Re: Marvel, SVS office→Staten Island: Louis D & Cris M
Louis believed him. He had no reason not to. He knew Sam didn't want him to know where she was staying, but he couldn't think of why Cris might lie if he didn't know where she was, and it established a consistency in her behavior that was, heartbreakingly, a comfort. "That doesn't surprise me all that much," he said, and had the decency to feel a little embarrassed that he'd suggested Cris knew where she was staying. It felt like an accusation, in retrospect.
Louis stepped outside the car. The police line around the murder scene was broad, covering a large section of both boardwalk and beach.
It started above, on the boardwalk, by the railing. a thin trail of blood had been marked off with pointers and numbers, and ended abruptly at the edge. The top of the railing of was clean, but the bottom rung was smeared with blood. Something had dragged the man through the gap below the rail and onto the sand below.
Louis followed the edge of the smear, peered over the edge, then walked down the stairs. The blood had curved to the right, so that was where he directed his attention. There was a small cluster of officers, techs, and the ME gathered around the corpse, tucked under the boardwalk and out of immediate sight.
"Who found her?" he asked the nearest uniformed officer.
"Homeless woman," the officer said. "Geneva Meyers. I guess she was looking for a spot for herself to get cozy, but her seat was taken."
Beneath the boardwalk, beside the stairs, there was a neat alcove in the foundations. The body was there, splayed flat - and strangely small, for the thick man Louis remembered meeting in the interview.
He stepped up and peered past the group collected around the body, taking gloves when they were offered. "We identified him by the jacket. One of the officers first on the scene remembered seeing him when he came in," explained the tech who passed off the gloves to them both.
Carson Matthews looked like a man a thousand years dead instead of a few short hours, and only the blood pooling black on the sand beneath him held any real clue to how long it had been since he died. He looked nothing like himself. His skin was shrunken and withered, pulled in tight to his skull as if it had been drawn around his bones like a pouch. There was no fat or muscle to cushion it, just hollow bones. His arm had cracked open and showed through the jacket at the risk. There was no marrow. It was all scoured clean.
A gold tooth winked cheerily in his mouth. His jacket was intact with the patches Louis remembered himself from the man's interview. His work boots were strangely untouched, but his pants had been eaten away. His eyes were gone, simply gone, empty pockets in his skull. His hair was intact, like a well-preserved specimen in an Egyptian tomb, and there was no sign of a tongue in a mouth that gaped open, retaining each and every one of his impacted and crooked teeth.
Louis stood quietly and looked at the body. It was so strangely dry and empty, a husk of a human being, that it was almost difficult to identify it with the malevolent, cowardly abuser who had sweat rivulets in their office. He had a brief, strong, strangling sensation that this was not where he should be -
He pushed those thoughts away and cleared his throat. He had enough control over his expression that he did seem to have only been looking and observing, though he rubbed gently at the pain flaring around the scar on his sternum, beneath his shirt. "How long has he been here?"
"CCTV has him getting gas at 9:15 last night," responded the uniformed officer from before. "The station was about half an hour away. Homeless woman found him around six in the morning."
"Ten hours, then. At the very most." Louis stared at the body. He looked over at Cris. "Cause of death?" he asked. The question was almost skeptical.
The ME, perched gingerly over the body, looked up when she heard the question. She picked up a small plastic evidence bag from the victim's chest. Inside was a dead insect, only as big as the pad of her thumb.
"We've found about a dozen so far," she said. "Locusts, by the looks of them."