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The murder of Trokil Gorute seems, upon first glance, utterly mundane.
In fact, it’s so innocuous Dirk’s not the only one wondering why they’re even here. In his professional opinion this one’s an open-and-close and going by Dana’s expression she’s even more stymied as to why this case requires their presence when they already had two rookies on the job as soon as Emergency dispatched a 10-42. In the car they’d hesitantly guessed at a supes job, but Emmers and Keyser really don’t need anyone to look over their shoulder. Especially not with what’s shaping up to be more and more of a standard double homicide. But if they’d been baffled at the precinct’s insistence before, they’re even further so now. It’s a tale as old as humanity itself from the first time Cain picked up a rock to throw at his brother.
Troubled writer has issues overcoming his mental block, goes a little barmy in the process. Things escalate when his beleaguered wife defends herself from his abuse, accidentally shooting him in the process. When she sees what she’s done she’s blinded by grief and follows him via murder-suicide.
These things happen daily. This is Houston.
“Did the neighbours give headquarters a call before?” Dirk vaguely asks in the general direction of Emmers, still mostly preoccupied with cataloguing the starburst pattern of bruises on Gorute’s neck, spreading down towards his collarbones and vanishing under the patterned fabric of his shirt. They’re not finger-shaped, more oval than elongated and a sickly green fading into yellow barely distinguishable from the victim’s greyish teint.
Gorute’s curled into a half-fetal position, hands lifted as if to cradle his head, mouth wide open in a frozen mask of terror. The problem’s only that the upper half of his skull is missing, blown away by what must’ve been a fairly close-up shot from the Ruger SR1911 half-hidden under the remnants of the coffee table. Barely two steps away is the half-slumped body of what used to be Moira Gorute, his then-wife and likely his now-assailant. Her hand’s still stretched out towards her husband in some sort of plea or futile attempt at reaching him. It’d be eerie, but Dirk’s last case involved a key victim half-eaten by a particularly vicious breed of fruit bats and this time he’s honestly just glad there’s nothing living in the corpses.
It takes a few seconds for Emmers to realise the question’s directed at him and a discreet elbow to the ribs from Keyser to actually start talking. “Yessir,” he manages in one big gulp, cap bunched together between two big, ungainly hands.
Dirk sighs and out of the corner of his eye he can see Dana smother a smile, concealing it in her cup of joe. Emmers, true to his indigo blood, is built like a brick shithouse and both of them have seen him take out perps with a single fist to the jaw, but even after a good two terms on the force he still turns into a shrinking violet as soon as a potential superior alights their attention on him.
“And?” he questions when it seems neither Emmers nor his partner are likely to be more forthcoming. Rookies. He might’ve been just as bad, but after ten years on the beat his memories of the first term mostly consist of a lot of coffee runs and cleaning vomit off his uniform in the men’s bathroom stalls.
“911 call or non-emergency? What did they report? For God’s sake, don’t just stand there, man. You did talk to the lady who dispatched the call, right?”
The look he gets from Dana in response might bode trouble for later, but his coffee’s gone cold twenty minutes ago and Emmers is still gaping at him like a fish out of water, mouth opening and closing until Keyser takes mercy on him and pulls out her notepad.
“We did, sir,” she dutifully rattles off, thumbing through pages of scribbled handwriting. “A Mrs Dorothy Johnson, fifty-eight, human, widowed. Said Mr Gorute and his, er, wife didn’t exactly keep their dirty laundry under wraps. Also mentioned calling the non-emergency number one or two times before when they were getting too loud. Apparently it never escalated beyond verbal altercations, but this time she overheard him screaming followed by a singular loud crash and then silence. Called 911 right after when they didn’t answer their doorbell or landline.”
For a moment she hesitates before adding with a sour twist of her mouth that shows a greater familiarity with the subject than she’d like to admit: “According to her the walls are so thin she couldn’t help but overhear, but in all honesty she seems like a nosey old bat. Sir,” she adds quickly when Dirk turns around to stare at her, bemused.
“The crash was most likely Gorute falling and taking the coffee table with him then,” Dana finally contributes, still sipping her lukewarm coffee with a tangible air of disgust. Dirk shoots her a look of long-suffering, barely concealed resignation and she raises the soggy paper cup in a toast.
“What’s weird though,” she continues more seriously now, stepping closer to look over Dirk’s shoulder at the chalk outline the CSU left before calling for backup. “Is that if the witness only reported one crash. If the wife really blew his proverbial brains out before offing herself there’s no way that it wouldn’t have translated to two, maybe even three distinctive noises.”
She’s right, of course. If Keyser’s account of Mrs Johnson’s attention to detail is correct – and that’s something he doesn’t doubt, no matter how ill-suited she may be for witness castigation – the audio account would’ve been vastly different. Of course there’s always the possibility of her mishearing or simply mixing up the succession of events into one amalgamation of static, but somehow he doubts that. It’s just a vague feeling, just a tendril slivering through his thoughts but it still itches somewhere in the back of his brain, lighting down neural chains in the process.
Interracial couples aren’t exactly the exception anymore, not since 2005’s ROTA bill gave troll-human marriages the same status as human-only relations, but it’s still comparatively rare and especially so in the Deep South. If Dirk’d have to guess he’d wager one heterospecies couple to five homospecies ones, but he’s never been a betting man and he’s not about to start now.
But still the thought remains. Gorute is, was, very visibly non-human and River Oaks has always been home to the rich and conservative. From Dana’s frown he can haphazard a vague guess as to where her thoughts have wandered to as well.
“This Mrs Johnson, she mention whether the Gorutes were well-liked in the neighbourhood?” At Emmers guileless stare he’s forced to elaborate, slowly rising from his crouched position over the corpse and groaning when the motion jostles his bad knee. “Well, were they members of the local HOA? Go to church, participate in summerly backyard grill-outs or bake sales? Any shit like that?”
At that Emmers lights up, nodding like a kid in a candy store. Dirk’s almost tempted to hand him a golden sticker star for participation, but he values his head and Dana might not let him keep it if he continues to terrorise the rookies even further.
“Yessir. She said that Moira—Mrs Gorute, that is, was very-well liked around these parts. Apparently her grandparents used to live down the street before they moved into a retirement home a few years back.”
Even from his half-hunched position he can see Dana’s fingers twitch, arm half-extending and then pulling back quickly when he hisses “I’m fine,” under his breath. She sighs in put-upon exasperation, but the worry in her eyes is very real. It proves to be even more humiliating than the last eight months of physical therapy and that shitbag of a personal trainer cheerily telling him he might even get eighty percent of his previous mobility range back.
“I’m fine,” he repeats, more for himself this time than for the other people in the room. He hastily continues on before Dana might force him to sit down and take what she calls “a breather”, but what they both very well know is a forced time-out to make sure he doesn’t pull a tendon again.
“What’d she say about the victim? This kinda neighbourhood, I imagine they’re pretty slow to warm up to a half-troll couple moving in next to them.”
“Especially one relatively low on the hemospectrum,” Dana adds, bending down with ease to pick up the penlight he dropped. Dirk really hates her at times. “No offense, Emmers.”
“None taken, Ma’am,” Emmers promptly replies before realising he’s just answered her without a previous five minutes of hemming and hawing and promptly aspirates his own spittle. In between his coughing fit Keyser pats his massive back with the long-suffering air of someone well used to the antics of slate-bloods and their hangups.
“Are we assuming it was a hate crime then?” she queries, a little too excited to keep the eagerness out of her voice. Dirk doesn’t blame her. He’d be eager for anything other than domestic disputes and traffic infractions if he’d spent a year solving 5501s on the beat of uptown Houston.
“Not with the evidence so clear in favour of a domestic homicide,” Dana answers for him and he gratefully lets her relieve him of the talking part. Instead he takes the proffered penlight and bends a little further down. From his standing position he’s finally able to reach the victim’s upturned eyes. The yellow of the sclera is interspersed with specks of red, clean surface shot through with burst capillaries. “Petechiae,” he says, surprised despite himself.
“Did Forensics include possible strangulation in the preliminary report?”
Dana turns around from where she’s still grilling a steadily more nervous Emmers and Keyser and steps over Moira Gorute’s body to take a look at what he’s indicating. She almost steps on the victim’s hair. It’s pretty, in the same way Moira Gorute must’ve been pretty herself when she was alive. Chestnut brown and fanned out in a half-circle, fine strands barely crusted by dried blood. Something about it triggers some far-off memory again, an index card he can’t place or categorise. A useless bit of information connected with a strand he can’t yet place. The back of his neck is prickling very slightly at the thought.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Dana mutters, sounding as surprised as he feels. “So either he was a chronic bulimic or he experienced some sort of trauma to the windpipe or retinal region before he was shot.”
“And no mention of that in the prelim,” Dirk adds with some grim satisfaction when she shakes her head. Technically he knows this, they both had a look at it on their way from the car. But there’s always been some sort of underlying tension between the CS Investigation department and his own LEA and he’s all too happy to pitch for his own team if it scores Forensics a good dressing-down.
Of course, it’s always possible that they’ll add it retroactively if they deem it important enough to be included. But Dirk’s seen maybe a couple hundred headshots over the past decade or so and he knows as well as Head Coroner Vantas does that no abrasion collar in the world affects facial blood vessels so far as to cause isolated haemorrhaging. And the entry wound’s so far up on the top of the skullcap that it seems even less likely.
As if on cue, the radio on Keyser’s hip springs to life, scratchy static molding out into the voice of the plainclothes policeman parked at the apartment complex’s entrance to prevent any curious bystanders from tracking their shit into a hermetically sealed crime scene. It’s a hulking, ungainly thing, almost as big as her entire hand and she struggles to tuck it back into the flap at her belt when the exchange is over.
“Miller said the SOCO’s here and they brought a field analyst with them,” she reports, eyes flitting between Dirk, Dana and the two bodies nervously, seemingly expecting some sort of reaction. As always, Dana doesn’t disappoint, snorting a little before placing her paper cup on one of the protective wiper PVCs spread out to preserve the surface of the coffee table.
“Great, just what we needed,” she sighs. “Another one of those snotty little pricks ten minutes out of ECPI or Liberty U.”
Dirk isn’t exactly inclined to disagree. Most crime lab specialists they’ve met while on the job can be sorted into one of the following categories: either they’re very tall, very thin men with crow-like beaks and glass-sharp avian eyes, or recent college graduates raring to one-up any available police officer by pulling senseless definitions and obscure facts out of their textbook-molded brains. But they all share a common denominator of perceived superiority and a penchant for gratuitous condescension.
However, the field agent stepping through the door barely five minutes later is nothing like Dirk expected.
First off, he’s tiny. Small doesn’t even accurately describe it, barely 5’6” even with the help of his reinforced boots, heavy duty and PVC soles laced up over the standard disposable CSI uniform. His shoulders’ breadth would fit comfortably under Dirk’s collarbones, his hips ought to line up perfectly against the sprawl of his own fingers. Dirk’s not even exceptionally tall and even he’d loom over this kid. And he is a kid, secondly, not a day older than early twenties if he’d have to guess. Probably barely out of university, fresh-faced and clean-shaven with a sprawl of black hair to boot. He should be exactly the kind of jumpy upstart Dirk hates, tight-lipped and eager to prove his worth, stepping on their toes to climb the career ladder while the common officers toil below in the dirt. And yet, and yet.
And yet thirdly and most importantly, his eyes are yellow and his skin is a rusty, ashen grey with an undertone of burnt brick red and his teeth are sharp and white and wet and Dirk’s in love, in love, love, love—
“Fuck,” he hears himself abruptly gritting out. And again when the unpleasant truth kicks in and burns through him like alcohol. The realisation that the possibility of a serial killer going for heterospecies couples might not be the only, might not even be the most important thing threatening his carefully built-up and preserved equilibrium:
“Fuck.”