Walling and I got out and joined Backus and Thompson and we were led to a rear door of the mortuary. Inside we stepped into a large room with white tile running up to the ceiling. There were two stainless-steel tables for bodies in the center with overhead spray hoses, and stainless-steel counters and equipment against three walls. A group of five men were in the room and as they moved to greet us I could see the body on the far table. I assumed it to be Orsulak, though there was no obvious sign of damage from a gunshot to the head. The body was naked and someone had taken a yard-long length of paper towel from the roll on the counter and placed it across the dead cop’s waist to cover the genitals. The suit Orsulak would wear to the grave was on a hanger on a hook on the far wall.
Handshakes were passed all around between us and the living cops. Thompson was directed to the body and he carried his case over and went to work examining it.
“I don’t think you’ll get anything we don’t already have,” said the one called Grayson, who was in charge of the investigation for the locals. He was a stocky man with an assured and good-natured demeanor. He was deeply tanned, as were the other locals.
“We don’t, either,” said Walling, quick with the politically correct response. “You’ve been over him. Now he’s been washed and readied.”
“But we need to go through the motions,” Backus said.
“Why don’t you folks tell us what you’re working?” Grayson asked. “Maybe we can make some sense out of this.”
“Fair enough,” Backus said.
As Backus gave an abbreviated report on the Poet investigation, I watched Thompson do his work. He was at home with the body, not timid about touching, probing, squeezing. He spent a good amount of time running gloved fingers through the dead man’s gray-white hair and then carefully brushed it back in place with a comb from his own pocket. He then made a careful study of the mouth and throat, using a lighted magnifying glass. At one point he put the magnifier aside and pulled a camera from the toolbox. He took a photo of the throat, the flash drawing the attention of the cops assembled in the room.
“Just documentary photos, gentlemen,” Thompson said, not even looking up from his work.
Next he began studying the extremities of the body, first the right arm and hand, then the left. He used the magnifier again when he studied the left palm and fingers. Then he took two photos of the palm and two of the index finger. The cops in the room didn’t seem to make much of this, seemingly accepting his earlier statement that the photos were routine. But because I had noticed that he had not taken photos of the right hand, I knew he had found something of possible significance on the left. Thompson returned the camera to the box after placing the four new Polaroids it had spit out on the counter. He then continued his search of the body but took no more photos. He interrupted Backus to ask for help in turning the body over, then the head-to-foot search began again. I could see a patch of a dark, waxy material in the back of the dead man’s head and I assumed this to be where the exit wound was. Thompson didn’t bother taking a Polaroid of this.
Thompson finished with the body at about the same time Backus finished his briefing and I wondered if it hadn’t been planned that way.
“Anything?” Backus asked.
“Nothing of note, I don’t think,” Thompson said. “I’d like to review the autopsy if I could. Was the report brought along?”
“As requested,” Grayson said. “Here’s a copy of everything.”
He handed a file to him and Thompson stepped back with it to a counter where he opened it and began scanning pages.
“So, I’ve told you what I know, gentlemen,” Backus said. “Now I’d like to hear what it was about this case that dissuaded you from calling it suicide.”
“Well, I don’t think I was entirely dissuaded until I heard your story,” Grayson said. “Now I think this Poet fucker—excuse me, Agent Walling—is our guy. Anyway, we raised the question and then decided to go with a classification of homicide because of three reasons. One, when we found Bill, his hair was parted the wrong way. For twenty years he’d been coming in the office, his part is on the left. We find him dead and the part’s on the right. That was a little thing but there were two others and they add up. Next was the forensics. We had a guy swab the mouth for GSR so we could make a determination if the gun was in his mouth or held a few inches outside or what. We got the GSR but we also got some gun oil and a third substance that we haven’t been able to identify properly. Until we could explain it I wasn’t comfortable going suicide on this.”
“What can you tell me about the substance?” Thompson asked.
“Some kind of animal-fat extract. There’s pulverized silicon in it, too. It’s in the forensic report that you’ve got in that file, too.”
I thought I saw Thompson glance at Backus and then away, a tacit admission of knowledge.
“You know it?” Grayson asked, seeming to catch the impression.
“Not offhand,” Thompson said. “I’ll get the specifics from the report and have the lab in Quantico run it on the computer. I’ll let you know.”
“What was the third reason?” Backus asked, quickly leaving the subject.
“The third reason came from Jim Beam, Orsulak’s old partner. He’s retired now.”
“That’s his name, Jim Beam?” Walling asked.
“Yeah, the Beamer. He called me up from Tucson after he heard about Bill and asked if we’d recovered the slug. I said sure, we dug it out of the wall behind his head. Then he asked me if it was gold.”
“Gold?” Backus asked. “Real gold?”
“Yes. A golden bullet. I told him no, it was a lead slug like all the others in his clip. Like the one we dug out of the floor, too. We’d figured that the floor shot was the first one, a get-up-the-courage shot. But then Beamer told me it was no suicide, that it was murder.”
“And how did he know this?”
“He and Orsulak went back a lot of years and he knew that Orsulak occasionally. . . hell, there probably isn’t a single cop who hasn’t thought about it at one time or another.”
“Killing himself,” Walling said, a statement, not a question.
“Right. And Jim Beam tells me that one time Orsulak showed him this golden bullet that he got from somewhere, he didn’t know, a mail-order catalog or something. And he says to Beamer, ‘This is my golden parachute. When I can’t take it no more, this one’s for me.’ So what Beam was saying was no golden bullet, no suicide.”
“Did you find the golden bullet?” Walling asked.
“Yeah, we found it. After we talked to Beam we found it. It was in the drawer right next to his bed. Like it was kept nearby in case he ever needed it.”
“So that convinced you.”
“In totality, all three things leaned it way over toward homicide. Murder. But like I said, I wasn’t convinced of anything until you walked in here and told your story. Now I got a hard-on for this Poet the size of—sorry for the offense, Agent Walling.”
“None taken. We all have a hard-on for him. Was there a suicide note?”
“Yes, and that’s the thing that made it so hard for us to call it a homicide. There was a note and damn if it wasn’t in Bill’s writing.”