"What did you expect?"
"I dunno, maybe a crime scene that looked like a crime scene?"
"That fact that a crime occurred makes it a de facto crime scene."
"Yeah, but this looks like your apartment."
"Marty, it is my apartment. These are photos of the crime scene."
"Oh, yeah. Then I guess the photos look like a crime scene."
"Your genius never ceases to amaze me."
"Well, that's why I'm a detective. What're your thoughts?"
"Incident is pretty straightforward. Vic has a bloody wound to the back of the head. No obvious trauma to the rest of the body. Guess he could also have been suffocated while unconscious, but he definitely wasn't strangled. And he was a virgin."
"How can you tell?"
"The T-shirt."
"Oh, yeah."
"What about you?"
There was a pause on the other side of the table.
"Well, guess I'm going OK. Sleeping reasonably. Been a bit constipated this week."
"Marty, what the hell? I'm not asking you about your personal life!"
Marty seemed somewhat let down. "Oh," he said despondently.
"I'm asking if you've found something else out since you are, by your own admission, a detective. Although heavens knows why."
"Yeah, Mark Stevens it seems is just your run-of-the-mill guy. Works- er, worked, in R&D at Finkelstein's Fine Foods."
"Don't they make food?"
"Don't they make food?"
"How'd you know?" asked Marty, without any trace of either irony or sarcasm.
"Lucky guess."
"Well, he worked in the cheese laboratory. Some advanced researcher in fermentation procedures. Who'd want to kill a guy who makes cheese?"
"I dunno. Some cracker?"
"Funny."
Looking at the scene together, there still wasn't much to go on. Dirt car park behind a comic shop, well travelled, unobtrusive, no direct line of sight. There were no signs of a struggle, which suggested that the Vic knew his attackers and didn't see the hit coming.
I mulled over things. "Did you speak to the Vic's family?" I asked Marty.
"Hasn't got any. Mother and father died, only child, no significant others. We did speak to his workplace, but they just said he'd stepped out to lunch and hadn't come back. Didn't say anything dramatic, and he usually hits the comics shop and then gets a hamburger. Or, y'know, twelve."
"I wouldn't have guessed. Guess that's why they didn't try to stab him. You'd need a machete to get halfway through the guts."
Angles and motive take time and deep thought to properly understand and get a picture of, but this was a no-go from the start. No names, no witnesses, no family, no motive, no chilli fries. I didn't mind running up a few hours on the Department's account, but this was ridiculous.
In fact, there was nothing at all to go on. Nothing, that is, unless you had in your possession a pair of cracked spectacles with the name Edward Pennington engraved in the side. It was the only solid lead and I could pursue it in my own time and fudge the details later. And convincing Marty that I had just stumbled upon the information- as opposed to interfering with a crime scene- would be relatively simple, since during one interrogation he had asked a suspect who was covered in blood and had defensive wounds on his hands whether or not he had committed the crime, and had let him go when the guy had answered that had cut his hands repeatedly cooking dinner and had wiped them on his clothes because he hadn't wanted to ruin the roast.
"I'm thinking of checking out the Edward Pennington angle," Marty said.
I kept my face carefully deadpan. "Who's Edward Pennington?"
"Apparently, some guy he'd been trading comics with online. We had a look through his computer at home, and it was the only thing he really did. That, and argue with strangers about whether Captain America was cooler than Wolverine."
"Was he?"
"Of course not. Everyone knows Deadpool is the the coolest."
"Marty, when did you last have a date with a woman?"
"Last week."
"Pay-per-view websites don't count."
"Oh, then six months?"
"So who is Pennington?"
"Dunno, I've got the boys back at precinct looking into him. They argued about superhero biology and effects of third-party introduced mutation strains versus inherent mutation on long-term adaptation to changing environmental conditions, so I got the impression that he's got a research background too. But we have to find him first, and then see what we get out him."
Marty's phone rang. He glanced at it, picked it up, and answered. I looked back down at the photos again, inwardly cursing that I wasn't going to be able to crack this part alone and take the credit. Stared, willing the scene to reveal something else useful. An empty site. A lone corpse. No clear footprints or tyre tracks. The standard-issue police cruiser the photographer had driven up.
The reflection of someone in the window.
I slid the photo towards me. Was it the photographer? No, I knew Becky, because the restraining order didn't run out for another three months. It was someone else.
Black trenchcoat. Blonde hair. Sunglasses. The woman in black.
I could hear Marty's conversation in the background.
"Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I'll be right there."
He turned to me.
"Well, we've found Pennington."
"Let's go interview him, then," I replied, my eyes still lingering on the photograph.
"Sorry, Knut, you can't interview him."
"Why the hell not?"
"'Cos he's dead."
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