Murder with a Twist (3 page)

After another fifteen minutes of thinking about it and listening in on the ideas the others proposed, I announced that I gave up. “I'm just not built to think this way,” I said.

“Give it time,” Cora said. “Mull it over. Let your subconscious do the work.”

I felt certain no amount of mulling was going to help, so I stepped away from the group and went back behind the bar to help wait on customers so Billy could participate in the game for a while. Duncan followed me and helped out as well. He has a knack for the job, and while doing his undercover stint several weeks back, he discovered he liked it.

Debra Landers—one of my other cocktail waitresses and the mother of two teenage boys—came up to the bar and ordered a round of beers. Duncan helped me pour them from the tap and, as we worked, our bodies came into incidental contact several times. Every touch was like an electric charge coursing through me and by the time we had the beers poured, I was a hormonal mess of synesthetic reactions.

Duncan must have felt something, too, because after Debra left to deliver her drinks, he leaned down close to my ear and whispered, “Any chance you'd let me spend the night here? I have to get up early in the morning and staying here would save me the drive time.”

I knew his request to spend the night meant my apartment upstairs rather than the bar, and it both frightened and excited me. This was a step I'd been anticipating in our relationship for weeks since it was obvious we shared an attraction to one another. But, for whatever reason, Duncan had so far kept things on a platonic level.

“What about your clothes?” I whispered back to Duncan, feeling flustered. It was an inane question, but at the moment, it was all my addled brain could come up with. I looked around to see if anyone was close enough to overhear. Fortunately, no one was.

“I always keep a suitcase in the back of my car,” he said. His breath was warm on my face and neck, and my mouth was bursting with the taste of sweet milk chocolate. Duncan's voice always tastes like chocolate.

I looked up at him, knowing I wanted him to stay. But then I had a second of doubt. Was I reading more into this than he meant? What if he was simply asking to sleep on my couch? I didn't want to jump to any conclusions, so I said, “You can stay if you want. I'll have to make up the spare bed, or if you prefer, the couch in my office is quite comfortable.”

Duncan frowned at that, and then flashed me a crooked smile. “I was hoping for something a little more . . . cozy.”

Based on that response, I decided to take the plunge. “Well, if your goal is to get some sleep, I don't think cozy is the answer. Neither of us will get any sleep.”

“Trust me,” Duncan said, “by the time I'm done with you, we'll both get the best sleep we've ever had.”

I looked away from him then and swallowed hard, my thoughts whirling with the possibilities. “Do I have to cook breakfast?” I said. It was another utterly inane question, but my mind was spinning.

Fortunately, Duncan didn't answer because Billy chose that moment to approach us. “Cora came up with a tough one tonight,” he said. “I gave up, too.”

Missy came up to the bar and ordered another round of Alibis for the crime-solving group and I used it as an excuse to move away from Duncan, hoping I could rein in my thoughts. I stayed focused on the task at hand, mentally ticking off each step even though I could make the drink blindfolded. It was as I was scooping the crushed ice into the shakers that I had my epiphany. I stopped what I was doing and froze for a few seconds, the shakers in hand.

“Mack, are you okay?” Billy asked, staring at me.

I looked over at him and smiled. “I'm fine,” I told him. “But I think I just figured out how Harry did it.” I handed the shakers off to him and made my way around the bar and back to the group table. Billy took over making the drinks, but I could tell he was intrigued, because he moved to the end of the bar to finish mixing them so he could be closer to the group and hear what I was about to say. Duncan followed me, a curious grin on his face.

“Cora, how big was the box they found in Harry's basement when it was in its original shape?”

I could tell from the smile on her face that I was moving along the right track. “It was a good-size carton, about two feet high and two feet wide.”

“We already went there, Mack,” Carter said. “Cora said Harry weighed around one-eighty, and there is no way an empty cardboard box like that would hold up that kind of weight.”

“You're right, an empty box wouldn't,” I said. “Did Harry make any purchases right before he died?” I asked, turning my attention back to Cora.

“In fact, he did,” she said, her smile widening. “After checking out stores in the area, the cops discovered that Harry made a purchase at one that was only two minutes away. It was a convenience store and the receipt wasn't itemized, but the cops knew that he spent just over thirty bucks.”

I did a quick calculation in my head. “Enough for about ten twenty-pound bags of ice?”

“Yes!” Cora said, now gleaming.

“That's how he did it, then,” I said. I saw a glimmer in the eyes of several of the others and a few nods of grudging admiration.

“Of course!” Carter said. “He filled the box with crushed ice and stood on that. That's why he had the hot water tap running, so it would melt the ice and disintegrate the cardboard box.”

“But what about the bags the ice came in?” Joe asked.

“He was close enough to the convenience store to pour the ice into the box and then run the empty bags back to the store and dump them in the trash there,” I said. “The ice wouldn't melt that much in the four or five minutes it took him to do that.”

“Well done, Mack,” Frank Signoriello said. Then, with a wink he added, “Only you thought more inside the box than outside it.”

I received kudos from around the table, and for the next two hours until the bar closed, I was on a high. I felt good, better than I had in a long, long time.

Though once the bar was closed, the cleanup was done, and everyone else had gone home for the night, Duncan proved that I could feel much, much better.

A
nd that brings me back to the real hanging man. The call came a little after eight the next morning while Duncan and I were still in bed, and despite Duncan's promises, neither of us had had much sleep, not that I was going to complain. He carried his phone into the bathroom and shut the door, eliminating any chance I had of overhearing. When he came back out, he told me he had a crime scene to go to, and based on my success with the crime-solving task the night before, he declared me officially ready for the real thing and invited me to come along. I agreed, but not without trepidation.

I had thought our little crime games, along with all the preparations I'd been making with Duncan over the past six weeks, would make a real crime scene easier to take. But that wasn't the case. Our little “test runs” had been clean, sanitary, pretend situations where we laughed and had fun. The crimes were all make-believe, or ones we only heard or read about, and the stakes were small. But the hanging man before me that morning was real, frightening, and all too dead. I don't like death, and staring it in the face that way was very unnerving.

A few minutes after we entered the apartment of the dead man, I turned to Duncan, who was standing next to me, and said, “I don't know if I can do this.”

“Would it help if you stepped outside for a few minutes?”

I shook my head and squeezed my eyes closed. “No. When I come back inside, everything will still be the same.” I sighed heavily. “How do you do this?” I asked him. “How can you face this sort of misery, cruelty, and sadness day in and day out?”

He shrugged. “I hesitate to say that you get used to it, but the fact is you do. I think after a while you start putting up mental fences, little guards around your inner emotional self. You only let your objective self out; you need to keep your inner self, the emotional self, protected and secluded.”

I had opened my eyes while he talked, but I was staring at my feet, which were covered with blue paper booties. In my mind, I was doing a little trick I've learned over the years, something that helps me clear away the noise and make my world more manageable. It worked; the majority of the noises, smells, and sounds that were assaulting me moments ago dissipated. Slowly I raised my eyes to look at the hanging man again. Some of the noise returned, and I sucked in a deep breath and blew it out very slowly, trying to focus on each reaction individually. But the sight of that bloated, purple face kept triggering a veritable locust plague of reactions. I shook my head, sighed, and looked back down at the floor.

“Maybe it would be easier if we started with the room,” Duncan said, handing me a pair of latex gloves. “Look around and see if there's anything that leaps out at you.”

I nodded, pulled on the gloves, and then shifted my gaze to the area behind Duncan. His partner, Jimmy, was standing there looking at me with an expression of impatience and disapproval. I knew Jimmy was skeptical about my ability to help out with this sort of thing, and I also knew that Duncan had convinced him to give me a chance. I didn't want to let Duncan down, but to be honest, I, like Jimmy, was feeling pretty doubtful about my abilities at the moment, even on the heels of last night's game success.

I turned my back on the hanging corpse and went back to the door we had come through moments before. I'd had an experience as we entered the place and I'd meant to comment on it right away, but then the sight of the man hanging from the stairway balustrade wiped the thought from my mind. Recalling it now, I decided to test the experience to see if I could replicate it. Turned out, I could.

“When we first came in here,” I said over my shoulder to Duncan, “I heard this sound. It was a swishing, watery sound, like clothes getting agitated in a washing machine, or dishes getting cleaned in the dishwasher.” I had reached the door and I turned back and looked at Duncan, making an effort not to let my gaze go toward the hanging corpse. “Can you hear it?” I asked him.

Duncan cocked his head to one side, closed his eyes, and listened for a few seconds. Then he shook his head. “I don't hear anything like that,” he said.

“Okay, good. I thought at first that it was a real sound, something coming from a neighboring apartment. But I can tell now that it's not.” I walked away from the door and headed right, toward the kitchen area. The sound grew in intensity. Then I turned left and walked toward the hanging man, keeping my eyes averted. The sound rapidly diminished, only to crescendo again when I approached the small bathroom that was off to one side of the entry door.

“I often hear smells,” I said. “I think that's the case here, because I can smell something by the entry door, and in the kitchen and bathroom, that fades as I get closer to the victim. And the sound I hear does the same thing.”

Jimmy frowned and asked, “Meaning what, exactly?”

“I'm not sure,” I said, feeling as frustrated as he looked. “I just know that it seems out of place, that there is something wrong about it. I'm still feeling my way through this stuff.”

Jimmy rolled his eyes and let out an exasperated sigh. “Duncan, you can't seriously believe this is going to be useful.”

Before Duncan could answer, I spoke. “If I'm interpreting the sensation correctly, it suggests to me that someone else was here in this apartment very recently. The smell and the sound that I think goes with it is strongest in the kitchen, bathroom, and by the door, and it all but disappears when I move closer to the victim. That implies to me that whoever was here with that particular smell on them didn't go near where the man is now.”

Apparently, this interpretation made Duncan happy, because he looked over at Jimmy with a smug expression. “There you go, Jimmy,” he said. “If there was someone here in this apartment around the time this man hung himself, we need to find out who it was and talk to them.”

I went over to the bathroom by the entrance and stopped after stepping over the threshold. It was small, and most likely meant to be a guest bath since it only contained a toilet and a vanity sink and cupboard. As I stood there, I felt an annoying itch on the back of my neck, as if I had a tag on my shirt that was irritating my skin. I reached back but there was no tag, making me think it was a synesthetic reaction. Had something in here been moved, added, or removed recently? Or was the itch a reaction to some lingering odor? It nagged at me because I was certain I'd felt this same experience before, plenty of times, but I've spent so much of my life trying to ignore and suppress my reactions that trying to identify the cause now was hard to do. I tucked it away for the time being and stepped out of the bathroom.

I meandered my way toward the small dining-room table just off the kitchen. On top of the table was a drinking glass with a smidge of whisky at the bottom and a nearly empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. The glass rested on one corner of the victim's suicide note, a single sheet of paper typed out and presumably printed from a laptop computer and printer, which were also on the table. I read the note.

The name
Dan Thornton
was typed at the bottom of the page.

During the time it took me to read the note, I heard an odd twangy sound like the strum of an out-of-tune guitar. This was a sound I'd heard before and this time I knew what it meant. Just to be sure, I bent down closer to the paper and inhaled deeply. Then I did the same thing on the keyboard of the laptop computer next to it. As I expected, the twangy sound increased as I got closer to the paper or the keyboard, and then decreased as I straightened and backed away from them. Puzzled, I looked around the rest of the small studio-like apartment in search of an explanation.

“Is there any indication our victim smokes?” I asked no one in particular.

The two men both looked around the room. “No,” Duncan said. “At least nothing obvious. Why?”

“Because the person who typed this note and handled the paper it's written on is someone who smokes.”

“Are you sure?” Duncan asked.

At the same time, Jimmy said, “How can you possibly know that?”

“When I get close to the paper or the keyboard on the laptop, I hear the same twangy guitar sound I hear when I smell cigarette smoke.” I looked over at Duncan. “Remember? It's one of the reactions we logged from before.”

“I do,” Duncan said. “And if you're right, it suggests that someone other than the victim wrote that suicide note.”

“Wait a minute,” Jimmy said, looking suspicious. “Did you hear this sound over by the door?”

I shook my head.

“Why wouldn't you hear it by the door? If someone smells like cigarette smoke, I would imagine you would be able to hear that sound anywhere they were in the apartment.”

“Not necessarily,” I told him. “Some smells come and go quickly. They are easily dispersed by breezes, showers, whatever. Other smells are more ingrained, or perhaps their molecules are just heavier and as a result they tend to linger on surfaces. For instance, no matter how hard I try, I can't eliminate the smell of lemons and limes from my hands because I cut them up every day, often several times a day. And even though I wash my hands dozens of times a day, the smell never completely goes away. It's the same for someone who has smoked for a long time. Even if they haven't had a cigarette in several hours, or even several days, the smell from holding so many cigarettes over the years lingers on their hands and fingers. I suspect that's the case with this smell. It's coming only from his—or her—hands. It's on the things that he or she touched.”

“And this other sound you heard . . . ,” Jimmy said, still looking skeptical.

I didn't know what point he was trying to make, so I gave him a questioning look.

“You don't hear this other sound, the washing machine thing, near the suicide note and the computer?”

“I do, but it's very faint. I don't think the person who had that smell spent much time by the note, or touched it.”

Duncan said, “So you're suggesting there were not one, but at least two other people here in this apartment along with the victim?”

“I'm not telling you anything except what I'm experiencing. How you choose to interpret that is up to you.”

Duncan could tell I had my dander up, and he placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “Look, I know this is difficult for you,” he said. “But I truly believe that your experiences can help us interpret these crime scenes, maybe even help us catch a few culprits. It might take some trial and error to figure it all out, but that's okay. The more we practice, the better we will get at this.”

I looked back up at the hanging man and grimaced. “I'm not sure this is something I want to get better at.”

“Understandable,” Duncan said. “I'm sorry, Mack. I suspect I may have pushed you too fast with this and, let's face it, this particular scene is a grim one to start with. So let's call it a day. I'll get one of the uniforms downstairs to drive you back to the bar.”

“No!” I was a little startled by my outburst, and judging from the expressions on both Duncan's and Jimmy's faces, so were they. “I told you I would help with this,” I said. “I promised I would try and I will.”

I felt I owed Duncan my efforts in exchange for what he did to solve both Ginny's murder and my father's. I know he was just doing his job, but the way he did it had made it more personal, more meaningful. And then there was the little fact of my own apparent guilt in both cases, which at one point seemed like a given. Even I had to admit that the evidence against me had been quite damning, but Duncan had kept an open mind throughout it all, working as much on instinct as he did on facts. There are some who might say that's not the best way to function in a job like his, but I disagree.

Granted, some of Duncan's skepticism about my guilt stemmed from his attraction to me, a fact he admitted to during the investigation into Ginny's murder. At one point, I thought his flirtatious manner was simply a ploy he used on women to get them to relax and open up to him, but over time I came to believe that his attraction to me was genuine. Lest I had any lingering doubts, last night had eliminated them, though I still wondered why it had taken Duncan so long to make that move. I also wondered if Duncan feared a personal relationship might cloud my decision making and the professional relationship he was trying to foster.

In addition to repaying Duncan for the extra business he brings me amongst the cop crowd, and the free labor he provides behind the bar on a regular basis, I have another motivation for wanting to do this crime stuff: my synesthesia, which has been a curse to me for most of my life. I'm far from being the only person who has it, but apparently my case is a unique and severe form of the disorder, something the doctors think might have been triggered by my traumatic beginnings. My mother was seriously injured in a car accident while pregnant with me and she was kept alive on machines while she lay in a brain-dead coma. As soon as the doctors thought she was far enough along in her pregnancy, they induced her. That's how I was born, and a short while later, the machines were turned off and my mother was allowed to die.

It took me awhile to realize that my view of the world differed vastly from that of my playmates. When my father realized I was seeing things other people didn't, hearing things other people didn't, and experiencing odd tastes, smells, and sensations that others were not aware of, he became intrigued. He discovered my ability to tell when small things in a room had changed, to detect odors most people couldn't, and to generally sense things on a level most people couldn't understand. We played games for a while—the same sort of games Duncan had been organizing for me over the past few weeks—little mini-tests where my father would show me a room, make me leave, make some small change, and then bring me back to see if I could tell what was different. I was able to do it every time and, when I saw how it pleased him, I embraced both the games and my disorder.