He could hear Claire on the radio behind him as he approached the body. Careful not to step in the blood that had pooled on the floor, he squatted beside the corpse. Archie recognized the gun in McCallum’s hand right away. It was a .38. The heart can continue to pump for up to two minutes with a brain injury like that, which explained the extensive bleeding.
Archie had once found the body of a man who’d punched his fist through a plate-glass window after an argument with his wife. He’d severed the artery in his arm and bled to death because she had stormed out of the house and he was too proud to call an ambulance. The blood had sprayed in a wide arc across the kitchen when the artery was severed and then continued to throb out of his body despite the several dish towels he’d tried to use as tourniquets. His wife had returned the next morning and called 911. When Archie got there, he found the man dead, slumped against a kitchen cabinet. Blood splattered the yellow kitchen curtains and the white walls and spread across the entire kitchen floor. Archie hadn’t known that one body could produce that much blood. It had looked like the scene of a chainsaw homicide.
Different kitchen. Archie leaned in close to examine the muzzle imprint of the contact wound near the mouth and an exit wound in the back of the head. A .38 will go right through the skull, whereas a .22 will bounce around for a while. McCallum’s hazel eyes stared sightless, the pupils dilated, the lids pulling back in full rigor. His jaw, too, had tightened, giving his mouth a disapproving grimace. The skin of his face was bruised with livor mortis, like he’d laid his head down to rest after a bad fight. He was wearing red sweatpants and what appeared to be a Cleveland Warriors sweatshirt. His feet were clad only in white sweat socks, their toes wet with blood. There was no coffee cup on the table.
Archie’s gaze returned to the body. Paw prints indicated where the cat had ambled across the table, leaving in her wake blood dusted with a fine gray cat hair. The brown hair above McCallum’s left temple was flattened and wet where the cat appeared to have licked him. Poor thing. Archie tracked the paw prints from the table to a cat door in the back door.
He stood up. It wasn’t as easy as it used to be. Henry had opened the back door and the Hardy Boys stood waiting, along with Susan Ward. They were waiting for him to say something. “Turn this place upside down,” Archie said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll still be here.” But he didn’t believe it. “And call Animal Control,” he added. “Someone’s going to have to take care of that cat.”
CHAPTER
37
I t seemed, to Susan, that every cop in the city had descended on Dan McCallum’s small house. Canary yellow crime-scene tape zigzagged around the yard to keep the growing throng of spectators at bay. In the distance, TV reporters positioned themselves in front of the action for their live-remote reports. Susan was sitting on a wrought-iron bench on McCallum’s front stoop, smoking a cigarette. She had her cell phone pressed against her ear explaining the whole situation to Ian, when they found Kristy Mathers’s bike.
A patrol cop searching the garage discovered it leaning up against the wall, hidden under a blue tarp. A yellow girl’s bike, with a banana seat and a busted chain. The cops all gathered around it, scratching their heads and looking taciturn, while newspaper photographers snapped digital pictures and neighbors took snapshots with their camera phones.
Susan thought of Addy Jackson and where she was right then and felt sick. She was surely dead, half-buried in some river muck somewhere. Charlene Wood from Channel 8 stood in front of the house, her back to Susan, reporting live. Susan couldn’t hear what she was saying but could imagine the cheesy dramatic graphics and local news hysteria. The state of humanity, it seemed to Susan recently, was looking pretty bleak.
After a while, Archie left the circle of cops and came over to where Susan sat.
“You not covering this?” he asked, sitting down next to her on the bench.
She shook her head. “It’s news. They want a reporter. They’re sending Parker over.” She bent her knees, lifted them to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs, and took a drag off her cigarette. “The ride along vest sat in a heap beside her. So he killed himself?”
“Looks like it.”
“I didn’t see a note.”
“Most suicides don’t leave notes,” Archie said. “You’d be surprised.”
“Really?”
Archie rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and looked out into the front yard. “I think it’s hard to know what to say.”
“I saw him the other day,” Susan said sadly. “At Cleveland.”
Archie raised his eyebrows. “Did he say anything?”
“Just small talk,” Susan said, ashing her cigarette off the side of the stoop.