J. Jance - Fatal Error

But if I get one, he told himself, I’m not keeping it in the entryway closet.

The overhang of the porch and the closed blinds along the front of the house left the entryway shrouded in shadow. Making a note of how he had found the light switch, Gil used a pencil to turn on the overhead lights. Immediately he saw evidence of tracked blood, coming and going through the entryway, but the patterns were smeared and indistinct. Gil knew what that meant. Whoever had tramped through the blood had been wearing booties.

Gil turned back to the door. “Hey, Officer Masters,” he called. “Did you or Dodd leave these tracks in here?”

“No, sir,” Masters returned. “We saw the tracks. We walked around them.”

Nodding, Gil dropped a numbered marker onto the floor next to each of three prints. Then, using a small digital camera, he took several photographs of the area indicated by the marker. Each time he snapped a photo, he paused long enough to make a corresponding note on three-by-five cards that he carried in a leather-bound wallet. That way, later, he’d be able to use the notes to explain what was in the photos and he’d use the photos to help decipher his sometimes illegible notes.

Gil knew that the corpse was in the living room. Instead of going directly there, he turned instead toward a room that had originally been intended as a dining room. Shelves that had probably once held knickknacks of some kind had been installed high on the dining room walls, but they were empty. An oak pedestal table stood in the middle of the room. There was only one chair at the table. Two others sat off to the side, just under the window. A buffet that matched the table was the only other piece of furniture. The top of the buffet was covered with packing boxes, tape dispensers, and blank shipping labels, while the top of the table was littered with tubes of epoxy and paint and brushes.

On the floor, scattered in among a snowdrift of foam packing peanuts, lay the smashed remains of what must have once been on the now-denuded bookshelves-dozens and dozens of model airplanes, all of them wrecked, ground to pieces on the floor. They had been stepped on. . no, stomped on, in what Gil read as deliberate, thorough, and wanton destruction.

Okay, Gil told himself. Kirby vacuum or not, if this is where the victim built his models, that means the guy definitely isn’t married. And he isn’t living with his mother either. No woman in her right mind lets a guy build model airplanes in the middle of her dining room table or spill packing peanuts all over the house.

Gil stayed where he was, in the dining room doorway. If he tried stepping into the dining room, he knew that no matter how carefully he walked, he wouldn’t be able to keep from crunching larger pieces of wings and propellers and fuselages into smaller bits of plastic, balsa wood, and dust.

At last, turning toward the living room, Gil was appalled by the mess. Except for the wrecked model planes on the floor, the dining room had been relatively neat and orderly. The living room looked like a trash heap, a lived-in trash heap that consisted of discarded magazines, packets of coupons, grocery bags, empty cans of chili, shipping boxes, and dead pizza containers, with little cleared paths like game trails leading through the mess from one place to another. It was possible someone could find out how long the debris had been there by shoveling through it like an archeological dig, but that wasn’t Gil’s job.

The small desk lamp on the far table did little to illuminate the rest of the room. Once again Gil tracked down a wall switch. Turning on the overhead fixture in the living room immediately revealed the same kind of fuzzy footprints he had seen in the entryway. They meandered in and out of the mess, sometimes following the trails sometimes stepping on or over the trash.

In the lamplight, the victim’s body hadn’t been immediately visible. Now it was. Just beyond the far end of the couch, a single sock-clad foot hung at an ungainly angle in midair. Only when Gil rounded the couch did he see that a large male was strapped to a fallen dining room chair by layers and layers of clear packing tape. His legs were fastened to the front legs of the chair while his arms and wrists, out of sight, were most likely similarly bound behind his back.

At first glance there was no evidence of any kind of bullet or stab wound that would account for the presence of all the blood that had been trod through the house. Instead, the man’s head was encased in a clear plastic bag, the kind that customers in grocery stores peel off conveniently located rolls to carry home their freshly chosen vegetables-heads of broccoli, lettuce, or cauliflower-but the plastic was heavy, not likely to be easily chewed through. Underneath the bag, Gil caught sight of another piece of packing tape that had been plastered to the man’s mouth to function as a gag. More tape had been used to fasten the open end of the bag tightly around the victim’s bulging neck.

Asphyxiation then, Gil thought. So why do I see so much blood?

Stepping to the far side of the corpse, Gil found the answer to that question. The tips of several of the dead man’s fingers-four in all-had been hacked off by poultry scissors that still lay where it had been dropped. Beside the shears were the blackened hunks of fingertips, although Gil counted only three, not four. It was likely the missing one had been covered by the man’s falling body when the chair had tipped onto its side. And the amount of blood on the floor told Gil what he didn’t want to know-that the victim had been alive when the fingers were hacked off one by one.

The gruesome savagery of that was enough to make even an experienced homicide cop want to toss his morning’s batch of Honey Nut Cheerios. The other thing contributing to his gag reflex had to do with teeming hordes of insect vermin that were visible both inside and on the body. Since the house itself was a gigantic trash heap, that came as no surprise. The good news about that was that flesh-eating maggots would provide a foolproof way for the coroner to establish the victim’s time of death with a good deal of accuracy.

Needing to step away for a moment, Gil turned toward the wooden desk. It was stacked high with a complicated collection of electronics-several printers as well as a single computer. A single glance was enough to tell Gil that this was high-end, top-of-the-line Mac equipment, and that struck him as odd. In the course of a normal home invasion, the electronics wouldn’t have been there. They’d have been among the first items stolen or else they would have been smashed to pieces like the model airplanes in the other room.

Gil made his way around the living room, laying down more evidence markers and taking photos as he went. Finally, returning to the corpse, Gil stepped closer to the body and squatted down next to it. Only then did Gil catch sight of a tiny set of white wires. They came from what Gil assumed to be an iPod in the pocket of the dead man’s sweatshirt. They threaded their way under the tape that was attached to his throat. With the victim lying on his side, Gil could only see the left side of the man’s head, but he could also see that one of the earbuds was still stuck in the dead man’s ear.

“So what went on here, big fella?” Gilbert asked aloud.

He often addressed questions to the corpses at crime scenes during those intimate moments when he was alone with murder victims. They never answered, but Gil’s one-sided conversations usually helped him make sense of what he was seeing.

“You were listening to your tunes, and then something happened. What was it?”

It was as Gil rose from his crouch and readied his camera once more that he noticed the presence of an extra dining room chair. He had seen it before, but this was the first time it actually registered. Before that Gil had been too focused on the body itself to realize that a second chair had been brought into the living room and positioned in a spot that was close to the dead man’s head.