I took allof it in with the eyes of a child instead of a detective. I was supposed to bescrutinizing the stuff and I suppose I was, because I knew it hadn’t been movedin a long time. While my inner child was freaking out over a little historyfrom my past, Dom reached into the case and opened a small drawer.
“These werefrom the movies. Only used for close ups, of course. I think it was mygreat-grandfather’s cousin that made them. They are one of a kind, best of myknowledge.” He shrugged. “I always kind of figured I’d get ‘em set up in amuseum some day or at least make a few bucks off of a collector.”
I looked atthem carefully, the brass knuckles. They were massive things, the betterto show up in the filmed close-ups. Unwieldy and I guessed at least four or fivepounds each. That may not sound like much, but that made them much heavier thanthe real thing. I didn’t touch them at first. I went for the gloves in my coatpocket. Dom didn’t even think about touching and I knew why: if there werefingerprints to be found he wanted to make sure they weren’t his.
I studiedthem closely before I touched. There was a thin layer of dust. Like witheverything else in the wardrobe.
When Ifinally picked them up I was impressed all over again with their weight. Like Isaid, they were larger and unbalanced. They’d never been meant to be used. Theboring on the metal, where the fingers slipped in, was smooth and well worn.But the designs on the knuckles themselves? I couldn’t see the faintest hint ofwear. I doubt they’d ever hit so much as a pillow with any force.
“No way,Dom.”
“What?”
“No waythese were used. I think we need to take them down for a proper examination,but I don’t think there’s a chance in hell these were ever employed onanything. The metal here? It’s too thin and delicate. It would have been marredby hitting someone in the face hard enough to break bone.”
Some of thetension flowed out of Dom in that moment. Listen, I knew where it counted thatDom wasn’t the type. I’d never once seen him lose his temper and while I knewhe could fight well enough, I don’t think he’s got what it takes to beat threemen to death.
Ten minuteslater we were on our way to the M.E. offices with the brass knuckles from theold shows. We stopped by the offices before that, so I could look over thevideo footage.
What I sawwas not much. Three men getting torn apart in a fistfight with nothing but anoccasional dark smudge. I looked hard at that footage and saw two things.First, the floor was spotty in the images. The ceramic tiles that were inlaidfaded a bit here and there. They disappeared like there was something blockingthem. Like maybe dry ice. That was a creepy enough thought, but all three menwere seeing something that we could not. I watched four more times and focusedon the occasional smudges. They looked a lot like shadows. The sort of shadowsthat might fall from clothing. Say, a hat and a cape. That is to say, I couldalmost make out the shadow at the bottom of a hat and the bottom of a cloak ora cape, but there was nothing else there, like bad green screen effects from ashow done in a different era, before CGI could hide away the things you weren’tsupposed to see.
I didn’tknow what to make of it. I also didn’t tell Dom what it looked like to me,because I didn’t want to say it first.
Afterwasting our time with footage that ultimately showed very little by way of apossible culprit, we were on our way to finish drop off of possible evidence.
Accordingto the coroner’s reports, the next vicious murder was occurring around the sametime.
* * *
Seriously,what goes through people’s minds? We looked at the single victim this time andI was appalled. That doesn’t happen very often.
EdwardMacDougal was a big man. I mean, physically he was very nearly a giant. Almostseven feet in height and in excellent physical shape. He wasn’t one of thetowering and ridiculously thin types you see who suffer from a glandularproblem. He came from a family of big people. His sister, Nelly, was six and ahalf feet tall. I know, because I’d arrested her a few times for beating theshit out of her husband. I wouldn’t have busted her, because I knew he liked touse his fists, too, but she gave me no choice when she threw the drunkenbastard through a window and went after him.
Violencewas a thing with the family and Eddie had long since made the best of that. Heworked in protections and usually just held out a hand and got the money. Noone wanted him pulling them in half and most people assumed he could.
One of the onlythings I ever liked about Eddie is he never resisted arrest. Trust me, Ithanked the Almighty for that fact on a few occasions.
Like theothers he had been beaten so severely that I genuinely couldn’t have recognizedhis face, not even with his carrot orange hair. I would have recognized therings on his fingers though, and his height and weight helped a lot. The factthat he’d tattooed his own name across both of his biceps also helped. Even inOctober, when the air was bitter, Eddie walked around in a too tight t-shirtand didn’t bother with a coat.
I
