“Be my guess.” Roger raised his face to Gus. “As long as the head isn’t ready to sever, better leave him as is for the coroner.”
I admit I felt a little squeamish, fought back the image that suddenly flashed behind my eyes of the decapitated corpse of Park Holloway crashing to the floor at our feet.
Bishop was studying the ceiling, looking at the fixture in the center from which Holloway’s noose was suspended.
“Any idea how we’re going to get him down, Rog?”
“That thing Holloway’s garrote is attached to up there connects to an electronically operated pulley. It was put in last week to support a big sculpture that’s going into the stairwell. If there’s any reason to bring Holloway down before Scientific Services gets here, we’ll open that panel over there, hit the switch, and lower away.”
“Interesting,” Bishop said, going over to the panel. He nudged it with the toe of his boot and the door popped open. I could see pry marks on the wall where the panel’s lock had been forced, marks that had not been there when I saw it earlier in the day.
“Better come away from there, Sid,” Roger said. “There might be prints.”
The radio on Bishop’s belt began to squawk. He took it off, had a brief conversation that sounded like code. Still holding the radio, he addressed Roger.
“There’s a collision on Kanan Road-car’s on fire. Because of budget cuts, we’re two crews short. I gotta get these guys up there. Any reason you need one of them to stick around?”
“Go ahead,” Roger said. He gestured toward Holloway. “Nothing you guys can do for him. Go on. We’ll wait for the coroner.”
“We?” I asked.
“You’ll need to answer questions, Maggie. You found him.”
Bishop summoned his crew and they thundered out as rapidly as they had entered.
In the quiet they left in their wake, I said, “Two’s company, three’s a nightmare.”
“You want to go over everything you did and everything you saw for me?”
“You gonna grill me, Officer, sir?”
He chuckled. “No, I just want to hear your story.”
There wasn’t much to tell, but I ran through it. I entered, the building seemed empty, I saw Holloway in the stairwell, and I called 911. The 911 tape should have captured everything except the first sixty seconds.
“You came here to film the empty stairwell?” he asked.
“I did.”
“Where’s your camera?”
I pulled it out of my bag where I dumped it when I went to open the big front doors for the paramedics. I hadn’t turned it off so, although inside my bag there were no images to shoot, the camera had continued to record sound.
He pushed his chin toward the stairs. “You think you can go up there and take some pictures?”
“If you need them.”
“Not a bad idea,” he said. “In two more hours he’ll be in full rigor and all his blood will have settled into his feet and lower legs. Let’s film a complete record of him pretty much as you found him.”
My lack of enthusiasm must have been apparent. Roger put a big hand around the back of my neck and brought his face down close.
“I’d do it myself, Mags,” he said. “But that’s a pretty fancy camera. Kate’s the picture-taker in our family, out of necessity. And, anyway, I should wait down here in case anyone shows up.”
He smiled his broad, white-toothed smile at me.
Roger was a big man, graying at the temples, softening in the middle, maybe a year from his sixtieth birthday, and though he wore old jeans and holey baseball sleeves-he had come straight from his fifteen-year-old daughter Marisol’s softball practice-he was still too handsome for his own good.
Before he took the job heading Anacapa’s little police department, Roger had put in his twenty-five at a big-city police department down the coast. For fifteen of those years he had been, like my husband Mike, a homicide detective. He had accepted promotion to commander for the last couple of years so he could pad his retirement as a matter of pride, in case it ever became necessary for his family to rely on his income.
Kate, his wife, was a true egghead who never concerned herself about money because, unlike Roger, she never had to. When Kate was sixteen her father died, leaving her, according to Forbes, the fifth richest teenager in California. Not that she cared one whit.
I looked up at Holloway, cringed, and stalled every way I could think of; I was in no hurry to get up close and personal with his remains. With luck, the coroner would show up right now and take his own damn pictures. I changed the battery pack on the camera, checked the available space on the photo disk. Next I tried diversionary conversation.
“So, Roger,” I said, “how does it feel to be working a homicide again?”
“Are you stalling?” he asked, grinning at me. “I know you’ve taken crime scene pictures before.”
“Sure. And no, I’m not stalling.” A little fib. “I’m just asking.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, rightfully skeptical.
“So, back in the saddle again, huh, Roger?”
“The thing of it is,” he said, “my department can’t handle a homicide. My guys don’t have the experience and we don’t have the resources. Mostly what we do here is write traffic tickets and haul in drunken college students on weekends. So, no, I’m not back in that saddle.
“I put out a call to the LA County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau, and they’re dispatching a team of detectives who’ll take over as soon as they can get here.”
“Too bad,” I said. I turned on the camera and, feeling resigned, headed up the stairs. “This one could be interesting.”
“Maggie,” Roger called behind me.
“I know, don’t touch anything.”
While I filmed Holloway, Roger kept up a conversational stream, friendly chatter as counterpoint to the grim images I was seeing through my lens. I was grateful to him.
“So,” he said as I started with the soles of Holloway’s shoes. “Kate tells me you finally got the okay to talk with Sly’s mother.”
“Finally, yes.” I zoomed in on a dark blob of something stuck on the outside of the heel of his left shoe. “Tomorrow morning, crack of dawn, I’m headed to Frontera State Prison for Women.”
“Traffic out to Corona shouldn’t be a problem that early.”
“It’s coming back I’m worried about.”
Dark blue trousers with a narrow gray pinstripe, creases from sitting and a little shine on the ass from wear. I could see a bulge in his right rear pocket that might have been a wallet, and the edge of a linen handkerchief showed at the top of his left pocket. Black leather belt, silver-gray dress shirt creased in the back, probably from leaning back in a chair, and a Mont Blanc pen clipped in the breast pocket.
“I have afternoon plans tomorrow,” I said, glancing down at Roger. He grinned at me.
“Right, Mom meets the boyfriend.”
“I’m over forty, Roger. Boyfriend doesn’t sound right.”
“He’s French, yeah?” he said. “How about petit ami?”
“That’s better.”
There was a narrow stripe of darkening blood that ran from a gash on Holloway’s forehead, down his face, along the edge of his yellow silk tie, and into the top of his trousers. Something had connected with the back of his head with enough force to crush the bone, leaving a fist-sized indentation that was now crusted over with black and sticky blood.
“Someone hit him, Roger,” I said.
“I saw that. Clocked him a good one.”
I couldn’t see whatever it was that had been used to garrote or hang Holloway because it was imbedded in the bloated flesh of his neck. About his face I will only say that hanging victims don’t often get open coffins.
“What are you hoping to get from Sly’s mother?”
“A handle on who his father was,” I said, turning off the camera. “There is no father named on Sly’s birth certificate.”