‘He sure could know about it if he wanted to.’
‘If he recognized you he might have been harassing you,’ I said as we followed a brick sidewalk. That might be all there was to it.’
‘I got no idea.’
‘Or it simply could have been your racist bumper sticker. A coincidence. What else do we know about him?’
‘Divorced, kids grown.’
A Richmond officer neat and trim in dark blue opened the front door and we stepped into a hardwood foyer.
‘Is Neils Vander here?’ I asked.
‘Not yet. ID’s upstairs,’ the officer said, referring to the police department’s Identification Unit, which was responsible for collecting evidence.
‘I want the alternate light source,’ I explained.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Marino spoke gruffly, for he had worked homicide far too many years to be patient with other people’s standards. ‘We need more backups than this. When the press catches wind, all hell’s gonna break loose. I want more cars out front and I want a wider perimeter secured. The tape’s got to be moved back to the foot of the driveway. I don’t want anybody walking or driving on the driveway. And tape’s got to go around the backyard. This whole friggin’ property’s got to be treated like a crime scene.’
‘Yes, sir, Captain.’ He snapped up his radio.
The police had been working out here for hours. It had not taken them long to determine that Lamont Brown was shot in bed in the master suite upstairs. I followed Marino up a narrow staircase covered with a machine-made Chinese rug, and voices drew us down a hallway. Two detectives were inside a bedroom paneled in dark-stained knotty pine, the window treatments and bedding reminiscent of a brothel. The sheriff was fond of maroon and gold, tassels and velvet, and mirrors on the ceiling.
Marino did not voice an opinion as he looked around. His judgment of this man had been made before now. I stepped closer to the king-size bed.
‘Has this been rearranged in any way?’ I asked one of the detectives as Marino and I put on gloves.
‘Not really. We’ve photographed everything and looked under the covers. But what you see is pretty much how we found it.’
‘Were the doors locked when you got here?’ Marino asked.
‘Yeah. We had to break the glass out of the one in back.’
‘So there was no sign of forced entry whatsoever.’
‘Nothing. We found traces of coke downstairs on a mirror in the living room. But that could have been there for a while.’
‘What else have you found?’
‘A white silk handkerchief with some blood on it,’ said the detective, who was dressed in tweed, and chewing gum. ‘It was right there on the floor, about three feet from the bed. And looks like the shoelace used to tie the trash bag around Brown’s head came from a running shoe there in the closet.’ He paused. ‘I heard about Jakes.’
‘It’s real bad.’ Marino was distracted.
‘He wasn’t alive when . . .’
‘Nope. His chest was crushed.’
The detective stopped chewing.
‘Did you recover a weapon?’ I asked as I scanned the bed.
‘No. We’re definitely not dealing with a suicide.’
‘Yeah,’ said the other detective. ‘It’d be a little hard to commit suicide and then drive yourself to the morgue.’
The pillow was soaked with reddish-brown blood that had clotted and separated from serum at the margins. Blood dripped down the side of the mattress, but I saw none on the floor. I thought of the gunshot wound to Brown’s forehead. It was a quarter of an inch with a burned, lacerated and abraded margin. I had found smoke and soot in the wound and burned and unburned powder in the underlying tissue, bone and dura. The gunshot wound was contact, and the body had no other injuries that might indicate a defensive gesture or struggle.
‘I believe he was lying on his back in bed when he was shot,’ I said to Marino. ‘In fact, it’s almost as if he were asleep.’
He came closer to the bed. ‘Well, it’d be kind of hard to stick a gun between the eyes of somebody awake and not have them react.’