d con
sider the possibility that they may have had assistance.”

  “Go on,” he said, without a hint of his former mockery.

  “I’d do a psychological autopsy. Find out everything I can about their last days—what they did and what their state of mind was leading up to”—I paused and sighed—“their demise. I’m sure that’s your standard procedure anyway, Lieutenant.”

  Jazz nodded.

  Sadness settled over me. I felt so sorry for the dead men. “Do you have their identities?”

  “I do.”

  “Is one of them named Gabriel?”

  “No.”

  “I’d start with the notebooks. Since these guys have so few possessions here and neither of them is named Gabriel, it’s probably significant. I’d also look closely at all their relationships—or lack of relationships.”

  “Do you have any specific relationships in mind?” Jazz asked, taking another quick glance at the two bodies.

  “This could have been more than a suicide pact between two close friends.”

  He looked impressed. “Tell me more, Dr. Brown.”

  “It may be something religious.”

  He paused for a few moments, and his eyes swept the room while the CSI team labored, dusting for prints. Souldier gave directions to a man holding a digital video camera.

  Jazz turned his attention back to me. “Why religious?”

  “Look at the room. It’s fit for a monk. There’s a Bible, but no other reference materials that would illuminate the scriptures. Just a Gideon’s Bible, probably lifted from a motel room.”

  He nodded. “Keep talking, Doctor.”

  The odious smell of decaying flesh and escaped bodily fluids assaulted me again. Jazz seemed only mildly fazed by it. I blew a quick breath out of my lungs and steeled myself to continue. “I don’t see many creature comforts here, so maybe the absence of dácor is less about feng shui and more about control. If this is some kind of religious thing, I’d bet whoever the leader is keeps a tight rein on what gets into the heads of the followers. Look, if it was a Bible study I attended here years ago, that wasn’t a good thing.” I wished I had a drink of water. I wished I were somewhere else—a place where the odor wasn’t about to make me lose consciousness.