Jacqueline seemed shocked when the maid escorted her into the morgue. Instead of a human corpse on the metal table, this time it contained the massive ten-foot bull shark that had been swimming around Darrel’s body.
Up close and out of the water, the shark seemed even larger. It was easily twice her size. She walked up to it and looked into its foggy, dead white eyes. Jacqueline didn’t do anything intrusive at first; she just walked all the way around the shark’s corpse, checking for any obvious exterior trauma.
It was hard to say what killed the shark, but then again, that certainly wasn’t why she, or it, was here.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with this damned thing?” she said aloud, looking toward the maid by the door.
The maid swallowed and shook her head. She would be no help, clearly.
“I need a cigarette,” Jacqueline said to no one in particular.
Or maybe she was talking to the shark? She’d always had this weird habit of talking to unconscious, comatose, or dead patients, and sleeping babies, at the hospital. It had earned her the nickname Tag Whisperer among her coworkers at the hospital from which she’d recently retired. As in, “There goes Jacqueline, chatting with another tag again.”
Either way, she knew she couldn’t smoke down here. She’d asked the first time she was down in the morgue, inspecting Mr. Cho’s burned corpse. Besides, smoking would likely only activate the commercial fire sprinkler system she saw installed in the concrete ceiling.
In the end, she knew what she needed to do next. It was time to stop stalling. She grabbed an extra-large scalpel from the small instruments table. Surprisingly, Jacqueline had participated in the dissection of a shark before, but that had been many, many years ago back in high school. She remembered very little about that experience. And what she remembered most was Michael, the guy she’d had a crush on. She’d spent more time watching him watch the dissection than she had spent watching the dissection herself.
Damn cute boys. She always knew they’d be the end of her eventually. They were good for nothing.
Mostly.
Jacqueline laughed aloud just before making her first incision. She supposed she must’ve looked crazy to the maid by the door. Not like that mattered, really.
She started with a shallow incision at the shark’s excrement hole, going all the way up to a few feet below its mouth. The shark’s skin was thick and unbelievably tough, and there were moments when she had to use two hands to push the scalpel forward. Were it not for the razor-sharp blade on the high-end scalpel, she doubted that she’d have been able to make the incision all the way.
After a few more rounds of tentative cuts, almost relying more on that scene from Jaws where they cut open a tiger shark than her medical training or her memory of a high school shark dissection, she finally managed to find the shark’s stomach.
Jacqueline grabbed one of the paper masks from the table and put it on over her mouth and nose. She tossed another one toward the maid.
“You may want to put that on, sweetie, it’s about to get even smellier in here, I think,” she said.
The maid hesitated but eventually retrieved the mask from the floor and put it on.
Jacqueline cut open the shark’s bloated belly. Then she screamed and took a sudden step back as milky digestive fluids spilled out across the table and onto the floor, followed shortly thereafter by a human head.
Darrel’s head rolled out onto the table, the hair wet and soggy from being inside the shark’s stomach for at least an hour. But it couldn’t have been too much longer than that because it wasn’t partially digested or anything just yet. It wasn’t exactly pristine, but it was still easily recognizable as a human head that had at one time been attached to the body of one Darrel Gleason.
But that almost made the sight more grisly and horrific in a way. Jacqueline leaned over and vomited on the floor next to the pool of shark stomach fluids. The maid covered her already masked mouth, likely attempting to keep from following suit.
It was a good five minutes before Jacqueline brought herself to look at the head again. After all, unless she wanted to end up like him, or worse, she still had a crime to solve. So she gritted her teeth, then reached out and rolled the head so it was faceup.
That’s when the red ball gag strapped on to Darrel’s head became visible for the first time. Jacqueline looked away for a moment. Then she reached out with her nitrile-gloved hand and touched the red ball stuffed inside Darrel’s mouth.
Jacqueline stood there and stared at it for a few minutes, perhaps debating whether to try to take it off. But, either way, she didn’t. She left the gag strapped to his head and continued inspecting the rest of it.
There were some cuts on the face, likely from when the shark had bitten the head off, but no other immediately visible injuries. As she worked her way around the slimy, matted hair, she found an indentation in the back of the head. It was a definite, clean fracture in the skull, as if he’d been struck very hard by a blunt object.
Shortly after finding the head wound, the estate bell dinged. It was time to switch areas. Jacqueline took off her surgical gloves and practically ran for the door. The smell of shark insides was not something you really ever got used to.
And it was the first thing that Bryce noticed when he got down to the morgue next. The smell was almost unbearable. The maid down there was already wearing a small paper mask, and Bryce quickly found one on a nearby table and strapped it on. Not that it really helped much.
The next thing he noticed was that there was a huge shark on the metal table instead of a human body like usual. Bryce circled the table, careful to avoid the puddles of milky goo on the floor. It was a big shark. And the human head sitting next to it made it look even bigger.
Jacqueline had already done the hard part, and Bryce didn’t really know where to start. He just looked at it all for a while. But then he eventually put on a pair of purple nitrile gloves and inspected the head more closely.
The ball gag was impossible to miss, obviously. The head wound was much harder to find, but Bryce still found it fairly easily. Not having to waste time slicing open the shark, and only having one object, really, to examine, left him with more than enough time to eventually find it.
Near the end, bored and unsure of what to do next, he decided to take off the ball gag. It was on a black leather strap with metal snaps. He undid the snaps and pulled the red ball from Darrel’s mouth. Spit, slime, and traces of water spilled out of the severed head’s mouth.
“Gross!” Bryce yelled, taking a step back.
After collecting himself, he leaned in and lowered the victim’s jaw. He grabbed a penlight from the table and shined it inside the open mouth. Nothing but a few teeth fillings. It had been worth a try, at least.
Thomas was the last to investigate the morgue. By the time he got there, the head had been removed from the shark and the ball gag from the head’s mouth. If the awful stench bothered him, he didn’t let it show like the other guests had.
At first, he didn’t recognize what the ball gag was. He just stood there holding it in his gloved hand. He turned it over in his hands several times and eventually snapped the snaps back together.
Then Thomas moved on to examining the head itself. He started by looking inside the victim’s mouth. Then his ears. Eventually, he inspected the rest of the skull, finding the same skull fracture that the other two had.
Thomas also finished early. He used the rest of the time trying to talk to the young maid, to find out more information she might know. She refused to engage him. She’d always found this guest particularly creepy, as had much of the other staff. Had the circumstances been different, they all might have even started an “office” pool, predicting who was likely the killer.
And had they done so, she most certainly would have put $5 on this creep.
CHAPTER 45
THE POWER OF QUESTION
Giles was assigned to the study, the victim’s last known whereabouts.
Bryce was the first guest escorted there, as stipulated by Thomas. The young kid, just twenty years old, had held his own pretty well that week, in Giles’s opinion. When the young man had first arrived, Giles hadn’t thought much of him. And once the game started, he’d suspected, along with most of the other guests, that Bryce would be among the first to die.
But here he was, one of the remaining three. Or maybe he was the killer himself. That was always a possibility, too, Giles knew.
Giles watched as Bryce entered the large study. He was curious to see where Bryce would start. This area was likely the most difficult one yet, since unlike many of the other crime scenes or last known whereabouts, which had been obviously disturbed in some way or another, the study, in its current state, showed no signs of a struggle. Nothing looked particularly out of place as far as Giles could tell.
So it would be intriguing to watch each of the three guests move about and look for evidence that may or may not actually exist.
Bryce started by pacing around the large room slowly. He stopped by each of the four massive desks and his head constantly moved as he looked from floor to ceiling while circling the study.
It went on like that for the better part of fifteen minutes. Bryce just paced and circled, looking increasingly panicked over the lack of finding any evidence. So he began taking more time looking at stuff on the desks, things on the walls. And that’s when he finally stopped walking and really leaned in to look at something hanging on the wall near the door.
Giles took a step back: for one, to give Bryce more room, to not interfere with the young man’s investigation, but also so that he could see better for himself what had caught Bryce’s attention.
It was a large plaque with a brass plate near the bottom.
The brass plate indicated that the plaque had been awarded to one Captain Oliver Pershing, for forty years of outstanding service with the LAPD. What was unusual about the plaque, and likely what Bryce had noticed, was that there was nothing else above the brass plate. It was just an empty wooden plaque, with a few spots of residue where something had clearly been mounted there.
Neither Giles nor Bryce knew what that meant just yet. However, it was definitely something worth noting. Bryce looked at it for a few minutes longer, then turned to face Giles.
“Do you know what was hanging there before?” Bryce asked him.
“No, unfortunately not. But even if I did, I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you. My instructions were clear: I am not allowed to help you interpret anything you find.”
“Oh, okay,” he said.
Then he kept going. He continued circling the room. The large, nearly empty mansion was eerily quiet that morning. And as Bryce circled, the silence became something more. It became a clue, of sorts. Or led to one, anyway.
With only ten minutes left, as Bryce made his third pass by the doorway, he suddenly stopped. He lifted his head as if listening for something. Then he took two slow, careful steps back. Then two more forward.
And then Giles realized what the young man was hearing. There was a small whirring noise every time he moved past the door. It was so quiet and subtle it was nearly completely imperceptible. Had Bryce not noticed it first, Giles wasn’t sure he ever would have heard it himself. Chalk it up to younger, better ears, he surmised.
A short time later, Bryce found the source of the noise. Mounted on the high ceiling, in the corner of the room nearest the door, was a very small security camera. It had motion detectors and the small motor was just barely audible in the deathly silent room as it zoomed and shifted lenses to follow Bryce’s movements.
“Can I, like, see the security footage from that thing?” he asked.
Giles didn’t answer right away. Not because he was being coy. No, it was because he actually wasn’t quite sure. He thought back to all the instructions that the killer had given him, which had been an awful lot by then. One of the first sets of instructions had laid out the groundwork for the general rules of the game. The guests or contestants were allowed to go to, alter, and see any part of an area of investigation unless the specific rules for the area said otherwise. For instance, during the helicopter investigation, which had occurred in this very same room, Giles now remembered that the room rules he’d received had said that the security footage was off-limits. In fact, that same rule had been stated for several of the challenges. But not for this one. For this murder, the documents Giles had received from the killer said nothing at all relating to security camera footage.
“This way,” Giles finally said.
He led Bryce down the hallway to a room not too far from the study. The security control room was fairly small. It was basically just a closet with a desk. On top of the desk was a large flat-panel computer monitor covered with a grid of security camera images.
Giles had actually been here several times since the game had started. At first, he had the clever idea that he could discover the identity of the killer by checking the security camera footage. But he really should have known better. Every room, event, or angle that could possibly have revealed the killer’s identity had been deleted. If it ever existed in the first place. The killer really had thought of everything. The killer must have had an iPad or some such device connected to this system where he or she could alter and delete footage as needed, while simultaneously keeping tabs on the rest of the mansion and everyone else’s activities.
For example, when Giles had returned to his room for the first time after checking the security footage, there had been a warning waiting for him on his bed. The warning was in the form of a single photograph of Giles’s youngest brother and his son, Giles’s nephew, taken last year at his eleventh birthday party. The words “Don’t do that again” had been scribbled across the bottom of the picture in red ink. The warning had been a most effective one, as Giles had not attempted to access the security footage again, unless instructed to.
But this time, he felt confident that he was supposed to. The absence of instructions not to was, in hindsight, fairly prominent for this particular area of investigation.
Giles accessed the study’s camera footage archive and played it starting at five A.M. He fast-forwarded the footage until he saw Darrel entering the room alone. Then he beckoned Bryce to join him.
They both watched as Darrel sat at a computer at one of the desks and tried to log in. It was difficult to tell if he was having any success because his back was to the camera and, likewise, the door, but based on his body language it seemed to Giles that he was not having any luck at all.
Then suddenly something was placed over the camera lens and the picture went mostly dark.
“Dude,” Bryce said quietly beside him.
There was still a small sliver of the screen left uncovered, likely on purpose, Giles assumed. In that tiny sliver of footage, they could just see Darrel’s shoulders and head as he continued to sit at the desk. A gun held by a black gloved hand came into the frame and pressed up against the back of Darrel’s head. He stood slowly and then moved out of the frame completely.
They watched for a few more minutes, but it quickly became obvious that that was the end of it.
“Wow,” Bryce said.
Giles checked his watch.
“Your time is nearly up. Let’s get back to the study,” he said.
Seven minutes later, the second guest to investigate the study showed up. Thomas entered the room without so much as even looking at Giles. He came in like a man with a purpose. Which, Giles supposed, made sense. The man had a crime to solve, after all.
Thomas went about his search far more methodically than Bryce had. He systematically inspected every inch of the various sections of the large study. The method was sound in theory, but in this particular case, it led him astray. He did find the plaque with the missing item. But his slow, systematic approach did not lead to the accidental discovery of the security camera like it had for Bryce.
It was even possible, Giles figured, that Thomas had noticed the security c
ameras. But perhaps he merely assumed that the footage was off-limits, so never thought to ask to see it. Giles wasn’t sure, exactly, but what he did know was that Thomas, in fact, never asked. Therefore he did not get to see the footage Bryce had seen earlier.
The same was true for the last guest to investigate the study that morning. Jacqueline also had eventually noticed the strangely empty award plaque on the wall, but she also failed to ask about seeing security camera footage. Not that it had been that revealing, Giles admitted. He wasn’t particularly sure just how much of an advantage it would give Bryce heading into the challenge portion of the investigation. But he knew it certainly wouldn’t hurt the young lad’s chances.
It wasn’t until that moment that Giles realized he still viewed the youngster as the underdog. He really did seem to be out of his depth here. Thomas clearly had a brilliant, analytical mind, capable of breaking down and solving problems with almost surgical precision and frightening speed. And Jacqueline, aside from a few emotional breakdowns recently, always seemed to have a calm presence about her. She was also clearly intelligent, had a medical background that had given her a great advantage in the morgue, and was likable, which had made the other guests more willing to share information with her thus far. Plus, she really seemed to enjoy this sort of stuff. She talked about how much she loved that dreadful TV show CSI and modern American mystery novels all the time. Agatha Christie novels put modern American mystery novels to shame in Giles’s opinion.
But that was neither here nor there.
The point was that Bryce was the only one who’d seen the security footage. Of course, it was entirely possible that while he’d been the most successful investigating the study, he might have performed horribly both in the morgue and at the crime scene. But obviously Giles had no way of knowing that.
Not that it mattered. This investigation was going to move very quickly, according to his last set of instructions from the killer. Within the hour, they would already be making their murder pitches. And then before dinnertime, they’d all likely know what had happened to poor Darrel.
Murder in Mystery Manor Page 16