Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(58)

We went back down the stairs. There were two closed doors at this end of the hallway. Rachel opened these with her sleeve-covered hand. The first was to a laundry room. Nothing there. The second was to the garage, and that’s where we found Hammond’s lab.

And where we found Hammond hanging from a noose fashioned from an orange industrial power cord.

“Shit,” I said.

“Don’t touch anything,” Rachel said.

“Hands in pockets. I got that.”

“Good.”

But I pulled one of my hands out of its pocket with my cell phone. I pulled up the keyboard and tapped in 9-1-1.

“What are you doing?” Rachel asked.

“Calling it in,” I said.

“No, not yet.”

“What do you mean? We need to call the police.”

“Just hold your horses for a minute. Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

“We got a dead guy hanging from the crossbeam.”

“I know, I know.”

She offered nothing else as she moved in closer to the body. There was a wooden chair kicked over on its side below the body, which I assumed was that of Marshall Hammond.

The body was suspended completely motionless in front of Rachel.

“Record this,” she said.

I moved from the phone app on my cell to the camera app and started a recording.

“Recording,” I said. “Go.”

She circled completely around the body once before speaking.

“I’m assuming the car out front is his,” she said. “So we are to assume that he went somewhere, came home, and then just came in here and threw that extension cord over the beam.”

The garage had an open ceiling where there was some cross-planking for storage up above. The center support beam had been used as Hammond’s gallows.

The body was suspended about two feet above the concrete floor of the garage lab. Rachel continued to slowly move around it without touching it.

“No damage to the fingernails,” she said.

“Why would there be?” I asked.

“Second thoughts. Often people change their mind at the last second and claw at the noose. They break their fingernails.”

“Got it. I think I knew that.”

“But there is slight chafing on both wrists. I think he was bound either at the time of death or shortly before.”

She looked around and saw a cardboard dispenser that held rubber gloves, most likely used by Hammond during DNA processing. She put on one glove and then used that hand to right the chair that had been knocked over during the hanging. She stepped up onto it so she could get a closer view of the noose and the dead man’s neck. She studied it for a long moment before telling me to put on gloves from the dispenser.

“Uh, why?”

“Because I want you to steady the chair.”

“Why?”

“Just do it, Jack.”

I put my phone down on a table, then put on the gloves. I came back to the chair and held it steady as Rachel stepped up onto the armrests so she could get a downward view of the noose and the knot behind the dead man’s head.

“This doesn’t work,” she said.

“You want me to look around for a ladder?” I asked.

“No, I’m not talking about that. I think his neck is broken and that doesn’t really work.”

“What do you mean doesn’t work? I thought that’s what happens when you hang yourself.”

“No, not often with suicide by hanging.”

She put her ungloved hand on the top of my head to steady herself as she climbed off the arms of the chair. She stepped down off the chair, turned it on its side, and positioned it as it had been when we entered the garage.

“You need a big drop to break the neck. Most hanging suicides basically die from strangulation. It was the execution hangings back in the day where you’d get the broken neck. Because you drop through a trap door, fall ten or fifteen feet, and then the impact snaps the neck, causing instant death. You ever heard that phrase Build my gallows high? I think it was a book or a movie or something. Whoever said that wanted to get it over with quick.”

I raised my hand, pointing at the dead man.

“Okay, then how did he get a broken neck?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I think he was dead first and then hung up like that to make it look like a suicide.”

“So somebody broke his neck and then hoisted …”

It hit me then: Somebody broke his neck just like the four AOD victims.

“Oh, man,” I said. “What is going on here?”

“I don’t know but there has to be something in this lab that helps explain things. Look around. We have to hurry.”

We searched but found nothing. There was a desktop computer but it was thumbprint protected. There were no hard files or lab books. Two whiteboards mounted on the walls had been erased. It became pretty clear that whoever had hung Hammond from the rafters—if the dead man was Hammond—had made sure that whatever the lab tech was doing with the female DNA he bought from Orange Nano was wiped clean as well.

There was a refrigerator that had racks of test tubes presumably holding DNA samples. I pulled one tube out of its slot and read the printing on the tape over the rubber seal at the top.