Festive in Death (In Death #39)(15)

Eve wondered if those who spent their days and nights working in its warrens even noticed.

She passed Vending’s bright and colorful lights, felt a low-level craving for more caffeine, nodded to one of the crew pushing a body bag on a gurney.

Not all the dead were hers, she thought, but in an odd way, they all belonged to Morris.

She found the chief medical examiner standing over her dead, a clear protective cape over Morris’s sharply elegant suit of forest green.

Two more bodies waited on steel slabs.

“You’ve got a backup,” she commented.

“Holidays. Some deck the halls, others opt to haunt them. An apparent suicide pact, but we’ll see.” He lowered his microgoggles, smiled. “A long day for you already. Can we offer you some refreshment? I have orange fizzies in the friggie.”

Peabody brightened. “Yeah?”

“I know my cops. Pepsi’s cold, Dallas.”

“Thanks. You look . . . cheerful.”

“I had a couple of days off, visited some old friends. It was good for me.”

“Nice.” And it was good to see him wearing color again, looking relaxed. In the months since he’d lost the woman he loved, the grief and strain had weighed visibly on him.

She cracked the tube Peabody brought her, took a swig of cold caffeine. “So. Ziegler, Trey. He won’t be decking any halls, either.”

“Blunt force trauma, tried and true.”

“Personal trainer of the year trophy.”

“Ah, the irony. Your vic was rather fiercely fit. Exceptional muscle tone, low body fat, no signs whatsoever he paid for body work. And I must say his skin’s wonderfully taut and smooth.”

“He loved himself, a lot.”

“He had a bunch of high-end products,” Peabody added. “Hair, body, skin. Some of it wasn’t even opened yet.” Her wistful sigh earned a hard stare from Eve. “It just seems like a waste, that’s all.”

“And it doesn’t seem ghoulish to covet a dead guy’s face gunk? Face-to-face, the first blow?” Eve asked Morris.

“Yes. Striking here, on the left forehead, and the second on the back of the skull.”

He turned to his screen, brought up the view of the second wound, now cleaned. “While the first blow would have incapacitated—severe concussion, considerable bleeding, leaving the jagged gash you see here, the second, a down-blow of considerable force, fractured the skull, driving bone fragments into the brain. Death within minutes. The trophy had some weight, I’d say.”

“Yeah, it’s hefty. A good six, seven pounds. About eighteen inches high.”

“We’ll just add that in.” He turned to his comp, keyed in some data.

“It had a figure on top,” Peabody added. “Ripped body.” She held out her arms, flexed.

“Of course,” Morris murmured, his exotic eyes amused as he added more data. “From the angles, the depth of the head wounds, the attack would have gone—probability ninety-six-point-eight percent—like this.”

On screen two figures faced. One gripped the trophy in both hands swung right to left, striking the other figure on the temple. Ziegler’s figure staggered back, then pitched forward. As it fell, the attacker swung again—now left to right—striking the back of the skull.

“Double-handed blows.”

“Considering the weight of the weapon, and the angles, the force, that’s my conclusion. Like swinging for the fences on the first, then rounding back, striking down—almost a chop—for the second.”

“Ziegler was six-one. You have the killer about the same height.”

“Yes, from the angles, near to the same. An inch or two either way, but I wouldn’t say more. And I’d also conclude the killer had excellent upper-body strength. These were not glancing blows.”

“Yeah, I get that. Then you’ve got a hundred-eighty pounds of dead weight—all muscle—to haul off the floor and onto the bed.”

“Our killer isn’t a ninety-pound weakling. An old cliché,” Morris said at Eve’s blank look. “As for the knife wound, the vic was dead before that was inflicted—and still there was considerable force used, enough to break the tip of the knife.” He gestured to a small sample bowl, and the tiny piece of metal it held.

“Somebody was really pissed off,” Eve acknowledged. “Did the vic have sex before death?”

“I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t like to, but I can’t tell you. He’d showered or bathed—and thoroughly. He sports what’s called a Continental.”

Eve looked down at the razor thin, sharply edged zigzag of hair at the crotch. “Yeah, I noticed that. Weird.”

“But tidy. His genitals and what pubic hair he has were thoroughly washed and groomed. He died clean. He’d consumed about eight ounces of red wine less than an hour prior to death, a field green salad and an energy drink about two hours prior.”

“He had a little bag of dried leaves in his suitcase. Looked and smelled like tea to me, but . . .”

“The tox isn’t back yet—they’re backed up as usual—but from the condition of his body, his organs, I’d doubt he had any habitual illegals use. I see no signs he took any sort of drugs on a regular basis. This was a very healthy man in peak physical condition.”