by Mark Hazard
“Gentlemen. How can I help you?”
“I’m Inspector Corus, and this is Lieutenant Chu. We’re with the Sheriff’s office.”
Chu undid his coat and showed the manager the credential hanging from a lanyard around his neck. Not a Sheriff’s department lanyard, but some cartoon Chu was obsessed with called “Naruto.” Corus groaned inwardly every time he saw it.
The manager nodded. “I remember. Would you like to speak in private?”
“Take us to the room,” Corus said.
“To which room are you referring, sir?”
“Conference room C,” Corus said, narrowing his eyes to reinforce the sarcasm. “Which room do you think?”
“Please, can we not discuss this in the lobby?” The manager waved them to follow him. He took a wad of keys out of his pocket and fidgeted with them as they walked down the main passageway toward the guest suites.
“Are you the general manager?” Chu asked. “Sorry. I forget. It’s been a while.”
“I am not, but I’m second in command. The GM isn’t here today.”
“And your name…”
“Calvin Barnett.”
“Right. Barnett,” Chu said. “Refresh my memory. Were you here the night of the mur—of the incident?”
“I was not. I was already home, but I was here the next morning when they were found.”
Corus wondered if speaking to the police was making the man nervous, or if he was just struggling for breath as they walked.
Calvin passed by a dozen rooms, took a right down another hall and stopped at an unmarked door. Instead of using a key card to open the door like the rest of the guest suites, Calvin unlocked it with one of his many metal keys. He swung the door open and held his hand up invitation.
Corus stepped in behind Chu. What he found shocked him, but it shouldn’t have. The crime scene photos in the file had been like many others: a snapshot of a room as lived in at the very moment of the crime, overlain with gore and tragedy. What greeted his eyes now, however, were bare walls and cement floors. Not a single item remained.
“Once you gave us the all clear to gut the room, we did. We tried to use it as supply storage, but most of the maids and other staff refuse to go in. So here it sits.”
Chu removed a folder from his bag and tried to orient himself.
The foyer entrance once held a kitchenette and a wet bar separating it from the small den. To the right of the entrance had been the bathroom, now demolished and disappeared. Past the bathroom on the right, had been the two king sized beds, past the bar counter on the left, was a sunken den.
Corus remembered it all of course. Some things you don’t forget. As Chu walked the scene off, Corus gave small corrections. Their pacing slowly illuminated the grey, dark room and the scene unfolded just as it had the first moment Corus took it in.
The father, Miles Griffin, was slumped back over the arm of the couch in the sunken den, head on the seat cushion and his pelvis jutting upward. The mother, Carrie Griffin, had fallen prone at his feet. Their teenaged children, David and Joseph, lay sprawled near the beds. Seventeen-year-old David was on his side at the foot of the far bed. What was left of his skull rested on his right shoulder. The bullet that killed him spattered his brains all over the ceiling and panoramic windows, through which the bullet also travelled. His fifteen-year-old brother, Joseph fell between the two beds on his stomach, one arm pinned beneath him.
“We can take it from here,” Corus said.
Calvin seemed clearly uncomfortable in this room, and there was no reason to make him stay. “We’ll come ask for you if we need anything more.”
Calvin moved to the door. He paused and turned back. “If I may…”
Corus twisted around without moving his feet or taking his hands from behind his back.
“…is there any hope of finding who did this? It’s been so long.”
Corus looked at Chu, who had picked his head up from the file.
Chu nodded confidently. “We’ll do our best. We haven’t given up.”
After Calvin had gone, Chu continued walking off the crime scene. “The father had two in his torso and one in his head.”
“The head shot came after the first two, from a downward angle.” Corus swept a foot over a divot in the concrete. “Thorough.”
“Same with the wife. The shots were more erratic though. One in her stomach then—”
“One in the head,” Corus said, kicking at the second divot five feet from the first. “There was one in the wall as well,” Corus said, stepping to the faintly visible patch mark on the far end of the room, “right about here. A miss.”
“It went through. They dug it out of the next room.”
“Right.”
“The boy, David, was only shot once in the head. Ballistics report indicated the bullet travelled from front to back because it exited the window behind him. The younger one was hit twice in the torso. One round went through the left arm first. Then when he was down on the floor—”
“One in the head.” Corus pointed to the third divot across the room.
“This was the worst one I ever saw.” Chu shook his head. “Kids man. Kids.”
Corus stepped up out of the den and walked to the entrance from where he surveyed the room. He projected the scene in his mind, assuming the point of view of the shooter who had come through the door somehow. He fired two imaginary shots at the father as he jumped up to face him. The father went down. He fired twice more as the mother came wheeling around in front of the couch, where moments before they’d both been seated. One of the shots missed, probably because she was moving. The other hit and dropped her. The older boy had gotten up now. One shot to the head painted the wall with gore. The younger boy hadn’t even gotten off the bed. The shooter put two into him. Corus looked around. The woman wasn’t dead yet. She’d be about to make noise now, crawling toward her boys and moaning from the pain of being gut shot. Corus had taken two steps from the entrance while miming the events. He took five more, shot the mother in the head, and looked right to see that the youngest was unconscious. Corus stepped over the mother and shot the father in the forehead from behind the couch. He moved up out of the sunken den and stood beside the youngest boy and fired his last shot.
Corus looked up at Chu who had been watching his movements. “Okay. Makes sense,” Chu said. “Happened quick. You think there was only one shooter?”
“The FBI thought there were two, but they obviously don’t feel too certain or interested about anything in this case, ‘cause they kicked it back to us.”
“What do you think?” Chu asked.
“Well, no one heard anything much.” Corus drew a hand down over his jaw. “Some sort of silencer or suppressor had to have been used. If someone had heard better, that could have told us more about how many shooters there were. Only one room a couple doors down reported hearing anything out of the ordinary upon questioning, and that they described as only snaps.”
“The FBI based the two shooter idea more on the parking lot surveillance video than ballistics,” Chu said.
“That may be all we have to go on. Two shooters side by side would be very hard to tell apart with the evidence we have. The angles could be quite similar. And only one kind of cartridge was found, 5.56 mm. But surveillance wasn’t conclusive, right?”
Chu shook his head. “All we had was lobby cam footage that appears to show two figures walking from the area near the exit at the end of this hall through the parking lot. There are no cameras in the guestroom corridors or the outside.
“No car right?”
“Not that the lobby camera saw. It’s pointed at the front doors and it caught two figures in the lot. It only got that because there are so many big windows in the front.”
“They could have been parked at the back of the lot closer to the road.”
“Sure,” Chu admitted.
“They weren’t holding guns.”
“Not that you can see. Just wearing jackets.
5.56 is a rifle round.”
“Did surveillance catch anyone suspicious coming in the building?” Corus asked.
“No. We had people looking at tapes from the twenty-four hours before the shooting. No exact matches were found, either because the image we had sucked, or because the figures seen leaving never came in the front doors.”
“Do you think they snuck in?”
Chu shrugged. “Who’s to say they needed to? They might have been guests or friends of guests that just came in another door. Could have been totally harmless folks by the look of them.”
“I thought we interviewed all the guests.”
“Yeah…all the ones that were still checked in.” Chu said.
“Jesus.” Corus whipped a small field book out of his side pocket. He pawed around for a pen. Chu threw him his. Corus snatched it out of the air and wrote, Who recently checked out?
“Pathetic,” Corus said under his breath. “Really pathetic.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. That was a crazy couple days. We were stretched thin. You didn’t have the manpower you needed. Besides, they might not have formally checked out. Might have just left the key cards in the room.”
“Goddam it. I was blind. It may be nothing, but to not see who had just checked out…” Corus shook his head at himself.
“Well now the dust has settled, and maybe it will all be clearer,” Chu said. He stepped closer to Corus.
“Ten months too late.”
“Who says it’s too late? It might be the perfect time.”
“Okay, Sunshine, so what else did we miss?”
“We never found the weapon,” Chu said. “Or weapons.” He closed the folder and rubbed his sore elbow with his free hand. “Could have been stashed or run off with.”
“Yeah, but we tore this place apart.”
“Who was we?” Chu asked.
“You, me, Pineda, Prangnathong, five other deputies.”
“Yeah for the first few hours. How many did you have the next day?”
“You were stuck in the office as usual. I was here. I had Deputy Wales, Curran and Rosen scouring possible hiding spots. Pineda begged off to go testify at a prostitution hearing. Prangnathong was here. Detective Strauss came over from Second too.”
“And the employees?”
“Yeah we put a couple of the managers to work, helping us keep the scene and this entire wing untouched as much as possible. Move the guests to other hotels or the other wing.”
“What are the chances it was a guest?”
“Who knows. 50/50? If it was, they could have hidden the weapon in their belongings. I got nothing here, L-T. I can think of a hundred ways this could have been done. I can’t see why and I can’t see how to pin it to anyone.”
A female voice called from the door. “Aye Dios mio!”
A Hispanic woman in a maid’s uniform stood in the doorway clutching at her breast. “I thought I hear voices,” she said. “You scare me.”
“Sorry,” Chu said.
The woman stood there continuing to eye them.
“Can we help you, ma’am?” Chu asked.
“They never catch them?”
“No ma’am. Not yet.”
“You have to catch them.” The woman pointed a finger and rattled away in Spanish. Too fast for Chu or Corus to grasp her meaning. Something about spirits.
“You hear me? Espirits. They here. They don’t go away.”
Corus gave Chu a sideways glance.
Chu piped up. “What do the spirits say?”
Corus gave him an elbow.
“I no talking to these espirits! No estoy una bruja.” She waggled a finger. “But they here. Not finish. You find the bad men. Okay? Okay?”
“Okay! Okay!” Chu said. He held his hands up protectively. “We find bad men.”
The housekeeper motioned to the air around her angrily before trudging off.
The two men stood in confused, thoughtful silence, gazing about the ominous, empty room. Finally, Corus snorted.
“Do they hurt?”
“Does what hurt?”
“The needles, L-T. The needles.”
SEVEN
Corus lay on a table, his arms at his sides, turned so that his palms faced upward. A round, padded doughnut supported his face. Through this doughnut, he saw a pair of dark, naked size 14 feet.
Corus had been expecting one of two things: either a middle-aged woman wearing a variety of crystals and a hempen mumu, or an ancient Chinese man, wearing a pillbox hat and smoking a small pipe. Corus had been pulling for the old Chinese man, and had demanded that Chu not send him to anything but the genuine article.
Eugene Simms was a powerfully built black man who towered above the six-foot-tall Corus. He hummed a tune as he worked. Corus normally hated humming. ‘Either sing or don’t’ was his position. Humming was just as distracting and without the full benefit of hearing a damn song, but Eugene’s humming was beautiful and soothing.
“Where did you learn to do this again?”
“Here in Seattle, and Taiwan.” Eugene spoke in a sonorous baritone.
“I see. Uh…and what brought you to acupuncture?”
“I guess I like to help people, and I like to understand the body.”
“Why didn’t you become a real doctor then?”
“Maybe the same reason you ain’t at a real doctor right now. Now you may feel a pinch with this one. Stay relaxed.”
When no real pinch came, Corus asked, “So how do you and Chu know each other?”
“We go to church together. He’s also a patient.”
“Wait, I thought Chu was a Baptist.”
“He is.”
“Hold on. I’m cool with the black acupuncturist thing, but I don’t know if I want a Baptist sticking needles in me. I need like a full bore Buddhist or whatever.”
Eugene laughed long and low, like a Lincoln Towncar rolling over a rumble strip. “That’s a good one, man. He doesn’t want no Baptist, teeheehee.”
Corus had to chuckle himself. “Sorry, but you get what I mean right?”
“Oh, I get what you mean.” Eugene moved around from his shoulders to his feet. “But Chu said you were smart. So check. You come here because your chi isn’t flowing, and I’m the guy who’s gonna set you right. That’s all you need to know.”
“You’re right. I’ll take confidence instead of a stereotype any day.”
“That’s right. Confidence. I can find you a billion Chinese, but only a handful know what Eugene knows.”
Eugene had a slow, measured way of speaking. It didn’t make him sound dumb. It made him sound like every word was as carefully chosen as his needles, each one according to its purpose. Corus admired that. People said he didn’t talk enough, yet when he did, no one seemed to like it much.
“Sorry, am I not supposed to talk through this?”
“Oh talking is fine. As long as you are relaxed. Try to keep thinking flow, like I said in the beginning. Flow.”
“So, if I can ask, honestly, how do you know where to put them? You haven’t even asked me why I’m here.”
“Oh, today we are starting with what you could call an introductory session. Sort of like your first day with a counselor. An ice breaker if you will.”
“An ice breaker? You can’t just dive right in and fix me?”
“Sometimes fixing ain’t fixing.”
Corus pondered that a while.
“Where you from Eugene?”
“All over, but mostly I was raised by my grandmother in Mississippi. Played a little football so I could go to college at Ole Miss.”
“I don’t suppose there was much acupuncture there.”
“No sir.” Eugene laughed. “I majored in psychology though. Close as I could get, even though I didn’t truly know what I was about at the time.”
“Ha. Me too. Don’t know what I was after either.”
“It usually starts with wanting to understand one’s self.”
“Where is t
he line between know thyself and narcissism though?”
“Where do you think it is?” Eugene asked.
“Ah Eugene, don’t pull that counseling shit on me.”
“Old habits, but you’re the one paying me. I can tell you my truth, but it won’t be as valuable as finding yours.”
“My truth…Jesus what a crock.”
“I’ll give you my shoes too. You can have ‘em. But they won’t fit for the long journey. You’ll just end up on some other table in a time.”
Corus saw himself on a slab in the morgue with the sheet pulled up to his chin. His face was cold and blue, but mostly disappointed. He took a breath and tried to think of flow.
“So what is it that brings you here then, Mr. Corus?”
Eugene must have taken the needles out because he was massaging his thumbs up the back of Corus’ calves.
“I used to be good at my job. My dog died, and now I suck.”
The fingers paused in their motions for a moment. “I see.” The thumbs began their swirling, upward motion again. “And why do you suck?”
“I don’t know. It feels like whatever I was standing on just got kicked out from under me. Like the whole Earth. Now I sort of just spin in the air.”
“Hmm.” Eugene considered his words. “What do you feel is keeping you aloft?”
“Pardon?”
“Well that thing – whatever it is – got kicked out from under you. So why aren’t you falling on the ground?”
“I don’t know.” Corus shrugged and waggled his head as best as the doughnut would allow. “Forget the analogy. I just need to be good at my job again.”
“Mmmhmm.”
A few moments later, Eugene gave him the all clear to stand up and get dressed. Corus emerged from the treatment room fully clothed and found Eugene sitting at a desk, behind a laptop screen in his makeshift reception area, a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose.
Corus told him to ditch the insurance info and insisted on paying with cash. He didn’t want this on his records. “How’s this time next week?”
EIGHT
“Inspector Corus, we told your associates all we knew about Miles. The FBI as well.”
