The Fairfax Incident: A Charlie Doherty Thriller by Terrence McCauley

Author:Terrence McCauley [McCauley, Terrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781639770823
Publisher: Wolfpack Publishing
Published: 2021-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

The crime scene photographer was already taking pictures of Doctor Blythe’s body when I got there. A kid who looked like he’d just gotten his detective badge was chewing gum like a cow chews cud while he scribbled something in a notebook.

I might not have been a cop anymore, but I still had cop instincts. I took in the scene in sections, just like I’d been taught.

The heavy dark drapes that hung in front of the study’s windows were closed. The only light in the room came from a chandelier and from the photographer’s flash.

Doctor Blythe’s body was slumped back in a chair behind the desk. His head was lolled off to the right, mouth slacked open. His dead eyes were half closed, staring into the great beyond. The tufts of hair that had been neatly combed when I’d met him at his club was now a puffy mess, sticking up at all odd angles. He was wearing a smoking jacket and pajamas. The jacket was open.

The glass tumbler of cut crystal on the blotter was either half empty or half full depending on how you looked at it. But either way you looked at it, Doctor Blythe was still dead.

I stood in the doorway of the study, careful to keep out of the way of the crime scene shots. But even from that distance, I could see the liquid in the glass was clear. The stench in the room confirmed it was gin.

I had only met Doctor Blythe the day before, but there was something about the man that I had liked. Maybe understood was more like it. He was a haunted man, filled with regret over things he’d done and hadn’t done. I could tell he was well on his way to realizing that no amount of booze could take away his pain or guilt. I already knew those things never faded, like scars on the soul.

All that guilt and regret over Fairfax’s death had plagued him and now he was dead, too. Just another corpse to tag and bag and file away.

At least that’s what someone was banking on.

Because even though I’d just gotten there, I could see one thing plain as day:

Doctor Matthew Blythe had been murdered.

I damned near jumped when I felt a large presence near me. I was glad it was only Hank Kronauer, the city’s deputy chief medical examiner.

“Mornin’, Charlie,” the fat man muttered as he passed me. His ancient black medical bag looked small in his fleshy hand. “They pull you out of mothballs for this one? Hope they didn’t put you through too much trouble. Heart attack, plain and simple. Plain as day. Seen it a thousand times.”

I hadn’t seen Kronauer in the year since I’d been forced into retirement, but he hadn’t changed a bit since the day I had first met him twenty years before. He’d been over three hundred pounds then and he hadn’t lost an ounce since. His suspenders strained to contain his girth as he leaned over to get a closer look at the corpse.

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