'Yes, sir, Captain.' He snapped up his radio.
The police had been working out here for hours. It had not taken them long to determine that Lamont Brown was shot in bed in the master suite upstairs. I followed Marino up a narrow staircase covered with a machine-made Chinese rug, and voices drew us down a hallway. Two detectives were inside a bedroom paneled in dark-stained knotty pine, the window treatments and bedding reminiscent of a brothel. The sheriff was fond of maroon and gold, tassels and velvet, and mirrors on the ceiling.
Marino did not voice an opinion as he looked around. His judgment of this man had been made before now. I stepped closer to the king-size bed.
'Has this been rearranged in any way?' I asked one of the detectives as Marino and I put on gloves.
'Not really.
'Not really. We've photographed everything and looked under the covers. But what you see is pretty much how we found it.'
'Were the doors locked when you got here?' Marino asked.
'Yeah. We had to break the glass out of the one in back.'
'So there was no sign of forced entry whatsoever.'
'Nothing. We found traces of coke downstairs on a mirror in the living room. But that could have been there for a while.'
'What else have you found?'
'A white silk handkerchief with some blood on it,' said the detective, who was dressed in tweed, and chewing gum. 'It was right there on the floor, about three feet from the bed. And looks like the shoelace used to tie the trash bag around Brown's head came from a running shoe there in the closet.' He paused. 'I heard about Jakes.'
'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.
'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.