John Miller - Upside Down

“What's the deal here?” Manseur asked the sergeant. His New Orleans accent made the word here sound like heeyah.

The cop opened his notebook. “Two female vics, forty-seven and forty-three. Multiple bullet wounds, probably from a. 38. No brass. One is Kimberly Porter, the forty-seven-year-old. It's her office. The other is Amber Lee, forty-three years.”

“Did anybody touch anything?”

“My people know better. The first officer was sure they were dead and came right out. Porter's law student, Napoleon Ferris, called 911 at 7:10. He's in the kitchen now cooling his heels. The janitor saw him come in, and a minute later he came flying down the fire stairs screaming bloody murder. Ferris swears he came straight here from breakfast at the Camellia Grill.”

“How did you identify the vics?” Manseur was writing everything down in his own brand of chicken scratches and symbols.

“Ferris is last year Tulane law. He knew Porter from being a legal volunteer. Seems students can handle cases in their last year of law school. And I recognized Amber Lee. There's an outstanding warrant out for her-”

“Warrant… for?”

“Embezzlement.”

“And how did you know her?”

“From the River Club. Amber's worked there for years and I think was the manager, sort of. I'da never figured her for a thief, but Mr. Bennett himself filed the charges.”

“You knew her from the River Club,” Manseur repeated, interjecting a fleck of suspicion in his words.

“I did some security work for the club back in the day,” the sergeant said defensively.

Manseur didn't know Jerry Bennett personally, but he knew of him. Bennett was one of those “special friends” of the police department, the mayor, the aldermen and fire departments. That meant he was both rich and generous and carried a gold badge the sheriff gave him that allowed him to carry a firearm and could be used in Orleans Parish to avoid traffic tickets-and he would never have to pay one or appear in court, if he got one.

Like most cops, Manseur had accepted his share of lagniappe from merchants during his eighteen years on the job. As a patrolman he'd turned a deaf ear when a benefactor's car was begging for a parking violation. Sometimes he'd stopped a driver who was going a little too fast, maybe had suspicious breath, and let the guy skate. He had fixed tickets when it didn't matter. But proudly, he had never compromised his oath to protect and serve the citizens of New Orleans.

“Where's Detective Bond?” the sergeant asked. Larry Bond was Manseur's partner.

“Larry's in Baton Rouge. His father-in-law died. Be back Monday afternoon. Can we get back to this?”

“Sure thing.” The sergeant nodded. “Janitor saw Porter come in around six with her daughter. Lee came in fifteen to twenty minutes later.”

“Where's the kid?”

The cop shrugged. “Janitor didn't see her leave, but she wasn't here when this happened.”

“And you know that, how?”

“She didn't call 911 or run to find help. He says she sometimes catches the bus to school from the corner. Her name is Faith Ann. There's a picture of her on the mother's desk.”

Manseur finished making his notes and underlined the child's name. Beside it, he wrote two question marks. One represented discovering where the girl was when this happened, the second was to remind him to find out all he could about her. He would assume for the present that the schoolgirl wasn't here when this took place.

Then he went to the first door down the hallway and looked into the office. He could see both bodies from the doorway. Porter was to his right, the body lying limp behind the desk. Amber Lee's corpse lay to his left, facedown in front of the desk. Another ten feet behind Ms. Lee's corpse, a second door stood open. Before he entered the office, Manseur took a pair of shoe covers and a pair of surgical gloves from his jacket pocket and put them on.

When a seasoned homicide detective looked over a crime scene, it would start to come alive. As he gleaned more information, the film that was the crime came into increasingly sharper focus, edited so that all of the collected elements defined the drama.

Was Lee in this office to get help with the embezzlement charge?

He noted how she'd fallen and studied the pattern made by bits of blood and tissue on the floor and desk. He formed an image of Ms. Lee sitting in the chair and the lawyer sitting behind the desk. Since he couldn't yet make a determination of the perp's size or sex, he visualized a featureless silhouette standing beside and behind Amber Lee, aiming a gun at her head. He noted the position of the purse, that the flap was closed and latched.

He squatted beside Ms. Lee and, using the bare end of his Cross ballpoint, parted her teased hair to examine the entrance wound located above and behind her left ear. The stippling and burned hair around the small round wound told him that the muzzle had been very close to her head. The exiting bullet had made a silver-dollar-size hole.

Could be a. 38, a. 32 revolver. If someone picked up their cases it might be a. 380 or even a nine millimeter. That was something the medical examiner could tell him. For whatever reason, you weren't looking at the killer when he fired. He leaned down and noted the tracks on her left cheek made from tear-melted eyeliner. Were you aware of the perp standing there? Were you crying because you were afraid? Or were you upset and didn't see him-or her?

Carefully, Manseur looked at both of her hands and under the nails. Nothing. Done with Amber for the time being, he stood and went around the desk and looked down at Kimberly Porter. The dead lawyer's name, but not her face, seemed familiar to him, he wasn't sure why. He was fairly sure that he had never faced her in a courtroom.

There were two holes in Porter's blouse, located so close together they almost formed a figure eight. There was a third hole in her forehead-a safety shot. It made him wonder if maybe she was the main target, had been shot first. No, he was reasonably certain based on the splatter pattern that Amber hadn't been cowering in the chair but sitting upright, her face pointed at the desk. He saw the phone beside the lawyer, and in his film he imagined her holding it-perhaps trying to make a call, before or maybe even after Amber was shot.

He saw blood on the wall behind the desk and judged that Kimberly Porter was standing when she was shot in the chest. Her missing loafer was several feet away, resting against the baseboard. Did you kick at your killer? No, it came off while you were rushing around the desk. You made it to the phone and picked it up before the killer fired. You went down, pulled the phone off the desk, and then he came around the desk and shot you again to make sure. Two that close together, fired from six, seven feet away, means he was a marksman and he was also a calm one. Two in the ticker, one in the head. A professional? Some client you didn't get results for? Someone who needed to keep one of you from doing or saying something?

Manseur was in the zone. The film was running in his mind and everything else was a million miles away. He was visualizing paths of travel, bullet channels that when charted would define angles, distances, and even put a nearly exact height to the perpetrator.

He studied the desk. A framed photo of a smiling girl-a young face that reflected equal measures of cheer, confidence, and intelligence. Faith Ann Porter was maybe ten, eleven years old in the picture, had long strawberry-blond hair tucked behind her ears, big blue eyes. Also on that desk sat a Sony cassette recorder whose door stood open, revealing an empty tape chamber. There were several unopened cassettes stacked on the credenza and an open package for one on top of the desk. He looked in the trash can. The cellophane wrapper for it lay alone in the bottom. He made a mental note to search for a tape, but he was certain it had been removed by the killer.