A Darkness More Than Night

furnished house or apartment.
    Coincidentally, Winston was wearing the same outfit she had worn when she had come to the house with the murder book and videotape. She had on rubber gloves that she had pulled up over the cuffs of her blazer. Her detective’s shield hung on a black shoelace which had been tied around her neck. She took a position on the left side of the dead man while her partner, a detective McCaleb did not recognize, moved to the right side. For the first time there was talking on the video.
    “The victim has already been examined by a deputy coroner and released for crime scene investigation,” Winston said. “The victim has been photographed in situ. We’re now going to remove the bucket to make further examination.”
    McCaleb knew that she was carefully choosing her words and demeanor with the future in mind, a future that would include a trial for an accused killer in which the crime scene tape would be viewed by a jury. She had to appear professional and objective, completely emotionally removed from what she was encountering. Anything deviating from this could be cause for a defense attorney to seek removal of the tape from evidence.
    Winston reached up and hooked her hair behind her ears and then placed both hands on the victim’s shoulders. With her partner’s help she turned the body on its side, the dead man’s back to the camera.
    The camera then came in over the victim’s shoulder and closed in as Winston gently pulled the bucket handle from under the man’s chin and proceeded to carefully lift it off the head.
    “Okay,” she said.
    She showed the interior of the bucket to the camera – blood had coagulated inside it – and then placed it in an open cardboard box used for evidence storage. She then turned back and gazed down at the victim.
    Gray duct tape had been wrapped around the dead man’s head to form a tight gag across the mouth. The eyes were open and distended – bugged. The cornea of each eye was rouged with hemorrhage. So was the skin around the eyes.
    “CP,” the partner said, pointing to the eyes.
    “Kurt,” Winston said. “We’re on sound.”
    “Sorry.”
    She was telling her partner to keep all observations to himself. Again, she was safeguarding the future. McCaleb knew that what her partner was pointing out was the hemorrhaging, or conjunctive petechiae, which always came with ligature strangulation. However, the observation was one that should be made to a jury by a medical examiner, not a homicide detective.
    Blood matted the dead man’s medium-length hair and had pooled inside the bucket against the left side of his face. Winston began manipulating the head and combing her fingers through the hair in search of the origin of the blood. She finally found the wound on the crown of the head. She pulled the hair back as much as possible to view it.
    “Barney, come in close on this if you can,” she said.
    The camera moved in. McCaleb saw a small, round puncture wound that did not appear to penetrate the skull. He knew that the amount of blood evidenced was not always in concert with the gravity of the wound. Even inconsequential wounds to the scalp could produce a lot of blood. He would get a formal and complete description of the wound in the autopsy report.
    “Barn, get this,” Winston said, her voice up a notch from the previous monotone. “We’ve got writing or something on the tape, on the gag.”
    She had noticed it while manipulating the head. The camera moved in. McCaleb could make out lightly marked letters on the tape where it crossed the dead man’s mouth. The letters appeared to be written in ink but the message was obliterated by blood. He could make out what appeared to be one word of the message.
    “Cave,” he read out loud. “Cave?”
    He then thought maybe it was only a partial word but he couldn’t think of any larger word – other than cavern – that contained those letters in that order.
    McCaleb froze the picture and just looked. He was enthralled. What he was seeing was pulling him backward in time to his days as a profiler, when almost every case he was assigned left him with the same question: What dark, tortured mind did this come from?
    Words from a killer were always significant and put a case on a higher plane. It most often meant that the killing was a statement, a message transmitted from killer to victim and then from the investigators to the world as well.
    McCaleb stood up and reached to the upper bunk.