All the variables had been checked, weight and height of the victim, the height of the bed and the length of the master bedroom and stairwell in the Tam's house. Now all they had to do was test out Susan Tam's theory that after finding her husband had committed suicide, she had pushed his body down the stairs to cover it up.
Olivia carried the white forensics dummy up the stairs, its featureless face fixed on the ceiling. Reaching the top she stood the dummy on its feet and turned, one hand on hip, to watch as Danny struggled up the stairs with the two sports holdalls which contained the weights.
'Messer, quit being such a guy and bring them up one at a time,' she told him, shaking his head.
'So you can get your jollies and tell the entire department what a wimp I am?' He shook his head as he grunted. 'Don't think so. I'm still sore after blackball-gate.'
Olivia sighed and hoisted the dummy and made her way across the hall into the Tam's bedroom. The room was the entire size of Olivia's apartment. The king-size four-poster bed swallowed up most of the floor space, a completely ostentatious piece of furniture with yards and yards of white organza serving as a canopy above it, and the carpet was at least five inches thick and made of the purest one hundred percent wool and of course, it was white.
Danny was still grunting out in the hallway. Olivia laid the dummy on the bed and then opened up her field-kit. She took out the relevant paperwork that she and Danny had been working on and was thumbing through the variables when he came through the door all but dragging the two bags behind him.
'Manage there?' she said not looking up from the paper, a hint of a grin on her face.
Danny drew in a deep breath and let it go as he dropped the weights. Pressing his hands to the small of his back, he arched back slightly, rolling his shoulders. He heard the crack in his neck and grunted. 'I don't get paid enough for this. You're carrying them out.'
'Fine.' She lifted her head from the paperwork. 'Let's get them strapped on.'
'Let's do this.' Danny opened up the bags and one-by-one took out the weights. They attached the Velcro strapping to each one before fastening the weights to the dummy's body at the correct weight of Jason Tam, two-eighty. 'Okay,' Danny slapped his hands together and gave them a rub, 'bed height?'
Olivia flicked to the relevant page. 'Ah, thirty-six inches,' she read off the sheet.
'Vic slept on the side of the bed furthest from the door...so that's what?'
She checked again. 'Twenty-six feet. From the bedroom door to the stairwell, that's another...seventy-two. And it's not a straight line, either.'
'Giving us a grand total of one hundred and one feet. What did the merry widow weigh?'
'One forty,' Olivia told him. 'She must really be into the Zumba.'
Danny grinned. 'Go for it,' he nodded at the dummy.
'Why me?'
'Do I look like I weigh one forty?'
'Do I?'
He shook his head. 'Not going there. Guessing a woman's weight always gets a guy into trouble.'
She rolled her eyes and handed him the wad of papers in her hand. 'Feet first you think?'
Danny thought about it. 'Probably the easiest way for a woman. Can't imagine the widow Tam having the upper body strength to hook him under the arms.' He shrugged. 'Fireman's lift out also.'
'Feet first then.' Olivia grabbed the dummy's feet and began dragging it off the bed, its head hitting the floor with a loud thwack.
Danny grimaced. 'Could explain the contusion he had.'
'You felt the thickness of this pile? The contusion didn't happen in this room,' Olivia said, continuing to drag the dummy around the bed and towards the door. 'Speaking of, check out the pile.'
The pile was clearly disturbed as Olivia was dragging the dummy and when they had first processed the scene, there had been no signs of disturbance to the carpet. 'Guy would've had some heavy-duty carpet burns on his back,' noted Danny.
'Which he didn't.'
Danny chewed his lip and folded his arms over his chest. 'It's not right.'
Olivia carried on dragging the dummy out into the stairwell. Danny kept an eye on how long it took her, and that included her stopping once to catch her breath. By the time she had the dummy at the top of the stairs, it had taken her a total of two minutes and fifty-four seconds. She let go of the dummy's feet and looked at him. 'What you thinking?'
'That our vic could've easily gotten banged up on the drag out. Floor's solid wood,' he said banging a heel against the floor. 'Only we didn't find any blood spill on the stairwell.' He waited a beat. 'Our widow put in the emergency call at nine-ten and according to Sid's autopsy report,' he thumbed to the page he needed, 'time of death was around nine-three.'
'Giving her a seven minute window to find him dead, panic, drag his body out here, push him down the stairs and then call 911.'
Danny looked at her and they both shook their heads in unison. 'It's possible but it doesn't feel right,' he said.
Olivia glanced at the dummy lying on its back, feet pointing towards the stairs. 'Can you remember the angle Jason Tam was at when we found him?'
'Uh...he was lying four stairs up, belly down, feet pointing towards the front door, left leg was bent at an angle.'
'It would have been impossible for her to get him to his feet and push him down, and even if she did, he would've landed head pointing towards the door. There's no humanly possible way that she rolled him, not at the angle we found him. So how was he laying the way he was when we came in?'
Danny folded his arms over his chest and rocked back on his heels. 'She could have dragged him down the stairs manually. Walking herself backwards,' he shrugged.
'That would've taken more time. Besides, the woman's tiny. She'd have risked falling herself.' Olivia gazed thoughtfully down the stairs and at the front door. 'It's impossible. There's no plausible way she could have pushed him. She either had to have had help or - '
'She's lying,' Danny finished.
Olivia met his eyes. 'But it doesn't make sense why she'd go to the trouble of covering up a suicide and then admit to covering it up. She messed up any chance of an insurance payout by doing that. So why?'
'To confuse us. She wanted us to believe that her husband killed himself.'
'She stood to get five million before she blew the lid,' Olivia argued.
Danny exhaled. 'I dunno, Duke. I'm just trying to piece it all together.'
'If Jason Tam did kill himself, insurance company's not gonna payout on a suicide. She knows this. But if it was accidental, she's five million richer than she was last week. So why bother lying in the first place? Why cover up a suicide with a suicide if you know you don't stand to gain from it?' Olivia shook her head. 'I'm not buying any of this. It's only managing to convince me that she had an accomplice.'
Danny slowly nodded his head. 'The elusive Mikey McCarthy.'
'He's the missing piece that we need to close this.'
'All the unanswered questions do point to him,' agreed Danny. 'So, this little experiment delivered a big fat zero.'
'But at least we know that there was no conceivable way she could have done this alone.'
'Ah,' Danny sighed, raking a hand over his mouth, 'I was kinda hoping, y'know? We could wrap this up by the end of the day. Straightforward suicide.' He wiped his hands together. 'Done.'
'Nothing's straightforward.'
Danny let go of a breath and nodded. 'I say we pack up Mr. Dummy over here and head back to the Lab.'
'No argument from me,' Olivia said. She moved across the stairwell towards the bedroom.
'Uh, s'cuse me, Detective? Aren't you forgettin' something?' Danny said, pointing at the dummy still lying at the top of the stairs.
'Can't you grab him?'
Danny snickered. 'Too heavy for you, Duke?'
'I just dragged him from the bedroom, didn't I? C'mon, Mess, help a girl out here. Besides, you've got all those strong, tight muscles working to your advantage,' she said, throwing in a teasing wink.
'You noticed, huh?' he said, puffing out his chest.
'Yeah, all brawn and no brains, Messer,' she said and sauntered back into the bedroom to collect her kit. 'Very attractive in a man.'
'Yup. That's - ' Then he frowned, realizing it had been no compliment. 'Hey!'
*
Once they were back at the Lab, Olivia and Danny sat in the break room with a mug of coffee each and the Tam file on the table before them. Danny was thumbing through it and kept shaking his head, while Olivia just looked thoughtful as she scanned the different reports. Both CSIs were thinking the same thing: What should have been a fairly straightforward suicide or murder case was turning into a big confusing mess.
They were still awaiting the DNA results from the swabs taken from two dirty coffee mugs that had been in the Tam's kitchen sink and Olivia had brought back the couples coffee grinder to see if Adam could pull any trace evidence that might be there. Doc Hammerback had since confirmed that the contusion to Jason Tam's head had happened on the fall - or push - down the stairs and that the codeine hadn't been ingested whole, it had been ground down or crushed.
'Wanna know what I'm thinking, Duke?' Danny said. He leaned back in his chair and pulled off his glasses, swiping a weary hand across his face. 'That we're out of evidence.'
'We're never out of evidence,' Olivia replied.
Danny slipped his glasses back on. 'We got nothing else.'
'There has to be something we missed.'
'Like?'
'I don't know. I'll give Adam a call, see how he's getting on with the grinder.' She took her cell phone from her jacket and was about to make the call to the lab tech when Flack came down the corridor. The Homicide Detective looked somewhat pleased. 'Let's see what Flack has to say first,' she said.
Flack pushed open the door to the break-room and came inside. 'Good news, guys. We found our phantom chip-eater.'
Danny looked up at him. 'Yes, this is good. What happened?'
'Motel manager in Long Island City flagged a call to a credit card company stating that a stolen card was being used to pay a deposit on a room. Credit card people called it in, I sent a couple of my boys down and our fraudster turns out to be none other than Mikey McCarthy.'
Olivia nodded. 'So you've got him in custody on identity theft?'
Flack grinned. 'That and I knew how desperate you were to meet him.'
'He is so good to us,' Danny mock-sighed at Olivia making her smile. She got to her feet and picked up her phone.
'Let's go then. I'm curious to meet this guy.'
'You might be disappointed,' Flack said as the three of them left the break-room. 'He's fairly nondescript.'
'Is he well-built?' Olivia asked him as they marched through the corridors towards the Police Department.
Flack looked baffled. 'Depends on your definition of well built. Put it this way, he's no Dwayne Johnson.'
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COPYRIGHT. © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. DebraJay. 2006