The Book of 21 (2 page)

“A bit much,” he whispered.

After taking a slow breath to calm down, he continued. With another step, he saw the other severed arm. He took a few more steps, and saw the drops of blood on the floor finally began to subside by the window at the front of the house.

He scanned the window a bit closer. At first, the amount of blood in the room made it seem as if the window was clean, but then he saw the small crimson marks he identified from the porch. The blood spatters slowly dripped downward.

Glancing back around the area he had already swept, he was amazed at the volume of blood. Spots of blood even dotted the ceiling. Thankful that it was almost over, he took the last step to reveal the remaining slice of the room.

He saw a blue chair. Just behind the chair was a hand—a hand moving on top of a head.

At the realization that somebody was hiding in there, Fanelli’s heart jumped, and his butt puckered tight. He struggled to control his fear and then let his fear became rage.

“
Don’t fucking move!
” he roared.

Fanelli entered the room and sidestepped toward the far corner to cover his exposed back.

As he did, he scrutinized the man cowering behind the chair. The man was young, probably in his mid-twenties. He wore a t-shirt that clung to his well-toned upper body. Below his curly brown hair, his face looked as if he were about to burst into tears. The expression made him seem as if he were a five-year-old child that had been beaten once too often and was expecting to get it again.

Although Fanelli was trying to scare the man, he knew this guy was already more scared than a cop could make anyone. Fanelli’s heart screamed out that this man was a survivor that needed help, but his head told him that he could not let his guard down just yet.

“Everything is fine, just don’t move,” Fanelli said in a calmer tone, though he kept the gun trained, just in case.

The odd thing, to Fanelli, was that the young man behind the chair seemed to have too little blood on him. Although there were a few spots on the guy, those could have easily dripped down from the ceiling.

The man stared at the severed head in front of the desk for a few seconds, and then his hands dropped forward into his lap. Since the guy’s hands were in plain view, Fanelli decided he did not need to shoot just yet. With their movement, however, those hands were migrating to more versatile and dangerous positions.

“No. Put your hands on your head,” Fanelli said.

The man stood up.

“I said, put your hands on your head.”

Staring at the severed head, the man failed to react to Fanelli’s command. He teetered for a second and then staggered forward like a drunk.

Fanelli took aim and then, through a clenched jaw, growled, “I
said
, put your
fucking
hands on your
fucking head
!”

Fanelli wanted to punctuate the end of the sentence by cocking his pistol. However, the Glock did not have an external hammer. He suddenly realized that he might wind up shooting this guy because he could not make a simple sound effect. He bit his lip and started to squeeze the trigger.

Just as Fanelli was expecting to hear the muzzle blast of his Glock, the man stopped and swayed, as if buffeted by a gentle breeze. After a few seconds, the man bent down took the grip of the machete in his hand, stood back up, and lifted the machete as if he were inspecting it. As the head tilted on the end of the blade, blood drizzled out of the mouth and nose. The man seemed to be oblivious to the sudden appearance of the blood, just as he seemed to be unaware of everything else in the room, including Fanelli.

Fanelli backed up and watched the man raise the machete just high enough to stare into the eyes of the severed head. As he viewed the morbid scene, Fanelli’s jaw moved, but words escaped him.

In a wobbly voice, the man sniveled, “Poor Yorick.”

The man’s eyes rolled back in his head and his body started to convulse. A gush of vomit spilled out his mouth. He dropped to the floor, and began flopping around like a fish.

Fanelli started around the desk, but then stopped himself. From experience, he knew this was some kind of overdose, and all he would do by trying to help was get covered by blood and spew. He had put himself at enough risk for one night and held no desire to spend the rest of his life receiving treatments for HIV. He watched and waited. When the man finally stopped thrashing, Fanelli walked to the desk, pulled out the chair, sat down, and exhaled.

He stared at the fresh corpse, now prostrate in a pool of blood and bile. He pondered how long the man had been hiding in that hole between the chair and wall, waiting for help. Letting his eyes wander back to the man’s last refuge, Fanelli saw one word finger-painted on the wall in blood—
Hamlet
.

Through the window, flashing lights shot bursts of red and blue into the room. Footsteps thundered across the porch but then seemed to suddenly stop at the front door. Fanelli wondered what was keeping them.

“Fanelli, it’s Moore. I’m coming in,” a voice boomed from the hall.

Fanelli rubbed his forehead and murmured under his breath, “About fucking time.”

Chapter 1:
The Den

Detective John McDonough knew why he was walking through the bone-chilling rain at three o’clock in the morning. It was not because he was the best, smartest, or even the most efficient detective on the force. It was because he was the low man on the totem pole in the homicide division, dispatch could not locate the detective that was supposed to be on call, and the commissioner wanted to soak up valuable face time on the morning news with a statement about a violent murder.

Finding a crack in the wall of people surrounding the old Victorian, he turned his face away from a news crew making a telecast and flashed his badge to the cop manning the perimeter. He meandered through a swarm of policemen and climbed the stairs onto the porch. Safely out of the downpour, he removed his tan baseball cap and ran his fingers through his brown hair. He then straightened his tall frame and brushed the water off his trench coat.

John stepped into the old Victorian home and found Fanelli standing in a doorway on the right side of the hall. He initially thought the room beyond the door was painted red, but gradually realized that the coloration was the result of blood spray. His shoulders slumped when he saw the dead man lying next to a pile of assorted body parts.

“Christ,” he sighed, “I’m going to be doing paperwork for a week. Is that puke?”

Fanelli nodded and replied, “Yeah, after I got here it looked like an overdose kicked in.”

“So, some crazy drug addict doped himself up and whacked that poor bastard?”

“Well, I’m not sure. The young guy didn’t have much blood on him when I got here.”

“Were any footprints leading out of here?”

“No, Detective, but there weren’t many footprints in the room, either. The only ones in there, other than mine on the left side there, went from the chair where the young guy was hiding, over to the spot where he is now.”

“Well, if there were no tracks out of here, then the drug addict had to be the killer. It’s pretty cut and dry. He probably needed some drug money.”

“Well, you should look at this.” Fanelli held out two Pennsylvania driver’s licenses and two Pennsylvania Commonwealth University identification cards.

John took the cards and realized their photos matched the faces on the corpses. The severed head belonged to Richard Dunglison, a faculty member at Pennsylvania Commonwealth University, which was also known as Penn Commonwealth. John assumed the assorted body parts were all his as well. The young man was Ted Hallman, who apparently was a student at the university. John knew at that moment, that it was unlikely this was a random act of violence.

He swallowed back an expletive, took a deep breath, and asked, “Is the CSA unit here yet?”

“Yeah, Dr. Mulgrew’s upstairs, in the bedroom.”

John clenched his jaw and handed the ID cards back to Fanelli. “Tell him I want to see him when he’s done up there.”

Fanelli tucked the ID cards into his pocket and then headed up the stairs.

The other officers stood in silence. After a few seconds, they slipped away, one by one, leaving John alone in the doorway of the office.

He squatted and stared at the young man lying in the pool of vomit and blood. Then he reviewed the assorted pieces of the dismembered corpse. Though his eyes focused on what was before him, his mind replayed what he had just done.

“Crap,” he growled.

Anger at his own stupidity welled up in him; this was his first case since his mentor, Frank Peluno, had passed away, and he had started it by looking cavalier to the patrolmen who had put their lives on the line to clear the scene. He knew he should have suspected there was a connection between the victim and the perpetrator, as that was most often the case, but his frustration over losing his night off had caused him to try to wrap up the case before he had all the facts. He swore that he would not be so eager to jump at the next convenient solution.

Heaving a sigh, he started thinking about the possible reasons a student would kill a professor. Most of the academics that John knew were more prone to talk than to action. Even though college students were an odd lot when it came to their precious GPA, murdering someone over a bad grade seemed too dramatic.

He also began to realize there were a few other problems with the idea that Hallman was actually the murderer. First, Hallman’s trail went directly across the bloody floor—from the blue chair where he hid to the desk where he died. Second, Hallman seemed to only be bloody at the places he contacted the floor. He reminded himself that Fanelli had pointed out both of these things earlier, and he had dismissed them.

Moving his gaze to Dunglison, he found himself looking at the machete. The weapon was another issue; it was simply impractical. A pistol, or a plain old knife, would be just as effective and much easier to use. A big, unwieldy blade was the last thing John would pick to murder someone.

Not only was the machete awkward, its appearance was alarming. To avoid the immediate flight response that the sight of a machete would invoke, Hallman would have had to conceal it from Dunglison until he was close—very close. Yet, there was no wet raincoat or windbreaker lying around that would have allowed Hallman to conceal the weapon. The machete would have been very noticeable; there should have been a chase and struggle, but instead it looked like Dunglison sat in the den and simply waited for his doom.

Though these things were peculiar, John thought that there were possible explanations. Maybe Hallman knocked the old man out, proceeded to look around the house for a fitting tool with which to hack the old guy up, and found the machete. Maybe they had an argument, and the big blade was in the room for some reason not yet apparent.

His mind fixed on one thought—too many maybes.

John stood up, stretched two latex booties over his shoes, and covered his hands with rubber gloves. He stepped over to the young man’s corpse and knelt down. From his new vantage point, John noted that a single large gash scarred the floor between the two dead men.

From the hall behind him, a voice whined, “I wish you hadn’t gone in there.”

John turned to see Harry Mulgrew, who led the Crime Scene Analysis unit. Harry rubbed his balding scalp and, after a heavy sigh, twisted his face in disapproval. The grimace accentuated the winkled lines beneath Harry’s tortoise-shell glasses. Flecks of unshaven gray razor stubble sparkled on his drawn cheeks. John was happy to see him; Harry was good at what he did.

“Well,” Harry said, “I took two sets of prints off of the headboard of Dunglison’s bed. Given the size and span of the overall handprints, I would assume they both are male.”

John raised an eyebrow, looked at the two corpses before him, and replied, “I’ll give you one guess to name who left those prints.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

“This gash in the floor seems to be fresh,” John said, pointing at the cut in the floor between the bodies.

“According to what Fanelli was telling the others, the younger man was holding the machete and talking to the head. The kid dropped the blade right about there. You really should hear his whole story.” After a few seconds, Harry continued, “Give him a few minutes, though.”

“Yeah, I will. How soon until you get down here?”

“Not long. I’m going to the bathroom next.”

“Do you need something to read while you’re in there?”

“I’m not—” Harry cut the sentence short, started toward the bathroom, and mumbled something unintelligible that ended with the word “bastard.”

John wished Harry would start by processing the room with the actual murder victim, but he knew that asking Harry to do so was pointless. Long ago, Harry decided that the best way to process a crime scene was to start with what he called the “cleaner” areas of the house. That way, he would not carry any trace evidence that he might have inadvertently picked up while inspecting the victim, into the rest of the house. There was no changing Harry now; that dog was too old.

A drop of blood fell from the ceiling, passing just beyond the tip of John’s nose and demonstrating Harry’s point about picking up trace evidence quite effectively.

He shook his head, donned his baseball cap, and mumbled, “Wonderful.”

Thinking back to the gash in the floor, he started to slowly look around the room. Something was missing. He just found yet another problem with the whole scene; if Hallman dissected Dunglison in this room, John would expect to see more cuts in the hardwood floor than this single gouge.

While John stared at the mess, Kim Wohlford appeared in the doorway with a leather bag in her hand. Kim was the junior medical examiner, so John had guessed she would be the one stuck with the call. The fact that they were both the junior staff members in their positions had resulted in the opportunity to commiserate with her over drinks a few times, but nothing ever resulted from it. He smiled and tried not to be too obvious as he ran his eyes over her. With her brown, shoulder-length hair cinched back into a ponytail, her almond eyes appeared to be even larger than normal. A baggy sweatshirt failed to conceal her feminine form. Old blue jeans hugged her toned legs. John fought off the urge to linger too long on any single body part and watched as her jaw dropped at the sight before her.