things were found.’
‘Yes, those are the obvious things. But what’s wrong here? What’s out of place?’
I looked.
‘Look at the blood. The spatters.’
I stared obediently at the whole baroque pattern of blots and curlicues.
‘Do you know anything about blood-spatter patterns?’
‘No. I’ve never-’
‘Well, there’s nothing mysterious about it. When blood or any other fluid falls straight down, it spatters evenly. You get a stain that’s a round circle with splashes of blood around it, the same in all directions. But when it strikes a surface at an angle, the blood’s own momentum makes it spread across the surface. So, instead of a round stain, it leaves a stain the shape of a teardrop. The fat end of the teardrop is where it hits first, then it tapers off, thinner and thinner as it moves away from the point of origin. You can tell all kinds of things from stains. If you get a round stain on the floor, you know the blood probably just fell with gravity rather than being projected by force. That’s called passive bleeding. A wounded victim will leave a lot of stains like that as he moves around and blood drips from his wounds. There’s not much of that here, of course, because your victim died instantly. But look at these stains, the ones like little comet trails. The blood was spattering out’ — he gestured — ’this way. You see, those cones are behind the blood spatters. The body couldn’t have fallen there. The way those cones are placed, it looks like the blood came flying toward the victim, and of course that’s impossible. So this body was moved after it hit the ground.’
‘Maybe he didn’t fall straight down,’ I argued. ‘Maybe the bullet pushed him in that direction after the blood sprayed out, so he just landed on the wrong side of the spatters.’
‘No, no.’ He shook his head — but patiently, even respectfully, with no suggestion that I was some hayseed sheriff from Acadia County. He seemed to take me for what I was, a young cop with a lot to learn. He seemed to enjoy playing the professor too, for a while at least. ‘You’ve been watching too many movies, Ben Truman. In movies, you see a man standing stock-still, and when he is shot the bullet sends him flying against the wall. Pure bullshit. It doesn’t work that way. A bullet can’t do that. Shooting into a human body is like shooting into a bag of sand. The bullet pierces the surface, and the sandbag, which is much heavier than the bullet, just absorbs the impact. Same with a person. The bullet is too small and too penetrating to shove him in any direction. So in real life, if a person is standing still and he’s shot, he falls straight to the ground. Now, if a man is moving — if he’s running, say — and he gets shot in the back, then yes, he’ll fall forward. But that’s not because the bullet knocked him forward; it’s because his own momentum carried him in that direction. Even allowing for Danziger’s height, he could not have landed that far on the wrong side of the spatters. So this body was moved, we presume by the shooter.’
He punctuated all this with a modest little shrug. Obvious.
‘Who are you?’
‘My name is John Kelly.’
‘No, I mean who are you? You were a policeman — okay, where? How long?’
‘Boston. Thirty-seven years.’
‘You were a homicide detective.’
‘Among other things.’
‘And you knew this guy Danziger? Is that why you’re here?’
‘We met. May he rest in peace.’
‘What do you do now?’
‘I told you, I’m retired. I watch baseball on my satellite dish. I call my daughter on the phone. At five o’clock I have a whiskey.’
‘Tell me more.’ I waved my thumb toward the bloodstained cabin.
‘What is it you want to know?’
‘Everything. I want to know everything.’
‘Everything. Hmm. Well, usually if you see a body moved this way, it means your scene was staged. The killer tried to make it look like something other than murder: accident, suicide, anything that will throw the investigator off. They always get it wrong, of course, because very few people have actually seen what it looks like when someone dies by suicide or by accident. They’ve seen movies so they think they know, just like you thought you knew, but they don’t know. That’s how you catch ’em, see. You look for the detail they got wrong — in this case, the blood spatters.’
How to explain the quickening I felt, the tremor? Kelly seemed to be able to read the environment in a way that no one — not Kurth, not the Game-Show Host, and certainly not I — had done. The resolution of this murder, with all its evident danger, seemed suddenly closer. Listening to him analyze the killer’s mistakes, I felt certain the truth would come out quickly, that the whole thing must look clumsy to an expert. Amazingly, given the circumstances, I enjoyed it.
‘What else?’
‘Well, you know someone jimmied the scene; he moved the body. So the next question is why? He didn’t try to stage it as something other than a murder. There’s no phony suicide note or anything like that. That’s why I say he must have been looking for something — it’s the only reason he’d have risked moving the body. Was there any sign of a motive?’
‘No.’
‘Anything obviously missing?’
‘No. In fact, the wallet was left on the floor, in plain sight.’
‘Well, he was after something. Otherwise he would have run. From the looks of this place, the guy must have used an elephant gun. It was loud. You ever hear a gun go off in a small space like this? Deafening, blows your ears out. The blood sprays, too, remember. So picture him: His ears are ringing, he’s covered with blood, he’s agitated. He ought to be thinking one thing — run. But he doesn’t run, this guy. He sticks around, he even touches the body. He moved it so he could search the thing without standing in all that blood. That’s an awfully big risk. Whatever Danziger had, your shooter wanted it bad. Prints?’
‘No prints.’
‘Well then I’d guess your man knew what he was doing. This wasn’t his first time. He may have planned the whole thing too. No other way to account for his bringing gloves in September. It hasn’t been that cold yet.’
I’d been standing with my back to Kelly, looking into the cabin, and now I turned toward him.
Kelly immediately stepped back. I later realized this was a habit of his. He stood well back from whomever he spoke to, presumably to muffle the effect of his height. Big men usually do just the opposite. They crowd you, they loom. They stand close enough that you — and they — are always aware of their superior size. It is an obvious advantage in conversation literally to look down on someone, and tall men tend to exploit it. But Kelly purposely renounced the tall man’s advantage by standing back, by burying his big hands in his pockets. At the time, all I can say is that I sensed a gentleness about him but could not explain why. Now, in hindsight, I realize that John Kelly wore his height modestly, as if that lanky body were two sizes too big for the man inside. Also, let me confess here, right at the start, that my image of Kelly is probably not an accurate one. To me, he is the hero of this story — though you might disagree — so I have to remind myself that there was nothing heroic about his appearance.
‘Well, you figure out what your man was looking for — why he moved that body — and you’ll find him.’
I shook my head. I felt at a loss, unnerved by the whole thing. The reality of it, the nearness.
‘Don’t look so hopeless, Ben Truman. It’s not rocket science. You’ll figure it out.’
‘Doesn’t matter anyway, it’s not my case. It’s just, you have to wonder how anybody could do this. Not how — I guess we know how. I mean why?’
‘Why indeed.’ Kelly gazed at the cabin. ‘Well, here’s your first lesson. There are only six motives for murder: anger, fear, greed, jealousy, desire, revenge. Your first job is just to figure out which one fits your case. There’s no such thing as a murder without a motive. Even psychopaths have a motive that makes sense to them. Every murder has a motive,’ Kelly said. ‘That’s the golden rule.’
‘I thought the golden rule was “Do unto others.”
‘For priests, not policemen.’ He winked. ‘We have our own golden rules.’
He turned and headed for a tiny Toyota Corolla, a car so small it was hard to imagine Kelly folding himself small enough to fit into it. But he fit.
