Ashes to Ashes (6 page)

When the young couple moved to the elevator,
Ashe departed and rushed off toward the stairs. He recalled that
Scott lived up on the third floor, which was a lot of steps for his
tired legs. Breathing heavily, he finally found himself in front of
Scott's door. A yellow crime scene banner still crisscrossed over
it, like the bones on a pirate’s flag. It was a warning. He had
long ago lost count of how many times he had been invited to
venture past the borders of the yellow banner and into a crime
scene. But he had been ordered, sternly, to remain on the other
side of the current one. An order he dismissed by opening and
swinging forward the unlocked door.

He was immediately curious to why it
was
unlocked. He figured there wasn't much point in locking
it. The damage had been done. And a pair of rookies was outside
watching the building.

Ducking beneath the yellow strands of
plastic, he entered the apartment. Closing the door behind him,
Ashe was suddenly smothered in black. He didn’t have any access to
a flashlight, so he decided to pull his cell phone from his pants
and use the dim light of the screen. The undercovers wouldn't be
able to notice it from the outside, like he would notice if the
overhead apartment lights suddenly sprung to life.

Scott was never the cleanest person and Ashe
wasn't surprised to find the kitchen little untidy, dishes in the
sink and trash protruding from the top of the garbage can. As a
young boy, his son liked to leave behind evidence of his existence,
a discarded sock or candy wrapper. He would often follow behind
Scott, picking up clothes as they fell from his body. If he had
found the counter tops freshly wiped with the salt and pepper
shakers labeled and evenly spaced, he might have been worried.

Moving the light into the living room, Ashe
looked for signs of a struggle. But he reminded himself that Owen
had been shot in his bed, obviously while sleeping. There wouldn’t
be any struggle or signs of one.

Standing in the center of the living room, he
illuminated all around him, across the couch, the walls, and the
floor, searching for anything out of the ordinary, something that
would stand out as weird. But there was nothing. The couch had the
expected wear and tear. The walls were pretty much bare, except for
a single cheap painting of an orange flower in a brown vase. The
carpet had a handful of stains, most likely from spilled soda or
beer. It was a bachelor pad. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Sigh.

It all seemed impersonal...lacking
personality. There wasn’t anything that represented Scott or his
roommate Owen. He needed to more than bland and boring. He needed
to find something personal. He needed to understand who they were.
Even his own son had become a stranger that he needed to better
understand. Without that understanding, Ashe had nothing. He looked
down the hallway. The bedroom, he considered, was always thought of
as personal space, where nothing was secret, even the whips and
chains hanging in the closet.

Using the cell phone to guide him, Ashe made
his way down the hallway. It was a short distance before the first
bedroom appeared on the left, the door wide open. The smell of
blood still hung in the air, drifting from Owen's room, like thick
metallic vapors. He wasn't sure but he thought he also smelled the
stench of a fired weapon. Blood and gun powder sometimes liked to
hang in the air long after the initial expulsion.

Ashe followed the odors into the bedroom and
his eyes instantly fell upon the bed that Owen had died upon. The
blankets and sheets had been stripped away by the Crime Scene Unit,
but the blood had soaked deep into the mattress, which had been
left behind. He could perfectly make out where Owen's head had
laid.

Shooting someone while they slept could have
meant many things. It could imply fear, like when an abused wife
murdered her husband while he was passed out drunk. Ashe could
clearly remember a fragile lady, Tela Poling, who had been sent to
his cage for assessment, after having been convicted of first
degree murder. Her complexion was pale and her frame was fragile.
The area around her eyes was forever bruised by worry, lack of
sleep, along with her husband’s fist. Outside observers might say
that she had “lost it” but it was clear to him, without Tela having
to utter a single word, that she was a gentle woman pushed too far.
In a moment of desperation, she had given in to fear and stabbed
her husband 34 times while he slept off a two-day binge.

Two or three jabs hadn’t been enough. Tela
made sure that her husband was good and dead.

Ashe had tried to put his professional two
cents in on Tela's behalf. He had gone to Oscar for advice and
help. Tela was not a killer, only a battered wife who had finally
stood up for herself, desperate to make the hurting stop. Her
defense counsel had been incompetent and her own voice was never
heard during the trial. And yet, there seemed to only be dead ends
down the road he tried to take. No one had listened to what he had
to say, even if he had had some good points. He too eventually
succeeded to the fact that Tela would remain in prison, her thin
form rotting away.

There could also have been a severe disregard
by the shooter for Owen as a person, which was why they killed him
in his sleep, like nameless cattle. If that was the case, the
murderer would surely be either a sociopath or a psychopath. Cold.
Calculated. Unfeeling.

A professional hit? But why would anyone hire
a hitter to kill a college student? That didn't make any sense.
Unless Owen had gotten himself in deep with the wrong people, the
kind of people that didn’t take being let down lightly.

Ashe shook his head in disgust.

Owen's room was simple. The bed had been
nothing more than a twin mattress and a box-spring on the floor. An
old television sat on top of an old stand. The stand was wooden and
slanted slightly to the right, looking ready to tumble over in a
heap. A DVD player was on the stand’s one and only shelf.
Everything was unplugged from the wall. Ashe wondered if Owen had
fell asleep watching television, which meant that it would have
still been on when the YPD found the body.

Did they take the movie, he wandered.
Squatting down, Ashe plugged in the DVD player and pushed the EJECT
button. Out came the tray revealing a disk. The Crime Scene Unit
must not have viewed the disc to be of forensic importance. Using
only the tips of his fingers, he picked up the disk and examined
the top picture. In the picture were images of sex and sexual
activities. Owen had been watching porn.

The fact that Owen had been watching porn
could mean something but it could also mean absolutely nothing. It
would depend on how much he watched and whether or not it was an
addiction. A porn addiction could be important. It was hard to say.
Ashe knew, from experience, that most college men were highly
sexual and probably watched porn quit a lot during their free time,
especially when they were alone in bed.

Placing the disk back in the tray, Ashe
closed the player and unplugged it. He remained squatting. That was
when he noticed a sprinkling of powder alongside of the television,
spread finely next to the base of the television. The thin layer
stood out under the light of the cell phone. It was barely visible,
as were the scratches across the wood of the stand, which had
obviously been done by a sharp razor.

Owen did drugs, Ashe concluded.

But the coke would have kept Owen awake and
alert and aware that an attacker had appeared in his doorway. The
evidence of coke use was strong, but Owen could not have been using
the drug before he was killed. Turning, the psychologist used his
lowered position to scan the floor around the stand. Down by the
base of the stand was a gathering of green seeds, obviously that of
marihuana. He thought about picking one up to examine it closer,
but he had already touched enough in the room.

If the stench of blood wasn’t so thick about
the room, Ashe might have smelled the scent of weed, telling him
that Owen had been high when he fell asleep. It was a real
possibility, because cannabis often put the users to sleep, unlike
those drugs found in powder form. And Owen might have even been
drunk, Ashe inferred, even though there was no evidence of alcohol,
at least not in the room. He had never searched the fridge, but
there might have been alcohol. It
was
, in fact, a college
bachelor pad.

Drugs might have been what got Owen shot in
the back of the head. A substance abuser or addict, if that was
indeed what Owen was, cared nothing of anything but that next high,
whether it came from an upper or downer. The high was all that
mattered. Not their friends or family or themselves. The high was
their only motivation. Owen could have possibly crossed the wrong
dealer or fellow addict while seeking that next high, giving that
person or group of people a need for violent restitution. And they
timed their homicide perfectly, by getting at their victim while he
was passed out in bed.

Why didn't they shoot Scott, too? Or at least
shoot
at
him? He had been home when the shooting occurred
and Ashe knew that his son would have reacted. He truly didn't see
Scott hiding in his room.

The train of thought only brought about more
questions.

Rising, Ashe went back into the hallway to
search for evidence of gunfire, holes in the walls, but there were
zero. Naught. The psychologist searched the rest of the bedroom the
best he could without leaving behind any prints. The surfaces he
couldn’t help but to touch, he quickly wiped off with the base of
his shirt. There was nothing left to find in the room, nothing of
substance, only some ragged clothing and additional pornographic
movies. Anything of substance or importance had been taken. The
Crime Scene Unit must not have seen any weight in the remaining
items, either, which was why they had left them behind.

There was nothing new to discover in Owen’s
personal space. All that was left to do was go into his son's
bedroom. Maybe there would be some answers to find there.

He hoped.

As he crept into the room, his foot thumped
hard against something on the floor. He cursed quietly. The object
was hard and metal. Lowering the light, Ashe saw that it was a hand
weight. Forty-five pounds of solid metal. Another one sat nearby.
Scott was always serious about staying in shape. He was surprised
that there wasn't an entire weight bench crammed into the small
bedroom.

Stepping over the weight, Ashe began to drift
the light over the room. He could tell that the bedroom had been
looked over and rummaged through, but only slightly. The top two
dresser drawers were still askew and the dresser itself had been
pulled a few inches from the wall. Scott’s mattress looked a little
crooked, off center from the box spring.

How hard or how fast did they inspect the
room? Ashe had hoped that Oscar and the other detectives wouldn’t
have torn the room asunder, because it meant that something might
have been left behind.

He came further into the room, taking in as
much as his phone light would show. On the walls were sports
posters, mostly basketball, with more posters depicting the
Cleveland Cavalier than any other NBA team. Scott must have
remained a loyal fan of the Cavs.

Ashe had always been a Celtics fan.

Scott had played many sports growing up,
baseball, soccer, football, etcetera, but Ashe knew that his son’s
heart had always been with basketball. During the last year of high
school, basketball became the only sport that Scott had played,
while the other sports fell to the wayside.

On the wall Scott had also hung three framed
pictures. One was of himself in his high school basketball jersey,
posing with a basketball wedged between his arm and chest. The
other was of himself standing next to his mother, his arm around
her shoulder. The last one, which was significantly bigger than the
other two, was solely of Susanne, smiling wide for the camera. Ashe
couldn't help but to smirk at the sight of his wife.

There were no other pictures in the bedroom.
None showing either friends or girlfriends. Maybe the police had
taken any other pictures, ones that might have contained possible
leads in the investigation, but Ashe didn’t see any signs of where
other pictures might have been placed.

At the right corner of the room was a narrow
metal desk, on which sat a thick black laptop. It was open. Putting
his rear end onto the black folding chair that sat in front of the
metal desk, Ashe nudged the laptop and watched as the narrow screen
came to life. The background was the YSU penguin, the mascot of the
college team. The psychologist scanned what few icons were on the
screen with nothing standing out.

Ashe was far from a computer expert, but he
was adequate enough to search through files and programs. Using the
wireless mouse, he opened and closed folder after folder, only
finding school work, Scott’s papers and presentations. He then
double clicked an icon and tried to open up the internet browser,
but instantly realized that there wasn’t any internet to connect
to. Scott must get online at the school or library, the
psychologist figured, because in those days, a college student was
nearly impotent without access to the World Wide Web.

Rubbing his sore eyes, Ashe turned from the
laptop. Beside the metal desk was a narrow wooden table, with what
looked like clutter on the top. Ashe moved closer to it. But the
clutter was only a group of high school sports trophies.

He leaned in closer to admire the grouping of
trophies. That was when Ashe noticed the little black container
sitting at the foot of the trophies. For some reason, he reached in
and picked up the container. The object was only slightly longer
than his thumbnail. It looked like a miniature lipstick case, black
with gold trim where the bottom and lid met. Due to its weight, he
was sure that it was empty.