“Danny?”
I have one arm inside my shirt, but I freeze: I can tell from Ceepak’s voice that whatever he’s going to say next isn’t going to be pretty.
“Yeah?”
“Mr. Williams discovered the body on a side wall of the booth. It was hanging in the middle of the stuffed animals they award as prizes.”
I hop in my Jeep and race up to the boardwalk, a good thirty minutes north of my apartment.
Ceepak and the other first responders have sealed off the crime scene with rolled-out POLICE LINE, DO NOT CROSS tape. The taut yellow plastic snaps in the gusts blowing up from the ocean. It looks like we’ve locked down the whole block of games, even though blinking bulbs are still throbbing in signs outside the unmanned booths: Water Gun Fun, Whack A Mole, Duck Pond, Frog Bog, Clown Bop, Balloon Pop, and Bucket Drop.
Most of the brightly colored booths have their fronts open, and I can see all sorts of stuffed animals hanging off hooks. Giant Teddy Bears wearing New York Mets, Yankees, Jets, and Giants uniforms. SpongeBob SquarePants flashing his two-toothed smile. Giant yellow banana people with pudgy cheeks. Long-limbed fleecy things that look like an octopus crossed with a rhesus monkey.
One or two booths are even offering “Official Fun House” prizes. I see a towering display of boxed-up bobblehead dolls. Paulie “The Thing” molded in mid T-shirt tug, his incredibly ripped chest immortalized in tan plastic.
“Danny?”
It’s Ceepak, waving at me from up at the Knock ’Em Down booth. One of our SHPD cruisers is parked thirty feet beyond the booth, its roofbar lights swirling, blocking off the mob of onlookers licking their orange-and-white swirl cones, trying to see what the heck is going on.
Officers Nikki Bonanni and Jen Forbus are working crowd control at the far end. The two Murray brothers have caught the duty at the end where I entered.
“Put down the corn cob,” yells some young wiseass in the crowd.
“Give me the full gear!” shouts another.
I shake my head. Six years ago? Both those guys would’ve been me.
“Detective Botzong is on his way,” says Ceepak when I reach the Knock ’Em Down.
William Botzong heads up the State Police Major Crimes Unit. They always get called in to do all the stuff they do on those CSI TV shows when a murder takes place in, oh, say a Jersey Shore resort town where the police department isn’t geared up to handle all the forensic work needed to mount a modern-day murder investigation, even though Ceepak has his own mini-crime lab on the second floor of police headquarters and watches every episode of Forensic Files. I think he has them on DVD too.
We had worked with Botzong back in June. He’s good people. In his spare time, he likes to sing in community theatre productions. Ceepak and I caught him in Jesus Christ Superstar. He’d had to wear a wig to hide his cop crew cut.
“We can assume that the killer placed the body in this very public location to send some sort of message,” says Ceepak.
“A mob hit? From Skeletor and his biker buddies?”
“It’s a possibility, Danny.”
I look up and see Paulie Braciole hanging on the wall between a giant pink gorilla and a flock of floppy green ducks. His head is slumped forward, so, fortunately, I don’t have to stare at his dead eyes. Whoever pinioned him to the wall had twisted the straps of his muscleman tee shirt into a knot that they then tied around a hook, leaving Paulie’s neck limp, his head sagging. Dry blood streams down from a temple-high hole in his fade haircut, just in front of his left ear, and trickles across his shoulder and down both sides of his tight white tee.
I note a ring of brown circling his neck. Also-some of the blood smears upward, instead of dribbling down.
“What’s going on around his neck?”
“Unclear,” says Ceepak. “The circle, to some extent, resembles a ligature mark. But it is not a bruise. It is blood.”
“What about those smears?”
“Perhaps the killer originally tried hanging Mr. Braciole with a noose. Discovering that he did not need the rope, he slipped it up and off his head.”
“Streaking the blood upward.”
Ceepak nods. “But all of this is pure conjecture on my part. I found no rope fibers. No noose. However, I did note dried blood on the floor.”
Meaning Paulie was still dripping when the killer hung him out to dry.
Ceepak makes a hand chop toward the rear wall of the booth. “There is a trail of blood out back. I also noticed a set of footprints and a single tire tread.”
“Like from a unicycle or something?”
Ceepak shakes his head. “Motorcycle, Danny. Two tires, one directly behind the other, leaving behind a single furrow.”
Right. Duh.
“Botzong’s team will want to plaster-cast both the footprint and the tire track.” Ceepak pulls a miniature digital camera out of the calf pocket of his cargo pants. He always wears long pants when we’re working a murder case. More pockets to stow stuff in. “Hopefully, they can also shed some light on the blood ringing the neck.”
I look up at Paul Braciole, his limp arms dangling at his sides like one of those bright pink fuzzy orangutan things. Something silver and frayed is wrapped around both of his wrists.
“Is that duct tape?” I ask.
“Roger that,” says Ceepak. “There is also evidence of it on both of his shoes. Mostly gummy residue with some filament webbing.”
“So they tied him up with duct tape so they could execute him?”
“Uncertain at this juncture. Also, there is no sign of duct tape around either of his ankles, or his calves.”
I nod. If you were tying up your victim, you wouldn’t just bind up his hands and shoes, you’d secure his legs and feet too.
On the rear wall, in that farm-scene mural, I notice a seam cutting through horsey’s snout and a doorknob poking up in the center of a flower.
“Was the back door locked?”
“Yes. But it was a simple hardware-store lock attached to a flimsy hasp. Judging from the splintering plywood where the screws ripped free, the killer was able to kick it open quite easily.”
“Any security cameras?”
“Negative. The major investment in booth security was out here.” He indicates the rolling steel gate, now stowed inside its overhead housing.
“What about the guy who discovered the body? Hugh Williams.”
“Junior at the local high school. Became quite ill when he smelled all the bodily fluids that had seeped out of Mr. Braciole during the period of time he hung on the wall.”
Okay. When Ceepak calmly downloads information like that, I know his big brain is off doing something else.
“Cameras,” he mumbles.
“You said there weren’t any.”
He shakes his head. “At the house.”
He doesn’t mean police headquarters, even though we always call it “the house.”
He means the Fun House.
They video everything, 24/7. That’s how I know Soozy K and Mike Tomasino are now whoo-hooing with each other. I saw him crawl into her bed right under this creepy night-vision security cam at the end of the “stalker in the parking lot” episode.
“Dylan? Jeremy?” Ceepak calls to the Murray brothers. “Hold down the fort.”
“You got it,” says Dylan.
“Come on, Danny. We need to go visit our friends at Prickly Pear Productions.”
Great. We’re going to get a sneak preview of coming attractions. See if, last night, all those Fun House cameras had shot anything that might help us catch a killer.
12
We race down the island toward Halibut street.
I’m thinking Skeletor or one of his Creed biker brethren killed Paulie as payback for splashing them all over prime time TV Thursday night. That would explain the very public execution and the motorcycle tire tracks Ceepak had discovered out back behind the Knock ’Em Down booth.