Page 67 of Killer on the First Page
A lonely pair of headlights moved down the road toward them. It was Doc’s SUV. He pulled in and got out with a stiff-legged gait, carrying his satchel. He looked tired.
“Ned inside?” he asked.
Miranda and Andrew followed him up the stairs and into the round room where the door lay fallen, the grandfather clock lay scattered, and the body lay cold on the bare floor.
“Hello, Doc,” said Ned.
“Busy night for the both of us,” said Doc. “Hey, Holly. Busy night for you, too. How are the twins?”
“At my mom’s.”
“You know you’ve got to get them in for their rubella, right?”
“I know.”
Doc placed his leather satchel on the table, looked down at the body on the floor. “I know this guy. One of the writers, right?”
“Fairfax DePoy,” said Ned. “Though his ID gives a different name.”
Miranda perked up at this. “A different name?”
Ned had placed the man’s wallet on the table. “Like Kane, Fairfax must’ve been using a pseudonym. His real name was Francis—Frank, I’m guessing. Or even Frankie, given he was born in Jersey.”
“Jersey,England?” Miranda asked. He was supposedly British, after all.
“What? No. JerseyJersey, as in New Jersey. Is there a Jersey in England, too?”
“Indeed there is,” said Miranda. “Hence the appellation ‘New’ affixed to the American one.”
“No kidding! Next you’ll be telling me there’s an Old York.”
Andrew was confused. “But Fairfax is—was—from the English landed gentry.”
“Landed, for sure,” said Doc, gesturing to the corpse that was supine before them, the rope still around his neck. “That part’s true.”
Doc pulled on a pair of latex gloves, crouched down on his uncertain knees. “Blue lips, yep.” He lowered one of the eyelids, then examined the ruptured capillaries on the man’s now mottled face. “Petechial hemorrhage, yep.” Ran his finger between the rope and the man’s neck. “Yep.” He stood back up, his joints creaking. “We’ll need an autopsy, of course, but I’d wager a dollar he died of oxygen deprivation.”
“A noose will do that,” said Holly.
“Not necessarily,” said Doc. “No major bruising around the rope, which suggests the blood had already stopped circulating when the rope was tightened around his neck.”
Ned didn’t like the sound of this. “What are you saying, Doc?”
“Just that he may have been dead or dyingbeforehe was hanged.”
“Impossible,” said Holly. “He was alone in here, and door was locked from the inside—with a deadbolt. We had to break it down to get to him.”
“His feet didn’t touch the chair,” Miranda reminded her.
“He could have jumped,” Ned suggested.
“How would that have worked?” said Miranda. “He throws the rope over the beam, anchors one end, and then—standing in midair above the chair—manages to tie the other end around his neck?”
Ned had no answer to this.
“But there was no one else in the room,” Holly insisted. “I tried the windows. Those iron bars won’t budge, and the glass hasn’t been removed or tampered with. No one tied that rope around DePoy’s neck after he died, Doc. It’s impossible.”
“Impossible or not, I’m just telling you what I see here. We got a team coming in from Portland tomorrow. They’ll do a full postmortem. We’ll keep our guy on ice till they get here, but my gut is telling me he died of asphyxiation, but not due to strangulation. The rope didn’t even crush his larynx. It was looped under his jaw. A guy might even survive that. But he didn’t. No bruising on the face, no injuries to the head or hands that I could see, so most likely it wasn’t an epileptic asphyxiation. Not anaphylactic, either; his throat would be swollen like a bullfrog if that was the case. Nope. He choked on something.L’ama’thut cun,”Doc said, looking down upon the deceased soul. “Safe journey, wherever it takes you.”
