The Theory of Death (3 page)

“This isn’t why you came down here,” Decker said.

“Things change, Old Man. As you always say, flexibility is a virtue.”

“I don’t remember saying that.”

“So you
are
working on the case?” Radar said.

“I’ll work with Decker if he wants me. If it’s a suicide, it won’t take long to wrap it up, right?”

“Once we find out who he is,” Decker said. “If it’s not suicide, it gets complicated. I’m not pulling you away from your studies.”

“Not to worry. I could probably take the exams right now and pass … albeit a low pass. Besides, I could use a break for a day or two. Clear my head of all that legal nonsense.”

“So are you working or not?” Radar asked.

“Yes, I’m working. And don’t worry about the money. We’ll use the bartering system. You can teach me all you know about ballistics, fingerprinting, and blood splatter pattern, and I’ll give you my time gratis. But only if the Loo wants me around.”

“You can tag along today.” To Radar, Decker said, “Did you find out the identity of the anonymous caller?”

“Carson Jackson, age sixteen. The other set of footprints probably belongs to Milo Newcamp, also age sixteen. They claim they were out hiking, but they were probably hunting illegally.”

“Hunting what?” McAdams asked.

“Turkey, fox, deer … which would be okay except it’s not hunting season. They’re coming down to the station house with their parents at around six in the evening.”

“Tell them to bring the shoes they hiked in this morning.”

“You’ve got shoe prints?”

“We do,” Decker said. “We’ll probably be back by then. I don’t want to be here in the dark. It’s disorienting enough in the daylight. Plus there’s no phone reception. If I’m not at the station house by six, come look for me,
please
.”

“I’ll do that.” Radar smiled.

Decker looked at McAdams. “Give him your phone.”

“What?”

“You have the snapshots of our victim on your phone.”

“So do you.”

“You have more. Give it to him.”

McAdams made a point of sighing as he handed his phone to Radar. Decker said, “When you get to your computer, could you download the snapshots and send them to my computer? Also have someone make leaflets with Doe’s picture so we can start passing them around.”

“Do you think he’s local?”

“McAdams thinks he’s probably a student at one of the five colleges of upstate. I suspect he’s right. Since no one has reported him missing, I want to pass the pictures around the campuses. If you could get someone to grease the skids at the colleges, we can move efficiently.”

“I’ll call in the mayor. He’ll want to know what’s going on … especially after last time.”

“Yeah, I have a feeling he doesn’t like me very much,” McAdams said.

“On the contrary, Tyler, your father just donated more money for a new emergency computer system.”

McAdams turned to Decker. “Did you know about this?”

Decker was staring at the depression where the body had sat. “Pardon?”

“Never mind. What are you looking at since there is no longer a corpse?”

“I was just wondering what was so bad in his life that he couldn’t bear to wake up and face another day.”

THE SUN WAS
casting long shadows as darkness waited in the wings. The footprints had stopped in a thicket of bare oaks, the trees identifiable by the brown, dead lobular leaves that they had shed during the fall. Decker’s feet sank into the patches of snow and earthy detritus: clammy and cold. Neither he nor McAdams was wearing hiking boots. Decker broke a ski heat pack and gave it to McAdams. Then he broke another one for his numb feet. His gloved hands and covered head were warmer, but not by much.

McAdams looked around. “There’s nothing out here and the ground is covered with leaves and snow. How are we going to figure out what direction he came from?”

“I don’t know and it’s getting late.”

“Pack it in?”

Decker didn’t answer. “The bottom of John Doe’s pants were wet but not muddy. If you were tramping through all this slush and leaves, there’d be some muddy residue on the cuffs, don’t you think?”

“Well, he had to have trudged through some of it because his shoe prints stop here.”

“I certainly don’t see any tire tracks.” Decker thought a moment. “The guy comes out to the woods and kills himself away from civilization. He has no ID, nothing to give us any idea who he is.”

“He wants to go out anonymously.”

“Yeah, and a car would ruin the anonymity. You can’t lose a car. It’s too big to hide and it can be traced. The same with a motorcycle.”

“Okay.”

“Look at all the dead stuff on the forest floor, Tyler. Between the leaves and the snow cover, you could easily bury a bike and no one would probably notice until next spring if at all.”

“Gotcha. So where do we start digging?”

“Like I said, his pant cuffs were wet but not dirty. I’m saying he buried it somewhere near his footprints.” Decker picked up a long stick and gave it to McAdams. Then he found another one. “You sweep the area to the left of the footprints, I’ll sweep the right.”

There were a lot of tree roots, but after ten minutes of searching, Decker hit something solid about a hundred yards from where the footprints disappeared. He took off his winter gloves and slapped on the latex. Then he bent down and brought the object to the surface, shaking off leaves and dirt and bugs. The bike was painted electric blue and had ten gears. Definitely not a mountain bike: it was meant for short distances like tooling around downtown Greenbury.

“It’s a Zipspeed,” McAdams stated.

“The bicycle rental place?” Decker said.

“Exactly. You can see the logo on the front fender. I’ve rented their bikes before. The company specializes in franchises in college towns.”

Decker studied the handlebars, the seat, and the wheels. He found what he was looking for etched into the wheel rims of both tires. “We’ve got an ID number: 19925.”

“I don’t have anything to write it down with.”

“Doesn’t matter. The bike comes back with us. It’s evidence.”

“We’re lugging it back with us?”

“Well, you are.” He handed the bike to Tyler. “You’re younger and stronger.”

“I was shot.”

“That pity card was used up a long time ago. When we get it back, call up the local Zipspeed office while I talk to our hikers who found the body.”

“The place will probably be closed by the time we get back.”

“Then you find who’s in charge and get them to open up.”

McAdams held up the bike. “How do we get this back to town? It won’t fit in the car.”

“It’ll fit on top of the car. I’ve got some bungee cords in the trunk.”

“Suddenly law school doesn’t seem so bad.”

Decker laughed. “You can beg off any time you want, Harvard.”

“I know. I guess I forgot how much tedium is in an investigation. But it’s better than the tedium in law school right now.”

“It’s your choice. You can think about it as we walk back to the car. It’s getting late. So get a move on.”

The kid heaved a big sigh and picked up the bike. “Why does this always happen to me? Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

“You can’t fight the devil.” Decker put his arm around his shoulder. “So you might as well learn how to swim.”

T
HE BOYS WERE
all arms and legs, gangly in the way that teenage boys are before the muscle comes in. Carson Jackson was fair-haired with adolescent acne. He looked like his mother, who sat next to him, throwing her son poison arrows with her eyes. Milo Newcamp was short with scruffy hair and a long nose, and was accompanied by his father. Both parents were impatient to get the interviews over. Their expressions were weary, conveying that the boys had been in trouble too many times before. Decker had placed them in one of the two interview rooms at the station house. It held a rectangular table and six chairs surrounded by unadorned walls painted off-white. The room did have a one-way mirror that had been installed five years ago. Decker had only been with the department for a little over a year, and in all that time, he never remembered anyone sitting on the other side while an interview was being conducted.

Once the shoe prints had been taken off of the teens’ boots, Decker started the interview by asking them the basics: time, place, reason for being there on a school day, where they came from, where they were going. Then he went over his notes.

“So you both decided to skip school and go for a hike.”

“It’s not the first time they’ve been truant,” Carson’s mother interjected.

“Okay,” Decker said. “Mrs. Jackson, I’d like them to answer the questions. Once I’m done—and it shouldn’t take too long—you can deal with your boy however you want.”

“Let’s just get it over with, Julia … again.” Mr. Newcamp frowned. “We’ve both got better things to do.”

“That’s for certain.” Julia muttered, “Morons!”

Decker said, “So you boys biked to the forest and started the hike around eleven, leaving your bikes in a thicket off Millstone Road.”

Again the boys nodded.

Decker looked down at his notes. “And you weren’t on any mapped trail?”

“No, sir,” Milo said. “But we’ve hiked the backcountry before.”

“From where you started to where you ended up, it’s about fifteen minutes.” Decker looked up. “What took you so long?”

Milo’s father chucked the back of his son’s head with two fingers. “Tell them what you were doing. They probably went hunting. No matter it isn’t hunting season and it’s dangerous to go shooting when you can’t see the orange jackets. Idiots!”

“Mr. Newcamp, let me ask the questions so we can all get going with the rest of our day,” Decker said. “So you found the body.”

“Yes, sir.” Milo answered for both of them.

“And then what did you do?”

“We couldn’t get phone reception. So we turned around and went back to our bikes and went home and called from there.”

“Not home,” Mr. Newcamp said. “You went to the Arby’s until school let out.” Again he chucked his head.

“Ow!” the boy exclaimed.

Decker said, “Stop hitting him, okay? You’re in the presence of the police.” Newcamp looked down, another sour look on his face. Decker continued. “Did either of you touch the body to see if he had a pulse?”

The boys shook their heads. Milo said, “His face was covered with snow. He wasn’t moving. I didn’t want to mess anything up.

Decker leaned across the table. “We didn’t find anything on the body, boys: no wallet, no cell phone, no pad, no backpack, and no personal identification.” A pause. “This is important, so don’t lie. Did either of you take anything?”

The boys shook their heads emphatically and said no several times.

“You didn’t go through his pockets?” Decker said. “Because if you did, we’ll find your fingerprints.” Not always the case, but the kids didn’t know that.

“No way, no way,” Carson said. “We just got the hell out of there.”

“We ran back, sir,” Milo said. “I don’t want nothing to do with a dead body.”

Yvonne Mastino came in and handed Decker a note. The boys’ boot prints matched the casts from the shoe prints in the snow. “Okay,” Decker said. “I have what I need for now. You can pick up your hiking boots and go home. I might have a few more questions later on. With your parents’ permission, I want to keep your rifles at the station house until hunting season begins.”

“Good idea,” Julia Jackson said.

“That’s so unfair!” Carson protested.

“Shut up, Carson.” To Decker, Julia said, “I’ll bring his in tomorrow.”

“Ditto,” Newcamp said. “Better it’s here than one of you shooting someone and going to jail for manslaughter. Idiots!” He started to hit his son’s head but stopped himself. “Are we done?”

Decker nodded. The four of them got up and left. He turned off the tape recorder just as McAdams came into the room. “Anything illuminating with the kids?”

“Just stupid teenagers playing hooky.”

“No one was in the Zipspeed office, but I got hold of the clerk and he looked up the numbered bike on his computer. It was rented by John Smith.”

“A pseudonym, y’think?” Decker said.

“I dunno about that. The clerk claims that no one rents without a driver’s license left on file as security.”

“So he got a false license with the name John Smith.”

“Or his name is John Smith,” McAdams stated. “I got one bit of news. The name might be fake, but the form that he filled out had his student ID number. According to that, he went to Kneed Loft.”

Of the five colleges of upstate, Kneed Loft was the smallest. It specialized in math/science/engineering, but it was still considered a liberal arts college rather than a technological institute like MIT or Caltech. Decker said. “Let’s grab some flyers. We can start there.”

“Um … question. Have you told Rina that I’m in town?”

“Yes.”

“And it’s okay?”

“Yes, it’s okay. For some odd reason, she likes you.” Decker stood up. “Let’s go.”

“Do you think the kids took anything from the crime scene?”

“Like a laptop or phone? They said no and I believe them. You saw how tidy the pile was, clothes neatly folded and stacked. If they did some rifling, the clothes would have been messed up.”

“They could have straightened the clothes afterward.”

“McAdams, have you ever been in the average teenage boy’s room? Meticulous is just not in their vocabulary.”

THE FIVE COLLEGES
of upstate were their own entities with their own security and their own secretive methods of handling crime, the offenses usually centered around students getting drunk and getting into trouble. There was the occasional crossover, usually when the incident was too serious for the colleges to handle. Such was the case last year when a student of Littleton College, a senior named Angeline Moreau, was found murdered in an off-campus residence.

The college had been more than happy to punt to the local police. Greenbury wasn’t used to dealing with big-city crime, and the town hadn’t had a brutal whodunit in years. It was Greenbury’s good fortune that Decker had signed up six months before the case broke, having recently hung up his shield as a detective lieutenant for LAPD.