Presumption of Guilt

by Archer Mayor

  Sally reached her door and knocked. “Kelly? It’s Sally.”

  No answer.

  She tried again.

  This time, she heard a scraping, as from a chair being shifted. “Yes?”

  “It’s Sally,” she said, speaking louder, slightly irritated. “You said you needed help.”

  “Come in.”

  Sally raised her eyebrows. Well, by all means, don’t open the door or anything.

  She twisted the doorknob and stepped inside. Kelly was sitting at a table facing the far wall, her back to the door. “Hey,” Sally said. “What’s up?”

  Kelly’s shoulders flinched slightly, but she didn’t turn around.

  Sally took two more steps. “Kelly, are you—?”

  That’s all she managed. In the same instant that she sensed a movement behind her, a large hand clapped across her mouth as a man told her softly, “Move and I slice your stomach open. Understand?”

  She froze, feeling him pressed against her back, and something sharp poking her abdomen. Not a submissive person by instinct, she’d heard a self-confidence in that voice that scared her, and made her believe in the threat.

  “I asked if you understood.”

  She nodded.

  “Good. Then let’s get started.”

  * * *

  Linda Lucas entered her kitchen carrying a bag of groceries, mostly filled with canned soups and microwavable items. Recent events had ruined her appetite almost completely.

  A man was sitting at her breakfast table, a steaming cup of coffee before him. He was about Johnny’s age, but rougher in appearance—a little paunchy, and balding with a comb-over.

  She stopped dead in her tracks.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” he said, indicating the cup.

  She opened her mouth to no effect, and quickly looked around the room, like a bird searching for an open window.

  The man stood up, took the bag, and placed it on the counter beside the sink. “Walter’s my name. Johnny ever talk about me? From the old days?”

  “What’re you doing in my house?” she finally asked in a higher-than-usual voice.

  “C’mon, Linda,” he said pleasantly. “I’m lookin’ for Johnny.”

  “He’s not here.”

  Walter smiled. “Yeah. I got that.”

  “I don’t know where he is. The police want to find him, too.”

  “I bet.” Walter glanced around the kitchen. “You got a living room? Let’s go there and talk.”

  Linda tucked her chin in a little. “No. You need to leave.”

  Walter approached her, standing too close for comfort. His voice remained at a soothing pitch. “What I need is to talk. In the living room. Now.”

  She blinked. “All right, but then you should leave.”

  He gestured politely for her to precede him through the door. “That I will.”

  They entered the living room, where Walter directed her toward an armchair, into which she settled uneasily. He sat on the coffee table directly opposite her, his knees almost touching hers.

  “Linda,” he began. “Listen carefully. Johnny’s been up to things that could get him into hot water. I think you know that.”

  He waited for her to nod, which she did after a slight hesitation.

  “Good. Then your options are simple. You tell me how to find him, and I move him off the hot seat, or you keep playing dumb and he ends up dead. In the latter instance, by the way, you don’t turn out that good, either. Just so you know.”

  “You don’t scare me.”

  He smiled again. “Of course I do. And I should. Johnny really never told you about me?”

  “No,” she said, sounding forlorn.

  “That’s okay,” he said softly. “You should be the one talking anyhow.”

  * * *

  Dan had taken a personal pledge long ago, which he’d thought he’d never break. When it came down to it, however, he barely gave its violation a second’s thought. When he’d purchased Sally’s smartphone, he’d created a clone of it for himself. He’d never accessed it—out of a paradoxical respect for her privacy—but his peculiarly driven psychosis had demanded that he keep such a back door available into his daughter’s life and activities.

  Now, standing in their empty borrowed penthouse, her cell not answering his repeated efforts to reach her, he didn’t hesitate to open up his copy of her phone in order to read any messages received or sent that might tell him of her whereabouts.

  Within moments, he was taking two steps at a time, running back downstairs, headed for Kelly Doane’s apartment, two blocks over.

  * * *

  “What do you want?” Sally asked the man behind her.

  “That’s my question,” Johnny Lucas said, placing one hand on her throat and angling his knife so that she could see it aimed at her face. “You and your old man were in my house a few nights ago. I want to know why.”

  Sally’s heart tripped a beat as she tried to calculate what might be coming. “We’re thieves,” she said. “We steal stuff.”

  The hand on her throat tightened a bit. “Nice try. You were after information.”

  “If you already know the answer, why ask the question?” she challenged him, her fear mixing with anger.

  His hand slipped a little lower on her torso, pushing her closer to losing self-control. She opened her mouth slightly in an effort to pace her breathing and heartbeat. Keep cool, she repeated to herself. Keep cool.

  “Feisty, aren’t ya?” he said in her ear. “I can deal with that, too. It’s your choice. Now … tell me why you broke into my house.”

  “We work with the police,” she tried hopefully. “They need a reason to get into people’s homes. We don’t. If we find a smoking gun and they don’t explain how they got it, it’s a win–win situation.”

  She wasn’t sure how her mention of the police would go over, but she hoped that he’d find it intimidating enough to back off.

  Of course, he didn’t. “Did you find this smoking gun?”

  At that moment, Sally sensed more than felt a minute change in the atmosphere around them, causing Lucas to swing her around in an awkward dance step so that the now silently opened door was to their left, while the still-frozen Kelly Doane remained seated on the right.

  In the doorway, as still as the dim light behind him, stood her father.

  “Let her go,” he said quietly.

  Sally didn’t wait for more. She’d been fighting her rising fear by inventorying every detail about Lucas—how he was pressed against her, the placement of his hands, his flat-footed stance—and contrasting those with her own array of escape options.

  Her missing ingredient had been any element of surprise, possibly combined with a weapon, or even an ally. With Dan’s arrival, she suddenly had two out of three. She wasn’t about to hesitate now.

  Trusting to her father’s perpetual readiness—as exhibited by the care and stealth with which he’d opened Kelly’s door—Sally enacted the moves she’d been rehearsing since Lucas seized her. She went limp at the knees, slipped from Lucas’s distracted grip like a burst balloon, and turned her collapse at his feet to her advantage by twisting around in one powerful movement and catching both his knees in her outstretched arms like a linebacker.

  The surprise of her attack combined with its abrupt low center of gravity caught Lucas off guard and brought him down to the floor with the force of a dropped tree.

  His knife skittered across the floor, and Dan was beside them inside of a second.

  But no more action was needed.

  Lucas was out cold.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Ron Klesczewski was head of the Brattleboro Police Department’s detective squad, which had recently begun calling itself the Criminal Investigation Division, perhaps to keep up with lofty titles like the VBI’s, which hadn’t been around all that long, either. Ron had risen through the ranks, been mentored by Joe Gunther when he was chief of the unit, and still occasionally wandered upst
airs from his office on the ground floor to compare notes with his old colleagues, who included Sam and Willy.

  This time, however, the call wasn’t social. He merely stuck his head through the doorway, said, “Got a homicide on Elliot, if you want it fresh off the boat,” and left just as abruptly.

  Willy laughed. “Small-town policing. Gotta love it.”

  He and Joe, the only ones then in the office, swung in behind Ron, who was already moving rapidly toward the stairs.

  “Any details?” Joe asked his back.

  Ron glanced over his shoulder. “Not much. A male in an apartment not his own, which is listed to Kelly Doane. She’s a known player to us.”

  “Doane,” Willy repeated—he of the elephant’s memory. “That rings a bell. Prostitution and drug use?”

  “That’s her,” Ron told him. “Although we have no clue of her whereabouts right now.”

  “The dead guy have an ID?” Joe asked.

  “Maybe. We just got the call. Patrol’s there, and the scene’s sealed.”

  * * *

  Well sealed, too, as they discovered minutes later, Elliot Street being only a couple of blocks south of the municipal center. There were two cruisers in the street, and four patrol officers positioned along the way to the apartment, three flights up. The last cop was at the open door, holding a clipboard.

  “Anyone inside?” Klesczewski asked, struggling into his white Tyvek suit, as were his two companions—including Willy, with his own well-practiced, one-arm technique.

  “Only the dead guy,” the officer said, registering their names. “And you’re the first ones I’ve logged in.”

  “Any word on the girl who lives here? Doane?”

  The man merely shook his head.

  “The medical examiner been called?”

  “ETA’s about ten minutes. He happened to be in town when we paged him.”

  The three of them entered the sparsely furnished room and stood silently, looking around. The daylight barely eked through a pair of small, filthy windows. A single overhead light provided a harsh and graceless glare to the place, all the better to bounce off the flat pool of dark blood that held the body in its midst like a large blob of sealing wax. The dead man, bald and nicely dressed from what they could see, was facing the distant wall.

  “Jesus,” Willy observed. “That looks like every drop he had in him.”

  There was some talking at the door, and the trio turned to see Jerry Senturia again, the local ME, already half dressed in white, being entered into the log. He looked up at them as he finished pulling on a pair of latex gloves.

  “Hey, guys. We meet again. Another homicide? I get like one of these a year.”

  He stepped inside, carrying a small silver case, which Joe had once heard him refer to as his “corpse kit.”

  “We need to point out your customer?” Willy asked.

  Senturia whistled instead. “You boys don’t fool around.”

  “We were wondering if that puddle represented a complete bleed-out,” Ron said.

  Senturia gave an appraising grunt, followed by, “Close, I’d say. It’s arterial, too, by the color of it. Wherever he was hit, it bled out like a garden hose.” He hesitated at the edge of the pool, somewhat at a loss on how to proceed.

  “Hang on,” Ron told him, crossing to the door and asking, “You guys bring those little stools we bought for scenes like this?”

  He was almost immediately handed a stack of shiny metal blocks designed to create a non-contaminating path through any field of potential evidence. In the meantime, Senturia had begun taking general scene photographs.

  In short order, they arranged a staggered row of the metal blocks like stepping stones across a pond, leading up to the body’s edge. Awkwardly, working to not lose his balance, Senturia juggled his camera, his clipboard, and a small flashlight, all while kneeling atop the carefully placed pedestals.

  “Crime techs coming?” he asked as he examined the body.

  “You want to make it easy?” Willy asked from the edge.

  “They’re on their way,” Ron told him. “Won’t be long. What’ve you got?”

  Senturia glanced at him. “I’ll show you in a sec. I’ve updated some of my toys. You’ll love it.”

  He finished doing the best he could, poking about and taking photographs without disrobing the body as he usually did, and then retraced his steps back to dry land.

  “Okay,” he said triumphantly. He took his camera, cabled it to a tablet computer he removed from his kit, and entered a few commands.

  “There,” he said, sitting back on his haunches, having set it all up in the middle of the bare wooden floor. His three companions clustered around him like shuffling ghosts.

  The first images showed the body’s neck. “See that line?” Senturia asked them, tapping the screen with his gloved finger.

  “What the hell is it?” Ron asked. “A knife wound?”

  “I don’t think so,” Senturia said. “You can’t see it in this shot, but it goes about ninety percent round.”

  “A garrote,” Joe spoke softly. “I saw those in combat—used to take out sentries.”

  “Right,” Willy agreed. “A piano wire with wooden handles at both ends. I’ve only seen a couple of those, in New York.” He glanced meaningfully at Joe before adding, “Almost like a signature Mob hit.”

  “It certainly explains the blood,” Senturia told them. “I poked my finger into the wound to see how deep it is. Basically, the only thing keeping the head attached is the spinal column. All the major vessels have been transected.”

  He forwarded through several more photos as he spoke, until he reached a shot of the body’s face.

  “Damn,” Joe muttered, straightening. “That’s not good.”

  Senturia looked up at him. “You know him?”

  “Yeah,” Willy said. “That’s Johnny Lucas.”

  * * *

  “I’d normally say that we ought to stop meeting like this,” Beverly told him. “But that would be completely disingenuous.”

  She glanced around the autopsy room, saw that Todd, her diener, had stepped out briefly, and pulled down her surgical mask for a kiss, which Joe happily supplied. He had never seen her so spontaneous and playful as he had since they announced they were a couple. It didn’t make him regret the months they’d been circumspect, but it certainly pleased him that he no longer had to tiptoe around the issue.

  They were gazing down at Johnny Lucas, who’d been opened up from neck to groin and had his innards removed. Beverly had also made the incision across the top of his head and peeled down his face in preparation for the removal of the skullcap, when Todd realized that his saw blade needed replacement.

  “I didn’t ask you before,” Joe said, putting his own mask back in place. “But a garrote was the weapon, wasn’t it?”

  She glanced at the traumatized neck. “It’s consistent with that,” she said. “Interesting thing to use, though.”

  “Why?” he asked. “It clearly worked.”

  “Oh, it did that, all right,” she agreed. “But this is the first such case I’ve had on this table. Garroting is an ancient form of execution, and as you’ve discovered, impressively messy.”

  “Fast, though,” Joe said. “And subtle, in its way.”

  “In what fashion?”

  “Well, it’s just a wire, isn’t it? If the handles are kept elsewhere, you could say you got it off a picture frame, or from around a bundle. And it’s fast, assuming you have the element of surprise and know what you’re doing.”

  She nodded at the body. “Indications are that his attacker was behind him, but that his head was turned to the left—the way it was when he was found, facedown and with his right cheek in contact with the floor.”

  Todd reentered with the saw, and efficiently went about removing Lucas’s skullcap. After he’d stepped away, Beverly approached the glistening brain itself, gingerly removed it, weighed it on a scale, and moved it to a small cutting boa
rd near one of the sinks.

  “This may be useful,” she announced after a minute’s careful examination.

  Joe moved beside her, seeing little more than a slightly bloody, lumpy blob, the size of a deflated half-soccer-ball. “What?”

  “He suffered a cerebral bleed before he died.”

  Joe shrugged. “That would’ve made it easier. Whack him on the noggin and then garrote him on the floor. Probably explains the positioning you just described.”

  But she was shaking her head. “True, but that’s not exactly what’s being suggested here.” She tapped the brain with a fingertip. “This was given a longer interval to hemorrhage than that.”

  Joe paused, staring. “How long an interval?” he asked.

  “Hard to say without knowing the circumstances,” she predictably answered. “But he definitely was not struck and then immediately killed. From the scene photographs of the body’s placement and the subsequent pooling of blood inside the cranium—which I can see here—I’d say it was beyond a half hour between events.”

  “Huh,” he grunted thoughtfully. “That opens up the possibilities.” He brushed her waist surreptitiously with his hand and stepped back. “Guess I better head back and start poking into a few of them.”

  She turned toward him, a carving knife still in her hand. “By the way?”

  He removed his mask and smiled. “What’s up?”

  “I’ve seen this kind of head injury often enough to venture a guess on what caused it.”

  “Really? You’re kidding. You almost never do that.”

  She looked embarrassed. “Well, as I said—familiarity. And I did stress it’s going to be a guess.”

  “Fire away.”

  “It’s consistent with a fall,” she said. “Combining the findings on the brain with the markings on the scalp suggests that Mr. Lucas landed with some force.”

  “Like from a roof?” Joe asked, incredulous.

  “No, no, no. Nothing that grand. More likely from a standing height, but forcefully. I’ve seen it in children, adults—multiple times. It’s similar to a skiing injury.”