Nerds Who Kill: A Paul Turner Mystery (3 page)

“Just aesthetic judgments.”

Turner said, “No cop has ever said the word ‘aesthetic’ before.”

“I still get bonus points from my eighth grade teacher when I use words such as those. She was hot. I’d have done anything for her. Did I ever tell you about the outfits she wore?”

“Several million times. I’d prefer to examine a dead body than listen to the intricate details of your sexual awakening or another one of your puns. And no, I don’t want to hear about punishment.”

Fenwick said, “You heard the old joke about the real aliens who happened to come to Earth and land in the middle of a Star Trek convention.”

“Do I want to?” Turner asked.

“Yes.”

“Maybe later.”

David Sanchez, a beat cop they had worked with before, met them at the main elevator bank. They were not about to cause an uproar by a chance remark. They ascended to the twenty-seventh floor in silence. As they exited, Fenwick said, “We’re moving up in the world.” Sanchez and Fenwick ignored him.

Once they were alone, Sanchez said, “We got a call at ten forty-six from the hotel. They said there was a body. When we got here, hotel security was on the scene. We moved them out and took over.”

Outside the elevator, the corridor was empty. Sanchez led them out of the small elevator hall and down a long corridor that branched at the end. They turned left. At the farthest end of this second long corridor they saw a uniformed Chicago cop standing in front of an open door. Two people huddled around him.

A matronly woman in the group said, “Please, I’m with the convention. I must know what is going on. Muriam is scheduled to give the keynote address to the convention in a few hours. Right now we are supposed to go to a luncheon tea reception.”

The beat cop nodded at Turner and Fenwick and said, “You need to talk to these two. They’re in charge.”

“I’m Oona Murkle. I’m in charge of the speakers for the luncheon and tonight’s banquet and I’m a good friend of Muriam’s. They won’t let me into her room. She was supposed to join us over an hour ago. Can you please tell me what is going on? While the tea isn’t that important, she really does need to give the speech tonight.”

Turner said, “Ms. Murkle, we’ll get information to you as soon as we can.” She subsided. The woman equaled at least two thirds of Fenwick’s bulk. She had gray hair and wore a navy blue pantsuit that shimmered and sparkled when she moved.

Fenwick asked, “Who’s with hotel security?”

A man about six foot two stepped forward. He wore a wellcut light brown suit. He had brush-cut hair. “Brandon Macer.” After handshakes, the two detectives and Macer entered the suite. They passed from a kitchen area into a living room. They joined a beat cop standing twenty feet away from the corpse.

Macer pointed. “That was Muriam Devers.” The body had a broadsword transfixing the chest. A gush of blood had covered the weapon halfway to the hilt. Turner and Fenwick had long since given up gaping at corpses, but this one did give them pause. Fairly horrific stab wounds were more than commonplace in their line of work, but this was more grotesque than your average gangland dustup over drugs.

“Who found what?” Fenwick asked.

Macer said, “A man waiting for the elevator on this floor said he heard a scream.”

Turner said, “Hell of a long way to hear a scream. Must have been awfully loud.”

Fenwick said, “If somebody was ramming a sword through my chest, if I could make any kind of noise, it would be at the top of my lungs.”

Macer said, “You can talk to him. The door to this suite was open.”

“Nobody else reported anything?” Turner asked.

Macer said, “If they heard anything, they didn’t report it. Middle of the morning on a Saturday, most people are out. A lot of the people are here with the convention. There’s a full schedule of events going on with that. Our guy says he came down the hall, saw this door open, called out, stepped in, saw what there was to see, got sick, and went to his room to call. He says he didn’t see anyone else in the hall. There’s a fire exit at the end of the corridor. Anyone could take the stairs up or down.”

They thanked him. He left. The stink from the witness being sick hit their nostrils as they moved forward to begin their examination of the murder scene. Skirting the witness’s mess and being careful not to touch anything in the room, Turner and Fenwick approached the corpse. The rug on both sides of the chest cavity was black with blood. As they neared the body, Turner could see in the sword hilt a bright blue stone. His son Brian’s sword had a bright blue stone. He said, “Brian’s sword had the same kind of stone.”

Fenwick said, “The killer would have to be pretty strong to be able to snatch it from your kid.”

Turner certainly didn’t think his son had committed murder, but he did feel a twinge of anxiety over the coincidence. He did not like the idea of there being a remote similarity between this weapon and the one he’d seen strapped to his son’s back.

The corpse wore boots that reached her knees, a short skirt, and a leather bodice contraption that clung to her torso. To Turner it looked like she was wearing a metallic bra.

Fenwick said, “That’s a Xena, Warrior Princess outfit. I think she’s a little old for that.”

Turner noted the sags and wrinkles on the arms and face of the corpse’s slender frame. The woman had to be in her seventies at least. He saw no Michelin tire effect, as Myra had mentioned.

Turner said, “Brian always watched the show. I never got what was so interesting.”

“Exactly,” Fenwick said.

Turner asked, “Does Madge know you know what a Xena, Warrior Princess outfit looks like?”

“You presume I didn’t buy her one as a Christmas present.”

“I know you didn’t,” Turner said.

“How so?”

“You haven’t said anything about Madge chopping your nuts off. Which she would have done had you brought her such a thing.”

Fenwick said, “You’re probably right.”

Madge was Fenwick’s wife and one of Turner’s favorite people.

Turner said, “So she’s in this full battle dress.”

Fenwick said, “I wonder if she had time to say ‘tanks for the mammaries.’”

Turner said, “Maybe when she said that she drove the killer over the edge. He decided he was never going to listen to one more hideous pun. I can certainly understand that.”

“A Philistine, as are so many others,” Fenwick replied. He pointed at the corpse. “Killer must have gotten soaked in blood.”

“Hard not to be,” Turner said. “Did the killer bring a change of clothes or did the killer risk running out into the corridor and being seen?”

To look for bloody clothing, they organized several other uniformed cops into teams to examine every trash receptacle in the hotel.

Fenwick said, “I’m going with a crime of passion. You don’t get people dressed in business suits in the Loop who also casually wear a broadsword as decoration or protection. Do you really plan to kill someone with a broadsword? It’s a weapon you go to a great deal of trouble to acquire.”

“Maybe the sword was hers. It could have been here already and the killer used it because it was the first thing that was handy.”

Fenwick said, “Which would be an argument for crime of passion, spur of the moment.”

“We’ll have to find out how sharp it is,” Turner said.

“What’s that glittery stuff on the hilt?” Fenwick asked.

“I have been informed by those in the know that the technical term is ‘glittery stuff.’ I handled Brian’s earlier. The glittery stuff comes off.”

“Easy way to find the killer,” Fenwick said.

“Unless the killer wore gloves.”

“That would complicate things. So, we’re looking for blood and glitter. Is it significant that there’s a broken red feather deal about four feet from the body?”

Turner pointed it out to the Crime Lab team and made sure they included it as part of the evidence. Now that the immediate needs of examining the body were over, he began to inspect his surroundings. The pictures on the wall looked like average hotel art, kind of milky impressionists, designed to soothe and be faceless. The lamps were fake brass. He opened the curtains that covered the entire east wall of the suite. He got a spectacular view of midday lights in the heart of the city in a gray rain. It rivaled the view from the Ohio Street off-ramp on the Kennedy expressway. Because of the downpour, traffic was more than its usual snarl on all the streets that could be seen.

Another of the red ostrich feathers lay on the bed.

Fenwick said, “It’s another one of those damn red plume deals.” It was a twin to the broken one near Devers’ corpse.

Turner added, “I saw her carrying one of them yesterday.” He explained.

“Your kid knows this stuff?” Fenwick asked.

“That and a great deal more. It’s frightening in an eleven year old.”

Turner took Sanchez aside before he left. He said, “My kids and a few friends of mine are attending the convention. Could you find out where they are? Make sure they’re okay?” He said nothing about the broadsword at the moment.

Sanchez said, “I’m willing to help out. I know they’re your family, but that security guy said there were a hundred thousand people at this convention. I’m not sure how I’ll find them.”

Turner said, “Jeff’s in a wheelchair. Another older-lady friend is in a Tribble costume. They’ll stand out.”

Bless the universality of
Star Trek
: Sanchez knew what a Tribble costume was without asking. Sanchez said he would do his best. Turner didn’t mention Ian. He figured that as an ex-cop, his friend could take care of himself. He didn’t want to deal with Ian switching from friend to investigative reporter, not right at this moment.

As the Crime Lab team performed its work, Turner and Fenwick examined the rest of the suite.

In the dead woman’s luggage they found several pairs of pantyhose, a pair of jeans, a pantsuit, and a pair of low heels. She also had a supply of the three-foot-long red ostrich feathers.

Fenwick held one up. “Another fetish. I prefer grit to fetishes.”

Turner said, “Maybe it was a gritty fetish.”

Fenwick asked, “Was the feather in the other room put there by the killer as a statement, or was the damn thing just laying around, and why was it broken?”

“The killer will know,” Turner said.

“Assholes always keep secrets,” Fenwick said.

In the closet they found a full-length red evening gown and a matching pair of high heels. There was a blue bathrobe made of thick, fuzzy cotton. It had the hotel’s logo on it. They found an iron and an ironing board. In a large economy-size Band-Aid box they found basic personal items along with prescription allergy pills. On the night stand they found books by Ursula K. LeGuin and Agatha Christie. Muriam Devers’ convention schedule was in a packet on the bed. They found a sheet of paper listing her activities. She’d appeared at a signing that morning. Later this afternoon she was scheduled to be on a panel, the topic of which was “Existential Realism in the Gothic Fantasy Novel.” Fenwick nudged Turner and pointed to the title. He asked, “What does this mean?”

Turner said, “That pretentiousness isn’t limited to any single literary genre?”

Fenwick said, “I love it when you say ‘genre.’ I get all tingly inside.”

“You getting ‘tingly’ is not a pretty concept. Besides, you’re the poet in this relationship. I’m just trying to catch up with you.” Turner held out his arm across the front of Devers’ dark brown suitcase. “Broadsword could fit in here sideways.”

“Did she bring her own death weapon?”

Turner said, “You can’t just drag one of those things onto a plane. Even in your luggage it’s got to be a pain in the ass to take along.”

“That’s if she was the one who brought it,” Fenwick said.

The two detectives watched from an unobtrusive corner as the Crime Lab techs and Medical Examiner’s people worked.

“Nothing’s out of place,” Fenwick said.

“Just the corpse,” Turner said. “Other than the sword, I don’t see any evidence of another person’s presence. Only one glass used in the bathroom. Only one wet towel.”

The ME people joined them. The ME said, “The obvious is true. Dead from the broadsword through her chest. Can’t be a lot of those floating around.”

“Chests or swords?” Fenwick asked.

Everybody sighed.

Turner filled the void. “You forget, this is the largest science fiction convention ever. There could be all kinds of the damn things.”

“No signs of a break-in,” Fenwick said. “She knew her killer?”

“Got to be,” Turner said. “Or she opened her door to strangers a lot.”

Fenwick said, “She couldn’t have committed suicide, plunged the sword into herself or propped it up and fell onto it?”

“Done it herself?” the ME said. “I don’t know. Her hands are bloody and cut, like someone tried to shred them. Normally those are defense wounds. Question is, are they real defense wounds or do they just look like defense wounds? It could be from trying to keep the sword from going in or trying to get it out. Or a neural reaction of trying to clutch the wound. Nothing under the fingernails. Her arms show no trace of a fight. No bruises or abrasions on her head or torso.”

The police personnel knew that if it was not clear whether a death was a suicide or murder then the occurrence was treated as a homicide until it was clearly not a homicide.

“No suicide note,” Turner said.

“The sword is heavy,” the ME said. “Doesn’t mean an older woman couldn’t wield it, just means it would have been awkward. Whichever it was, she would have been very alive while she was being skewered.”

“She couldn’t have tripped?” Fenwick asked. “Maybe been fooling around with the damn thing, lost her balance, fell on it somehow, rolled onto her back?”

“Blood stains say she didn’t move far after she was stabbed. She didn’t go staggering around the room. There’s a lot of blood within a foot or so of where she lay. She may have flopped around for a few seconds involuntarily. That would be caused by her body shutting down. Once she was skewered, she probably died pretty fast. She lost a lot of blood very quickly. She got plowed from the front and down she went.”

Fenwick said, “Somebody heard a tremendous shout.”