The Shoulders of Giants (9 page)

I turned on the news to put off doing any real work for a little longer. A blonde reporter was interviewing a distraught Hispanic cleaning woman outside an apartment building on what looked like Wacker Drive. The interview ended before I could work out what they were discussing and just as the reporter was handing back to the studio, Al Freedman walked into shot behind her.

I managed not to call Scott’s cell for a full thirty seconds. After all, I didn’t want to bother him while he was working. When he answered, he didn’t sound relaxed and fulfilled in his work.

“Hey, I just saw Freedman on the news. What’s going on? Have you got Walsh?”

“Not exactly. We’ve got another body.”

“Shotgun?”

“Kitchen knife. Sorry man, gotta go.”

I surfed through the channels, looking for another local news station covering the same story. I didn’t find one, so I waited patiently for Scott to call me back.

Chapter 13

It was after six when Scott eventually turned up at my office. I had still not finished my case report, but I’d made a very impressive title page for it.

Body number five belonged to Grant Foster, a thirty-six year old actor slash model. Unfortunately, someone had taken the slash part too literally. He had been discovered in the kitchen of his apartment, with a large knife embedded in his neck. And yes, he did have a Z cut into his foot.

“Maybe it’s an elaborate marketing campaign for a new Zorro movie.” I suggested. “Who found him?”

“His cleaning woman. Hysterical Mexican lady named Hernandez.” The woman I’d seen being interviewed on the news.

“Think she did it?”

“Well, we thought about taking her fingerprints, just to freak her out, but Al said it was too cruel.”

“I suppose it’s too much to hope Calvin Walsh’s fingerprints are on the knife?”

“Way too much. No fingerprints anywhere. Not a mark on the body except the knife wound and the Z. Killer is neat, left the kitchen spotless.”

“Except for the dead actor slash model making a mess on the floor.”

“Except that.”

“Do you know how Walsh got in?” I asked.

“No sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle. We can’t rule out the idea that maybe they knew each other. Soon as we catch the asshole, we’ll ask him.”

“No luck there at all?”

“None. Nobody he knows has seen him in almost a week. Hasn’t been into work, or into a bar. Hasn’t made any calls from home, got money from the bank, used a credit card.”

“Well, he’s had a busy week killing people. Probably hasn’t had much time for shopping.”

“He’ll have to surface soon anyway, to get some insulin. We’re staking out the places he usually goes to get it, in case he’s figured out he can’t go back to his apartment. Just a matter of time.”

“There’s a few things I wanted to ask you about,” I said. “Richard West. You said the M.E. wasn’t sure if he was drowned in the lake or a pool. Can’t he test the water in the lungs for chlorine?”

“There wasn’t much water, from what I heard. I don’t know whether it’s possible. I can ask.”

“Do you know if he could tell if it was bath water?”

I told Scott about my theory. He took it all in, but I couldn’t tell whether he bought it or not.

“Also,” I went on, “if Walsh’s car was the one Susan was found in yesterday morning, and it had been in the parking lot since Monday afternoon, how could he pick up a hitchhiker in the early hours of yesterday morning.”

“He probably stole a car.”

“Or rented one,” I supposed.

Scott shook his head. “No, we took a picture of Walsh round to all the car rental places in Chicago. Nobody recognized him.”

“Anything else?” he asked.

“The hair you found in the VW. You said it showed the driver was black, but Walsh is white.”

“So it’s somebody else’s hair. Maybe he lent his car to a friend the day before. What are you saying; you think he didn’t do it?” he asked.

“No, of course he did it, look at all the evidence. I’m just saying it bugged me, that’s all. It just didn’t seem to fit. I mean why would he leave a body in his own car, and then steal a car to drive around in. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to leave Susan Patterson’s body in a stolen car? More to the point, if Walsh was dumping his own car, why wipe it clean? His own prints in his own car don’t prove anything. And why leave the gun with Julie Campbell’s body. He didn’t even shoot her, and it leads us straight to him. Do you seriously believe he just dropped it?”

“Hey, you’re supposed to be the Psychology expert. Didn’t Freud say something about criminals secretly wanting to be caught? Leaving clues subconsciously or something?”

“Yeah, Thanatos, an instinct for self destruction. But Freud talked a lot of shit. You don’t want to believe...”

I was interrupted by a beeping sound. Scott looked at the number on his pager and pointed to my phone. I nodded, and he lifted the receiver and dialed. I tried not to listen in, but I didn’t try very hard.

“This is Bales, is Al there?” said Scott. Someone went to get him.

“Al, it’s Scott. What’s up?” he continued.

“What?”

“When?”

“How?”

“Shit.”

“Okay, I’ll be there soon as I can.” He hung up.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“They’ve found Calvin Walsh.” He did not look happy. He grabbed his coat from the back of the chair, and looked back at me as he headed towards the door. “You coming, or not?” he asked.

I went.

Chapter 14

I caught up with Scott as he was getting into his car. He shoved open the passenger door from inside, and I got in. He made a U-turn in traffic and pulled away fast. I looked at his face. It was not the face of someone who had just caught a serial killer.

“So what’s the deal here?” I asked. “You said they’ve found Walsh. That’s good, right?”

“Wrong. Walsh is dead.”

“What, they had to shoot him?”

“No, he was dead when they found him.”

“Suicide?” I suggested, hopefully.

“Not unless he beat himself to death with a baseball bat. It’s not a very common method.”

“Okay, lets start at the beginning.”

“We had a couple of guys in his apartment, in case he saw us watching the door and decided to go in by a window, or a skylight or something. Anyway, it seems they got hungry and started looking around for something to eat.”

“Man can only live so long on coffee and donuts.” Scott gave me a serious look. I shut up.

“They looked in the cupboards, didn’t see anything they wanted, so they took a look in the freezer. Then they lost their appetite.”

“Walsh?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, maybe he tried one last kill, and the victim overpowered him, beat him to death and put him in the freezer.” Scott looked at me quizzically. “What? It could happen.”

“He must have been there at least since yesterday afternoon, we’ve been staking out the place since then. And Grant Foster was killed this morning.”

We pulled up outside an apartment building on East 46th Street, and walked up two flights of stairs and along a musty corridor. Scott indicated to the policeman guarding the door that I was with him, and we ducked under the yellow tape across the doorframe. The short Texan M.E. was there, along with Sgt. Freedman, and about six uniforms, all doing nothing very busily. Freedman saw me and looked at Scott. I waited for him to say ‘What’s he doing here,’ but he didn’t. Scott took a pair of surgical gloves from his pocket and put them on. He told me not to touch anything and to stay out of the way. I did as I was told.

The M.E. came over to talk to Scott and Freedman. He glanced at me before he started. He probably recognized me from the other crime scenes and wondered if I was a reporter. He gave them his opinions anyway.

“Cause of death is almost certainly massive head trauma. Murder weapon looks like the baseball bat found in the freezer with him, we’ll match it to the dents in his skull at the lab. Like the others, there is a Z shaped laceration in the sole of his left foot, peri-mortem, with a sharp blade.”

“What?” I said, out loud. The three of them turned and glared at me, and then went back to their conversation. I don’t know why I was surprised, but I was. Calvin Walsh wasn’t the killer, he was another victim. Suddenly, everything fell into place. Unfortunately, that meant that when we thought we had answers, we had been asking the wrong questions.

“Time of death?” asked Freedman.

“Ah, that may be a little tough on this one. The freezer screws up just about every method we have of estimating the time of death. Obviously it speeds up body temperature loss dramatically, but it also slows down putrefaction, and makes rigor and livor mortis meaningless. Since the freezer is hermetically sealed, we can’t even use entomology. Vitreous potassium might give us some clue, since it’s not affected by ambient temperature, and when we get him back to the lab we’ll check stomach contents and so on, but at the moment, my best guess is somewhere between eight hours and six days.” He shrugged apologetically.

I knew a bit about rigor and livor mortis and entomology. Rigor mortis is the stiffening of muscles after death because of the loss of ATP. It usually starts about four hours after death, and by twelve hours, the body is totally stiff. After about thirty hours, the muscles all relax again, because the muscle fibers start to decompose. Contrary to popular belief, rigor is one of the worst ways to estimate time of death, because it varies with the environmental temperature, the body weight of the victim, and the level of physical activity immediately before death.

Livor mortis is another matter. After death, the blood stops pumping, and gravity draws it to the lowest points of the body. After about six to eight hours, the blood no longer moves when the body is moved. That’s known as ‘fixed lividity’, and it means the police can sometimes tell if a corpse has been moved after death.

Forensic entomology, as any regular viewer of
C.S.I.
knows, is about the study of insects that come to feed on a corpse in a predictable order. Flies arrive within ten minutes and lay thousands of eggs in the eyes, mouth and nose of the corpse. Twelve hours after death the eggs hatch, and the maggots start feeding on the tissue. At twenty-four to thirty-six hours, beetles arrive to feed on dry skin, and two full days after death, spiders and millipedes show up to eat the insects that are already there. The M.E. had mentioned one method I hadn’t heard of, vitreous potassium. I asked Scott about it in the car on the way back to my office.

“When you die, your red blood cells start to break down and release potassium, and it builds up fairly predictably over time in the liquid in your eyes. They get a big needle and suck out the vitreous humor, then check the potassium levels against a table of expected results”.

“Does it work?”

“Depends who you ask,” said Scott. “Some experts’ll tell you it’s the most accurate method, but most agree there’s a high margin for error. Trouble is, you don’t know what the victim’s potassium levels were when he was alive. Sometimes you’ll get different readings from each eye. Still, it should at least narrow it down. When you’ve got nothing else…”

Scott didn’t need to know this kind of information to do his job, but he’d never let that stop him. Most cops will rely on the scientists for the science stuff and the lawyers for the law stuff and just stick to what they know, but Scott felt that everything he could learn would make him a better detective. It’s a trait I admire, and like to think I share.

“Well, it’s obvious Walsh has been dead since Sunday, at least,” I said. “My guess is he was the first victim. Then the killer stole his guns, his insulin, and his car.”

“And his Ray-Bans.”

“Them too.”

“And, apparently, the tape from his answering machine. Probably means the killer called him, so we’ll run his phone records and see if they were stupid enough to use their own phone.”

I thought about my next question carefully. I didn’t want Scott to think I couldn’t handle everything I was going through, even if I had been having doubts myself. I’d been telling myself that P.I.’s don’t deal with corpses on a regular basis, and that after this case was wrapped up I’d probably have a few months of nice easy cases following wayward husbands. But I hadn’t slept well the previous night, and I wasn’t looking forward to trying again.

“Does it get easier?” I asked him, finally.

“What?”

“I don’t know, the whole thing. Looking at dead bodies; that smell; talking about death? Do you stop thinking about it when you go home at night?”

“It’s hard at first. I remember the first time I saw a corpse. Was still in uniform, and I got called out to a domestic dispute. Usually we just went in and stopped a drunk from hitting his wife until the following night, or something like that. But this time we pulled up to a house and this lady was on the front steps crying, and there was no yelling. My partner and me thought maybe the husband had left, gone back to the bar, or to his mistress or whatever, but then we heard more crying inside the house. A kid.”

I realized we had stopped, and we were outside my office. Scott continued his story, his eyes focused on something outside the car, mine on him.

“The lady was hysterical, we couldn’t get any sense out of her, so we went on in to investigate. I saw the kid first. He was maybe eight or nine, and he was sitting in the corner of the room, rocking back and forth, bawling. And then I saw the kid’s father, flat on his back on the floor, blood everywhere. He had on a white shirt, but it was totally red from the blood. I stood there in the doorway. Didn’t know what to do. I should have checked for vital signs, but I didn’t have to. I knew he was dead. My partner came in, went straight to the body, checked his pulse. Nothing. I knew he was dead. I didn’t sleep that night.”

“Did the wife kill him?”

“Yeah. Turned out he was drunk, he was beating up on her, then he started on the kid. She went and got an axe from his toolbox, and she cut him sixteen times. She kept chopping even after he was dead, just to make sure. She got off. Pled justifiable homicide.”