The Boy Must Die (34 page)

“Good morning, Inspector.”

“You found him like this, Johnson?”

“Yes, sir. Slumped over to the left. I’ve done the site photos already and most of the dusting. Here, on the sketch, you can see the layout as we found it at 7:30.”

“We did a full walk-around on all floors, Billy. While you were on your way in.”

“Thanks, Dodd. The noose was hanging down like that? Undone?”

“Yep. The knot worked loose somehow, we figure, and the body fell.”

“A slow fall, though, sir. The knot was probably a basic ‘granny.’ A slipknot. Like the one here around the wrists. The way the body ended up like this, the torso bent forward and the knees buckled, it’s possible the knot loosened gradually, allowing him a slow slide to the floor. But what we can’t figure. . . .”

“It’s this bruise on the temple, Inspector. The colouring, especially the nature of the lividity, and the texture of skin tell me it’s postmortem.”

“And yet, Tommy, the body has fallen the other way. To the left, not the right. What’s that on the lip?”

“A small hematoma and cut. Pre-mortem.”

“Johnson, can you lift the head for me? Turn the face up. Lift up the left eyelid a little more. Fine. Justin Moore all right.”

“Let me get a closer gander. Jesus!”

“So the neighbour didn’t look at the body?”

“No. She thought she’d smelled fire and called the smoke-eaters.”

“By the way, where’s the dog? What happened to the terrier she said was barking all night?”

“There was no dog by the time we got here. The fireboys and their lights may have frightened it off.”

“Any sign of a dog being here, Johnson?”

“As a matter of fact, sir, there was a small bit of urine over on the wall by the dryer. The dog must have been marking its territory.”

“You sure it’s dog piss?”

“No, sir. But it’s just a few drops. I took a sample and bagged it so we can run a lab check.”

“Well, it makes sense the animal got in here; it would probably stake a claim.”

“Understandable that it might also bark at a dead body.”

“You need to look around the room, Billy?”

“I’ll wait until you are done, Tommy. Any temperature reading yet for time of death?”

“I’m getting there, sir. Can you figure this black paint on the genitals and the chest?”

“Is it paint for certain?”

“Yes, sir. Johnson found the can in the other room.”

“It’s the same black paint used last week, sir. On the pentacle on the wall there. Whoever daubed it on the genitals was careful. There are few spill spots on the floor here, beneath the noose, where this new pentacle was painted.”

“No candles or books this time, Johnson?”

“No, sir.”

“What do you make of the torn shirt? And the shorts and underwear pulled down to the ankles?”

“Seems the shirt was cut with a knife rather than torn. Not much left, by the looks of it.”

“Two pieces were found to the left of the body, sir. I’ve tagged and bagged them already.”

“Any blood on the shirt?”

“No, sir.”

“There is hardly
any
blood, Inspector. Except for the lip cut, which had congealed, there is no cutting or bleeding evident on the body.”

“And the neck bruise? The ligature mark?”

“Well, Inspector. If this cadaver was hanged and asphyxiated, then it wasn’t by this binder twine. From what I can gather here, the bruising is minimal, and the spotting at the neck leads me to guess the body may have been dead
before
it was strung up.”

“Jesus! What are we getting into here? This town’s going crazy with. . . .”

“Don’t jump ahead, Butch. Let’s go up to the back porch and garden. Johnson, you come with me. You’re done with the dusting?”

“Yes, sir. In one second.”

“Dodd, get out to the neighbours.”

“It’s done. Bolling’s knocking on doors already.”

“Then I want you to do a slow thorough walk-through in the garden. Comb the grass, the back fence, and the bushes near that garage. Look up on the garage roof and inside it. No one here has mentioned a knife or a weapon, but last time we found a bread cutter shoved into the mud by the fence. Also, where is the paintbrush that made the pentacle and decorated the kid’s genitals? We need to find it, if it’s still on site.”

Billy found a space in the room where there was no one dusting or putting up tape or chalking and leaned his back against the rough surface of the whitewashed concrete wall. A pen hung suspended in his right hand, and he looked through the small window at the grass and the hot light of the Satan House backyard. To his side lay the cadaver, paint-smeared, bruised, its clothes half on, half off. Tommy, the medic, was kneeling by the buttocks and inserting a thermometer into the anus to determine body temperature and a possible time of death. Billy had watched Tommy take swabs of this area, the penis, the mouth, and fingers for any signs of body fluids other than blood, the assumption being that perhaps the body might have been sexually molested given the state of the torn and pulled clothing. And, of course, the painted genitals. Billy was shocked at the state of the body and its odd slumped posture. Satan House had been invaded once again. A door kicked in. The padlock smashed. And now a second victim. How much of a connection did it have with the hanging of Darren Riegert seven days before?

Billy was wearing jeans, a white T-shirt, and brown loafers. He’d been in the garden early, digging holes for the new trees, stopping occasionally to glance at the changing sky patterns. Granpa Naughton had once said that clouds and light were the prairie man’s scenery. When Butch had called telling Billy another young man had been found in Satan House, Billy had left his shovel on the porch, knowing immediately that this presaged a turn for the worse, a veering towards a greater evil.

Now he pondered the myriad facts of the case and the new questions the scene in front of him would raise. Butch had been right. They were similar crimes — the room, the pipe, the pentacles, and the nudity. But so much didn’t add up. Why would a body be strung up after death, if what Tommy had said was true about the ligature bruising? And the painted genitals? Also, Justin Moore was older than the others.
How much does Sheree Lynn Bird know of this already?
If at first glance there were too many contradictions, Billy always knew he was in for some difficult work.

“We’re lifting him now, sir. Bagging him for Hawkes.”

Billy turned and watched Tommy and Johnson, their hands sheathed in grey skin-tight rubber gloves, place the body into a plastic body bag. The legs were first, and then the arms and head were manipulated until the plastic zipper could be closed to cover the contorted face. Just as the zipper slid over the upper portion of Justin Moore’s face, Billy took a last glance at his pale skin.

When the body had been carried up the stairs, and Butch and Dodd had gone to scout the garden, Billy took a few minutes alone to examine the empty room. As he had done a week before, when inspecting the site of Darren Riegert’s hanging, Billy stood at attention. He placed his hands behind his back and whispered under his breath: “Observe all, make no assumptions.” Although his mind had been racing and forming all kinds of suppositions, Billy decided to let the room “speak” to him, to let himself stand immobile and silent to allow the space to enter into his mind.
Out came his notebook. He lifted up his right hand and the pen he had been holding. The floor had been painted with a crude pentacle in the same black paint found on the body’s genitals. Mud and mouse droppings crunched under Billy’s loafers. He went to the sink, bent down, and smelled the drain. He knelt and swept his eyes over the floor. The intense light of the morning brought out the white in the brick walls. Daubs of black paint ran in a thin necklace from the pentacle in the centre of the room to the edge, suggesting to Billy where the paint can had been placed by the perpetrator. A small shred of the cheap cotton binder twine that had been tied around the cadaver’s wrists and neck lay on the floor like a wisp of grass. Billy wrote a few notes, pulled in a deep breath, and went upstairs into the kitchen.

Johnson was waiting for him. Billy looked out the window to the garden, where Butch and Dodd were slowly walking along the fence, their heads held down towards broken stalks, stone, and mud.

“Let’s you and I walk over to that gate, Johnson. The woman next door claimed she saw two men come into the yard from there. You have your kit?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bolling hasn’t come back from questioning the neighbours?”

“Not yet.”

At the back door, Billy pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and took a handful of Ziplocs from Johnson’s kit. The two of them stood for a moment on the threshold, with Billy bending close to the broken padlock. Splinters from the screws that once held the padlock and its metal arm were scattered by the door and on the top outside wooden step. “Looks as if the lock was struck by a rock. Maybe one of those greys from the garden there.”

Johnson stepped down to the area beside the back wall of the house. Overgrown with weeds, the mound of stones was composed of flat field rocks, potato-shaped grey boulders, and large lichen-spotted slabs of granite brought in from the quarries in the Crowsnest Pass.

“The gate is straight ahead, twenty yards. The two men walked or
strolled from there to here. It’s been dry for the most part, Johnson, so I don’t expect we’ll find any footprints. But you never know.”

Billy headed for the gate, walking a foot or so to the left of the path he assumed was taken by the men. He watched Johnson keeping her head down, examining the grass. At the gate separating the Moore property and that of Satan House, Billy saw that the garage in the Moore yard butted up flush to the fence. A small, rain-spattered window faced out from the Moore garage and gave onto the backyard of Satan House. The glass in the window was so smudged it looked as if it had been painted with a light beige undercoat.

Passing through the gate, Billy noted trampled grass leading into the Satan House yard. He bent down, looked closely, then stood up. The Moore yard was small; the house was large, with a square open-air back porch made of concrete. Stairs led up to the back door on both sides of the porch, giving access to the backyard as well as the street beyond. The garage was built of wood, covered with faded red paint. Its old swinging doors had glass panes as dirty as the one in the back wall. The roof sagged in the middle, and there was a smell of car oil and dust and rotting timber. The right swinging door was ajar. Billy gazed into the shadowy interior.

“Someone’s left a light on in there,” he said to Johnson.

An Oldsmobile was parked close to the left wall.

Billy also saw bags of soil, a workbench, clay garden pots, a row of garden tools neatly arranged on a phalanx of hooks that ran parallel to the right side of the car. “We’ll have to get permission to search in here. I wonder why that light is on, though? Unless the Moores leave it on all night for security reasons.”

Billy walked to the back porch steps.

“We’d better call on Mrs. Moore, now, Johnson. This will not be easy.”

Grabbing the metal railing, Billy suddenly stopped. He looked at the small flower patch ranged at the foot of the steps. White sweet alyssum grew in precisely spaced mounds. The ones nearest the steps had been trampled flat. “Hold it, Johnson.” Kneeling down, Billy examined the
soil. He then let his eyes roam past the step and towards the cut grass bordering the cement foundation of the house. He got up, moved to the foundation, and knelt again. “What do you think this is, Johnson?” Johnson climbed on the step above Billy, opened her kit, and pulled out a pair of tweezers and a Ziploc. She leaned close to Billy’s face. In the grass were tiny shards of a shiny white material. Broken glass from a lightbulb? Billy raised his head and looked at the light fixture over the door. A round clear cut-glass globe sheltered a standard opaque white lightbulb. Johnson lifted a number of the pieces and placed them into the Ziploc, then held the bag up to the sun.

“Beats me, sir. It could be glass or shale. . . .”

“There is a lot of it right here, around the step, small bits, as if someone had broken a teacup or a lightbulb. And look, the pieces are light enough to sit atop the blades of grass. Get as many as you can, Johnson, and we’ll run them through the lab.”

From inside the house, a sharp-pitched barking erupted. Suddenly, through a small hinged square flap cut into the bottom quarter of the wooden back door, a white terrier burst out onto the concrete porch, barking and wagging its tail.

“Spencer?” Johnson slowly reached out her hand to the dog’s face. The terrier barked and shook its body, then out of curiosity sidled up to Johnson and quickly sniffed. “Spencer?” Johnson said. “Good boy.” The dog’s tail began to wag furiously. Then it pricked up its two shaggy ears, froze, suddenly, as if hearing a distant whistle, and dashed back through the swinging flap into the house.

Billy climbed the steps, yanking off his rubber gloves and putting them into his pants pocket. He rang the doorbell. Footsteps gradually grew louder, and when the door opened, a tall woman in a white quilted housecoat stood in the doorway, glowering into the sunlight.

“Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” Billy said, holding up a badge Butch had lent him. Johnson pulled out hers, too. “My name is Billy Yamamoto, detective inspector with the city police force. This is Constable Gloria Johnson.”

The woman took a second to register what was being said. Billy thought she must have just climbed from bed. She spoke in a slow, sleepy manner.

“Is there something wrong, officers? I’m sorry. . . .”

“Are you Mrs. Aileen Moore?” asked Billy, placing the badge into his pocket.

“Yes. Ah, do you need to come in? Has something happened?” Aileen Moore rubbed her face quickly with her right hand and seemed at that moment to waken. Her demeanour changed to one of alert fear. “I’m afraid I was ill last night and took a sleeping pill, officers. I just woke up. Has something happened?”

Billy looked first at Johnson, then to Aileen Moore.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Moore. I have some bad news.”