Two officers were positioned on either side of the spa entrance and through the illuminated windows she could see her partner, Sam Jackson, talking to a youngish, fairly tall, but slightly built man seated on one of the spa’s reception couches. She supposed he was the business owner and he looked young – maybe mid-to-late twenties. From this distance, he struck her as being frail and fragile.
“Might as well get this show on the road,” she said under her breath while moving her t-shirt away from her perspiring skin and hitching her heavy purse higher on her shoulder. She made her way to the door, moving her mismatched and rumpled jacket aside to show the ID clipped to her sweatpants to the uniformed officer on the right. She had to look up to meet his eyes. She suspected Officer Helliman was delighted that he was taller than she. Since she was only five feet, four inches, almost everyone on the force was taller than she. Reightman suppressed a sigh. She’d learned many things over her years on the force about the types of men common in these parts, and Helliman certainly fit the profile.
“Detective Reightman,” she identified herself, which was technically unnecessary. Everyone on the scene knew her or at least, knew of her.
“Yes, ma’am,” he drawled with a pronounced southern accent, and eventually moved aside so she could enter the crime scene. Helliman didn’t actually smirk as he scanned her wrinkled, navy jacket and faded blue sweatpants, but she knew he wanted to. Men could be such chauvinistic, judgmental asses, even when their own bellies hung several inches over their belts. There were rednecks like him everywhere, unfortunately for all womankind.
Reightman edged past him and stopped just inside the reception area, taking it in. Directly across from the door was a check-in counter, made out of light brown wood with a photo hanging behind the reception desk. The huge, soft focus black and white picture captured the image of a young, pouting child positioned on a straight-backed wooden chair, with arms crossed defiantly across his tiny chest. Over the photo hung brushed chrome letters which spelled “Time Out Spa.” The walls were painted in soft, almost-beige-but not beige colors, and the floors were a glossy brown.
The chairs were plush and well-padded and Melba had an urge to take a seat and test them out. On second thought, the small, low armed sofas in various shades of light blue and green might be a better choice. They not only looked inviting, but reminded her of the 70’s. They were scattered around the space, along with a couple of small glass topped tables. There was a small wall fountain made out of stone on a small accent wall. The fountain was off. “It’s all very Zen.” Reightman turned to the right of the reception desk, where an additional uniformed officer was stationed by the door leading into what she assumed was a hallway.
“Just like home,” she told herself cynically, “all brown and blue and green,” although she knew the colors and textures here were nothing like the dreary walls and faded, worn plaids she experienced in her own dull living room. “The air conditioning is nice though,” she acknowledged gratefully as she continued her inspection. This place looked upscale, inviting and relaxing – very classy for a city like this. She turned and caught her partner’s attention.
“Jackson?”
He walked over, gave her a quick glance and winced. “Glad you dressed up for the occasion, Reightman. You look flushed.”
She grunted at him. “I’m also hot and cranky, Jackson – just to let you know. Glad you like the outfit. I made an effort, and I’m glad you noticed.”
“I always notice, Reightman.”
Sam was dressed in a nice pair of blue jeans and a linen blend jacket, neat and pulled together even at this hour. The jeans suggested he’d been home settled in for the evening when he’d received his call, but Jackson would never appear in public wearing sweatpants. He maintained a professional image, regardless of the time, day or night. He took another gander at her clothing and then winked, before ushering her over to the furthest sofa where the young man was hunched.
“This is Mr. Toby Bailey, the owner of the business. He found the body and called it in.”
“Mr. Bailey.” She extended her hand.
The young man rose to his feet and cautiously reached out a hand. She studied him carefully, revising her earlier impression. He stood just under six foot, she guessed, with light brown hair that flopped awkwardly onto his forehead and almost hid one eye. “Some fancy stylist would probably call that color ash blond,” she decided.
His eyes were a light icy blue, ringed in darker blue – almost black. They were unusual, but striking and appealing. They reminded her of those Alaskan husky dogs popular up north. He was somewhat thin, in-line with her earlier observation, but after getting up close and personal during their handshake, she decided there was nothing fragile about him.
Underneath the short-sleeved shirt and slim-fitting black slacks he wore, his body looked fit and strong. In contrast with the tentative offering of his hand, his grip was firm and confident, although his palms were slightly damp. He was very pale under his summer tan. Covertly wiping her hand on her sweatpants to remove the damp, she glanced down and noticed his slim feet were bare and slightly pink around the edges.
“Do you always run around barefooted, Mr. Bailey?”
Her question startled the young man. He looked down at his feet and squenched-up his toes.
Jackson cleared his throat, “Mr. Bailey’s footwear is currently in one of the adjoining rooms. The room where the body was found,” he added meaningfully.
“Okay.” She raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Maybe I’d better go take a look.” She turned to the young man. “Mr. Bailey, why don’t you sit back down for a bit? You look kind of shaky. Jackson, stay here with him. I’ll be back shortly.”
At her partner’s nod, Reightman made her way to the door where the young uniformed officer stood. He was fairly new to the force she thought, not immediately able to put a name with the face. As she passed by him into the short hall leading to what she presumed was a spa room, she looked up at him and inquired, “This way?"
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, motioning down the hall.
She started forward, but he did something which surprised her: He reached out and lightly touched her arm.
“Ma’am?”
“Yes?” she asked, and after reading the nameplate on his uniform to remind her of his name, added “Officer Mitchell.” She stared down at the hand resting on her arm.
The officer quickly dropped his hand and looked her in the eye. “It’s pretty bad back there, ma’am.”
“It usually is when I get called out this time of night, Officer Mitchell.” He probably thought she was some kind of delicate southern flower who couldn’t handle seeing anything bad, even though she was a seasoned cop and the senior detective on the force. The thought made her irritable. She started down the hall but stopped about halfway. “Oh, hell! Maybe chivalry ain't dead after all. The kid’s just trying to be nice.” Reightman looked back with a tentative smile, “Thanks, Mitchell – I appreciate the warning.”
The hall she entered was maybe ten feet long, and ended at an open door through which she could see a couple of familiar crime techs. Halfway down the hall was another door to the left, which was also open, and one to the right, which was closed. There was no one in the room on the left, although the lights were on. She took a quick look, but passed it by, continuing to the threshold at the end of the hall. There she stopped and took her first look at the scene.
Like the front reception area, this room had been done in soft brown colors accented with silvery brushed metal storage cabinets with frosted glass fronts and stone surface counter tops. The beigey walls in this room were also decorated with tasteful black and white photos, but in this room the images were of lush foliage echoing the leafy texture of the large green plants placed around the room. Just inside the door sat a pair of shoes, made of white plushy leather. “Well, those are ruined,” she thought, recalling the young man’s bare feet. “What a damn shame for Mr. Bailey.”
In the center of the room was a wide, padded massage table on some sort of mechanical lift. The table currently held a nest of blue sheets. “Those sheets almost finish off the color scheme.” Reightman allowed herself a moment of sarcastic self-congratulation. “You’re finally getting the hang of this decorating stuff.” Then she saw the body.
Carefully placed in the pile of blood stained sheets was a young, extremely well-built man whose glazed green eyes stared toward her as she stood in the door. She gave the victim a careful once over, noting all the details, including the fact he was completely naked, and his chest and neck were decorated with several cuts and slashes. She turned to view the room again. From the ceiling above the table hung two shiny bars with padding wrapped around their centers. She didn’t even want to think about how those might be used by the spa staff. Melba noticed the ceiling needed to be touched up – there were a couple of scrape marks spoiling the otherwise pristinely painted ceiling tiles. Dismissing them, she continued her inspection. Other than the body, the only obviously jarring thing in the room was the massive amount of blood. Stab scenes always included a lot of blood, it seemed, but it looked horribly out of place in this calm, soothing room. “But then, blood usually looks out of place.”
“Laurie, Tom,” she greeted the crime techs. “Is it okay for me to come in?” Tom Anderson, the unit’s senior tech, absolutely hated when a crime scene was disturbed before his team was done.
“Sure, Detective, we’re almost all finished in this room. We just have a couple more things to check. We’re waiting on the coroner before we wrap up in here and start working the rest of the building,” Anderson replied. “Be careful though; those puddles of blood are everywhere.”
“Yeah. Good thing you told me, I probably would’ve missed them,” she quipped sarcastically, earning a smile from the tech. “Sometimes,” she reminded herself, “the only way to get through nights like this is to make light of the situation, even when the humor’s obvious. Otherwise, death becomes overwhelmingly real.”
She pulled a set of gloves and a pair of plastic booties out of the boxes by the door and put them on. “What do we know so far?” Careful to avoid as much of the gore as possible, Reightman made her way toward the table and the reclining victim laid out on the sheets.
It was Laurie Nelson who responded, moving to join Reightman at the table’s edge. “The victim is Geraldo Guzman, and he appears to be in great shape.” Laurie reconsidered her comment. “I mean, he appears to have been in great shape, well, before this happened.” At Reightman’s encouraging nod, the young tech continued. “He works – I mean worked here in the spa as a masseur, or as Mr. Bailey described him, as a body worker.” Reightman could almost visualize the air quotes, and remembered the female tech was fairly new to her job.
“He is – I mean was – a part-owner of the business, or at least that’s what Detective Jackson told me.” Laurie stopped her recitation of the facts and gave it some thought. “Frankly, Detective, other than those basics, we don’t know a whole lot more. There’s no sign of a struggle and no obvious footprints. We’ve dusted for prints, but all the brushed stainless surfaces on the cabinets and counters are really clean. That kind of material doesn’t take prints well, even under ideal circumstances. I guess that’s one of the reasons people choose it.” Laurie looked down at the body on the table, considering the situation before looking back up again. “As you can see, Detective, it’s pretty clear he was stabbed several times and probably bled out.” That did seem obvious, but Reightman withheld comment.
Laurie tilted her head toward the man on the table “The vic looks like he was gently placed on the table and arranged like that. It looks very peaceful and…”
“And what?”
“Well, it almost looks like he’s lying there exhausted after having really great sex.” The young tech quickly looked away, embarrassed at her observation.
Reightman cut her a break and changed the subject. “Any thought on how someone made it in and out of here without leaving more of a trace?”
“No, ma’am, but we’re working on it.”
Laurie waited while the detective shifted her eyes slowly around the room. “Any sign of a murder weapon, Laurie?”
“No ma’am, nothing so far. We haven’t checked the rest of the building yet, but there’s nothing here.”
“Okay, but we need to get on with that as soon as possible. Any guess as to the time of death?”
“No, ma’am. As Anderson said, the coroner hasn’t made it in yet, and the details are waiting on him. He should be here any minute though.” Laurie pushed up the trendy tortoise shell glasses that were beginning to slip down the bridge of her shiny mahogany-skinned nose. “The call to him went out well over an hour ago.”
The two women shared a cynical look which spoke of shared history with the city’s coroner. For Laurie to already be sharing in the cynicism spoke volumes about the doctor.
“Some things never change, Laurie. We all know that Doctor Lieberman operates on his own timetable, so there’s no reason why things should be different tonight. Is there anything else you can think of? Anything that strikes you as off?”
“Well…”
Reightman waited for the tech to continue, and then gave her verbal nudge. “What are you thinking, Laurie?”
Laurie shot a glance toward the senior tech, indicating he should answer. “Well, Detective,” Anderson replied, “the thing is, we’ve got a body, and we’ve got a lot of blood. We’ve even got a pair of fancy white shoes by the door. But as Laurie said, we haven’t found a weapon, and we don’t know yet how the killer made it in or out of the room. There are no distinct footprints, just a couple of small markings that might be from the edge of a shoe – an athletic shoe, I’d guess.”
“Any sign of a shoe around here that might be a match?”
“Nope, not yet anyway. The other thing that’s weird is how clean this scene is. For someone to get in and out of this room without leaving a trace would be almost impossible, given all the mess on the floor. We’ll spray it all down and hit it with the lights to see if we can find anything, but right now we don’t have much to go on.“
“I understand. Is anything else is bothering you?”
“Well, I guess the other thing we don’t have, is clothes.”
Reightman frowned and rubbed her forehead, feeling perspiration. “Clothes?”
“Yes, Detective. We don’t seem to have any clothes in here for the dead naked man laid out over there on that table.”
She looked at the body and into the staring green eyes. “Well, isn’t that interesting?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the senior tech agreed. “I’d say it was.”
A noise from the front of the building drew her attention. Looking through the door, she saw Doctor Benjamin Lieberman, the eagerly awaited coroner, lumbering down the hall and talking under his breath, followed by Dr. Riley, his harried young intern and the current assistant coroner. Dr. Lieberman was pulled up short by a hand on his sleeve as Riley tried to keep him from bursting into the room. Before Lieberman could castigate the young man for the imagined affront to his dignity, Reightman held up a hand. “Doctor, I realize you’re running late and anxious to get to work, but remember, this is an active crime scene. Put on some of that gear by the door before you screw up any evidence. The rest of the team’s already been here for over an hour, patiently waiting on you. A few seconds more won’t make any difference.”
The coroner flushed red at her reference to his delay, but bit back any harsh comment he thought about making, either to her, or to poor Riley. He snapped on some gloves, pulled on a pair of footies and huffed past her into the room. Riley followed suit, offering her a polite, apologetic “Excuse me, ma’am,” as he made his way past her.
Reightman nodded, and stepped out of the way. She noticed that Lieberman stopped abruptly as he neared the table and saw him glance back her way. When he met her eyes, he flushed again, and after another slight hesitation
, he finally stepped up to the body. “You’re nothing but a no good, better-late-than-never SOB.” After fixing the scene in her mind, she started back down the hall to the calm, serene reception area, and Mr. Toby Bailey. She had a whole lot of questions that needed answers, and he might be just the man who had some.
Toby, in the meantime, curled himself up into a ball on one of the small sofas, with his bare feet tucked up underneath him. He was tired and cold. “It’s probably from the shock,” he told himself. He’d heard that a severe shock made people feel really tired, and really cold. Someone had thrust a cup of hot tea with an awful lot of sugar at him not too long ago, telling him it would help. He’d drunk it down, but it hadn’t helped at all.
He occupied himself by keeping trying to keep completely still, and stared vacantly into space even though his eyes were feeling heavy. “Maybe if I don’t move too much I’ll feel warmer,” he reasoned. “Besides, every time I close my eyes, I see Geri laid out on that table.” After a couple of replays of that horror show, he decided the best thing to do was to just keep his eyes open, no matter how tired he was feeling.
Toby had no idea how long he’d been curled up on the sofa. There weren’t any clocks in the reception area. He felt a lack of clocks made for a more restful ambiance. He didn’t wear a watch himself and somewhere this evening he had laid down his cell phone. That’s what had brought him back to the spa after grabbing a quick dinner to at one of the neighborhood joints. He’d thought maybe it could be in one of the treatment rooms, but given his record of laying his phone down in unlikely places and forgetting about it, the phone could be anywhere.
It wouldn’t do him any good to call the number. He always turned the ringer off so the noise wouldn’t disrupt a session with a client and ruin the vibe. One of the rules of the spa was everyone had to keep their ringers turned off – no exceptions.
Done Rubbed Out: Reightman & Bailey Book One Page 2