Murder with a Twist

by Allyson K. Abbott

  I kept hearing the sound of high-pitched flute music, louder in some areas than others. It was something I’d experienced before but once again I didn’t know what was triggering it. Like the annoying tag sensation, I kept this one to myself for now, and instead shared the things I could interpret.

  “Well, when I look at the carpet I also feel pressure spots along my arms. Most of them feel the same, but in some areas, the pressure is lighter or heavier. I’m not sure what it means, but I think it might be footprints I’m picking up on. For instance, over there by the end of the couch you can see a depression left by someone’s foot. I think that’s the victim’s footprint, because the pressure I feel when I look at the majority of the rest of the room is the same. But over by the dining table, and here by the stairs, I feel lighter and heavier pressures when I look at the carpet. It’s as if other people were walking in here—someone with a bigger, heavier footprint and someone with a lighter one.”

  Duncan cast a smug look toward Jimmy before telling me, “The person who called nine-one-one was the victim’s girlfriend, and she found him pretty much the way you see him now. She told us she didn’t go near him, and that the only places she went in the apartment once she let herself inside were the bathroom and the kitchen. Apparently the sight of her boyfriend hanging there made her ill and she ran into the bathroom because she thought she might vomit. She didn’t, and she then went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. Then she went out into the hallway and used her cell phone to call nine-one-one.”

  “That probably explains the sound I picked up on in those areas,” I said, “though I can’t tell if the smell that caused it was something on her body like a perfume, lotion, or shampoo, or if it was her laundry detergent.”

  I looked away from the carpet and toward Duncan to assess his reaction. He cocked his head to one side and smiled at me.

  “What?”

  “I knew your little talent would come in handy.”

  “I’m not sure how handy it is telling you stuff you already know,” I said.

  “We knew about the girlfriend being in here, but not anyone else.”

  “Those other footprints could well be yours, or Jimmy’s, or the other cops who’ve been here.”

  Duncan nodded and gave me a grudging look. “You may be right, but it’s still useful information. You have to understand, it’s rarely just one thing that helps us solve these cases. More often it’s a combination of things. We have to take bits of evidence and lay them out so we can see a pattern, and most of the time it’s the pattern that provides the solution, not the individual bits.”

  “You didn’t seem surprised when I mentioned the chair or the smoke smell on the note and laptop. You knew this wasn’t a suicide when you brought me here, didn’t you?”

  Duncan’s smile turned apologetic. “Busted! But without you we might not have known that the position of the chair was staged, or that the person who typed the fake suicide note is a smoker.”

  “Is his girlfriend a smoker?”

  “I don’t know,” Duncan said. “We’ll ask her, but she may lie. We can search her credit card records, and check at stores near here and ask if she buys cigarettes. But that all takes time and it isn’t necessarily proof, because she could say she bought the cigarettes for someone else. We could also search her apartment to see if there are ashtrays filled with butts. However, that requires a warrant if she doesn’t give us permission. Or I can simply introduce you to her and you can tell me if the same smell exists on her hands.”

  “You want me to sniff her hands?”

  “Based on what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think you’ll have to do that. I think just standing next to her will suffice. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Probably,” I said grudgingly. “If you didn’t know about the chair or the note before I got here, how did you know this wasn’t a suicide?”

  “Walter Finch, who was the first police officer on the scene, figured it out. Jimmy clued me in during his call. Walter’s a sharp cookie and he was able to tell it wasn’t a suicide by the marks on the victim’s neck. That was lucky for us, because it kept more of the scene preserved. Walter has seen several hanging victims and he knew this one was beyond any medical help, so we were also able to avoid having EMS tromp all over our scene. Thus far we’ve allowed only two officers to enter the apartment, so up until the arrival of the medical examiner, the only people who have been in here are Walter Finch, his partner, me, and Jimmy . . . and now you, of course. Jimmy got the initial call, and when he told me what we had, I decided to bring you along to see what you could figure out.”

  I glanced over at the body, curious about what Duncan had just said.

  Duncan called over to the man from the Medical Examiner’s Office. “Hey, Martin, can you show Ms. Dalton here the marks on our victim’s neck?”

  Martin, who was standing alongside the stretcher on the opposite side of the body from us, grabbed a hold of Thornton’s shoulder and hip, and rolled him up onto his side, exposing his back to us. The rope, which was still around Thornton’s neck, was slack now.

  “You can see where the rope came in contact with the victim’s neck,” Martin said. “Everywhere it touched the skin is blanched white.”

  Even though I could see what he was referring to easily enough, he traced the path of the rope on Thornton’s skin with his gloved finger. The white stripe ran along the front and sides of the man’s neck, under his jawline, and up behind his ears, where it then disappeared. Martin then took hold of the rope above the knot and pulled it up behind the back of Thornton’s head, mimicking the position it had been in when he was still hanging.

  “You see how the rope forms an upside-down V when the knot is located at the back of the head, as it was in this case?” Martin said. “It doesn’t touch the back of the neck, so the blanched area stops just behind the ear. It’s a typical finding in a hanging of this nature.”

  I must have looked confused because Duncan leaned into me and whispered, “Wait for it.”

  “What isn’t a typical finding for a hanging like this is the bruising we see here,” Martin said, returning Thornton to his back and tracing a finger along a dark, somewhat linear mark at the base of the man’s neck near his collarbone. The bruise appeared to crisscross just under Thornton’s chin. “This bruising, along with the color of the man’s face, tells me he was strangled and then hanged.”

  “How can you tell the difference?” I asked.

  “Frontal strangulation will typically cut off the flow of the jugular vein before it cuts off the flow from the carotid arteries, thereby blocking the return of blood flow from the head to the heart, but not the flow from the heart to the head,” Martin said, continuing my education. “Hence the congestion and the purple coloring that we see here. He also has what we call petechiae—tiny burst capillaries—on his face and in his eyes. These are also classic signs of strangulation that typically aren’t seen in a hanging. In general, hanging causes a much quicker loss of consciousness because the flow from the carotid arteries is interrupted. A lot of people think the cause of death in hanging is suffocation, assuming the neck isn’t broken, but it’s actually the obstruction of the carotid arteries and a lack of oxygen to the brain that causes death most of the time. The trachea is a fairly rigid structure and it’s more difficult than most people realize to compress it hard enough or long enough to cause death.”

  Martin picked up the hand closest to him. “Also, his fingernails are too clean,” he said. “If someone was on top of him, or in front of him strangling him, I would expect him to have clawed at his attacker. Even if this was a suicide, I would expect to see something under the nails or, at the very least, some broken nails. It’s common to see scratch marks at the neck and fragments of the rope or whatever else was used under the victim’s nails. It’s an instinctive reaction to the hanging process if there isn’t a broken neck. This guy’s neck doesn’t appear to be broken and yet he has nothing under his nails and no
ne of them are broken.”

  Duncan said, “He didn’t struggle?”

  “It doesn’t appear so,” Martin said.

  “Can you give me an approximate time of death?” Duncan asked.

  Martin probed the man’s face, arms, and torso with his fingers. “There are some indications of rigor mortis in his upper body. Based on that and room temperature, I would say he died around six hours ago, give or take an hour.”

  Duncan glanced at his watch and said, “So between two and four this morning.”

  I approached the man’s body, trying to inure myself to the sight and smell of it. As I drew closer, I heard a rhythmic grating sound, as if a stick was being scraped over a cheese grater. It was a sound I knew well, one I heard all the time, except this time it was off. In addition to the grating sound, I heard a high-pitched whine.

  When I reached Thornton’s body, I bent down close over his face and sniffed, making Martin back up a step and mutter, “What the hell?”

  I turned around and looked at Duncan. “You’re right; he didn’t struggle. I suspect he was sedated with something and I think it was probably in his drink,” I said.

  “Why do you think that?” Duncan asked.

  “I know the smell of Johnnie Walker Black. I know the smell of all the liquors and the sounds that go with them. This Thornton guy drank Johnnie Walker Black, all right, but it had something else mixed in it. The sound of it over there by the table where the glass and the bottle are sitting is the way it should be, but the sound of it over here by his mouth is off. The smell is off.”

  “Could it be off because he imbibed it, and he’s dead?” Duncan asked.

  It was a good question, and I wasn’t sure of the answer.

  “And if the glass on the table didn’t seem off to you, how could it be the source of whatever was given to him?” Duncan added.

  It was another good question and another answer I wasn’t sure of. As I thought about it, I walked past Duncan and went back into the kitchen. On the counter beside the sink was a small dish rack with a bowl, a spoon, a coffee mug, and a drinking glass in it. I bent down close to the drinking glass and took a big sniff. Then I whirled back toward Duncan.

  “This is the glass he drank the bad whisky out of,” I said, pointing to the culprit. “It may have been rinsed, but I can still smell it or, rather, I can still hear it. It makes a rhythmic grating sound. I know this glass had the Johnnie Walker in it, but it also had something else mixed in, something one wouldn’t normally expect to find, something that makes me hear an odd undulating high-pitched whine that I’ve never heard before.” I felt pretty confident of this last claim. After working in a bar virtually my entire life, I know the smells and attached sounds associated with every possible mix of drink.

  “That glass is the one his girlfriend said she used,” Jimmy said. “Maybe that’s the reason it seems off to you.”

  Despite his questioning of my claim, this comment from Jimmy was definite progress. Normally he would have dismissed my take outright with a sneer of skepticism.

  “Not unless she rinsed her mouth out with the Johnnie Walker,” I countered. “There was whisky in this glass.”

  “She said she used water,” Jimmy said.

  At this point, Martin was staring at me like I was someone who had just escaped from the insane asylum.

  Duncan jumped in to shift the focus onto something else. “The crime scene techs should be here anytime. Make sure they bag all those dishes in the rack,” he said to Karl Jensen, a uniformed officer who was guarding the doorway. “And ask them to limit their efforts to the kitchen area until I get back here.” Then he turned to Martin and said, “Let me know what you find when you finish his autopsy. Call me on my cell.”

  Martin, who had been staring at me agape for the past minute or so, managed to shake off the trance he appeared to be in and refocused his efforts on securing Thornton’s body to the stretcher.

  “You, come with me,” Duncan said, and he cupped my elbow and steered me out of the apartment and into the hallway. “I’ve got a special project for you.”

  Chapter 5

  Duncan said, “Walter Finch and his partner, Adam, have the girlfriend in her apartment, which is in this building, one floor up. I need to go talk to her and, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to come along. You don’t need to talk, but I’d like you to observe her and see what type of reactions you have, if any. I’m particularly interested in the cigarette thing, but I haven’t been in her apartment myself yet to see if there’s any obvious evidence that she’s a smoker. If there is, you won’t need to sniff her hands.”

  He winked at me to let me know he was joking, at least a little bit, although his next words sort of belied that. “If there is no obvious odor in the apartment, or any ashtrays or packs of cigarettes lying around, then I’d be curious to see if you can detect anything on her. How close do you think you need to be to her if that becomes necessary?”

  “I don’t need to snuggle with her, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said. “If we are sitting relatively close, like at the same table, I should be able to pick it up.”

  A few minutes later, I met Shelly Dominsky, a tall, slender woman who looked to be in her midthirties. She had short, curly brown hair with bangs, thin lips, and blue eyes that at the moment were puffy and rimmed in red from crying. Glasses with a modern rectangular frame sat atop her head, their proximity making me suspect she needed them for vision and wasn’t just wearing them as a fashion statement.

  Duncan introduced me as a consultant, a title that made Adam shoot me a curious look. Both Walter and Adam were regulars at my bar, frequently stopping in at the end of their shift for a nightcap or two, but as far as I knew, only Walter was in on my little secret. Though, to be honest, what I knew about cop partners led me to believe they shared pretty much everything. So I figured there was one more person who would know my secret if he didn’t already, which didn’t bode well for my goal of keeping it under wraps.

  There was no odor of cigarette smoke in Shelly’s apartment, nor was there any visible evidence of smoking, such as an ashtray. Even before Duncan began his questioning of the woman, I knew she wasn’t the person who had typed the suicide note. The sound I typically heard whenever I smelled cigarette smoke was absent. I did, however, hear the faint washing machine sound I’d heard in Dan’s apartment and knew that it must be a manifestation of some odor on Shelly’s body, hair, or clothing.

  Shelly’s apartment was nearly identical to Thornton’s. We sat at a small table similar to the one that had held the suicide note, and I listened as Duncan questioned Shelly about her relationship with Dan Thornton. Shelly told him that they had originally met at work, but had known each other for more than a year before they started dating.

  “Dan was the one who helped me get this apartment,” Shelly said. “I was in a bad situation with a roommate I couldn’t stand and I wanted to move. Finding something I could afford seemed impossible until Dan told me that a couple living in the apartment above him bought a house and they were moving out at the end of the month. He put in a good word for me with the landlord, and I was able to move in right away. I’ve been here three months now.”

  “How long had you and Dan been dating?” Duncan asked.

  “Our six-month anniversary is . . .” She stopped herself and hiccupped a sob. “It would have been next week,” she concluded, tears welling in her eyes. “We were happy . . . or at least I thought we were. I spent some time with him last evening and he seemed fine.”

  “What time did you leave?” Duncan asked.

  “Around ten. We were in bed and he wanted me to spend the night, but I wasn’t feeling so hot all of a sudden. I think the fish I ate for dinner might have been bad because I spent most of the night running to the bathroom. Dan was fine when I left, I swear.” Tears were flowing freely now, and she swiped at them irritably as they tracked down her cheeks. “I tried to call him this morning to let him know I was okay, but he didn�
��t answer. After several tries, I went down and let myself in. We swapped keys a while back.”

  “Did Dan ever say anything to you about playing fast with the company money?” Duncan asked.

  Shelly shook her head vehemently. “I read that note, but I don’t believe it,” she said. “Dan’s the most honest and moral person I know. I just can’t see him stealing money from people. And as far as I know, he doesn’t make bets or gamble.” She swiped at her tears, sighed, and then combed a hand through her hair, pushing the fringe of bangs off her forehead. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Did you touch the note at all?” Duncan asked.

  Shelly shook her head again. “I read it from a few feet away. I didn’t want to get anywhere near it.”

  “You two worked together, is that right?”

  Shelly nodded. “Yeah, Dan’s been with Stratford and Weber for two years now. I was there for several years before he came on board. He joined us straight out of college, but he has a master’s degree and I only have a bachelor’s. I’m going back, though, just as soon as I get my feet on the ground financially.”

  “How has Dan done at Stratford and Weber?”

  “Really well,” Shelly said. “In fact, he passed over several people when he got a promotion six months ago. It opened up a position in his group and I took it. That’s when he and I got close. But we keep things strictly professional at work because we’re not supposed to date people from our own investment group.”

  “Did Dan’s promotion create some bad feelings?”

  Shelly shrugged and blew her nose. “There was some grumbling from some of the others, but it was hard to argue with Dan’s success. He works . . . worked hard and earned that promotion.”

  Duncan spent a little more time with her, verifying the calls she said she made this morning by checking her cell phone, and getting the names and numbers of the people she and Dan worked and socialized with. Shelly responded in a sad, bereaved monotone interspersed with sniffles. I felt sorry for her, and what’s more, I believed her. Her words, her tone of voice, her expressions . . . they all felt—and tasted—right to me.