“Hell of a show, Carl,” Landry says.
“And you figured I’d want to come take a look.”
“Well, sure I did. I thought you could use the fresh air.”
“Some air. It must be forty degrees out here.”
“These nor’west winds—don’t know what it is, but they make the crazy even crazier,” Sheldon, the medical examiner, sighs, before taking off his glasses and wiping them with the tail of his shirt. “Don’t discount it,” he adds, “I’ve been doing this long enough to know.”
“So what have we got?” Schroder asks, stepping into the alleyway. The body doesn’t look any better than it did from behind his steering wheel. Landry and the ME follow him.
Blood has puddled around the dead man, creating a perimeter of about a meter that Schroder can’t cross without contaminating the scene; the footprints already in it are from Sheldon. The victim’s limbs are all twisted up, especially the legs—the left one has bent forward and snapped somewhere in the knee joint so the ankle is tucked up against the front of the groin.
The guy has three suction cups attached to him—one strapped on each hand, the third secured around his right knee. The fourth is resting on the ground about half a meter from the body, the strap broken in the fall.
The alleyway is cooler than the street, and in complete shade, but the top nine storeys of the ten-storey building are in direct sunlight. Even in this heat the alleyway smells damp. There are recycling bins lining one of the walls, broken wooden pallets and cardboard boxes lining the other. Christchurch alleyways are always full of something—just normally not bodies. He looks up, shielding his eyes against the bright reflection from the windows, then back down at the dead man’s face. A guy with big Vegas-style Elvis sideburns and busted-up features and head wounds that have leaked all over the cracked tarmac.
“See, told you it was a show,” Landry says. “Ain’t much for us to do except wrap Batman up in a bag and take him to the morgue.”
“I think he was trying to be more like Spiderman,” Schroder says.
“Either way, the fact he’s naked except for a trench coat tells us he’s a piece of crap.”
“Maybe.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? For all we know he was on his way to rape somebody,” Landry says. “Dressed like this—he certainly wasn’t trying to watch cable TV for free. I’m thinking he got what he deserved.”
Schroder nods. Still, if he was planning on peeking into somebody’s apartment—surely there was an easier way.
They all turn as one as the media vans begin their assault on the scene, all pulling up at the same time. The cameramen and reporters climb out and move around the barriers to get closer. Police constables push them back. Cameras are hoisted up onto shoulders and the sun glints off the lenses.
“And the show gets an audience,” Landry says.
“We should cover him up,” Schroder says, glancing up at the other tall buildings surrounding them. Landry is right—this is a hell of a show. People are standing in the windows, all staring down and pointing, their faces full of excitement. The reporters scan the buildings for better vantage points to invade the dead man’s privacy from. A constable comes over and goes about covering the victim, a white sheet of canvas hiding the view away from the public. Not all the blood has dried and some of it seeps into the material.
“Anything in his pockets?” Schroder asks.
“Nothing.”
“I’m all done with him,” Sheldon says. “Pretty obvious what happened, but I’ll know more once we get him back to the morgue. Messed up the way he is, he must have gotten pretty high.”
“I’m not so sure,” Schroder says. “All of this—something here doesn’t add up.”
Landry and Sheldon glance at the body, at the building, at the body again, then back at Schroder. “You want to elaborate on that, Carl? What exactly are we missing here? A mostly naked dead man with suction cups strapped to him at the base of an apartment building with a couple of hundred windows—what doesn’t add up?”
“I don’t get it,” Schroder says. “I mean, it seems a hell of an effort to go to just to peep through some windows. Problem is, all the effort in the world wouldn’t have helped him out. This whole suction cup thing, it’s a myth. You can’t scale buildings like that. Can’t be done.”
Schroder takes a step back to reduce the glare and gazes up the side of the building. None of the floors have balconies.
“All that means is he started climbing from higher up. Maybe he has an apartment here,” Landry says. “He probably climbed out on the sixth or seventh floor, and fell from the sixth or the seventh floor. Come on, Carl, we didn’t call you down here to try and make us look like idiots—there’s no crime here.”
“If there’s no crime, why did you call me down?”
Landry rolls his shoulders back, and when he talks, a vein pops out in his forehead and starts throbbing. “For once the victim is someone who deserved it. For once the victim isn’t some girl who smiled at the wrong guy and got sliced up for it. Come on, Carl, how many times have we seen that, huh? And this time—well, this time it’s score one for the good guys.”
“How come nobody found him earlier?” Schroder asks.
“There was a car parked at the front of the alley, blocking the view. Belonged to one of the tenants. He normally leaves it parked here overnight. He only came to move it half an hour ago.”
“Time of death is about twelve hours,” Sheldon says.
“Tell me, when he climbed out last night, before he fell, do you think he closed the window?”
“What?” Landry asks.
“None of the windows are open.”
They all study the side of the building. There’s no way the victim climbed out and made the effort to close the window behind him. There’s no way he could have gone more than a meter before the suction cups gave way.
“Shit,” Landry says. He pulls a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and dances one across his fingers.
“Maybe he managed to climb all the way up from the ground,” Sheldon suggests.
“It can’t happen,” Schroder says. “Look it up. Try it out. Do whatever you need to, but it doesn’t work.”
“How do you know for sure?” Landry asks.
“I saw it on the Discovery Channel.”
“Maybe he took the elevator to the roof and climbed down,” Landry says.
“Take another look,” Schroder says. Between the roof and the top apartments is about a two-meter strip of concrete. “This isn’t what it seems. This guy was a victim of something.”
“I still don’t get it,” Landry says, putting the cigarette back. “What you’re saying makes sense, I see that, but there are other alternatives.”
“Like what?” Schroder asks, reaching into his pocket for his ringing cell phone.
“Like maybe the suction cups worked.”
“Or maybe somebody dressed him up,” Schroder points out, “and threw him off the roof.” He takes the call. The woman on the other end of the phone talks quickly, and thirty seconds later he’s back in his car, racing toward the bank, fighting for position with the reporters making their way in the same direction.
chapter three
It’s a moment in a movie. Something so incredibly implausible and so far away from what I’m thinking about that I can’t even comprehend it. I actually look away for a second, just this normal slice of life in this everyday normal bank where abnormal things don’t happen, back to the family-oriented posters and floating interest rates, back to Jodie sitting opposite me—and then, somehow, somehow, it all becomes real.
The doors are two large side-by-side glass doors that open automatically as indiscriminately for these men as they did for me and my wife. The six men enter in three groups of two. The first group goes left, the second, right, and the third, straight ahead. It’s all happening behind Jodie and she has no idea what’s going on. She keeps talking. Most of the people are still talking. Some glance up at the men for a second before returning to what they were doing, then the realization of what they saw kicks in, the disbelief on their faces perhaps comical under other circumstances. Others seem to be noticing immediately, perhaps people who have seen this kind of thing on TV enough times to figure out what happens next. They’re dropping out of sight behind desks. All this and the men haven’t even made a sound.