The door downstairs was beyond the drinking fountain and conference room. I opened it and then stopped, groping for the buzzer button below the light switch. The wiring was one of Bob Torrez’s brainstorms and more than once had saved a valuable piece of film from someone inadvertently opening the wrong door and letting in a blast of light.
I tapped the button twice tightly, hearing its bray down in the bowels of the basement. In a couple of seconds, the stairwell light snapped on and the doorway at the bottom unlatched with the sharp, quick snick of an electric dead bolt, activated when the folks in the darkroom knew that any unexposed film or paper was safely stowed.
I made my way down and pushed open the door at the bottom of the stairs. The darkroom shared the basement with the heating and cooling plant and the concrete fireproof evidence locker that had been built a couple years before during the renovation. A dozen steps ahead, the darkroom’s black doorway was partially obscured by the corner of the furnace. The door was open and the light on. Thomas Pasquale was bent over the counter examining a display of photos.
Linda Real, about half his size, stood beside him, and she was using Pasquale’s broad back as a leaning post, her elbow comfortable on his shoulder, her head supported by her fist.
“How do they look?” I said.
Linda jerked her arm off Tom’s back. I didn’t know who she had been expecting, but evidently it wasn’t me.
“Really good, sir,” she said, and traded places with the deputy. Pasquale made for the door and I stood to one side to let him pass.
“Are you going to be around for a while, or are you going home?” I asked him.
“I can stay as long as needed, sir.”
I waved a hand, wishing sometimes that he didn’t have to be so goddamn formal when he talked to me. “I just need to talk to you a minute. But it can wait if you have something you need to do.” To Linda I added, “Let’s see what you’ve got here.”
“Nasty, nasty,” Linda said.
I didn’t share her enthusiasm for watching crime scene photos appear under the magic of the darkroom safelight. Corpses in their natural habitat were bad enough without special effects.
A live Jim Sisson may have been photogenic, but he certainly had made a mess of himself this time. “These were taken after Sisson’s body was moved by the medical examiner,” Linda explained needlessly, indicating the set on the right. “And this is what Bob was trying to understand.” She positioned half a dozen eight-by-tens in front of me. I could smell her perfume or shampoo or whatever the source of the fragrance was-light, fresh, appealing even at that hour and in that morbid place of red lights, chemicals, and time-frozen tragedy.
“This is a tread mark on the outside wall of the shop.” She touched a photo with the tip of her pen. “The way the siding’s dented, that might be the point of first impact.”
“It would have to be,” I said. “It’s the farthest point up on the wall.”
Linda nodded. “From there to this mark on the concrete apron is fifty-four inches, give or take.”
“And that would be the height of the tire,” I said, and turned to Tom. “Did you measure it yet?”
“Yes, sir. It matches that.”
“So the tire dropped off the chain, or whatever, and crashed against the side of the building. Jim Sisson happened to be there, for what reason we don’t know. If the chain had started to slip, I would have thought he would have just lowered the thing to the ground.”
“It caught him somehow,” Linda said. “And I guess they’re pretty heavy?”
“Loaded, with weights and all, I would guess close to a ton,” I said. “Somewhere in that ballpark, anyway. More than he could manage, that’s for sure.”
I looked at the photo. “And these?”
Linda pointed. “You can see where the tread slid down the wall. In order to do that, the bottom has to kick out, too.”
“Sure. That’s not surprising. And it looks like it did.” The black marks on the concrete scrubbed away from the building as the tire slid down, with Jim Sisson pinned underneath.
I frowned and leaned close, trying to bring the marks into the right portion of my bifocals. “On that concrete, though, I would have predicted that the tire would just have leaned against the building and stayed there. Or maybe rolled off to one side. It’d have to hit it absolutely square.”
“Sir?”
“I’m surprised that it slid down in the first place. That’s all I’m saying. The concrete isn’t slick, and the rubber tire would have had a pretty good grip. It must have dropped hard, maybe with even a little bounce to it.”
“And then there’s this,” Linda said, “and you have to look close. But I made an enlargement.” She pulled another photo closer. “See the last set of black marks on the concrete? They’re the farthest out from the building, right?”
“Right.”
“The tire would have been almost horizontal by then, propped up by Jim’s body.”
“Yep.”
“Now look at this.”
I folded my arms on the counter to act as a brace, relieving my protesting back. Linda bent the goosenecked drafting lamp closer. “What am I seeing?” I asked.
“The scrub marks are darker, more pronounced, and abruptly change direction. They look like a comma, with the tail off to the left.”
“Huh.”
“The tire had to jig sideways,” Tom said.
“I can see that.” I looked at the marks for a long time, then turned my head to gaze at Linda. She was a fetching kid, a little heavy from too much fast food at odd hours, but with raven black hair that she kept cut short, framing a wide, intelligent face. She looked like she could be Tom Pasquale’s younger sister.
“You do good work,” I said, and she grinned. The late hour was costing her, though. When the fatigue started to win, her left eye wandered a bit. She had been blinded in that eye during a shotgun assault a couple years before that also had taken the life of one of our deputies.
The harsh light from the table lamp played on her features, and the scars on the left side of her face were just faint pale tracks against her olive skin. She could have covered them with makeup if she had been the sort to worry about such things.
“So tell me what you think,” I said to them both.
“The tire had to kick sideways some,” Tom replied. He reached across and tapped the enlargement. “That sideways mark is about six inches long.”
“So the tire fell against the wall and then slid down, and just as it stopped sliding downward, it kicked sideways. All right. Maybe. I can think of several explanations for that.” I reached across for the other photos. “What do these tell us?”
“The most instructive set are these,” Linda said. The first was a grisly photo of Jim Sisson crushed under the tire. The weight of the tire had smashed him into the small space beside the wall, his skull crushed against the metal flange that made up the frame for the massive overhead door. The tire was resting diagonally across his back.
Linda took a second copy of the same print and with a grease pencil circled the portion of the photo that included all that could be seen of the actual contact point between the tire tread and Sisson’s back.
“See these tire treads?”
“Cleats, I think they’re called.”
“Yes. Now, they’re about four inches apart, and each one is roughly two inches wide. That’s what Tom measured. Here’s one resting on Sisson’s right shoulder, digging into his neck and head.
Going to the left, here’s another, just past his spine and down a little bit.”
“OK,” I said, feeling uneasy.
“Now this.” Linda slid one of the photos of Sisson’s corpse across for me to look at.
Sisson had been a wiry little guy, the sort who could work ten or fifteen hours without a pause. That he hadn’t been able to scramble out of the way indicated that the chain had snapped loose so fast he hadn’t had time to even say, “Oh, shit.”