The Eternity Project Read online

  ‘Is that right?’ Donovan replied. ‘Well, I tell you what. If you can explain this crime scene, then I’ll talk to you about Lymes. Deal?’

  Jarvis gestured to the warehouse. ‘Deal. Something here not making sense to the CSI team?’

  Donovan introduced his team to them: Karina Thorne, a young-looking detective, Glen Ryan, whom Ethan quickly deduced was a former soldier, and Neville Jackson, an African-American detective.

  ‘Got ourselves a double homicide,’ Donovan explained.

  ‘What’s the big deal?’ Lopez asked.

  Donovan looked at Lopez quizzically for a moment. ‘Nicola Lopez, you say? Why do I know that name?

  ‘Metropolitan Police Department,’ Lopez replied, ‘over in DC. I worked there for several years.’

  Donovan nodded slowly as though trying to recall something. ‘Didn’t you blow some kind of corruption scandal in DC a couple of years back? Got yourself a hell of a reputation?’

  ‘Reputation is one word,’ Lopez replied with an easy smile, ‘infamy’s another.’

  Donovan grinned back at her and then looked across at the warehouses that were now ringed with bright yellow police-cordon tapes. A forensics vehicle was parked nearby, and a small cluster of construction workers from nearby buildings were watching the police with interest.

  ‘The feds would have been our first port of call here anyway so it’s helpful you turned up,’ Donovan said finally to Jarvis, ‘because what we’ve got in there sure as hell doesn’t make much sense to me.’

  Lopez led the way. ‘Let’s go see what the fuss is about. You got up real early for a double homicide.’

  Karina Thorne rested one hand on Lopez’s arm as she passed, her features creased with concern. ‘It’s a bad one.’

  Ethan glanced at Lopez as they followed Donovan’s team across to the warehouse entrance, the two uniformed cops standing guard outside parting to let them through. Ethan whispered to Jarvis as they walked.

  ‘What’s the story with these guys?’

  ‘Call came in,’ Jarvis replied. ‘These guys called the FBI about the killing of Aaron Lymes and the feds followed the new protocol and sent it on to us right away. We’ll chat with them and find out what we can about Lymes’ death, see if it yields any clues to Joanna’s involvement or whereabouts.’

  Lopez moved ahead alongside Karina Thorne. ‘Forensics done a sweep yet?’

  ‘All cleared,’ Karina confirmed. ‘Donovan got here first, then Nev Jackson worked the scene with the CSI guys. Not that they found much.’

  Ethan heard their voices echo as they entered the cavernous warehouse. Shafts of pale morning light beamed weakly through windows thick with grime. The warehouse floor was stained with thousands of bird droppings and coated with dust, through which he could see several rows of footprints ahead of them that wound a trail back and forth toward the very rear of the warehouse. More faint footprints were to either side, where the CSI teams had walked around the originals to avoid contaminating them.

  ‘Guns kill, then,’ Lopez surmised. ‘No contact.’

  ‘No gunshots,’ Donovan said over his shoulder at her, ‘not with resulting wounds anyway.’

  ‘Blades?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘You’ll have to see it for yourself , ’ Donovan replied.

  Ethan followed them to the rear of the warehouse, but, like Lopez, he came up short long before he reached the corner where the forensics team were still dusting down for prints and evidence around the scene of the crime.

  The trail of footprints in the dust led to a scattering of more footprints, appearing to move in random directions all in the same area. Clearly, whoever had entered the warehouse had made their way to this corner before doing something on the spot.

  Whatever that something had been, it hadn’t ended well for the two victims now lying within ten feet of each other on the dusty warehouse floor. Ethan looked down at the body of one man lying on his side, his torso ending in a bloodied mess of congealing intestines, entrails and blood stains smearing the ground.

  ‘Jesus,’ Lopez murmured. ‘Where’s the rest of him?’

  ‘That’s where this starts to get interesting,’ Donovan said, and gestured across to Ethan’s right.

  Ethan turned and saw some fifty feet away another smaller cordon of police tape and a lone forensics officer working on two long objects lying on the ground. Between the two locations was a faint splatter of blood droplets scattered in a thin line across the ground.

  ‘That’s his legs?’ Jarvis asked in amazement.

  ‘That’s not all,’ Donovan replied and gestured the other body nearby. ‘This guy doesn’t have a mark on him. We’ll have to have it confirmed via autopsy but there are no visible wounds, puncture marks, contusions or any other visible sign of death.’

  Ethan looked at the second corpse. The body was on its knees, crouched over with its elbows resting on the ground and the hands clasped across the chest. The dead man’s face was pinned against the ground and locked in a gruesome rigor of agony, the jaw open and the eyes wide, the tongue hanging limp and dry between the lips.

  ‘Looks a little like a heart attack,’ Lopez suggested. ‘He still in rigor mortis?’

  ‘Coming out of it as we speak,’ Donovan confirmed, ‘but for some reason, he’s still stiff as a board. Only thing the coroner can confirm at this moment is that he died in that position. Liver mortis shows he hasn’t moved since his heart stopped beating.’

  Ethan looked from one body to the next. ‘Were any weapons recovered from the scene?’

  ‘A pistol,’ Donovan replied. ‘Nine millimeter, an old Russian make, apparently.’

  ‘Makarov?’ Ethan hazarded.

  ‘How did you know?’ Donovan asked.

  ‘Former standard Soviet sidearm,’ Ethan explained. ‘Very stable weapon, easily obtained on the black market, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union. Were these two guys criminals?’

  ‘Ethan was an officer in the United States Marines,’ Jarvis explained to Donovan, ‘served with me on a couple of tours.’

  Donovan nodded, looking at Ethan with renewed respect. ‘Connor Reece and Wesley Hicks. Local hoods and petty thieves, not much between them but jail-time. They were known to us but didn’t figure much on the bigger scale of things.’

  ‘They do now,’ Lopez pointed out, ‘for somebody at least. Who the hell would rip a man in half just for the hell of it?’

  ‘They did more than that,’ Donovan said. ‘Coroner gave the body a quick once over and said that virtually every bone in his body was broken, and that it likely happened before he died of massive hemorrhage.’

  ‘Gangland beating got out of hand?’ Karina wondered out loud. ‘Maybe they got in with bigger fish and upset them.’

  Lopez shook her head slowly. ‘Doesn’t make any sense. This guy’s been ripped apart but there’s no sign of any power tools, weapons, nothing. How’d they do it?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Donovan replied. ‘Biggest problem we’ve got here is that both men were obviously murdered, yet the only weapon on the scene cannot have been used to commit the crime.’

  Ethan frowned. ‘You said that there were gunshots though.’

  Donovan nodded, and his grizzled features seemed to pale a little. ‘Five shots, all closely spaced.’

  Lopez blinked, looking around her. ‘Where’s the mark then?’

  Donovan slowly lifted his hand and pointed straight up.

  Ethan craned his neck back and looked up to the warehouse ceiling, forty or more feet above their heads. There, needle-thin shafts of light pierced the dusty air in the warehouse from five tiny holes in the roof. It took Ethan only a moment to realize that there were no walkways, no beams and no girders across which a potential killer could have been hiding when the shots were fired.

  ‘That’s weird,’ Karina murmured.

  ‘It gets even weirder,’ Donovan said. ‘Our heart-attack victim has powder residue on his right hand, suggesting that he fired the shots. But
both of their prints were on the weapon. So he probably didn’t kill his companion here and was instead firing at something else. Judging by what happened to his friend, we think that he was trying to defend himself against someone.’

  ‘Or,’ Lopez said, finding a more comfortable foundation for thought, ‘this was drugs related. Maybe they were both high, got spooked into shooting at shadows.’

  Donovan looked at Lopez. ‘Drugs and shadows don’t normally tear people in half.’

  ‘No,’ Lopez agreed, not bridling at the accusation of stupidity. ‘But there’s nothing to say that these two people died at exactly the same moment. The man who is in half may have died here first. His companion comes to find him, panics at what he finds and then starts shooting wildly. Maybe has a heart attack. He could have had an existing condition that made him vulnerable to cardiac arrhythmia, common in cocaine users.’

  Donovan conceded the point with an inclination of his head, but Ethan had already considered something else.

  ‘The answers may lie in finding out why these two were here at all,’ he said as something on the floor near the bodies caught his eye.

  He carefully skirted the nearest corpse and knelt down alongside several deep grooves in the warehouse floor.

  ‘Who called this in?’ he asked, glancing up at Karina Thorne.

  ‘Site manager,’ Karina replied. ‘Found the gate chains broke and the warehouse door unlocked when he showed up this morning to open the site.’

  ‘I got here first,’ Donovan added, ‘and called the team in as soon as I saw these guys lying here.’

  Ethan gestured down to the grooves in the floor.

  ‘This warehouse is old and covered in dust from lack of use, but these grooves are fresh. These boys came in here looking for something, found it, and then got hit by someone. Whatever they found is now gone, taken by whoever walked out of here. Those footprint trails in the dust are moving both in and out of the warehouse.’

  Donovan shrugged. ‘The grooves in the flooring could be unrelated, maybe residue from recent storage operations. The footprints are interesting but still don’t explain cause of death.’

  Ethan stood up and looked about him.

  ‘Cause of death is for the coroner,’ Ethan said. ‘My guess is that the footprints in the dust trail leading to this spot will hold some answers. Have forensics take a closer look and try to figure out who walked out of here last, then have the site manager give up any documents regarding users of this building in the last six months. If anyone’s there it might be a lead, but this warehouse looks like it’s been abandoned for a few years. Perfect place to hide things to be recovered at a later date.’

  Karina Thorne frowned at Ethan. ‘To do that, you’d need access,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Yes, you would,’ Ethan agreed as he jabbed a thumb in the direction of the entrance door. ‘Somebody had to cut the chains to the gate to get into the compound but there’s no forced entry to the warehouse itself. Who would own one key but not both?’

  ‘Maybe they picked the lock?’ Glen Ryan hazarded.

  ‘You see the size of it?’ Lopez challenged him. ‘It’s turn-of-the-century and no evidence of tampering. They got in without a problem.’

  ‘And with an empty warehouse inside, they had to be looking for something that somebody else had already left here. The question is: What?’

  Donovan nodded, then cast a last glance at the grooves, before he turned to Karina.

  ‘What do you think?

  Karina shook her head, mystified by what she was looking at but, more, Ethan suspected, by the lack of evidence to support what had actually occurred.

  ‘There’s not much that we can do here until forensics finish their work and the medical examiner can get toxicology reports on the two victims,’ she said. ‘Right now, I don’t have any explanation for how they could have died this way.’

  Ethan glanced up at the five tiny bullet holes piercing the ceiling high above.

  ‘Somebody does,’ he said finally. ‘Ultra-violent killings like these, with people torn in half, are usually the preserve of organized crime syndicates like the Mafia. But they don’t bother with technical skill – they’d have just used a chainsaw or something. These guys were in fear of their lives from someone who had managed to get above them.’

  Donovan turned away from the grisly remains. ‘Either way, we need to figure this one out and fast. If the perpetrator strikes again, it could cause a media frenzy. I don’t want them championing a vigilante killer.’

  Donovan strode away, leaving Ethan and Lopez staring at the bodies.

  ‘Hell of a way to go,’ Karina uttered.

  ‘They say crime doesn’t pay,’ Lopez shrugged.

  Ethan glanced up again at the holes in the ceiling and saw a shadow hovering over them. As soon as he focused on it, the shadow whipped aside and vanished. In the empty warehouse, the sound of soft footfalls rushed across the warehouse roof.

  ‘We’re being watched!’ Ethan shouted, and whirled for the exit.

  14

  Ethan sprinted past Donovan, who turned in surprise as he shouted out his warning to the police officer. The footfalls across the roof had been heading in the opposite direction to the warehouse exit, and Ethan already realized that he would be lucky to catch whoever had been watching their every move.

  ‘Call for back-up!’ he yelled to Jarvis as he ran through the warehouse door and vaulted down the steps. Lopez was in hot pursuit, with Karina Thorne close behind her.

  Ethan turned right, guessing that the mysterious figure would probably drop down into the haulage yard behind the warehouse. He had seen trucks parked there, some loading and unloading inside a small parking lot with maybe a dozen vehicles.

  ‘Escape route?’ he yelled back at Lopez and Karina, who were also running hard.

  ‘Anywhere off 26th Avenue!’ Karina yelled back. ‘Probably 4th onto 27th and they’ll be gone!’

  Ethan mentally pictured 26th Avenue running parallel to them to the south as he reached the back of the warehouse and slowed. A high chain-link fence lined the rear of the lot, shipping containers stacked up on the other side. Ethan’s practiced eye scanned the fence line and saw a portion of the fence quivering from where it had been recently scaled.

  He ran hard across the lot and leaped high up onto the fence, his sneakers finding purchase and his fingers gripping the thin metal links as he scrambled up over the top and jumped down onto the roof of a container that was slick with water and filth.

  A man was sprinting across the parking lot ahead and below him, dressed in black and with a hooded top concealing his features. Light brown boots splashed through puddles of icy water as they fled.

  ‘He’s heading for 4th!’ he yelled back at Karina.

  The cop grabbed her radio as she ran and began directing Donovan as Ethan leaped down off the container and rolled onto the cold asphalt, Lopez landing alongside him and setting off like a scalded cat.

  Ethan kept running but moved out to the right, hoping to cut the man off as they dashed out of the shipping yard and down 4th while Lopez stayed behind them. He dashed down 3rd Street, a hundred and fifty yards straight, his chest heaving and his heart thundering as he reached the end and turned left onto 26th Avenue.

  He had almost made it to the Shop Smart on the corner of 4th when a small, battered-looking gray Pontiac screeched across the intersection in front of him and vanished away to the south. Lopez clattered to a halt on the sidewalk, heaving for breath as she saw him and shook her head.

  ‘Car was parked on 4th,’ she gasped. ‘No chance.’

  Donovan’s car swerved out of 3rd Street behind them, and the cop pulled in to the sidewalk. ‘Where’d they go?’

  ‘South,’ Ethan replied breathlessly, ‘gray sixties Pontiac, pretty rough-looking.’

  Donovan picked up his radio and called in a description for patrol vehicles to keep an eye open for the Pontiac, as Karina jogged up alongside them, her labored breath condens
ing in clouds on the cold air.

  ‘Who the hell was that?’ she asked.

  ‘Probably our perpetrator,’ Ethan replied, getting his breath back. ‘Killers often return to the scene of the crime.’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ Donovan said, getting out of his car. ‘Unless they’re serial killers looking to get off on how horrible their crimes are or how stumped detectives are in trying to solve them.’

  ‘You think we’ve got a serial killer on our hands?’ Karina asked. ‘That’s a big leap from the double homicide of two low-life criminals.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Donovan corrected her. ‘It’s not likely to have been the media, and who the hell else would get all the way up on top of that building to spy on us?’

  Karina shot Ethan and Lopez a curious glance before she replied: ‘I’ll have somebody get up there and take a look, okay? Maybe see if there were any security cameras running, anything that can pick up their trail or identify them.’

  Donovan nodded, got back into his car and drove off into the flow of morning traffic. Karina waited until he was gone before confronting Ethan and Lopez.

  ‘You want to tell me who you think that was on the roof ?’

  Ethan raised a placatory hand. ‘I don’t know, okay? Nobody’s informed the media and they’re unlikely to stumble on this investigation by chance way out here on the docks.’

  ‘Then, who?’ Karina demanded. ‘You guys turn up here and suddenly there are weird people in black hoods hanging around.’

  ‘We don’t know who it was,’ Lopez replied. ‘It’s likely that it was somebody snooping around the crime scene for kicks.’

  Ethan turned away from Karina in time to see Jarvis’s black SUV sweep through the intersection and turn toward them. It performed a graceful U-turn across the street, its thick black tires squealing as it did so, and pulled into the sidewalk.

  Jarvis climbed out. ‘You find them?’ he asked.

  ‘They got away,’ Lopez replied. ‘Donovan’s on the case right now.’