The boy lying near her had his eyes almost closed. He had on a brown knit shirt. There was a hole about the size of a half dollar in his throat—shotgun blast, probably a twelve-gauge at close range. There wasn’t much of a spread pattern, and you could see the powder tattoo on the shirt left by bits of burning powder as they hit him. Sometimes, those burns are on the skin if the gun is fired from a close enough range. This shotgun was fired from very close range, probably no more than two or three feet at most, or else the pellet spread would have taken his head off. These kids knew what was coming after the first shot. So why did they just stand there?
Fortunately, neither the responding officers nor the paramedics had made much of a mess of the crime scene. Usually, they rush in and do what they’re supposed to do, which is save lives. They don’t pay attention to moving things around that might be evidence. That isn’t their job. This time they hadn’t made any quick gestures. They, or the first deputies on scene, had turned the bodies to check for vital signs. It was obvious both kids were dead. The blood from the two bodies spread out all over the floor. It always amazed me how much blood there is in one human being.
Bill was standing behind me. “Look over here behind the shelves. We have another one. Maybe a little older, but still a kid.” Bill had been around a long time but I could tell that even he was shaken. They were just kids and I could hear him muttering “Goddamn” over and over again. When you have your own kids and you see something like this, it really brings it home.
I looked over and could see the feet sticking out from behind the shelving that was along the back wall of a walk-in freezer. The body was lying on its side, the back to a desk along the wall. The room was obviously used as an office area. His face, or what was left of it, was turned in the direction of a small safe. It was a young man in his mid-twenties. Even though the top of his head was gone, I knew him. It was the owner’s son, Bryon. He had been a witness for me several years before in the other murder that came out of a burglary of the store. Now, he was a murder victim. I looked up at the shelf. His brain was sitting up there like somebody had just casually placed it there. The rest of his head, the top of the skull and the hair, was splattered all over the wall. There was a fine mist of blood that had traveled up the wall. Pieces of skull and bloody tissue were splashed on the desktop and the adding machine sitting on the desk. Blood, tissue, and bits of bone were spread over so many places that it was hard to envision the impact of the shot. The shooter had obviously intended to kill the boy. But why? This was just a country store. How much money did the killer think he would find? Besides, these kids didn’t have any weapons. They weren’t a threat.
The crime scene didn’t make any sense. People don’t just stand around waiting to get shot if they have a chance to get away. For some reason, these kids just stood there after the first one got shot. And the shooter’s actions made no sense. Most of the time, a robber will shoot in a panic and then run. They don’t usually intend to kill anybody when they walk in, even though they have a gun. Most robbers just intend to use the gun as a threat. This was an execution. But why? Whoever did this was way beyond being just some two-bit, punk robber. Kenny was right. There were too many questions, and there was something very strange about the crime scene.
When you’ve seen enough homicide scenes, you get a sense of what happened. Most of the time, murder follows a pattern, and so, when something doesn’t fit, you can sense it. Regardless, whoever did this was a really bad guy. Shooting someone in a panic or without thinking is one thing, but pointing a gun at a kid and deliberately killing him or her? For that, one had to be a cold-blooded killer, and those kind of people are a breed apart. Most murders happen because people get angry or panic or are intoxicated. I had investigated a lot of homicide cases, but it wasn’t often that you saw a real premeditated murder, the kind where the killer thought about it in advance and then did it just like he was killing a bug. Those guys are scary, but even those guys usually don’t kill kids. This guy was more than scary. Somewhere out there we had a real killer.
The coroner joined us. Unlike what a lot of people think or what is shown on television, the coroner called to the crime scene is usually not a doctor and is there to check for information and control disposition of the deceased. The coroner looked down at the boy with the head wound and said, sadly, “I pulled his ID out. We’ll need to make a positive identification later. I can’t tell from the ID if it’s him. I hate it when people have to see their kids like this, and I’m always the guy who has to tell them.”
Bill glanced at me. I spoke first. “Don’t bother. I can make ID. His name’s Bryon Schletewitz. I saw his parents outside. I know him. He was a witness in an old case of mine involving this store.”
The coroner looked up. “Do you want to tell his parents or should I?”
He looked relieved when I said I would do it. I had done it before with other parents or husbands or wives. It was never easy, but at least this time it would be coming from somebody they knew and not from a stranger. “The names of the other two kids?”
“I don’t have an ID on the girl yet. The boy’s driver’s license says Douglas White.”
Kenny interjected, “We don’t know yet whether they were working here or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Right now, we got two witnesses and maybe a third, depending on whether the woman in the bathroom is a witness or a perp. The kid in the bathroom knows what happened I’m guessing, but he’s in the hospital right now. We’ll have to wait on the woman. She’s over at county medical center at the moment, but I got a guard on her.” Kenny stared at me for a few seconds. “You going to talk to the parents?”
“Yeah, Bill and I will take care of it.” I looked over at Bill for moral support. He was shaking his head. He wasn’t happy about being dragged into informing the parents, but he knew it was something that needed to be done and he too had done it many times before.
I stepped back out of the storage room, being careful not to open the door too much. The television camera lights were on and the glare was directly in my face. The cameramen were trying to get the camera eye into the storage room, and I wasn’t going to give them a chance to catch any part of the victims or the blood on the floor. It was bad enough that several parents were going to get the worst possible news tonight about their kids. I wasn’t going to make it worse by having family and friends see their loved ones bleeding on the floor of a storage room. People deserve better than that.
Bill and I walked past the news crews, shouting questions at us. The deputy holding the onlookers back lifted the crime scene tape. He took the lead, putting his arm in front of the lunging cameramen. “Not now, please. Just step back.” We moved around them and for once they didn’t follow. If they had known the family was over on the other side of the parking lot they would have been there trying to wring the last ounce of emotion out of the scene; asking the questions that they themselves would never be able to answer if they were on the other side of the lens: “Is your son in there?” “Do you know if your daughter is alive?” “How does it feel? How does it feel?” What is it about the need for human misery