Dan O'Shea - Penance

“Anything else?”

“Smelled dope when we got here.”

Lynch took a sniff. “Yeah, a little. OK. ME guys are here, so you and your partner get on the canvas, see if the neighbors got anything.”

First thing the next morning, Lynch met with Dr Thomas Anthony, the ME. Sitting in the glassed-in office Anthony had off the autopsy room, metal furniture, chemical smell. Anthony was a big guy, bald, huge head, which, Lynch knew, was pretty much full of brains.

“Thanks for turning things around so quick. Long night for you guys, I know,” said Lynch.

“At least I’m done for now, detective. I don’t suspect you’ll be sleeping until you have an arrest.”

“I’m hoping you have something to help me out there, doc.”

“To start, you’ve got multiple assailants. Three sets of footprints, definitely contemporaneous because they walked on one another’s tracks a couple of times. At least one of your assailants is likely colored, because we’ve got a couple of Negroid hairs stuck to the ax handle. They were in Stefanski’s blood, so they were deposited while the ax was being used. One set of tracks is from a pair of Converse All-Stars, size twelve. One is from a pair of Red Wing work boots, ten and a half. I’m working on the other one. Smooth soles, heel, more like a dress shoe. Smaller, maybe a nine. We found the butts from two marijuana cigarettes in the room.”

“Wonderful,” said Lynch. “Coloreds and drugs — old man Hurley’s head is gonna explode. Cause of death looks pretty straightforward. Standard ax murder. Not that I ever had an ax murder before.”

“Almost impossible to tell, actually,” said Anthony. “Especially with Stefanski. The damage done with the ax is so severe that if there was any preexisting cause, it was obliterated. There was a mark on one rib, or should I say rib fragment, that didn’t seem to correspond with an ax. But the rib cage and surrounding anatomical context were so disassociated that any findings other than death due to trauma from the ax simply can’t be supported.”

“What are you telling me with this marks-on-the-ribs shit?”

“You saw Stefanski. I don’t have a piece of Stefanski’s ribs or sternum bigger than four inches, and the pieces I have are badly damaged. However, I have one piece of rib, still connected to the sternum, that has a fresh groove in it that doesn’t look like the ax wounds. Again, though, with so much trauma, I can’t do anything but report it as an anomaly.”

“Groove like what?”

“Like a gunshot, actually, if I had to guess.”

“This groove, where was it located?”

“Not on the rib itself, but along the top of the costal cartilage where it connects the third rib to the sternum.”

“And a bullet goes through there, it hits what?”

“The heart.”

Lynch looked at Anthony for a moment, waiting for a sign.

“You telling me Stefanski got shot?”

“No. I’m telling you that a single anomaly in the evidence could support that conclusion. Arguing against it, I have no soft tissue damage consistent with a bullet wound. Although, if Stefanski were shot prior to the ax wounds, such evidence would have been obliterated. And we recovered no slugs — not from the body, not from the scene.”

“Anything else?”

“We’re missing a piece of Hurley’s skull and scalp from the right temple. It could have stuck to one of the assailants. It could have been tracked out. It could have been taken as a souvenir.”

“That a big deal?”

“It happens. I won’t say it’s common.”

“Sounds like there’s something else you won’t say.”

Anthony nodded. “There’s this. Most of Hurley’s clothing, and Stefanski’s for that matter, is soaked with blood. The clothing is lying in the blood, got walked on — it’s just a mess. Except Hurley’s shorts, which aren’t much of a mess because he was wearing them. Which is why I noted a small amount of blood and other fluids in his underwear. Semen. Further examination revealed additional blood and semen in his rectum. I have no way of telling whose, but based on the serology, it could be Stefanski's.”

Lynch’s turn to be quiet. Anthony just sat, looking at him, waiting.

“You telling me Hurley’s kid was queer?”

“I’m telling you he had anal intercourse shortly before his death, possibly with Stefanski.”

“Willingly?”

Anthony shrugged. “No bruising not associated with the head wound, no defensive marks. No significant tearing in the anus. Anuses are not designed for sex, so in cases of anal rape, tearing is usually evident.”

“So you got a few things making you think,” said Lynch.

“It’s the combination of them. By itself, the missing piece of Hurley’s head? Like I said, it happens. But I’ve got this weird groove on Stefanski. So, suppose somebody shot him but didn’t want it to look like they shot him. So they take the ax, chop him up, dig the slug out of him or maybe out of the floor. Now, you have this transverse ax wound on Hurley. That’s a little strange. Usually when bodies come in with head trauma, the blow is descending or at a bit of an angle. That’s the natural swing at somebody’s head. This is pretty much straight across. Makes sense if you were a baseball. Might even make sense if the wound were to the thorax.”

Lynch pictured what the doc was saying. Awkward to swing sideways at a guy’s head. “OK, doc, go on.”

“OK, so if you are standing up, the only way somebody takes you through the head from side to side with an ax is if they are a couple of feet taller than you. Hurley was over six feet. In this case, it looks as though Hurley was lying on the floor. We’ve got an ax mark in the floor under his head and wood splinters in his scalp on that side. So the transverse wound makes sense because it was a descending blow to the side of his head while he was lying down. But what’s he doing on the floor?”

“Maybe he got knocked down first.”

“I don’t have any other sign of trauma, and, if our guy had used the ax to knock him down, I would. So there’s that. Now, suppose our fictional somebody, he doesn’t want Stefanski to look shot, so he does his Jack the Ripper routine on him. Suppose he also doesn’t want Hurley to look shot, but Hurley’s shot through the head. So he lays Hurley on the floor and cuts his head in half, and picks up the chunk that shows an entrance wound.”

“OK, say I play along here. Before the ax work, what I got is one guy shot through the chest and another guy shot through the head, temple to temple. Missing chunk’s from the right temple, Hurley’s right-handed. Which probably makes it a murder-suicide. Hurley pops Stefanski, then pops himself. You got any powder burn on Hurley? Stippling?”

Anthony shook his head. “No. But if it was a contact wound, then it would have been very localized, localized enough to be on the missing chunk of Hurley’s head.”

“And with the semen stuff, maybe you have some kind of lover’s quarrel. But what’s with the ax shit? I mean, Hurley and Stefanski didn’t chop themselves up.”

“Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“So maybe this. Hurley and Stefanski do the nasty. Maybe Hurley wants to, maybe he doesn’t. Either way, it sets him off. He plugs Stefanski, he plugs himself. Somebody walks in, puts it together. Somebody who doesn’t want a homo murder-suicide to be the story. So we get the ax and the footprints and the blood graffiti and all of that.”

“Makes you sound like a fruitcake when you say it out loud, doesn’t it, detective?”

“Little bit, yeah.”

“Another problem with that. Time of death. Based on body temperatures, we’ve got a time of death right around midnight. You guys got there by 12.30, right?”