by Joe McKinney
“Too bad they didn’t have this kind of security before this happened,” Anderson said.
“Yeah. Well, at least the press won’t be getting in. God, can you imagine this footage playing out on the six o’clock news?”
Actually, yeah, Anderson thought. He’d been thinking about exactly that, as a matter of fact. He’d been thinking about Jenny Cantrell sitting on her couch, trying her best to hold it together after learning of Ram’s death, then having the news come on with this mess. Jesus, what was he going to tell her about this?
He rolled down his window, and the campus police officer leaned in.
“You guys from SAPD?”
Both Anderson and Levy held out their IDs. “Homicide,” Anderson said.
“Okay, sir,” the officer said, and stepped back. He waved them through, and Anderson drove on.
“Chuck,” Anderson said, “what in the hell are we gonna tell Jenny? Have you thought about that yet?”
“I thought about it,” Levy said. “I thought about it, and I have absolutely no fucking clue.”
They drove in silence down the winding tree-lined road that Anderson had driven just a day before. Ahead of them they could see a circus of red and blue lights. There were police cars and evidence technician vehicles parked all over the place. Uniforms were setting up barricades and marking off safe lanes for entering and exiting the scene. Anderson parked out of the way and watched the show.
“There’s Allen,” Levy said.
Anderson spotted the deputy chief easily enough. He was the only suit in a sea of uniforms, and he looked agitated. Poor guy’s probably had even less sleep than me last couple of days, Anderson thought. And that ain’t much.
“You ready for this?” Levy asked.
“I guess. Ready as I’ll ever be.” He shook his head. “Jesus, this is something else.”
***
As Anderson stepped through the barricades and onto the lawn in front of the morgue, he saw Allen talking with a group of people in plain clothes. He recognized several of them as investigators with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office Homicide Unit. A few he knew by name; others, he just recognized their faces.
Levy joined him on the front steps and together they walked inside the lobby. Anderson stopped just inside the doorway and waited for a pretty young evidence technician to get the picture she was trying to take. He stood there and took in the scene.
There were four bodies in all, and he knew all of them. The two young women both had their eyes open. One of them, Julia Culpepper, was on her stomach in the middle of the doorway that led back into the rest of the building, one leg holding the door open. The other young woman was slumped against the wall to his left. Her head was turned towards them, her eyes and mouth open in a gesture of surprise that Anderson found both disturbing and pitiful. He could only imagine what she must have been thinking at the last moment, how scared she must have been. There was a nasty gash on the side of her head that Anderson guessed was caused by the melon-sized rock in the middle of the floor. They’d have to confirm that during her autopsy, of course, but it looked pretty obvious to him. A few feet in front of her, one hand close enough he might have been able to touch the heel of Melinda’s right shoe, was the body of Randy Sprouse. He’d known Sprouse for twenty years, and as he stared down at the body he thought, I was at your retirement party. Jesus H. Christ.
Off in the far corner, sagged down between two heavy couches, was the body of David Everett. He was dressed in a filthy white t-shirt and blue jeans and sneakers with no socks. The t-shirt had a bib of blood and brain matter down the front. There was a hole under his chin and one arm was slung limply over the arm of a couch.
Melinda Sanchez’ gun was on the floor in front of him.
“Whose footprints are these?” Anderson asked, pointing at the tread print on a piece of broken glass in the middle of the room.
Levy looked at the glass. “Looks like a Hi Tech boot print. Probably from one of the Patrol officers who made initial entry. I talked to him out front. He said he came here, saw the scene, then called for backup. Once they got back up, they did a protective sweep of the rest of the building.”
Anderson nodded. “I’d like to confirm his print just the same.”
“Okay.”
“I saw you talking with Bexar County Homicide. What are they doing here?”
Levy walked on his tiptoes through the crime scene. He made it to the door held open by Julia Culpepper’s left leg and turned back to Anderson.
“You know Dylan Hodges and Wayne Taliaferro?”
“I know Dylan.”
“Apparently, Dylan Hodges was dating this girl here.” He pointed at Julia with his toe.
“Oh man, that sucks.”
“Yeah.”
Anderson knelt down in front of David Everett and looked into the man’s eyes. He was staring off into the nothingness beyond Anderson’s right shoulder.
“What are you thinking?” Levy asked him.
“I’m thinking how badly we misjudged this one. Looking at him in the witness room, I never would have thought he could do this.”
“None of us did, Keith.”
“Yeah, but it still doesn’t make it any easier, you know?”
Levy said, “Yeah, I know.”
Anderson rubbed his chin, deep in thought.
After a long silence, he said, “You played us, didn’t you? That whole time you were sitting in the interview room, pretending to be all spaced out, you were playing us. You were a part of this the whole time.”
***
Down in the autopsy room, there were three bodies on the waiting tables. The doors to the coolers were standing open. They were propped open with towels, just like every other door between here and the front lobby. Anderson stood in the middle of the autopsy room and looked around. From where he stood, he could see into the coolers. There were a few bodies in there as well.
“My guess is these bodies that are still here didn’t come from the Morgan Rollins crime scene,” he said to Levy.
“Do you recognize any of these guys from there?”
“No,” Anderson said. “We’ll have to check it for sure, but I’m willing to bet that whoever took the bodies from here knew who they were looking for. I don’t think we’ll find any of our Morgan Rollins victims here.”
“Why would they take the bodies?” Levy said, and shuddered. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe not to us.”
“But you think it makes sense to somebody?”
“It must. Why else would they do it?”
Anderson walked over to the coolers. The fluorescents in this place were cheap, or maybe just old, and they cast a sickly bluish light on the tiled floor. But even in the bad light, Anderson could see there was something there.
He knelt down next to the cooler door and stared at the floor.
“What is it?” Levy asked.
“Can you get one of the evidence technicians down here?” he said. “It’s more of that black soot we found on Everett’s hands.”
***
Anderson watched an evidence technician dab the tiled floor with a cotton swab. He held the swab up so that Anderson could see and said, “You think that’s enough?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Anderson said.
“Okay.”
The technician, a young man with GUERRA written in bold white letters above the pocket of his utility uniform, dropped the swab into a clear plastic envelope, peeled off the self-adhesive strip, folded the flap over to seal it, then wrote his initials across the seal with a magic marker.
“Is there any more of it?” Guerra asked.
“No, I don’t think so.”
Guerra walked towards the door that led to the upstairs, and Anderson watched him go, his mind starting to drift. He was thinking about his oldest son, Keith Jr., and the weekend he’d spent a few years ago helping the boy move into his first college dorm room. Keith Jr.’s room had been on the third floor of a s
habby 1950s era building, and the weekend he’d moved in, the elevators had been out. They’d moved a pickup truck full of stuff up three flights of steps, back and forth, all day long, and by the time they were done, they’d worn a black trail into the carpet with all the dirt they’d dragged in.
“Stop!” he yelled. “Hey, hold it a second.”
Levy gave him a look. “What is it, Keith?”
“Hold on a second, Chuck.” Anderson went to the doorway. To Guerra, he said, “Come back here a second, will you?”
“Sure,” Guerra answered. “What is it?”
“Let me see one of your swabs, will you?”
He handed Anderson an extra swab from his kit and Anderson knelt down and rubbed it on the floor. It came away with the same black soot as the first swab.
“Damn it,” he said. “Let me see your flashlight.”
Guerra took a Mini Stinger from his belt and handed it to Anderson. Anderson knelt down again and shined the light at an oblique angle to the floor. In the beam, he could see more of the soot. He moved to the doorway and did the same thing down the hallway.
“What is it?” Levy asked.
“Damn it,” Anderson said. He hung his head and muttered, “Damn it.” Then he stood up and handed the flashlight back to the evidence technician. “Any idea how many people have been through here since this incident started?” he asked.
Guerra said, “I don’t know. Probably about fifteen.”
“Damn it,” he muttered.
“You mind telling me what the problem is?” Levy asked.
“That soot is everywhere down here. There’s a trail of it that leads from here all the way down the hallway. Probably goes up the stairs and out the front door, too. But we’ve walked all over it now.” He laughed at himself. “Damn it,” he said. “Sometimes I feel like such a fucking amateur.”
***
Anderson and Levy walked back up to the lobby. The bodies had been moved, all but Everett’s, and now there was nothing in the lobby but broken glass and a spent shell casing and a bunch of numbered metal tents to mark the various locations of pieces of evidence.
Levy said, “Well, what do you think? Allen’s gonna want your first impressions.”
“First impressions, huh?” Anderson thought, My first impression is that I don’t have the slightest fucking clue what’s going on. But what he said was, “I think it’s pretty obvious we’re dealing with a group of people here. How many I don’t know, but those bodies had to go someplace, and that means somebody had to load them into some kind of vehicle. My guess is they had some kind of van parked out here in the parking lot. They used those towels we saw to hold open the doors, and they came and went through here like you would if you were moving furniture. That’s why that black soot was spread out like it was. They must have traipsed it in with them as they were moving the bodies out of here.”
“Okay,” Levy said, “I can see that. But what about Everett there? How does he play into this?”
“Beats me,” Anderson said. “It looks like he shot himself, but why he did it, and when he did it, is anybody’s guess at this point.”
Anderson scanned the crowd in the parking lot and his gaze found Allen. He was with two other members of the SAPD Command Staff and they were talking to a fourth man Anderson didn’t recognize. Actually, they weren’t really talking. Allen was doing the talking, nearly yelling, in fact, and the fourth man was standing there with his head hung low like he was a kid about to be sent to his room.
“What do you mean, when he did it? We have it on the video monitor. Well the sound of it anyway.”
Everett had been standing in a spot the video cameras didn’t cover, though they had picked up the gun’s report.
Anderson turned back to Levy. “I was just wondering if he helped the others move the bodies. I don’t see any of that black soot on his hands.”
“You think it’s possible he didn’t shoot himself?”
“At this point I just don’t know, Chuck. Hey, who’s that with Allen over there?”
“No clue. He doesn’t look happy, though.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
Anderson took a deep breath. He was thinking about Jenny Cantrell again and what this was going to be like for her. Poor woman; it just kept piling up.
“Hey Keith?” Levy was at Anderson’s side now, talking low, almost in a whisper. “Tell me something. We got goats with their hearts cut out. We got a detective with a goat’s heart stuck in his chest cavity and his own heart God knows where. Now we’ve got missing bodies. Tell me, do you think we’re dealing with some kind of cult?”
Anderson thought about that. It did make more sense than any other idea they had come up with so far. A lot of the sickness of all this was easier to digest when you started talking about cults. Cults were strange. They got people to do things they would never do on their own. Look at the Heaven’s Gate people killing themselves so they could join up with the UFO mother ship. Look at Charles Manson talking his “family” into committing mass-murder. Look at Jim Jones talking nine hundred and something people into committing mass-suicide. You saw that kind of craziness, and the things they were dealing with suddenly seemed a little less crazy.
“Certainly seems like a cult thing, doesn’t it?” Anderson said. “We ought to get somebody from the office to contact the FBI and see if they can crosscheck their files for similar crimes. If it’s a cult, there’s bound to be some kind of precedent.”
Allen joined them then. He was wearing a crisp gray suit, white shirt, and blue and gold tie. His expression was smooth and reserved, but there was anger in his eyes.
“You guys find anything,” he said.
“More of that black soot,” Anderson said. “Whoever took the bodies must have had it on them.”
Allen looked at the body of David Everett in the corner and shook his head. “This is unbelievable,” he said. “Un-fucking-believable.”
“Yes, sir,” Anderson said.
“Do you know who that guy is over there? The one in the blue suit?”
He was pointing at the man Anderson had seen him talking to. Anderson told him that he didn’t recognize him.
“That’s Edgar Gantz. He’s the Chief of the campus police. You know what he just told me?”
“What?”
“You’re gonna love this. I figured whoever took those bodies had to have brought a van or something in here to do it. Am I right? You don’t move forty-something bodies in a fucking Hyundai, right? So I ask him if he can have somebody go through the records. You know, try to get a list of all the vans that came and went through here tonight.”
“And?” Anderson asked. He was almost afraid to hear the answer.
“He tells me they were short-handed last night. They only had three guards working, and he was at the main gate. You know how many other gates there are to this place?”
Anderson shook his head.
“Eight. They had one patrol car working last night. You know what that means?”
Levy said, “Sounds like nobody saw a damn thing.”
“Bingo,” Allen said.
Anderson said, “I’m almost afraid to ask about the video cameras.”
Allen pointed at the three buildings behind him. From where they stood they could see the backs of each. There were generators and Dumpsters and loading docks and a paved runway leading straight on through between them.
“There are no cameras back here,” Allen said. “Can you believe that? This is supposed to be a secure facility. God, we’re gonna look like fools when this gets out.”
Allen scanned the scene again, then turned back to Anderson. “You said you found some more of that black soot. What’s that all about?”
Anderson glanced at Levy, and he would have laughed if it hadn’t been happening to him.
***
As they were heading back to the car, Anderson’s cell phone rang.
“Hold on a sec,” he said to Levy. “This is Margie.”
/> He answered. “Hey babe, what’s up?”
“What’s up? Jesus. How about you fucking tell me, Keith. Jesus Christ, why in the hell didn’t you say anything to me about this when you left this morning? You knew, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
“Margie, wait. Hold on, would you? What are you talking about?”
“You know damn well what I’m talking about. Jesus, Keith. I get over here to Jenny’s house this morning and I find her crying her eyes out. She tells me Ram’s body’s missing from the morgue. Is that true, Keith? Tell me that’s not true. Somebody’s playing a really shitty joke on her. Tell me that.”
Anderson stopped. He didn’t answer for a long time. Levy was already at the car, but when he saw Anderson wasn’t with him, he stopped and looked back.
“What is it?” he asked.
Anderson held up a finger for him to wait.
“Keith?” Margie said.
Anderson took a deep breath and said, “Yeah, Margie, it’s true. Somebody, a group of people, we think, killed three Medical Examiner’s Office investigators last night and took all the bodies from the Morgan Rollins crime scene.”
“Including Ram?”
“Yes, including Ram. Raul Herrera, too. The other detective who was with Ram.”
“Oh my God,” Margie said. “Why? Why would anybody do that?”
“We don’t know.”
Levy was standing next to him now. He said, “What happened? Does she know?”
Anderson nodded.
“Fuck! How? Who told her?”
“Margie,” Anderson said. “How did Jenny find out?”
“What difference does that make? You should have told me, Keith. She deserves more than that, Keith?”
“Margie, please. I know. Just tell me. How did she find out?”
“Steve Garwin called her an hour ago. Keith, you knew about this before that. Why didn’t you tell me?”
