Archer Mayor - Scent of Evil

“Strangled.” I had noticed two bruises on either side of the body’s windpipe, but none of the standard transverse markings common to hanging, garroting, or throttling. Also, his face was pale and normal-looking, rather than bloated and flushed, as I’d come to expect in day-old strangulations.

“Not in the sense you mean. He didn’t die of asphyxiation. The way I read it, his assailant placed a thumb on either side of his larynx and applied sudden pressure, completely blocking off both carotid arteries. He might also have hit the carotid sinuses and triggered what you’d call a heart attack. Either way, it was a pretty painful way to go, and slow, too. The face looks normal because the carotid veins weren’t cut off at the same time, so no blood built up in the head to make his features discolor.”

Gould had placed his hands gently on my throat to demonstrate. I removed them, feeling slightly squeamish. “So the murderer was facing him.”

“Presumably.”

“Wouldn’t this guy have put up a fight?”

“He may have tried. That may be where the injection fits in. Its location makes it all but impossible that the victim injected himself.” Gould lifted one of the lifeless arms and turned it stiffly so I could see the inside of the wrist. “Also, there’s a slight red band here, and a corroborating one on the outside of the other wrist, both of which suggest they were bound together at one point, probably just prior to death.”

I bent over and studied the mark on the other arm. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I noticed a neat rectangular pattern of hair had been removed from the back of the wrist, just where the watch had once been. “Tape?”

“I think so. I’ve made a note to Hillstrom to have the skin at those points analyzed for residual adhesive.”

I straightened and looked thoughtfully at the body for a minute. Tyler had yet to carefully examine the dirt he’d gathered at the grave site, but I already knew he’d found nothing as obvious as a piece of torn tape.

“There’s something else,” Gould added. “Normally, if a body were laid flat on its back after death and covered with dirt, the lividity-the postmortem pooling of the blood-would be equally distributed along all the low points-the shoulder blades, the buttocks, the calves, the heels, and the undersides of both arms.”

“And here they aren’t.”

Gould rolled the body all the way over. “It’s not crystal clear, but I see most of the pooling having occurred in the buttocks, thighs, and feet, and not at all along the upper torso-”

“As if he’d been sitting in a chair,” I finished for him.

He returned his uncomplaining patient to its previous position. “Yup. Of course, it’s all conjectural, including the injection, which could indeed be an insect bite.”

My fingers strayed to the blue pants we’d removed. “I better have the State Police Crime Lab check these for adhesive, too.”

Gould looked puzzled for a moment and then nodded, understanding. We both shared the mental image of how this man had died, sitting in a chair, his hands taped behind his back, his legs taped to the chair legs. The man opposite him-his killer-must have carefully positioned his thumbs over the fat carotids, feeling the life blood pumping underneath just seconds before he pressed down with all his might, shutting off the flow, starving the brain, backing the blood up to the nearby heart, jamming it to a halt, forcing the blood back further to flood the lungs. I wondered what had killed him first-the brain, the heart, or had he drowned in his own blood?

“You said the death was slow as well as painful. How long would this have taken?”

“If I’m right on the cause of death, his assailant had to have kept his thumbs in position for almost five minutes to do the job right.”

“Would a shot of something play in with that? He must’ve been flopping around like a landed fish, even tied down.”

“You mean a sedative? That’s what I was thinking, actually. The killer gives this guy an injection to calm him down, maybe even knock him cold, and then goes to work without a struggle. The fact that the wrists show only adhesive and no abrasions or bruising indicate he didn’t put up a fight.” Gould made a sour face and shook his head. “But then, why bother cutting off the blood supply? Why not just overdose him and be done with it?”

I looked at the body again, those questions and more running around my brain. He looked fine for a corpse-a little in need of the bottled tints lining the far wall, of course. I wished I could peel back his eyelid and see reflected there the last image of his life. “How long do you think he was in the chair after he died?”

Gould stuck his lower lip out slightly. “Hard to say. Lividity generally becomes permanently fixed after eight to twelve hours, but that’s not set in stone-variations can be huge. Best I could say is that he sat for several hours after he died and before he was moved to a supine position.”

So he was killed somewhere else, before being dumped behind the Canal Street retaining wall. “Can you tell if he was gagged?”

Gould shook his head. “I looked. I don’t think so, but anything’s possible.” He glanced at his watch.

“I know-you got to go.”

“Well-he has to. I’m just going back to my office. But I don’t want to keep Hillstrom waiting.”

I headed toward the door to arrange for a patrolman to accompany the body to Burlington. “I know, Al. Thanks for your help.”

I paused at Tony Brandt’s open door, allowing some of the pipe smoke to filter out before I wandered blindly in, hoping I’d find his guest chair before falling over his desk in the smog. He glanced up from his computer keyboard and squinted at me as I settled down.

“Why the hell don’t you open a window?” I asked him.

“Wouldn’t make any difference.” He pulled the omnipresent pipe from his mouth to make sure it was still burning brightly.

“Maybe not with the heat, but it might help with this stuff.” I waved my hand through the tendrils of smoke.

There was the sudden shriek of a circular handsaw ripping through plywood. Brandt motioned to the door, and I reluctantly rose and shut it against the noise, my day-long headache struggling for new heights. The police department’s previous rabbit warren of offices was being totally remodeled. Walls were coming down, work spaces redefined, lighting replaced, and central air-conditioning being put in. Unfortunately, some logistical genius had arranged to have the window air-conditioners removed before the central system had been completed, leaving us all to swelter at the peak of the summer’s heat amid the pounding of hammers, the screaming of power tools, and the continuous swirl of sawdust.

I paused to open a window before sitting back down. Brandt made no comment. He’d been chief for the past nine years, on our force for ten years before that. Aside from Deputy Police Chief Billy Manierre and myself, he’d spent more years as a cop than any of us.

Not that he looked the role. I’d seen a television documentary recently about the Manhattan Project. It had shown all those tweedy professor types-skinny, aquiline, and bespectacled, with thinning hair-scurrying around the New Mexican desert in search of the perfect bang, and I could have sworn I saw Tony Brandt six different times. But where rocket scientists of lore are reputed to be sloppily dressed, absent-minded, and insensitive of other people’s feelings, Brandt was neat, organized, tough as nails, and fully aware of the emotional buttons we all carry within us.

He fixed me now with a long look, his head slightly back, the blue rectangle of his computer screen reflecting off his wire-rim glasses. “So-we found a man in a grave.”