John Fulghum Mysteries by E.W. Farnsworth

Author:E.W. Farnsworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery, private eye, detective, international action intrigue, nior
Publisher: Zimbell House Publishing

Amok Machetes

Officer Nigel Pounce of Boston Police Homicide, his partner and his forensics team arrived at the sleazy apartment on the South Side at ten o’clock on Sunday morning, one of those grisaille days a cosmopolitan might associate with Paris. Clouds hung over the seamy side of the city like crepe in a funeral cortege, and that was appropriate for the grisly work the police began because the murdered woman’s body had been hacked into so many pieces it was hard to consider how they could come back together as a whole even on Resurrection Day. The exception was a single hand that remained intact clutching a plain white handkerchief as if to wipe eyes full of tears or dab a runny nose.

“Dot, the problem with publicity is look-alikes,” Pounce said to his new sidekick Officer Dorothy O’Neill while the flashes of police photographer’s cameras provided a strobe effect. “This is the fifth such mutilation killing since that hideous crime in Nashua, New Hampshire, and they’re getting progressively worse. So now that the tape is up, let’s keep snoopers and the press well clear until we clean up this mess. We don’t want to contaminate the crime scene any more than what has already happened.”

Pounce hated to have his female partner witness the mess, but, Harvard grad that she was, Dot had volunteered to join Homicide since her father and grandfather had both been outstanding members of the Force. Crime solving may have been in her Boston-blue blood, but such senseless, brutal, bloody crimes as this one didn’t fit the prim Agatha Christie closed-door model. Dot had found the hand with the kerchief and prodded it with her extensible probe to see whether the victim was still wearing her rings—she was not. Robbery might have been a motive, though sheer rage and vengeance ranked high on the list as well. The victim’s dirty blonde hair lay here and there in clumps with blood and gore.

After the photographs had been taken, the forensics team bagged the body parts as best they could, and labeled each part with the grid location where it was found. Computers would try to make sense of the chaotic jumble later, but now the police team did their work as respectfully as possible because for them this former living room was now hallowed ground and no human deserved what had happened here. The forensics team went through the entire place with a fine tooth comb, dusting for prints and bagging the woman’s belongings. Then in the mid-afternoon when the forensics team had completed their work, Nigel and Dot began their own walk-through of the apartment, remarking out loud what they observed as they went.

The two homicide detectives left the locked and sealed apartment in light rain at five o’clock sharp and proceeded directly through the heavy Boston rush hour traffic to the forensics lab to be sure that all the evidence had been laid out properly along with the external lab samples that were delivered for analysis

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