by Blair Howard
I nodded. It was reasonable. Why would they?
“I’d like to take a look at it; with your permission, of course. Do you have a key?”
“Yes, of course you can, but why?”
I hesitated for a moment, then said, “I’ll be honest with you, Mrs. Thomas. I don’t have a good reason. I’m just curious, that’s all. Would you mind?” I looked at her, then said, “The key?”
She nodded. “I’ll go get it.” And she walked through to the kitchen. She was gone for several minutes, during which I could hear her searching through drawers. Finally, she returned, shaking her head.
“I can’t find them. Let me call Cletus and see if he knows where they are.”
She did. He didn’t. He also wanted to know why I wanted into the house. I told her to tell him the truth. He said it was okay by him for me to enter the property, but not to break into the house, that he’d find us a key.
I didn’t quite smile at that, but I was happy enough with his answer. It was the back yard I was interested in, not the house. At least not then. And now I had permission to enter the property, the yard at least. The house as well if I could find a way in without breaking anything. I thanked Arlis Thomas and returned to the cruiser.
***
It was a little white frame house. It had an open porch at the front, facing Bonny Oaks, and a screened-in porch at the rear. The front door and windows were locked, but the screen door at the rear wasn’t. Unfortunately, the back door itself was.
Tracy and I tried to look in the windows but all of them had blinds and we could see nothing.
Damn! Okay, now to the reason we’re here.
I told Tracy to follow me and I headed away from the house across the yard. The grass hadn’t been mowed in a couple of weeks. It was long but, thankfully, dry.
The perimeter of the property—maybe a hundred and twenty feet long by eighty wide—was delineated by a chain link fence. Just as I’d seen on Google Maps, it was surrounded by dense woodland. I walked the fence at the end of the property. It was overgrown, interwoven with long grass and weeds to the point where it was hard to tell it was even there.
Then I found it. It was maybe ten feet from the eastern edge of the property. The fence had been cut and the wire pushed back to make an opening. The grass beyond the fence had been trodden down. So had the grass inside the fence, but that had almost recovered, so it was harder to see.
I trod the grass down as I stepped through the gap. Tracy followed me through. The only thing on my mind right then was chiggers. Those little buggers love the long grass, and I’d been infested by them more than once. And itch? They could make life hell.
Anyway, the trail through the trees, if you could call it that, was almost completely overgrown and strewn with broken twigs and branches.
I made Tracy take the lead—what the hell good is rank if you don’t take advantage of it?—and we pushed our way through the undergrowth… well, Tracy did. I followed in his footsteps, so to speak.
Finally, we emerged into a small clearing… and there it was, maybe thirty feet away. A derelict wooden barn, almost completely overgrown, walls leaning inward, rusty metal roof. There were two big wooden doors, one slightly overlapping the other. The sun filtered through the tree tops and glittered on what looked to be a brand-new lock and chain. I looked at the dirt in front of the doors. The half-circle scribed in the dirt told me that the door on the left had been opened many times; the dry dirt had been pushed aside, leaving a three-inch-high mound. And there were footprints. Everywhere. Dilapidated it might have been. But deserted? Not so much.
I felt a cold chill run down my spine. Somehow, I knew I was standing at the crime scene, the place where Jasmine Thomas had died.
“This is it,” I said to Tracy. “This is what I was looking for.”
He took a step forward. I grabbed his arm, “No! We can’t, not yet.”
As warm as it was, I shivered. More than anything in the world at that moment, I wanted to look inside that barn, but I knew I couldn’t. Nor could I look around the outside, not only because most of it was so overgrown the barn was inaccessible, but because if it was a crime scene, I didn’t want to disturb it.
I needed to call Mike Willis. The brand-new lock and chain on the barn door were tantalizing. Reasonable suspicion?
I thought so, and that provided me with probable cause to search the barn, even without a warrant. I already had permission to enter the house, but I wanted to cover my ass, do it right. I wanted a warrant to search both the barn and the house. Getting one wouldn’t be a problem, I knew that, but I didn’t want to leave the property.
I called Judge Henry Strange. I knew him well, and he was one of Harry’s best friends. So long as I had my ducks in a row, I knew he would comply.
“Hello Judge,” I said when he answered his private cell phone. “This is Kate Gazzara. I hate to bother you, sir. I know how busy you must be, but I need a search warrant… quickly…” I closed my eyes and grimaced after I’d said it. I didn’t know him quite that well.
There was a moment of silence, then: “Talk to me, Kate.”
I explained what I needed and told him I had permission to enter the house but didn’t know who owned the barn, and that I needed a warrant for the house and any outbuildings in its vicinity.
I could almost hear him thinking about it, “The house is no problem, you already have permission, but the barn. All you have is the lock and chain. That’s a little thin on the PC, wouldn’t you agree?”
“No, Judge. I have reasonable suspicion, based on the ownership of the rental, the hidden locale of the barn, and the brand-new lock and chain on a building that’s nothing more than a falling down pile of lumber. That barn may well be my crime scene. The place where Jasmine Thomas was murdered.”
He was quiet for a long moment, then I heard him sigh. “The house, the property, and the barn… all right, Kate. I’ll draw it up now. Come and get it.”
“Uh, if you don’t mind, sir, I’ll send Detective Tracy. I don’t want to leave the property. You know how it is.”
“I do. Send him on.” And he disconnected without giving me a chance to thank him.
I sent Tracy on his way, then I called Mike Willis; it was just after three-fifteen.
“Hey, Mike,” I said when he picked up. “I think I’ve found my crime scene. I need you to bring a team to a rental property on Bonny Oaks, a two-bedroom house with an old barn out back. The house is locked up tight, but Tracy is on his way to pick up a warrant. Can you handle it?”
He could.
“You’re going to need bolt cutters, big ones. Park in the driveway and come through the yard all the way to the… no, wait. I’ll meet you out front.”
I gave him the address, “It’s urgent, Mike. How long will you be? Thirty minutes? Twenty would be a whole lot better. Okay. I’ll be out front waiting for you.” I went to the front porch of the house and sat down on the steps to wait.
True to his word, Willis arrived twenty minutes later. “So, what do we have?” he asked, as he exited his vehicle. He was alone.
“Are you it?” I asked, hoping to hell he wasn’t.
“Nooo,” he said. “I’m just the spearhead. The rest of the team will be here momentarily. Tell me, Kate. What’s going on?”
“I need this house processed.” I turned and looked at it; so did he. “But not yet. What I’m most interested in is the old barn back there among the trees. We haven’t touched anything; hell, we didn’t even approach it. There are footprints, and there’s a steel lock and chain on the door that probably have prints on them.” I took a breath. He watched me intently. “The barn, Mike. I think that’s where she was killed.”
“What makes you think that?” he asked.
“Nothing specific. It’s just a feeling. Instinct, intuition, whatever.”
He nodded, walked a few steps down the side of the house, and stared out at the yard and the trees beyond. Then he came back and opened the rear doors of hi
s vehicle.
“Best to suit up out here, I think. Help yourself.”
I donned Tyvek coveralls and latex gloves; the booties I’d carry with me to the barn and put them on there. The hair cover…
Damn, I hate those things.
I decided to carry that too.
I was just about ready when the rest of Mike’s CSI team arrived. He had a quick word with them, grabbed a huge set of bolt cutters from a tool box in the back of the vehicle, and we headed for the barn.
We broke through the trees into the small clearing and Willis stopped and held up his arm; I almost ran right into him.
For several minutes he stood silently, surveying the area, then he nodded and said, “This way.”
He led us to the right, around the perimeter of the clearing—if such a small area can even have a perimeter. It was no more than a few yards before we were at the front wall.
“Booties, please,” he said.
I put them on and followed him, taking care to disturb the dry, dusty ground as little as possible.
He stood in front of the two doors, then crouched down with the bolt cutters across his knees and examined the lock and chain without touching them. Then he stood, took the tool in both hands, looked at me, and said, “Kate? If you would.” He nodded at the lock and chain. “I don’t want them to fall in the dirt.”
I took hold of the chain. He set the cutters on the shackle of the lock and pressed. It was a monster of a lock, the shackle made of hardened steel at least three-eighths of an inch thick. It took m’man Mike a couple of tries, then suddenly the shackle gave with a crack that rivaled a pistol shot, and the assembly dropped loose in my hand.
Willis took an evidence baggie from the pack he had slung over his shoulder and opened it. I dropped the lock and chain into it, and he sealed and signed it. I countersigned, and handed it off to one of the techs.
The two doors were each about six feet wide and seven feet high; the wood had weathered to a dirty gray. They’d seen better days, and sagged until both touched the floor. The right-hand door, deeply embedded in the dirt, looked as if it hadn’t been opened in years. Not so the one on the left; as I’d noticed earlier, it had been dragged through the dirt many times.
Willis handed me the cutters, grabbed the door with both hands, and pulled. It gave a couple of inches, the top moving almost a foot. And that’s how he did it. Pull after pull, several inches at a time, until he had a gap big enough for us to slide through.
It was dark inside, and hot, and dry. The temperature outside the barn was in the low nineties; inside, it had to be twenty degrees more.
I had a tiny flashlight on my keychain. Unfortunately, there was no way for me to get at it through the protective coveralls.
I stood for a minute, my eyes slowly adjusting to the low light. Then a great beam shone across the interior; Mike was holding one of those big rechargeable flashlights with an adjustable beam.
“Kate, we need to get some lights in here, but we can’t do that until my guys have processed the approaches.” His “guys” were one male and three female techs.
It took them another hour to clear the approaches to the barn. Then I had to wait impatiently for another fifteen minutes while they brought in three large portable lights and a generator.
Then, finally, “I don’t suppose you’d like to stay outside for a few minutes, would you, Kate?”
“As the saying goes, Mike: not only no, but hell no. Let’s get on with it, for God’s sake.” And we did.
The techs set up the lights to illuminate the entire interior. Mike and I stood silently by as they did so. Slowly, one light at time, all was revealed.
The barn, if it could have been called that, must at one time have been a stable or cow shed. There were three stalls, now dilapidated almost beyond recognition, along the right side. A pile of rotting wood boards was stacked against the left side. The rest of the space, an open area maybe twenty feet by thirty, stretched the entire length of the structure. Throughout the structure was a dirt floor, dry and dusty. A small propane lantern, bright red and obviously quite new, stood on the stack of boards.
But what caught my eye was the chair at the far end, lying on its side in the center of the open space. I shuddered. I looked at Tracy, now returned from his trip. His face was a mask, his features drawn tight; he nodded at me. Mike had that enigmatic half-smile on his face. What he was thinking, I had no idea.
“Hmmm. Interesting,” he said, eventually. “I think we might have something here. See the pieces of duct tape on the back of the chair?”
I hadn’t, but I did then, and I felt my heart begin to race.
“Let’s go take a look,” Mike said. “I’ll go first; you follow, carefully. Try to step in my footsteps and when I tell you stop, you stop, yes?”
We nodded, and followed Mike in single file as he made his way slowly and carefully across the floor. I can’t imagine what the three of us must have looked like, dressed in whites from head to toe, creeping along in unison like the Three Stooges in a haunted house.
It sounds hilarious, I know. It wasn’t.
Suddenly, Mike held up his hand: “Stop.” And bitch-slap me if Tracy didn’t bang right into my back.
“Dammit, John. For God’s sake, give me a little space, will you?”
“Yeah, Boss, sorry, I wasn’t—”
“I know you weren’t,” I said, irritated. “But you’d better.”
“Hey, you two.” Mike turned. “Simmer down. This ain’t a friggin’ bar. Stay right where you are. I want to look at the area around the chair.”
He took two more steps forward, leaving me feeling like a scolded child.
Damn you, Tracy.
Mike reached the chair, stooped down, and stared intently at it, and the dirt floor under and around it. He must have stayed like that for five minutes or more before poking a forefinger into the dust. He put his finger to his nose and breathed deeply. He nodded to himself, then stood and turned around.
“Okay,” he said, crisply. “Outside, please, both of you, and be careful where you put your feet.”
So we turned and trooped back across the open space and out the door.
Once safely outside, I turned to Mike and said, “You found something. What?”
“I’m not entirely sure. Urine, I think. It’s dried out, but there’s a slight discoloration in the dirt where the chair stood. It does have an odor, but not much. I don’t know if we can get enough material to extract DNA, but we’ll try.”
I nodded, and he continued. “The tape. It looks like it’s been used as a restraint. I can see what appears to be blood on it. Did you see the lamp?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Did you see what was beside it on the plank?”
“No… what?”
“Again, I’m not sure. Some sort of flimsy fabric, balled up; could be underwear.”
Her bra and panties.
“So, this is it, then?” I asked. “This is the crime scene?”
He shrugged. “We’ll see. It’s going to take most of the rest of the day and night to process the building. I can’t have you here. You need to leave.”
It was said in a friendly manner, but there was no doubt he meant what he said, so I nodded.
“Of course, but…”
“But what?” he asked.
“The house. If this is what we think it is, then I think maybe we should take a look at it. We have enough probable cause to break in.”
“Ummm…” He looked over his shoulder at the activity inside the barn, then turned back and said, “Give me a minute. I don’t want you doing that without me.”
He went back inside the barn and spoke to one of the techs, who nodded vigorously. Then Mike left him and came back to us.
“Let’s do it,” he said. “We’ll go into the house, take a quick look around, see what we can see, then out of there. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
We returned to the small white house, where w
e waited while Mike went to his vehicle to “get some tools.” We entered the screened-in porch through the unlocked door. The door into the house took no more than a couple of minutes to open; the tools Mike had fetched were lock picks.
“Whew,” he said, as he pushed the door open. “It’s hot as hell in here.”
He flipped the light switch. The kitchen light came on.
“Hmmm. The power’s on,” he said. “The AC must be turned off. Holy crap!” He grabbed his nose. “What’s that stink? The place smells like a sewer, jeez.”
And it did: the air inside the house was musty, but beyond that, there was an overpowering smell of… well, something unmentionable.
We made our way through the house, from room to room. We found the source of the stench. The commode in the bathroom off the hall had been used, several times by the look of it, and hadn’t been flushed. Mike turned the water faucet: nothing.
“The water’s turned off,” he said, stating the obvious.
The rest of the rooms, with one exception, were completely empty. In one of the bedrooms were two pieces of furniture: a king-size bed and a nightstand. The bed was unmade, the covers rumpled, turned back. The bottom sheet was stained and I could see several long brown hairs on the pillows. Two glasses, one half full of some sort of clear liquid, were on the nightstand beside the bed.
Willis stepped into the room, lifted the glass to his nose, sniffed, and then replaced it.
“Sprite, I think. Flat. Several days old, at least.”
He walked to the far side of the bed and lifted the covers.
He slowly shook his head. “This has seen a lot of action.” He looked at me. “Stains, lots of them.”
“Semen?”
“Yeah, looks like it.”
“DNA, then?”
“Yeah, for sure. When the guys get finished in the barn, I’ll have ‘em start in here…” he looked around. “We’re talking several days’ work, at least. Prints? I can have Margo run them as we find them. The rest? We won’t know much until the work is complete. For now, I suggest you go home and get some rest. I’ll call if I find anything significant. If not, we’ll talk tomorrow, at the office.”
