The Man In the Bag
The Man In the Bag
Finn puts the pieces together.
Author’s note: This is Episode 4 of “Catching the Impossible Killer”. Here’s a link to the full index so you can catch up on the story so far. Enjoy!
The forensic team had found a large grey suitcase stuffed under the bed. Inside was the unnaturally contorted corpse of a forty-something man. There was dried blood in his startling white hair. The man had been killed by a blow to the back of the head, which left the face intact for identification. June insisted on doing said identification herself.
She did much better than I expected. She didn’t vomit or anything. I watched as June looked intently at the body, crunched up as it was within the confines of the suitcase. Then she turned to Faiza and me and said, “That’s not him.”
“But it is,” Faiza insisted. “We checked. It’s Adams.”
“Well, it isn’t the man I saw,” June replied, crossing her arms. “Face, height, build, it’s all different. Even his hair is the wrong colour.”
Clearly, she had picked up a thing or two. It made me feel proud.
“This is Kenneth Adams,” Faiza repeated. “And he’s been dead for at least 36 hours. We can double-check his DNA and fingerprints, but there’s really no doubt about it. This is him.”
“Then who did I talk to?” asked June.
Who did she talk to? An excellent question. I had no idea.
Let’s review the case.
A woman is murdered and her neighbour makes threatening statements to her niece. The neighbour allegedly suffers from agoraphobia and hasn’t left his flat in years, yet the murdered woman’s niece sees him outside on the street. A few hours later, the police receive an anonymous tip about a murder and they find the body of a handyman who works in the building. The body is in the neighbour’s flat and the supposedly agoraphobic neighbour is now missing. Then his body is found stuffed in a suitcase in the murdered woman’s bedroom, but it’s not the same person who threatened her niece. What’s more, the neighbour has been dead longer than the murdered woman, so there’s no way he could have been the killer.
In fiction, we often see detectives solve a crime almost the second they lay eyes on the scene. I’m not saying that doesn’t happen, but more often than not, cracking a case takes time. Time is the biggest advantage and most precious commodity in crime-solving.
There was nothing else to do. June and I returned to my flat. Faiza went back to looking for whoever killed Dope King Mickey Hill.
Over the next 24 hours, I gathered all the facts I could find, incidental evidence, testimonies from the neighbours, and reports from initial responders. June helped, sorting through statements and looking up things for me. Then I ate some food, took a shower, and watched some TV. At some point, I fell asleep.
And when I woke up, I knew (almost) exactly what had happened.
I took June out for breakfast. We went to a sandwich shop down the road and she asked me if I’d made any progress.
“All will be revealed,” I told her. “What about you? Have you decided what you’re going to do once all this is done?”
Time for a little honesty. I was hoping she would stay. I rather enjoyed having an assistant on this case, someone to notice all my brilliant deductions and provide appropriate applause. But I didn’t want to just ask her; I wasn’t sure we were there yet.
“I think I know what I’m going to do,” June said, and my hopes were raised. Foolish of me, I know.
“Turns out, Aunt Ivy left me her flat,” she said. “I don’t suppose it’s worth a lot, especially after two dead bodies, but I’m going to sell it.”
“Oh,” I said, the wind rushing out of my chest.
“I can pay you then,” June pointed out enthusiastically. “After that, I’d like to travel the world. Find myself, you know?”
“That sounds wonderful,” I told her. “You should definitely do that.”
We focused our attention on our sandwiches after that, eating in silence. When we were done, June asked about the case again and I was glad for the change of subject.
“A dead man can’t kill someone,” I said. “That’s just impossible. But what we’re looking for here is an impossible killer.”
June asked me what I meant. I smiled and said, “Here’s what happened.”
The day before June’s arrival, in the early hours of the morning, someone climbed up the fire escape and broke into 601. Kenneth Adams discovered the intruder and was killed. However, this was no burglar. The killer wasn’t looking for money or valuables; he needed a place to hide. Lucky for him, Mr Adams was a recluse who never set foot out of his flat, and rarely had any visitors. He could impersonate the dead man and hide out in his flat. There was just one problem.
A corpse starts decomposing from the moment of death. Even if he kept the body cold with lots of ice, it would start to smell within a day or so. The killer wasn’t necessarily a genius but he had a certain devious intelligence, which presented to him a solution: kill someone else and use the stench of one body to hide the other. He just walked out of the flat, went to the next door, and killed the person who answered the door. (If there had been more than one person in the flat, would he have killed them all?)
The killer needed some help to properly pull off the deception, so he bribed Dick, the handyman. Dick deleted the CCTV footage, got the killer some white hair colour, and stole a roll of police tape while he was being questioned by the cops.
June showing up was not in the plan, and it spooked the killer a little. He made sure to scare her away from the building so moving on to the next stage: breaking into the crime scene and hiding Mr Adams’ body there.
With all the pieces set up, all the killer had to do was tie up loose ends. So he killed Dick, framed Mr Adams, shaved his head probably, and disappeared. And nobody would ever suspect him because there was no way he could have done it.
June looked thoroughly enthralled as I unravelled the chain of events. At the end, she gave a little clap and said, “That was amazing!” She really would have been an excellent assistant.
“Just one thing,” June added. “Who is the killer?”
To Be Continued.
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Yes, I echo June, who-dun-it? So many bodies. And why was he hiding?
Love it so far.