Chooch did the same. They stood in the Police Academy parking lot, all shifting their weight awkwardly.
'Next stop, dinner with Buddy,' she said. Buddy had left the ceremony shortly after it was over. 'He had to go back to the hotel and get packed,' she alibied.
'So what happened to Mark Shephard?'
Shane finally asked. 'That was strange, wasn't it?'
'I don't know. I called his office and his house, but there was no answer,' she said.
A heavy cloud passed overhead, further darkening the parking lot and the moment.
'Listen, I think on the way to dinner, we should swing by Shephard's house,' Shane said. 'There could be more here than the eye can see. This guy is a Glass House commander. I doubt he'd miss a chance to make the six o'clock news.'
'It is pretty strange,' she agreed.
'So, let's do it.' Shane said. And that decision took them on step further down the road to disaster.
Chapter 9
SHANE AND CHOOCH followed Alexa's department-issue Crown Vic to Commander Mark Shephard's house in the Valley. It was strange, Shane thought, that Alexa knew exactly where he lived. They pulled up in front of a small Spanish-style bungalow- typical L. A. construction from the mid-forties. The house had a red-tile roof, arched doorways, and a small, neatly trimmed front lawn. A spill of purple bougainvillea garlanded off a garage trellis.
'This is it,' she said, exiting her car and joining them at the curb.
Shane stole a glance at her. 'How many times you been here?' he asked with forced casualness, trying not to come off like a stiff-necked jealous boyfriend.
'Had to drop some budget stuff off once or twice,' she said, not looking at him.
'Okay, let's go see if he's home.' He got out of the car, and Chooch scrambled out of the backseat. 'Stick out here by the car, will you, Chooch?' Shane asked.
'How come?'
'Just wait by the car, okay? I'm not sure what we're gonna find.'
'I think you're being overly dramatic,' Alexa said, but her voice seemed guarded.
They left Chooch and moved up to the front door of the house. It was locked, so they rang the bell. No answer. No key under the pot, over the jamb, or in any of the other no-brainer hiding spots.
They rang the bell three more times.
Shane moved around to the garage and looked in the side window. A dark green, department-issue Crown Victoria staff car was parked inside. 'Car's here,' he said. Not a good sign.
Next they tried the back door-also locked. He decided he'd have to break in, so he took out his small set of lock picks.
'Those things again?' she said, wrinkling her nose at them.
'We could just stand out here until the neighbors report us,' Shane said.
She nodded, so he slipped the picks out of the little leather case. The set contained half a dozen slender needles with widened ends, and one larger shaft piece. The trick was to work the pick's wide shaft into the lock, then slip the needles in under it, twisting them so they'd fill up the spaces inside the tumbler lock. Once he had enough purchase inside the dead bolt, he could turn the collection of picks to throw the lock. Shane had seen several newer-style lock-picks used by state-of-the-art B amp;E men. The most recent consisted of long strips of a new metal alloy attached to a heating coil. They were first slipped into the lock, then heated up by the coil until the soft metal melted into the lock. The alloy dried quickly, hardening and allowing the bolt to be turned. But Shane liked his old-fashioned Sam Spade set better. It took a little longer, required more skill, and appealed to his sense of police noir.
He got the door open and smiled tightly at Alexa; then they moved into a small, white-tile-and-wood-trimmed kitchen.
Mark Shephard lived alone. For a bachelor, he was uncommonly neat: dishes washed and stacked on the drip tray, washcloth folded neatly over the goosenecked faucet that hung over an old-style metal sink. They passed out of the kitchen, into the dining room.
Shane could smell him before he saw him. The sweet, sick odor of flesh decaying in a self-liquefying bath of butyric acid.
The Good Shepherd wasn't looking so good today. He was sitting in his Archie Bunker armchair, directly in front of the TV, wearing gray slacks and a white dress shirt, his shoes laced neatly on his feet. His head was thrown back with his mouth wide open, as if he had fallen asleep in front of the tube. Except for two green flies crawling in his mouth, he looked peaceful. His.38-caliber Smith amp; Wesson was halfway across the floor behind him.
He had shot himself in the temple, or so they were supposed to believe. The entrance wound was round and neat. Purple-black blood and cerebral spinal fluid had oozed from the hole, staining his shirt collar and shoulders. There were what looked like second-or third-generation maggot larvae festering inside the wound. Shane knew that each generation represented approximately twelve hours, indicating that he had been dead somewhere around thirty-six hours, or at least since yesterday evening.
'Oh, my God,' he heard Alexa whisper. 'No… No… Please, no.'
Shane glanced at her and saw a look of shock and pain tightening her features. She seemed pale and frightened-not exactly Medal of Valor crime-scene behavior. However, Mark Shephard was her friend, he reasoned. The Good Shepherd had arranged for her to be his XO at Detective Services… arranged it early, even before she had made lieutenant. So they were close. It was hard to witness a close friend in terminus situ, oozing blood and hosting fly larvae. Even though they were cops and had seen it before, she would find this difficult; that's why she seemed emotionally wrought.
He reached out and touched the body. It was loose, the flesh jiggled… Rigor mortis had already come and gone, confirming his rough estimate of TOD.
'Suicide. Why would he commit suicide?' he heard Alexa say.
'Yeah,' Shane said, now noticing some more disturbing pieces of the crime-scene puzzle. Shane was a homicide detective, so right off, three things bothered him-two small, the other large. First, and least important, was the fact that Mark Shephard had his shoes on. Most suicides, approximately 80 percent, remove their shoes before killing themselves. The why had never been adequately explained to him, but they did it nonetheless. It was troubling only in conjunction with his two other observations. The large event was the bullet itself. It had entered Mark Shephard's right temple, but had not come out again. The gun was on the floor where it had supposedly been thrown from his hand by the recoil after the shot. It was the same checkered-grip.38 that Shane had seen on his belt in Shephard's office Friday morning. Shane knew that a f full-load, 110-grain.38 caliber slug traveled at a velocity of 995 feet per second and had 240 foot pounds of muzzle energy. These were manufacturer's stats. So the big, hard-to-explain piece was why the bullet had not exited the other side of Shephard's head, taking half his skull with it like it was supposed to?
The third thing Shane noticed was that at the edge of the wound, there was 'tattooing' from the exploding gunpowder coming out of the barrel. Most tattooing from guns held close to the head made a tight pattern around the wound. The tattooing around Mark Shephard's wound, however, was about an inch from the exterior circumference of the bullet hole, indicating that the bullet Commander Shephard had used to take his life was most likely a standard-police-issue, light-load cartridge. Light loads were the hated ordnance of all street cops because they contained half the gunpowder of a full load. The reasoning was that if a police officer got into a gunfight in the street, the bullet would carry only half as far and not kill an innocent civilian feeding a parking meter a mile away. It also had damn little velocity, so when fired close-up, it left this wider tattoo.
Mark Shephard was a cop. Cops were issued light loads. A light load wouldn't necessarily go all the way through Shephard's head and out the other side. It would cause this wider tattoo. That's physics. That's the way the cartridge is designed. So what's the problem? What's wrong with this picture?
Only one thing.
