Steven Havill: Dead Weight

“Explain the door to me, for instance,” I said.

Torrez nodded. “The cooler door is closed. The broken bottles are behind it. So how does the beer spill so far across the aisle if the door is closed, with only a little bullet hole through it?”

“Unless Carter grabbed it when he fell,” Mears said. “Maybe pulled it open some, then the door closes after he tumbles away.”

“Could be,” Torres said. “Could be.” He was gazing at the floor, and held up both hands as if he were blocking traffic. “Stay put,” he said, and brushed past me, staying close to the racks.

“Christ, Sam,” I muttered, “what the hell have you gotten yourself into?”

In a few moments, Torrez returned with his flashlight. The evening sunshine was still bright outside, streaming in through the advertisement-plastered store windows. The specialty stock, piled high in pyramids at the end of each row, bounced and shadowed the slanting sunlight so that most of the cavernous store, especially the rear portion where we were standing with its high fluorescent lights turned off, was gloomy.

“Just a thought,” Torrez said. “The killer didn’t run out the front door, unless he had Carter’s keys…and he’s not likely to spend time fumbling there and risk being seen. And we found the back door ajar. That’s what makes sense to me. You’ve got to really give that door a good hard push to make sure it latches securely. So if whoever it was goes out the back way after tussling with Carter, he either goes down this same aisle, maybe even having to step over the body, or goes up front, cuts across, and then down another aisle.”

“We don’t know if there was a struggle or not,” I said. “And we don’t know how Sam was standing when he was shot.”

“No, but we’ve got a trajectory in the cooler there, from door to bottle. That’s a start.”

“We’ve got to take this one step at a time now,” I said, apprehensive that the undersheriff was just eagerly charging ahead without any clear notion of what he was looking for. “We need to call Perrone over here,” I said to Mears. Trying to reach conclusions without even preliminary findings from the medical examiner always made me nervous.

Sam’s corpse hadn’t been touched yet. I looked down at him, wondering if his keys were in his pocket, wondering if he’d had a weapon when he came down the stairs to confront the killer, wondering who the hell had pulled the trigger, wondering all kinds of things in a confusing blizzard of questions.

Moving methodically, Bob Torrez crouched down, snapped on the flashlight, and laid it on the polished tile floor. “Some things we don’t want to have slip away,” he mused. “I don’t think we want to wait on this one.” The beam shot down the aisle toward the back wall, a parabola of white light harsh on the white-and-gray-flecked tile. He rolled the flashlight slowly across the tile, using just the tip of his index finger.

None of us were breathing. I bent down with my hands on my knees as the light stopped, and even I could see what had to be shoe prints.

“Bingo,” Torrez whispered. “Somebody got careless.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” I said.

“We need Linda here with the camera,” he said to Mears. “And Perrone, and the whole crew. But stay off the radio. Use the phone.”

Mears backpedaled down the aisle, following Torrez’s example by keeping his steps immediately beside the shelving…an awkward and difficult place for anyone to walk and the least likely place for us to plant our size twelves on important evidence.

I knelt down while Torrez held the light motionless. “See ’em?”

“I see something,” I said. “I’d hate to be the one to have to swear what they are.”

He reached out his left hand toward the ghostly patterns. “Not much,” he said, “but something.” With his index finger, he traced the print’s outline in the air just above it. “It looks like whoever it was just sort of grazed the puddle here, enough to leave about a quarter of a print, a slice lengthwise from toe to heel. If we’re lucky, we can even measure a size.”

“What’s it look like to you?”

“It ain’t very big. Teenager, woman, small man.”

“You think it’ll show up in a photo?”

“If it can be done, Linda can do it,” Torrez said. “If we can bounce the light just right, I don’t see why not. If we can see them clearly with the flashlight, there’s no reason the film shouldn’t be able to see ’em, too.”

I remained kneeling, gazing at the prints-or at least at the spot where Bob Torrez said they were. “Shit,” I said, and shook my head. It was more than just a comment on the current state of affairs, particularly those that included the dead Sam Carter. Torrez caught the inflection and looked sharply at me.

“What?”

I took a deep breath and then pushed myself to my feet. “It was no casual robbery. Not shooting him in the back of the head like that. And unless Sam’s lying right on top of it, I don’t see a weapon, either. Nothing left behind.”

Torrez looked sideways at me. He held out a thumb. “Kenny Carter is home, under surveillance. Sam’s wife could have done it, but she’s bowling. I already verified that with a phone call after we stopped by there and saw Kenny. Grace Sisson is home, and has been ever since she came back from Las Cruces. Jennifer was locked in a motel room, waiting for her sugar daddy, here.” He gazed down at the corpse and then back at me. “So who does that leave?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wish to hell I did.” I looked down the aisle. “Tell you what. You don’t need me here. While you’re working this, I’m going to go back upstairs and turn that office upside down. I gave it a once-over, but now…” I hesitated. “And don’t forget to have Gayle, or someone else who’s good at that sort of thing, break the news to MaryBeth Carter.” I turned to go, then stopped. “And make sure you give our brilliant assistant DA a call. He should be in on this. If you don’t, you’ll be on his shit list for life. And he’s too stupid to have as an enemy.”

I looked down at the remains of Sam Carter. As bad as I felt about not being able to save Sam Carter from his own foolishness, some ideas were beginning to coalesce in my mind that were making me feel a whole lot worse.

I sat down in Sam Carter’s chair and looked out across the sea of papers on his desk. If there was some kind of order there, it escaped me. The Mexican brass trash can under the left desk wing was packed to the brim, just as it had been when Torrez and I had visited not too many hours before. If possible, more stuff had been piled on top until it looked like some crazy artist’s mixed-media bouquet.

The computer near my elbow was the same model as those in the county building, and I pushed the corner key, rewarded by the symphony of start-up chimes. Sam Carter might have been working after-hours, but it hadn’t been on the computer-unless when he’d been interrupted he’d taken time to shut down the system first.

While I waited for all the bells and whistles to do their thing, I opened one desk drawer at a time. Guessing what might have been out of place was impossible, since nothing appeared to be in any particular place. Sam Carter had been a fan of landfill filing-the most recent junk on top.

In the right-hand drawer, hidden under a pile of old-fashioned receipt books, was a small nickel-plated pistol, one of those cheap imported things that are supposed to make you feel safe until you actually have to use them. With the tip of my pen I lifted it out by the trigger guard. The clip was missing, and it hadn’t been fired. I put it back.

Turning to the computer, I looked at the list of the most recent files that had been accessed and clicked on the top of the list. After a few seconds a letter to QuadState Distributors appeared on the screen blistering them about dairy product expiration dates-perhaps a subject near and dear to Sam Carter’s heart. An irate milk distributor might have shot Sam Carter, but it seemed unlikely.