Chapter 5: Working the Crime Scene
Even though dispatch had given me the address, I didn’t need it—I literally followed the lights and sirens, all the way to the block party of NYPD patrol cars parked all the way up and down the street. As I walked, I made note of what homes had cameras. While the little village we lived in had it’s own security, it wasn’t a gated community. And half a dozen Wi-Fi security cameras could be bought from CostCo for the price of a dinner out at Arby’s for a family of five.
Before even seeing the slightest evidence of the crime, I knew it was going to be one of the least pleasant scenes I’ve been to. And yes, there is such a thing as a pleasant crime scene—a neat little twenty-two in the head, a touch of poison in the tea, or even a garrote around the neck.
The first rule of the crime scene is simple: When the Medical Examiner people are staying outside, away from the body, it’s a bad one. In this case, they parked the ME van directly in front of the house, yet they were across the street, trying to get as far away from the scene of the crime without abandoning their van.
It got worse when I saw my partner, Alexander Packard, also standing outside. He was a tall, skinny fellow, bald with a graying handlebar mustache. His gray tweed was, as always, a size too large for him—it was as small as he could get before going to specialty stores for a size zero.
Packard had been in the navy, and had seen two crew mates eaten—one by a shark, one by a propeller—and had fifteen years on the job more than I did.
Packard gave me a wave, and I returned it “How did you get here so fast?”
He shrugged. “I was going to say hello. Congratulate you on meeting IA for the first time. Got the call on the way by.”
I nodded and looked around at the usually orderly chaos of the neighborhood. “I’d ask how bad can it be, but...” I gestured to the ME van. “Is it that messy?”
“A real horror show. And the vic is thirteen.”
I cringed. “Name?”
“Carol Whelan. Thirteen. She never made it to school. The parents work in the city, so they had to be up and out before she was even awake. She generally made it to the bus on her own.”
I nodded. “The bus stop is only a block away. Where’s school for her?”
“Grammar school down near the Cross Island. Saint Gregory the Great.”
I sighed and shook my head. “God. My son goes to Greg’s. She must have only been a year or two ahead of him. What happened to her?”
Packard frowned, stuck his hands in his pockets, and looked away. He stared off for a moment, and I was actually worried about him for a moment. My partner was perhaps the most sarcastic and cynical cop I knew in a profession that bred sarcastic and cynical.
Packard looked back at me with his deep blue eyes. “The question is more like what didn’t happen to her.
“Obvious signs of cause of death include dismemberment and disarticulation.”
I raised a brow. “Both? That seems like ... I can’t tell if that’s overkill or the most disorganized psycho ever.”
“Embrace the power of ‘and,’ Tommy. From what the Medical Examiner guys could tell before they ran out of the room, most of the bones are broken, and the body cut to pieces at most of the major joints. It means ankles, knees, hips, wrists, elbows, shoulders, though he was at least nice enough to leave her head attached to her upper trunk.”
I held out a hand. I didn’t want to hear any more, and that was more than enough between now and the autopsy. “We can assume that he knows how to carve a turkey and wield a hammer. Got it. Time of death? Or did the ME not bother with a liver temperature before they ran out?”
“That would be difficult,” Packard told me. “The liver isn’t there.”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course not. It wouldn’t be a complete slasher film if the perp had left it behind. At this point, I’m just going to assume that there was a sexual component to this.”
Packard shrugged. “That’s the good news. For the moment, we can’t tell. Our brave boys from the coroner couldn’t hold onto their dinners that long. They say they’re going to go in again in a few minutes. And that was a half-hour ago.”
I sighed and shook my head. At the very least, I wasn’t there for when they had discovered any of this nightmare. It was bad enough to hear about this without having to perform an in-depth examination to discover these horrors myself. “Now here’s a real question: How did everyone beat me here? I literally walked to the crime scene, Alex.”
He shrugged, and finally gave me a small, cynical smile that I knew him best for. “There was a debate about whether or not we should invite you in. We had to get hold of Statler and Waldorf to make certain that you were clear to work a crime scene already. Wouldn’t want this guy to get off on a stupid technicality—though they’re all stupid, really. This assumes he makes it to trial. Circulate the crime-scene photos around Rikers Island, I wouldn’t lay money on him lasting long, unless he’s in solitary the entire time.” Packard’s smile became evil. “But I’m told that’s cruel and unusual punishment.”
I gave him a flicker of a smile to show that I saw what he did there, but I wasn’t in a mood to be amused. While I fully believed what I had told Internal Affairs that afternoon, and I knew that most of our perps were good people who did bad things, there were two exceptions that I had experienced: rapists, and people who committed crimes against children. It wasn’t a coincidence that those two had the highest recidivism rate, and they seemed to be completely unrepentant. Funny enough, other criminals tend to enforce their own death penalty on them when they could.
“Anything else?”
Packard nodded. He pulled out his phone and flipped through a series of photographs. He picked one, played with the magnification, then showed it to me. “Then there was this.”
I leaned forward. It was a photograph of the crown of Carol Whelan’s head. She was apparently a brunette, but that was the only detail I could make out about her. The picture was focused on what looked like a large-bore needle mark in the girl’s head, and possibly her skull. “What the hell?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, Tommy.”
I frowned. This was the “cleanest” part of the murder, from what was described, and the most puzzling. Then again, it was like there were two killers: one was precise and methodical, who made incisions to disarticulate joints and used a needle; and a second killer who was violent, deranged, and broke bones apart.
“It’s too much to hope for fingerprints left in a pool of blood?” I asked.
Packard pulled back the phone. “Yup. Even though he did enough finger painting.”
I blinked. Did I miss a memo? “Explain, please?”
“Oh, right, the Jackson Pollock in her blood. One second.” He flipped through the photographs on the phone again, then handed it back to me. “Make like it’s Tinder and swipe right.”
I did. It was like Packard had made it just for me. There were no images of Carol Whelan, but there were plenty of the walls. I presumed that the red and black “paint” was her blood.
There was a circle with some spikes coming out of it, and what looked like a hand with an apple being thrust at the circle. There was no reason I could think of, but the image left me cold. The next one looked like squiggles, though it could have been a language that didn’t use the Latin script. The third image was a triangle with lines coming out of it, and an oval in the middle. It looked like a bizarre child’s drawing, with art materials prepared by Stephen King. The last and final one looked like nothing so much as a demonic cow, complete with horns. If the circle and apple left me cold, this dropped the temperature to “sub-zero.”
“He’s not getting into art school, that’s for certain,” I drawled. I made certain to text the relevant photos over to my phone and then handed Packard his. “Has anyone checked the organs? Or is that also something the ME didn’t get around to yet?”
“The latter. But I can’t blame them. This is one meat puzzle I wouldn’t want to assemble.”
“Any sign of forced entry?”
“None. Windows are shut tight. Doors were locked. The parents had to unlock the front door with a key.”
I winced. “Which one found her?”
“Both.”
I nodded, and turned towards the house. It was time to head inside. “Shall we?”
Packard put away the phone, and we went inside.
I did my best and did not gag with the scent of blood the moment I opened the door. In fact, there was no decay in the air, which I would have expected, given everything that Packard had told me.
I will spare you the gorier details on the corpse of young Carol Whelan. It was indeed a mess. The only relevant detail is the layout of her remains. Each part that had been disarticulated was itself split in half. Each piece was carefully laid on the floor like she had been laid out on a bed, or a slab in the morgue. But there was nearly an inch of space between each part, just to show that they had been separated.
This was perhaps the neatest, most organized crazy person ever.
The second relevant detail ... the floor was wall-to-wall carpet, so we all needed to slip paper coverings over our shoes, just to make certain that we didn’t tread blood all over the place. It was probably too late, but minimizing contamination was a real hazard. I was trying to reconcile how much blood had soaked the carpet with how much was on the wall. Who knew she had so much blood in her?
“So, no signs of forced entry,” I said, examining the living room.
“No signs of sexual assault,” Packard added, “for the moment—let’s face it, a black light will make most of the floor light up with blood, if nothing else.”
I stood at the edge of the living room and just felt the air for a moment. “Warm in here, isn’t it?”
Packard nodded. “Good catch. The thermostat has been raised to over ninety. The mother says that it was at sixty-five when they left. And no, no prints on it.”
I frowned. He had raised the temperature deliberately. Did he just like it warm? Did he use it as a forensic countermeasure, trying to screw up the temperature of the body? Was the lack of liver a similar countermeasure? After all, he had taken the trouble to cut up the body, why not take some liver home while he was at it?
“I smell blood, but shouldn’t something like decomp have started already?”
Packard shrugged. “Could have. Hasn’t. And if it’s been this hot since before eight—the parents say she leaves at quarter to—then you’d figure it would have.”
I looked to Packard with a sickening thought. “Think she could have been alive only a few hours ago?”
“That’s what I’m thinking. Especially with the blood. Some of it isn’t dry on the walls yet. That won’t be confirmed until later.”
I tightened my lips together to keep from throwing up. “I know one way to test.”
I took out my tactical baton, and carefully flicked it open to make certain that I didn’t hit anything or anyone. I approached the edge of the visible pool of blood. I reached over and slid the tip of the baton under one of her delicate little fingers, and lifted. Her finger moved easily. I stepped back, wiped at my baton with a Wet Nap (you’d carry them, too, in my line of work), and held it against my arm. These things were a pain to close unless you were smacking them against concrete.
“Not stiff yet,” Packard observed, which was the point. “Not even four hours.”
Which meant that I was having dinner with my family while little Carol was still being murdered. Also, that the killer had prevented her from leaving for school twelve hours ago, yet she was still alive less than four hours ago. I didn’t need a medical examiner or forensics to make a guess about how this bastard spent his time.
No, I wasn’t feeling particularly generous.
I closed my eyes, ran through a quick prayer, and took a slow breath...
And then I caught the whiff of something foul and vile. It was worse than the smell of blood, and cut through everything else that had assaulted my nose since I came in. Yes, it is common to use a sort of menthol gel, or even vapor rub under the nose to block out the smell at crime scenes, but I dislike the practice, lest I miss something.
In this case, I’m surprised I even caught this. It was faint, and barely there, almost like I was undergoing an odorous hallucination, which would be a first for me, and possibly most other people.
The strange thing was that it smelled familiar.
“Hold on a sec, Alex,” I said to Packard. “Give me a moment.”
I followed my nose, and moved slowly and carefully through the crime scene. I worked my way around the body, and made certain that when I arrived at the other side, I hadn’t tread any blood with me. I hunted the scent, and kept my hands in my pockets the whole time. I was deathly afraid of messing up the evidence trail; I wanted to make certain that when we got this bastard, we threw him into the deepest hole we could find. Yes, repentance and forgiveness are part of the faith, but step one is that he must repent.
I traced it upstairs, into Carol’s room. It was very pink, from the walls and ceiling to the carpet. There didn’t seem to be any drag marks or heavy impressions left in the carpet, but I still kept one eye on the carpet, while following the stench to the its source.
The closet door was partially open, and the smell seemed to emanate from inside.
I took my hands out of my pocket, and unsnapped my holster, keeping one hand on my gun. I reached forward, hooked the open door with my elbow, and pulled back on it.
The murder weapon was stabbed into the middle of the closet’s back wall. And into the wall was carved: “Come and get me, Patron Saint of Detectives.”
I don’t know why, but at that moment, I realized that I knew where the smell had come from: that morning, at the station, right before the altercation with Hayes. It was the same smell ... even though Hayes was dead at the same time that Carol Whelan was being murdered.