by Deanna King
“When was the last time you saw either of your parents?”
“Let me think, that would have been I believe, let’s see, today is Monday, I saw them last on, I think it was Thursday of last week.”
“How often do you see them, every day, every other day?
“Not every day. They have, or rather had their lives and I had mine. You know I am independent of my parents.” He half-pouted not acting like a man who was grieving.
He noticed the dingy walls and a single picture hung crookedly; a picture of a Red Tailed Hawk.
“But you do live on their property in a converted pool house.” He turned back to see the boy.
“I’m not on a curfew or have to answer to them, I’m on my own.” He spat out the words, indignant that someone would think he was under his parents’ domain and rule at his age. He had begun to sweat although the room was relatively cool, and his body language became twitchy.
“Okay, so you lived your own life, rent free, no house expenses, bill free, huh?” Jack prodded into his personal life.
“Detective, what are you getting at? Just because I’ve had it better than most people my age doesn’t mean shit. I’m going to ask you again, what are you getting at?” He leaned back and through hooded eyelids looked at Jack.
“Trying to figure out why, if you lived on the premises, you never saw your folk.”
“I saw them, but not every single day. We tried to eat a meal together on the weekends but…” He stopped.
“You didn’t see them this weekend, why not?” If he admitted to seeing them, he knew they were dead.
“I went…I was not home, and I needed to get away, is that a crime?” he ground out.
Jack ignored his question.
“When did you leave and where did you go?”
“You’re asking for my alibi? My parents are dead, you waltz in here and spring that on me, then what, you begin giving me the third degree. Am I a suspect or what?” His face got red and the last few words hissed out of his mouth.
“No, not at this time,” Jack explained, “but we have to investigate, Sean, this is what we do, we ask questions, hard ones, intrusive ones, but we do it, we ask questions. We’re going to stop for now, Sean, call your sister, and in a couple of days we’ll be contacting you again.”
I’m sorry, this is j-j-just too much to take all at once. I hafta go call Shayla and I…need to go.” His voice was back to normal.
“We can show ourselves out. Here’s my card, call me if you think of anything you can recall that might help us, and Sean, just like the crime shows say, ‘don’t leave town.’ ” Jack stuck his hand out and Sean reciprocated.
“Again, we are very sorry for your loss, Sean.”
Sean mumbled his thanks, preoccupied with his own thoughts. Jack doubted the boy was thinking about his dead parents.
“Okay, Jack,” he said once they were out of earshot and at the truck. “What gives, now I’m your stenographer?”
“Teach you a lesson about dealing with people, how was I to know the sexual orientation of this kid, or how you’d react?”
“You’re an ass, a Jack ass, West, do you know that?”
“This jackass knows that the boy is lying through his teeth. Get a search warrant for his office and the pool house. No one searched the pool house, did they?”
“No, the pool house wasn’t searched, and I admit, he didn’t act broken up about his parents. What’cha got up your sleeve, Tall Drink?”
Jack rolled his eyes. “Lucky, if don’t want a punch in your big honker,” Jack warned him.
“All right already, I’ll stop with the tall drink thingy. What did you get in there, a premonition, gut instinct, or what?”
“His office is a huge disaster. He needs a housekeeper like Mrs., uh, what was her name?”
“Beatrice Gonzales.”
“She’d have that place spotless. He must not have a cleaning crew unless he has Darla taking out the trash, cleaning the toilets, and doing the janitorial job. She’s an airhead, the kind that doesn’t break a fingernail, not even at her own desk. What I did see in the far corner behind where I was sitting was a pile of clothes, a blanket, and a pillow. He was lying, he slept at his office, and that, my friend, was his ‘getaway.’ He was hot to trot on calling about their wills and the life insurance policies. Plus, he never answered my question about where he went to get away. Check your notes, Miss Macgillicuddy.”
“Yeah, he never did answer that question, did he?”
“Lucky, drive around the corner, park by the pharmacy, we’re going to see if he takes any trash to the dumpster.”
“What are you talking about, Jack?”
“If he tosses anything into the dumpster, we’re going to confiscate it. He dumps it, it’s free pickings.”
“You think he’s tossing incriminating trash?”
“It ain’t gonna hurt us to check. If there’s nothing, there’s nothing, but if there’s something, there’s something.”
“You’re a loon, Jack, a real loon.”
In the parking lot, on the corner across the street, they watched the building. Sean Stegwig came around from the back carrying three overlarge trash bags not more than twenty minutes later. He tossed them into the dumpster next to the building, headed toward his motorcycle, and they watched him leave.
“Going for a dumpster run, put some latex gloves on. We’ll catch the captain up and then we’ll be digging in this trash.”
. . .
Back at the station, Jack got the captain up to speed on the case while Lucky started the warrant paperwork.
“What you thinking, that the son did them?” Captain Yao leaned back in his chair.
“Not sure, but he’s lying about not knowing something. I think he found them and he took the gun, but why he didn’t call it in, that has me doing a head scratch.”
“Your gut is telling you something?”
“My gut tells me a lot, Davis, like when to eat. However you want to spin it though, my gut, or my intuition, tells me something’s not right.”
“Listen, I know the Stegwig name, Jack. Marta Stegwig is, rather was, loaded, don’t know how much her net worth was, she kept a low profile, but word on the street was she had it to burn. From what you’re telling me, I doubt it was a robbery gone sideways, revenge, jealousy, and greed, all reasons people commit murder.”
“Yeah, I know all too well, Davis.”
“Keep me posted on your progress, Jack.”
“Will do, Cap.”
. . .
Back at his desk, Jack picked up his messages.
The first one was from a woman named Daphne Walden. The message said to please call her, something about a person named Celeste Mason. His brows shot up, a call about the cold case—that was unexpected. The new case took priority; the cold case was on hold. He stuck the message in his pocket. He would call her back in a few days, he hoped.
The second message was from a woman named Gretchen. “Fetching Gretchen,” as Jack called her. She bartended at the Lone Star Saloon located on the corner of St. Joseph and Travis Street. He liked going there for a beer when he closed an investigation. He felt comfortable there sitting on the end corner of the bar nursing a beer and people-watching. The first night he had stepped foot in the bar was when the Griffin murder investigation was closed. It had been grueling and he needed to relax. After that, it became his regular place to sit and have a beer. He never went in as Detective West, he wanted to wear the regular drinking man’s shoes, drink, and ponder life.
He was not there to meet a girl or for a hookup until Gre
tchen came to work there. She made him smile. He did not go there just to unwind any longer, now he went hoping to see her. He had let it slip that he was a cop one night, and she was easy to talk to; and as the saying goes, your bartender is your therapist, just like your barber. He opened up to her about the case of the murdered fifteen-year-old. Gretchen gave him her full attention that night. He had given her his card and told her to call him anytime. The message simply said, Jack, when you can stop by the Lone Star, I’ll buy you a beer, haven’t seen you in a while, Gretchen. He slipped that message into his wallet. He did not have time for her right now, but damn, he needed to make the time. He bet she would be worth it. He promised himself he would call her no matter what case he was knee-deep into working, or should call her before he cracked the case; women did not wait forever. The cold case, of course he wanted to get back on it, but he needed a life.
Jack snapped out of his “I need to get a life” and thoughts of Gretchen when his phone rang. He glanced at the blinking numbers in the corner of his monitor. It was almost 7:40; who was working this late?
“Jack West, Homicide.” It was the M.E.
“Hey, Ben-Gay, got a report, some good news for me?”
“You think it’s too late to swing by the morgue? I’ve got some interesting stuff I wanna show you.” His voice had a certain giddy lilt.
“If you’ve got something interesting to show us, it’s never too late. Be there in twenty, you’re still going to be there?”
“If I ask you to come by, Jack, that means I’ll be here, you dumbass. Use the rear entrance, the place is dead right now.” He chuckled at his own joke. Jack hung up thinking Bennie was a hair wacky.
“Lucky, you got the warrant written up yet?” Jack walked around the desk, hovering over Luck’s shoulder.
“Yep, all that’s missing is a signature.”
“Come on, we’ve been summoned by Bennie to go to the morgue, he has something for us, and he sounds giddy. When we’re done there we’ll come back and go through the trash that we fished out of Stegwig’s dumpster.”
“Well, yippee, Jack, I can hardly contain my happiness.”
“Quit being a sad sack, and before we leave let’s fax the warrants over to the criminal courts building. On the cover page, tell ‘em we’ll pick them up first thing in the morning.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m gonna call the wife on the way, tell her I’ll be getting home even later.” It had been a damn long day and he for one was ready to quit and start over in the morning.
“Let’s go see what Bennie has.” Jack was excited anytime Bennie wanted to show them something—it meant something was gonna happen.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Lord, Jack, when the morgue is closed and this quiet it always creeps me out.” Lucky scanned his ID card over the laser eye to the rear door to gain access.
“Not a place I’d want to be alone in at night either.”
They’d both seen enough dead bodies at crime scenes and in the morgue, but it was like being alone in a funeral home with dead bodies and the eerie sense you got like you weren’t alone, and someone was watching you from beyond.
Bennie stood in the autopsy room with a ham and cheese sandwich in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other. On the stainless steel table beside him lay the corpse of Marcus Stegwig, his upper body now sewn up in the obligatory Y, and exposed for all to see, a white sheet covering his lower half. Jack knew that Mrs. Stegwig lay chilling in the cadaver lockers at the back of the room.
“You guys want to split a sandwich? I have another ham and cheese on rye in the fridge…” He chomped again taking another bite, following it up with a sip of his Coke.
The look on Dawson’s face made Jack laugh. “Man, you know he doesn’t keep his lunch in the cadaver freezer, he keeps them in the fridge next to it.”
“I’ll have to pass, Bennie, I don’t like the dinner company altogether.” Dawson glanced at Marcus Stegwig on the autopsy table.
Food and cadavers, Lucky still had a weak stomach, but he was better than he used to be, at least now he no longer turned green and headed for the nearest toilet.
“Naw, Ben, we’ll grab a bite on our way out, there’s a James Coney Island on our way back to the station and I have been craving a chili cheese coney, but thanks all the same. What’cha got for us?”
Bennie walked over to the LED X-ray view box and motioned for them to follow, his mouth full of ham and cheese. “Com’ere,” he mumbled.
Flipping on the light, an X-ray of a skull with a hole in the right temple emerged.
“Picture of our boy here on the table’s skull?” Jack leaned in toward the X-ray.
“Yep, sure is. See this,”—he pointed out—“what do you imagine that is?” He stood back grinning.
“A bullet, well, I’ll be Jack Sprat.”
“No, you’d be Jack West, and that would be bullet number two.”
“Didn’t Lord and Taylor take a bullet out of the wall? I thought they only found the one shell casing by the body.”
Dawson took his turn looking at the X-ray and then turned his head to the dead body that lay on the steel table. “He was shot twice, is that it?”
“So it would seem, Lucky, so it would seem. The bullet,” Bennie began, “or the first one I should say, went in then exited out. CSU found it lodged into the second layer of the wood in the doorjamb. The second time, whoever shot the gun held it at a different angle on top of the same entry point. The bullet went in, but it lodged in his skull, which means no second exit wound. Up close and personal, the first bullet was a through and through. The vic’s brain mass was damaged from the first shot. A .22 caliber does most of the damage by bouncing around, that’s why they’re lethal. The second bullet bounced off already messed-up brain matter, and it lodged in the parietal bone. I would venture to say it tumbled around then hitting the bone it stopped bouncing. The shooter left two things—one shell casing and the second bullet in the skull, but no second shell casing. I’m betting that the shooter searched for the second bullet, not knowing it had lodged in a wall. When he couldn’t find it, he got frustrated so he quit looking. If the shooter had any idea it was in the head, I highly doubt he was going to dig in the dead man’s skull to retrieve it.”
“At this point, we can clearly rule out a murder/suicide, right, partner?”
“You know, the Mr. could’ve been the wife’s doer, then someone else came in and he got it. That doesn’t even sound plausible now that I’ve said it aloud. The mister got it twice. I just don’t see it. Did he shoot himself first and then someone came in and shot him again? What had the second shot been for, good measure?”
The three of them stood staring at the X-ray then Jack continued his thoughts aloud.
“Could someone have walked in, saw that the husband killed the wife, got mad, then shot him and made it look like a suicide? On the other hand, did the mister get off a first shot and it was not enough to do the job, and he was able to pull off the second shot, and then what, he got up and disposed of the gun? That’s all pretty inconceivable.”
“No, the first shot was clearly the kill shot, it hit the gray matter. He may have not died instantly, but he wasn’t going anywhere, and he wasn’t capable of taking a second shot. The first bullet’s trajectory hit the parietal lobe taking out his eye-hand coordination, he wouldn’t have been able to take the gun in his hand and reshoot, he had no coordination to do that, and it nicked his motor sensory. But there’s more…” Bennie told them.
They waited as he took the last bite of his sandwich, smacking his lips. “Ah. That hit the spot until I get home. Come here, let me show you.” Bennie walked over to another long countertop where microscopes, glass slides, Petri dishes, an
d glass tubes set in nice neat rows in holders with a plethora of chemicals.
“In my examination of the clothing for any trace evidence, I found three hairs on the man’s slacks. They appeared to be the same color as the victims’. I took a hair sample from our boy over there and then got a hair from the misses, and it wasn’t her hair nor was it his. I’m thinking it was our suspect’s, but I have nothing to match it to.”
“The housekeeper has medium to dark brown hair, it could have been transferred somehow, hypothetically, that is.” Lucky scratched his head.
“Could be,” the M.E. said, as he finished off his soda and tossed the can in the wastebasket. “Get a sample and I can check.”
“The son has medium to dark brown hair too.” Jack’s heart kicked up a notch. He was itching to get to the trash bags. “What about her?” Jack thumbed toward the cadaver lockers. “Whatdaya get on her?”
“She was hit in the throat, would have bled out, but there was so much blood in her lungs that she aspirated in a matter of seconds. Other than that, she was in excellent health for a woman of her age. She did have bruises in other areas, old and new bruising like her old man may have smacked her around. When I opened her up the ribs on the right side were broken and splintered. Someone kicked her damn hard, but she didn’t feel a thing, she was kicked postmortem. Whoever killed her had pent-up rage.”
“That would account for the blood smear, it had to be the killer’s shoe. At least she didn’t feel the kick to the ribs if she was already dead.” It disgusted Lucky that the killer had already killed and then inflicted more violence on the victim.
“I guess I’ll never understand it. To be murdered is an awful thing. Then someone kicks your lifeless body viciously, that’s just monstrous. That’s pure hatred of the worst kind. You guys know I understand the medical aspects, but the psychological issues will always be a mystery to me.” Bennie never wanted to be in the head or mind of a psychopathic killer. Everyone knew that was a scary place to be.
