“Got here about the same time the squad did,” Poteat was explaining. “Made sure the guys didn’t do nothing more’n necessary. Didn’t turn him over or remove his clothes or nothing. He was DO A.”
“Thank you,” I said abstractedly.
“Looks like he was beaten about the head, cut. Maybe shot. Bird shot all over the place. You’ll see in a minute. We ain’t found a weapon. Appears he pulled in around quarter of seven, parked where his car is now. Best we can figure, he was attacked as he got out.”
He looked over at the white Rolls-Royce. The area around it was thick with shadows cast by boxwoods older and taller than he was.
“Was the driver’s door open when you got here?” I asked.
“No, ma’am,” Poteat answered. “The car keys is on the ground, like he had ’em in his hand when he went down. Like I said, we ain’t touched nothing, was waiting till you got here or till the weather forced us to proceed. Gonna rain.”
He squinted up at the layer of dense clouds. “Could be snow. No sign of any disturbance inside the car, no sign of a struggle at all. We’re figuring the assailant was waiting for him, hiding in the bushes prob’ly. All I can tell you is it happened mighty fast, Doc. His sister in there didn’t hear a gun go off, nothing, she says.”
I left him to talk to Marino as I ducked under the tape and approached the Rolls-Royce, my eyes instinctively probing everywhere I stepped. The car was parallel parked less than ten feet from the back steps, the driver’s door toward the house. Rounding the hood with its distinctive ornament, I stopped and got out my camera.
Gary Harper was on his back, his head just inches from the car’s front tire. The white fender was speckled and streaked with blood, his beige fisherman’s knit sweater almost solid red. Not far from his hips was a ring of keys. In the glare of floodlights all I saw was glistening sticky red. His white hair was matted with blood, his face and scalp laid open by lacerations caused when he was struck with severe force by a blunt instrument that had split the skin. His throat was cut from ear to ear, almost severing his head from his neck, and everywhere I directed the flashlight bird shot glinted
like tiny beads of pewter. There were hundreds of them on his body and around it, even a few scattered over the hood of the car. The bird shot had not been fired from any sort of gun.
I moved around taking photographs, then squatted and got out the long chemical thermometer, which I slid carefully under his sweater and wedged in the fold of his left arm. The temperature of the body was 92.4 degrees, the temperature of the air 31. The body was cooling at the rapid rate of approximately three degrees per hour because it was below freezing out and Harper wasn’t heavyset or heavily dressed. Rigor had already started in the small muscles. I estimated he had been dead less than two hours.
Next I began looking for any trace evidence that might not survive the trip to the morgue. Fibers, hairs or any other debris adhering to blood could wait. I was worried about anything loose, slowly scanning his body and the area directly around it, when the narrow beam licked over something not far from his neck. I leaned closer without touching, puzzling over a small greenish lump of what looked remarkably like Play-Doh. Embedded in it were several more pellets. I was carefully sealing this inside a plastic envelope when the back door opened and I found myself staring directly up into the terrified eyes of a woman standing inside the foyer beside a police officer holding a metal clipboard.
Approaching footsteps belonged to Marino and Poteat. They ducked under the tape and were joined by the officer with the clipboard. The back door quietly shut.
“Will there be someone to stay with her?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” the officer with the clipboard responded, his breath smoking out. “Miss Harper’s got a friend coming, says she’ll be okay. We’ll have a couple units staked out nearby to make sure the guy doesn’t come back for an encore.”