It could have happened that way, Estelle thought. “We’ll call that number two.”
And the damage continued. Another wound punctured the victim’s right chest, just an inch or so to the right of the midline. If it had blown straight in, the slug would have missed his heart after punching through the heavy pectoral muscle, shattering ribs, and then likely macerating lung and liver. Or it could have angled to the victim’s left, careening through the heart itself. She focused on the wound, noting the absence of powder flecks. The wound hadn’t bled much, and she guessed that the gusher of even more vessels ripped apart had stayed within the vault of the chest cavity.
But if this was chronologically wound number three, the victim’s blood pressure already would have been headed toward the basement. Maybe he was still standing, maybe on his way down. Any one of the three shots would have sent Scott sailing into a deep pit of shock and then unconsciousness, slammed to the floor of the shower, flat on his back.
Estelle squatted down, keeping her knees out of the water. She looked toward the far wall, where the shower might have been running. “If he started there, under the shower, and ended up here, he was out of the direct spray of the shower, even with it running.” No one spoke. “So this is what we have. None of the four bullet wounds in the corpse are either under water, or in the spray. None of the entrance wounds, anyway.”
She gazed at the blank look on the victim’s face. No pain, no surprise, no anger. Just nothing. There was no doubt in her mind that he never felt the fourth wound, and she turned the camera on that. The shot had taken him in the center of his heart, and unlike the others, had been fired close enough that the corona of unburned powder granules marked the wound to the left of midline. The corona of powder stippling was circular, the size of a dinner plate. A single, tiny rivulet of blood—the sort of trail that might be produced by skin capillaries as the body’s system pressure collapsed—oozed from the hole but did not cross the corona of powder residue.
Estelle stood to rest her knees, and glanced at the camera’s battery icon displayed on the back. While she fished in her jacket pocket for another set of batteries, she said to Perrone, “Your thoughts?”
“Somebody wanted him really dead,” Dr. Perrone observed. “I’m guessing that any one of the four shots would be fatal. I mean, this guy was quite the athlete, but this stopped him in his tracks. No fighting, no crouching in the corner, no trying for the doorway to escape, no defensive wounds.” He glanced over at Torrez, who hadn’t uttered a word. “Your shooter didn’t want there to be any chance of his victim crawling away for help.”
“No evidence that says he was given any chance at all,” Estelle mused. “And to administer this last shot, the killer likely stood right over the victim. The corona is circular, not oval. Dead on. Maybe not for any of the other three, but for this one—he would have had to have stepped into the shower room. He would have stood right beside the victim. Or even straddled him.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Perrone said. “That first shot, I’m guessing the one in the groin with all that blood, was certainly incapacitating—maybe even paralyzing if it broke the spine. Now, with someone hurt that bad? It takes a special sort of mindset to shoot again, and again. Seems that way to me. Cold, cold, cold.”
Torrez pushed himself away from the wall, gloved hands still in his pockets. “Remember when Louise Smalley shot her husband out in their barn?”
Perrone peered at the sheriff over the top of his half glasses, puzzled at the reference to a decade-old crime. But then his face lit up. “I do, indeed.”
“Louise shot until the gun was empty. Sixteen rounds in that nine millimeter of hers. Somewhere in that string, she managed to hit him once, and that did the job.” He drilled a finger into his own left ear. “And the other fifteen went sailin’ this way and that. She just kept goin’ ’till the gun was empty. Bill Gastner had us measuring and searching all night until we found every one of those misses. ‘Panic passion’ he called it. She just kept jerkin’ the trigger ’till the gun wouldn’t fire any more. Some of the shots weren’t even close—like yards away.”
Torrez sidled closer to the corpse, little waves searching out from his boots. “Gotta wonder which shot was first, and I’m thinkin’ same as you and Estelle. The groin shot threw blood all over. Even if the killer hadn’t shot him again, he’d be dead in a minute or two just from blood loss, floppin’ around on the floor.” Torrez grimaced. “But it don’t look like he flopped much. The first shot, bam, he crumples and staggers away, makin’ a mess over on the wall. Bam, he spins around the way he came, and starts to go down. Then bam, center mass puts him on his back.”
“Look at the way his lower arms and hands have rictus, locked upward as if he’s trying to push something up and away,” Perrone observed.
“That’s right. And then the killer steps close and bam, the fourth shot solid through the heart ends the story. Right then, right there. Not much panic in those shots.” Torrez made a sound that could have been a chuckle. “This ain’t no Mrs. Smalley runnin’ in circles around the barn, chasin’ after her drunk husband through the cows and horses.”
“That’s grim.” Perrone bent at the waist for a closer look. “That’s an interesting corona, and the only one. As you suggest, it’s as if the killer stood right over him for the last shot.” He looked up at Estelle. “Looked him right in the eye.” He glanced over his shoulder. “We going to get that screen?”
“Tom’s on the way.”
“Okay. I’m more than a little curious about what we’ll find.” He straightened up. “Coach Scott has been teaching here a good number of years, well-known and well-liked by a whole lot of people. Big game last night…what, number sixty-five? And his girls win another romp. Lots of press. And somebody pulls this when the town is full of reporters. Big time mess. This is going to a troublesome case before it’s over.”
“We’ll keep it tight,” Torrez said.
“Good luck with that.” Perrone sounded skeptical.
“He started teaching just about the year I graduated,” Estelle offered. “Twenty-two years ago. I remember all the girl-talk about him. Handsome, buff, single…ay, he was only four years older than we were.”
“Ah. Here we go.” Perrone nodded toward the doorway. “So you’re putting him at what, forty-four or five? If this was his first job out of college?”
Standing off to one side of the sill, Mears held out the square of screening. “This is what the hardware could come up with, Sheriff.”
“Perfect.” Estelle eased though the water and took the screen, bending the last of the rolled arc out of it until it would rest flat over the drain.
“And Mr. Lavin wants to know if he can go home yet. I told him not a chance.”
“Not a chance is right. I need to talk with him. Ask him to be patient.” She straightened up. “In your preliminary with him, find out who was the last person he saw leaving after the game last night. Maybe the assistant coach, Ms. Avila? Whoever it is, I’ll want to talk with them. I saw Avila out in the parking lot. And find out if the game was filmed. If it was, I want the file…or disc—whatever they use.”
“You got it. Oh,” and Mears stopped short, “apropos of nothing…the SO in Cathay, Illinois is sending out two deputies to extradite the Bonds back home. Paperwork willing, they’ll be here sometime next week.”
“So much for their grand vacation,” Estelle remarked.
She had squatted near the corpse, sleeves rolled up, the screen spread on the tile floor under four inches of water. “TOD here is going to be interesting,” she said. “From after the game, when Scott was last seen, to just a few minutes ago, when he was found today by the custodian? That’s a sixteen-hour window.”
“The cold bath is going to complicate things a little,” Perrone said. “But we’ll see.”
Estelle slid the screen closer to the body until she was satisfied that it would remain flat. “I think if you just slide his hips a foot or so u
p and over, we can do this. Don’t roll him over yet. Just shift the body over far enough for me to slide the screen into place and make sure nothing slips by down the drain.”
Sheriff Torrez straddled the body, a gloved hand on each hip. “Ready?”
“Yes.”
Unable to work the way she was crouched, Estelle dropped to one knee. When she nodded, Torrez rocked the corpse up and away, giving her room to work. The victim’s left buttock cheek was clearly imprinted with the pattern of the chrome drain cover. The screen slid into position, the powerful suction of the drain holding it in place. She stood up, ignoring her now soaked left leg. “Hold him up so I can catch that drain pattern on his butt,” Estelle said. “I want the photo to include the victim, the screen, and the drain itself.”
“Take your time.” Torrez had braced his elbows on his knees, and watched impassively as she shot another series of photos.
“This is where I miss Linda.”
“I hear ya,” Torrez said affably. “Hell of a time to go on vacation.”
Satisfied, she backed away. “Let him back down now.” Torrez did so, and straightened up with a creak of backbone and leather. “You know, if the killer left here with the shower running…” she said after a moment.
“Lavin says it was still running when he arrived today,” Torrez said. “He says that he walked in here just after noon, saw this mess, and called 911 right away. So the shower was runnin’ since…could have even been yesterday a little bit after the game.”
“And why would Scott use this one, anyway? There’s a coaches’ shower in their office.” She shook her head. “This place wasn’t full of steam, was it? Lavin will tell us for sure, but with the shower running hot for what, fifteen or twenty hours? It’d be pretty steamy ripe in here. The boiler would be working overtime. I didn’t smell that when I came in.”
“Hot, humid night, cold shower,” Torrez offered with considerable skepticism. He shifted the body so it lay just to one side of the drain.
The water level in the shower took its time lowering, with an occasional gurgle from the drain. The screen remained clean. While she waited, Estelle shot more than a hundred digital photos of fragments as they became visible—and they were few and far between. Most were little chips of grout or tile, grouped below the wall that carried the blood smear. A deformed slug, its hollow point mushroomed deeply, lay six inches out from the wall.
“So we have one. Not enough flow to carry anything heavy to the drain,” Estelle said. “Which means all the other bullet fragments are either still in the body or somewhere in this room. It’s going to be hands and knees time, Bobby.”
“Better’n scattered all through a barn.”
Chapter Eleven
In deference to Estelle’s first guess, the bullet tracks that had snuffed out Clint Scott’s life were labeled one through four, beginning with the bloody groin shot and ending with the point blank round through the heart. Two of the wounds were through and through.
Number one had not exited, but showed huge bruising near the spine. Number two, the axillary wound, had entered on the left, then coursed across through the victim to plough a large, messy exit wound below his right arm at the back of his armpit. The third shot, dead on through the right chest, had not exited. “And even with a powerful handgun, that’s not unusual,” the physician said. “We’ll find it during autopsy, probably snuggled up against the heavy spine of the shoulder blade, or maybe buried in a vertebra. No telling. But this…” He rested one hand on the victim’s raised shoulder, pointing at the exit wound of the final heart shot.
“Unless what we think are obvious wound paths end up fooling us, I’m going to bet that this round blows straight through, just barely missing the spine, and then exits to smack into the floor tile.” He touched a cracked, chipped portion of the tile a foot from the drain, still under an inch of water. “It hits here, still with some energy, ricochets up off the floor and enters the victim’s upper back. In fact…” and he poked hard with two fingers at a spot near the wing of the shoulder blade, just beyond the wound carved by the ragged secondary entry of the ricochet. “If you feel right there, I think that’s number four in situ.” He drew patterns in the air. “Down, almost straight through, out, ricochet, back in again. It didn’t penetrate very far after that.”
He looked up at Bob Torrez who nodded, not appearing the least bit surprised.
“Essentially, the victim was thoroughly dead before number four. From the first three shots, his insides were just blown apart. The blood loss would have been huge, since his heart hadn’t been altogether ruined yet. I mean, at this point, we don’t know. Number two could have grazed the back of his heart on its way through. We won’t know until autopsy. But after those first three shots, about all he could do, if he was conscious at all, was lie there and take it.”
He relaxed his hold on the body and stood up with a middle-aged grunt, pushing a lock of blond hair back with his wrist. “When you find the gun, your ballistic tests will show how far away it was held for that final shot, but I’m guessing three or four feet, at the most.” He pointed an index finger at the corpse and let his thumb drop. “Like that. Standing right beside him, and boom. Standing maybe on that side of the body, maybe this. I don’t know, but it sure as hell spells hate to me.”
The physician held out his hand to Estelle, who held the small evidence bag with the recovered bullet. “You know off the top what that is?”
She handed it without hesitation to Bob Torrez, who slipped a new acquisition from his pocket—half-glasses for close work. He peered at the slug, even as he had when they had found it near the base of the far wall. “I’m thinkin’ either a .38 special or a .357 mag. Same bullet in either cartridge.”
“Someone should have heard it,” Estelle remarked.
“I’m kinda thinkin’ .357, with all the damage. If it was just a .38, it was loaded hotter’n shit. Plus-P, probably. Somethin’ like that.” He looked at the bullet. “We got no shell casings ejected in here, so unless the killer picked up after himself, we’re talkin’ revolver. Ain’t many autos that shoot either one. And you gotta wonder why just four rounds fired, in a weapon that holds five or six.”
“He saved one or two for later,” Perrone said with morgue humor. He held up both hands. “The victim has been lying in a nice deep pool of cold water, so TOD is going to be a little bit tricky. Lividity says this is where he fell and this is where he stayed.”
Torrez nodded at Tom Mears, who had been standing in the shower doorway.
“I talked to the janitor for just a moment on the way in,” Mears offered. “He said that when he was cleaning up after the game yesterday—last evening—he heard Scott call good night. So sometime between nine or so until Lavin found him this afternoon. That’s our window.”
Perrone nodded. “He’s well into rigor, though. It wasn’t as recent as even late this morning.” He shrugged. “I’ll tell you what I can after autopsy.”
The physician reached out and shook hands first with Torrez and then Estelle, the clasp of rubber gloves making an unpleasant sucky sound. “Good luck with this. I don’t envy you. I always thought Coach Scott was something of a primo don, but it’s also my impression that he was well-liked. Worshipped by some of the kids, I’m sure. This is going to be hard. Maybe forty-four years old, but still vibrant. Still young enough to elicit some idol worship.”
Lieutenant Mears stepped aside to let the physician pass. “Sheriff, Superintendent Archer is here and wants to see you.”
“I bet he does,” Torrez muttered, and Mears held up a finger.
“And…”
“And what?”
“Coach Avila is here now, outside. And Frank Dayan is also here. Who do you want first?”
“Tell Frank to go home,” Torrez snapped. “We ain’t got nothin’ for him.”
“He won’t leave like that, you know.” The newspaper publisher could be counted on to complain, only half joking, that the Sheriff’s Departme
nt had staged this event the day after the weekly Posadas Register’s publication day, giving competing news organizations a week’s head start on the scoop.
“With any luck, most everyone is still out at the mesa,” Estelle said. “Miles was serving a fancy lunch. I’m surprised Frank chose to miss that.”
Torrez glared at her as if she had notified the press. “What, he wants a picture of this on Page One?” The sheriff knew better than that, of course, but he’d never met a newspaper he would even wrap fish in, including the local Posadas Register. Estelle knew Torrez to be as adverse to publicity as Coach Clint Scott had cherished it.
“Tell Frank that I’ll talk with him in a little bit,” Estelle offered. “Make sure he stays outside the tape, though. Not a single footstep inside the school.”
“Yes, ma’am. You want the superintendent first?”
“Just very briefly,” Estelle said. “He has to know what we’re up against here, and what he’s going to be up against come school on Monday morning.”
“You got it. We went through the clothes after we shot a bunch of pictures, by the way. Fiber by fiber. They appear to be the victim’s. His wallet, ID, all that, still in place with about a hundred bucks in small bills, along with his car keys, a cell phone, and a pack of breath mints.”
“Bag it all, Tom. Be especially careful with that phone. Messages or pictures, you never know what it’s going to tell us.”
“And you want his towel before Archer gets here?” He nodded at the bench where the white towel lay folded neatly by the clothing.
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