It was a crowbar.
A black-painted crowbar, all matted on one end with blood
and hair.
I stayed with it and sent Summer to get the truck. She must
have jogged all the way back for it because she returned sooner
than I expected and out of breath.
‘Do we have an evidence bag?’ I asked.
‘It’s not evidence,’ she said. ‘Training accidents don’t need
evidence.’
‘I’m not planning on taking it to court,’ I said. ‘I just don’t
want to touch it, is all. Don’t want my prints on it. That might
give Willard ideas.’
She checked the back of the truck.
‘No evidence bags,’ she said.
I paused. Normally you take exquisite care not to contaminate
evidence with foreign prints and hairs and fibres, so as not to
confuse the investigation. If you screw up, you can get your ass
chewed by the prosecutors. But this time the motivation had to
be different, with Willard in the mix. If I screwed up, I could
get my ass sent to jail. Means, motive, opportunity, my prints on
the weapon. Too good to be true. If the training accident story
came back to bite him, he would jump all over anything he
could get.
‘We could bring a specialist out here,’ Summer said. She was
standing right behind me. I could sense her there.
‘Can’t involve anyone else,’ I said. ‘I didn’t even want to
involve you.’
She came around beside me and crouched low. Smoothed
stalks of grass out of the way with her hands, for a closer look.
‘Don’t touch it,’ I said.
‘Wasn’t planning to,’ she said.
We looked at it together, close up. It was a hand-held
wrecking bar forged from octagonal-section steel. It looked like
a high-quality tool. It looked brand new. It was painted gloss
black with the kind of paint people use on boats or cars. It was
shaped a little like an alto saxophone. The main shaft was about
three feet long, slightly S-shaped, and it had a shallow curve on
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one end and a full curve on the other, the shape of a capital
letter J. Both tips were flattened and notched into claws, ready
for levering nails out of planks of wood. Its design was stream
lined and evolved, and simple, and brutal.
‘Hardly used,’ Summer said.
‘Never used,’ I said. ‘Not for construction, anyway.’
I stood up.
‘We don’t need to print it,’ I said. ‘We can assume the guy was
wearing gloves when he swung it.’
Summer stood up next to me.
‘We don’t need to type the blood either,’ she said. ‘We can
assume it’s Carbone’s.’
I said nothing.
‘We could just leave it here,’ Summer said.
‘No,’ I said. %Ve can’t do that.’
I bent down and untied my right boot. Pulled the lace all the
way out and used a reef knot to tie the ends together. That gave
me a closed loop about fifteen inches in diameter. I draped it
over my right palm and dragged the free end across the dead
stubble until I snagged it under the crowbar’s tip. Then I closed
my fist and lifted the heavy steel weight carefully out of the
grass. I held it up, like a proud angler with a fish.
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
I limped around to the front passenger seat with the crowbar
swinging gently in midair and my boot half off. I sat close to
the transmission tunnel and steadied the crowbar against the
floor just enough to stop it touching my legs as the vehicle
moved.
‘Where toP’ Summer asked.
‘The mortuary,’ I said.
I was hoping the pathologist and his staff would be out eating
breakfast, but they weren’t. They were all in the building,
working. The pathologist himself caught us in the lobby. He
was on his way somewhere with a file in his hand. He looked
at us and then he looked at the trophy dangling from my
boot lace. Took him half of a second to understand what it was,
and the other half to realize it put us all in a very awkward
situation.
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‘We could come back later,’ I said. When you’re not here.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ll go to my office.’