‘There’s no evidence he reacted at all. The wound is perfectly centered. The pistol was placed snugly against his skin and it doesn’t seem he moved.’
‘Maybe he was passed out,’ Marino said.
‘His blood alcohol was .16. He could have been passed out but not necessarily. We need to go over the room with the Luma-Lite to see if we find blood we might be missing,’ I said.
‘But it would appear he was moved from the bed directly into the body pouch.’ I showed Marino the drips on the side of the mattress. ‘If he had been carried very far, there would be more blood throughout the house.’
‘Right.’
We walked around the bedroom, looking. Marino began opening drawers that had already been gone through. Sheriff Brown had a taste for pornography. He especially liked women in degrading situations involving bondage and violence. In a study down the hall we found two racks filled with shotguns, rifles and several assault weapons.
A cabinet underneath had been pried open, and it was difficult to determine how many handguns or boxes of ammunition were missing since we did not know what had been there originally. Remaining were nine-millimeters, ten-millimeters, and several .44 and .357 Magnums. Sheriff Brown owned a variety of holsters, extra magazines, handcuffs, and a Kevlar vest.
‘He was into this big time,’ Marino said. ‘He’s got to have had heavy connections in DC, New York, maybe Miami.’
‘Maybe there were drugs in those cabinets,’ I said. ‘Maybe the guns weren’t what Gault was after.’
‘I’m thinking they,’ Marino said as feet sounded on the stairs. ‘Unless you think Gault could have handled that body pouch all by himself. What did Brown weigh?’
‘Almost two hundred pounds,’ I replied as Neils Vander rounded the corner, holding the Luma-Lite by its handle. An assistant followed with cameras and other equipment.
Vander wore an oversize lab coat and white cotton gloves that looked ridiculously incongruous with his wool trousers and snow boots. He had a way of looking at me as if we had never met. He was the mad scientist, as bald as a lightbulb, always in a rush and always right. I was terribly fond of him.
‘Where do you want me to set up this thing?’ he asked nobody in particular.
‘The bedroom,’ I said. ‘Then the study.’
We returned to the sheriff’s bedroom to watch Vander shine his magic wand around. Lights out and glasses on, and blood dully lit up, but nothing else important did until several minutes later. The Luma-Lite was set to its widest beam and looked like a flashlight shining through deep water as it worked its way around the room. A spot on a wall, high above a chest of drawers, luminesced like a small, irregular moon. Vander got close and looked.
‘Someone get the lights, please,’ he said.
Lights went on and we took our tinted glasses off. Vander was standing on his tiptoes, staring at a knothole.
‘What the hell is it?’ Marino asked.
‘This is very interesting,’ said Vander, who rarely got excited about anything. ‘There’s something on the other side.’
‘The other side of what?’ Marino moved next to him and stared up, frowning. ‘I don’t see anything.’
‘Oh yes. There’s something,’ Vander said. ‘And somebody touched this area of paneling while they had some type of residue on their hands.’
‘Drugs?’ I inquired.
‘It certainly could be drugs.’
All of us stared at the paneling, which looked quite normal when the Luma-Lite wasn’t shining on it. But when I pulled a chair closer, I could see what Vander was talking about. The tiny hole in the center of the knothole was perfectly round. It had been drilled. On the other side of the wall was the sheriff’s study, and we had just searched it.
‘That’s weird,’ Marino said as he and I went back out the bedroom door.
Vander, oblivious to adventure, resumed what he was doing while Marino and I walked inside the study and went straight to the wall where the knothole should be. It was covered by an entertainment center that we had gone through once. Marino opened the doors again and slid out the television. He pulled books off shelves overhead, not seeing anything.