Come Dark (10 page)

Torrez and Perrone watched her work, without comment or impatience. They stood still, letting the water subside into a dull pane. She hated to disturb it. Moving slowly and making certain of each step in the four-inch-deep water, she crossed and stood near Clint Scott's feet. The coach had been a big, athletic man, sure enough, with broad shoulders, muscled chest, and flat belly. Approaching middle age, he'd kept his conditioning, his classical physique marred only by an old appendectomy scar and a more recent blemish above his right rotator cuff.

But now, surrounded by a pinkish-brown lake and collapsed in on himself, he looked more like a mannequin from a men's clothing store. He'd been at least that handsome, once upon a time.

Estelle documented the corpse from each side, then moved in for close-ups of each wound. She paused and looked over at Perrone. He stepped closer and squatted, careful to stay out of the water. “I'd start there,” he said.

What appeared to be a heavy caliber bullet wound in the gut punctured three inches directly below the naval, dead center. The wound had bled profusely, soaking the crotch and thighs, indicating that the large arteries and veins of the groin had been lacerated open by the shot while the heart was still beating powerfully. Lots of pumping pressure there as quarts of blood gushed.

For certain, the groin gunshot all by itself would have been a fatal wound, giving Scott just a few seconds to stagger, doubled over in agony, toward the support of the wall two steps to his right—if he was facing the doorway when the shot was fired.

Estelle turned and looked at the doorway—six feet wide at the sill, a four-inch step. Had the killer stepped inside the shower room? Why bother? If Scott had been standing under the farthest shower, the one directly opposite the door, the shot would have been a scant ten feet. The blood smear, and what could have been a handprint, were off to the victim's right, half-way down the wall.

Had Scott recognized his assailant, and charged forward? Did he have time to do that? He might have thought about grabbing a towel, and might have made it to about the room's center when the first shot was fired. Estelle shook the image away. The natural tendency was to try and answer the “what happened” question before the survey of scene and the victim were completed.

“We need to ask Lavin which shower the victim was using.” None of the showerheads were conveniently dripping.

“And then here,” Perrone said softly. A second bullet appeared to have entered under the victim's left arm, forward of the armpit an inch or so, just visible past his biceps—likely if the assailant had fired even as Scott pitched toward the wall, groping for support, and in the process presenting his left side as a target opportunity. Without turning the victim over to search for an exit wound, there was no way to gauge where the bullet had rampaged, or what internal damage it had done. The wound near the arm was clearly a wound of entry, though—neat, almost round, about the size of a pencil eraser now with the elastic skin drawing in around the hole.

It could have happened that way
, Estelle thought. “We'll call that number two.”

And the damage continued. Another wound punctured the victim's right chest, just an inch or so to the right of the midline. If it had blown straight in, the slug would have missed his heart after punching through the heavy pectoral muscle, shattering ribs, and then likely macerating lung and liver. Or it could have angled to the victim's left, careening through the heart itself. She focused on the wound, noting the absence of powder flecks. The wound hadn't bled much, and she guessed that the gusher of even more vessels ripped apart had stayed within the vault of the chest cavity.

But if this was chronologically wound number three, the victim's blood pressure already would have been headed toward the basement. Maybe he was still standing, maybe on his way down. Any one of the three shots would have sent Scott sailing into a deep pit of shock and then unconsciousness, slammed to the floor of the shower, flat on his back.

Estelle squatted down, keeping her knees out of the water. She looked toward the far wall, where the shower might have been running. “If he started
there
, under the shower, and ended up
here,
he was out of the direct spray of the shower, even with it running.” No one spoke. “So this is what we have. None of the four bullet wounds in the corpse are either under water, or in the spray. None of the entrance wounds, anyway.”

She gazed at the blank look on the victim's face. No pain, no surprise, no anger. Just nothing. There was no doubt in her mind that he never felt the fourth wound, and she turned the camera on that. The shot had taken him in the center of his heart, and unlike the others, had been fired close enough that the corona of unburned powder granules marked the wound to the left of midline. The corona of powder stippling was circular, the size of a dinner plate. A single, tiny rivulet of blood—the sort of trail that might be produced by skin capillaries as the body's system pressure collapsed—oozed from the hole but did not cross the corona of powder residue.

Estelle stood to rest her knees, and glanced at the camera's battery icon displayed on the back. While she fished in her jacket pocket for another set of batteries, she said to Perrone, “Your thoughts?”

“Somebody wanted him
really
dead,” Dr. Perrone observed. “I'm guessing that any one of the four shots would be fatal. I mean, this guy was quite the athlete, but this stopped him in his tracks. No fighting, no crouching in the corner, no trying for the doorway to escape, no defensive wounds.” He glanced over at Torrez, who hadn't uttered a word. “Your shooter didn't want there to be any chance of his victim crawling away for help.”

“No evidence that says he was given any chance at all,” Estelle mused. “And to administer this last shot, the killer likely stood right over the victim. The corona is circular, not oval. Dead on. Maybe not for any of the other three, but for this one—he would have had to have stepped into the shower room. He would have stood right beside the victim. Or even straddled him.”

“That's what I'm thinking,” Perrone said. “That first shot, I'm guessing the one in the groin with all that blood, was certainly incapacitating—maybe even paralyzing if it broke the spine. Now, with someone hurt that bad? It takes a special sort of mindset to shoot again, and again. Seems that way to me. Cold, cold, cold.”

Torrez pushed himself away from the wall, gloved hands still in his pockets. “Remember when Louise Smalley shot her husband out in their barn?”

Perrone peered at the sheriff over the top of his half glasses, puzzled at the reference to a decade-old crime. But then his face lit up. “I do, indeed.”

“Louise shot until the gun was empty.
Sixteen
rounds in that nine millimeter of hers. Somewhere in that string, she managed to hit him once, and that did the job.” He drilled a finger into his own left ear. “And the other fifteen went sailin' this way and that. She just kept goin' 'till the gun was empty. Bill Gastner had us measuring and searching all night until we found every one of those misses. ‘Panic passion' he called it. She just kept jerkin' the trigger 'till the gun wouldn't fire any more. Some of the shots weren't even close—like
yards­
away.”

Torrez sidled closer to the corpse, little waves searching out from his boots. “Gotta wonder which shot was first, and I'm thinkin' same as you and Estelle. The groin shot threw blood all over. Even if the killer hadn't shot him again, he'd be dead in a minute or two just from blood loss, floppin' around on the floor.” Torrez grimaced. “But it don't look like he flopped much. The first shot,
bam,
he crumples and staggers away, makin' a mess over on the wall.
Bam,
he spins around the way he came, and starts to go down. Then
bam,
center mass puts him on his back.”

“Look at the way his lower arms and hands have rictus, locked upward as if he's trying to push something up and away,” Perrone observed.

“That's right. And then the killer steps close and
bam,
the fourth shot solid through the heart ends the story. Right then, right there. Not much panic in
those
shots.” Torrez made a sound that could have been a chuckle. “This ain't no Mrs. Smalley runnin' in circles around the barn, chasin' after her drunk husband through the cows and horses.”

“That's grim.” Perrone bent at the waist for a closer look. “That's an interesting corona, and the only one. As you suggest, it's as if the killer stood right over him for the last shot.” He looked up at Estelle. “Looked him right in the eye.” He glanced over his shoulder. “We going to get that screen?”

“Tom's on the way.”

“Okay. I'm more than a little curious about what we'll find.” He straightened up. “Coach Scott has been teaching here a good number of years, well-known and well-liked by a whole lot of people. Big game last night…what, number sixty-five? And his girls win another romp. Lots of press. And somebody pulls this when the town is full of reporters. Big time mess. This is going to a troublesome case before it's over.”

“We'll keep it tight,” Torrez said.

“Good luck with that.” Perrone sounded skeptical.

“He started teaching just about the year I graduated,” Estelle offered. “Twenty-two years ago. I remember all the girl-talk about him. Handsome, buff, single…
ay,
he was only four years older than we were.”

“Ah. Here we go.” Perrone nodded toward the doorway. “So you're putting him at what, forty-four or five? If this was his first job out of college?”

Standing off to one side of the sill, Mears held out the square of screening. “This is what the hardware could come up with, Sheriff.”

“Perfect.” Estelle eased though the water and took the screen, bending the last of the rolled arc out of it until it would rest flat over the drain.

“And Mr. Lavin wants to know if he can go home yet. I told him not a chance.”

“Not a chance is right. I need to talk with him. Ask him to be patient.” She straightened up. “In your preliminary with him, find out who was the
last
person he saw leaving after the game last night. Maybe the assistant coach, Ms. Avila? Whoever it is, I'll want to talk with them. I saw Avila out in the parking lot. And find out if the game was filmed. If it was, I want the file…or disc—whatever they use.”

“You got it. Oh,” and Mears stopped short, “apropos of nothing…the SO in Cathay, Illinois is sending out two deputies to extradite the Bonds back home. Paperwork willing, they'll be here sometime next week.”

“So much for their grand vacation,” Estelle remarked.

She had squatted near the corpse, sleeves rolled up, the screen spread on the tile floor under four inches of water. “TOD here is going to be interesting,” she said. “From after the game, when Scott was last seen, to just a few minutes ago, when he was found today by the custodian? That's a sixteen-hour window.”

“The cold bath is going to complicate things a little,” Perrone said. “But we'll see.”

Estelle slid the screen closer to the body until she was satisfied that it would remain flat. “I think if you just slide his hips a foot or so up and over, we can do this. Don't roll him over yet. Just shift the body over far enough for me to slide the screen into place and make sure nothing slips by down the drain.”

Sheriff Torrez straddled the body, a gloved hand on each hip. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

Unable to work the way she was crouched, Estelle dropped to one knee. When she nodded, Torrez rocked the corpse up and away, giving her room to work. The victim's left buttock cheek was clearly imprinted with the pattern of the chrome drain cover. The screen slid into position, the powerful suction of the drain holding it in place. She stood up, ignoring her now soaked left leg. “Hold him up so I can catch that drain pattern on his butt,” Estelle said. “I want the photo to include the victim, the screen, and the drain itself.”

“Take your time.” Torrez had braced his elbows on his knees, and watched impassively as she shot another series of photos.

“This is where I miss Linda.”

“I hear ya,” Torrez said affably. “Hell of a time to go on vacation.”

Satisfied, she backed away. “Let him back down now.” Torrez did so, and straightened up with a creak of backbone and leather. “You know, if the killer left here with the shower running…” she said after a moment.

“Lavin says it was still running when he arrived today,” Torrez said. “He says that he walked in here just after noon, saw this mess, and called 911 right away. So the shower was runnin' since…could have even been yesterday a little bit after the game.”

“And why would Scott use this one, anyway? There's a coaches' shower in their office.” She shook her head. “This place wasn't full of steam, was it? Lavin will tell us for sure, but with the shower running hot for what, fifteen or twenty hours? It'd be pretty steamy ripe in here. The boiler would be working overtime. I didn't smell that when I came in.”

“Hot, humid night, cold shower,” Torrez offered with considerable skepticism. He shifted the body so it lay just to one side of the drain.

The water level in the shower took its time lowering, with an occasional gurgle from the drain. The screen remained clean. While she waited, Estelle shot more than a hundred digital photos of fragments as they became visible—and they were few and far between. Most were little chips of grout or tile, grouped below the wall that carried the blood smear. A deformed slug, its hollow point mushroomed deeply, lay six inches out from the wall.

“So we have one. Not enough flow to carry anything heavy to the drain,” Estelle said. “Which means all the other bullet fragments are either still in the body or somewhere in this room. It's going to be hands and knees time, Bobby.”