"What the hell happened?" Captain Rudy Olsen's voice could be heard above the babble as he strode into the waiting room. Sergeant Norm Haseejian broke away from a small group of uniformed officers and crossed towards him.
Shaking his head, the Armenian detective snapped his notebook shut. "I'm about to head over to the scene, just wanted to stop here first to find out what's going on. All we know so far is, Mike's in surgery, Steve is having his face put back together and no one has any idea why they were even there. As far as anyone knows, that location has no connection whatsoever to the case they were working on."
"How bad are they?"
"Well, from what we could find out from the ambulance guys, Mike took one large caliber bullet to the right shoulder and he lost a hell of a lot of blood; he was unconscious when they got there and he didn't wake up.
"Steve was badly beaten; even the guys that found him didn't recognize him. He lost consciousness at the scene and as far as we know right now, he hasn't woken up yet either, but nobody's really come out to talk to us for about fifteen minutes now."
Olsen looked around anxiously, worried. "And I gather we have one dead at the scene?"
"Yeah," Haseejian nodded, "but I have no details yet. That's why I want to get over there. Dan, Lee and Bill are there already, and the lab guys. You wanna ride with me?" he asked his boss.
Olsen shook his head. "No thanks, I'll hang around here for awhile, find out how they're doing. Just get back to me as soon as you find out what happened and why, okay?"
"We'll do our best, sir," Haseejian nodded again, turned to leave and then looked back. "If, ah, if you get the chance to see either of them…?"
Olsen smiled warmly and put a hand on the detective's forearm. "Of course, Norm," he said with a smile.
As the sergeant moved off, Olsen glanced once more around the room, nodding in recognition to most of the officers who had already congregated at the hospital. He sat heavily and dropped his head into hands, hoping it wasn't going to be a long wait, praying that it wouldn't be a tragic one.
# # # # #
Detective Bill Tanner jogged up to Haseejian's car as the sergeant got out. "How are they?" he asked quickly.
Haseejian shrugged. "No news yet – Mike's still in surgery and Steve hasn't woken up yet, as far as I know. Look, let's, uh, let's just get to work on finding out why and what, okay?" He sounded harsher than he meant to but his nerves were fraying fast and he had to establish some kind of protocol. "What do we know so far?" he asked as they crossed to the tan LTD still parked in front of the building.
As they stopped, they were joined by Patrolmen Madsen and McKinley. Madsen and Haseejian shook hands; they had met before. Madsen introduced McKinley to the two homicide detectives.
"You guys were the first here?" Haseejian asked as Tanner checked out the unmarked sedan.
Madsen nodded. "Yeah, we heard the call about shots fired and we were only about six blocks away so we answered it. We found this just as you see it," he gestured at the car, "the doors were closed, no gumball, like they just drove up and parked. Nothing out of the ordinary."
Tanner pulled his head out from the passenger side front window and turned to his colleague. "Nothing in there out of place."
Haseejian looked back at the patrolmen, and Madsen continued. "We found Steve at the foot of the staircase on the first floor," he said as he led them into the building and towards the stairs. Both he and McKinley had armed themselves with flashlights and he played his beam around the hallway. He shuddered slightly as he looked at the banister post. "I didn't recognize him, his face was a bloody pulp. But we knew it was their car, so…"
The light picked up the streaks of blood on the post and the down the railing, mute testimony to the effort it had taken Steve Keller to get down the stairs in his desperate attempt to get help.
Haseejian took a deep breath and nodded, then led the way slowly up the stairs to the second floor.
"Tom stayed with Steve down there," Madsen continued, "after calling for back-up and ambulances, and I made my way up here." They stood for several long seconds in the hallway outside the two apartment doors. They could hear the crime lab guys talking quietly through the open door of the apartment on the right. Madsen gestured towards the left door. "The doors were as you see them, so it didn't take a lot of thought for me to figure out the right one was the one I had to go into."
Madsen lead them to the door of the apartment then stopped. "When I stepped through the door, all I could smell was blood and gunpowder. There was no sound, nothing. I, ah, I thought I could see a body on the floor at the end of the hall but I knew I had to secure rest of the place first."
He preceded them into the narrow kitchen then stood near the door as Haseejian and Tanner stepped inside for a closer look. A crime lab technician was taking blood samples from the congealing pool on the floor in front of the fridge, blood that they now knew must be Mike's. The crime scene photographer was changing the roll of film in one of his cameras. They all exchanged nods of recognition.
"This is exactly like I found it," Madsen continued. "The cupboard door was open and all this crap was on the floor… and the blood…"
The cops took in the room, their trained eyes noting and recording everything they saw. There were dark smudges of fingerprint dust on the open cupboard door and the counter, blood drops leading from the pool in front of the fridge out the second door and into the hallway.
Not wanting to disturb the lab tech, the four exited back out the first door and down the hallway towards the back room. They could see Lessing, Healey and Peter Ramsay, the on-call medical examiner.
They passed the empty bedroom and decaying bathroom and came to a halt outside the 'bedroom' door. Lessing and Healey looked up from their positions at the far side of the bed, where Ramsay was on his knees.
Madsen gestured down at the floor near the door where there was another large pool of blood. "Mike was lying here, on his back. He was unconscious but I found a pulse in his neck. He was covered in blood." He hesitated for a second, then pointed at the .38 still on the floor near the doorframe. "His piece was in his left hand." He looked up into Haseejian's eyes. "And that's when I found him." He nodded in the direction of the far wall, where Ramsay was kneeling.
Healey and Lessing stepped back and out of the way so Haseejian and Tanner could take their places. Ramsay looked up from his position on the floor as the new arrivals studied the almost naked body of the young man lying prostrate before them.
"Norm, Bill," he said in greeting, "well, we won't know more until we cut him open, of course, but, at first glance, I'd say the shot through the heart is what killed him," he said, gesturing at the small blood-filled hole in the centre of the man's chest. Anticipating Haseejian's snide comment, he continued hastily, "And before you say 'that's obvious', look here," he said, raising the dead man's left arm, exposing another entry wound about four inches below the armpit. "It seems this shot came from the side and, as I can't find an exit wound, it's still in there somewhere."
"So, that shot could have been the one to kill him?" Haseejian asked carefully, trying to understand exactly what Ramsay was implying.
"What I'm saying is, either bullet could have killed him, but from what I can see right now, this is the wound that bled the most, so he was still alive after this bullet entered his body. A good guess is that most of the blood on the bed right here is his. Alternately, there is no blood around the second entry wound, the one through his sternum, which means his heart wasn't pumping," Ramsay answered, equally cautiously. They all knew what he was intimating, and none of them liked it.
Healey cleared his throat and everyone looked at him. "Ah, we have five fresh bullet holes in the walls in here," he said as he straightened up and began pointing around the room. "Here, here, here, here and here."
"From Mike's gun?" asked Tanner, puzzled.
"Nope." Healey gestured under the bed and Ramsay twisted around to lift the corner of the sheet that was half-off the bed, exposing a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum. "We left it there so you could see where it was, same with Mike's .38. The pictures have already been taken so it can be bagged and tagged."
Haseejian kneeled down to get a closer look.
"It's empty" Healey continued. "So we're thinking, five shots into the walls in here, and the sixth is the one in Mike's shoulder?"
"Yeah, but, from what we can tell right now, Mike was shot in the kitchen, right?" Haseejian said quietly as he stood. On Healey's nod, he shook his head in confusion. "That doesn't make too much sense, does it?" After a pause, he looked at Healey again. "How many from Mike's gun?"
"Two," Healey answered with a sigh, glancing back down at the body of their still unidentified victim. "So, we're working at trying to get an I.D. on this guy, but we can't find a 'landlord' and nobody's home next door. There's no mail lying around anyplace with a name on it – that's no surprise - and no one in that crowd outside seems to know anything about this guy, or at least is willing to admit to knowing him. It's gonna be a slog, Norm, and until we get to talk to either Mike or Steve and find out what happened…" He left the end of the sentence hanging.
Nodding, Haseejian tried to smile. "Yeah, well, that's not gonna be for quite awhile, I'm thinking." He sighed sadly then pulled himself out of his reverie. "Okay, fellas, let's get to work. Details, I want details. You know how Mike'll be if we don't record everything, and I mean everything, in this apartment… We all know what's at stake here, right?"
The others nodded soberly and fanned out. They could hear footsteps in the hallway and two morgue techs with a stretcher entered the room. Ramsay stood up to give them access to the body. As they began to lift it, Ramsay yelled for them to stop. "Sergeant!" he called and both Haseejian and Healey crossed back to the far side of the room.
Ramsay pointed. The techs had the dead man's body partially lifted and there, under the small of his back, lay a large blood-covered butcher knife. The two homicide detectives shared a concerned and confused look. "Jimmy!" Healey yelled over his shoulder to the photographer in the other room, as he and Haseejian stepped back to make room.
Healey looked at Haseejian. "Jesus, Norm, what the hell happened in here?"