Firebreak (Josie Gray Mysteries #4)(33)
They stood outside for a water break, sweaty from the exertion and nauseated from the stench.
“You took prints in the bedroom the day of the fire?” Josie asked.
He wiped his hands on a cloth and tried to rub the black soot off of his skin. “I did. Everything’s logged.”
“I was thinking about Billy’s question. What was the first thing he asked after he found out about the body?”
“Remind me.”
“He asked whether the victim was male or female.”
Otto shrugged. “He wants to know who the victim is.”
“But we already told him we don’t know who it is. And if Billy didn’t have any idea who was lying on his couch, then why would he care if the body was male or female?”
“He’s wondering if the body belongs to someone he knows after all. Maybe there’s a woman he’s seeing on the side?”
Josie nodded. “Let’s check the bedroom and bath again. Maybe it was a crime of passion. Maybe that’s where it started, and ended up with a dead body, and a married couple seven hours away in Austin.”
Otto walked into the master bathroom to search the cabinets and countertops for something more telling than what his original search had turned up. Josie stood in the bedroom, observing the space as a place of intimacy, shared by a married couple. The room was painted white with a few department-store framed paintings of flower arrangements in vases. The furniture was a matching set from one of the discount chains. There was nothing ornate or original to distinguish it from a hundred other bedrooms. Josie figured it fit Brenda’s sensibilities. Her focus seemed to be on Billy and his career, not material possessions or fostering a homey place to live.
The alarm clock was located on the right side of the bed, closest to the bathroom. Josie figured this was Brenda’s side. She couldn’t imagine Brenda allowing Billy to set the alarm. Next to the clock were a box of tissues and a hardback novel by C. J. Box. A small pad of sticky notes and a pen lay underneath the table lamp. Josie picked up the pad and found several notes Brenda had apparently jotted down to herself.
The first note said, “Call L. Lester follow-up recording.”
Underneath that she found another note with what appeared to be a phone number. She jotted the number down in her steno pad to call later from a restricted phone line that would protect her identity.
A drawer underneath the tabletop revealed a pile of jewelry pitched haphazardly into a glass bowl and a pile of odds and ends from earrings to lip balm and pens and pencils. Underneath the drawer was a pile of paperback mysteries and romance novels. Nothing of consequence. No photos or letters.
Billy’s side of the bed held mementos, from a CD case signed by Willie Nelson to several concert tickets signed by people Josie didn’t recognize. She found a pile of coasters from assorted restaurants. She flipped over one coaster with SAMUEL ADAMS BOSTON LAGER on the front, and on the back saw the scrawled message “Love you man.” None of the other coasters bore any writing.
After an hour of digging turned up little of consequence, they gave up the search. They were walking back down the hallway when Josie’s eye settled on a tiny brightly colored piece of paper lying on top of the edge of the baseboard. She asked Otto for a plastic bag and tweezers from the evidence kit he was carrying. He went back into the bedroom and opened up the case on the bed. The hallway and bedrooms hadn’t been burned, but the fire in the living room had left a thick coating on the tiled floor and the hallway. Since the bedroom door had been closed, the ashfall there wasn’t nearly as heavy.
Otto handed Josie the supplies, and she bent down and retrieved the piece of paper. She stood, pressing the tweezers tightly between her fingertips, holding the tiny piece of paper out for Otto to look at, a wide smile on her face. “Recognize this?”
He studied it for a moment and then laughed. “I think we have ourselves a murder investigation.”
TWELVE
Josie and Otto spent a half hour sifting through the ash on the Nixes’ hallway floor with small soft brushes, looking for more of the confetti-like pieces of paper, and plotting them on a diagram to determine the starting and stopping points of their trajectory. The brightly colored pieces of paper were ejected from a certain model Zaner stun gun when fired. Each piece of paper carried a set of numbers that a law enforcement agency could use to track down owner registration for the gun. They found several dozen pieces, which made it clear they weren’t left there from a prior use. The gun had no doubt been used to stun the victim before killing him: a brutal, premeditated murder.
On the drive back to the office Josie received a call from the coroner.
“What do you have for us?” she asked.
“It’s clear the man didn’t die of asphyxiation. There was no smoke damage to his lungs. He was dead before the fire burned him.”
“Any idea yet what caused his death?”
“I’m not finding any blunt-force trauma. My gut feeling is an overdose, but I can’t say. I was able to pull enough blood for toxicology, but that could be two weeks or longer.”
“But what about his arms pulling up to his face? You called it the boxer’s pose. If he overdosed that wouldn’t have happened, would it?” she asked.
“Think of it as shrink wrap. When you apply heat to shrink wrap it shrinks up. When intense heat is present, or the soft tissue burns, it causes the muscles to contract and pull in. The victim could have died of an overdose while lying on the couch. As long as rigor mortis hadn’t set in, his muscles would have contracted when the fire started.”