Death Order

Excerpt from Death Order:

Crime Scene had beaten me to the location, and I caught one of the flashes of their cameras reflecting off the white walls after I slipped on the shoe coverings and crossed the threshold.

“Careful,” Officer Lipton said, pointing to the blood smear on the linoleum floor. “They’ve already taken plenty of pictures since it’s hard to step around it, but I don’t want you to slip or anything.”

I eyed him. Did he think this was my first pool of blood? “Thanks, I’ll be careful.”

The stains moved to the beige carpet about five feet beyond the first pool. If they’d carried on straight, they would have entered the living room, but instead, they took a sharp right into the kitchen. A mixture of droplets and streaks decorated the dingy floor, and when I looked up, I noticed a fair amount of spatter on the low popcorn ceiling.

The state of the kitchen, all in all, wasn’t a pretty one. It could have used a good scrubbing before the murder, and the dried blood didn’t do it any favors. Whoever got stuck with the decedent’s belongings would be finding hidden blood spots in the nooks and crannies of them for years.

The spatter stopped at the far edge of the kitchen, where a doorway on the left created a loop between the entry hall, living room, and kitchen. The blood smears continued onto the shag carpet, but the spatter did not. The real violence took place in the kitchen, then.

Once I stepped around the bulk of the blood and got my first look into the living room, it became apparent why Sergeant Popov had called this a weird one.

The victim lay splayed on his back, arms spread wide, empty eyes still open, ankles bound. White briefs that had seen better days were the only clothing he had on.

A crime scene technician stood below the man’s feet, snapping pictures.

“You capture the footprints in the kitchen?” I asked.

The camera remained pressed to his face. “I did. And before everyone started stomping through.”

Footprints were only sometimes helpful, and the ones I’d seen weren’t from shoes, but socks, judging by the spongy pattern and lack of tread. Whoever did this had done it in sock feet. I filed that away and then returned to the body on the floor.

The deceased man appeared to be mid- to late fifties. Caucasian, clean-shaven, with male pattern baldness winning the battle for his crown. His large belly spilled over to each side of him like it was melting.

Though he was naked from the waist up, with all the blood, not much of his pale skin below the neck was visible. I pulled the collar of my shirt up over my mouth and nose and leaned over him to get a closer look at his torso. No exit points of a bullet, but there were a few stab wounds visible on his right side.

“Downstairs neighbors heard what they thought was yelling and thumping last night when they were already in bed,” Officer Lipton said. “Took until morning before the girlfriend convinced the boyfriend to go check on things. When nobody answered, they called it in.”

I nodded. “You get their statements?”

“Yes, detective.”

“Great. Send it my way. I’ll probably want to talk to them again before long. Who was the responding officer?”

“I was, ma’am.”

“And when you got here, was the door locked?”

“No. Door was unlocked already.”

“And this debris”—I motioned to the circle of junk that had been cleared around the body, all but the few objects that had been left near him—“was that laundry and the trash pushed away from him like that when you got here?”

“Yes, ma’am. I did my best to preserve the scene.”

I circled the corpse until I stood at his feet, staring up at him. His arms out, ankles bound, head tilted slightly toward his right shoulder—the Christian imagery was impossible to miss. “Do we have an ID on him?”

“Property manager says this unit was rented to Clive Skutnik. That’s spelled like Sputnik, but with a K instead of P. He’s out of town, but I had him describe Skutnik, and it matched up.”

“No reason yet to believe this isn’t him.” I turned my attention to the objects placed around the body. His apartment was a mess—a bachelor-with-depression sort of situation. Not hoarding, but filthy. But around the body, the floor had been cleared, almost like the suspect had created a canvas for himself.

Whoever had done this had my attention, that was for sure.