Chapter 25
I stared at the man on the table, not having many words for what I was looking at. I put the man’s age around fifty. Height and weight were about average. Hair, brown. Eye color, foggy blue.
“What do you think that is, Skip?” Colt asked. “Four? Maybe five strikes?” Colt reached out his gloved hand and counted beneath his breath as he pointed at certain areas of the man’s forehead.
“Not sure,” Skip said. “Three for sure. But it gets a bit messy after that.”
I could see into the man’s head, as there was about a two-inch piece of skull simply missing from the center of his forehead.
Above his right eye, his brow had also been crushed in.
There was another indentation in the guy’s brown, gray, and bloodstained hair.
Two of his front teeth were missing, and he had a quarter-inch-wide wound across the bridge of what appeared to be a very broken nose.
Skip had agreed with my guess that a collapsible baton, or something very similar, was the murder weapon used on Grant Minter out at the storage unit.
The weapon would account for how the suspect had removed it from his hip upon walking in, the damage inflicted on Minter, and the fact that we didn’t find it or see the weapon upon the suspect as he left the storage unit.
The thinking was that he’d collapsed it and put it into his pocket, or into a hip sheath that batons often came with, before he walked out.
“Does this actually look like the same weapon to you guys?” I asked. “To what was used on Minter?”
Colt shrugged then nodded.
“It could very well be,” Skip said. “But I’ll get some detailed measurements once I really get into this to hopefully either confirm or deny.”
“I’m not sure if a confirmation would be better or worse,” I said.
“Yeah, me either,” Colt said.
“Well, it’s pretty safe to say that blunt force trauma is our cause of death,” Skip said.
“I got the body temp before you guys came in. Between that, the lividity on his back and legs, and the fixed rigor, I’m thinking that this guy has been deceased somewhere around thirty-six hours.
It could be plus or minus a couple hours on either end of that, but I would think that he was killed the evening before last.”
I pulled my notepad from my pocket and jotted down Skip’s estimation. “Can we try to get that wallet? See who we have here.”
“Got it,” Colt said.
He reached into the man’s pocket and pulled out a fat leather wallet. “Do you have a little table or something for me, Skip?”
“Use this,” Skip said. He removed a bone saw and a scalpel from a blue-towel-covered rolling table and pushed it toward Colt.
Colt set the wallet down and opened it. The man’s driver’s license was in a clear sleeve on one end of the trifold. Colt slid it out and gave it a look.
“John Russell,” Colt said. “Doral address. Date of birth nine, nineteen, seventy-five. He’s a local.”
I wrote down the man’s name and date of birth—my guess of his age was spot-on. When Colt passed the ID over, I added the man’s address.
“I’ll hunt down the next of kin and make sure they have your contact info,” Skip said.
“I’m going to need to talk to anyone who knew this guy ASAP,” I said.
“I’ll give you their information as soon as I have it and before I start on the autopsy,” Skip said.
“Appreciate it. Anything else in the wallet?”
“Six bucks, some credit cards, a medical marijuana card, some warehouse store cards. A couple receipts.”
Colt removed each item and set them all on the table he’d gotten from Skip.
We went through the receipts—a gas station receipt for fuel, an ATM receipt for a cash withdrawal, and a home improvement store receipt for some lumber.
The most recent of the three was a couple of weeks old.
What, if anything, they would do for us, I didn’t know.
As Colt got all the items from the wallet bagged up as evidence, Skip went through the rest of the man’s pockets—he found a pair of cough drops, a pocketknife, and some loose change.
I wasn’t counting on any of the items breaking our case.
Getting as much as we were going to with the man’s body and having quite enough of both breathing the putrid air and sharing the room with corpses, I wanted to get the letter to the forensics lab to see what we had on that front.
“What else do we need before we get out of here with that envelope?” I asked.
“Clothing,” Colt said. “And then we have to write up the transfer-of-evidence paperwork quick. But that should be it.”
“How long to get all that knocked out?” I asked.
Skip took the question. “Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.”
“Okay. Skip, thanks. Colt, I’ll meet you at the office. Shoot me a message when you’re back, and I’ll come down to the lab.”
“Sounds good,” Colt said.
“Catch you later, Nash,” Skip said.
I left the guys in the autopsy room, walked from the facility, and sucked in big clean breaths of fresh air as I walked to the Explorer.
After a sniff of my right and left shoulders, I discovered that as I’d imagined, the smell from inside the medical examiner’s office had permeated my clothing.
I tossed my suit jacket into the rear hatch area so the smell wouldn’t soak into the driver’s seat as I drove.
Behind the wheel of the car, I dropped the windows and plugged the victim’s name into the Explorer’s computer.
The guy’s information displayed on my screen.
The address information was the same as I’d jotted down.
The search showed no warrants. But that wasn’t what I was looking for.
I wanted to see if the man had been reported missing, but there was nothing.
Windows still down as I pulled out onto the main street, I got on my way and dialed Halloway.
“What do we have?” the captain answered. “What the hell is with all the wind noise?”
“I just left Skip’s office. It was pretty rough in there today, so I have the windows down.”
“Ugh,” Halloway said. “Say no more.”
“Yeah, I’m heading back to the office, but I’m making a quick pit stop at home for a shower and change.”
“Got it. And understandable,” he said. “What do we know? Tell me we have something.”
I ran through my interview with the 911 caller, the fact that we didn’t get anything else on scene, and what we’d learned at the medical examiner’s office—which wasn’t a ton other than the man’s identification, cause of death, and approximate TOD.
I also told the captain that I’d run the guy’s name and he hadn’t been reported missing.
“What are we doing with the letter?” Halloway asked.
“Colt is bringing it to the lab. It’s still unopened. He needed a couple more minutes by Skip to collect the man’s clothing and get the evidence-transfer paperwork set, and he was heading out. I’m guessing he’ll be over there about the same time as me.”
“All right. Grab me when you are back at the office.”
“Yeah, will do. Guessing about a half hour.”
“Sounds good.”
I ended the call and continued my drive.
The smell of death was still present, and I wasn’t sure if the rolled-down windows were helping with the smell or just making things worse.
I pulled up to my house about twenty minutes later, parked in the driveway by the garage, and hopped out.
After grabbing my suit jacket from the rear hatch, I walked straight to the backyard and stripped off my shirt and pants.
With my body armor also not passing the sniff test, I took that off as well and hung everything on our clothesline.
Hopefully, being left for a day or two on the line would air the items out.
After standing in my backyard at midday in my underwear and socks, I went into the house for a quick shower and change.
With some fresh clothes and some backup soft body armor beneath them, I drove to the office. What might be in the envelope, I didn’t know, but I was just minutes from finding out.