We walked up the gravel driveway and passed through a moongate into the backyard, which was mostly cedar deck, multileveled as it cascaded from the house down to the bay and ended at the long dock where the Gordons' boat was tied. It was really a beautiful evening, and I wished Tom and Judy were alive to see it.
I observed the usual contingent of forensic lab people, plus three uniformed Southold town cops and a woman overdressed in a light tan suit jacket and matching skirt, white blouse, and sensible shoes. At first I thought she might be family, called in to ID the bodies and so forth, but then I saw she was holding a notebook and pen and looking official.
Lying on the nice silver-gray cedar deck, side by side on their backs, were Tom and Judy, their feet toward the house and their heads toward the bay, arms and legs askew as though they were making snow angels. A police photographer was taking pictures of the bodies, and the flash lit up the deck and did a weird thing to the corpses, making them look sort of ghoulish for a microsecond, à la Night of the Living Dead.
I stared at the bodies. Tom and Judy Gordon were in their mid-thirties, very good shape, and even in death a uniquely handsome couple — so much so that they were sometimes mistaken for celebrities when they dined out in the more fashionable spots.
They both wore blue jeans, running shoes, and polo shirts. Tom's shirt was black with some marine supply logo on the front, and Judy's was a more chic hunter green with a little yellow sailboat on the left breast.
Max, I suspected, didn't see many murdered people in the course of a year, but he probably saw enough natural deaths, suicides, car wrecks, and such so that he wasn't going to go green. He looked grim concerned, pensive, and professional, but kept glancing at the bodies as if he couldn't believe there were murdered people lying right there on the nice deck.
Yours truly, on the other hand, working as I do in a city that counts about 1,500 murders a year, am no stranger to death, as they say. I don't see all 1,500 corpses, but I see enough so that I'm no longer surprised, sickened, shocked, or saddened. Yet, when it's someone you knew and liked, it makes a difference.
I walked across the deck and stopped near Tom Gordon. Tom had a bullet hole at the bridge of his nose. Judy had a hole in the side of her left temple.
Assuming there was only one shooter, then Tom, being a strapping guy, had probably gotten it first, a single shot to the head; then Judy, turning in disbelief toward her husband, had taken the second bullet in the side of her temple. The two bullets had probably gone through their skulls and dropped into the bay. Bad luck for ballistics.
I've never been to a homicide scene that didn't have a smell — unbelievably foul, if the victims had been dead awhile. If there was blood, I could always smell it, and if a body cavity had been penetrated, there was usually a peculiar smell of innards. This is something I'd like not to smell again; the last time I smelled blood, it was my own. Anyway, the fact that this was an outdoor killing helped.
I looked around and couldn't see any place close by where the shooter could hide. The sliding glass door of the house was open and maybe the shooter had been in there, but that was twenty feet from the bodies, and not many people can get a good head shot from that distance with a pistol. I was living proof of that. At twenty feet you go for a body shot first, then get in close and finish up with a head shot. So there were two possibilities: the shooter was using a rifle, not a pistol, or, the shooter was able to walk right up to them without causing them any alarm. Someone normal-looking, nonthreatenmg, maybe even someone they knew. The Gordons had gotten out of their boat, walked up the deck, they saw this person at some point and kept walking toward him or her. The person raised a pistol from no more than five feet away and drilled both of them.
I looked beyond the bodies and saw little colored pin flags stuck in the cedar planking here and there. "Red is for blood?"
Max nodded. "White is skull, gray is — "
"Got it." Glad I wore the flip-flops.
Max informed me, "The exit wounds are big, like the whole back of their skulls are gone. And, as you can see, the entry wounds are big. I'm guessing a.45 caliber. We haven't found the two bullets yet. They probably went into the bay."
I didn't reply.
Max motioned toward the sliding glass doors. He informed me, "The sliding door was forced and the house is ransacked. No big items missing — TV, computer, CD player, and all that stuff is there. But there may be jewelry and small stuff missing."
I contemplated this a moment. The Gordons, like most egghead types on a government salary, didn't own much jewelry, art, or anything like that. A druggie would grab the pricey electronics and such, and beat feet.
Max said, "Here's what I think — a burglar or burglars were doing their thing, he, she, or they see the Gordons approaching through the glass door; he, she, or they step out onto the deck, fire, and flee." He looked at me. "Right?"
"If you say so."
"I say so."
"Got it." Sounded better than Home of Top Secret Germ Warfare Scientists Ransacked and Scientists Found Murdered.
Max moved closer to me and said softly, "What do you think, John?"
"Was that a hundred an hour?"
"Come on, guy, don't jerk me around. We got maybe a world-class double murder on our hands."
I replied, "But you just said it could be a simple homeowner-comes-on-the-scene-and-gets-iced kind of thing."
"Yeah, but it turns out that the homeowners are… whatever they are." He looked at me and said, "Reconstruct."
"Okay. You understand that the perp did not fire from that sliding glass door. He was standing right in front of them. The door you found open was closed then so that the Gordons saw nothing unusual as they approached the house. The gunman was possibly sitting here in one of these chairs, and he may have arrived by boat since he wasn't going to park his car out front where the world could see it. Or maybe he was dropped off. In either case, the Gordons either knew him or were not unduly troubled by his presence on their back deck, and maybe it's a woman, nice and sweet-looking, and the Gordons walk toward her and she toward them. They may have exchanged a word or two, but very soon after, the murderer produced a pistol and blew them away."
Chief Maxwell nodded.
"If the perp was looking for anything inside, it wasn't jewelry or cash, it was papers. You know — bug stuff. He didn't kill the Gordons because they stumbled onto him; he killed them because he wanted them dead. He was waiting for them. You know all this."
He nodded.
I said, "Then again, Max, I've seen a lot of bungled and screwed-up burglaries where the homeowner got killed, and the burglar got nothing. When it's a druggie thing, nothing makes sense."
Chief Maxwell rubbed his chin as he contemplated a hophead with a gun on one hand, a cool assassin on the other, and whatever might fall in between.
While he did that, I knelt beside the bodies, closest to Judy. Her eyes were open, really wide open, and she looked surprised. Tom's eyes were open, too, but he looked more peaceful than his wife. The flies had found the blood around the wounds, and I was tempted to shoo them away, but it didn't matter.
I examined the bodies more closely without touching anything that would get the forensic types all bent up. I looked at hair, nails, skin, clothing, shoes, and so on. When I was done, I patted Judy's cheek and stood.
Maxwell asked me, "How long did you know them?"
"Since about June."
"Have you been to this house before?"
"Yes. You get to ask me one more question."
"Well… I have to ask… Where were you about 5:30 p.m.?"
"With your girlfriend."
He smiled, but he was not amused.
I asked Max, "How well did you know them?"
He hesitated a moment, then replied, "Just socially. My girlfriend drags me to wine tastings and crap like that."