He carried a pair of telescopic lightpole stands—each of which had two halogen floodlamps burning brightly at the top and a power cord snaking back up the steps—and a telescopic tripod.
The tech reached the bottom of the steps. He then set up the stands at opposite ends of the basement, adjusting the brilliant floodlamps so that the entire room was more or less evenly lit. Next he set up the tripod, and the tech with the camera walked to it. The camera image shook, then became stabilized as it was mounted on the tripod. The camera’s lens was adjusted so that the entire room was visible.
The brilliant halogen lights clearly showed all the incredible filth. There were clothes scattered everywhere, pile after pile of pants and shirts and more, and stacks of suitcases. The walls were mostly bare wooden studs.
And in the middle of it all: a stack of wooden pallets with a blood-soaked, torn mattress on top. On the wall behind it, the exposed brick and the wooden studs were covered in blood and brain splatter that resembled some sort of morbid Rorschach inkblot test.
“Well, there’s where Kendrik Mays went off to meet his maker,” Harris said.
“More like to meet Satan,” Payne said, shaking his head out of disgust. “Though this place looks like hell on earth. No wonder Shauna Mays looked and smelled so damn awful.”
“Someone busted all the Sheetrock off the walls,” Rapier said.
“Probably to pull out the electrical wiring,” Harris said. “Pretty common if it’s copper wiring. And they also rip the copper from air-conditioning units to sell it as scrap.”
Payne then remembered thinking, after Shauna Mays had said crack houses didn’t have clocks, that everything not nailed down got sold for drug money.
And here’s proof that even things that are nailed down get hocked.
Unbelievable. . . .
“And all the suitcases and clothes?” Rapier asked.
“From home invasions,” Harris said. “Those wheeled suitcases make it easier to haul off all the loot. The clothes cover up whatever they stole, and they’re easy to sell, too.”
“They don’t sell the suitcases?”
“Some are sold, some reused. Who knows about the rest. Maybe it’s hard to hock them if they have someone’s name written on them in Magic Marker.” Harris shrugged. “Hell if I know. Hard to say what dopeheads think—or don’t think, as the case may be.”
Harris then pointed to a far corner of the basement. “Is that what I think it is?”
“A shit bucket,” Payne said disgustedly.
The first tech, who had carried the video camera down, came into the frame. He held a professional Nikon digital camera with a squat zoom lens and an enormous flash strobe.
They watched as he began putting out the four-inch-high inverted-V evidence markers. The first yellow plastic marker bore the black numeral “01.” It was placed in the middle of the bloody mattress, next to a pair of torn women’s panties. He then raised the Nikon to his eye and took a series of four photographs of the panties and marker, overlapping the angles of the shots so that later a computer could create a three-dimensional rendering of the evidence.
A couple minutes later, after repeating the process with three other markers, the tech bent over in a corner of the basement. He placed an inverted-V marker bearing the numeral “05” next to a shiny black metal object that was on a dirt-encrusted, sweat-stained T-shirt.
“It’s a pistol,” Kerry Rapier said.
The tech raised the camera and popped four overlapping images of the pistol.
Then he reached down with his gloved hand and carefully picked it up.
Now they had a better view of it on the TV monitor.
“A snub-nosed revolver,” Rapier added. “Looks like maybe an S&W Model 49?”
“Uh-uh,” Payne said, shaking his head. “The Bodyguard has a hammer shroud. And that hammer is not only exposed, it’s cocked back.”
“Then it’s a Chief’s Special,” Rapier said with more conviction. “At least both are .38 caliber.”
“Yeah,” Payne said absently.
They watched as the tech, with what obviously was practiced skill, put the thumb of his gloved right hand on the knurled back of the hammer and, keeping a steady pressure with the thumb, squeezed the trigger with his index finger. The released hammer rotated forward—but slowly, the pressure from the thumb preventing it from falling fast enough to fire off a possible live round.
Then he thumbed the release that allowed the cylinder to swing open and carefully removed the round that had been under the hammer. It was a live one. He shot another series of four photographs of the