Page 87 of Water's Edge

Most everyone is at some kind of protest on the other side of campus where bulldozers are threatening a tiny grove of trees. A serial killer is on the loose, but they wouldn’t know that or even care if it didn’t interrupt a good party or a protest.

“Did you have a warrant to enter?” Clay asks me.

Chief Holmes saves me an explanation.

“She came to check on the welfare of Boyd’s roommate. I knocked and didn’t get an answer. I smelled something disturbing and opened the door with my master key. I knew the smell immediately and entered to ensure there wasn’t someone else inside injured.”

Clay rubs the back of his neck and grins.

“Textbook explanation, Chief.”

He looks at me. “Is that your story as well?”

“Yes,” I tell him. “I also entered. We touched nothing and came right back out and called you.”

That part wasn’t true, but the chief didn’t even flinch. I was starting to like the Navy way—or at least her version of it.

Chief Holmes speaks up. “The name the guy gave when he became a student was Qassim Hadir.” She fills him in on how the Social Security number came back to a guy dead for nine years.

“I’ll run his fingerprints through AFIS and locally,” Clay says. “You should have fingerprints from the body this morning. If you run those, can you let me know if you get a hit? I’ll do the same.”

I nod.

“Well, looks like you don’t need me or my people here any longer,” Chief Holmes says. “We’ll get back to policing the campus. Keep me in the loop on this one, Clay.”

It wasn’t a request. Someone had been killed on her campus.

“Looked like his neck was broken,” she says.

He nods.

Chief Holmes gets on her radio and tells her people to go back to their jobs. I catch up with her as she leaves the front walk of the apartments.

“I appreciate what you did back there.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“I want to catch this guy.”

“I know you do. Good luck. He’d better not come back on my campus.”

I return to the apartment, small space with a combination living room and kitchen. The living room couch has been made into a pull-out bed. It looks like it hasn’t been slept in and is cluttered with dirty clothes, magazines, and snack wrappers. I get on the floor and look under the couch, in the kitchen cabinets, in the oven, in the refrigerator. Adhering to the front of the refrigerator with a magnet is a poster. It’s a crude drawing of a pig. The eyes are crosses and the tongue is hanging out. Next to the pig is an even cruder drawing of a handgun with flames coming from the barrel. Under the drawing, someone has written in rough letters, “SORRY PIG.” I fold this up and stick it under my blazer in my waistband. The residents of the unit weren’t very literate and there is nothing else around that I can compare with the note found in Boyd’s hand.

I study the body lying on its stomach on the bedroom floor. It’s a black male, twenties, short, chubby, long arms. Three things strike me. One, he has tattoos on the backs of both hands. Each tat is of an eyeball. Two, his head is almost turned around facing me. Three, he has been posed in the same manner as Karynn Eades.

Vitruvian Man.

Nothing is out of place. The apartment is a mess but not any more than you would expect with two younger men living there. I hear a siren. I go outside to wait with the chief. I don’t need photos of what I saw inside.

I have it all stored in my head.

Chief Holmes returns and I ask her to dig up any records she can find on Boyd and the dead guy. She promises I’ll have them before the end of the day.

A beat later a uniformed Kitsap County deputy climbs up the stairs with Detective Clay Osborne.

Now Clay is inside the apartment while I sit on the top step, waiting. Trying to stay out of the way of the crime scene techs.

“What a mess,” he says.

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