The Art of Detection

by Laurie R. King

  ‘Corporal, double-time it over to the stables and have a horse saddled by the time I get there.’

  ‘I say, Major,’ I began.

  ‘And another horse for this gentleman here. You do ride?’ he demanded of me.

  Not by preference in a city suit and shoes, but if the alternative was to be left behind, then ride in a city suit and shoes I would.

  Before long I could see why the major had called for four-legged transport over that with four wheels. The road was well enough maintained, but when we turned off it for the cliffs that first climb, then precipitously drop down to the sea, we should have had to proceed on foot. As it was, the way the horses picked their cautious path downhill, it might well have been more comfortable to have walked. Certainly it would have been faster. However, a major requires the dignity of transport, even if it be just for a mile, so transport we had. Morris led the way, his voice reaching me in uneven phrases, snatched away by the perpetual wind from the sea. ‘…not maintained…new long-range guns…mine-fields…bird-watchers…’

  Eventually, we reached the gun emplacement, a low, grey, weed-choked concrete structure rooted in the cliffs like the nest of some enormous sea-faring bird. Unlike the other batteries we had passed, this one was, as the major had been trying to tell me, not well maintained. One of the cliffs had slumped across the narrow roadway, and the horses were not happy about picking their way across. We reached the gun and dismounted, tying our reins onto an iron ring clearly set there for the purpose, and walked past the circular clearing where once the gun had thundered. To the south had been built a set of rooms for the storage of powder and such, although as the gun was inactive, and looked to remain that way, the wide doorway was not supplied with so much as a padlock. The major wrestled with the rust-clotted handle, then laid his shoulder against the door. The hinges gave way with a groan that appeared to embarrass him, as evidence of neglect.

  Neither of us said anything, however, and in a moment the thought of rusted metal had fled from our minds. For inside the first room, slumped in a heap against the northernmost wall, we found the body of Lieutenant Jack Raynor.

  INSPECTOR Kate Martinelli, reading this section of typescript in a busy office crowded with ringing telephones and well-used computers, sitting beneath fluorescent lights and holding a half-forgotten focaccia, turkey, and provolone sandwich in one hand, exclaimed aloud. The two other detectives in the room at the time looked up at her, and one of them asked her a question. She looked up at him blankly, more aware of a hillside eight decades earlier than the room she was in, then lowered her eyes again to the story.

  …the body of Lieutenant Jack Raynor.

  The moment I saw the figure, I was aware of a considerable feeling of satisfaction. Not, I hasten to say, that the man was dead, but rather that Major Morris and I had come here alone. It was rare to be given the opportunity to examine a body before the police arrived with their clumsy ways. I held out no hope that the Army methods would prove any more gentle.

  ‘You must go back and summon assistance,’ I told him, wincing at the way his great boots scuffed the floor around Raynor’s head.

  ‘I can’t leave you alone here,’ he declared.

  ‘But the poor fellow, he’ll be eaten by the foxes,’ I protested, with more sentiment than accuracy. ‘I can’t very well go for help, your men wouldn’t obey my orders--indeed, they’d probably clap me in the brig for trespassing. I’ll just remain here and chase away the vermin. You won’t be long.’

  The man gave a brief and disapproving look at the remains of his lieutenant, mounted up, and rode off. I took up a position just outside the entrance of the emplacement and lit a cigarette, sketching a brisk salute as Morris turned to look back at the top of the rise. And the moment his hat had vanished behind the hill, I tossed the half-smoked cigarette over my shoulder and stepped inside.

  The room had clearly gone unused for some months, if not years, which vastly simplified my examination of the floor. From the door, I shone my pocket-torch at an oblique angle, comparing what I saw there with the soles of the shoes worn by the dead man. I could see no sign that Raynor had walked over the accumulated dirt; instead, he had been bodily carried inside by a size- nine boot with a heavily worn right toe, then dropped. I then continued inside to look at the body itself.

  Raynor lay on his left side, and had done so for some days, long enough for rigor to come and go, long enough to attract the interest of flies and a few small teeth. He had been described as handsome, but no one would say that now. He possessed the requisite facial structures of nose and lips; his teeth had been good and his hair light; that was about all that could be said of his appearance.

  Fortunately, he had come to this place fully dressed, and the thick wool of his uniform had preserved the rest of his skin against encroachment. I searched the pockets, finding a silver cigar-case in one pocket, containing two slim, brown cigarillos, and a matching silver wind-proof lighter. In another pocket lay his note-case. This held eighteen dollars in assorted denominations, a letter from his mother, and an assortment of scraps and receipts that seemed to have no immediate bearing on the case, although I made note of them, for future reference, before returning them to their respective places. The case also contained two items of interest to a limited number of people; those I transferred into my own pocket, for the sake of the young man’s reputation.

  I then loosed his clothes, primarily to confirm his identity, and found just above one hip the kite-shaped birth-mark described by Billy Birdsong. I looked over the rest of the man’s torso, then scrupulously restored the clothing to its previous arrangement.

  I examined the head wounds closely, then tipped Raynor onto his back. The dark stains along the left side of his body showed that he had been placed here while his blood was still liquid enough to pool with gravity. He had not, however, been killed here. I could see no blood on the walls, none but the stains directly under his head--indeed, when I turned on my heels to look back at the floor, there were not even any droplets between the body and the entrance. I became aware that I was softly humming one of the Bach cantatas, a sign that the case had just become interesting.

  The wounds to Raynor’s head had been done with a smooth, rounded piece of wood as big around as a girl’s wrist, which had left a few slim splinters embedded in the wreckage. The first injury described a line a fraction of an inch above the right ear, descending slightly towards the chin. The second injury, the fatal one, had come straight down into Raynor’s face, driving everything from brow to jaw back into the brain. A thorough autopsy could prove the sequence, based on the intersecting fracture lines of the skull, but I thought it unlikely that a trained soldier would placidly sit and watch a blow coming at his face. Nor would his assailant have reason then to hit the side of a dead man’s head.

  No: Raynor was sitting and calmly smoking an evening cigar--a glance into his mouth revealed the chunk of tobacco leaves bitten involuntarily by his front teeth--when someone behind and above had swung a vicious blow at his head. The lieutenant had collapsed to the ground. His assailant had then kicked him onto his back, leaving a sharp semicircle of discolouration on Raynor’s belly, before standing over his victim and delivering the coup de grâce, straight down onto the once-handsome face.

  Even with the rudimentary tools of pocket-torch and magnifying glass, I could see among the smashed flesh and bone a splinter of wood and some threads of white cotton. The latter, I decided, explained the lack of dripped blood: The murderer had wrapped Raynor’s head in a bath-towel as he transported his victim, so as not to leave a trail, or incriminating stains on his own person; the threads I saw now had remained behind on the drying blood when the cloth was ripped free.

  I sat back on my heels and considered the figure before me.

  The note in Raynor’s room indicated a meeting here at two in the morning. It was remotely possible, taking into account the perpetual breezes playing across this exposed spot, that he had failed to notice a man wit
h a bat sneaking up behind him. Still, I thought it more likely that Raynor had known his assailant, and trusted him enough to allow him to pass behind his back.

  Raynor’s scribbled note, the location of their meeting, clandestine or not, and his acquaintance with the man determined his identity: a fellow soldier.

  It shouldn’t be difficult to identify him, I knew, not with the evidence at hand and the limited pool of individuals. The main problem would be preserving the evidence, that he might be convicted.

  I was conducting a close but fruitless search of the emplacement’s forecourt when the sound of voices reached my ears. I met the Army half-way, Morris with four privates, one corporal, and a sergeant.

  ‘They’re sending a man over from the Presidio,’ Morris said without preamble, and sounding none too pleased at the interloper. ‘We’re to take the body back to Baker.’

  ‘Major, a word?’ I asked. He glanced at his men, and told the sergeant to allow them a smoke while we stepped aside for a little chat.

  ‘Sir,’ I began, ‘I have had occasion once or twice to work with the police, and have some little experience with their methods of gathering information on criminal cases. I would suggest, therefore, that before you have your men take up Lieutenant Raynor’s body, you make an effort to preserve those things that might lead to his murderer. It is, of course, possible that the man from the Presidio would do the same, but after all, Raynor wasn’t his man.’

  ‘I can hardly leave the poor fellow lying here until morning, and it’ll be dark by the time the investigator gets across.’

  I stifled the impulse to point out that another evening would make no difference to Raynor, and thought instead about the resentful edge to his voice. Morris cared nothing for ordering his soldiers to stand about--that, after all, is what soldiers do best. No, what the major resented was for his men to be forced to wait on an outside authority. And I was very willing to play on his territoriality to maintain personal control of the investigation, before it was taken forcibly from my hands.

  ‘Would you like me to begin one or two actions a professional investigator might take?’ I offered. ‘For example, there’s a foot-print that must have been left by the man who put Raynor here. It needs only some care not to be trod upon, and later a small pot of plaster-of-Paris. And if I might borrow one or two of your men, we could search for the place where Lieutenant Raynor was killed.’ Again, I took care to pronounce the man’s rank in the American fashion, lest the introduction of a leftenant remind Morris that I, too, was an outsider.

  The major readily agreed to this--although less, I believe, in any hope that I might solve his case before the outsider could, than to get me out of his hair while he took control of Raynor’s corpse. To him, the discipline of restoring a missing soldier to his post, even if he be an inanimate soldier, was foremost.

  At his command, the men resumed with their lamps and the canvas stretcher they had brought. I stood over the foot-print while they worked, to save it from their heavy boots, and when Morris mounted up, I reminded him that a small pot of plaster would be very helpful. He nodded and turned his ceremonial little procession in the direction of Fort Baker, leaving me with the corporal, a diminutive tow-head by the name of Larsen. My miniature platoon and I removed our hats in recognition of the sombre occasion, then got to work.

  ‘We have but a few hours of daylight left,’ I told Larsen. ‘We need to find where Lieutenant Raynor was killed.’

  ‘Wasn’t he killed here?’ he asked.

  ‘A blow like that would cause the blood to splash about, and there was no sign of that inside.’

  ‘So we’re looking for a lot of blood?’ he enquired, casting a dubious glance at the expanse of hillside.

  ‘Yes, although it rained briefly on Sunday night, so there may not be much visible. Let us instead search the ground for one of two things: a stick or bat, broken in pieces, or a half-smoked cigarillo. Brown, about the size of your little finger.’

  Three invisible items on some acres of hillside: dried blood, wooden stick, and brown cigar. With the sun already working its way down in the sky.

  We began our search in the vicinity of the emplacement, the most logical place to sit while waiting for a meeting to begin. We found nothing, and I directed my troop to begin a sweep in circles out from the gun.

  For myself, however, I find a systematic approach both unsympathetic and ineffective. Much better to step aside and allow the human sense known as intuition to take command. I settled on a grass-covered rock and took out my pipe.

  It is two o’clock in the morning, at 37 1/2 degrees north, with a moon that is five nights past full riding in what until Sunday evening would be a clear night sky: enough light that, were I a young man well familiar with the terrain, I would not require a lamp to make out my path. I am a young artillery officer, fully dressed, anticipating a difficult interview--were the conversation to be simple, it could have been held in closer proximity to the base. This was most probably the wee hours of Saturday morning, since Raynor left Birdsong early, expecting to see the singer on Saturday night--‘See you tomorrow,’ he’d said at dawn Friday. It is two o’clock in the morning, I am a young man with concerns on my mind, a young man who has also been looking at wedding rings, and I sit to smoke one of the slim cigars from my case. The sky is clear--and the moon…

  I rose and looked around the daylight hillside, then strode downhill nearly to the cliff face. The waves below crashed and churned, the great Pacific stretched out endlessly, and the number of available protruding boulders grew.

  But I would want to watch for the approach of the person I was meeting. I would sit where I could keep the emplacement in view.

  I followed the ridge south, scarcely conscious of the precipitous drop to my right, and suddenly there it was, a three-inch-long scrap of brown marginally darker than the red-brown colour of the soil. I bent down and teased it out of the grasses. One end showed the uneven remains of a cigar allowed to burn itself out, but the other, despite the intervening rain, still appeared sharply broken off: cut, by Raynor’s teeth when the crashing blow came to the side of his head.

  I tucked the cigarillo remnant into an envelope and in my pocket, pulled out my glass, and dropped to my knees for a close examination of the vicinity.

  Ten minutes later I spoke.

  ‘That is close enough. You risk treading on the marks.’

  ‘I saw that you’d found something,’ my corporal said, somewhat unnecessarily. ‘I wondered if you wanted my help over here instead.’

  ‘You found nothing?’

  ‘A wad of chewing gum, a dead sea-gull, a sheet of week-old newspaper caught on some branches. No blood.’

  ‘The blood and the cigar are here. And two tiny slivers of wood, although the remains of the bat appear to have been carried off. Or perhaps thrown. But the pattern of the blood, although diminished by the rain, presents a clear picture. I don’t know if you have noticed, but when a viscous liquid such as blood falls, its manner of striking the ground testifies to the direction of its fall.’ The young soldier murmured some response, but I paid him no heed. I do find it useful to have a pair of ears in the vicinity--when no audience is to hand, I will even talk to myself to aid the process of thought. The best assistant is the one who contributes nothing, acting as pure sounding-board to reflect my thoughts. My audience here was, at least, experienced in volunteering nothing.

  ‘Blood dripping straight down produces a circular shape, ragged at the edges but essentially round,’ I continued. ‘Blood thrown up from a wound that then hits a vertical surface tends to slump, leaving a tear-drop shape that can be traced back to its source. Similarly, when shed from a moving man, it leaves its tail in the direction from which the man is moving. I am writing a monograph on the subject, for the use of crime investigators. I call it “The Science of Blood Splash Analysis.” Now, young man, what do you make of this? You may come this way, there’s nothing to be damaged along the path.’

  I was
not actually interested in what he made of the mark on the ground, although what he had to say would tell me what kind of man I had been given to assist me. The corporal picked his way across the ground, following the faint path left by generations of deer, and looked at the soil where I pointed.

  ‘That from a boot?’ he offered.

  I looked up in surprise. Not only had he seen the gentle depression cut into the turf, he had recognised it.

  ‘Very good,’ I told him. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘The lieutenant was sitting on that rock, wasn’t he?’

  For this, I wanted to look my assistant in the eye or, in any event, from a standing position. I braced myself to rise, and the polite lad took my elbow to help me.

  An unremarkable face, with pale brown eyes and corn-silk hair, crooked teeth, the upper-body musculature that comes with physical labour from childhood, and the exaggerated muscles of hand and wrist that indicate far too many hours bent over a cow’s udders: dairy farmer’s younger son, escaped into the Army, I diagnosed. His was a face of boyish innocence, which on closer examination hinted of a vein of well-concealed humour. That combination can only mean intelligence.

  ‘How do you know that’s where he was sitting?’ I asked Larsen.

  ‘The marks on the stone. The moss is all mussed along the top, and there’s a scratch where a metal grommet scraped it.’

  ‘Lichen, not moss,’ I corrected absently. He grinned suddenly, so that he looked about eleven years old.

  ‘Me and my pappy did a lot of hunting. They sometimes use me as a tracker here, when one of the horses wanders off or something.’

  I sent a vote of thanks in the direction of Major Morris, and said, ‘A veritable Natty Bumppo. What see you here, young man?’

  ‘I’m not that good, and there’s probably not all that much to see, what with the ground being a little on the dry side beforehand and then the rain afterwards. One man was sitting here smoking, another man came up behind him and knocked him off the rock. Looks like one or both of ’em sort of rolled around the ground a little, and although I don’t know about blood splash patterns and all, you can sure see the blood right there.’