"Could it be Vibram?" he sarcastically said.
"I need to get started," I said, getting swabs and a chemical thermometer out of my case.
"We got too damn many people in here!" Marino announced. "Cooper, Jenkins, go find something useful to do., He jerked his thumb at the open doorway. They stared at him. One of them started to say something.
"Swallow it, Cooper," Marino told him. "And give me the camera. And maybe you followed orders by securing the scene, but you weren't told to work the damn scene. What? Couldn't resist seeing your deputy chief like this? That the deal? How many other assholes been in here gawking?"
"Wait a minute…" Jenkins protested.
Marino snatched the Nikon out of his hands.
"Give me your radio," Marino snapped.
Jenkins reluctantly detached it from his duty belt and handed that over to him, too.
"Go," Marino said.
"Captain, I can't leave without my radio."
"I just gave you permission."
No one dared remind Marino that he had been suspended. Jenkins and Cooper left in a hurry.
"Sons of bitches," Marino declared in their wake.
I turned Bray's body on its side. Rigor mortis was complete, suggesting she had been dead at least six hours. I pulled down her pants and swabbed her rectum for seminal fluid before inserting the thermometer.
"I need a detective and some crime-scene techs," Marino was saying on the air.
"Unit nine, what's the address?"
"The one in progress," Marino cryptically replied.
"Ten-four, unit nine," said the dispatcher, a woman.
"Minny," Marino said to me.
I waited for an explanation.
"We go way back. She's my radio room snitch," he said.
I withdrew the thermometer and held it up.
"Eighty-eight-point-one," I said. "The body usually cools about one and a half degrees an hour for the first eight hours. But she's going to cool a little quicker because she's partially unclothed. It's what? Maybe seventy degrees in here?"
"I don't know. I'm burning up," he said. "For sure she was murdered last night, that much we know."
"Her stomach contents may tell us more," I said. "Do we have any idea how the killer got in?"
"I'm gonna check out the doors and windows after we finish up in here."
"Long linear lacerations,",I said, touching her wounds and looking for any trace evidence that might not make it to the morgue. "Like a tire iron. Then there are these punched-out areas, too. Everywhere."
"Could be the end of the tire iron," Marino said, looking on.
"But what made this?" I asked.
In several places on the mattress, blood had been transferred from some object that left a striped pattern reminiscent of a plowed field. The stripes were approximately an inch and a half long with maybe an eighth of an inch of space between them, the total surface area of each transfer about the size of my palm.
"Make sure we check the drains for blood," I said as voices sounded down the hall.
"Hope that's the Breakfast Boys," Marino said, referring to Ham and Eggleston.
They showed up carrying large Pelican cases.
"You got any idea what the hell's going on?" Marino asked them.
The two crime-scene technicians stared.
"Mother of God," Ham finally said.
"Does anyone have any idea what happened here?" Eggleston asked, his eyes fixed on what was left of Bray on the bed.
"You know about as much as we do," Marino replied. "Why weren't you-called earlier?"
"I'm surprised you found out," Ham said. "No one told us until now."
"I got my sources," Marino said.
"Who tipped the media?" I asked..
"I guess they got their sources, too," said Eggleston.
He and Ham began opening the cases and setting up lights. Marino's unit number blared from his purloined radio, startling both of us.
"Shit," he mumbled. "Nine," he said over the air.
Ham and Eggleston put on gray binocular magnifiers, or "Luke Skywalkers," as the cops called them.
"Unit nine, ten-five three-fourteen," the radio came back.
Three-fourteen, you out there?" Marino said.
"Need you to step outside;" a voice returned.
"That's a ten-ten;' Marino said, refusing.
The techs began taking measurements in millimeters with additional magnifiers that looked rather much like jeweler's lenses. The binocular headsets alone could magnify only three-and-a-half, and some blood spatters were too small for that.
"There's someone who needs to see you. Now," the radio went on.
"Man, there's castoff all over the place." Eggleston was referring to blood thrown off during the backswing of a weapon, creating uniform trails or lines on whatever surface it impacted.
"Can't do it," Marino answered the radio.
Three-fourteen -didn't respond, and I unhappily suspected what this was all about, and I was right. In minutes, more footsteps sounded in the hall, and then Chief Rodney Harris was standing in the doorway, his face stone.
"Captain Marino;" Harris said.
"Yes, sir, Chief." Marino studied an area of floor near the bathroom.
Ham and Eggleston in their black fatigues, latex gloves and binocular headsets only added to the cold horror of the scene as they worked with angles and axes and points of convergence to reconstruct, through geometry, where in space each blow was struck.
"Chief," they both said.
Harris stared at the bed, jaw muscles bunching. He was short and homely, with thinning red hair and an ongoing battle with his weight. Maybe these misfortunes had shaped him. I didn't know. But Hams had always been a tyrant. He was aggressive and made it obvious he didn't like women who strayed from their proper place, which was why I'd never understood his hiring Bray, unless it was simply that he thought she'd make him look good.
"With all due respect, Chief," Marino said, "don't step one damn inch closer."
"I want to know, did you bring the media, Captain?" Harris said in a tone that would have frightened most people I knew. "Are you responsible for that, too? Or did you just directly counter my orders?"
"I guess it's the latter, Chief. I had nothing to do with the media. They was already here when the doc and I pulled up."
Harris looked at me-as if he'd just now noticed I was in the room. Ham and Eggleston climbed up on their stepladders, hiding behind their task.
"What happened to her?" Harris asked me, and his voice faltered a little. "Christ:'
He closed his eyes and shook his head.
"Beaten to death with some sort of instrument, maybe a tool. We don't know;" I said.
"I mean, is there anything…?" he started to say, and his iron facade was rapidly slipping away. "Well…" He cleared his throat, his eyes pinned to Bray's body. "Why would someone do this? Who? Anything?"
"That's what we're working on, Chief," Marino said. "Don't have a single damn answer right now, but maybe you can answer a few questions for me."
The crime-scene techs had begun painstakingly taping bright pink surveyor's string above droplets of blood spattered on the white ceiling. Harris looked ill.
"You know anything about her personal life?" Marino asked.
"No," Harris said. "In fact, I didn't know she had one."
"She had someone over last night. They ate pizza, maybe drank a little. Appears her guest smoked;' Marino said.
"I never heard her say anything about going out with someone." Harris tore his attention away from the bed. "We weren't really what I'd call friendly with each. other."
Ham stopped what he was doing, the string he held connected only to air. Eggleston peered up through his Optivisor at blood droplets on the ceiling. He moved a measuring magnifier over them and wrote down millimeters.
"What about neighbors?" Harris then asked. "Did anyone hear anything, see anything?"
"Sorry, but we ain't had time to canvas the neighborhood yet, especially since nobody called any detectives or techs until I finally did," Marino said.
Harris abruptly walked off. I looked at Marino and he avoided my eyes. I was certain he had just lost what was left of his job.