A Darkness More Than Night

I can’t -”
    “Okay, okay, I know. I was just checking to make sure you didn’t keel over or something.”
    “Okay, thanks, but I’m fine.”
    “I’ll be up for a little while if you need something.”
    “I won’t, but thanks.”
    “You know, you’re using a lot of juice. You’re going to have to run the generator tomorrow after I split.”
    “No problem. I’ll do it. I’ll see you later, Buddy.”
    Buddy pointed at the now empty television screen.
    “That’s a weird one.”
    “Good-bye, Buddy,” McCaleb said impatiently.
    He got up and closed the door while Lockridge was still standing there. This time he locked it. He returned to the seat and the notebook. He started writing and in a few moments he had constructed a list.

    SCENE

    Ligature Nude Head Wound Tape/Gag – “Cave”?
    Bucket?
    He studied the list for a few moments, waiting for an idea, but nothing came through. It was too early. Instinctively, he knew the wording on the tape was a key that he wouldn’t be able to turn until he had the complete message. He fought the urge to open the murder book and get to it. Instead, he turned the television back on and began running the tape from the spot he had left off. The camera was in and tight on the dead man’s mouth and the tape stretched tightly across it.
    “We’ll leave this for the coroner,” Winston said. “You got what you can of this, Barn?”
    “I got it,” said the unseen videographer.
    “Okay, let’s pull back and look at these bindings.”
    The camera traced the baling wire from the neck to the feet. The wire looped around the neck and passed through a slip knot. It then went down the spine to where it had been wrapped several times around the ankles, which had been pulled so far back that the victim’s heels now rested on his buttocks.
    The wrists were bound with a separate length of wire that had been wrapped six times around and then pulled into a knot. The bindings had caused deep furrow marks in the skin of the wrists and ankles, indicating that the victim had struggled for a period before finally succumbing.
    When the videography of the body was completed, Winston told the unseen man with the camera to make a video inventory of every room in the apartment.
    The camera panned away from the body and took in the rest of the living room/dining room space. The home seemed to have been furnished out of a secondhand store. There was no uniformity, none of the pieces of furniture matched. The few framed pictures on the walls looked as though they could have come out of a room at a Howard Johnson’s ten years before – all orange and aqua pastels. At the far end of the room was a tall china cabinet with no china in it. There were some books on a few of the shelves but most were barren. On top of the cabinet was something McCaleb found curious. It was a two-foot-high owl that looked hand painted. McCaleb had seen many of these before, especially in Avalon Harbor and Cabrillo Marina. Most often the owls were made of hollow plastic and placed at the tops of masts or on the bridges of power boats in a usually unsuccessful attempt to scare gulls and other birds away from the boats. The theory was that the owl would be seen by the other birds as a predator and they would stay clear, thereby leaving the boats unfouled by their droppings.
    McCaleb had also seen the owls used on the exteriors of public buildings where pigeons were a nuisance. But what interested him about the plastic owl here was that he had never seen or heard of one being used inside a private home as ornamentation or otherwise. He knew that people collected all manner of things, including owls, but he had so far seen none in the apartment other than the one positioned at center on the cabinet. He quickly opened the binder and found the victim identification report. It listed the victim’s occupation as house painter. McCaleb closed the binder and considered for a moment that perhaps the victim had taken the owl from a job or removed it from a structure while prepping it to be painted.
    He backed the tape up and watched again as the videographer panned from the body to the cabinet atop which the owl was perched. It appeared to McCaleb that the videographer had made a 180 -degree turn, meaning the owl would have been directly facing the victim, looking down upon the scene of the murder.
    While there were other possibilities, McCaleb’s instinct told him the plastic owl was somehow part of the crime scene.