Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
I’ve worked enough homicides to know that the body is never the worst part. The worst part is the living—the ones who knew the victim, the ones who have opinions on the victim, and the ones who lie to your face while you try to figure out which category they fall into.
The best thing about the dead was they couldn’t lie. At least not to me.
Lieutenant Daniels was in the living area when we got to Wade Rivers’s condo. She looked up when we came in.
“Bedroom’s yours,” she said. “We’ve done the entry, the living room, the kitchen, and the guest room. No sign of forced entry anywhere. Whoever came in had a key or was invited inside. The master bedroom is untouched.”
“That’s the best kind of present,” Jack said.
She snorted. “I’ll remember that at Christmas.”
Jack and I pulled on gloves and booties.
The condo ran long and narrow, with the main living and dining area open concept.
Original factory windows stretched across the far wall in steel frames painted matte black, the glass old enough to be wavy in places, and the floors were a pale oak.
Two identical charcoal sofas faced each other on top of a jute rug.
The coffee table was black iron, but there was nothing on it—no remotes, no coasters, no magazines.
There was no mail stacked by the door, no shoes piled in the entry, no water rings on the coffee table from a glass set down and forgotten.
The kitchen was on the left with a pass-through bar, and from what I could see it was black and minimalist, much like the rest of the condo. There was another door to the left of the kitchen where one of the CSIs was standing in the threshold.
“It’s like a model home,” I said. “Hard to believe anyone lives here.”
Everything had a place. The only disruption was the thin sheen of fingerprint powder across the doorframes and surfaces.
“Anything out of place?” Jack asked the CSI tech in the doorway. He was an older guy in a white jumpsuit and he had a camera slung around his neck.
“Other than the dead body?” the man asked.
“Yeah, other than that.”
“Vic’s got a full home gym in this second bedroom,” he said. “Premium equipment. Got a missing ten-pound weight from the rack.”
“I guess that blows the theory that Paige was sleeping in the second bedroom,” I said. “You think the building manager is na?ve or it’s wishful thinking?”
“I think she had the hots for her neighbor,” Jack said.
We moved toward the bedroom and I noticed the yellow evidence tag on the floor around the back side of the sofa.
“Somebody is missing something important,” Jack said, arching a brow.
A pair of black lace underwear lay crumpled on the ground, small enough that someone gathering their things in a hurry could easily miss them.
I took my camera from my bag and photographed the underwear, making sure to get the label and size.
“That’s gross,” I said. “Who leaves without putting on their underwear?”
“I imagine it happens more often than you’d think,” Jack said.
“Why do I get the feeling you’re speaking from experience?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.
He grinned unrepentantly. “I’m just saying I can see how something so small can be easy to miss. Especially if you’re in a hurry. Or getting dressed in the dark. Daniels said vic was in the master bedroom.”
“You trying to change the subject?”
“I just thought you’d want to get to the fun portion of the programming. Daniels did say it was interesting.”
“Saved by a dead body,” I said, following him into the remaining bedroom.
The smell hit first—copper and something earthy beneath it, and then I looked down at our victim.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “That’s definitely interesting.”
Who I assumed was Wade Rivers lay on his back near the foot of the bed, completely naked except for the kitchen knife that had been plunged into his groin and the dime store American flag that had been laid on top of his crossed arms.
“Someone posed him,” Jack said.
I took several pictures, zooming in on the flag and knife. “He’s a big guy. What do you think, maybe six four?”
“Yeah,” Jack said, looking around the room until he saw a wallet on the dresser in a black shallow bowl. He picked it up and flipped it open. “Wade Rivers. Thirty-four years old. Six foot five and two hundred and fifteen pounds. Looks like our guy.”
He’d been a good-looking man. You could still see that, underneath the death pallor. His jaw had gone slack and his mouth hung slightly open, and his eyes were fixed on the ceiling with the milky, dried-out stare that sets in once the moisture goes.
I walked around the body, looking at the angle and the smears of blood on the floor. “He was killed here,” I said, pointing to the blood spatter across the sheets and pillow near the headboard. There were flecks on the wall as well.
“Not arterial,” Jack said before I could.
“No,” I said, watching where I stepped. “Body dropped to the floor here.” There were blood smears down the side of the comforter to the floor. “See the initial pooling?”
“Mmm,” Jack agreed.
I took more photographs.
“Whoever killed him didn’t leave him here long though,” I said. “They dragged him to where he is now. Blood trail is smeared the whole way, and then he was fresh enough to leave another pool of blood where he is now.”
“That’s heavy blood loss,” Jack said.
“If he was still alive when he was moved it wouldn’t have been for long.”
“It’d take some strength to move a man his size,” Jack said.
“Heat of the moment,” I said. “Pure adrenaline. We can’t rule out a female.”
I took more pictures of the blood trail and spatter patterns before heading back to the body and kneeling beside him.
“What do you want to bet the knife in the balls is a message of some kind?” I asked.
“That’s a sucker’s bet,” Jack said and moved to the nightstand, opening the drawer.
I paused what I was doing and looked at Jack. The expression on his face was odd. “What is it?”
“I’ve just never seen a sex drawer this organized.”
“What, like it’s alphabetized or something?”
“No, he’s got dividers and drawer hooks. Like we have in the kitchen.”
I laughed and realized he was serious. “Maybe it’s like a mechanic keeping his tools arranged in the garage.”
“Wade Rivers was a sex mechanic?” he asked.
“You know what I mean.”
He grinned and started going through the drawer.
“Three different types of condoms. Sex toys of the male and female persuasion, lubes and creams organized by size, color, and label, handcuffs and black satin restraints of various kinds, blindfolds, and something that looks like a police baton, but it has an on switch so I can’t even begin to speculate what it does. ”
I snickered. “When you love what you do you never work a day in your life.”
“This room feels off,” Jack said.
“In what way?”
“It’s lived in,” he said. “It’s like you said, the rest of the house looks like a model home.
Like no one actually lives here. No personal effects.
No books, car keys or random coffee cups sitting around.
No shoes kicked off by the front door. Everything in here is neat, but his wallet is out, his phone charger is plugged in over here, the sheets are mussed. They’ve been slept in.”
“Slept in or sexed in?” I asked. “There’s a difference. A guy like Wade seems like the type who would make his bed every day.”
“Mmhmm,” Jack said. “Which begs the question of his company for the evening. Nothing seems to be missing out of the sex drawer. Everything is in its slot or on its hook.”
“So they hadn’t gotten that far yet,” I said. “Maybe they were interrupted.”
I got my penlight out of my bag and shone it across his face, neck, and chest. “No petechiae in the eyes. No ligature marks. He wasn’t strangled.
” I checked his arms, turned his hands over one at a time.
“Knuckles clean. No visible defensive bruising. I can still smell shower gel or aftershave on him.” I reached into my bag for evidence bags and sealed both hands.
“I’ll check under his nails at the lab. But they look clean. ”
“I’m assuming the knife didn’t cause those blood spatter patterns.”
“Good eye,” I said.
“Well, it’s not my first rodeo.”
I smiled. “It’s postmortem,” I said. I pulled out an evidence bag and carefully removed the knife.
“God,” Jack said, closing his eyes.
“At least he wasn’t alive,” I said, looking at the knife. “This knife is from the same set we got as a wedding gift. It’s a nice set. And sharp.”
“And expensive,” Jack said. “The set retails at almost two thousand dollars.”
“For knives?” I asked, shocked. “Who would pay that for knives to cut up chicken?”
“As the person who cuts up our chicken and cooks it,” he said wryly, “I can tell you a good kitchen knife is the most important tool in the kitchen.”
“You watch too many cooking shows,” I said. “I heard that chef with the beer gut and the Crocs say that when you were flipping channels during the baseball game commercials.”
“Then you know it has to be true. He’d never lie.”
My mouth twitched. “Like I was saying. This wound is postmortem. There’s no blood flow. The groin contains several major arteries. He would’ve bled out in minutes if this wound was cause of death. I’ll swab for sexual activity. Maybe we can get DNA from whoever he was with last.”
I swabbed him with a cotton swab and secured it in a tube before adding it to the evidence collection.
“No other front-facing wounds I can see or feel,” I said.
I moved to the flag that lay across his crossed arms. I photographed it in place, then carefully lifted it with two fingers and placed it in an evidence bag.
“No blood on the flag,” I said. “Placed after the fact.”
“Patriotism at its finest,” Jack said dryly.
“Help me roll him,” I said.
Jack wasn’t too far off from Wade’s height and build, and he knelt next to me and rolled the victim onto his side. Jack held him in place while I looked for posterior wounds.