Still four steps below the body, Quinn squatted to get a better look. The dead man lay facedown, legs trailing, arms above his head, as if he’d been trying to climb the stairs on all fours before he died. He was white and looked to be in his early forties, with a receding hairline and a sizeable spare tire around his waist. A well-worn leather penny loafer hung from the toe of one foot. A gray polo shirt, the back of which was oddly clean for the amount of blood on the stairs, bunched up around his armpits, exposing his back and belly — as if the killer had attempted to lift him off his feet during a struggle.
Quinn looked over his shoulder, checking in on Carly. “You okay?”
She nodded quickly, mouth clenched tightly as if she was trying not to throw up. “I’ve just never seen anything this gruesome before.”
Quinn took a deep breath, wishing he could say the same.
There was a bizarre obscenity in looking at someone who’d died a violent death — especially when that death had come at the hands of another. The dead could not turn away or cover their own nakedness. Investigators, for a time at least, were forced to leave the bodies exposed and twisted, frozen in their final moment of terror. Worse than that, the sight of such a scene drew in the unprepared, making them ponder too long and too hard on the short distance between life and death.
Carly stood behind him, hands at her sides. Her twitchiness disappeared now that she was certain Quinn was going to help.
Still squatting, Quinn studied the curvature of the wall above the body, where the victim would have been standing when he was killed. A swath of blood spatter, four feet wide, flecked the white plastic in tiny specks of red. There was a notable vacancy in the pattern, where someone or something else had blocked the path of the spray.
Quinn glanced back at Carly. “Don’t you carry some nitrile gloves for cleanup in case someone gets airsick?”
“I’ll get you some.” She ducked back down the stairs, apparently happy for the chance to step away from the gore.
“And a camera,” Quinn added. “Something better than a phone if you can find it, with a good flash.”
Quinn stepped up next to the void in the blood spatter and found, as he suspected he would, that it was roughly the shape of his shoulder. He bent at the knees to make the comparison, which put the person who’d been standing there when the victim’s throat was cut at around five-seven or five-eight.
Carly returned a few moments later with a pair of blue gloves. Quinn hung the camera around his neck, and then slipped the gloves on with a snap. He took photos from every angle, noting the way the man was positioned, the spatter and the blood that pooled on the polished wood beneath the body, before overflowing and dripping down the riser to the next step.
Moving up beside the victim, Quinn stooped to take close-ups of the wound in the man’s neck before he moved him. Whatever it had been, the weapon was sharp, maybe a piece of glass. A deep gash began under the dead man’s left ear, severing both the carotid and jugular before continuing around to open his windpipe.
“So,” Quinn muttered to himself. “You’re right-handed.”
“Pardon?” Carly took a tentative step forward, watching where she put her foot to avoid stepping in blood.
“Our killer is probably right-handed.” Quinn pantomimed grabbing someone from behind and drawing a blade from left to right, as much to get the movement in his own mind as to demonstrate to the flight attendant.
The wound was deep enough to expose the grotesque white of vertebrae and glistening cartilage. Quinn knew from experience that it took someone with a substantial amount of upper-body strength to hold even a small victim still while inflicting this much damage.
After he’d taken far more pictures than he’d ever need, Quinn passed the camera back to Carly. He fished the wallet out of the dead man’s back pocket and flipped it open.
“Aaron Foulger,” he said, reading the man’s driver’s license. “From south Anchorage… There’s about five hundred bucks cash US and roughly…” He thumbed through the bills and did some quick math in his head. “About two grand worth of 5,000-ruble notes.”
Quinn found a faculty ID for the University of Alaska and passed it back to Carly, along with the wallet. “Have Natalie get somebody to check and see if he’s traveling with anyone. Don’t make contact if he is. Just let me know one way or the other.”
Carly ducked away long enough to use the interphone and find out Foulger was traveling alone. She studied the ID and looked up at the body from her vantage point on the gentle arc of the staircase below Quinn. “Why would anyone want to kill a UAA professor?”
“We’re looking for opportunity, means, and motive,” Quinn said. “Our killer had opportunity when he caught Foulger alone on the stairwell.” Quinn nodded toward the gash in the dead man’s neck. “He had access to some sort of sharp blade, which should theoretically be difficult to come by on a commercial aircraft. I’m guessing it was a piece of glass — maybe a broken wine bottle or something. Anyway, the blade, along with the strength to employ it, gave him means.”
Quinn scanned the body again to see what he’d missed. “What I’m not seeing is motive.” He bent to study the dead man’s hands. “There’s a good chance the professor was a target of opportunity. If this was preplanned, I can think of a dozen better places to kill somebody than in the stairwell of a crowded airplane.”
Carly gave him a weak smile. “You know it doesn’t calm a girl to know you can think of a dozen better places to commit a murder.”
Quinn ignored her, instead working through the odds that someone would risk committing a murder at this exact spot with five hundred potential witnesses.
“Too big a chance that you’d get caught here,” he mused. “Why not wait for him in his house, wire his car to explode, slip something in his coffee? If it just had to be up close and personal, you could even cut him like this when he’s walking past a blind alley in downtown Anchorage.” Quinn paced back and forth on the stairs. “He lives up on the Hillside, not five hundred feet from Chugach State Park. It would be nothing to set up a sniper nest and pop him while he was out walking his dog…”
“Again with the creepy stuff,” Carly said. “You just rattled five ways to kill a man right off the top of your head.”
“Yeah.” Quinn shrugged. “I guess that is a little scary.” He resisted the urge to explain himself further.
Carly cocked her head to one side, pondering. Her long hair hung down, away from her shoulder. She wrestled with her thoughts for a moment before looking up at Quinn.
“What kind of sick person murders a random passenger on board an airplane?” she said.
Quinn took a deep breath, thinking through the ramifications of his theory.
“Somebody who wants a diversion,” he said.
Carly’s eyes narrowed. “A diversion from what?”
“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “It’s still only a theory.”
Quinn stepped down to the base of the stairs so he could talk to both Carly and Natalie and do a quick check on Mattie.
“How many people in the crew?” Quinn asked.
“Twenty-two flight attendants,” Carly said. “And the two up front in the cockpit. We don’t pick up the relief pilots until Vladivostok.”
“Twenty-one,” Natalie corrected. “Stacy Damico called in sick.”
“Okay,” Quinn said. “From this time forward, every attendant needs to find a buddy and stick with them. A murder is too big an incident to keep buttoned up. Word will spread quickly, if it hasn’t already. There’ll be a lot of uncomfortable questions that no one will be able to answer. My advice is to keep up service.”
“To keep people calm.” Carly nodded.