14. Another Murder Scene

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Read Part 13

Gilbert surveyed the cheap formica countertop that took up most of the tiny kitchen in his rented apartment and the ingredients he had lined up carefully along its fake green-veined granite surface. Tomatoes, red onion, three kinds of peppers, blue cheese crumbles and the cheap bag of salad greens that would form the base for his dinner. He would have liked to have had a jar of sun dried tomatoes, but he was out and hadn’t been to the grocery. He would have to do with what he had.

He didn’t really care, from a culinary perspective. All of his salads seemed to taste pretty much the same, which he didn’t mind. It wasn’t the taste of a salad that attracted him to it, nor its lack of weight inducing calories. He thought of it as art. He had found over the many years he had lived on his own, that if you combined all of the right ingredients, you couldn’t help but have a satisfying outcome when it comes to a salad.

As it turned out, that rule didn’t always hold when it came to other forms of cooking because heat created its own problems. Even with all of the right ingredients, a mistake over the fire would render the result less than satisfying. In some cases, downright catastrophic. Salads, on the other hand, required no heat and had therefore become his culinary art form of choice. He was just dropping some sliced banana peppers into the salad bowl when his phone rang.

By the time he got to Eagan’s apartment building, the fire department’s trucks were already rolling away. He could see the crime tech’s bright lights shining from the window off the 4th floor corridor. He shook his head as he trotted up the front steps to the apartment building’s front door.

He couldn’t believe that Parme was right. He could see his partner waiting for him through the glass front door. They had cut Eagan loose and he had killed someone in his own building. He felt like a fool for falling for his act. As soon as he opened the door, the smoke hit his nostrils and he came up short.

“I didn’t know you smoked?” Gilbert said. “You stink!”

“It’s not me. And it’s about time you decided to come to work, Rookie. Come on,” Parme said as he turned to the stairwell. Gilbert fell in line behind him.

“The fire department responded to a building fire on the 4th floor. It was contained. Singleton said they smothered it with a blanket,” Parme said.

“Oh, Singleton’s here? I like him,” Gilbert replied.

“Great. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to hear it,” Parme said. “Where else would he be?”

“I can’t believe you were right about Eagan,” Gilbert said. “I guess he really was crazy. We never should have let him go.”

“For the record,” the older man said as they passed the third floor doorway and continued on up toward the fourth, “the lab is very rarely wrong. It’s not our job to second guess them, so the department did nothing wrong by releasing him.”

“Who is the victim?” Gilbert asked.

“Don’t know yet,” Gilbert said as they reached the fourth floor landing. “I hope it’s not another kid.” As soon as they opened the door to the fourth floor corridor, the stench hit them like a wall.

Wayne Singleton was standing in the door to Eagan’s apartment when the detectives arrived. He wore a mask and latex gloves. His shoes were covered with disposable booties.

“We’ve got to quit meeting like this,” he said through the mask.

“What have we got, Wayne?” Parme asked.

Singleton just nodded at the apartment’s open door and offered the detectives both masks. “You’ll want these. Have a look.”

As they neared the doorway, the smell got even worse, causing both men to slap the masks up over their mouths and noses. Gilbert’s eyes were starting to water. It was cold inside the room, suggesting that someone had opened up the windows in the back to disperse the smoke. It wasn’t working very well. Clouds of it still hung in the air, mostly in the vicinity of a pile of burned human remains just inside the doorway.

“Oh God,” Gilbert mumbled involuntarily. The floors and walls were covered with splattered blood, as was the furniture, except for a band on the bottom and back of the couch, where something must have been sitting and later removed. The stench was almost overwhelming. Parme donned the mask and started pulling on the latex gloves.

“Do you have an ID yet?” he asked.

“These remains belong to the resident, one Arlington C. Eagen. C for Conrad,” Singleton replied.

"Are you sure?" Parme asked.

Singleton nodded. "A victim of foul play, it would seem."

“Yeah?” Parme growled, though not unkindly. “What was your first clue? Shouldn’t you leave the detecting to the detectives?”

Singleton’s eyes suggested a smile over the mask. “Well, I suppose he could have set himself on fire, but probably not after bashing in his own skull and breaking most of his own bones with a blunt object.” He pointed to a large plastic bag that held a blood-stained crowbar.

Gilbert donned his mask and gloves and then asked a nearby tech for a pair of shoe covers. He looked at Singleton for permission and then, after receiving the nod, moved carefully into the room.

“We didn’t find a crowbar among Eagan’s possessions on our first visit, did we?” Parme asked. 

Singleton just shook his head. “It seems to have been left by the victim’s assailant.”

Gilbert had only gone a couple of steps into the room. He stopped and turned around to face the lead tech and his partner. “Well, that doesn’t make any sense.”

Something about this scene was altogether wrong. People who committed murder, unless it was purely motivated by passion, did not create unnecessary problems for themselves. Gilbert couldn’t imagine anyone getting that passionately angry over Eagan and yet this scene was filled with problems.

The assailant cooks the body in the middle of his apartment, absolutely guaranteeing that the body will be found immediately when the fire department responds, and then leaves the murder weapon to be found by the police? Gilbert shook his head. Cooking always causes problems; who doesn’t know this?

“Why didn’t he just leave the body?” he asked his partner. “Why burn it? It would have been days before anyone noticed that Eagan was missing. We had written him off and wouldn’t be surveilling him. The killer could have drug the body to the basement and it would have been months before the weather warmed up and the smell led someone to the body. This doesn’t make any sense.”

“Crazy people seldom do, Rookie.” Parme said quietly. “Besides, no one outside of the department knew we had written him off."

"Even so," Gilbert shook his head.

"But it looks like you were right about one thing," Parme continued. "We should have been asking who that other chair in the basement was for. It appears that Eagan had an accomplice. Someone who knew he was talking to us. He won’t be talking to us anymore.”

Down the hallway, someone opened one of the apartment doors and stepped into the hallway. Parme turned to tell whomever it was to remain in their apartment and out of the way, but then stopped. Singleton turned, too, and both men stared at Mark Boyle as he stood in the center of the hallway, looking like he’d just awoken from a nap.

He saw them staring at him and then slowly raised his hands to see them covered in dried blood. “What the…,” Boyle shook his head as if trying to clear it and then blinked his eyes. That’s all the time it took for the two police officers stationed at the far end of the hallway to tackle him.

From inside the apartment, Gilbert heard the scuffle in the hallway. He head a man yelling all of the things criminals always yell when they are arrested, but he had other things on his mind. He stood in the center of the room, fishing around in his pockets for the copies he had made of the cover of Eagan’s book. He unfolded the image and then turned slowly around the room. The rational part of his brain was feeling stupid, but something made him search the blood stains for the pattern that was engraved into the leather journal.

Finally, he found what he was looking for. Parme and Singleton were no longer in the doorway, so he called over the closest member of Singleton’s team.

Ronnie Smith answered his summons, his eyes narrowed over his disposable face mask. Detectives were always asking questions at crimes scenes that the techs were in no position to answer. The information had to be carefully gathered, transported back to the lab and then tested and considered before any clues would be revealed or meaningful conclusions could be drawn. Cops always wanted quick answers and in his line of work there were never any quick answers. Anyone who offered one was bound to be wrong.

“Yes, detective?” he asked cautiously.

“Could any of these bloodstains have been painted on the walls?”

Smith shook his head. At least this was an easy one. “No,” he answered quickly and started to turn around.

“Then,” Gilbert said, placing a gloved hand on his shoulder, retarding his escape, “how did that get up there?” He pointed up at the ceiling.

Parme and Singleton returned to the doorway in time to hear his question and they, too, looked upward.

While the blood was splattered as expected on the floor, walls and furniture, on the ceiling it had created a circular pattern that matched, almost exactly, the printed image that Gilbert had in his hand. A couple of the techs began snapping photos of the image, but Smith just stood there, his open mouth pulling down the disposable mask.

“Why, that’s impossible,” he said.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Gilbert replied to the technician, but he was looking at his partner.

Read Part 15.