Killing Floor

I thought about it. I’d walked right by there at eight o’clock on Friday morning. Right between the two bodies.

“And you figure he was called Sherman?” I said.

“His name was on his watch,” Finlay said.

“Might not have been his watch,” I said. “The guy could have stolen it. Could have inherited it, bought it from a pawnshop, found it in the street.”

Finlay just grunted again. We must have been more than ten miles south of Margrave. Roscoe was keeping up a fast pace down the old county road. Then she slowed and slid down a left fork which led straight to the distant horizon.

“Where the hell are we going?” I said.

“County hospital,” Finlay said. “Down in Yellow Springs. Next-but-one town to the south. Not long now.”

We drove on. Yellow Springs became a smudge in the heat haze on the horizon. Just inside the town limit was the county hospital, standing more or less on its own. Put there back when diseases were infectious and sick people were isolated. It was a big hospital, a warren of wide low buildings sprawled over a couple of acres. Roscoe slowed and swung into the entrance lane. We wallowed over speed bumps and threaded our way around to a spread of buildings clustered on their own in back. The mortuary was a long shed with a big roll-up door standing open. We stopped well clear of the door and left the car in the yard. We looked at each other and went in.

A MEDICAL GUY MET US AND LED US INTO AN OFFICE. HE sat behind a metal desk and waved Finlay and Roscoe to some stools. I leaned on a counter, between a computer terminal and a fax machine. This was not a big-budget facility. It had been cheaply equipped some years ago. Everything was worn and chipped and untidy. Very different from the station house up at Margrave. The guy at the desk looked tired. Not old, not young, maybe Finlay’s sort of age. White coat. He looked like the type of guy whose judgment you wouldn’t worry about too much. He didn’t introduce himself. Just took it for granted we all knew who he was and what he was for.

“What can I tell you folks?” he said.

He looked at all three of us in turn. Waited. We looked back.

“Was it the same incident?” Finlay asked. His deep Harvard tones sounded out of place in the shabby office. The medical guy shrugged at him.

“I’ve only had the second corpse for an hour,” he said. “But, yes, I would say it’s the same incident. It’s almost certainly the same weapon. Looks like small-caliber soft-nose bullets in both cases. The bullets were slow, looks like the gun had a silencer.”

“Small caliber?” I said. “How small?”

The doctor swiveled his tired gaze my way.

“I’m not a firearms expert,” he said. “But I’d vote for a twenty-two. Looks that small to me. I’d say we’re looking at soft-nose twenty-two-gauge shells. Take the first guy’s head, for example. Two small splintery entry wounds and two big messy exit wounds, characteristic of a small soft-nose bullet.”

I nodded. That’s what a soft-nose bullet does. It goes in and flattens out as it does so. Becomes a blob of lead about the size of a quarter tumbling through whatever tissue it meets. Rips a great big exit hole for itself. And a nice slow soft-nose.22 makes sense with a silencer. No point using a silencer except with a subsonic muzzle velocity. Otherwise the bullet is making its own sonic boom all the way to the target, like a tiny fighter plane.

“OK,” I said. “Were they killed up there where they were found?”

“No doubt about it,” the guy said. “Hypostasis is clear in both corpses.”

He looked at me. Wanted me to ask him what hypostasis was. I knew what it was, but I felt polite. So I looked puzzled for him.

“Postmortem hypostasis,” he said. “Lividity. When you die, your circulation stops, right? Heart isn’t beating anymore. Your blood obeys the law of gravity. It settles to the bottom of your body, into the lowest available vessels, usually into the tiny capillaries in the skin next to the floor or whatever you’ve fallen down onto. The red cells settle first. They stain the skin red. Then they clot, so the stain is fixed, like a photograph. After a few hours, the stains are permanent. The stains on the first guy are entirely consistent with his position on the warehouse forecourt. He was shot, he fell down dead, he was kicked around in some sort of mad frenzy for a few minutes, then he lay there for around eight hours. No doubt about it.”

“What do you make of the kicking?” Finlay asked him.

The doctor shook his head and shrugged.

“Never seen anything like it,” he said. “I’ve read about it in the journals, time to time. Some kind of a psychopathic thing, obviously. No way to explain it. It didn’t make any difference to the dead guy. Didn’t hurt him, because he was dead. So it must have gratified the kicker somehow. Unbelievable fury, tremendous strength. The injuries are grievous.”

“What about the second guy?” Finlay asked.

“He ran for it,” the doctor said. “He was hit close up in the back with the first shot, but it didn’t drop him, and he ran. He took two more on the way. One in the neck, and the fatal shot in the thigh. Blew away his femoral artery. He made it as far as the raised-up section of highway, then lay down and bled to death. No doubt about that. If it hadn’t rained all night Thursday, I’m sure you’d have seen the trail of blood on the road. There must have been about a gallon and a half lying about somewhere, because it sure as hell isn’t inside the guy anymore.”

We all fell quiet. I was thinking about the second guy’s desperate sprint across the road. Trying to reach cover while the bullets smashed into his flesh. Hurling himself under the highway ramp and dying amid the quiet scuffling of the small night animals.

“OK,” Finlay said. “So we’re safe to assume the two victims were together. The shooter is in a group of three, he surprises them, shoots the first guy in the head twice, mean-while the second guy takes off and gets hit by three shots as he runs, right?”

“You’re assuming there were three assailants?” the doctor said.

Finlay nodded across to me. It was my theory, so I got to explain it.

“Three separate personality characteristics,” I said. “A competent shooter, a frenzied maniac, and an incompetent concealer.”

The doctor nodded slowly.

“I’ll buy that,” he said. “The first guy was hit at point-blank range, so maybe we should assume he knew the assailants and allowed them to get next to him?”

Finlay nodded.

“Had to be that way,” he said. “Five guys meeting together. Three of them attack the other two. This is some kind of a big deal, right?”

“Do we know who the assailants were?” the doctor asked.

“We don’t even know who the victims were,” Roscoe said.

“Got any theories on the victims?” Finlay asked the doctor.

“Not on the second guy, apart from the name on his watch,” the doctor said. “I only just got him on the table an hour ago.”

“So you got theories on the first guy?” Finlay said.

The doctor started shuffling some notes on his desk, but his telephone rang. He answered it and then held it out to Finlay.

“For you,” he said. Finlay crouched forward on his stool and took the call. Listened for a moment.

“OK,” he said into the phone. “Just print it out and fax it to us here, will you?”

Then he passed the phone back to the doctor and rocked back on his stool. He had the begi

“That was Stevenson, up at the station house,” he said. “We finally got a match on the first guy’s prints. Seems like we did the right thing to run them again. Stevenson’s faxing it through to us here in a minute, so tell us what you got, doc, and we’ll put it all together.”

The tired guy in the white coat shrugged and picked up a sheet of paper.

“The first guy?” he said. “I haven’t got much at all. The body was in a hell of a mess. He was tall, he was fit, he had a shaved head. The main thing is the dental work. Looks like the guy got his teeth fixed all over the place. Some of it is American, some of it looks American, some of it is foreign.”