Michael Connelly: A Darkness More Than Night

He put the television down on the desk and plugged it in. He turned to go back up to the salon to retrieve the binder and tape when he saw Buddy coming down the stairs, holding the tape and leafing through the binder.

“Hey, Buddy -”

“Looks like a weird one, man.”

McCaleb reached out and closed the binder, then took it and the tape from his fishing partner’s hands.

“Just taking a peek.”

“I told you, it’s confidential.”

“Yeah, but we work good together. Just like before.”

It was true that by happenstance Lockridge had been a great help when McCaleb had investigated the death of Graciela’s sister. But that had been an active street investigation. This was just going to be a review. He didn’t need anybody looking over his shoulder.

“This is different, Buddy. This is a one-night stand. I’m just going to take a look at this stuff and then that will be it. Now let me get to work so I’m not here all night.”

Lockridge didn’t say anything and McCaleb didn’t wait. He closed the door to the forward bunk and then turned to the desk. As he looked down at the murder book in his hands he felt a sharp thrill as well as the familiar rising of dread and guilt.

McCaleb knew it was time to go back to the darkness. To explore it and know it. To find his way through it. He nodded, though he was alone now. It was in acknowledgment that he had waited a long time for this moment.

The video was clear and steady, the lighting was good. The technical aspects of crime scene videotaping had vastly improved since McCaleb’s days with the bureau. The content had not changed. The tape McCaleb watched showed the starkly lit tableau of murder. McCaleb finally froze the image and studied it. The cabin was silent, the gentle lapping sound of the sea against the boat’s hull the only intrusion from outside.

At center focus was the nude body of what appeared to be a man who had been trussed with baling wire, his arms and legs held tightly behind his torso to such extreme that the body appeared to be in a reverse fetal position. The body was face down on an old and dirty rug. The focus was too tight on the body to determine in what sort of location it had been found. McCaleb judged that the victim was a man solely on the basis of body mass and musculature. For the head of the victim was not visible. A gray plastic mop bucket had been placed entirely over the victim’s head. McCaleb could see that a length of the baling wire was stretched taut from the victim’s ankles, up his back and between his arms, and beneath the lip of the bucket where it wrapped around his neck. It appeared on first measure to be a ligature strangulation in which the leverage of the legs and feet pulled the wire tight around the victim’s neck, causing asphyxia. In effect, the victim had been bound in such a way that he ultimately killed himself when he could no longer hold his legs folded backward in such an extreme position.

McCaleb continued studying the scene. A small amount of blood had poured onto the carpet from the bucket, indicating that some kind of head wound would be found when the vessel was removed.

McCaleb leaned back in his old desk chair and thought about his initial impressions. He had not yet opened the binder, choosing instead to watch the crime scene videotape first and to study the scene as close as possible to the way the investigators had originally seen it. Already he was fascinated by what he was looking at. He felt the implication of ritual in the scene on the television screen. He also felt the trilling of adrenaline in his blood again. He pressed the button on the remote and the video continued.

The focus pulled back as Jaye Winston entered the frame of the video. McCaleb could see more of the room now and noted that it appeared to be in a small, sparely furnished house or apartment.

Coincidentally, Winston was wearing the same outfit she had worn when she had come to the house with the murder book and videotape. She had on rubber gloves that she had pulled up over the cuffs of her blazer. Her detective’s shield hung on a black shoelace which had been tied around her neck. She took a position on the left side of the dead man while her partner, a detective McCaleb did not recognize, moved to the right side. For the first time there was talking on the video.

“The victim has already been examined by a deputy coroner and released for crime scene investigation,” Winston said. “The victim has been photographed in situ. We’re now going to remove the bucket to make further examination.”

McCaleb knew that she was carefully choosing her words and demeanor with the future in mind, a future that would include a trial for an accused killer in which the crime scene tape would be viewed by a jury. She had to appear professional and objective, completely emotionally removed from what she was encountering. Anything deviating from this could be cause for a defense attorney to seek removal of the tape from evidence.

Winston reached up and hooked her hair behind her ears and then placed both hands on the victim’s shoulders. With her partner’s help she turned the body on its side, the dead man’s back to the camera.

The camera then came in over the victim’s shoulder and closed in as Winston gently pulled the bucket handle from under the man’s chin and proceeded to carefully lift it off the head.

“Okay,” she said.

She showed the interior of the bucket to the camera – blood had coagulated inside it – and then placed it in an open cardboard box used for evidence storage. She then turned back and gazed down at the victim.

Gray duct tape had been wrapped around the dead man’s head to form a tight gag across the mouth. The eyes were open and distended – bugged. The cornea of each eye was rouged with hemorrhage. So was the skin around the eyes.

“CP,” the partner said, pointing to the eyes.

“Kurt,” Winston said. “We’re on sound.”

“Sorry.”

She was telling her partner to keep all observations to himself. Again, she was safeguarding the future. McCaleb knew that what her partner was pointing out was the hemorrhaging, or conjunctive petechiae, which always came with ligature strangulation. However, the observation was one that should be made to a jury by a medical examiner, not a homicide detective.

Blood matted the dead man’s medium-length hair and had pooled inside the bucket against the left side of his face. Winston began manipulating the head and combing her fingers through the hair in search of the origin of the blood. She finally found the wound on the crown of the head. She pulled the hair back as much as possible to view it.

“Barney, come in close on this if you can,” she said.

The camera moved in. McCaleb saw a small, round puncture wound that did not appear to penetrate the skull. He knew that the amount of blood evidenced was not always in concert with the gravity of the wound. Even inconsequential wounds to the scalp could produce a lot of blood. He would get a formal and complete description of the wound in the autopsy report.

“Barn, get this,” Winston said, her voice up a notch from the previous monotone. “We’ve got writing or something on the tape, on the gag.”

She had noticed it while manipulating the head. The camera moved in. McCaleb could make out lightly marked letters on the tape where it crossed the dead man’s mouth. The letters appeared to be written in ink but the message was obliterated by blood. He could make out what appeared to be one word of the message.

“Cave,” he read out loud. “Cave?”

He then thought maybe it was only a partial word but he couldn’t think of any larger word – other than cavern – that contained those letters in that order.