“ID?”
“Michael Swanson. Black guy, early thirties. Low-level street dealer. Started his career right out of high school. He’d been arrested before on petty stuff. Did some short stints twice in the local lockup. But nothing too serious. Last address we had for him was an apartment on the outskirts of town. Very low-rent district.”
“The second body?”
She led him over to a machine that was used to lift engine blocks out of vehicles.
“He was found wrapped in chains and hanging from this.”
“Cause of death?”
“Same as Swanson. But he had a mark branded into his forehead.”
“What sort of mark?”
“You ready for this?”
“I guess.”
“It was a flame, but it was turned upside down.”
“A torch, you mean? That’s the symbol of the Greek god of death, Thanatos.”
Lassiter’s jaw slackened. “How did you know that?”
“I read a book once. With pictures. Who was he?”
“Bradley Costa. White, age thirty-five. He was a fairly recent transfer here. Worked at Baronville National Bank. A senior vice president.”
“Pretty big title for a guy in his thirties.”
“He came here from Wall Street and had a lot of experience. Those types don’t show up here every day. He was described as a real go-getter.”
“Any connection to Swanson?”
“Not that we can prove. He might have been a customer of Swanson’s. Wouldn’t be the first time a banker did drugs. And because of Costa’s line of work, money laundering or some other financial shenanigans come to mind. But we couldn’t get any traction on that angle either. And I don’t think Swanson generated enough cash to need a money launderer.”
“And yet both had their lives ended in this place,” said Decker, looking around the space. “How did they get here?”
“We don’t know. Costa didn’t have any family that we know of, but his boss at the bank reported him missing. No one reported Swanson missing. I guess he moved in circles where he went missing a lot. Definitely out of the mainstream.”
“The mainstream as it used to be,” corrected Decker.
“Right.”
“Any useful trace?”
“No prints. No spent cartridges. No tossed cigarette with DNA on it. Only blood belonged to the vics.”
“And we’re sure they were killed here?”
“Blood spatters say yes. And the ME said there was enough blood present to account for the shots and the bleed-outs to have occurred here.”
“Was it the same ME I met today?”
“Yeah, Charlie Duncan. Why?”
Decker didn’t answer.
She said, “And what did you mean that he should take some courses, or get out of the business of autopsies altogether? Do you think he was wrong on the time-of-death call?”
“I know that he missed two big inconsistencies.” He turned to her. “But then you and your partner missed them too.”
“Like what?” she said defensively.
“A body in a dank basement that’s been dead longer than twenty hours and in full rigor is going to have a lot more than a few flies and a few unhatched eggs on it. Blowflies can locate a dead body and arrive within minutes of the death. The body hanging upstairs had no blowflies on it that I could see. The one in the basement only had a few. Each blowfly can lay over two hundred eggs, and those eggs hatch within eight to twenty-four hours into first-stage maggots. That’s what I meant when I told the first officer on the scene that what I had observed was forensically impossible. A stiff corpse with only minimal insect infestation and not a single egg hatched? Your ME should have seen that right away. But he just focused on the rigor and not the entomology, lack of body decomp, and core temp factors. And he just assumed that his instrument was out of whack with the core temp instead of digging deeper to see why the body would be that cold, namely below ambient temperature. A competent ME has to look at the total package. Everything impacts everything else. Otherwise, you screw up and a bad guy gets to walk.”
Lassiter looked taken aback by his comment. “O-kay,” she said slowly. “I get where you’re coming from. But the bodies were found inside. Wouldn’t that have made a difference with the flies?”
“It can. But you’d be surprised at the places blowflies can get into. And here we had an empty house with an old basement probably filled with cracks and holes. Trust me, they would’ve gotten to it if the body had been there for twenty hours or longer.”
“What was the second inconsistency?”
“Hypostasis, otherwise known as livor mortis. Once the heart stops pumping and the internal body decomposition commences, vessels get porous and the blood reacts solely to gravity and heads for the lowest spot. With a guy hanging that means he’ll have blood collecting in his fingertips, earlobes, and feet. He might even have a death erection.”
“What? A death erection?”
“Because when you die vertically, the blood also pools in the groin. Like a balloon filling up with water. Heart’s no longer circulating, so there’s no way for the blood to leave the spot once it gets there. In the morgue when I checked out the body of the guy hanging, the staining was on his back. That means he didn’t die by being strung up and left there for twenty hours.”
“Then he might have been killed elsewhere and brought to the house?”
Decker nodded. “Your ME didn’t mention anything about the livor mortis inconsistency. He either didn’t know about it or he just flat out screwed up.”
“I’ll have to go back and check with him.”
“Good luck on that. So, why kill them here?”
“It was abandoned. It had grease pits. Equipment to hang someone.”
“I was actually thinking about a broader question.”
“What’s that?”
“Why Baronville?”
Chapter 9
TWO PEOPLE AT a dining room table shotgunned to death.
That’s what Green had just told Jamison.
Talk about a last meal.
They were in a house that seemed much like the residence where they had found the two dead men.
“Damnedest thing I’d ever seen,” said Green as he chewed his gum. “Sitting right there, and bam. They both died instantly, the ME said. Close quarters with a shotgun usually has that effect.”
“Did the vics live here?”
“Not as far as we know. No one lived here legally. The bank owned it too, like the other place.”
“Any connection between the two people?”
Green consulted his official notebook. “None that we could run down. Different walks of life. No known ties.”
“Tell me about them.”
“Joyce Tanner was white and fifty-three years old. She worked at JC Penney before it closed. She was unemployed at the time of her death. She was divorced with no kids. Her ex left the area a long time ago. We’re still trying to track him down, but there’s no basis right now to believe he had anything to do with it. Toby Babbot was white and forty years old, on disability because of a work-related injury.”
“Babbot have any family?”
“Never married, no kids that we could find.”
“Were they from Baronville?”
“No. Babbot moved here from Pittsburgh about six years ago and worked at a plant building air-conditioning units. Plant closed down. Then he did some miscellaneous work.”
“And Tanner?”
“Her parents were killed in a car accident in Connecticut. She came here to live with her aunt and uncle about forty years ago. They raised her here and then they died too. Natural causes,” he added.
“Any idea how the pair ended up here?”
“No. We canvassed the neighborhood after it happened. But you can see for yourself, there aren’t that many folks around who could have seen something. So we got no leads at all.”
“Were they eating dinner when it happened?”
“No. It was like they were made to sit in the chairs and then they were shot.”
“Anything else about the deaths that was curious?” asked Jamison.
Green pointed to the wall that still bore the bloodstains from the homicide. “Their killer wrote something there with a Sharpie. We cut it out and collected it as evidence.”
“What?”
“A Bible verse.”