Salvation Boulevard (27 page)

“We have had,” I said into my recorder, “two narratives for this crime. The first was a suicide. There were, and are, a set of facts consistent with that narrative. I am now going to ask Oliver Noble, a security officer of the University of the Southwest assigned to me
today, to occupy the place of the deceased. Officer Noble, could you sit in this chair please?”

I put the camera on a tripod at the back of the office. I took my gun, removed the clip, then demonstrated for Noble and the camera that the chamber was also empty. I had him hold the gun in his right hand and put the barrel to his temple. I had him hold a piece of yellow cord against his left temple and ran the other end to the bullet hole.

“This is creepy,” Oliver said.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said, then explained to the camera that the cord illustrated the trajectory. “In addition, according to the original notes, the victim's fingerprints were found on the gun, and there was powder residue on his right hand, all consistent with, and supporting, the theory of suicide.”

“Now,” I said, rolling up the cord, then walking over to Oliver's right side, “we have a second theory of the crime. That it was a homicide. That a second party fired the gun. The nature of the wound, the stippling around the entry, and the trajectory of the bullet”—I took the gun from Oliver but held it in the same place—“still demonstrate that the gun had to have been fired from here, in this position, against the victim's head.”

“However,” I said, “how are we to account for the victim's prints on the gun and the residue on his hand. Oliver, with your permission,” I said, taking his hand.

“Yeah, sure,” he said.

Continuing to narrate each step of the way, I put his hand around the gun and put my hand over his. “Now,” I said, “I am going to force Officer Noble's finger to pull the trigger,” and I began to squeeze.

“No fucking way, man!” he yelled and flung the gun out of his hand. It clattered across the desk and banged up against the wall. He glared at me, his face full of fury.

I looked at the camera and said, “This is a demonstration of how hard it would be to force someone to fire a gun into their own head. In this case, even though we had thoroughly demonstrated
that the gun was unloaded and of no danger, our stand-in reacted with a violent reflex of resistance.”

“Wow,” Noble said, “very slick. Yeah, nobody would let somebody do that.”

He was great. I hoped I would get to use the tape in court someday.

“So what the fuck did happen?” he asked.

 

Narrative number three.

If you can't get a living man to fire a bullet into his own head, leaving evidence on his hand and on the gun, you have to kill him first, then use his dead hand to fire a second shot. That meant two shots, two bullets, and two bullet holes.

I had Oliver, who was now beginning to enjoy himself a great deal, assume the pose in which MacLeod's corpse had been found. MacLeod had bled profusely. The splatter pattern, what was left of it, and the blood evidence indicated that he had stayed in one place. It wasn't conclusive, but that seemed to be the case.

I put the gun in Oliver's hand, the way I had before, with my hand over his, to determine what range of motion I could get without moving the body.

If I had killed MacLeod by standing beside him and shooting him in the head, then wanted to restage it as a suicide, where would I aim the second shot. My first choice would have been out the window. The bullet goes away, far, far away, and there's no bullet hole. I opened the windows and tried to determine if, by bending MacLeod's arm—Oliver's arm—over his back, I could get a clear shot through the open windows. It seemed exceedingly difficult, and I demonstrated that with the yellow cord again.

An easier, and more likely, direction to shoot would be in the victim's natural range of motion, a cone-shaped space, biased to his right. The door and a blank wall were directly to his right. It was easy to see that there was nothing there.

By raising the victim's arm, however, it would be easily possible to fire into the books on the shelves above the desk. How many times in
my life had I heard the story of the soldier who had the Bible his mother gave him in his breast pocket, which stopped the bullet that would have struck his heart? The atheist's books would also have stopped a bullet. Then the perpetrator could have collected the book, or books, along with the bullet itself, removed them, and replaced them with other volumes. There had to be a couple of thousand books in there, and who would know if one, or two, or three were out of place?

Teresa might.

My mind slid easily, and without conscious effort, into fantasies of how that would play out, starting on the couch or leaning on the desk . . . now that Gwen had stopped being my wife in the terms we both understood that to mean.

The aromas of tobacco and burgers and the peculiar way people sweat under a polyester uniform, coming off of Oliver, all two hundred and forty pounds of him, brought me back to what I was there for. A damn good thing I'd come here with him, not her. Much better for my concentration.

Would firing a bullet into a book leave some sort of trace? I didn't know offhand. I would have to get a few and test fire into them. Not Bibles, of course, but secular material.

The most natural shot, given the position of the body, was under the desk. I had Oliver move out of the chair. I set up a small, portable battery lamp to illuminate the area and began to examine the floor underneath, taping my search. There was dirt and dust and a crumbled receipt, which I put in a baggie and marked.

And there they were. Little bits of paper, like confetti, with letters and bits of letters on them. And what looked like, possibly, charred edges. It would have to go to a test lab to be sure.

 

The killer had put some books on the floor, wrapped MacLeod's dead hand around the gun, and fired into them. Possibly the deceased's own work, the missing copies of his mystery novels. They'd been right beside the gun. It would have been natural to grab them at the same time.

Both sides of the desk had drawers in them. The set on the right ended eight inches from the floor, but the ones on the left only cleared it by about a half-inch, and I couldn't really see underneath them.

I photographed the desktop, disconnected all the lines to the computer, and took everything off that was likely to fall. Then Oliver and I carefully lifted up the desk, which weighed a ton from all the papers in it, and moved it out toward the center of the room.

There, amidst ancient dust and old crumbs, was a shining silver cross.

I was ready to take bets it was Nicole Chandler's cross.

I was wearing a sports jacket to cover the gun that I now carried all the time.

When I entered her house, Teresa came to me and kissed me on the cheek. The kiss itself was polite and restrained enough to be a simple greeting, but her body came in closer than was appropriate for someone who wanted to be just a client—and stayed there longer.

I'd set a line of proper conduct between us. It had the effect of putting both of us in that state of aroused awareness that makes every point of contact—the spot where her breast touched my chest, the feel of her thighs on either side of one of mine, and her hand on my arm, placed there so casually in such a normal position for that kind of greeting—electric and hypercharged.

“Let's sit down,” I said, breaking the contact, “and I'll tell you where we are.”

“I'd like to know that,” she said.

When Gwen spoke, her voice was a single tone that delivered just one message. When Teresa spoke, or even looked at me, there were layers upon layers and aromatic hints of distant flavors. Some complimentary, some contradictory.

In this case, there were at least seven varieties of curiosity. A simple one that wanted information about the investigation. A more
anxious one about where we stood. That held both a faint, hidden trace of hope and a tight anxiety about being rejected. There was an earthy subtext that was wondering what it would be like to be rutting on the couch. Yet another, less necessary to disguise, about getting the book that she sought, and with all that, a kind of child's eagerness to just hear a story.

I sat in one of her living room chairs and put my attaché case on the floor beside me. She asked me if I would like anything to drink.

“Water,” I said. “Or club soda.”

I watched her walk away into the kitchen. She was wearing a gray skirt and a lighter gray top, a snug cotton spandex blend, with a white mesh vest over it that played hide-and-seek with her prominent nipples. The skirt hung to just above her knees, reasonably proper, but it clung to her shape so closely that I knew no more than a thong, if anything, could be underneath it. She brought me a bottle of imported sparkling water and a glass with ice in it.

“I'm going to have something stronger,” she said and went to a combination liquor cabinet and wine rack in the corner. From there she asked, “Are you sure you won't join me?”

“This is fine.”

She came back with a bottle of Old Charter Proprietor's Reserve, a thirteen-year-old bourbon, and a glass for herself. She opened it and poured out two fingers. The aroma of it, sweet, sour, and expensive, reached out to me.

“Tell me,” she said, lifting the glass to her mouth and taking a small sip.

“I'm accepting the premise,” I said, “that whoever killed your husband also took the book. Though I still don't really understand why.

“I've identified the girl you told me about, though she's not a girl. She's a young woman, twenty-three. Her name is Nicole Chandler. The reason, probably, that he referred to her as his ‘
own
special angel,' is that she was—is—a member of the Choir of Angels at Cathedral of the Third Millennium.”

“Your church?”

“Yes. She seems to have disappeared. My next major step will be to try to find her. In the meantime, I did the crime scene investigation.”

“What's that like? What do you actually do?” she asked with the kind of eager interest a lot of people react with, as if a TV show had just walked into their home.

“If you like,” I said, “I can show you.”

“Go back there?”

“No,” I said. “I video what I do to create a record. I have it with me. I can show it to you in the camera, or I can play it through your computer where it'll be a whole lot easier to see.”

“A Mac's okay?”

“Sure.”

“Great. Follow me,” she said, taking her drink with her.

One of the two bedrooms had been turned into an office. She was obviously working on a project. There were books and papers spread out on her desk. Several aerial maps, marked up with pale blue and light red highlighter, were tacked to a wall lined with corkboard. There were four paintings on the opposite side. Three of them had that Mexican style, vivid colors, but very flat, as if they came from a world that had just two dimensions. The fourth was a nude of a slender woman, her back to the painter, just a hint of her profile visible, and I guessed that it might be Teresa herself. We played don't ask, don't tell.

It took me a few minutes to hook up her computer to the camera and get into iMovie. When I got it set, I had her sit in her office chair, and I stood beside her to run the camera. I began to take her through it, fast-forwarding past all the dull stuff and explaining what I was doing and why.

I got to the point where I was speaking into the camera about the various versions of the crime, and she asked, “What do you mean by that?”

“The goal of a crime scene analysis is, in a way, to establish a narrative,” I said, looking down at her.

“You can't know what actually took place. But you look at the facts you do have and then imagine a story that would explain them,” I went on. She looked at me with that rapt attention a
good-girl student gives her teacher. “You do that both informally, intuitively as you go, and then formally as you get further along. Once you have that story, it implies that you will find other things consistent with it. And you look for those things. If you don't find what should be there, or you find things inconsistent with your narrative, then you have to revise it. Of course, as you start to develop a theory, it influences what you look for, where you look, and how you look. So, to some degree, you have to fight that tendency and be thorough and methodical, even though your instincts say you're done and you're wasting time. So, you're trying to do both at the same time: create the story, because that's your ultimate goal, and prevent it from blinding you to facts that contradict it.” By then she had turned away from me and was looking at the screen, making me think I'd gone on too long and bored her.

“Here, I'll show you,” I said and started up the video again. I was fast-forwarding, looking for a good part, when she reached up blindly and took my hand. She pulled it to her face and held it there, and I felt the warm moisture of tears.

I turned her face toward me, and they were rolling down her cheeks. She looked truly bereaved.

“What? What is it?”

“I miss him,” she said. “I miss him so much. Oh, you can't know. You sound just like him.”

“What do you mean?”

“What you just said.” She sort of half-laughed through her tears. “That could have been Nathaniel describing ‘how we actually determine what reality is,' and ‘the commonsense version of the scientific method.'” She looked away from me, holding my hand to her cheek and crying. “Hold me,” she said softly.

There was no sexuality in it this time. Maybe that made it more insidiously seductive, reaching around my defenses, but I put the camera down and awkwardly put an arm around her. She leaned into me and cried, genuinely sobbing. Her other arm went around me, and she held on tight.