by A. E. Howe
Should I go in? The law was a little fuzzy here. Could I claim that I had a compelling reason? Was concerned for the occupant’s safety? Maybe, but the best course would be to walk around the house and look for further evidence that would make any reasonable person concerned enough to enter the house.
I started around the side of the house. The lawn was neat and tidy. Hedges made it a chore to get in close enough to peek through the windows, but I managed to do it while getting snagged and poked by the holly bushes. The windows were shut tight. I could see a few lights on, but nothing looked out of place. Then halfway around the side of the house I caught the first whiff.
I gave up on the windows and started following the smell. It seemed to be coming from the back of the house where I could see a screened-in pool. The odor was much stronger now. Is it time for the radio or the gun? the cop part of my brain asked. Whatever it was had been dead a while. The smell was worse than any dead body I’d ever encountered and that was saying a lot.
When I could see the entire pool area I noticed a glass on the side of the hot tub. Reluctantly, I made my way to the screen door. The odor was almost a physical barrier now. I had to force myself to open the door and go near the hot tub.
What I saw made my whole body convulse. I ran outside to a nearby flowerbed, falling down in the plants as I vomited until my stomach was empty. Finally, I was able to call in the dead body that was boiling in a stew of its own flesh.
Cops, firefighters, EMTs and morticians all deal with death through the liberal use of black humor and Vick’s Vapor Rub. But today no one made snide remarks or crude jokes. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but this scene was too gruesome. No amount of vapor rub under the nose could quite wipe out the stench of boiled flesh. Everyone just wanted to get their jobs done, go home and get under a hot shower.
“Dr. Darzi’s here,” Pete told me. I was leaning against a pine tree, well upwind of the hot tub.
“Bet he loved getting called out on a Saturday.”
“Actually, he looked pretty excited,” Pete said. I gave him a hard look. “I’m serious. Guess he gets tired of the same old car accidents, stabbings and shootings. Me, on the other hand, you could have left off your call list. Not that I wasn’t working anyway.”
“How were the interviews going?”
“I talked with two of the women. Neither of them had anything new to add, and I felt like shit for asking them to think about it again. But they both said they’d call me if they thought of anything else.”
He nodded toward the pool. “You think this was our suspect?”
“How the hell do I know?” I grumbled, irrationally irritated by the question.
“Yeah, what a mess.”
“Sorry. I went through the house while I was waiting on everyone. No one else is here. I didn’t find a cell phone or any indication of where the other occupants are.”
“The only thing for sure is that it was only one body in the tub. And the hair was short.”
“Yeah. I’m figuring it was male, but…” I shrugged. “Guess we ought to go back over there,” I said reluctantly and started back.
Within a hundred feet of the enclosure there was no safety in being upwind. Will the smell ever come out of this place? I wondered. I could see Dr. Darzi, wearing a hazmat suit, carefully fishing around in the tub. They had raised the body, or at least what was left of it, out of the water and laid it on a huge plastic sheet that was draped over a stretcher. A camera on a tripod was focused on the hot tub, making a gruesome record of the recovery of the body and its parts. I could see Shantel and Marcus bagging and tagging items around the pool deck.
Darzi finally lifted something small and square out of the water. A cell phone. One of his assistants came forward with a plastic evidence bag and Darzi dropped the phone into it. He noticed me and stood up, waving.
When he was standing next to Pete and me, he took off his helmet and mask. “What a gruesome discovery you made.”
“Can you tell us anything?” I asked.
“It’s a male. Between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five would be my guess. Most of the skin has sloughed off, which makes it hard to tell if he has any bruising, cuts or ligature marks. His hair is brown and he’s five-foot ten, roughly. Normal weight. Be very glad he wasn’t overweight or this would have been much worse.”
“That’s hard to imagine,” Pete said.
“Believe me, if the tub had been filled with fat… far worse. As it is, one of my interns threw up.” He pointed to the area in the flowerbed where I’d lost my lunch. “He got to the same place you did. Trying to keep it all together. And you all weren’t the only ones.”
“Anything else?” I asked, trying to move the subject away from retching lest I start dry-heaving again. As it was, I was never going to be able to eat one of Winston’s barbecue wraps again.
“When we get the parts back to the morgue, I’ll be able to tell you a bit more. A toxin screen will give us blood alcohol and drug levels. We’ll be able to determine if he was stabbed or shot.” He shrugged.
“I’d appreciate…” I started.
He held up his hand. “You don’t need to tell me to put a rush on it. We have to autopsy a body in this condition as quickly as possible.”
“Can you give us an approximate time of death?”
“A couple of days? The temperature of the water was one hundred and eighteen degrees. I know a researcher at the body farm in Tennessee. I’ll give him a call and see if they have any data that can help me narrow it down. But I think we’ll be lucky to put it in a twenty-four-hour window. Unlike a body out in the open, insects couldn’t get to our victim. And insects are one of our best clues once we’re beyond what the body’s temperature can tell us.” He was sounding a bit like the college lecturer he was on some days.
“I know you’ll do your best.”
“We did recover a phone.”
“So we might get an earliest possible time of death from it.”
“Ha, can’t wait to see the IT folks when they unbag that little stink bomb,” Pete said.
“Yeah, I might warn them,” I offered. “We really need the numbers off of it.”
“Tallahassee police are helping us track down someone from,” Pete looked down at his phone, “Rambling Oaks Productions, the Conways’ company, to get a contact number for the parents.”
“If his parents can provide dental records, it will be faster than DNA. If it’s their son, that is,” Darzi said.
“We’ll follow up on that as soon as we find the parents.”
Chapter Thirteen
An hour later we had a number for Mel Conway. I dialed, got voicemail and left a message for a call back as soon as possible. Five minutes after I hung up, my phone rang.
“Conway here, what’s up?” He sounded suspicious.
“I’m Deputy Macklin, an investigator with the Adams County Sheriff’s Office.” I’d tried to think of the best way to put the rest of what I had to tell him. Not knowing if it was his son, I decided to proceed with caution. “I’m checking on the welfare of your family, Mr. Conway. Could you tell me where your wife and son are?”
“What do you mean you’re checking on their welfare? My wife is right here with me.”
“And where are you?”
“What the hell is this all about?”
“Please bear with me. We’re trying to figure this out too.”
“We’re in Panama City. We just finished filming a commercial. Figure out what?”
“And your son?”
“Hard to say with him. He’s supposed to be at home watching the place. What’s happened? Has our house burned down or something? That would be just like him.”
“Mr. Conway, you need to come home. We found a body at your house. We haven’t identified it yet. It might not be your son,” I told him, but the odds seemed to be going up that it was.
“You don’t know?” Conway’s voice was shaky. “There are pictures of him in the house
.”
“I’m afraid the body isn’t recognizable.” I didn’t want to go into the horrid details on the phone.
“I see.”
“If you could come home immediately, that would be a great help. However, you’ll want to arrange to stay with friends or at a hotel. I’m afraid your house is currently designated as a crime scene.” Gee, was there any other bad news I could give him?
“I see,” he repeated, then went quiet for a moment or two. “Okay, I can leave all of this to be packed up by Edgar. Maya and I can be there in a couple hours.” I looked at my watch. Two hours would put them back at eight o’clock.
“I’ll meet you at your house,” I told him, hanging up.
I’d texted Cara earlier and told her I’d be running late. Now I figured I didn’t have any choice but to call her. I didn’t want to call her, because I knew that the best thing would be for her to go home. I wouldn’t be in any mood to be sociable when I got home, which probably wouldn’t be until ten at least. I sighed and called.
“Hey! Where are you?” she asked cheerily.
“I found a body. And now I’m waiting for the parents, who are down in Panama City and won’t be here for another couple of hours.”
“That sucks. Is there anything I can do?”
“Honestly, you might as well go home.”
“Why?” She sounded hurt, which seemed unfair. I just wanted to spare her from my foul mood.
“Because I’m not going to be much fun when I do get home.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“Well, I do.”
“I don’t mind…”
“Cara, I’ve had a shitty day. I just want to go to bed when I get home,” I said more harshly than I meant to.
My mind was going over all of the plates I was juggling: whatever the hell was going on with Matt; the rapist that might or might not still be on the loose; Deputy Nichols, who was lying to us about shooting Ayers; all the political fallout that was going to come down on Dad; and now this horrific death. I just wanted to have some time where I didn’t have to think… about anything.
“We don’t have to talk. I’m happy to just be with—”
I couldn’t argue with her about this anymore. I couldn’t think of a way to explain it to her without hurting her feelings, so I did the obvious thing and hurt her feelings.
“Just go home,” I said, and instantly felt the cold chill come through the cell phone. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” I added hastily, already feeling like crap.
“Okay then. Bye.” She hung up before I could say anything more.
I stared at my phone, wondering what I should do. I was too frustrated and tired to call her back, even though not calling was going to eat at me.
I looked up to see Pete walking toward me, texting at the same time.
“What’s wrong? Besides all the obvious,” he asked. Then he saw the dejected look on my face as I put away my phone. “Oh, new relationship angst.”
“Not in the mood,” I growled.
He held up his hands in surrender. “We’ve got time to catch some dinner before the parents get here.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” My stomach wasn’t even close to ready for food. But Pete had almost three hundred pounds to nourish and one sautéed dead body wasn’t going to put him off.
“I hear you. Look, I’ll go and bring you something back… Maybe some crackers? A PowerBar? You got to eat something or you’re going to collapse. And you better put on a heavier coat too.”
I realized that I could see his breath. “Okay, just bring me back a Coke and a couple PowerBars.”
After he left I went back and stood outside the pool enclosure where Shantel and Marcus were almost finished collecting evidence. The sun had fallen below the horizon and the area was lit by the house’s exterior spotlights and the crime scene work lights. I watched as Marcus made a final sweep of the pool deck and Shantel continued to fish in the murky soup at the bottom of the hot tub. They had managed to find the drain on the pump, but the last four or five inches of disgusting muck refused to drain out.
Shantel stood up suddenly, something small gripped in her glove, then washed the item off in the bucket of fresh water they had for that purpose. She held the item up to the camera before she put it in an evidence bag. Spotting me, she came through the screen door and headed my direction.
The smell reached me when she was still twenty feet away. I held up my hand.
“I’m sorry, but that’s close enough,” I told her.
Shantel took off her helmet and almost retched when the full force of the odor hit her. “Oh, Jesus, save me,” she said. She held out the bag in her hand. Then, realizing I was serious about not letting her get any closer, she set it on the ground. I took out my flashlight and approached the bag, waving her back.
“The odor’s not that bad,” Shantel said. I gave her the eye. “Okay, it’s pretty horrible. Guess I’ve got to go back to the office and get a shower before I go home,” she said, shaking her head. “Oh, that’s a ring. I found it at the bottom of the hot tub. Leon High School class ring. His name is on the inside.”
I stopped looking at the ring. “Why show it to me if you’re just going to tell me everything about it?”
“Well, ain’t you in the mood tonight? Hey, I’m out here too. I’m not exactly enjoying spending a Saturday night fishing around in human muck for the department.” Shantel never let anyone give her lip.
“Sorry. This hasn’t been a good week and this is pretty much the icing on the cake. Not the ring. The body.”
“Tell me about it.” Shantel kept her ear close to the tracks and always knew what was going on in the department. “I know the sheriff’s in for a hard ride. But he’ll get through it.”
She had a fondness for Dad, who had recognized her and Marcus as the unsung heroes of our crime scene unit. He never hesitated to give them the credit they deserved and, more to the point, he made sure they got a salary that would keep them happy and on the job.
“Rumor has it that you’ve found a girl who’ll go out with you,” Shantel kidded me. The look on my face must have told her all she needed to know. “Oh, so it’s like that.”
“It’s like nothin’,” I told her.
“She does what? Works for Dr. Barnhill? It’s hard to be the SO of a cop or a fireman. Takes a lot of patience. Not many women are happy to learn that a job comes before them.”
“I told you, it’s not… Well, maybe it is like that, but it’s complicated,” I said, trying not to be too prickly with Shantel. Something I should have worked harder on when I was talking to Cara.
“No, honey, it’s not complicated. You’re a deputy and you want to be with a woman, so you got to work twice as hard as a man with a normal job.” She stuck her hand up to stop me replying. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
I thanked her for the ring. She helped Marcus pack up and they left before Pete got back, leaving me sitting all alone in the cold, hungry and covered in the stench of death. Oh, yeah, I had myself a little pity party. Even when you know it’s stupid, counterproductive and selfish, sometimes it’s hard not to feel sorry for yourself. Tonight, on top of everything else, I was feeling bad for being a jerk. But deep down there was a dumbass telling me that I had a right to be a jerk. I was glad to see Pete drive up so I could quit talking to myself.
Chapter Fourteen
We were sitting in my car with the heat running when the Conways’ SUV came up the drive. I took a last swallow of Coke and we got out to meet them
“Can we go inside?” Mel Conway asked.
“Of course. But we can’t let you move about in the house by yourselves. We’ll be done with the house and grounds by Monday afternoon or Tuesday. But if you want to get anything this evening, we’ll be glad to help you.”
“I just want to use the restroom and have something to drink,” Conway said, looking at his wife, who just nodded.
Pete and I followed them into the house.
It was a half hour before we were all seated around the kitchen table.
“I don’t understand,” Maya Conway said, sounding confused and frightened. She was petite with an olive complexion and straight black hair. I’d learned from the DMV information I’d pulled up on them that she was over fifty, but looking at her I would have guessed much younger.
“We can’t be positive that the body we found is your son’s until we’ve had a chance to compare his dental records or, barring that, compared his DNA.”
“Couldn’t we see him? Surely we can tell you if it’s our son,” Mel offered. We had tried to avoid going into details about the condition of the body.
“You don’t want to see the body,” I said firmly, looking squarely into Mr. Conway’s eyes. He flinched, but took my meaning.
“We did find a ring with the body.”
Both of the Conways looked at me as though I was going to throw them a life preserver. Evidence that this was someone else’s nightmare. I pulled out the bag and set it on the table. Both of them reached for it at the same time.
“Don’t open the bag,” I said. I didn’t really think the ring had an ounce of trace evidence on it, after what it had been through, but I didn’t want them opening the bag and letting the smell of death into the room.
When they looked at the ring their faces told me everything I needed to know.
“The ring wasn’t found on the body.” I hated myself for giving them hope that was almost surely false.
“He always wore that ring,” his father said in a tone flat with shock.
“How could this have happened?” Maya Conway asked everyone and no one at the same time.
“Right now we don’t know much.”
“He took drugs sometimes. Bought drugs,” Mel said.
“What type of drugs was he taking?” Pete asked, his voice calm and sympathetic.
“Nothing really. Pot, a little pot, and I think cocaine.” His mother was used to defending him.
“Amphetamines sometimes too. We got him into rehab once.”
“It was recreational. He could hold down a job.”
