“What’s the deal with all the security?” I murmured to Derrel. “Is this a government building or something?”
“Not anymore,” he replied, keeping his voice low as well. “Used to be a NASA computer center a couple of decades back, but NuQuesCor took over the building about five years ago. They’re private, but they work on some government contracts. From what I gather they mostly do nutrition science, sports supplements, vitamins, and the like. But even though they aren’t NASA anymore, they still likely have a fair amount of proprietary information that they want to protect. Hence the security.”
“In other words, they’re afraid of industrial espionage, that sort of thing?”
“Exactly.”
I gave him a doubtful look. “What could an industrial spy want in a nutrition science lab?”
“Well, suppose they come up with low-fat low-sugar food that doesn’t taste like complete ass,” he said. “They don’t want someone else coming in and stealing it before they can patent it, right?”
“Ahhh, gotcha. It all comes down to money.”
He snorted softly. “It always does.”
We came out abruptly into another two-story area that appeared to be a lunchroom. By my guess it was in the exact middle of the building to judge by the hallway entrances on all four sides. There was no “hotel lobby” look to this, either. This was more of the plain white décor. Walls, ceiling, even the staircases to my right and left were white. The only deviations from the color scheme were the tables and chairs, all made from what looked like aircraft aluminum.
Yellow crime scene tape had been strung across each of the hallways, and I saw a number of onlookers peering toward the stairs to my left. There, crumpled at the foot of those stairs, was the body.
I figured he was in his late fifties or maybe early sixties. Short grey hair, somewhat aged and lined face. He was dressed in a dark blue uniform that looked to be the same as the one the other security guards wore, though I saw that he was missing a shoe. A trickle of blood tracked from his ear, which I’d come to learn meant a bad head injury. But that was easy enough for me to figure out, since there was another pool of blood beneath his head. From what little I could tell, it looked like this guy had tumbled down the stairs, landing at the bottom with enough force to crack his skull open.
Hi there, darlin’. My name is Angel, I thought. I’ll probably eat your brain sometime soon. I hope you don’t mind.
I held back the snicker and managed to maintain a properly serious expression. I wasn’t the smartest chick in the world, but even I knew that laughing at a death scene was pretty uncool.
In the couple of months I’d been working for the St. Edwards Parish Coroners Office I’d probably been on more than a hundred death scenes. Some were tragic and heart wrenching—which was anything that involved kids; a few were truly bizarre—such as the guy who choked to death on a sex toy; but the large majority were simply in the category of “ho hum, another person died and I get to go pick them up.”
It wasn’t that I was jaded. At least that’s what I kept telling myself. But my views of death had certainly come a long way from the screwed up chick I used to be. I mean, I was definitely still a chick, but I wasn’t screwed up. Well, not as screwed up. Or rather, I was screwed up in different ways.
This death scene looked like it was going to be one of the ordinary ones. No kids, no sex toys, no batshit craziness that I could see so far.
A gangly red-haired man wearing a jacket with SEPSO Crime Scene stenciled across the back flashed us a smile. “Almost ready for y’all,” he said, lifting the camera in his hands.
“No rush, Sean,” Derrel replied before turning to me. “I’m going to go talk to the head of security and see if I can get this guy’s personnel info.”
“Go wild,” I said. Derrel gave me a wink and a smile before abandoning me and heading toward an unsmiling man with a walkie-talkie in his hand, who totally looked like a head of security. Hell, he practically looked like a Secret Service agent. He wore a black suit and white shirt, with a tightly knotted grey tie that had some sort of boring and forgettable pattern. Dark brown hair was buzzed short enough for the military, and good grief, if his jaw had been any more square it could have been used as a brick. All he was missing was the little ear thingy with the squiggly wire that I always saw Secret Service agents wearing in the movies. He was deep in conversation with a slim auburn-haired woman several inches shorter than he was. If he was dressed like Secret Service, she was dressed like an uptight congresswoman—maroon suit with a fitted skirt, cream blouse, and matching cream pumps that were well within the “I am a woman to be taken seriously!” height range.
The woman walked away before Derrel reached them. I watched as Derrel spoke to the security guy, then they both headed off down yet another hallway, I assumed to get the dead guy’s personnel file.
Which meant I was definitely at loose ends until he got back. I made myself comfortable against the wall and took in the general bustle of activity. Detectives Abadie and Roth had their heads close together and seemed to be involved in a serious discussion, though, knowing them, it had more to do with acquisition of Saints tickets than anything to do with the body. A knot of six or seven people stood in the hallway on the other side of the room, held back by the thin, yellow authority of the crime scene tape strung across the entryway. I assumed they were employees who had stayed late. Several of them wore white lab coats, and they all had ID badges clipped somewhere visible. Most of them looked upset or simply curious, but a few looked annoyed and impatient. The woman who’d been speaking to the security guy was talking on her cell phone, and she looked downright pissed. Maybe all of this was disrupting some sort of super important project? That sort of attitude didn’t really surprise me anymore. I’d lost count of the number of times I’d been out on a highway to pick up a victim from a traffic fatality and witnessed some irate driver bitching about the fact that the road was closed off while we did our work. Some people were insensitive shits, and that’s all there was to it.
Then again, maybe she’s fighting with a husband or boyfriend, I told myself. Or maybe her purse was stolen, and she’s calling to cancel her credit cards. Sometimes people weren’t actually insensitive shits and were simply having a bad day. See, this was me trying to be open-minded and understanding.
I looked around for Marcus and saw him near the hallway, across from where Derrel and I had entered, in conversation with a tall and slender blond woman wearing a lab coat. I felt a frown tug at my face as I watched them. This was definitely more than him talking to a possible witness, not with how close they stood or the way she occasionally touched his arm. She looked deeply upset, though, and kept glancing toward the body.
I didn’t have much time to wonder about it before Derrel returned from his info-gathering expedition with the security chief guy. As if on cue, the crime scene tech stepped back from the body and gave a slight wave to let Derrel and me know he was ready for us to get on with our part of this whole thing. No one else was allowed to touch the body except for coroner’s office people, yet we had to wait until the crime scene folks finished doing all the stuff they did, which meant there was usually a little dance of cooperation when it came to working death scenes.
Derrel and I stepped forward now and carefully rolled the man over so that Sean could snap pictures of the other side of the body as well as the floor beneath him. The dead man’s grey uniform shirt had been unbuttoned in the front and sticky pads dotted his torso, left over from the EMTs—the only exception to who was allowed to touch the body, since technically it wasn’t a “body” until it was declared dead after the EMTs ran an EKG strip. They’d already come and gone, which was often the case on death scenes. Even unbuttoned the shirt looked overly large on him, and the pants were bunched up beneath his belt. He must have lost a lot of weight recently. Maybe he’d been sick? Not that it mattered now.
“Definitely some serious skull fractures,” Derrel said as he ran his gloved fingers over the man’s head. Pieces moved underneath the scalp in unnatural ways as he carefully probed the injuries. He glanced up at the stairs, a slight frown tugging at his mouth. “He must have tripped? Somehow he came flying down and smacked his head hard. I’m not seeing any blood anywhere else on the stairs.” He glanced up at the tech for confirmation.
“I didn’t either,” Sean said, “but I took lots of pictures anyway. One of the lab employees who was working late here walked through the room just as the guy hit the bottom. He called nine one one immediately, but…” He shrugged.
“But this guy was probably dead within seconds,” Derrel murmured.
Sean took one last shot of the man’s head and then stepped back. “And that’s the last of it for me. Thanks, y’all.”
Derrel gave me the nod, and I went ahead and spread the body bag out on the concrete. The man looked like he probably weighed around one-seventy or so—more than easy enough for me to handle when I was “well fed,” but it had been about a day and a half since I last had brains, and my strength was about what one would expect from someone my size. In other words, total weakling.
Fortunately, Derrel was willing to help without me having to ask. He grabbed the dude under the shoulders, I grabbed him under his knees, and together we got him into the bag with a minimum of fuss. A smear of blood lingered on the tile, and I saw that it had seeped into the grout, making a stain. That’d be a bitch to get out.
Derrel tilted his clipboard toward me so that I could jot the dead guy’s info onto the toe tag—Norman Kearny, age sixty-three—and then I snapped the rubber band around the big toe of the foot that was already shoeless. I did a quick search of his body for valuables, finding only a watch; no wallet or jewelry. After removing the watch and dropping it into a property bag, I retrieved the wayward shoe from under the stairs and stuck that in the body bag as well. It was probably stupid, but I had a feeling that if the shoes were separated they’d never get paired up again, and they’d be doomed to wander the world alone forever.