The Easytown Box Set Page 3

  “Hey! Hey!” he shouted as I walked away.

  After a moment, the man screamed, clearly in agony. The idiot had stepped into the laser barrier that was holding him captive in the room. Dumbass.

  A few more turns down the hallway and we came to the murder scene.

  TWO: SATURDAY

  “Hey, Detective,” Sergeant Drake said as I walked up to the small group of people assembled in the hallway outside of a room.

  Greg Drake was a beast at six foot three, and a rock solid two hundred and forty pounds. He’d been a three-year starter at middle linebacker for Tulane right here in New Orleans and even though he was a couple of years older than I was, he hadn’t let any of his muscle deteriorate. I’d known the guy for as long as I’d been on the force and he’d gotten even bigger in that time. Some guys had all the luck.

  “Morning, Drake,” I replied. “What have you got for me?”

  “Victim is a forty-eight-year-old male named Charles Wolfe,” the sergeant began.

  Flash. The forensic cameraman’s flashbulb lit up the hallway, throwing odd shadows across the opposite wall, highlighting to me how clean this club was. Normally in that kind of light, the walls in these sex clubs revealed stains from the years of debauchery and a general lack of cleanliness. That’s why most places kept the lights low and used a ton of surface decontaminants.

  “I haven’t been inside yet and cause of death hasn’t been established,” Drake continued. “But, I’m gonna guess either blood loss or heart attack—and then blood loss.”

  “That sounds like a winning combination,” I chuckled and turned to the three uniformed cops standing in the hallway. “I think we’re good for right now, fellas. Can you go finish getting the personal information and statements from the johns in the other rooms? There are a few guys back there who are less than happy to be stuck in here for so long. After we get everything we need, Miss Himura will release them.”

  Flash.

  I peeked into the room after the officers left to get statements. Two cameramen worked the scene, one taking stills, the other recording video. As it was, they both blocked my view of the body. The only thing I could discern from my angle in the hallway was that the victim was grossly obese and there was a lot of blood splattered on the walls and a large puddle on the tile floor.

  “How much longer, gentlemen?”

  Benjamin Roberts looked up from the viewfinder on his oversized camera. “Good morning, Detective.”

  I waved at the cameraman. “Morning, Ben. How much longer until I can get in there?”

  “I just need to get a few more shots from up here at the head, down the length of the body. Maybe three or four minutes, then we’ll be on our way.”

  “Okay. We’ll stay out of your way.”

  “Thanks.” Flash.

  “Wolfe was married,” Drake continued with his general victim description. “Lived over in Leonidas and ran a hobby shop.”

  “Quite a haul to come down here,” I muttered. Leonidas was about an hour away, even when the traffic was flowing smoothly. “Next of kin notified?”

  Flash.

  “I called it in. A patrol officer was dispatched to notify the wife.”

  I jotted a note down to speak to Wolfe’s wife and visit his shop. Without knowing anything about the case, my initial thought was that someone he knew murdered him. Random murders tended to be less violent than what my quick glimpse into the room showed me; crimes of passion were usually messy, emotionally charged events.

  The mention of Wolfe’s wife reminded me that the club’s mistress still stood in the hallway. I ducked back around the corner. “Miss Himura, are—”

  “Detective, please. Call me Paxton.”

  Flash.

  I shot her an annoyed look for interrupting me. “Like I mentioned earlier, Miss Himura, I’m going to need to ask you some questions after I’ve had the opportunity to examine the body. Are you going to be available later this morning?”

  “How much later? I’ve been up all night because of this. I feel fine now, but I’m still in shock from…” She jutted her chin out toward the room where the cameramen worked, “Well, you know, what I saw. But my body is going to force me to sleep soon.”

  “That’s understandable,” I replied. “Maybe we can set up an appointment a little later today. Does 3 p.m. work for your schedule?”

  I’d learned long ago if you gave someone a specific time, they were more likely to agree instead of floating out a vague block of time.

  “Yes, I can meet with you at three.”

  “Great, thank you for your cooperation in this matter. Would you like me to meet you here or back at the Easytown Precinct headquarters?”

  She tucked a stray lock of blue behind her ear. “Uh, I don’t think meeting here is a good idea. After you’re done, we have to have a biological spill remediation cleaning crew come through, so no one will be allowed in the building for twelve hours while their chemicals do their work.”

  “Hmpf. Sounds like you’ve done this before,” Drake grunted.

  She smirked at him. “When you run this kind of business, you put the biological remediation companies on speed dial. Some of our clients have very specific fetishes. As long as they can pay for the cleanup, they can carry out their fantasies to their full extent.”

  “So the precinct then?” I pressed.

  She inhaled sharply through clenched teeth; the sound reminded me of a snake. An odd look passed over her face for a second that I attributed to a decision she’d made in her mind. “I don’t think I’d be comfortable at the police station,” she said. “Can you just come by my place?”

  “Your place? That’s a little unusual, Miss Himura. I’m sure you can understand—”

  “All done, Detective.”

  I glanced up, “Thanks, Ben. I’ll stop by your lab in a few hours to see the photos.”

  The cameramen waved and headed toward the lobby. “Sorry,” I apologized to the witness. “Going to someone’s house for routine questioning is not typically the way we do business.”

  “The NOPD restrictions on personal privacy violations by police officers, right?” she smirked.

  “Exactly,” I nodded. “The precinct has a comfortable interview room where you’d be more than—”

  “No, I’d prefer you to come to my place. I’ll feel more comfortable there. I give you permission to come to my apartment.”

  “Alright,” I agreed, grudgingly. I couldn’t force her to go down to the station and her place of work was out of the question. She gave me permission in front of witnesses; that should satisfy the department’s requirements. “I’ll be at your apartment at three this afternoon, then.”

  “That’s fine… Am I free to go back to the foyer? I need to settle the accounts of the clients that the other officers clear to leave.” She gestured toward the murder scene. “And, I really don’t want to see that again. Plus, I need to start making phone calls to see which remediation company can come immediately—after you complete your investigation, of course.”

  “Of course.” I nodded my head. “You’re free to go.”

  She spun around and began hurrying back down the hall. “Oh, Miss Himura?” I called.

  “Yes, Detective?”

  “At the risk of sounding cliché, don’t try to skip town.”

  “I—” She caught herself and whipped back around, stomping down the hall.

  “What’s that about?” Drake asked.

  I shrugged. “I’ve never claimed to understand women, man.” I took my coat off and draped it over the hook outside the room, setting my hat carefully on top of the shelf. “Okay, what’ve we got?”

  Drake handed me a pair of plastic overshoes. “You’re gonna want these.”

  I stepped across the room’s threshold into a puddle of fluid. The average adult male body contains roughly one and a half gallons of blood and about half a gallon of other fluids. The victim was not an average male. Wolfe’s bulk could have easily contained
two and a half gallons, maybe a little more. And it looked like every bit of it either stained the walls or pooled on the floor around his body. No wonder the Diva’s flood sensor alarms had sounded.

  The cameramen’s footprints were all over the place. I couldn’t blame them; there wasn’t any place to step inside the room to avoid Wolfe’s blood.

  Once I was inside, I surveyed the room quickly while I slid on a pair of latex gloves. It appeared to be a standard room, like those in most of Easytown’s sex clubs: king-sized bed with undisturbed sheets, an upholstered couch with no coffee table, a small desk and chair off in the corner to simulate a legitimate hotel, and a bathroom at the furthest point from the door. A pair of jeans and a light green t-shirt lay in a pile on the chair. There didn’t seem to be anything special about the room itself.

  Halfway between the bathroom and the bed, the john’s body lay on the floor. It looked like he’d been torn to shreds by a bear. Dark red blood covered all four walls and large blobs of gelatinous fat tissue clung to the paint, slowly drying. The place was an absolute mess.

  The bedsheets were still in place from when the service droid had made the bed. In fact, the comforter was barely rumpled. Miss Himura said the john showered after he finished with the bot. I made a note in my book to ask the house mistress to verify her timeline.

  “Hmm, what the hell is that?” I asked as I pointed at the baseboard beside the bed, out of view of anyone who wasn’t in the room.

  Printed in blood was the phrase, “JOB 36:14.”

  “Looks like a biblical verse,” Drake sighed.

  I nodded and tapped my phone lightly. “Andi, what does ‘job 36:14’ mean?”

  “It’s not job, it’s Job,” Andi replied over the speaker, correcting my pronunciation to make the word sound like robe, except with a capital J at the beginning. “Job was a biblical character who was tempted by Satan, but remained faithful to God throughout his trials. The most common translation of the verse is, ‘They die in youth, and their life ends among the cult prostitutes.’

  “So now we have a religious nutjob on our hands? Okay, thank you, Andi. Keep digging for any type of cross-reference to this verse that may be pertinent.”

  “On it, boss.”

  I disconnected the phone and squished my way across the floor to peek into the bathroom. It looked clean and unused. The towels were still folded on the rack. “Hey, Drake,” I called.

  Squelch. Squelch. Squelch. The sound of his shoes slopping through the drying blood made me wish I wore headphones on an investigation. He stepped up beside me, “What’s up, sir?”

  I pointed at the towels, “The manager said the john had already finished fucking the sex bot and was showering.”

  “Yeah, so… Oh!”

  “See what I mean?” I asked.

  “Yeah. The bed’s made—which isn’t necessarily odd. People come to these places to carry out their fantasies, do things with the robots that their spouse would never let them do in the bedroom. Maybe he was into bathroom sex or something.”

  I nodded, “Yeah, I hear you, Drake. I’m not concerned with his sexual preferences, though. Why are all the towels dry if he showered after having sex?”

  “Maybe the killer dragged him out of the shower.”

  “Nah, the floor’s dry. If someone dragged Wolfe out of the shower, there would be water everywhere.” I paused as I worked through what it meant. “I don’t know about you, but I put a towel down on the floor so I don’t slip when I step out of the shower. The mat’s still folded on the towel rack and…” I reached inside to pat the mat. “It’s still dry.”

  “Hold on,” Drake muttered as he pushed past me into the bathroom, leaving a bloody trail of size fourteen footprints across the tile. “We’re over-thinking this.”

  He stopped shy of the shower and put on a glove before opening the door from the top, not the handle. “Shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “Shower’s wet. I thought he didn’t take a shower.”

  Someone turned the shower on, but didn’t use it. “Lift every fingerprint from that shower door,” I ordered. “Get the handle, but scan up high too. The killer may have opened it by pulling from the top like you did.”

  “On it,” the sergeant said. He pulled a fingerprint scanner from the satchel on his shoulder and ran it slowly over the possible places where clients, or the murderer, could grasp the shower door to open it.

  The victim didn’t use the shower, but the Diva’s water usage log showed that it ran for four minutes before the motion sensor turned it off. Who turned it on and why? The easy answer would be that either the killer turned on the shower to keep up the appearance of a normal pleasure house transaction or that he came in and killed him while Wolfe waited for the shower to warm up.

  “Hey, Drake.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Get a scan on the shower too. See if any blood was washed off recently.”

  It would take him a few minutes, so I turned around and looked at the body. Whoever you were, Chuck Wolfe, you sure were a fat bastard, I chuckled. The body snatchers would have a fun time trying to get him into a bag for transport to the morgue, where he’d be autopsied.

  Ragged gashes covered the body; several of them large enough to reach inside the body cavity. I pulled a disposable prod from my pocket and placed it gently against the sides of the wound on his chest, flipping over a large flap of skin.

  “Well, if the heart attack didn’t do it…” I muttered.

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “The john’s heart is missing,” I dug around a little more, lifting his damaged lung out of place with the prod. “I think… Huh.”

  “What?”

  I pulled the stick out of his chest and gently pried apart the jagged wound across his stomach. “Looks like most of his intestines are gone… Possibly liver as well, but it’s hard to tell without getting in there and digging around. We’ll have to see what the medical examiner thinks.”

  “You think this was an organ harvest?”

  I looked around the room, “Maybe. The organs don’t seem to be here.”

  “What the fuck? This is way too messy for a routine organ harvester,” Drake said. His voice echoed back to me from the shower where he’d gone back to work collecting the fingerprints.

  If it was an organ harvest, why did they take his intestines? Intestines were useless as a transplant. I focused my examination on other parts of the body instead of the massive wounds to the chest and stomach; the disembowelment question would have to wait until the autopsy. Dark bruising around the throat peeked out from underneath the blood. I pushed softly into the john’s throat and my finger sank. “His larynx was crushed,” I called toward the bathroom.

  “Must be why nobody heard him,” Drake grunted.

  I eyed the walls dubiously. They were double- or even triple-lined for sound protection, I doubted the crushed larynx was why no one heard him. About the only reason it would have made sense was if the door was open.

  “Wait a minute…” I felt stupid for not noticing it immediately. “How the fuck did the killer get out of this room without leaving a bloody trail in the hallway?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Thanks for the help,” I mumbled, walking to the door. Squelch. Squelch. Squelch.

  I’d left my bag of toys in the hallway. Damn. I’m in a whorehouse; maybe I should have phrased that differently. I’d left my forensics kit in the hallway. Better. Inside the bag, I had a portable scanner, much bigger than what Drake used to get fingerprints. My scanner detected wall density. A consistent, solid wall wouldn’t register, but if there was a hollow spot, the scanner would notify me to check for potential secret passageways.

  NOPD dicks who worked the other precincts didn’t have one of these in their standard kit, but Easytown was unique. Thomas Ladeaux, aka Tommy Voodoo, had a hand in everything that was done down here, including construction and remodeling of old buildings for new businesses. There’d been a few times whe
re we discovered hidden compartments in the walls of buildings, oftentimes unbeknownst to the proprietor. It was straight out of the old stories of Prohibition-era speakeasies. Like I said, Easytown was unique.

  “Powering on the radar,” I said loudly enough for Drake to hear.

  “Aww shit, sir. Do you have to use that thing around me? Genevieve and I are still planning on having another kid.”

  I flipped the switch, turning on the system, and aimed it toward the wall. A high-pitched whine came from the box as the 3D rendition of solid masonry came up on the green monochrome screen. “You’re thirty-six, Drake. If you’re gonna have another child, you better get to it.”

  I walked along the wall slowly, checking for hollow spots while Drake complained about his sperm count. After a few circuits, I decided that there weren’t any secret passages hidden in the walls of this room. Shit. Where does that leave us?

  The scanner’s whine stopped as I turned it off. Sergeant Drake poked his head out from the bathroom. “You done with that thing yet?”

  I walked back to my kit and put the scanner back inside the case. “Yeah,” I replied. “Didn’t find anything, though.”

  Drake walked into the bedroom and held up his fingerprint scanner. “Mainframe shows several male fingerprints and a few women. None of them is from Charles Wolfe.”

  I nodded; I’d expected as much.

  “I’ll cross-reference the fingerprints I lifted with vehicle sensors and drone camera footage to see if any of them were in Easytown tonight.”

  It was standard police procedure. It wasn’t perfect since the murderer could have taken a cab to Easytown, disabled their vehicle’s tracking device, hid from the drones—or they could work in the district. But, it was a start.

  “Okay, send it on over to Mainframe,” I ordered. Then I wondered aloud, “What are we missing here?”

  “The elephant in the room is how the killer got out of here without leaving footprints.”

  I shot him an annoyed look. I thought the guy was a great homicide cop, but he had an aggravating habit of stating the obvious. “Did you find any evidence of the killer cleaning off in the shower? They should have been covered in blood and bodily fluids.”