“But we might get lucky,” Officer Dodd said.
“How so?” Gil asked.
Dodd gestured to the upper corner of the front porch to where a CCTV security camera had been mounted on the wooden siding.
“The only way that’ll help us is if it’s turned on,” Gil said. “Now what about the coroner?”
“Fred’s on his way,” Dodd said. “He should be here any minute.”
Without waiting for the arrival of the coroner, Fred Millhouse, Gil slipped on a pair of crime scene booties and a pair of latex gloves. “Do we have a name?”
“Several actually,” Officer Dodd said. “We were originally sent here to do a welfare check on a guy named Richard Lydecker whose fiancee called nine-one-one to report him missing. Later another woman called looking for her missing fiance. She gave the nine-one-one operator the same address, only she says her guy’s name is Richard Loomis.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Gil said.
Dodd nodded. “County tax records say the residence is owned by someone else named Richard, only his last name is Lowensdale. So I’m guessing the dead guy is one of those three or maybe he’s all of them. According to them, Lowensdale is age fifty-three. Looks like he lives alone.”
“Were the lights on or off when you got here?” he asked.
“The overhead fixture in the living room was off. The desk lamp is on in the corner, but the blinds were closed in both the living room and dining room. The only way to see inside was through the window in the front door. That allows a view of the entryway only, not the actual crime scene, which is in the living room.”
“So no one could see what was happening from the outside.”
“I don’t think so. I suspect this all went down sometime in the course of the afternoon on Friday or maybe even Thursday. The porch light was off, and we found a UPS package here by the front door, so it was probably delivered on Friday afternoon at the latest. UPS doesn’t deliver on weekends.”
Gil paused long enough to look down at the label. Zappos. From information on the label and from the shape of the box, Gil figured the package probably contained a pair of shoes. The victim may have needed new shoes and he may have ordered new shoes, but he was never going to wear them.
“So the UPS guy may have some information for us,” Gil said. “Any idea who he is?”
“The local driver is named Ted Frost,” Dodd said. “I went to high school with him. He’s a good guy.”
Gil nodded. “See if you can get him on the horn.”
While Officer Dodd set off to do Gil’s bidding, the detective geared himself up for the task at hand. As he stepped on the grimy hardwood-floored entryway, Gil Morris encountered the appalling stench that immediately overpowered the puny efforts of his Vick’s Vaporub.
That one sickening whiff was enough to tell him that he was also stepping into a nightmare.
For a moment, after he crossed the threshold, Gil stood still, trying to get the lay of the land and assimilate what he was seeing and feeling. As expected, the house was unbearably hot. If he had been able to see a thermostat, he would have turned it down. The overheated air reeked with an ugly combination of odors. Fighting his own gag reflex, Gil catalogued the unwelcome but familiar smells-both the putrid odor of decaying flesh and the lingering coppery scent of dried and rotting blood. Beyond those two, however, was something else besides, something obnoxious that Gil couldn’t quite place.
As he stepped into the room, a small coat closet was to his immediate left. The door had been left ajar and the coats, jackets, and sweaters on the pole inside had all been pushed to one side in order to leave enough room for an old-fashioned Kirby vacuum cleaner that had been stowed in one corner of the closet.
For some strange reason that tickled Gil’s funny bone. Where was it written that vacuum cleaners always had to be stored in entryway closets? That was where Linda had kept her Bissell and where his mother had kept her Hoover. At that moment, Gil was without a vacuum cleaner and without much hope of ever having one either.
The overhang of the porch and the closed blinds along the front of the house left the entryway shrouded in shadow. Making a note of how he had found the light switch, Gil used a pencil to turn on the overhead lights. Immediately he saw evidence of tracked blood, coming and going through the entryway, but the patterns were smeared and indistinct. Gil knew what that meant. Whoever had tramped through the blood had been wearing booties.
Gil turned back to the door. “Hey, Officer Masters,” he called. “Did you or Dodd leave these tracks in here?”
“No, sir,” Masters returned. “We saw the tracks. We walked around them.”
Nodding, Gil dropped a numbered marker onto the floor next to each of three prints. Then, using a small digital camera, he took several photographs of the area indicated by the marker. Each time he snapped a photo, he paused long enough to make a corresponding note on three-by-five cards that he carried in a leather-bound wallet. That way, later, he’d be able to use the notes to explain what was in the photos and he’d use the photos to help decipher his sometimes illegible notes.
Gil knew that the corpse was in the living room. Instead of going directly there, he turned instead toward a room that had originally been intended as a dining room. Shelves that had probably once held knickknacks of some kind had been installed high on the dining room walls, but they were empty. An oak pedestal table stood in the middle of the room. There was only one chair at the table. Two others sat off to the side, just under the window. A buffet that matched the table was the only other piece of furniture. The top of the buffet was covered with packing boxes, tape dispensers, and blank shipping labels, while the top of the table was littered with tubes of epoxy and paint and brushes.
On the floor, scattered in among a snowdrift of foam packing peanuts, lay the smashed remains of what must have once been on the now-denuded bookshelves-dozens and dozens of model airplanes, all of them wrecked, ground to pieces on the floor. They had been stepped on. . no, stomped on, in what Gil read as deliberate, thorough, and wanton destruction.
Gil stayed where he was, in the dining room doorway. If he tried stepping into the dining room, he knew that no matter how carefully he walked, he wouldn’t be able to keep from crunching larger pieces of wings and propellers and fuselages into smaller bits of plastic, balsa wood, and dust.
At last, turning toward the living room, Gil was appalled by the mess. Except for the wrecked model planes on the floor, the dining room had been relatively neat and orderly. The living room looked like a trash heap, a lived- in trash heap that consisted of discarded magazines, packets of coupons, grocery bags, empty cans of chili, shipping boxes, and dead pizza containers, with little cleared paths like game trails leading through the mess from one place to another. It was possible someone could find out how long the debris had been there by shoveling through it like an archeological dig, but that wasn’t Gil’s job.
The small desk lamp on the far table did little to illuminate the rest of the room. Once again Gil tracked down a wall switch. Turning on the overhead fixture in the living room immediately revealed the same kind of fuzzy footprints he had seen in the entryway. They meandered in and out of the mess, sometimes following the trails sometimes stepping on or over the trash.
In the lamplight, the victim’s body hadn’t been immediately visible. Now it was. Just beyond the far end of the couch, a single sock-clad foot hung at an ungainly angle in midair. Only when Gil rounded the couch did he see that a large male was strapped to a fallen dining room chair by layers and layers of clear packing tape. His legs were fastened to the front legs of the chair while his arms and wrists, out of sight, were most likely similarly bound behind his back.
At first glance there was no evidence of any kind of bullet or stab wound that would account for the presence of all the blood that had been trod through the house. Instead, the man’s head was encased in a clear plastic bag, the kind that customers in grocery stores peel off conveniently located rolls to carry home their freshly chosen vegetables-heads of broccoli, lettuce, or cauliflower-but the plastic was heavy, not likely to be easily chewed
