Geometry

Chapter 3

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Early the next morning, Ray surveyed the crime scene and flinched. "Jeez, Frase, crime scenes always suck but this one takes the cake."

"I find it hard to disagree with that assessment, Ray," Fraser admitted. "I'm glad we left Diefenbaker in the car." Parking garages weren't known for their warm and homey feeling and yellow and black crime scene tape always lent a macabre aspect to any place, but this was almost unbelievable.

"Yeah..." Ray knelt down and scratched at the coating of dried blood that extended in an irregular blotch nearly forty feet across.

The place was grim yesterday, with detectives questioning everyone and the meat wagon loading up, flatfoots chasing off the press crawling all over the place every five minutes, but this morning, empty and echoing, it was just this side of surreal. It made Ray's finely honed street senses jumpy as hell.

Opposed to the usual single white corpse outline left by the forensic team, there were seven separate smaller outlines showing where the various body parts were discovered. A few outlines could be matched to specific body parts, but the rest were irregular blobs, without any defining features.

Ray shuddered. "This guy was hacked to pieces, Frase. Glad we brought the crime scene photos the prelim team took, or we'd never know what half these... parts... were."

"The preliminary autopsy report specifies complete exsanguination as well as dismemberment?" Fraser asked; kneeling down beside Ray and cocking his head slightly to assess the patterns of movement left behind in the dried bloodstains. Ray had time to review the preliminary autopsy information on the case while Fraser checked in at the Consulate but while his partner had brought the preliminary file along for him to review, Fraser hadn't had time to read it completely on the trip over.

"Yep. Hardly any blood left in the... pieces... at all."

Fraser suppressed his own discomfort- aware it would only agitate Ray further. "What state was the body in when it was first discovered?"

"Body was almost run over by the woman who works the early-morning shift. The garage is closed from midnight to six am. She unlocked the front gate at quarter 'til, pulled her car in to start the day, and nearly drove into this mess."

Odd, the crime scene was in the lowest level, not street level. "Why would she park down here, Ray? The station she would work at is up two levels and clear across the building."

Ray rolled his eyes. "The good parking spots are for the paying customers, Frase. Employees get stuck with the ones nobody wants. That's why there's nothing on the security cameras, this area's in a blind spot."

Fraser frowned disapprovingly. "That's unsafe, Ray. Don't the attendants work alone?"

"No sh... no kidding, Frase. Heck, the building owner'll be lucky if the city doesn't pull his business license for this mess. And yeah, the staff sits in that little plexi box at the entrance gate; takes payments and monitors the security cameras. Kind of a no-brainer job, really. Strictly minimum-wage stuff."

Fraser's natural concern for people immediately came to the fore. "Is the woman all right?"

"Sorta. She quit on the spot after calling the police and the Channel Six news hotline, and she was pretty freaked out, but she's okay physically. The news van got here first 'cause the Channel Six building's only four blocks away. That's how they got that damn footage that's got the city in an uproar."