“There’s someone who needs to see you. Now,” the radio went on.
“Man, there’s castoff all over the place.” Eggleston was referring to blood thrown off during the backswing of a weapon, creating uniform trails or lines on whatever surface it impacted.
“Can’t do it,” Marino answered the radio.
Three-fourteen -didn’t respond, and I unhappily suspected what this was all about, and I was right. In minutes, more footsteps sounded in the hall, and then Chief Rodney Harris was standing in the doorway, his face stone.
“Captain Marino;” Harris said.
“Yes, sir, Chief.” Marino studied an area of floor near the bathroom.
Ham and Eggleston in their black fatigues, latex gloves and binocular headsets only added to the cold horror of the scene as they worked with angles and axes and points of convergence to reconstruct, through geometry, where in space each blow was struck.
“Chief,” they both said.
Harris stared at the bed, jaw muscles bunching. He was short and homely, with thinning red hair and an ongoing battle with his weight. Maybe these misfortunes had shaped him. I didn’t know. But Hams had always been a tyrant. He was aggressive and made it obvious he didn’t like women who strayed from their proper place, which was why I’d never understood his hiring Bray, unless it was simply that he thought she’d make him look good.
“With all due respect, Chief,” Marino said, “don’t step one damn inch closer.”
“I want to know, did you bring the media, Captain?” Harris said in a tone that would have frightened most people I knew. “Are you responsible for that, too? Or did you just directly counter my orders?”
“I guess it’s the latter, Chief. I had nothing to do with the media. They was already here when the doc and I pulled up.”
Harris looked at me-as if he’d just now noticed I was in the room. Ham and Eggleston climbed up on their stepladders, hiding behind their task.
“What happened to her?” Harris asked me, and his voice faltered a little. “Christ:’
He closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Beaten to death with some sort of instrument, maybe a tool. We don’t know;” I said.
“I mean, is there anything . . . ?” he started to say, and his iron facade was rapidly slipping away. “Well . . .” He cleared his throat, his eyes pinned to Bray’s body. “Why would someone do this? Who? Anything?”
“That’s what we’re working on, Chief,” Marino said. “Don’t have a single damn answer right now, but maybe you can answer a few questions for me.”
The crime-scene techs had begun painstakingly taping bright pink surveyor’s string above droplets of blood spattered on the white ceiling. Harris looked ill.
“You know anything about her personal life?” Marino asked.
“No,” Harris said. “In fact, I didn’t know she had one.”
“She had someone over last night. They ate pizza, maybe drank a little. Appears her guest smoked;’ Marino said.
“I never heard her say anything about going out with someone.” Harris tore his attention away from the bed. “We weren’t really what I’d call friendly with each. other.”
Ham stopped what he was doing, the string he held connected only to air. Eggleston peered up through his Optivisor at blood droplets on the ceiling. He moved a measuring magnifier over them and wrote down millimeters.
“What about neighbors?” Harris then asked. “Did anyone hear anything, see anything?”
“Sorry, but we ain’t had time to canvas the neighborhood yet, especially since nobody called any detectives or techs until I finally did,” Marino said.
Harris abruptly walked off. I looked at Marino and he avoided my eyes. I was certain he had just lost what was left of his job.
“How’re we doing here?” he asked Ham.
“Already running out of shit to hang this on.” Ham taped one end of string over a blood droplet the size and shape of a comma. “Okay, so where do I tape the other end? How about you move that floor lamp over here. Thanks. Set it right there. Perfect,” Ham said, taping the string to the lamp’s finial.
“You ought to quit your day job, Captain, and come work with us.”