Two Parts Bloody Murder

by Jen J. Danna

  “Sure.” Kiko knelt down and opened up her camera bag, drawing out the big SLR they used for crime scenes.

  “The Crime Scene guys have already done that,” Leigh reminded him.

  “I’m sure they have, but I bet they were shooting the remains. I want those too, but what I’m thinking of is the wall. If the vic was alive when he was bricked up, there might be evidence of an attempt to escape. We’ll destroy that evidence when we pull down the wall.”

  Leigh winced at the thought, but nodded.

  “You understand what I need, Kiko?” Matt asked.

  Kiko patted the body of the camera lens. “Help me get in there. I’ll get your shots.”

  “Great. Now—” He stopped short when a voice echoed down the stairs.

  “Hello!”

  Leigh’s wide gaze met his. “Rowe?”

  They waited while the sound of clattering footfalls came closer. Seconds later, Rowe appeared in the doorway. “Am I late? You said you were meeting at nine.”

  “We got started early,” Leigh said. “It’s Sunday morning. I didn’t think you were coming.”

  Rowe gave her a flat look. “You really thought I was going to miss this?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Damn straight.” Rowe crossed the room. “Just getting started, Lowell?”

  “We are.” Matt picked up a heavy steel mallet and a cold chisel by the handles and held them out to the medical examiner. “In the mood to get a little dirty this morning?”

  “You bet.” Rowe took the mallet, swinging it up lightly to rest on his shoulder.

  Matt picked up the other set of tools. “Let’s get started then.”

  Sunday, 9:27 a.m.

  The Adytum Building

  Lynn, Massachusetts

  “That’s far enough!” Matt set down his mallet, head down, on the floor. “I don’t want to lose any more of the wall if we can help it.” Wiping the sweat from his brow, he dragged the mallet out of the way, leaning the handle against a crate.

  Leigh eyed the wall; the remaining section was less than three feet high. “You think that’s enough?”

  “I’d rather leave it as intact as possible. It’s low enough now I can climb over the top and get in there. I don’t want to risk the wall losing stability and falling onto the remains. Kiko, one more round of photos, then I want to have a good look before we start packing the remains for transport.”

  They all waited while Kiko took the last set of pictures. “That should do it,” she said, stepping back. “Matt, you’re sure you don’t want me to get in there? I’m the smallest of all four of us.” His cheeks warmed as her gaze moved up and down his body, even though it was clearly a clinical evaluation. “You’re going to have trouble fitting your shoulders in that gap.”

  “If I get stuck, I’ll wave a white flag.” He bent over to hide his discomfort, pulling out a Tyvek jumpsuit and concentrating on pulling it on over clothes now covered in grit from demolishing the wall.

  “Just offering. You know where to find me if you change your mind.” She grinned and bent down to put the camera away.

  Matt zipped up the suit and then swung one leg over the threshold, carefully balancing on his toes. “Paul, give me a hand. I’m not sure how stable the wall is now and I don’t want to knock it down.” Paul moved to stand beside him and Matt braced his hand on the younger man’s shoulder, keeping some of his weight off the bricks as he slid over the top. Reaching down with a booted foot, he found a clear section of wood floor and slowly transferred his weight. Swinging his other leg over, he settled into the tomb.

  Carefully placing his boots, he crouched down on the balls of his feet, having to stay nearly parallel to the wall to allow his upper body to fit inside the two foot gap. He glanced up at Kiko, who was smirking.

  “Maybe you should lay off the rowing a bit,” she suggested.

  “Not going to happen.” Finding his balance, he turned to the remains. The victim had been lying with the upper body partially rolled on its side at the time of death, one hand pressed to the wall, the lower arm thrown over its head. The ribs had fallen in a tumbled scatter as the body slowly settled and dissociated. The leg bones were stretched out, a few ankle bones still tucked into the uppers of cracked leather shoes lying pressed against the end wall. Delicate bits of cloth settled over raised sections of bone: dark, thickly woven wool from a suit and the fine weave of a cotton shirt, once probably white, but now stained and aged to a light mocha. He touched a gloved index finger to the edge of a piece of wool and it crumbled to dust. Scanning along the body to the phalanges of the right hand still pressed to the brick, his stomach dipped at the sight of deep shadowed gouges in the mortar of the outside wall and the small spots of dark staining on some of the lighter bricks. Picking up a distal phalange, he turned it into the light, immediately finding subtle abrasions on the very end. He tried not to imagine the horror of lying in the dark, feeling the grainy mortar squeeze through your trembling hands, clawing at the wall until your fingers bled and you scraped bone. Tearing and kicking at the four walls of your own tomb. He pushed the thought away, concentrating on the purely scientific appraisal of the victim before him as he set the small bone back into place.

  “Better analysis back in the lab but here’s your preliminary report.” Matt paused as Leigh pulled out her notebook and pen. “The skeleton is fully articulated and appears to be totally intact. The long bones are all fused, so it’s an adult, but I need to get a look the pubic symphysis and a better look at the skull sutures to be more specific about age.” He studied the pelvis and then shifted to bend over the skull. “Definitely male. Dentition as well as nasal aperture and bridge suggest he was white. I’ll confirm when I examine the palate.”

  “Shouldn’t he have mummified behind a wall like this?”

  Matt shook his head. “Mummification requires large amounts of dry air to desiccate the tissues rapidly before bacteria-induced putrefaction can set in. That didn’t happen here. And walled off like this, it’s doubtful any rodents or insects got to the body. He simply liquefied.” He pointed at a thick line of white powder below the ribs before crouching down. “Juka, hand me a spatula and a sample jar.”

  Juka pulled the items from his backpack and handed them over the wall.

  Matt loosened several small chunks of the dried powder, collecting them in the sample jar before handing it back. “We’ll run it on the mass spec.” He looked up at Leigh. “Back to the decomp process. We’re assuming this is a murder victim.”

  “Doubtful it’s a suicide,” Paul mumbled to Juka. “Pretty hard to brick yourself in like that.”

  Matt gave him a narrowed stare before turning back to Leigh. “As a murder victim, the body wouldn’t be embalmed, so decomp would have progressed normally. Do you see how this powder follows the contours of the body, almost like a chalk outline?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever this is, it was either on the body or under it and as the body putrefied and liquefied, it puddled with the body onto the floor.”

  “But where did it all go? The … puddle … I mean.”

  Matt rapped his knuckles on the plank floor. “It drained through the gaps. There might be a dirt floor under this. If so, it just percolated into the soil. If it’s a concrete foundation, then it settled there and dried. But notice the only scraps of material left are raised off the floor. And do you see this discoloration of the wood under the body? As decomp progressed, the putrefaction products on the floor became very alkaline. The puddle essentially dissolved all the natural fibers of the clothing and chemically burned the floor itself.”

  “Can you tell how long the remains have been here?”

  “That one’s going to be tougher,” Matt said. “If this body is from Prohibition times, I can’t use the atomic bomb curve because the bones pre-date it. But I could use a combination of uranium, polonium, and lead isotopes.”

  “Something doesn’t make sense to me,” Kiko said. “If he decomposed behind
the wall, how was it no one smelled anything? A brick wall and wood floor … there must have been some gas exchange with the room air.”

  “I can go one further,” Juka said. “How did no one notice a brand-new wall in this room?”

  “I think I can answer that,” Rowe said. “You guys missed what this room looked like when we found it on Friday.” Reaching into one of the open crates stacked against the side wall, he pulled out an empty whiskey bottle. “This was a storeroom. Whoever put up the wall only had to move whatever boxes were against that wall, brick in the victim, and then move the boxes back so the wall was essentially invisible. Unless someone had a very sharp eye, they might not notice the room suddenly got a few feet shorter. And remember what it was like back then. If anyone smelled decomp, they might have just assumed a rat died in the wall. But I’ll bet this place was always so full of cigarette smoke and sweat from all the bodies, the smell of decomp probably got lost. Certainly no one reported it back then.”

  “And clearly he didn’t get out on his own.” Leigh rested an arm lightly on the bricks and leaned in to peer over the edge. “Did he try?”

  Matt set a hand against her shoulder, gently pushing her back. “Watch the wall. Kiko, did you get all the shots we need?”

  “Yes.”

  Kiko’s relaxed expression told him she must not have been able to visualize the gouges through the camera’s two-by-three-inch display. Just say it. There’s no way to pretty it up. “There are several significant gouges in the mortar and some faded bloodstains on the brickwork. It wasn’t enough force to displace the bricks, but he knew what was happening to him and struggled to escape.”

  Kiko gave a small jerk, her face going pale. “That’s horrible. Did he starve to death?”

  “Assuming there wasn’t any trauma,” Rowe said, “which isn’t ruled out yet, he likely asphyxiated first. We can calculate the oxygen capacity of that space and a time frame.”

  “As far as trauma goes, we’ll have to examine the bones in the lab,” Matt said. “There’s no obvious fatal trauma, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any traumatic damage.” He noticed Juka staring fixedly at the remains of the wall, eyes narrowed and head tilted at a thoughtful angle. “Juka, what have you got?”

  Dark eyes rose slowly to his. “Have you ever built a brick wall?”

  “Myself? No.”

  “I helped my father do some repairs to our garage once so I have a little experience. Here’s the thing—mortar doesn’t set that fast. If the victim could claw at the wall, he probably could have pushed hard enough to displace the bricks and bring the whole thing down. So why didn’t he?”

  Paul leaned in to look again at the remains. “Any sign of rope remnants in there?”

  “Implying his hands were tied?” Matt shook his head. “Nothing visible. We’ll check under the remains once they’re moved, of course.”

  “I think it’s simpler than that,” Rowe said. He rapped his knuckles against a wooden crate. “This was a storeroom so there were plenty of crates in here to use to stack against the wall. Maybe the victim was unconscious when the wall started to go up. If the killer was skilled as a master bricklayer, he could probably put up a wall like this pretty quickly. Then all he’d have to do is stack a series of crates in front of the fresh wall.” He glanced upwards, squinting at the ceiling. “That’s nine, maybe ten feet high? He’d need to stand on something to finish the job anyway. So he built his own platform as he worked, immuring the victim behind the new wall. The victim was trapped no matter what he did.”

  “Awful way to go.” Stooping down again, Matt picked up a button from the floor by the ribs. “Shirt button?”

  “Too big,” Rowe said. “Maybe off a suit jacket?” He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and held out his hand for the button before turning it back and forth in the light. “It’s probably celluloid. Check out the gorgeous Art Deco styling. That by itself will help us date this man.”

  “Shoes and belt won’t help,” Matt said. “They look well made, but of standard style. Now this is off his shirt for sure.” He handed a silver cuff link inlaid with black enamel over the wall to Rowe.

  “Classy.”

  “Very.” A flash of gold caught his eye and Matt gave a low whistle. “Now this … this doesn’t look standard.” He held a ring up to the light: a huge square-cut, blood-red ruby set into a thick gold band, flanked by two square-cut diamonds. A sunburst was carved into the gold band on each side.

  “Whoa,” Paul breathed. “That thing is huge.”

  Matt held it up into the light, using an index finger to scrape some of the white powder out from inside the band. “It took a bit of a beating from being on the floor and flooded with all those decomp products. But all things considered, it’s in pretty good shape.” He squinted down at the band, angling it into the light beam and rubbed at it again. “There are initials inside the band. It looks like … C.W.?”

  Matt jerked when a hand clamped over his wrist. His gaze shot sideways to find Rowe standing just on the other side of the wall from him, his intense gaze fixed on the ring.

  “C.W.?” Rowe’s voice was strangely hoarse.

  Alarm mixed with confusion surged through Matt’s veins like ice water. “Does that mean something to you?”

  Instead of answering, Rowe took the ring, holding it up to the tripod light.

  Even though Matt was just on the other side of the half wall, he only barely caught Rowe’s mumbled words. It couldn’t be. “Couldn’t be what?”

  Rowe turned slowly, the ring looped over the first knuckle of his index finger. “Have any of you heard of a big local politician during the Depression who pulled a Jimmy Hoffa?”

  Leigh stepped forward and grasped Rowe’s gloved hand, angling it so the old-fashioned dull facet cuts caught the light. “Pulled a Jimmy Hoffa?”

  “Disappeared without a trace. His name was Charles Ward. Ward was a congressman and it was one of the worst kept secrets of the day that he had his eye on the White House. Even during the Depression, he had the money to take a run at it. He was also rumored to have ties to the Mob.”

  “You think this is Ward?” Matt stared down at the bones at his feet. “Buried behind a wall for all these years?”

  “It would explain his disappearance.”

  “You think it was a Mob hit?” Paul asked.

  Rowe frowned. “I guess that would depend on why they might want to kill him. But hidden behind a wall wasn’t really the Mob’s style. The Mob way back then was in the middle of the street with a Tommy gun. Any way we can trace this ring?”

  Leigh held out an evidence bag and Rowe dropped the ring into it. She sealed the bag and stared at the ring thoughtfully. “I can try to see if there are any family members still around.”

  “They might have photos of him and we can see if he’s wearing the ring,” Matt said. “Maybe the B.U. archive would also have photos.”

  “Can you get me a better description of our vic? An estimate of height and body build? Maybe a partial medical history?” she asked.

  “I can do all of that back in the lab. And I’ll get you an estimate of how long the bones have been here.”

  “I have a feeling finding out who he was may be the easy part.” She looked over the wall at her newest victim. “What happened to you? And who hated you so much they’d bury you alive?”

  CHAPTER SIX: THE UNTOUCHABLES

  * * *

  The Untouchables: a group of nine Prohibition agents recruited and led by Eliot Ness to fight organized crime in Chicago in 1929. The name “Untouchables” was coined by newspapers after multiple attempts by Al Capone to bribe members of the unit. Allegations of corruption in the unit likely stem from disbelief that agents earning $2800 per year would refuse $2000 per week in bribes, or that Frank Basile—Ness’s friend, assistant, and driver—was a reformed convict. The Untouchables were disbanded in 1931 after Al Capone’s conviction for tax evasion.

  Sunday, 3:12 p.m.

  Abbott Res
idence

  Salem, Massachusetts

  “You’re sure you don’t want to take a nap?” Leigh asked as they entered her kitchen.

  Matt set his duffel bag down on the floor by the door. “I’m fine.” It was a bald-faced lie and he knew it. He suspected she knew it too, but he wasn’t about to take an afternoon nap like a toddler, not when they were back together for the first time in days. “But I wouldn’t mind more caffeine.” His stomach gave a queasy, acidic roll at the thought of coffee, but he ignored it and pulled his laptop out of his bag.

  “You’re running on a mixture of adrenaline and caffeine already; no way am I giving you more. You need to ease back. How about something to eat instead? I have some leftover Chinese from last night I can warm up to hold us until dinner, since we never ate lunch.”

  “Sounds good.”

  They were just back from Boston, having transported the skeletal remains to Matt’s lab at Boston University. Once the bones were secured in the lab, Matt sent his students home with instructions to be back in the lab the next morning at nine o’clock to get started on the real examination. He and Leigh then drove back to Salem for a quiet dinner together.

  Matt pulled out a kitchen chair, more collapsing into it than sitting. Setting his laptop on the kitchen table, he booted up. “I’m curious about this Charles Ward character.”

  “I’m kind of half hoping it’s not him,” Leigh said from inside the fridge as she pulled out folded paper cartons.

  “Why?”

  “We had enough of a media circus in the Simpson case. The last thing I want is another victim that attracts attention.”

  Matt glanced up at her over the top of his screen. “You don’t want to trip over that reporter again.”

  “Jason Wells? Absolutely not. I’d be happy to stay off his beat forever.” She started dishing food onto plates.