False Witness (John Steel series Book 3) (5 page)

“Because that gives us a time line,” McCall answered. “We find out when it got loud and work from there.” Her eyes suddenly caught the full view of Tooms talking to Becky Carlson and she stopped speaking. Her eyes transfixed on the sight of the two people talking, memories came flooding back of when she had been told of her own father’s shooting. McCall had been no more than eighteen when it had happened. He had been a homicide detective responding to a shooting in a hotel room.

The whole thing had been a set-up to stop one of his ongoing investigations. A sniper’s bullet took him from her and her mom much too soon.

“You okay?” McCall shook herself back to reality at Steel’s question. She nodded and smiled at him, then set off towards the corridor.

She stopped and looked left towards what appeared to be the bathroom. She looked right then smiled and started to walk past the kitchen towards the sitting room and Tina, the Medical Examiner, who was crouched over the body.

“Morning, Tina, so what we got?”

Tina Franks ME, didn’t turn, she just merely raised a gloved hand and waved. “Good morning, Sam. Well, we have a strange one here, that’s for sure.”

McCall gave a confused look as she came closer. The body was not visible to her and Tony at first until they had walked past the armchair and the orderlies, who were busy taking snapshots of the corpse.

The detectives’ faces contorted into a look of disgust as they got the full view.

“Did someone sew his mouth and nose shut?” asked Tony, struggling not to stare at the dead man’s horrified face.

Tina nodded and, using a pen, pointed out the stitching.

“I have no idea what was used to sew him up,” Tina answered. “What I don’t get is why didn’t he move or try to rip it out or something? For heaven’s sake, why did he just lie there while they did it?”

The woman detective took some photographs while Steel knelt in front of the man’s face and stared.

Everyone looked at Steel’s poker-faced reaction, his cold stare, as if he was looking into the empty shell of what had once been a life.

“Something you want to share with the class?” McCall asked. Her heart skipped a beat, almost in fear of what he was going to come out with.

“Doctor, whatever you do don’t remove the stitching until we get to the morgue if you please,” John Steel said to the attractive African-American ME. Tina nodded slowly, terrified at the thought of why he’d asked such a thing.

“Sure, but, uhm, why exactly?” she asked him.

Steel moved his head up to look at her, his eyes hidden behind his dark sunglasses.

“Because if I am right I have seen this before, and believe me you don’t want to undo those stitches.”

Tina stood up, almost shaking with fear at his revelation.

“Is that what killed him, do you think? Did he suffocate?” Steel asked her.

Tina shook her head. “I will know more once I get him back but I am pretty sure it wasn’t suffocation. There’s no haemorrhaging round the eyes or blueness round the lips. No, our boy was killed by something else.”

McCall took a close-up shot of the man’s face before the orderlies began to place the body into the body bag. She turned and looked at the hallway and the bedroom, where the victim’s daughter Becky was talking to Tooms. “Okay, Tony, can you go and see this neighbour and get some details. Steel and I will go and talk to the girl.”

Tony nodded and headed off towards the front door, leaving McCall and Steel looking around the sitting room.

“I don’t think this guy has left his apartment in years, if at all,” John Steel assessed the situation. “So why would anyone want to kill him?”

McCall shook her head as she shut down her camera. “Who knows? Maybe there is no reason. Maybe he just wanted to kill and didn’t think Carlson would be found yet. People do strange things, you should know that.”

Steel shot her a sarcastic smile and watched her head off towards the bedroom.

Becky Carlson sat on her father’s bed—which appeared as if it had never been slept in.

She looked up as McCall and Steel entered the room and wiped her eyes with her hooded top’s sleeve. Tooms looked round at the pair and stood up, and McCall nodded to him and watched him head out of the door. McCall moved closer and gave the younger woman a friendly smile.

“Hi,” Sam began, “I am Detective Samantha McCall and this rather intense looking gentleman is Detective John Steel. We are here to find out what happened to your dad, okay?”

Becky nodded as another cascade of tears flowed.

Steel reached into his jacket pocket and handed her a cotton handkerchief, and Becky smiled and took it, her eyes transfixed on his almost chiselled looks. He didn’t look like a cop—more like some character from a comic or a graphic novel.

“Okay, Becky, why don’t you start us off?” McCall’s voice was soft and calming as it carried on the still air.

Becky closed her eyes and took in a lungful of air. “Since my mom and dad split up about nine years ago, I have been coming round to make sure he has been looked after.”

Tooms returned with a glass of water and handed it to the girl. She took a sip and smiled at him in gratitude.

“Every other day I come in before work.” Becky paused as though something had slipped into her thoughts. “I work at the diner just round the corner so it’s on the way.”

McCall smiled as though the girl had read her thoughts.

“So this morning Mr Edwards—he’s the guy next door—well he was waiting for me. He asked if I could talk to my dad about having the TV on too loud all night.”

Sam could see there was something troubling Becky as she spoke.

“I knew then something was wrong. You see, my dad had problems with his ears. He couldn’t stand loud noises. It would make him black out sometimes if something was too loud.”

The woman detective looked over to Steel, who just nodded as though he had had the same idea.

“Didn’t he have a job or anything?” she asked.

Becky shook her head and looked out into the hallway at all of the confusion. “No, he used to be a gym teacher at the local school but something happened and after that everything sort of fell apart.”

Steel looked down at the girl, his face full of questions. “What happened at the school, do you remember?”

Becky shook her head and wiped away another tear that was travelling down her cheek. “No, I was only little, but we used to live just a block away so it was easy for me to come down by myself.” The distraught young woman looked up at the strange detective in his black suit and dark sunglasses, thinking that there was something mysterious and dark about him.

“So he lived here all by himself. How was he paying for this place?” Steel’s voice rang with a soft but powerful British accent, which she found drew her closer to him.

“We had savings and, well, Mom married rich after that, some dentist guy, so she didn’t want anything to do with him or the money. Benefits helped as well, the doctors reckoned he had a bad anxiety about leaving home, so I would pick up his cheques and basically help to sort his life out.” She smiled and shook her head.

“It’s funny, I remember him when I was a little girl,” Becky went on. “He was this great powerful man who lived for adventure and the outdoors. He had made plans to go round the world.” She shook her head and looked out as the orderlies wheeled out her father’s body. “What the hell happened and why would anyone want to kill my dad?”

Steel hitched a ride
with McCall as she headed to the morgue to see Tina before her friend started to do the autopsy on Andy Carlson.

The 1966 Mustang was old but it drove as well as it did when it rolled off the production line. The car had been a present from Sam’s dad for her high school graduation, and after his death she felt closer to it. This was no longer just a car—it was all she had left of him, apart from the memories.

An awkward silence hung in the air as they drove down the busy streets. McCall could tell that there was something wrong with the often enigmatic guy, and there had been for at least a week. Normally Steel would be his normal charming, annoying self but these days he was withdrawn and distant.

“So what have you been working on?” she asked him. “We haven’t really seen you for a while.”

Steel said nothing at first, he just looked out of the window at the city as it blurred past. Slowly he turned towards her and smiled.

“Sorry, I picked up a case,” he told her. “I have been busy with that but it can wait.”

McCall shot him a quick puzzled look before turning her attention back to the road. “I don’t remember any cases coming over the desk.”

Steel turned back to the side window next to him. “No. It’s a favour for a friend. They asked me to look at something.”

Sam McCall wanted to dig deeper but she knew that was all she was going to get for now, but that would not be the end of it.

She felt hurt after everything they’d been through together that he was keeping this one close to his chest but then that was Steel: as secretive as ever, always with the armour, always in the shadows.

*

Dr Tina Franks sat patiently on one of the long stainless steel counters that McCall liked to perch on. Normally she would pay no heed to someone’s request to put her work on hold, but there was something in Steel’s voice, that suggested to her that it was serious.

Tina was tall with the figure of a playboy pin-up but rather than choose a career where looks mattered, she had chosen to study medicine. Her father was a former Marine, whose family came from Jamaica, who met Tina’s Brazilian mother when he was posted to Hawaii.

Unfortunately when she was a teenager, her mother had died right in front of her, and the terrible impotence she’d felt at not knowing how to help her had inspired her to become a doctor, so that she could save lives.

Tina’s dark skin contrasted with the colour of the blue scrubs, something which most men—including Steel—found attractive.

She looked up at the clock above the door and began to swing her crossed legs back and forth impatiently. Tina looked up as McCall and Steel burst through the double swing doors.

“Nice of you two to show up, I figured you weren’t coming!” she sneered playfully.

“Sorry we’re late,” McCall told her. “I had to wait for Mr Happy here.”

Tina tried to hide her smile by pursing her lips together.

“So, why is it I couldn’t start to cut up our vic, here?” Tina asked, jumping down from her ledge.

Steel walked round the body, bending down and paying special attention to the mouth area. “In my time I have seen let’s say
questionable
things that have been done to people to either get them to talk or just out of a twisted sense of fun.”

Tina and McCall gazed up at each other with an almost terrified look on their faces.

“Now one of those things was when someone was a snitch, they would... Well...” Steel pointed out the nose and mouth of the corpse. He stood up and looked at Tina and smiled.

“Could I trouble you for a large container with a lid?” he asked.

Tina smiled and nodded nervously, all the while thinking,
What the hell does he want it for
?

The ME soon found what he wanted in one of the stores at the back and rushed back to find Steel with a pair of surgical scissors and some forceps in his hands.

“What do you need those for?” Tina asked, approaching slowly and eyeing up the forceps.

Steel smiled and got into position at the man’s head. Tina stood opposite him with the large glass jar open and ready to receive whatever it was he thought was in there.

“Are you ready?” he asked with an almost excited grin. Tina nodded quickly, knowing full well she was not.

“Okay, now I have no idea what is in there, I just need you to be ready to put the lid on when the time comes.”

She looked up at the strange detective. Even though his eyes were shrouded with those damned sunglasses, she could feel an air of confidence about him that made her feel less scared. Tina smiled and nodded.

“Okay, let’s do this thing.” Steel smiled back and looked down whilst moving the scissors closer.

One by one he cut the stitching as close to the lip as possible so that there would be plenty for CSU to process. After cutting the last one, Steel slowly forced Carlson’s mouth open.

He looked down into the depths of the dead man’s mouth until he saw something. Slowly, he moved the forceps into the orifice and moved around, as if searching for it. With a victorious smile Steel started to draw out the forceps.

“Okay. It’s not what I was expecting, but nevertheless—”

Tina moved the jar forwards to receive whatever it was that had been in the man’s mouth. As the surgical equipment was being slowly pulled out McCall could see what appeared to be a black tail, then a hard shiny endoskeleton.

“A scorpion?” Tina said in surprise. “They put a scorpion in his mouth then sewed it shut?”

Steel placed the creature into the jar, waited until Tina had replaced the lid, and stretched across to put it on the counter.

“Why the hell would they do that?” Tina repeated.

Steel shrugged and moved towards the enclosed evidence. Tina thought for a moment then turned to the man as he patted the jar like it contained a good pet and headed for the door.

“What did you mean, you didn’t expect to find that?” she asked. “What were you expecting to find?”

The detective looked at the jar and then at Tina. “I was expecting to find a rat. This guy obviously snitched on someone. In some places I’ve heard that they put a rat in your mouth while you’re still alive and let it feed. You can’t do anything because—” Steel stopped talking, and thought to himself for a moment before bolting out of the door.

“Was it something I said?” Tina asked her friend McCall, confused at his sudden departure.

McCall just made a ‘screwy’ gesture next to her own head and followed Steel out.

*

Tony and Tooms had spent hours with witnesses and doing the usual door to door enquiries, just in case someone did actually see something. It was almost twelve by the time they had gotten back to the precinct and Tooms’s stomach was feeling the effects.