by Jance, J. A.
Gil knew that the corpse was in the living room. Instead of going directly there, he turned instead toward a room that had originally been intended as a dining room. Shelves that had probably once held knickknacks of some kind had been installed high on the dining room walls, but they were empty. An oak pedestal table stood in the middle of the room. There was only one chair at the table. Two others sat off to the side, just under the window. A buffet that matched the table was the only other piece of furniture. The top of the buffet was covered with packing boxes, tape dispensers, and blank shipping labels, while the top of the table was littered with tubes of epoxy and paint and brushes.
On the floor, scattered in among a snowdrift of foam packing peanuts, lay the smashed remains of what must have once been on the now-denuded bookshelves—dozens and dozens of model airplanes, all of them wrecked, ground to pieces on the floor. They had been stepped on . . . no, stomped on, in what Gil read as deliberate, thorough, and wanton destruction.
Okay, Gil told himself. Kirby vacuum or not, if this is where the victim built his models, that means the guy definitely isn’t married. And he isn’t living with his mother either. No woman in her right mind lets a guy build model airplanes in the middle of her dining room table or spill packing peanuts all over the house.
Gil stayed where he was, in the dining room doorway. If he tried stepping into the dining room, he knew that no matter how carefully he walked, he wouldn’t be able to keep from crunching larger pieces of wings and propellers and fuselages into smaller bits of plastic, balsa wood, and dust.
At last, turning toward the living room, Gil was appalled by the mess. Except for the wrecked model planes on the floor, the dining room had been relatively neat and orderly. The living room looked like a trash heap, a lived-in trash heap that consisted of discarded magazines, packets of coupons, grocery bags, empty cans of chili, shipping boxes, and dead pizza containers, with little cleared paths like game trails leading through the mess from one place to another. It was possible someone could find out how long the debris had been there by shoveling through it like an archeological dig, but that wasn’t Gil’s job.
The small desk lamp on the far table did little to illuminate the rest of the room. Once again Gil tracked down a wall switch. Turning on the overhead fixture in the living room immediately revealed the same kind of fuzzy footprints he had seen in the entryway. They meandered in and out of the mess, sometimes following the trails sometimes stepping on or over the trash.
In the lamplight, the victim’s body hadn’t been immediately visible. Now it was. Just beyond the far end of the couch, a single sock-clad foot hung at an ungainly angle in midair. Only when Gil rounded the couch did he see that a large male was strapped to a fallen dining room chair by layers and layers of clear packing tape. His legs were fastened to the front legs of the chair while his arms and wrists, out of sight, were most likely similarly bound behind his back.
At first glance there was no evidence of any kind of bullet or stab wound that would account for the presence of all the blood that had been trod through the house. Instead, the man’s head was encased in a clear plastic bag, the kind that customers in grocery stores peel off conveniently located rolls to carry home their freshly chosen vegetables—heads of broccoli, lettuce, or cauliflower—but the plastic was heavy, not likely to be easily chewed through. Underneath the bag, Gil caught sight of another piece of packing tape that had been plastered to the man’s mouth to function as a gag. More tape had been used to fasten the open end of the bag tightly around the victim’s bulging neck.
Asphyxiation then, Gil thought. So why do I see so much blood?
Stepping to the far side of the corpse, Gil found the answer to that question. The tips of several of the dead man’s fingers—four in all—had been hacked off by poultry scissors that still lay where it had been dropped. Beside the shears were the blackened hunks of fingertips, although Gil counted only three, not four. It was likely the missing one had been covered by the man’s falling body when the chair had tipped onto its side. And the amount of blood on the floor told Gil what he didn’t want to know—that the victim had been alive when the fingers were hacked off one by one.
The gruesome savagery of that was enough to make even an experienced homicide cop want to toss his morning’s batch of Honey Nut Cheerios. The other thing contributing to his gag reflex had to do with teeming hordes of insect vermin that were visible both inside and on the body. Since the house itself was a gigantic trash heap, that came as no surprise. The good news about that was that flesh-eating maggots would provide a foolproof way for the coroner to establish the victim’s time of death with a good deal of accuracy.
Needing to step away for a moment, Gil turned toward the wooden desk. It was stacked high with a complicated collection of electronics—several printers as well as a single computer. A single glance was enough to tell Gil that this was high-end, top-of-the-line Mac equipment, and that struck him as odd. In the course of a normal home invasion, the electronics wouldn’t have been there. They’d have been among the first items stolen or else they would have been smashed to pieces like the model airplanes in the other room.
Gil made his way around the living room, laying down more evidence markers and taking photos as he went. Finally, returning to the corpse, Gil stepped closer to the body and squatted down next to it. Only then did Gil catch sight of a tiny set of white wires. They came from what Gil assumed to be an iPod in the pocket of the dead man’s sweatshirt. They threaded their way under the tape that was attached to his throat. With the victim lying on his side, Gil could only see the left side of the man’s head, but he could also see that one of the earbuds was still stuck in the dead man’s ear.
“So what went on here, big fella?” Gilbert asked aloud.
He often addressed questions to the corpses at crime scenes during those intimate moments when he was alone with murder victims. They never answered, but Gil’s one-sided conversations usually helped him make sense of what he was seeing.
“You were listening to your tunes, and then something happened. What was it?”
It was as Gil rose from his crouch and readied his camera once more that he noticed the presence of an extra dining room chair. He had seen it before, but this was the first time it actually registered. Before that Gil had been too focused on the body itself to realize that a second chair had been brought into the living room and positioned in a spot that was close to the dead man’s head.
It took a moment for Gil to grasp what he was seeing. Two dining room chairs had been brought into the living room, one to confine the victim and one to be used as an observation post. Murder was murder, and the bloody mutilations were nothing short of appalling, but the idea of sitting and watching while your victim struggled to take his last breaths moved what had happened in this room to a whole new level.
25
Grass Valley, California
Gil was still struggling with that reality when the Nevada County coroner, Fred Millhouse, arrived on the scene.
“Hey, Detective Morris,” Fred said. “We’ve gotta stop meeting like this. Three in one week is more than I bargained for. Is it all right if I move this chair out of the way?”
“Just a moment,” Gil said, laying down another marker. “Let me get a photo first.”
While Fred went to work doing what he needed to do, Gil walked through the house. He was looking for evidence, yes, but he was also trying to get the feel of what he was seeing.
A good deal of the mess in the room was trash that had been there for a long time, but the wanton destruction of the model planes was recent. It had taken time to smash them one by one. If the plane smasher and the killer were one and the same, that meant that the culprit had been in the victim’s house for an extended period of time. This wasn’t a quick in and out. The killer had come here looking for something. The question was, had he found it and taken it?
Gil glanced again at the collection of electronics on the desk in the corner
. Gil Morris was no geek, but he knew enough about computers to realize that the computer was a potential source of all kinds of useful information, including the names and e-mail addresses of the people the victim had corresponded with in the last days of his life. It would also tell investigators what, if anything, Richard Lowensdale had been working on at the time of his death. Gil looked around for a cell phone or a landline. At first glance, neither was visible. And if there were some way to view any of the footage from the security camera over the front door, that wasn’t readily apparent either.
Not wanting to observe Millhouse at his grim work and not wanting to be in the way, Gil let himself out of the overheated, dimly lit house into bright sunlight and a welcome January chill. He paused on the front porch long enough to search for evidence that the bloodied footsteps had exited this way. There was nothing visible to the naked eye, but luminol might reveal the microscopic presence of blood evidence. A more likely scenario told him that the perpetrator had walked around in the house long enough for the blood on the bottom of his feet to dry.
Gil stood on the porch’s top step and breathed in a lungful of fresh air. Even with the Vicks right there beneath his nostrils, some of the terrible odors of death still lingered. Gil walked down the cracked sidewalk and let himself out through the crooked gate. A patrol car was parked on the far side of the street. Officer Masters was inside and appeared to be talking on the radio.
Gil pulled the cigar out of his shirt pocket and mimed his need of a light to Masters.
When Dale Masters joined him at the rear of the black-and-white, he brought a second cigar for himself and a lighter, as well as a small metal container which, with the lid removed, served admirably as a makeshift ashtray. Leaving ashes of any kind near a crime scene was a bad idea. The black-and-white had a perfectly functioning ashtray in the front seat, but smoking in city-owned vehicles was not entirely verboten.
Once they both lit up, Gil was pleased to discover that the cigars were impressively obnoxious—the kind Linda had always regarded as “pure evil”—but the smoke helped displace the last of the noxious odors.
“Thanks,” Gil said, holding up his cigar.
“You’re welcome,” Dale said. “You lasted a whole lot longer inside there than I did. By the way, I just got off the phone with Irene in Records. She said there was a B and E at this address on the twentieth of September of this past year. According to the report, an ex-girlfriend allegedly broke into the house in broad daylight while Lowensdale was off getting his Cadillac serviced.”
“New Cadillac?”
“Old,” Masters said. “The way I understand it, it used to belong to Lowensdale’s mother.”
Gil pulled out a new three-by-five card. “Name?”
“Mother’s name?”
“No. The B and E suspect.”
“Her name’s Brenda Riley. She used to be Lowensdale’s girlfriend.”
“They caught her in the act?”
“Not exactly. Lowensdale came home, saw a broken window, and realized someone had been inside his place. Even though nothing of value had been stolen, he raised enough of a stink that the chief finally agreed to have our guys come by to do a crime scene investigation. Her prints were found everywhere. No effort to cover them up whatsoever.”
“She’s in the system?” Gil asked.
Masters nodded. “She’s been booked for a number of moving violations, DUIs as well as driving without a license, and so forth. Once we told him who the perp was, Lowensdale declined to press charges. Said it was the aftermath of a bad breakup and since nothing was taken, he was prepared to let it go.”
“Brenda Riley?” Gil asked with his pen poised to write.
“Brenda Arlene Riley,” Masters confirmed. “She lives in Sacramento. Irene in Records can give you the exact address, but you may want to check. I believe there was something in that original nine-one-one call this morning about an ex being involved in all this one way or the other.”
“Thanks,” Gil said. “I’ll look into it.”
When Masters was called back to the radio, Gil stood there with a cloud of smoke circling his head while he studied his surroundings and the cracked and peeling exterior of Richard Lowensdale’s house.
Jan Road was steep. The house was built into the flank of the hill, but the sidewalk leading up to the house was level. A cracked concrete walkway went from the front porch to a small detached garage and from the garage to a side door near the back of the house. Looking at the elevations, Gil realized that meant there was probably a basement under the house and maybe under the garage as well.
Ready to resume his examination of the house, Gil followed the walkway door to door to door. There were no visible footprints anywhere.
He went back to the small garage and opened the side door wide enough so he could peek inside. There was definitely no basement in the garage. The hard-packed dirt floor reeked of decades of old grease and oil. Above the workbench, the wall was lined with a collection of antique tools. The smell and tools hinted that the garage had long been used by a homegrown, do-it-yourself mechanic. What looked like most of a case of motor oil stood inside the remains of a cut-down cardboard box on a shelf above the work bench.
Clearly the garage had been built at a time when vehicles were smaller. Lowensdale’s ten-year-old black Cadillac Catera barely fit inside the four walls. If this had been a standard robbery, most likely the car would have been taken along with the electronics. No, this was definitely something else.
Leaving the garage, Gil went to what he assumed to be the back door of the house. The first room inside was a small utility room that held a washer and dryer, an older model top-loading set. The utility room opened into an old-fashioned kitchen complete with a single-bowl porcelain sink and knotty pine cabinets, as well as an avocado-colored fridge and matching stove that had to date from sometime in the seventies. There was no dishwasher. There was a small white microwave on the counter and the freezer was packed full of Nutrisystem food. Obviously Richard wasn’t much of a cook.
Considering the condition of the rest of the house, Gil fully expected the kitchen to be filthy. It was not. There was no junk on the floor and no dirty dishes in the sink. The counter was clean and the microwave wasn’t greasy. There was a dish drainer with a few clean dishes sitting in it—a single plate, a single glass, a single set of eating utensils. It reminded Gil of his own kitchen. Yes, this guy definitely lived alone.
The kitchen was far enough from the living room that the odor of putrid flesh didn’t penetrate. But the other smell, the one Gil had noticed earlier, was much stronger in this part of the house than it had been in the living room. Just outside the kitchen door in a hallway that evidently led to the bedrooms, he found a closed door that he assumed to be a possible broom closet.
When he opened the door, the stench was almost overpowering. Covering his mouth and nose, Gil groped for the light switch using his pen. When the light came on, he found he was standing at the top of a set of planked wooden stairs that led down into a true garbage dump. In the living room, the trash made a layer on the floor that was walkable. Here the heap was tall enough to come halfway up the steps, tall enough to reach Gil’s shoulders if not his head. And on the steps were the faint fuzzy footprints he had seen before. The blood must have been nearly dry when the transfer was made. The prints ventured down only three steps then they turned and returned the way they had come. Whoever it was had considered wading into the garbage in search of whatever it was they wanted. But they hadn’t wanted it badly enough to go digging through the garbage. No doubt the stench had proved to be too much for the killer just as it did for Gil.
Stepping back, he switched the light back off and then slammed the door shut behind him. Shutting the door didn’t fix the problem. Even with it closed, the smell was still overpowering. It was almost as though the smell had leached into the wallboard and wooden trim. Gil wished fervently that Masters had offered him more than just that one cigar.
> Unfortunately, at this particular crime scene, cigars were limited, only one to a customer.
26
Los Angeles, California
Ali left the hotel to drive to Laguna Beach as mad at B. Simpson as she had ever been.
When she started reading the High Noon material, the item on top had been a copy of the e-mail Brenda had sent to her on Friday that she had in turn passed along to B. She read through that. There was nothing at all that indicated anything out of the ordinary. It was lucid. There were none of the self-justifying excuses that are often employed by someone intent on doing something stupid. In fact, the message was exactly the opposite of that—purposeful, organized, and with no senseless meanderings that would indicate a drunken rant. Yes, Camilla Gastellum believed her daughter had gone off on a bender. If so, the decision to do that had come after she sent the e-mail rather than before.
Next up was the Richard Lowensdale background check—the same material that had been sent to Brenda almost five months previously. A copy of that had been sent to Ali as well. It contained nothing new, nothing unforeseen.
Ermina’s background check came next, and it contained only the bare bones of the story. She had been born in Croatia. There was nothing that explained how she had been orphaned. The story picked up again once she was adopted by a family in Missouri as a teenager. The adoptive mother died of heart disease a couple of years later, and the father committed suicide. Ermina moved to California and was doing minimum wage catering jobs when she hooked up with a widower named Mark Blaylock.
So far so good, Ali thought. Sounds like it was time for her to have some good luck.