BLUE BLOOD RUNS COLD (A Michael Ross Novel Book 1) (5 page)

              When he drove down the first road in the college, there were no signs pointing the way towards the crime scene. At first, he saw nothing to indicate that a crime had been committed. He came to a stop sign at a three-way intersection and took a left. He passed a large building on his right with a solar energy collector placed out front. He drove slow, trying to get a feel for his surroundings. Though he had not yet found the scene of the crime, he knew that the atmosphere of the university would be an important factor in determining why a man had been murdered.

              He saw on his left-hand side a profusion of yellow tape run about and a group of people gathering around something he could not see, presumably a body. He found a small parking lot on his right, and parked his car there, not caring if it was the right place or not. He got out, feeling the cold air bite against his skin more than it had outside his home. He opened up the trunk of his car and pulled a black woolen cap out of a plastic grocery bag. He put it as far down on his head as he could, covering up the tips of his ears and his eyebrows.

              He felt, not for the first time, that carrying a Glock to a crime scene where police officers gathered was overkill. He was required to wear his service weapon whenever he was on duty, for he never knew what might happen. The reality he had discovered proved very different from the perception that many officers had. He knew officers who saw threats in every shadow. For them, no weapon was big enough, effective enough, or deadly enough to assuage their fears. He told them, when he could get anyone to listen, that a kind word went farther than a drawn weapon and a warning.

              He walked up six steps to the crime scene. He saw a man he recognized, a middle-aged man with grizzled gray hair and glasses with wide frames. Chief Richard Metzger, the man in charge of the borough police, stood with his hands in pockets, a deep frown giving away his frustrated desire to have a cigarette. Though the Cumberland County police force had phased out cigarette smoking as much as they could over the last ten years, Chief Metzger hung on with a stubborn will, as he did with everything.

              The man said, “Detective Ross, glad you could come on such short notice. I trust you aren't terribly inconvenienced?”

              Michael wanted to answer that he had four other outstanding cases he was working on, but he knew what the chief would say in response. The death of a fellow officer, even one who worked on a college campus, always took top priority over every other investigation. He said instead, “I wasn't doing anything today. Might as well come in for the overtime.”

              “Right, New Zealand. Hope you don't burn out, that's all I'm gonna say.”

              Michael did not respond. Working for weeks on end always had people telling him that he should take more time off. Yet, when he took time off, someone wanted him back on the job. There was nothing to do but take such comments in stride, accept them in the helpful way they were presented.

              He said, “Thanks for your concern. As long as I get enough sleep, I'm all right. What have you got for me?”

              “Campus cop shot dead sometime in the night. Kevin Bailey, thirty-six years old, white male, six-foot-three, 252 pounds. Shot six times in the chest, all in a circle, like the shooter was using him for target practice. We know the shooter has to be an expert. That might or might not help us much.”

              “Why is that? Surely not many people on a sleepy campus like this one know how to fire a gun with that much accuracy.”

              “Hey, you'd be surprised. Some teachers, they got black belts. You'd never even know it. Some teachers, old war vets, keep up with their practice on weekends with their buddies in the woods. Sometimes students, too. This campus wasn't so sleepy yesterday.”

              Metzger waited for a moment, then continued, “A girl died in her dorm room yesterday morning, around 7 a.m. The roof collapsed from heavy snow. Well, apparently that was the last straw for the students here. A group of them went to complain to the bigwigs at Old Main—that's the administration building. One of them, a young girl named Shannon Moore, got a dislocated shoulder, four cracked ribs, and a face full of pepper spray for her trouble.”

              “What did she do?”

              “Shouted swear words at the university president, it seems. Some of the other students threw snowballs. This cop here, the dead guy on the ground, took Miss Moore down. Then he turns up dead the next morning.”

              “So, what? Are we thinking this girl Moore is the primary suspect? With a dislocated shoulder and who knows what side effects from the pepper spray? Was she taken to the hospital? Does she have an alibi?”

              “I haven't dug down that far yet. There's no one here but us and one member of the library staff. All the administrators are gone home for the weekend. It's going to be the devil itself to get them back here. Fortunately, that's your job, not mine. Your primary task will be to track all these people down by Monday. Most of them have profiles up on the university's website.”

              Michael thought of a picture of himself and Billy on the Cumberland County Sheriff Office's website. The website did not list any names of its officers other than a few support staff who agreed to have their name posted. Michael had opted not to do that. He had a made a point of keeping himself off the Internet as much as possible. He had once seen a young girl doing Internet searches on his name while he questioned the girl's parents. She had done it on an old desktop computer with a large hard drive and larger screen. Ever since then, he tried to avoid the press, giving interviews, posting blogs, or writing articles. As long as he remained a detective, he wanted nothing to do with the Internet.

              He said, “All right, work the phones. I got it. I'll keep watch over the scene until Billy arrives.”

              As soon as he said that, Michael saw the bulky form of William McGee striding down the long pathway that led from university's playhouse to the library. When he arrived, he huffed out steamy breaths. He said, “Good, Michael, you're already here.” He nodded his head towards Metzger. “Chief.”

              Chief Metzger put his hands in his jacket pockets, then said, “Well, I'll leave you two gentlemen to it. Try not to get in a pissing match with the officers on campus here, would you?”

3

              Though there wasn't much for the evidence technicians to do, they recorded with great care every fact that they could about the murder scene. They recorded that the temperature in the morning was twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, that no shell casings had been found at the scene, that no bullets had passed through the decedent's body, that he had been left lying in a pool of frozen blood. They recorded that the man had been in uniform when he died. Though he had been carrying pepper spray, a Taser, and a gun, he had utilized none of these. They photographed the ring on the ring finger of his left hand, which read Erie University. The officer had a wallet on his person, though the wallet had not been stolen. In fact, when the first technician on the scene tried to pull the decedent's wallet out of his pants pocket, the wallet came out only with great difficulty, for his pockets were small, his legs muscular. He did not carry a flashlight in either hand, even though he had been walking around in the dark. He did not even have a flashlight on his person, though an empty slot in the side of his utility belt was just the right size for a flashlight. That, Michael concluded, was the most important discovery the team had made. Whoever owned an extra policeman's flashlight would be the prime suspect for the killing. The killer might think to wipe down the flashlight itself, but he might not think to wipe down the batteries inside.

              Officer Kevin Bailey was also possessed of a keyring which had various keys on it. When Michael handled it himself, turning it over in his gloved hands, he observed at least one key that was old, a sentimental keepsake rather than a possession of necessity. The key was for an International vehicle, though whether it was for the old pickup trucks the company used to make or an old tractor trailer, he could not say. He only knew from personal experience that the company no longer made keys with the letters
IN
on them; instead, a single
I
was engraved on each factory key. He didn't think that to be a major part of the case, but he made a note of it anyway. Sometimes cases broke open from the smallest of details, the most inconsequential of facts.

              Going through the man's wallet felt, at first, like an invasion of privacy. Then Michael remembered the murder always forced officers to strip away the privacy of anyone even remotely involved. He felt as though he should be asking permission from someone, but there was no one to ask. Kevin Bailey was beyond such concerns as who might be looking through his credit and membership cards.

              He found three library cards: one to Cumberland County, one to Dauphin County, and one to the state library in Harrisburg. He made a note of that, too. He had always found it unusual for a person to hold more than one county library card at once. Any materials not available in Cumberland County could be requested through an interlibrary loan. There was no need to have more than one library card unless he traveled regularly. Working as he did at the southernmost end of Cumberland County, he would have to drive the better part of an hour just to get to a Dauphin County library location. If his schedule was that of a normal police officer, he would have found it difficult to go from county to county. He did not, for a reason Michael could not determine, have a Franklin County library card. This would have made more sense to him, since Franklin County was closer to Shippensburg than Dauphin County was. The state library card, which allowed him access to a location in Harrisburg that was only open three out of every seven days, was for the moment a mystery.

              Additionally, Kevin had possessed a PayPal card, two bank debit cards, four shopper's club cards for local grocery stores, sixty-six dollars, a laminated license to drive powered industrial trucks—among which were forklifts and other machines Michael had never heard of—and a wrinkled, slightly faded business card for St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Shippensburg. Michael knew of the church, though he had never been there. Partly because he could not remember the last time he'd had a Sunday off. He found more solace in religion through contemplation rather than instruction anyway, and so he hadn't set foot inside a church for nine years. The last time had been for his marriage; seven years after that, he had stepped inside a lawyer's office seeking advice on how to file for divorce.

              He put all the cards back in the wallet, and put the wallet in a ziplock bag. He handed it over to one of the technicians who offered him a clipboard. He put down his initials, indicating that he had handled that piece of evidence.

              Michael spent several minutes surveying the scene, trying to get a sense of his surroundings. He watched as his breath plumed out in front of him. He smelled a faint odor of manure in the air. He saw farms on two sides of the campus. A distance away, beyond a baseball field, white cows with splotches of black roamed about in the cold. He tried to put a picture together of what Shippensburg might feel like: a conservative area, somewhat stuck in the past, with forward-thinking undergraduates and Amish citizens. The two sides of the camp, conservative and progressive, must have clashed on more than one occasion, he thought. He made a note of that, too. It might be worth his time to see how many students came from local families who lived close to nature. Perhaps some of them had gone hunting.

              Billy tapped him on the shoulder, bringing him back to reality. The other man said, “Hey Mikey, you got a feel for the crime scene? Got everything you wanted? The coroner's been here for a while, waiting to move the body. He's getting all antsy.”

              Michael turned around to see the short, diminutive man standing outside, his jacket pulled up above his mouth, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. Josiah Hostein, who liked to be called Joe but wasn't, had been a fixture at all the homicide investigations Michael had taken part in. Officially, Joe belonged to the Cumberland County Sheriff's Office; unofficially, Joe roamed around the county, weighing in on every case where even the smallest doubt of foul play existed. On that morning, his short, uncombed hair blew sideways in the breeze while he tapped his foot on the ground with impatience. He stood in front of a gurney upon which lay a black body bag. As was usually the case, the coroner came without an assistant. There were too many deaths in Cumberland County; the county's resources were spread thin, even on a Saturday.

              Michael called out, “Hey, sorry for the wait! Good to go now.”

              The coroner pushed the cart forward, a scowl coming over his face. As Joe approached the body, he said to the detectives, “About time. What were you doing, just standing there, staring off into space? Did you receive telepathic messages from the great beyond, hmm?”

              Michael said, “Come on, Josie, you know how I work. You never know what the human mind can come up with until you take it into a place where it's not used to going.”

              The coroner grunted. He said, “Help me with the body, please. I have to deliver it to the freezer, which is probably warmer than it is out here.”