“Record this,” she said.
I moved from the phone app on my cell to the camera app and started a recording.
“Recording,” I said. “Go.”
She circled completely around the body once before speaking.
“I’m assuming the car out front is his,” she said. “So we are to assume that he went somewhere, came home, and then just came in here and threw that extension cord over the beam.”
The garage had an open ceiling where there was some cross-planking for storage up above. The center support beam had been used as Hammond’s gallows.
The body was suspended about two feet above the concrete floor of the garage lab. Rachel continued to slowly move around it without touching it.
“No damage to the fingernails,” she said.
“Why would there be?” I asked.
“Second thoughts. Often people change their mind at the last second and claw at the noose. They break their fingernails.”
“Got it. I think I knew that.”
“But there is slight chafing on both wrists. I think he was bound either at the time of death or shortly before.”
She looked around and saw a cardboard dispenser that held rubber gloves, most likely used by Hammond during DNA processing. She put on one glove and then used that hand to right the chair that had been knocked over during the hanging. She stepped up onto it so she could get a closer view of the noose and the dead man’s neck. She studied it for a long moment before telling me to put on gloves from the dispenser.
“Uh, why?”
“Because I want you to steady the chair.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, Jack.”
I put my phone down on a table, then put on the gloves. I came back to the chair and held it steady as Rachel stepped up onto the armrests so she could get a downward view of the noose and the knot behind the dead man’s head.
“This doesn’t work,” she said.
“You want me to look around for a ladder?” I asked.
“No, I’m not talking about that. I think his neck is broken and that doesn’t really work.”
“What do you mean doesn’t work? I thought that’s what happens when you hang yourself.”
“No, not often with suicide by hanging.”
She put her ungloved hand on the top of my head to steady herself as she climbed off the arms of the chair. She stepped down off the chair, turned it on its side, and positioned it as it had been when we entered the garage.
“You need a big drop to break the neck. Most hanging suicides basically die from strangulation. It was the execution hangings back in the day where you’d get the broken neck. Because you drop through a trap door, fall ten or fifteen feet, and then the impact snaps the neck, causing instant death. You ever heard that phrase Build my gallows high? I think it was a book or a movie or something. Whoever said that wanted to get it over with quick.”
I raised my hand, pointing at the dead man.
“Okay, then how did he get a broken neck?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I think he was dead first and then hung up like that to make it look like a suicide.”
“So somebody broke his neck and then hoisted...”
It hit me then: Somebody broke his neck just like the four AOD victims.
“Oh, man,” I said. “What is going on here?”
“I don’t know but there has to be something in this lab that helps explain things. Look around. We have to hurry.”
We searched but found nothing. There was a desktop computer but it was thumbprint protected. There were no hard files or lab books. Two whiteboards mounted on the walls had been erased. It became pretty clear that whoever had hung Hammond from the rafters — if the dead man was Hammond — had made sure that whatever the lab tech was doing with the female DNA he bought from Orange Nano was wiped clean as well.
There was a refrigerator that had racks of test tubes presumably holding DNA samples. I pulled one tube out of its slot and read the printing on the tape over the rubber seal at the top.
“This stuff is from GT23,” I said. “Says it right here on the tube.”
“Not a surprise,” Rachel said.
“There’s nothing else here,” I said. “Just a dead guy and that’s it.”
“We still have the rest of the house to check,” Rachel said.
“We don’t have time. We have to get out of here. Whoever did this probably spent all night searching the place. Whatever was here is gone and probably so is my story.”
“It’s not about your story anymore, Jack. This is bigger than your story. Check the printer.”
She pointed behind me. I turned and went to the printer in the corner. The tray was empty.
“Nothing here,” I said.
“We can print the last job,” Rachel said.
She stepped over and looked at the printer. Still wearing a single glove, she pressed the menu button on the printer’s control screen.
“Little-known fact,” she said. “Almost all modern printers print from memory. You send the job from your computer, it goes into printer-buffer memory, and then it starts to print. It means the last job is in memory until a new job comes in.”
She clicked on the “Device Options” tab and chose the “Print Memory” option. The machine immediately started humming and was soon printing pages.
We both stood there watching. The last job was a big one. Many pages were sliding into the tray.
“The question is who printed this,” Rachel said. “This guy or his killer?”
Finally the printing stopped. There were at least fifty pages in the tray. I made no move to grab the stack.
“What’s wrong?” Rachel asked. “Take the printouts.”
“No, I need you to take them,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m a reporter. I can’t just come into some dead guy’s house and take printouts from his computer. But you can. You don’t have to live by the same standards I do.”
“Either way it’s a criminal act and that trumps your journalistic ethics.”
“Maybe. But just the same, you can take the pages and then give them to me as my source. Then I can use them — stolen or not — in a story.”
“You mean like we did before and it cost me my job?”
“Look, can you just take the pages, and we can talk about this later? I want to either call the police or get the hell out of here.”
“All right, all right, but this buys me into the case.”
She scooped the thick sheaf of documents out of the tray.
“It’s not a case,” I said. “It’s a story.”
“I told you, it’s more than that now,” she said. “And I’m totally in.”
“Fine. Split or call it in?”
“Your car’s been sitting out there for at least a half hour. It was most likely seen by a neighbor and if not, there are probably cameras on every house. Too risky. I say we secure the documents and call it in.”
“And we tell them everything?”
“We don’t know everything. This is going to be Burbank PD, not L.A., so they won’t connect the dots to the other murders. Not at first. I think you run your original cover story about researching DNA data protections and say you followed the bouncing ball to this guy and this lab and here you are.”
“And what about you?”
“I’m your girlfriend and I just came along for the ride.”
“Really? My girlfriend?”
“We can discuss that later too. We need to find a place to hide the printouts. If they’re good, they’ll search your car.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I would if it was my call.”
“Yeah, but you’re better than everybody. I have so many files and other junk in the back of my Jeep they won’t know what it is if they look.”