'It's real bad.' Marino was distracted.
'He wasn't alive when…'
'Nope. His chest was crushed.'
The detective stopped chewing.
'Did you recover a weapon?' I asked as I scanned the bed.
'No. We're definitely not dealing with a suicide.'
'Yeah,' said the other detective. 'It'd be a little hard to commit suicide and then drive yourself to the morgue.'
The pillow was soaked with reddish-brown blood that had clotted and separated from serum at the margins. Blood dripped down the side of the mattress, but I saw none on the floor. I thought of the gunshot wound to Brown's forehead. It was a quarter of an inch with a burned, lacerated and abraded margin. I had found smoke and soot in the wound and burned and unburned powder in the underlying tissue, bone and dura. The gunshot wound was contact, and the body had no other injuries that might indicate a defensive gesture or struggle.
'I believe he was lying on his back in bed when he was shot,' I said to Marino. 'In fact, it's almost as if he were asleep.'
He came closer to the bed. 'Well, it'd be kind of hard to stick a gun between the eyes of somebody awake and not have them react.'
'There's no evidence he reacted at all. The wound is perfectly centered. The pistol was placed snugly against his skin and it doesn't seem he moved.'
'Maybe he was passed out,' Marino said.
'His blood alcohol was.16. He could have been passed out but not necessarily. We need to go over the room with the Luma-Lite to see if we find blood we might be missing,' I said.
'But it would appear he was moved from the bed directly into the body pouch.' I showed Marino the drips on the side of the mattress. 'If he had been carried very far, there would be more blood throughout the house.'
'Right.'
We walked around the bedroom, looking. Marino began opening drawers that had already been gone through. Sheriff Brown had a taste for pornography. He especially liked women in degrading situations involving bondage and violence. In a study down the hall we found two racks filled with shotguns, rifles and several assault weapons.
A cabinet underneath had been pried open, and it was difficult to determine how many handguns or boxes of ammunition were missing since we did not know what had been there originally. Remaining were nine-millimeters, ten-millimeters, and several.44 and.357 Magnums. Sheriff Brown owned a variety of holsters, extra magazines, handcuffs, and a Kevlar vest.
'He was into this big time,' Marino said. 'He's got to have had heavy connections in DC, New York, maybe Miami.'
'Maybe there were drugs in those cabinets,' I said. 'Maybe the guns weren't what Gault was after.'
'I'm thinking they,' Marino said as feet sounded on the stairs. 'Unless you think Gault could have handled that body pouch all by himself. What did Brown weigh?'
'Almost two hundred pounds,' I replied as Neils Vander rounded the corner, holding the Luma-Lite by its handle. An assistant followed with cameras and other equipment.
Vander wore an oversize lab coat and white cotton gloves that looked ridiculously incongruous with his wool trousers and snow boots. He had a way of looking at me as if we had never met. He was the mad scientist, as bald as a lightbulb, always in a rush and always right. I was terribly fond of him.
'Where do you want me to set up this thing?' he asked nobody in particular.
'The bedroom,' I said. 'Then the study.'
We returned to the sheriff's bedroom to watch Vander shine his magic wand around. Lights out and glasses on, and blood dully lit up, but nothing else important did until several minutes later. The Luma-Lite was set to its widest beam and looked like a flashlight shining through deep water as it worked its way around the room. A spot on a wall, high above a chest of drawers, luminesced like a small, irregular moon. Vander got close and looked.
'Someone get the lights, please,' he said.
Lights went on and we took our tinted glasses off. Vander was standing on his tiptoes, staring at a knothole.
'What the hell is it?' Marino asked.
'This is very interesting,' said Vander, who rarely got excited about anything. 'There's something on the other side.'
'The other side of what?' Marino moved next to him and stared up, frowning. 'I don't see anything.'
'Oh yes. There's something,' Vander said. 'And somebody touched this area of paneling while they had some type of residue on their hands.'
'Drugs?' I inquired.
'It certainly could be drugs.'
All of us stared at the paneling, which looked quite normal when the Luma-Lite wasn't shining on it. But when I pulled a chair closer, I could see what Vander was talking about. The tiny hole in the center of the knothole was perfectly round. It had been drilled. On the other side of the wall was the sheriff's study, and we had just searched it.
'That's weird,' Marino said as he and I went back out the bedroom door.
Vander, oblivious to adventure, resumed what he was doing while Marino and I walked inside the study and went straight to the wall where the knothole should be. It was covered by an entertainment center that we had gone through once. Marino opened the doors again and slid out the television. He pulled books off shelves overhead, not seeing anything.
'Hmmm,' he said, studying the entertainment center. 'Interesting that it's out about six inches from the wall.'
'Yes,' I said. 'Let's move it.'
We pulled it out more, and directly in line with the knothole was a tiny video camera with a wide-angle lens. It was simply situated on a shallow ledge, a cord running from it into the base of the entertainment center, where it could be activated by a remote control that looked like it belonged to the television set. By doing a little bit of experimentation, we discovered that the camera was completely invisible from Brown's bedroom, unless one put his eye right up to the knothole and the camera was on, a red light glowing.
'Maybe he was doing a few lines of coke and decided to have sex with somebody,' Marino said. 'And at some point he got up close to look through the hole to make sure the camera was going.'
'Maybe,' I said. 'How fast can we look at the tape?'
'I don't want to do it here.'
'I don't blame you. The camera's so small we couldn't see much anyway.'
'I'll take it to the Intelligence Division as soon as we finish up.'
There was little left for us to do at the scene. As he suspected, Vander found significant residues in the gun cabinet, but no blood anywhere else in the house. The neighbors on either side of Sheriff Brown's property were cloistered amid trees and had not heard or seen any activity late last night or early this morning.
'If you'll just drop me by my car,' I said as we drove away.
Marino glanced suspiciously at me. 'Where are you going?'
'Petersburg.'
'What the hell for?' he said.
'I've got to talk to a friend about boots.'
There were many trucks and much construction along a stretch of 1-95 South that I always found bleak. Even the Philip Morris plant with its building-high pack of Merits was stressful, for the fragrance of fresh tobacco bothered me. I desperately missed smoking, especially when I was driving alone on a day like this. My mind streaked, eyes constantly on mirrors as I looked for a dark blue van.
The wind flailed trees and swamps, and snow-flakes were flying. As I got closer to Ft. Lee I began to see barracks and warehouses where breastworks once had been built upon dead bodies during this nation's cruelest hour. That war seemed close when I thought of Virginia swamps and woods and missing dead. Not a year passed when I didn't examine old buttons and bones, and Minie balls turned into the labs. I had touched the fabrics and faces of old violence, too, and it felt different from what I put my hands on now. Evil, I believed, had mutated to a new extreme.