“It’s a murder, isn’t it,
Jesse?”
“Probably,” Jesse said. “Gimme
the light.”
Simpson handed the flashlight to Jesse and went to his cruiser.
Jesse squatted on his heels and studied the corpse. It had been a young white man, maybe thirty-five. His mouth was open. There was sand in it. He wore a maroon velour warm-up suit, which was soaking wet. There were two small holes in the wet fabric. One on the left side of the chest. One on the right. Jesse turned the head slightly. There was sand in his ear. Jesse swept the flashlight slowly around the body. He saw nothing but the normal debris of a normal beach: a tangle of seaweed scraps, a piece of salt-bleached driftwood, an empty crab shell.
Simpson walked back across the parking lot. Behind him the blue
light on his patrol car revolved silently.
“Perkins is on the way,” he said.
“And Arthur Angstrom. Anthony
called Molly. She’s coming in early. Anthony’ll be down as soon as
she gets there.”
Jesse nodded, still looking at the crime scene.
He said, “What time is it, Suit?”
“Six-fifteen.”
“And it’s dead low tide,” Jesse
said. “So high was around
midnight.”
A siren sounded in the distance.
“You think he was washed up here?” Simpson said.
“Body that’s been in the ocean and washed up on shore doesn’t
look like this,” Jesse said.
“More beat up,” Simpson said.
Jesse nodded.
“He’s got some marks on his
face,” Simpson said.
“That would probably be the gulls,” Jesse said.
“I coulda lived without knowing that,”
Simpson
said.
Jesse moved the right arm of the corpse. “Still in rigor,” he
said.
“Which means?”
“Rigor usually passes in twenty-four hours,” Jesse
said.
“So he was killed since yesterday morning.”
“More or less. Cold water might change the timing a little.”
A Paradise patrol car pulled in beside Simpson’s, adding its
blue light to his. Peter Perkins got out and walked toward them. He was carrying a black leather satchel.
“Anthony says you got a murder?” Perkins said.
“You’re the crime-scene guy,”
Jesse said. “But there’s two
bullet holes in his chest.”
“That would be a clue,” Perkins said.
He put the satchel on the sand and squatted beside Jesse to look
at the corpse.
“I figure he was probably shot here, sometime before midnight,”
Jesse said, “when the tide was still coming in.
There’s the high
water line. The tide reached high about midnight and soaked him, maybe rolled him around a little, and left him
