Centaur of the Crime: Book One of 'Fantasy and Forensics' (Fantasy & Forensics 1) (4 page)

But here’s the deal: the makeshift knights didn’t go in for the museum-piece plate armor suits. They went for body-length chain mail, or vests and a kind of metal skirt. Mail was cheaper, easier to move in, breathed, and since it was just clothing made up of little metal rings, it was lighter as well.

I was willing to bet a year’s salary that at the time of his death, John Doe had been wearing chain mail.

Okay, but did that get me anywhere? Again, it looked like I just replaced one mystery with another. I paced the length of the kitchen and stuck my hands in my pockets. Something cold tingled against my index finger.

To my horror, I pulled John Doe’s damned gold medallion out of my pocket.

My mind whirled back through yesterday’s events.

Okay, I sent samples of Doe’s clothing to the fiber experts, dumped the sweaty jumpsuit, sterilized the medallion, stuck it in my pocket…

Oh my God! What the hell was I doing? I’d just tampered with—I’d just stolen evidence from a murder case! I’d robbed a corpse!

Breathing hard, I pulled open a kitchen drawer with one hand. With the other, I moved to put the medallion in the drawer.

The hand holding the medallion put the damned thing back in my pocket.

I blinked. I took the medallion out, tried to put the thing away, and a second time, into my pocket it went. The little hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention as if someone had just run their nails over a chalkboard.

Okay, now this was getting just plain spooky.

I took the medallion out and examined it again. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I’d have blinked if I’d seen the phrase
One Ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them
stenciled on one side.

Instead, clear imprint of a horse’s hoof dominated one face of the medallion. The strange lettering on the other looked like a cross between Latin letters and Nordic runes. My arms goose-pimpled as I considered what was going on here.

One, I could be losing it.

Two, something effing strange was going on.

I didn’t believe in voodoo or witchcraft or Wicca or any dopey new-age version of an Earth-Mother. Hell, I didn’t even go to church on Sunday to partake in any of the local religious denominations on order.

I went out the front door in a rush. Of course, I’d completely forgotten that Deputy Chief McClatchy had put me under surveillance for my own safety. I badly startled the half-asleep pair of cops that had taken over for the Bears’ linebackers. I gave them an apologetic wave as I hopped into my car and thanked whoever was pulling the strings upstairs that no one had yet tried to take a potshot at me for my absent-minded spate of stupidity.

I drove to the M.E.’s office at the sizzling Southern California highway speed of twenty miles per hour in bumper to bumper traffic. I didn’t mind this time. It let me think more on the medallion. I could feel the cold lump of metal in my pocket. Tugging at me like it had its own gravity field.

“Okay,” I said to myself, “John Doe didn’t get shot with this little golden marker. So how did it get into his chest wound?” The answer was obvious, and it almost made me miss the highway off-ramp to the Medical Examiner’s headquarters.

It got into his chest wound because someone planted it there.

Fair enough. Why would someone do that? Knowing even the basics of forensic examinations meant that whoever put the thing in the most obvious wound expected it to be found. In other words, someone planted it there for a single reason.

Whoever it is
wanted
me to find it.

With that happy thought dancing in my head, I pulled in and parked in my assigned garage slot. My police escort parked nearby, in a spot where they could watch the entrance.

The Office of the Medical Examiner was a long, low-slung trapezoid of smoky black glass and long corridors lined with gray carpet. Compared to the ‘well-tended junkyard’ look of a lot of labs I’d worked for, the high-tech look of the place was a welcome change.

I clipped my badge identity card to my belt, pushed through the lobby’s king-sized revolving glass door, went through the security checkpoint’s metal detector, and then set off down the long gray-shaded corridor for my office at a pace just under a run.

“Dayna!” a familiar voice called, “Wait up!”

A matronly woman with a frizz of hair the color of weak tea and pince-nez glasses that would’ve warned a librarian to keep quiet half-walked, half-ran to catch up with me.

“I’m sorry, Shelly,” I said, as she puffed her way over to my side. “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

“Figured that as soon as I saw you break the new land-speed record through the door. Any faster, and you’d set the carpet on fire,” she said. Her soft Texas drawl spun out her last word into ‘fahr’.

Shelly Richardson and I had started out together as junior medical examiners. I’d swapped the M.E.’s green gown to move over to Crime Scene Analysis, but Shelly had stayed and prospered over the last couple of years. Like me, she loved pulling the bizarre and puzzling cases, the ones that could give you a bad case of the shivers, or make you stay up late chewing on your split ends in frustration.

“Maybe if I keep moving, I’ll be a more difficult target.”

She made a disapproving
tsk
. We were friends, but she didn’t always appreciate my dark sense of humor. Shelly’s tastes ran more to reruns of
The Brady Bunch
and comic strips involving cats who hated Mondays and loved lasagna.

“News spreads quick,” she said. “Someone gunning for you? Or was it just some punk who up-n-decided to take a couple pot-shots at the cops?”

“It sure seemed like someone was aiming for me,” I replied, as we started walking again. “But I can’t think of anyone who’d want me dead.”

“No jealous ex-lovers? Boyfriends?”

I sighed and shook my head ‘no’. It’d been a while since I’d been out with a man on an honest-to-goodness real live date, but that didn’t stop Shelly from trying to get me married off. We turned up a second corridor, one which bore a white plaque with an arrow: Forensics Department. Some joker had taken a marker and written
Labs n’ Slabs
on the plaque’s bottom edge. Well, it was graffiti, but at least it was accurate graffiti.

“I haven’t heard from McClatchy about an arrest,” I added.

“Because there wasn’t one. I asked Esteban. They swarmed the building the shots were fired from. The boys are swearing on the Good Book that nobody could’ve slipped past, but all they found was four spent rifle casings on the roof.”

“More good news,” I grumbled. “Well, I mostly came to see what’s up with the John Doe we picked up downtown.”

“Oh, Connor McCloud? I worked it with the tox-box folks last night. Hector sent me his photos, too.”

“
Connor McCloud?
We actually got a hit on that goofball name?”

Shelly rolled her eyes. “That’s ‘McCloud’ as in
Highlander
, dear. We’re calling him that ‘cause of that little metal fragment you gave us.”

“You’re kidding me!” I exclaimed, as we reached the glorified broom closet they’d repurposed as my office.

“Read the reports for yourself. You’ll find it right peculiar, I think.”

I turned the worn brass doorknob and pushed my way inside. Dusty teak bookshelves fairly groaned under the textbooks that took up the bulk of two walls, while the window on the remaining one looked out over the grassy expanse of the building’s rear lawn. The mess of paper on my desk was bad enough so that a hamster would’ve considered the place in prime move-in condition. But I kept a spot on the front left corner for a bright red cookie jar that I always kept stuffed with fresh brown-sugar ginger snaps. The picture on the front of the jar came from one of my favorite Disney flicks. It showed the Mad Hatter and White Rabbit at a tea party, holding up a wooden sign that proclaimed:
Have One!

I slid into my office chair with a creak of dry springs and opened the first of the folders that lay atop the pile of paper I’d been meaning to properly organize someday. Shelly took the visitor’s chair, lifted the top of my jar, and grabbed one of the cookies. I suppressed a grin. I didn’t actually like ginger snaps that much, but their sweet-spicy scent gave me a nice tingle in the nostrils. Not coincidentally, it also told me who’d been visiting my office on any given day.

The reports were terse but clearly laid out. No immediate hits on the fingerprints, but the FBI was checking their database as well. ‘Connor’ had been in excellent health before his death, about six hours before we’d found him. Clean living, too. Zero hits for drugs from cocaine, heroin, aspirin, or even aspartame in his body fluids, stomach contents, hair follicles, and subcutaneous fat.

Findings like that are unusual. But Hector Reyes’ photos moved the case from unusual to head-scratching. He hadn’t found any shoe prints at all. But he’d seen the same curious thing that I had—multiple blood trails leading to the body. He’d systematically put together a montage of pictures from 360 degrees around the body and then spliced it into a combined image. The blood trails radiated out from the body in a perfectly symmetrical pattern.

There were no traces of someone dragging or carrying a body across the jumbled terrain of broken concrete to leave him in the middle of the lot. None. That had to be wrong. Connor would’ve been more than two hundred pounds of dead weight. Hard for even a bodybuilder to handle. But Hector’s photos showed that we weren’t looking at blood trails. We were looking at a splatter pattern.

It was as if someone had simply dumped poor, dead Connor from a platform ten feet in the air, let him fall straight down, and then vanished. Taking the platform with them as well, I might add.

Effing im-poss-i-ble.

And then the report got
really
interesting.

Chapter Five

My office chair squeaked in protest as I leaned forward. Shelly looked up expectantly as she popped the last of the ginger snap in her mouth with a spicy-smelling
crunch
. I closed the report she’d done on the metal fragment.

“Are you serious about what you found?” I asked.

“As serious as a Baptist in church, hon.”

The metal chip from the massive shoulder wound was a piece of medium-grade iron called ‘blister steel’. But the tox guys had run the metal’s impurities against hundreds of possible metal implements. Their conclusion: Connor had been wounded by a genuine antique. The steel shard came from a sword that could only have been manufactured during Europe’s High Middle Ages.

“Okay,” I acknowledged, “at least I’m getting the
Highlander
joke now, sort of. So our guy got attacked by a nut with a medieval sword. Any recent thefts from museums, private collections?”

“Nope.” Shelly leaned back in her chair to give the hallway a long look in both directions. When she was sure it was clear, she continued. “Let’s head on over to the slab, take a gander at Mister McCloud. We need to talk. Private-like.”

I started to ask a question. Then shut my mouth with a snap. I’d only seen Shelly get serious about stuff like this once or twice, and when she said ‘we need to talk’, she meant business.

We walked down to the chiller rooms, where we actually kept the bodies. The cold chambers were windowless rooms coated with cheery yellow-brick tiles that looked like they belonged in Oz, not a morgue. The light came from a combination of harsh fluorescent bulbs and a special kind of skylight that bounced the sun down to us indirectly from a reflection panel on the roof. Different kinds of light helped throw different kinds of dyes or marks into sharper relief for us.

Shelly and I didn’t chit-chat as we did the surgical hand-wash routine and gowned up in a matching pair of pale green scrubs. A couple pieces of paperwork later, we rolled the body out of the cold chamber. The gamy smell of rotting flesh was muted here—the low temperature slowed decomposition—and there was a background scent of formaldehyde that curled up in the nostrils and plastered the back of the throat.

The man I now thought of as Connor—funny, how easily we can attach names, even to dead things—didn’t appear to be much worse for wear. Shelly had performed a modified Y-shaped incision for the autopsy. Normally, we started the cut at the top of each shoulder and ran down to the front of the chest, switching over to shears or bone saws when we reached the sternum. Since our boy’s sternum had been powdered, the cut continued around the wound and down to the pubic bone. But Shelly didn’t pull the flaps back. Instead, she directed me to Connor’s hands as she spoke.