It was easy enough for the authorities to identify the body. Ace McCall’s blood-soaked cowhide wallet was still buttoned securely inside his back pocket. Whatever had happened to him, it wasn’t a robbery. No one had disturbed the California driver’s license, the half dozen credit cards, or the five hundred dollars in cash tucked into the back flap.
The white Lincoln parked outside the house on Oleander carried additional identification in the form of a registration slip and a leather briefcase crammed with documents attesting to the identity of its owner.
It was far more difficult to determine precisely what had happened in the back bedroom of the house.
Officer Mark Riehmann’s first impression of the carnage in the back bedroom was simple: homicide. After calling for back-up on this one-a gnawing gut instinct honed by fifteen years with the County Sheriff Department told him that this case was going to be a bad one-he made sure that the Jantzen kid was going to be all right, then approached the house at the top of the hill.
He moved tentatively, slowly, alert to the sounds of sirens racing in response to his call. He was not quite to the sidewalk in front of the house when the first back-up car arrived. In spite of a sense of urgency amplified by the knowledge that there was still a kid in the house, perhaps trapped there with a homicidal maniac, he hesitated long enough to be joined by two other figures, shadowy in the darkness. He whispered instructions, then the three of them approached the house.
The front door gaped open. Other than that, there was no sign of life. Still, it took almost five minutes for them to penetrate the house and turn their flashlights onto the scene in the back bedroom.
McCall’s body lay sprawled across the floor, the feet still in the closet, the head angled toward the window opposite. The body was awash with blood, most of it crusted and brown, some still vividly scarlet and dripping. Beneath him lay another body. For an instant all three officers thought the boy must be dead, too. Then they realized that what they assumed to be a deathly pallor was actually smudged cosmetics and that the boy’s open eyes were not rigid with death but deep and dark and secret.
They pulled the body off the boy, and one of the other officers knelt to carry him outside. The boy shrieked once-long and loud and piercingly shrill. Then he lapsed into a silence so absolute that Riehmann wondered for a second time if he weren’t dead.
“Get him out of here,” Riehmann instructed softly. “Quick.” As soon as the other officer disappeared into the hall, Riehmann knelt beside McCall’s corpse. The face was distorted with pain and fury. Even after fifteen years witnessing death and destruction in all of their guises, Riehmann knew that this one was different. He trembled when his light played across the tight, drawn features
And the blood.
There couldn’t be a pint left in the guy, Riehmann thought, not with what’s spattered all over the walls and the carpet and the ceiling, not with the fact that the front of McCall’s clothing was stiff with it. Not given the fact that his chest and belly and groin and thighs were slashed and that a wickedly sharp, massive shiver of glass was still embedded in his throat.
Homicide, Riehmann decided almost immediately. And he was rarely wrong. But this time, as the evidence unraveled, he seemed to be. True, it looked impossible for it to have been suicide, for McCall to have inflicted some of the gaping wounds-at least impossible for any man in a healthy state of mind.
But the crumpled newspapers and the documents locked in the briefcase ultimately suggested that McCall might not have been quite sane. He could easily have been on the edge of desperation, seeing the company he had built on the verge of total collapse with himself the sole responsible agent for what eventually amounted to millions of dollars in alleged fraud. Beyond that, much of the money involved was linked to individuals and organizations whose financial dealings were at best questionable. It looked increasingly as if Ace McCall had swum too far beyond his depth, discovered that he was doomed, and instead of struggling to get back, simply took a deep breath and sank beneath the waves. Figuratively speaking, of course.
In addition, an examination of the room-especially the blood-splattered door jamb, the razor-sharp shards of glass, the small red and silver flashlight found beneath the Wilton boy-revealed three sets of finger prints…and only three. Brady Wilton’s. Kyle Jantzen’s. And Ace McCall’s.
Of course it was possible that the killer or killers might have protected themselves by wearing gloves. But as the days became weeks and the weeks turned into months, the County investigation team could not discover one shred of evidence that anyone else had been in that room for at least a month before McCall died.
Riehmann kept up with the case as much as he could. He read reports and followed up leads. But everything led to the same conclusion. There was no evidence that McCall had died at the hands of another person. And, given the at best ambiguous nature of his wounds, it was just possible that he did kill himself.
Just barely possible.