by BJ Bourg
“How do you mean?”
“This isn’t the murder scene; it’s only a dump site.”
“How can you tell?”
“There isn’t enough blood on the ground.”
She scanned our surroundings. “Where do you think he came from?”
“He certainly didn’t fly here,” I mused as we approached the spot where Arlene was standing guard over the body.
CHAPTER 5
“Is it okay if I hang around?” Arlene asked. “I’d like to watch the process.”
“You can help us measure the scene when we’re ready.” I tossed her a measuring tape and she caught it deftly with one hand, her eyes lighting up.
Rachael pulled out her camera and began photographing the entire area. While she did that, I visually examined the scene and made notes of what was there. It wasn’t much.
When Rachael was done, I made my way near the body to get a better look at the condition of the young man. He couldn’t have been older than eighteen. He wore long khaki shorts and a blue Polo shirt. His hair was short cropped and there was a hint of a goatee on his face.
“That’s a school uniform,” Rachael said, pointing at his clothes. “I bet he’s a student of South Magnolia High School.”
“Good call.” I made a note to check the school, but remembered they were out next week for Thanksgiving. “I hope the principal didn’t leave town for the holidays.”
I asked Arlene to borrow her flashlight and then shined it over the front of the boy’s blue shirt. I saw two bullet holes in his chest, about three inches apart.
“Accurate shooting,” Rachael muttered. “How close do you think the shooter was from the victim?”
I leaned forward to check the shirt for stippling. There was none. “He was definitely shot from more than a couple of feet.”
Rachael steadied her camera to get a close-up of the bullet holes in the shirt and then we both turned our attention to the victim’s face, where his left eye was a mess of torn flesh and dried blood. There was a welt above the right eye, as though he’d been punched, but it was the left eye that really stood out. I stabbed at it with the beam of light, attacking it from different angles until I was satisfied it was a bullet hole. His skin was dark, but I could make out burn patterns from the gunpowder. I pointed to it. “This was a contact wound. The shooter wanted to make sure he was dead.”
Rachael took some pictures and then rocked back on her heels, thoughtful. “You mean, the shooter put the gun to his eye and pulled the trigger?”
I nodded.
“That’s cold-blooded,” Arlene said from behind us. “Who would do such a thing?”
I looked into her innocent eyes. “Unfortunately, you’re going to encounter people in this job who would do the most unspeakable of all evils, and that includes killing you if they get the chance.”
“Yeah, we saw some videos in the police academy of officers being brutally murdered on the job.” Arlene frowned. “It made me question why I would consider such a career.”
“And then you remembered you were doing it for the money,” Rachael joked, moving away from the body so we could begin the process of measuring the scene.
With Arlene’s help, I measured the scene and Rachael took more photographs of the area and the body. Once all was completed, we pulled on fresh glozes and laid out a piece of butcher’s paper beside the victim.
Before moving him over, I patted the outside of his front, right short pocket and felt a bulge inside. Pulling on the pocket with my left hand so I could see inside, I carefully reached in with my right hand and felt a soft package. I gripped it with two fingers and pulled it free. I held it for Rachael to photograph and let her know it was a baggie of marijuana.
“So, do we think this is a drug-related murder?” she asked.
“He was murdered and he’s carrying drugs, so…”
Rachael took the suspected drugs from me and packaged it in an evidence bag, labeled it accordingly.
After I checked the other pocket—it was empty—we bent to roll the body onto the paper, hoping to catch any fibers, hairs, or other trace evidence that might have been left behind by the suspect. I grabbed his arms and Arlene grabbed his legs, while Rachael waited to photograph the back of his body.
“Ready?” I asked Arlene.
She nodded and I counted down from three. When I reached one, we slowly rocked him forward and onto the paper. I checked his back pockets, but they were empty, too. “That’s not good,” I murmured to myself, and then visually examined his body. There were two holes in the back of his shirt that corresponded with the bullet holes in the front of his body, and a circular blood stain surrounded each hole. I glanced at the back of his head and frowned. Another exit wound.
“What’s wrong?” Arlene asked.
I pointed out the exit wounds. “The bullets went clean through, which means we won’t have projectiles for comparison purposes.”
“We really need to find the murder scene,” Rachael said. “We’ve got nothing from here—not a single piece of evidence.”
I ambled out from under the high rise bridge and surveyed our surroundings for the umpteenth time. Even if he was shot in this area, there was nothing around us that could’ve caught one of the two bullets from his back and, thanks to the tall grass covering the fields in the area, it would be nearly impossible to find the bullet that went through his head and into the ground.
“If he wasn’t killed out here somewhere, we may never find the location.”
“Yeah,” Rachael said as she walked up beside me. “What we may need is a miracle.”
The word “miracle” had barely rolled off her tongue when it happened.
CHAPTER 6
After the coroner’s investigator had transported the body away from the scene, I followed Rachael to the criminal operations center in Payneville. While she downloaded her photographs onto her desktop, I secured the bag of marijuana in an evidence locker. As I was returning down the hallway toward the detective bureau, I ran into Uma Menard—she was our top hostage negotiator—heading in the opposite direction. I was surprised to see her in the office on a Saturday.
“How’s it going, Uma?”
“I’m great.” As always, she was smiling and pleasant. “Heading home. I had to print up some documents for our next training session. And speaking of that…we need to get together soon to set up the scenarios for the mock school shooting drill. I’ve been in touch with all three high school principals and they’re on board.”
“Sounds good.” The text message alert on my phone dinged and I checked the screen. It was Detective Melvin Ford—we’d found our miracle! I turned and hurried off, calling over my shoulder, “Rachael and I have to catch a call, but I’ll get with you next week.”
I punched my security code into the keypad near the door to the detective bureau and hollered for Rachael as I pushed through. “Ready to go? It’s definitely a bullet hole!”
“Just about…” After a brief pause, her head popped up from her cubicle and she hurried around the lobby area. “Your truck or my car?”
“My truck.” I led the way across the parking lot and quickly pulled onto Highway Three, heading north. Dispatch had received a call from a homeowner who said he’d awakened to find what looked like a bullet hole in his bathroom window, and we thought it might be the miracle for which we’d been hoping. Since Rachael and I were busy with the crime scene, we had called Melvin to respond to the home and inspect the damage to the window to ensure it was a bullet hole.
Not only had Melvin inspected the window, but he’d searched the bathroom and located a projectile. With luck, it would be related to our case and help lead us to the murder scene, which would hopefully lead to more evidence and, ultimately, the suspect.
As I drove, Rachael called headquarters to get the exact address. She pointed to the residence when we got close. It was a small brick house and it was located on the bayou side across the highway from a popular snowball stand, now
closed for the winter.
I parked on the shoulder of the road near Melvin’s unmarked cruiser and shoved the gearshift in park, scanned the area. An ancient oak tree squatted on the property near the snowball stand and a few houses lined either side of the highway, but, for the most part, it was a quiet little strip of road.
We were about three miles from where the body was found and on the opposite side of the bayou. “If he was killed here, how’d he get under the bridge?” I asked Rachael as we were approaching the house.
“That’s the million dollar question,” Melvin called from the front porch. He was about five-eight and was thick across the shoulders, but he was even thicker in the gut and it had been growing larger and larger over the past couple of years—ever since he got married. He rubbed his hand through his thick and unruly black hair. “And this is definitely one of the bullets that killed your guy.”
When I asked what made him so certain, he said there were bits of tissue and blood shoved up in the crevices of the projectile. He whipped a magnifying glass out of his back pocket and held it up. “When I looked at it through this bad boy, I could see it clearly.”
We followed Melvin inside and he introduced us to Pappy and Molly Dufrene, who were sitting at the kitchen table, each with a cup of coffee in hand. They had to be in their mid-seventies, but Pappy seemed spry for his age. He bounced up and shook hands with Rachael first and then me.
“Would y’all like some coffee? Or tea? My dear Molly makes a hell of a pot of green tea.”
We politely declined and I asked if he could tell me what happened.
“Well,” he began, adjusting the round-rimmed glasses that hung from his nose, “I woke up this morning and went to the bathroom like I always do. When I stepped next to the toilet, something stabbed the bottom of my foot. When I looked down, there was glass all over the floor. That’s when I noticed the hole in the window.”
I nodded, jotted down the highlights of his statement in my notepad. “Did you hear anything last night?” I asked. “Like a gunshot?”
“Heavens, no.” Pappy shook his head and laughed. “Molly, here, she keeps that old sound machine cranked up so loud I can’t hear a damn thing. Hell, you could crash an eighteen-wheeler through the front of the house and it wouldn’t even interrupt my snoring.”
“That’s why I have the sound machine,” Molly retorted playfully, “so I don’t have to hear those strange noises he makes. I keep telling him to do the sleep test, but he won’t do it.”
“I don’t need no damn sleep test. I sleep just fine.”
They would’ve probably argued for thirty minutes about snoring and the sound machine, but I stood and pointed toward the hall. “Is the bathroom that way?”
“Yeah,” Melvin said. “Mr. Dufrene, is it okay with you if I show them the damage?”
“Sure, young man, go right ahead.”
Melvin led Rachael and me down a narrow hallway and then he turned right into a tiny bathroom. Standing in the doorway, I studied the damage to the window and then turned my attention to the glass on the floor. There wasn’t much. The bullet had punched a neat hole through the screen and then through the window, leaving a minimum amount of glass shards scattered on the linoleum. Thanks to the thick tint on the window, most of the glass had remained intact.
I followed the thin trail of glass with my eyes and spotted the projectile resting on the floor in the near corner of the room. It was a 9mm bullet and it was banged up a bit, but—thanks to it being a full metal jacket bullet—it was whole. I scanned the wall and located a dimple of damage on the panel, and it appeared consistent with a bullet that had lost a lot of its energy striking the area.
Taking a careful step into the bathroom and straddling the bullet, I positioned my head directly in front of the damage on the wall and lined it up with the hole in the window. I then moved slowly forward until I could see out the window. It faced Highway Three, and that made sense. Give or take a few lateral feet, the bullet should’ve come from the area of the giant oak tree, but there was no way to know if it was fired from the center of the highway, the eastern shoulder, or the western shoulder. When a bullet goes through a body, it loses a lot of energy and—due to a multitude of factors, including what it hits internally along the way—it’s impossible to predict what it will do when it punches out the other side.
“That’s the general area from where the bullet came.” I pointed toward the oak tree. “But there’s a lot of real estate along this line and we’ll have to get busy.”
“Where’s the other bullet?” Rachael asked. “They were fired so close together that the other one should be around here, too.”
I shook my head. “While they impacted the body within inches of each other, they hit different things as they traveled through to the other side. If the other bullet hit a bone or more muscles than this one, it could’ve dropped to the ground before reaching the house.”
“Makes sense,” she said, pulling an evidence bag from her back pocket. She snapped some photos with the camera hanging around her neck, and then packaged the bullet. “Okay, let’s go look for the others.”
After thanking Mr. and Mrs. Dufrene, we made our way out the front door and locked the evidence in my truck before beginning our search. I split up the area to be searched, assigning Melvin the area by the oak tree, Rachael the front yard of the Dufrene residence, and I took the dangerous assignment—the shoulders of the road, where the afternoon traffic was thick and vehicles whizzed by relentlessly.
If I get hit by a car, I thought, Dawn will never forgive me.
CHAPTER 7
Three hours later…
It was almost one o’clock when Rachael and I met Melvin under the oak tree. The sheriff himself had driven by and dropped off burgers and fries for the three of us, and Melvin had commandeered a large wooden spool as a table and three buckets as chairs. We gathered around the makeshift table and tore into the food, discussing our findings as we ate.
I had located blood along the western shoulder of Highway Three and—with the help of a metal detector—recovered a 9mm bullet from about two inches deep in the mud. Melvin found a boy’s bicycle in the ditch along the highway—about 100 yards from where I’d located the bullet—and Rachael located the third bullet in the front yard of the Dufrene’s residence near a tree.
Rachael tucked a tuft of short, sweaty hair behind her ear and swallowed a mouthful of food. “Do you think we’ve found everything?” she asked.
“We’ve covered every inch of this place—” My phone buzzed on the table and I glanced at the screen. I grinned when I saw a message from Dawn saying she was halfway to her mother’s house and was stopping for food and gas.
“What is it?” Melvin asked. “Did you win the lottery?”
Ignoring him, I sent a quick response and took another bite of my burger. I could still taste Dawn on my lips, could feel her arms around me. As I continued eating in silence, I tried to figure out exactly how many days it would be until Christmas, but gave up after a minute. I just knew it would be a long time before I could hold Dawn again. A feeling of emptiness began to form in the pit of my stomach and grew upward into my chest. I tried to shake it off—angry at myself for being weak—but it was no use. Dawn’s hooks were planted deep inside me.
Once I finished my food, I looked over at Melvin and Rachael. “We’re done here. We’ll have to wait for the blood work to come back, but I’m sure this is where our victim was killed.”
“Now we need to figure out who he is,” Rachael said, collecting her trash and shoving it in a plastic bag. “I can attend the autopsy to roll his prints, put them in AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) and see if we get a hit.”
I nodded, but wasn’t very optimistic. “Unless he’s been arrested as an adult, he won’t be in the system, but you can certainly try.”
I asked Melvin if he could attend the autopsy with Rachael.
He shrugged. “Sure. I’ve got nothing else planned for t
oday.”
“Rachael, can you also transport all the evidence to the detective bureau and secure them in lockers?” I shot a thumb toward the bicycle. “Except for the bike. I want it in the back of my truck.”
“Sure. What are you going to do—shag ass for Arkansas to catch up with Dawn?”
I felt my face flash red. “No.” I pointed in the direction of the streets to the south that intersected with Highway Three. “I’ll be canvassing those neighborhoods. They’re the closest to this area, so probably a good place to start.”
“How do you plan on doing that?” Melvin asked. “You don’t even know the name of the kid.”
“That’s true, and I can’t show a picture of him in his current condition, but”—I shot a thumb over my shoulder—“I can show that bike around, see if anyone recognizes it.”
“Ah,” Rachael said. “You’re going to backdoor the identification.”
“I’ll do whatever it takes to find out who he is.” I glanced at my phone. It was after two in the afternoon. “I’m surprised no one has reported him missing yet.”
“That is odd.” Rachael turned away and began loading all of the evidence in the trunk of Melvin’s car, while Melvin tore down our makeshift kitchen and returned the items to their rightful owners.
I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and placed the bicycle in the bed of my truck. There was nothing remarkable about it. It was a dark blue mountain bike for boys, it had hand brakes, and there were pegs on both wheels. No plastic license plate with the owner’s name on the back and no stickers to readily identify it. There were probably a million such bikes in the country, and at least dozens in Magnolia. They were popular and I’d seen quite a few of them around town myself, so any identification would be tentative—unless they had a serial number, and no one had those—and I would need other connecting pieces.