In the past, he had entered the back room on only a few occasions but now, approaching it, he clearly pictured the six canisters that had caught his attention each time. It was a large room, perhaps twenty-five feet square, and after he walked in and looked toward the shelf on the right wall, he arched back as if he had been shot. The canisters were not there.
David put his hands on his hips and retreated in order to improve his view of the entire room. Like stalking prey, his eyes darted to all four corners, across and under tables, from cabinet tops to carton tops, and up along the ceiling, for good measure. Where are they?
He tossed splints aside, looked behind aspirators, and moved stretchers stacked like furniture in storage. The more supplies and equipment he encountered, the more careless he became; oxygen tanks clanked against each other like bowling pins, metal drawers thwacked pulley weights, I.V. poles toppled over and bounced off his toes. He felt no pain, an obsessed hunter looking for round silver containers.
Pillows and blankets were piled in a corner while, nearby, one blanket lay crumpled on a folding cot. Under a bench, he uncovered a leather trunk covered by a blue tarpaulin. The canisters are in there? Why? He yanked out the trunk, threw off its covering and opened it. Stuck into a clutter of books and manuals were a pair of bloody latex gloves, a roll of yellow tape and a woman's black
Hollings
Cardiac Defibrillator
Vehicle
It was a combination of curiosity, basic detection procedure and that sixth sense that drew him out into the crisp morning. He steadied his Minx against his chest and Friday against his thigh as he advanced toward the van.
It was unlocked. He lifted one foot up to the floor before stopping short, barely able to maintain his balance. He felt his heart hammer on his chest wall and, swaying forward, caught the stench of gunpowder, blood and death. He tried breathing through his mouth but that only distilled the smell on his tongue. He settled on short expiratory grunts until adaptation kicked in.
To the left, a male body lay doubled over, wedged between a folded stretcher and the floor, while lining an adjacent glass cabinet were the objects of his hunt minutes before, the objects he momentarily felt were anticlimactic. Except David knew better. Six silver canisters shone in the light that beamed over his shoulder.
The body's face was obscured. David stooped and climbed into the van, tossing Friday toward the driver's seat to the right and sliding his Minx behind it. He didn't bother checking for a pulse because the exposed surfaces of the body felt cold, clammy and stiff. He righted the head with difficulty and flinched at the agonal face of Victor Spritz.
David eased upright and for a split second-until his head tapped the ceiling of the van-he felt lifeless, detached, as if he were disembodied, suspended in some other location, but certainly not there, cramped in quarters too small for even average size men. In his day, he had treated many patients who had had acute anxiety attacks but he had never had one himself, and in a moment of self-diagnosis, reckoned that if he were disposed to having one, this discovery would have triggered it by now. He bent forward, probing the full extent of the body. Spritz was completely clothed and wore a blue windbreaker which David unzipped. Underneath, a tight sweater in bright yellow contrasted with streaks of desiccated blood. He palpated the chest, abdomen and all four extremities, and then pulled up the sweater and a shirt to inspect Spritz's exposed flanks and to press on his skin.
There was a circular bullet entrance wound on the left side of his forehead with no surrounding gunpowder traces. A single bead of caked blood ran from the wound to the angle of his jaw like a crimson termite tunnel. David counted five other round entrance wounds through the sweater, two in the vicinity of the heart, two at the level of the navel and one at the right clavicular area. The one nearest the left heart border appeared to have sucked in threads of yellow fabric. He detected no soot smudges and estimated the shots came from a distance greater than fifteen to eighteen inches. Several pools of dark blood lay clotted on the floor and on the lap of the body.
David braced himself against a side wall and calculated: full rigor mortis, fixed lividity, van temperature about thirty-five to forty degrees. Dead twelve to fourteen hours.
He massaged his knee and, feeling the strain on both legs from maneuvering in a crouch, backed up to allow one leg to extend out the door, his foot to be planted on the snow-filmed macadam. His body spanned the length of steps in the van as he supported his weight on his hands and searched for other details before he would return inside for a closer look. He noted five spent shells to the right of the body and, tilting his head sharply to the side, identified a sixth one partially hidden by the wheel of a red metal crash cart. David reminded himself to refer to the shells as "empty brass" in talking with the police later. He combed the van like a robin looking for worms but found no gun.
An electronic defibrillator which he knew was ordinarily stationed on the cart lay askew on the floor. The cart itself was tipped on its side, all five drawers exposed and emptied of drug bottles, vials and ampules; of scalpels, tape, airways and catheters; of syringes, suture materials and tourniquets. They were scattered about, some items intact but most crushed or bent out of shape.
David returned his attention to Spritz's body. When he had forcibly lifted the head minutes earlier, it remained frozen in that position and now he had a better view of its neck. At Zone I, between the collarbone and the Adam's Apple, there was a straight-line bruise around the circumference. The bruise was broad and irregular in spots, wider in others. He noted several satellite markings above the line and some egg-shaped discolorations over the face and forehead. There were blotches on the backs of Spritz's hands which David interpreted as defense wounds.
Strangled and shot. Shot? Riddled! He had heard about the difference between "stranger" murders with their trim format, and crimes of passion with their telltale evidence of anger and rage, of the repeated stabbings or shootings, of the usual conclusion that such a killer had a strong relationship with his or her victim. He wondered why the multiple shots hadn't been heard. No doubt a suppressor. Another baby nipple?
In a matter of minutes, David had observed and acted swiftly, not peimi.tting himself time to react emotionally to his discovery. Quite aside from the violence of the murder, he grappled with the question of its relationship to the others in and about Hollings General. And his expectation of soon nabbing a killer had been dashed, as in the case of an athlete with a supposed insurmountable lead who then sees certain victory evaporate.
Chapter 19
David knew that within minutes of notifying others of Spritz's death, the area around the cardiac defibrillator van would be swarming with humanity, so he decided first to complete his snooping and then to place calls to Security, Foster and Kathy.
He snapped on a pair of surgical gloves he took from Friday and went straight for the silver canisters. He picked one up and before opening it, looked at its undersurface. A strip of tape read, "CAR." The bottoms of two others were similarly labeled while those of the remaining three read, "CAN."
In removing the lids, David treated each canister like a jack-in-the-box. All were stuffed with sealed glassine bags filled with white powder. The "CAR" powder appeared fine in texture; its bags, about four inches square, were unmarked. The "CAN" powder felt denser, more crystalline; its bags, tiny by comparison, measured no more than an inch by a half-inch and were stamped with the word "HORNET" above a small lightning bolt. Spritz's trademark for the street, he thought. He hadn't gotten to the fine stuff yet. He opened representative bags and sniffed; the powders were odorless. He reminded himself that narcs never sample drugs, that the finger test was a creation for TV actors.