Chapter 66
Seven and a half hours later—hungry, road-weary, and with a
set of badly frayed nerves—Luna Faye finally pulled off Route 40 and arrived in
Brownsville, Pennsylvania. She drove as fast as she could through the little
town towards Thomas Tutter’s house.
The trip took her longer than she had anticipated. One
factor she had failed to take into consideration was the weather—she ran into
heavy snow about the time she passed through Morgantown, PA, and the white
stuff had been coming down relentlessly ever since, big, heavy wet flakes that
swirled in front of the car’s headlights and reduced visibility.
When she finally turned down Water Street, she prayed that
Tutter was all right.
“Oh, no,” she moaned, slowing the car.
There were two police cruisers and an ambulance in front of
Tutter’s house. The ambulance was parked in the driveway, right behind Tutter’s
SUV, its rear doors closed. The strobe lights on all vehicles were off, and the
vehicles were empty. Even though it was dark outside now, she could see that no
cops or paramedics were inside them.
What the hell
happened? she thought, trying to suppress her worst fear. Namely, that what
was left of Thomas Tutter splattered all over the living room wall by several
blasts of a sawed-off shotgun.
Luna’s heart started thumping as she pulled her car over
behind the cop car. She quickly got out, glancing at the side of police
vehicle, which was already piled with snow—it had to have been parked there a
couple hours.
FAYETTE COUNTY SHERIFF, it said.
Now she noticed a few neighbors across the street, huddled
together in the cold, looking on, vapor pluming from their mouths. She could
see the silhouette of a policeman in a ranger hat standing up on Tutter’s
porch, the glow of a cigarette moving in the dim light. She heard the crackle
of a police radio that must have been on his belt.
As she headed up the walk, she also noticed that the front
yard’s recent snow was littered with fresh tracks, some of which led to the
rear of the ambulance. Whatever had gone down here, it was long over.
“What’s the story?” Luna said, almost with a gasp, as she
stepped up onto the porch.
“Hey, you can’t come...” the cop began, but Luna already
pulled out her ID. The officer was so young he had a few pimples on his face. When
he saw the gold shield his eyes widened a little.
“U.S. Secret Service,” Luna said authoritatively.
The kid suddenly straightened his shoulders, glanced down
at the cigarette in his hand as if he thought it might look unprofessional, but
having nothing he could do with it, lowered his hand again.
“What’s going on?” she repeated anxiously, looking at the
half-open front door. She could hear voices inside.
“Old man who lives here killed himself.”
Luna hadn’t expected that. “Who’s in charge here?”
“Jimbo, uh, I mean Detective Skinner. James Skinner.” The
young cop cocked his head towards the door. “He’s in the kitchen.”
Luna nodded and entered the foyer. The voices were coming
from the kitchen, and Luna headed towards them, stepping over the same set of dumbbells
she had less than a week ago.
“Okay, that’s it,” a man said, and just as Luna reached the
kitchen door, two paramedics stepped out. They glanced curiously at her and
moved aside as she went by.
When she entered the kitchen, she found a man of no more
than thirty years of age sitting at Tutter’s dining table, filling out a
report. He didn’t look much more experienced than the young cop outside. He was
dressed in plainclothes, jeans and a sweater. His black hair was neatly combed
to one side, but there was a day or two’s worth of stubble on his face.
His gloves and wool
hat were stacked neatly in one of the empty chairs. On the table in front of
him was an open wallet, with a driver’s license, credit cards, and other
documents spread out around it. The spare key Luna had found out on the porch
was there, too—she recognized it.
Luna also noticed that the cellar door was wide open, the
light coming up from the basement. The window across the kitchen was also open,
cold air blowing into the room, along with a few snowflakes. The detective had
apparently opened it to air it out—Luna thought she faintly smelled the foul but
familiar odor of a decomposing body.
She patiently watched him for a moment—he was so involved
in his work he didn’t even notice her.
She cleared her throat. “Excuse me, are you Detective
Skinner?”
He finally turned and looked at her, then frowned. “Yeah, I’m
Skinner. Who the hell are you and how did you get in here?” He turned and
glanced irritably towards the front door. “Dammit, Mark, I told you not to—”
Luna flashed her badge and identified herself.
Skinner sat a little straighter in the chair, looking her
up and down with a confused expression. “Secret Service?”
“What exactly happened here, Detective?”
He motioned towards the open cellar door. “The man who
lived here committed suicide.” He looked at the report he was filling out and
read from it. “A Thomas James Tutter, sixty-seven years old.”
“How?”
“Hanged himself down in the basement.” The detective let
out a disgusted-sounding chuckle. “You should see the shit this guy has down
there, real sicko! I’ll bet when we run his prints we find out he’s some kind
of serial...is he of interest to the Secret Service? Why are you here?”
Luna wanted to avoid this question as long as possible. “Where
is the body?”
“Already loaded into the meat wagon. Took them a while to
get him down.”
At that moment, Luna could hear the rumble of the ambulance
engine starting up.
“Who reported it?”
“Next-door neighbor. She noticed the same lights on for two
nights in a row, noticed he hadn’t been out, knocked on the door a few times
today, finally called it in. I happen to live pretty close by, so on my way
home from work I stopped to investigate. I really didn’t expect...” He pointed
to the table. “Found that spare key out on the porch.”
“Any sign of forced entry?”
Skinner frowned. “Forced entry? The guy hanged himself, it’s
an open and shut. No sign of anyone else around, or foul play.”
“You didn’t notice anything unusual downstairs?”
The detective shook his head, looking down at his
half-written report. “No, nothing. Except...”
“Except what?”
“Well, he hung himself with a trash bag. Which is kind of
strange, considering all the ropes and chains and bondage stuff he has down
there. What the hell is going on? Can you please—”
“Mind if I take a look?” Luna said, and headed towards the
cellar door. The light was already on.
As she descended the stairs, she did so carefully, looking
at the steps for any clues, but they were wet from the tromping of the medics
and police with their snowy boots.
When she reached the bottom step, her nostrils flared—the
foul odor was much stronger.
“What was he hanging from?” she asked.
“That water pipe over there,” Skinner said, using his pen
to point to a rafter across the room.
Luna carefully stepped towards it, glancing down at the
concrete floor of the dimly lit basement, watching her step to make sure she
didn’t contaminate anything that might yield information.
The water pipe ran directly above the worn,
leather-upholstered spanking bench.
“Where, exactly?”
“His feet were hanging right about here,” Skinner said,
indicating a space about a foot from the end of the bench. “He must have stood
up on this...whatever you call it—”
“Spanking bench,” Luna said.
“Yeah.” Skinner gave her a curious look as if he wondered
how she knew such terminology. “And then he wrapped the trash bag around his
neck, and the pipe, and just stepped off into space.” Skinner made a choking
noise in his throat.
“Did you take any photos?”
“Yeah,” he said. “On my phone.”
“Let me see them.”
Skinner regarded Luna for moment as if he really didn’t
like taking orders from her, but then again he was only a county sheriff’s
office detective and she was a federal agent. He drew the phone from his coat
pocket, pulled up the photos, and handed it to her.
There were three pictures, taken with the flash on, from
different angles. As Luna scrolled through them, she tried not to wince. Tutter’s
lifeless body hung there, stark naked, looking much the same as Patrick Brogan’s
had in the photos from the medical examiner’s office, his head lolled to the
side, his tongue protruding between his lips. Too much so, she thought.
“Where’s the trash can liner?” Luna said.
“In the evidence bag,” Skinner said, patting the front of
his coat.
“You didn’t find anything else?” Before the detective could
answer, something caught her eye under the spanking bench. She pulled out her
flashlight and squatted, shining the beam on it.
Rolled up against the rear leg of the bench was what looked
like an empty toilet paper roller.
Luna pulled out her pen and carefully lifted the cardboard
roller up close to her face, shining the flashlight beam on it.
One end was cut off clean, and the other end was slightly
ragged, just like the one left behind in Patrick Brogan’s cell. And just using
the flashlight, she could see that tiny bits of plastic were stuck to the
adhesive.
“Bag this, too.”
Skinner frowned, squinting at the benign-looking cardboard cylinder.
“Why?” He shrugged. “The freak probably used a lot of toilet paper down here to
wipe up all the blood and other stuff from—”
“It’s not from a roll of toilet paper. Bag it.”
Puzzled, Skinner did as she told him, opening the bag for
her while she dropped it in. “If not toilet paper, then what the hell was on it”
Well, Luna thought, it’s time to finally open the can of
worms—there was no way around it now. Better to tell some young relatively
inexperienced county detective than the Pittsburgh police.
She summarized what she knew about Thomas Tutter. “If I
were you, I would designate this as a crime scene before it gets any more
contaminated. Call your CSI unit over here right now.”
Skinner nodded, looking back at the spanking bench, trying
to take everything in. “There’s one thing that doesn’t make sense.”
“What’s that?”
He held up the evidence bag with the cardboard roller
inside. “Why would Hendrix use the same M.O. to kill Tutter that they used to
kill the guy in jail? If he didn’t want Tutter to talk, he could have just shot
him or something. Doing it this way, he left his signature all over it.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what he wanted.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a message.”
“To who?”
“To me,” Luna said darkly.
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