Terrier Transgressions

Chapter Twelve

I may not have much experience with murder or crime scenes, but something about those photos jumped out at me.

“Can we lay these out in the closet?” I asked, shoving them back toward Charles.

He nodded, got down on his hands and knees, then matched the photos up to their corresponding spots in the actual physical space. Together, we spent a few minutes making sure the angles were represented perfectly.

“Okay, walk me through this,” I said, rubbing my chin with the side of my index finger. “What exactly do we know from the pictures?”

Charles pointed to one on the left-hand side of our spread. “From the angle of the blood splatter, we know that the killer approached his victims from the right.”

We both studied the wall, which had once been painted red with blood. Now it was a pristine and perfect white.

“Okay, what else?” I asked, chewing on a fingernail now that the antacid had fully dissolved. I needed something to ground myself in the now so my fears wouldn’t get the best of me.

Charles swept his vision across the arc of photographs before turning back toward me. “Well, we believe Bill was killed first and that Ruth was killed a few minutes after when she came to investigate.”

I hadn’t heard this bit before, but I also hadn’t asked for many details about the crime scene, either. One thing was for sure: I definitely needed to work on thickening my skin or at least strengthening my stomach when it came to these things—especially since it seemed investigating murders was becoming something of a habit for me as of late.

I nodded. “Okay. What makes you say that?”

“Bill’s blood was more saturated in the carpet and spread further than Ruth’s, but really it was a matter of minutes between the murders, so it’s hard to say,” Charles explained, keeping his voice steady. I wondered if thinking about the brutal killings upset him as much as it upset me. If it did, he certainly didn’t make his feelings obvious.

“Hmm,” I said, considering my investigative partner just as much as the information he’d presented. After a moment of tense silence, I grabbed a pencil from my purse and did my best to trace the area of blood splatter on the wall. Art was one of my many failed talents, but I did okay considering.

Charles panicked and tried to wrest the pencil away from me. “What are you doing?” he demanded with a look of horror on his handsome face. Although, I had to admit, he seemed less handsome today than he had at the beginning of the week. Maybe I was unconsciously beginning to associate the Hayes’s double murder with him, and that definitely wasn’t swoon-inducing or crush-worthy.

“Trying to match the evidence to the conclusion.” I had to admit, I felt very Sherlock Holmes in that moment. Well, if Holmes had secretly harbored an on-again-off-again crush on Watson. Yeah, I still hadn’t found anything groundbreaking, but something told me if we kept following this line of thought, we’d find exactly what we needed to save Brock.

My Watson unfortunately wasn’t the most agreeable when it came to my current tactics. He argued, “But Breanne—”

“She’s already mad,” I said through gritted teeth. “It’s not like this will make things any worse.”

Charles sighed but moved aside and let me finish my work.

Ignoring the small droplets, I reproduced the outline for the main burst of the blood splatter carefully. A few minutes later, I stepped back, satisfied with the effort.

“Now,” I said, brushing my hands off on my pants even though they hadn’t gotten the slightest bit dirty. “We need to finish setting the scene. You be Bill, and I’ll be the killer. Do you have anything can work as the hammer?”

“Um…” Charles shifted his weight uncomfortably. He didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what I was on about, but I didn’t want to waste time explaining, especially when Breanne could barge in and disrupt us any minute.

“Never mind, we can use this.” I grabbed Octo-Cat’s neon leash and folded it over several times to approximate the length of a standard hammer, then tied it in place with a hair tie on each end. “Got any sticky notes in there?”

Charles fumbled around in his bag, then pulled out a mini pad of brightly colored notes, which he promptly handed to me. “Never know when these might come in handy,” he said with a shrug. “In fact, I still don’t know how they’re going to help right now, but I’m ready to find out.”

“Good,” I said, eyeing him carefully for a moment. He smiled instead of grimacing, which I took as a win. “Now go lay down the way Bill was found and in the same spot, too.”

He did, lowering himself gently down onto his stomach and reaching his arms overhead at odd angles. It was eerie, seeing him there sprawled out like the victim from our photos—especially since my mind automatically filled in the missing details like the blood and the giant, blossoming bruises.

I shook my head to clear my mental Etch-a-Sketch of that gruesome picture, then picked up the photo of Bill’s prone body and put a series of sticky notes on Charles’s back and head in the same spots where the hammer had wounded Bill. There were three in total—one near the base of his neck, one on the side of his face, and the last on his upper back near his shoulder.

“Okay. Now stand up,” I instructed, taking a big step back to give him space.

Charles did without saying anything. I could tell he was intrigued and also wanted to see where this was going.

“How tall was Bill?” I asked as I motioned for my colleague to turn around so that I could study his back from behind.

“About five foot ten,” he answered after a brief moment’s thought.

“And how tall are you?”

“Six feet even.”

“Now how tall is Brock?”

“Six-four.”

I kept all these numbers in my head, adding my height of five foot seven to the mix as I brought my makeshift murder weapon up and down on each of the sticky notes. I caught each shot with the camera on my phone.

“Okay. You can turn around now.” I made a quick trip to the app store to download a measuring app while I explained the next steps to Charles. “Brock is six inches taller than Bill. So now we’re going to make me six inches taller than you. Can you crouch to about yea-high?”

I drew the phone from the floor to about my shoulder height and held it there while Charles got into position. He was a bit shaky as I redid my measurements and snapped pictures of each.

“Now check these out with me,” I said, helping him back to his feet so we could both examine the six new photos on my phone. “These first three photos are from when we were both at our normal height, and the next three are from us recreating the height difference between Bill and Brock. What do you notice?”

Charles grabbed the phone from me excitedly and flipped back and forth reviewing each photo several times, then we placed my phone onto the floor next to the crime scene photos of Bill. He looked from the walls where I’d traced the path of the blood splatter and back to the pictures.

“Given the angle of the blood splatter and placement of the wounds, the first pictures look much more accurate.”

I nodded. “If Brock had landed these blows on Bill, he would have needed to angle his wrists awkwardly like this and taken a wide, golf-like swing. It would have been much more natural—and more effective—to hit him from above.”

“So you think someone shorter committed the crime?”

“I do, but let’s recreate Ruth’s death before deciding for sure.”

We went through all the same motions again, with me playing the victim this time. Ruth had only needed one blow to go down and it was directly to the top of her skull.

“See,” I told Charles as we were going through the resulting photos. “Why would the murderer hit Ruth over the top of the head and not Bill?”

“Because he couldn’t reach on Bill,” Charles answered excitedly.

I nodded, happy to see that my companion both understood and supported my theory. “Actually, I’m pretty sure the culprit is a she. Or a very short man. In any case, it’s not Brock.”

“So we’re looking for someone about…” His eyes found and held mine.

“My height, yup,” I confirmed.

Charles grabbed the discovery folder and flipped through it quickly, mumbling the names of each witness and person of interest as he went. “It couldn’t be Brock. Also couldn’t be Bill’s boss. Both are too tall.”

I already knew exactly who this new evidence implicated, but I needed Charles to arrive there on his own.

“Almost everyone is either too tall or too short to be considered,” he murmured while stashing the folder back in his bag.

“We know at least one person related to this case who’s exactly my height,” I pointed out.

“Breanne,” Charles said with a sigh. “I was afraid of that.”

A series of footsteps stomped up the staircase, causing us to share a horrified expression. We knew exactly who had come to find us now.

“Okay, time’s up!” Breanne called, charging angrily into the room and growing even more livid when she found Charles and me sitting on the closet floor with the crime scene photos and a matching pair of guilty expressions on our faces.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, placing a hand on each hip. “And where are your animals?”

Uh-oh. This was not good. Not good at all.