My mouth was still somewhat watering from the nausea, but the major wave seemed to have passed for the most part; at least I hoped that it had. I was still keeping my eyes closed, but the image I’d seen was freshly imprinted on my retinas, so I suppose it didn’t really matter. I was going to see it one way or the other, and I suspected that my rampant imagination was probably coloring my memory of the sight to appear much worse than it actually was.
“Rowan?” Felicity’s worried voice filtered into my ears, and I felt her hand softly pressing against my back.
“I’m okay,” I mumbled after puffing out a heavy breath.
“Keep yourself grounded,” she told me, her tone wavering as I heard the note of concern begin to rise.
“No,” I slowly shook my head. “That’s not it. Don’t worry.”
“What is it then?”
I swallowed hard and opened my eyes, then as I slowly brought myself upright, I pointed past her through the doorway. “Just a little queasy, that’s all.”
The first thing that had caught my eyes was the very point that now had me transfixed. A large splotch of blood intermixed with what was presumably brain tissue and bone fragments formed a hideous blot against the dingy tile of the bathroom’s back wall. My suspicion, in this case, had been dead wrong. My imagination hadn’t even begun to do justice to the horror that now fell directly in my line of sight. It was all I could do to keep from staring at it, and truth be told, even that wasn’t enough. I was losing the battle with each passing second.
I tried to calm my churning stomach by forcing myself to detach from the reality of what I was seeing and view it from an analytical standpoint. It wasn’t easy, considering the circumstances, but after a moment I managed to invoke the thin delusion out of self-defense. It was no panacea, but it helped, even if only a little.
Judging from the density of the smear along with the shattered tile, the point of the matter’s impact appeared to have been just over halfway up the wall. From there, it continued to spread heavily along its vertical path. Above that, the splatter arced outward in a wide pattern, eventually becoming a light spray of rusty red upon the dull surface. Below the broken squares, blood and bits of flesh trickled downward, streaking the ceramic and eventually pooling on the bathtub ledge. I finally allowed my gaze to roam as I followed the drizzles of crimson downward, inevitably coming to rest on the victim himself.
Wentworth, or what was left of him, was a gross adornment to the already dirty floor. He wasn’t what you would call a small man, but he also wasn’t exactly enormous either. Still, his bulk went a long way toward filling the tile floor of the small bathroom. He was visibly overweight by a good margin and certainly out of shape, both facts that couldn’t be missed because he was completely nude.
Based on his current position, he probably would have been facing outward through the doorway were it not for the fact that he was pitched back against the side of the bathtub. He appeared to have been kneeling at the time of death, and that was pretty much his position now, albeit canted backward and slightly to one side where gravity had forced him to slip. He hadn’t gone far, however, as his shift to the right had been halted early on by the unaccommodating narrowness of the gap between the toilet and the tub.
What remained of his head was lolled to the side, face slack and jaw hanging open with bright blood dribbling across his chin, dripping down onto his chest. A wide strip of silver-grey duct tape was positioned firmly over his eyes. The left side of his skull, from just above and behind the ear on up to the crown, was all but completely missing and of course, now formed the sickening mosaic behind him. It didn’t take much to figure out that someone had shoved a gun into his mouth and then pulled the trigger.
Even though his body had gone limp in death, his shoulders appeared strained, and upon second glance one noticed that his arms disappeared behind his back as if bound there.
In front of him was a multi-hued puddle, ranging from yellow to an orangish-pink. Amid it all was a stream of something whitish and viscous looking. The bulk of the liquid was obviously a mixture of blood and what was probably his own urine. I wasn’t certain, but I suspected the white substance was seminal fluid.
There was no real way to tell for a fact if the urine had been the product of fear or simply muscles relaxing once his life had fled. My guess, however, was that it had occurred after death. I couldn’t prove it, of course, but I felt no fear in the room, only the buzz of heightened passion. Even now, standing in this doorway and looking at this macabre scene, sex came to the forefront. Those physically intangible facts weren’t helping me deal with this at all. When you added the suspected ejaculate to the list of oddities, I was even more unnerved.
Up to this point the scene looked much like I had voiced earlier-a contract killing. It had all the hallmarks of an execution style murder. However, as I took in the raw tableau, I continued to have even more of the “not quite right” sensation tickling my brain-as had Ben. I knew that what I was feeling didn’t fit the scene, and I couldn’t yet put my finger on it, but something I was seeing, other than just the semen, didn’t belong either.
“Are you going to be okay?” Felicity asked me.
I realized that I was still staring past her and gave my head a quick shake then focused on her face. “Yeah… Yeah, I’ll be all right. What about you?”
“Aye, me?” she asked. “I’m fine.”
“This doesn’t affect you?”
“Yes… and no,” she replied almost apologetically. “I’m afraid perhaps I’m a bit indifferent right now. I’ve seen this sort of thing quite a bit because of the classes. And… much more recently than you as well.”
“Yeah. Probably so.” I gave her a nod then fell silent again, shifting my gaze to stare back over her shoulder at Wentworth’s corpse.
“Do you want to go outside then?” she asked after a moment. “It’s okay. I can finish up here.”
I shook my head.
“What is it?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve got that look on your face, Row,” she pressed. “What are you thinking?”
“What Ben said…” I answered as I returned my eyes to meet hers. “You know, about something not being right. Do you get that too?”
She gave a quick nod in the affirmative. “But I’m not sure what.”
“Well, if the white stuff is what I think it is…” I offered.
“Aye, I noticed that… And… and…” She allowed her voice to trail off.
“And what?”
“Gods, Row,” she almost whispered, her tone disturbed. She looked away for a second then back to me with a tortured embarrassment in her eyes. When she started speaking again, she kept her voice low but stammered through the sentences as if trying to confess a mortal sin. “There’s something about this room… Ever since we came through the door… It sounds crazy… No, more like sick… No, it IS sick… But if… If we were alone right now, I’d… Right now, I want to…”
I gave her a knowing nod, and when I spoke I kept my voice down as well. “I know, hon, I can feel it too. There’s a residual sexual energy in this room that’s beyond…” I stammered myself, searching for the right words. “…Intense, is the only way I can explain it.”
She nodded back in agreement. “And it feels far too singular and recent, then. Not like something built up over time.”
“Yeah, I got that too,” I returned. “And did you notice there’s no fear?”
She gave me a quick nod. “Aye. I did. And, I really don’t know what to make of that.”
“Me either,” I huffed. “But something is definitely odd here.”
“Is everything okay back there?” Murv called out from the front of the room.
“Fine,” I replied, looking up with a quick wave. “Just took me by surprise is all.”
“Yeah,” he replied, continuing about his business with the other tech he’d brought in. “It’s a friggin’ mess.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Felicity asked me when I turned back to her. “Are you certain you don’t want to wait outside?”
“No, I’ll be okay. Really. It was just the initial shock.”
“If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure. Let’s get this done.”
“All right then.” She gave me a nod. “There is a set of photoevidence scales in the bag. I’m going to need them.”
Even though I was more than ready to put distance between this scene and me, my stomach had calmed considerably. I knew there was a time when it would have taken much longer for me to get over something like this, but my own learned indifference was starting to return, much to my disappointment.
We had already shot the wide angle and mid-range photos of the scene proper then moved immediately into the close-ups. We ran into a problem positioning a photoevidence scale near the exit wound, so since I had the free hands, I had been charged with the duty of reaching in and carefully holding it in place. Felicity didn’t really have it any easier as she was forced to contort herself into a position where she could shoot the picture and not disturb any potential evidence. Still, it wasn’t the most pleasant task I’d ever performed.
I was certain that the medical examiner would be taking far more detailed photos and even made mention of it aloud. However, my wife informed me that this was standard operating procedure, and she was going to follow it to the letter. I couldn’t disagree.
I stepped back out of the way and watched on as she steadied herself in the doorway while snapping off a series of pictures to show the location of a bed pillow, which had been haphazardly tossed into the bathtub. It bore its own velocity-patterned bloodstains, as did the translucent plastic shower curtain. Both spatters had their own stories to tell. One said that the pillow had probably been used to muffle the gun’s report; the other hinted that perhaps the shower curtain had been used to shield the killer from the spray. Still, even as Felicity called out the particulars of the shots for me to record, my gaze kept being drawn back to the victim.
Wentworth’s chest and protruding belly were flaccid and pale, making the red spatters and trickles of blood stand out in stark contrast beneath each harsh white burst from the camera’s flash unit. I lowered my eyes to make sure I was writing in a straight line as I filled the logbook with the details I’d been given but almost unconsciously returned my gaze to his lifeless torso.
The niggling “something not right” feeling grew into a full-fledged itch at the base of my skull as I stared. The brilliant glow of the strobe painted his form once again, and I heard my wife call out another set of notes. This time, however, I didn’t look away.
Instead, I asked, “Are you going to do close-ups of his chest?”
“No,” she replied. “That will be in the mid-range shots. You only do close-ups of wounds or anomalies.”
“Okay, but look at his chest,” I told her, pointing.
The streaks of blood, which at first had appeared to be merely a by-product of the head wound were beginning to reveal much more. Upon close scrutiny, a few of the trickles followed an opposing pattern to that which had dripped from above. It wasn’t readily obvious, primarily due to the amount of collateral spattering, but if you looked hard enough, you could see it. On top of that, they looked as though they formed some kind of pattern.
Felicity cocked her head to the side and concentrated on the area I indicated. Finally, she leaned in at the threshold and peered through the viewfinder of the camera. That didn’t surprise me, as the lens always seemed to act as an amplifier for her. It was a focal point of sorts and one that often caused her to transcend the physical, allowing second-sight to take hold. And, through it she could see things even I could not.
After a moment she snapped a series of pictures then turned back to me. “I think they’re shallow cuts. Like from a razor.”
“Like maybe he was tortured?”
“Maybe.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. They aren’t very deep. In fact, there are several of them that are almost completely superficial. They don’t even look as though they actually bled. But, there might be a pattern there. I’m not sure.”
“Bizarre,” I mumbled.
“Aye, that’s for sure. Either way, the medical examiner will be able to get better pics once he’s cleaned up.”
Whether it was an effect of the flash, prolonged staring, or just luck, I couldn’t say. At any rate the equation suddenly changed. It wasn’t solved, but there was definitely a new value to assign to one of the variables. Of course, new values sometimes do nothing more than beget new unknowns, and that didn’t always make solving the equation any easier.
I kept telling myself that we were just here to take the crime scene photos, but in the back of my head I knew better. There was a reason for the flu epidemic and rash of no-answers from the other photographers on the list. I might not be having one of my customary headaches or visions just yet, but they were probably just around the corner. There was something ethereal at work here, and it had brought us to this particular scene for a purpose; of that I had no doubt.
I could feel the muscles in the back of my neck tighten as my hair prickled upward. A tired bromide that I’d spouted to my wife only a few days before popped into my head, and I suddenly realized just how foretelling it had been.
The calm was over and a violent storm front was fast approaching. What’s more, Felicity and I were standing directly in its path.