She walked past me to the Explorer, looked in. I saw her right hand trace a quick cross upon her front side, then return to the warmth of the pocket. She stared awhile, then came back to me.
“Looks like he might have pulled his own plug,” she said.
“Kinda does.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“Seems like he’d have done it sooner.”
McKenzie nodded and looked at me. She’s a few years older than me, half Anglo and half Latina. She is strong and intelligent. Single, proud, unfazed by risk. Her face is pretty but rudely scarred by acne. She’s tough and unhappy.
“Let the GSR decide,” she said.
The hand of a suicide by gun will be peppered with gunshot residue, mostly the barium and antimony contained in gunpowder. It’s easy to lift off with tape. But if the hands are clean, you might have a homicide. A tricky bad guy can shoot someone up close, then put the dead or dying person’s hand around the gun and fire it somewhere the bullet can’t be found, so it looks like a suicide. But this happens in books and movies much more than in real life and death.
There were no known witnesses, although one elderly motorist stopped to tell us that he’d driven past here around nine the night before and seen a red Ferrari parked down by the side of the freeway. It was pulled over not far from where the black Explorer now stood. He also saw a man moving in the trees, just barely visible. I had one of the officers detain and run a records and warrants check on the motorist, but he came back clean. Retired Navy. He sat in the back of a prowl car with a look of authority while the check went through.
The anonymous caller who had reported the Explorer and possible victim was male and spoke English with an undetermined accent. The conversation was partially recorded by a desk officer at headquarters.
McKenzie and I watched the crime-scene investigators sketch and measure and photograph and video the scene. Glenn Wasserman, one of our best CSIs, brought me a small paper bag with a cartridge casing in it, a nine-millimeter Smith factory load by the look of it.
“Up on the dashboard,” he said. “Almost fell down into the heater vent.”
“Nice grab,” I said.
“It’s Garrett Asplundh, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I never worked with him.”
I talked briefly with the first-on-scene officers. They’d handled the scene by the book: checked for signs of life, called Dispatch with the possible 187, taped off the scene using the convenient tree trunks, and waited for the Homicide hordes to arrive. They confirmed that the passenger’s door had been like it was now — closed, with the window up.
The Coroner’s team pronounced and removed the body. They just opened the driver’s door and guided Asplundh onto a plastic body bag atop a lowered gurney. Before they zipped it up, I pulled his wallet from his coat pocket. I noted the currency and credit cards, the driver’s license and “City of San Diego Employee” ID. I noted that his birthday was in November and that he would have turned forty years old. I slid the wallet back in. I saw the cell phone clipped to his belt. I saw that his necktie was almost completely drenched in blood. A small portion of it was still light blue. There are few places where blood looks more startling than on a necktie.
They zipped him and covered him with a blanket. I thought of how he had once seemed large and been feared. And how the death of his daughter and the ruin of his marriage had left him smaller. And how, soon, not one recognizable molecule of him would be left.
I reached into the Explorer, slipped the automatic garage door opener off the sun visor and put it in my pocket. Then I walked alongside Asplundh to the Coroner’s van. Hoped his soul would be well taken care of. After all, he was once one of us.
Over on the passenger side of the Explorer I hoped to find good footprints but found none at all. The grass was healthy and wet and too springy to hold an indentation for long. But a second vehicle had been parked here very recently. And it had left dark green tracks coming down the hillock, just as the Explorer had. The tracks of the second vehicle were deeper and darker than those of the Ford, and I wondered if its driver had perhaps gunned it in reverse to back up the side of the swale. With the grass wet from the rain, it might have taken a four-wheel drive to back up that hill.
I bent down a little and looked straight through the passenger-side window to where Garrett’s head would have been when he was alive. Sitting there. Talking, maybe. Looking ahead. Hard to imagine he was unaware of the shooter.
Then I looked beyond him, trying to estimate where the bullet might be if it had continued in an approximately straight line. It would have shot across Highway 163, bored through several yards of tree foliage unless it clipped a branch and veered off, then lodged in the rising slope of earth toward the far end of the bridge. But the chances of an approximately straight line of flight were not good, given the skull and glass the bullet had to pass through. The chances of the bullet’s being in one piece were not good at all. I made an unhopeful note to have the CSIs look for fragments.
I climbed the gentle embankment down which the Explorer had traveled to get to the secluded, shaded swale. It was easy to pick out the tire tracks that had been left by the vehicle. Easy, too, to see the second set that came down the embankment and stopped right next to it.
I waved to Glenn, pointed to the tracks. He worked his way up the hillock toward us, shooting digital and video. For a moment we stood at the top. I looked out at the cars charging by on Highway 163.
“Asplundh was a kick-ass cop, wasn’t he?” asked Glenn.
I nodded.
“What a turnaround,” said Glenn. “From Professional Standards to this.”
We went back down for a closer look at the Explorer. Another CSI was examining and photographing the tires before they towed it off to the impound yard to be dusted for fingerprints and combed for hair and fiber.
“Look at this,” she said.
I came around and knelt and looked at the shiny green rock caught in the tread of the left rear tire.
She photographed it. Two angles, three shots from each. Then she shot some video, explaining what she was shooting. Then she pried the rock out and dropped it into a small paper evidence bag. I took the bag and stared down, holding my flashlight beam steady. It wasn’t a rock at all but half a small glass marble. It was bright green. I remembered that size from when I was a kid.
“We called them minis,” I said.
“Right,” she said. “Smaller than a shooter.”
It looked like it had lodged in the wide tread of the SUV tire, then been sheared off to a half sphere. There was a fragment of something pale and red-orange embedded in the glass. Part of the cat’s eye, maybe. Or some other kind of inner design. The sheared surface around it, recessed into the tread, was pitted.
“Fifty bucks he shot himself,” said McKenzie.
Odd words for her to use, because the lavender ovals that spilled out of her mouth and hovered in the air between us meant she was feeling genuine sympathy for Garrett Asplundh. I nodded as the ovals bobbed like corks on a slow river, then dissolved. McKenzie likes to talk tougher than she feels. After three years I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the colors and shapes of other people’s feelings, unless they don’t match up with their words.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He used to be Professional Standards. One of the real straight arrows.”
“Straight arrows can’t bend,” said McKenzie.
We walked around to the other side of the vehicle. I pulled on some gloves, then swung open the right rear door. In spite of the cool early hour, the flies had already found the blood. I squared the aluminum case on the seat in front of me, pushed the thumb buttons, and watched the latches jump. One yellow legal pad with neat handwriting on the top page. Two pens, two pencils, and a tiny calculator. An address book. A datebook. A small tape recorder, a digital camera, and a .45 automatic Colt pistol in a heavily oiled leather holster. With a pencil I poked and pried around the items, looking for something hidden or loose or out of place. But all of it was splendidly organized into cutouts in the foam that lined both the bottom and the lid.