The Dark Side Of Justice

Chapter 1-1

Murder is such an up-close and personal venue.

Especially if the weapon of choice is a garrote made with piano wire. The C-string. With wood handles carved with a craftsman’s precision to fit the end of the wires for a firm, deadly grip.

Yes. A garrote is a very intimate form of death. It requires strength. Perseverance. Patience. It’s not like shooting someone with a 9mm. Stand ten feet away. Aim at the chest. Pull the trigger and then walk away. The garrote is not mundane and pedestrian. To kill with a garrote means you must stand close to your victim. As close as two bodies intertwined in a lover’s embrace. You must stand close enough to feel the victim’s body heat. Smell the victim’s fear. Taste the victim’s blood.

It’s messy.

The victim doesn’t die by strangulation so much as by drowning. If the proper technique is used the carotid artery is severed. Blood spurts everywhere. The victim drowns in his own blood. A macabre sense of retribution. Dying by drowning in your own blood.

Yes. Garroting is very personal. Someone choosing this method meant the killer wanted to enjoy the act of snuffing someone’s life out. Like a wine connoisseur wanting to savor every passing second of a rare wine.

The victim was Dr. Walter Holdridge. The Walter Holdridge. Nobel prize winner in Physics and for the last dozen years the academic catch for our own Anderson University. The victim lay sprawled across a computer terminal in the basement of the campus’ Computer Sciences building. Very dead. Very messy. And promising to be a case which would bring an overwhelming amount of bad publicity to the university. Publicity of the unwanted kind.

TheAnderson University is a synonym for ‘money.’ It’s in the dictionary. Look it up in Webster’s and the number three definition will say, “Anderson University–and lots of it.” The campus is six blocks of downtown prime real estate. Sculptured lawns, big platters of well-manicured flower beds, and red brick buildings of various architectural styles which somehow blend together describes the school. It has ten thousand students, and each student is in the top three percent in the nation. Smart kids. Rich kids. Money and lots of smarts.

For a cop that’s a bad combination.

The tiny room the victim claimed as his own was all white. White walls. White ceiling. White tiles for floors. The only thing not white in the room was the black vinyl office chair, two small black chairs sitting against one wall, the CRT screen, and the keyboard. There was also the professor’s scruffy-looking leather briefcase lying on one of the chairs. A big thing, looking as old as the professor himself, heavy and locked tightly shut. Everything else was pure white. Add in the fluorescent lights in the ceiling and one could easily get the impression of the movie character HAL in the movie, 2001.

.Disregarding extraneous oddities out of my head, I concentrated taking in the crime scene. The professor’s dark blood contrasted sharply with the white. Reminding me, gruesomely, of a surreal painting by a moribund Picasso or de Kooning.

Ah! Murder as an art form! The ultimate sacrifice to create the ultimate piece of art. A thin crease in my lips told me I was grinning. Sometimes I have very bizarre thoughts. And my sense of humor needs working on as well.

The price you pay, I suspected, for working in Homicide too long.

Behind me I heard my partner, Frank Morales, step into the room and grunt in curiosity. Turning, I nodded, and he looked at me and shrugged.

“Must have been a bleeder.” Frank grunted, shoving hands into his pockets.

“Yeah, must have,” I nodded, my eyes returning to the body. “Who called in the report?”

“Campus security. The prof’s student-assistant came down here and found him. Dispatch sent Gonzales and Charles over in a black-and-white to take the initial squawk.”

Officers Alonzo Gonzales and Tubby Charles were two beat officers whose beat would include the campus. Good men. Good beat cops who preferred remaining beat cops.

“Where are they now?”

“Upstairs interviewing anyone who was in the building at the time the body was discovered.”

I nodded, frowned, and looked at the blood again.

“Lots of blood.”

“Yeah, a hell of a lot of blood,” Frank repeated softly, nodding. “Garroting someone is messy. But this. This is really messy.”

“The prof put up a heck of a fight. Maybe some of this belongs to the killer. When are the lab boys due?”

“Any time now.”

I nodded.

“Okay, find the security guys who found the body, and the ones who were on duty during the approximate time of the murder if there was a shift change. Interview everyone.”

Frank turned on a heel and left. I frowned and glanced at my watch. Technically the lab boys are supposed to come in and do their thing before the investigating detectives begin poking around. Technically. They weren’t here yet, so what was I supposed to do? Frowning, I turned and stepped out into the hall directly in front of the room.

The hall was an exact copy of the room. All white. White ceiling, white walls, white tile floors. Fluorescent lighting. I read somewhere about polar explorers worried about walking into a situation where everything turned white, leaving no way to ascertain a horizon or any sense of direction. Snow blindness they called it. I could understand the worry. I felt a slight sense of vertigo. Welding goggles came to mind. Something to cut down the glare of everything white.

The hall was one side of the basement. It was wide, empty, and ran past nine other rooms exactly like that of the crime scene. To my right and to my left the hall ran maybe one hundred feet in each direction. Staring in one direction and then the other, I found it most curious. All that blood in the room behind me. Lots of blood which covered both the victim and had to cover the killer as well, yet the pristine white halls were spotless. Not even a shoe scuff mark could be seen decorating the white tile. Either our killer was damned lucky in getting nothing on him. Or he was damn fastidious. Pulling on my ear thoughtfully I turned and reentered the room.

I searched the man’s pockets. I know I should have waited for the crime team to arrive first. Although, I didn’t and hurriedly, but efficiently, searched the corpse. Keys, wallet, change in his pockets, a second set of keys on a single key ring, and two pens and a mechanical pencil comprised the man’s possessions. His wallet had three credit cards and fifty bucks in cash in it. There was a driver’s license, a university medical card, a couple of phone numbers hurriedly written on two pieces of paper and folded in half before being inserted into the wallet. There were two library cards. One for the campus library and one for the city’s. What was not in the billfold was any kind of a photo. No wife, no kids, no precocious grandchildren. Nothing. As I carefully put everything back into the billfold and inserted it back into the man’s rear trousers pocket, I found myself wondering what that meant. No photos.

Although, I did find one curious item. A torn paper, ripped from a memo pad, with the words “Gamma-ray outbursts!!!!!” scribbled across it. Written so fast it was barely discernable. With five exclamation points. Folded in half, it was in the man’s upper left hand shirt pocket. It appeared like something one might find in a physicist’s pocket. However, there was something in the way it was so hurriedly scribbled which made me curious as I folded it and slipped it back into the pocket.

There were bruises around the man’s mouth and jaw. The man’s well-manicured fingernails looked messy. Meaning, with luck, there might be some skin material of his killer there. Only a good going over in the morgue would tell me that. Coming to my feet, I turned and decided to take a good look at the briefcase.

It was a big clunker of a leather briefcase. Engraved into the metal latch were the letters WH. The leather handle was sweat stained from years of toting things around in it. Where it opened, the leather was worn and grooved. Old, worn, but still serviceable. Like an old friend who should retire but can’t because he would be missed too much. Nevertheless, the clasp showed no markings of someone trying to open it. Gently lifting it with a finger it weighed enough to make do for a temporary anchor for the Queen Mary.

Frowning, I stepped back to the cubicle’s single entrance and looked the scene over again. We had a murder of a physics professor, a professor in a small, private, and I should say very expensive, college who prided itself on its academic reputation of elusiveness in its selection of students. First glance suggested it was not a murder by impulse. No thief suddenly caught in the act of burglary turning and killing his discoverer here. The garrote, a weapon of intimacy, suggested premeditation. To use a garrote, one had to be willing to take a chance, a chance of his would-be victim being more ferocious in his defending himself. And taking the chance of being caught in the act itself. This grisly picture before me looked more like an execution. Someone really disliked the idea of the good professor taking one more unnecessary breath on this planet.

I stepped out of the room, and looking down the white hall, saw the lab boys lugging in their gear herding down the hall, and behind them, Frank strolling down the hall with a scowl on his face. Nodding and waving the tech boys into the room I waited for Frank to pull up beside me and tell me what, or who, had just rained on his parade.

“Christ, this is going to be a b***h, Turn. A royal bitch.”

“How so?”

“Finished talking to the security guards. Get this. In order to get down here you have to have an identification card. It’s a magnetized card which directly connects into the campus’ mainframe. It recognizes your number and then unlocks the door to let you in. Except, you don’t automatically get in. After the computer scans the card you then have to have your thumb print scanned.”

“That’s a lot of security for a computer research area like this. What’s down here so important?”

Frank’s scowl darkened as he nodded in agreement.

“Apparently the research computer they’ve got down here is very fast, very experimental, and very expensive. The Air Force is interested in it, and they have a couple of research grants being worked on here. So, they added a third layer of security to monitor anyone coming or going. At each end of the hall there is a guard assigned to monitor those who come and go. Anyone who wants in has to scan his card, scan his thumb print, and then sign his name in a logbook, indicating the time he entered and the time he left.”

“So, we should know who was in the basement at the time of the professor’s death, right? We find out approximate time of death, then we check the logbook and computer logs, and we have our killer.”

A wicked little grin spread across the thin lips of my pasta-loving partner. Frank had this twisted sense of humor I found amusing. He loved to irritate others. He enjoyed portraying himself as a thick-headed, stupid cop who wore badly fitting cheap suits. Furthermore, he would surprise everyone by saying something or doing something which was astonishingly brilliant. He hated to investigate cases which contained any form of a puzzle in it. An incongruity, if you ask me because of his high I.Q. yet he loved to torment me by adding layers upon layers of additional complexity to an already complex case. The little twist of his lips on his cement-block head told me another little wrinkle was coming.