By Gordon Cope
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San Francisco, California.
Monday, March 18
Jack Kenyon glanced at his watch. It was 7:30 am, a few minutes after dawn on a damp spring day in San Francisco.
A cold wind was blowing in off the Bay, sweeping a curtain of rain west across the city until it encountered Twin Peaks Park.
The FBI agent was standing at the north end of the park near the Twin Peaks Reservoir, where a cab had dropped him off. The large, concrete-encased pool of fresh water was part of the San Francisco Fire Department’s emergency response system, built in reaction to the uncontrolled fires that had destroyed much of the city after the 1906 earthquake. It was enclosed by a high steel frost fence and a fringe of pine and fir trees.
Normally, the area was deserted at this time of day, but now the strobe of red and blue emergency lights and police radio chatter filled the air.
Jack spotted the compact form of Marcy Locke, a detective with the SFPD. He had worked with her the previous year on a fraud case that involved embezzling funds from a federal superfund earmarked for restoring waste sites in the Bay area. Locke’s diligent work had resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of several CEOs involved with the excavation of a PCB factory in Oakland.
Buttoning the collar of his wool coat, Jack advanced through the underbrush to where Locke was standing. “What we have got here, detective?”
Marcy turned, a smile appearing on her face. “Jack! Hey, it’s great to see you!”
“Likewise.” Jack shook some of the rain off his sleeves.
“I just wish it was under better circumstances.”
“Me too.” Marcy, a pretty woman with dark brown eyes, long brunette hair and sensuous lips, had been coming off an acrimonious divorce during the embezzlement case and had pursued Jack as a pleasurable diversion. Jack had been appreciative of the attention from someone as warm and intelligent as Marcy, but had made it clear at the time that he wasn’t interested in a relationship. They had remained on good terms, both personally and professionally.
Marcy turned and pointed further into the underbrush. “We got a doozy.” She advanced to where a uniformed officer was standing beside a waterproof tarp that had been spread over a bulky object below. “Lance, can you give Jack a look?”
The officer pulled back the tarp and Jack gave an involuntary gasp. A man lay face-up in the underbrush, his arms splayed out awkwardly. He was clad in a dark wool suit, the front of which was stained dark with blood. In contrast to the mayhem of his upper body, his legs had been placed together at the ankles so that his brown Oxford shoes pointed neatly outwards.
But it was the means of death that captured Jack’s attention. A crude axe with a short wooden handle stuck out from his forehead at a high angle. He turned to Marcy. “Has he been touched?”
“Just to pull his wallet.” Marcy produced a pair of latex gloves similar to the ones she was wearing and handed them to Jack. She then removed a plastic evidence bag from a pouch slung around her shoulder and handed it to the FBI agent. “Victim’s name is Dag Hammerson, of North Bethesda, Maryland.”
“Tourist?”
“No, he’s an investigator for the NRC.”
Hunching forward to keep the wallet dry, Jack tilted the contents to capture the thin morning light. The pale face of a man in his early fifties stared out from a laminated ID card. The obverse side of the card was decorated with the great seal of the United States, a white circle enclosing a bald eagle clutching an olive branch in one talon and a sheaf of arrows in the other. United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission was printed around the eagle.
“He’s a federal agent.”
Marcy nodded. “When we saw that, we contacted your office.”
Normally, Jack began work at 9 am on Mondays, but he had been on reserve roster. Any crime against a federal agent fell under the jurisdiction of the FBI, and the obligatory notification from the SFPD had precipitated an early morning call to his home.
Jack glanced at the rest of the contents in the wallet, over $300 in cash as well as several credit cards. “Robbery doesn’t seem to be a motive.”
“No, and you don’t normally mug someone with an axe.”
A police photographer arrived and began to set up his equipment. Marcy and Jack stepped back several feet to give him room. “Who found him?” asked Jack.
“Neighbour out walking his pooch.” Marcy pointed to a cruiser, in which a man in a raincoat sat in the back seat clutching a wire-haired terrier in his lap. “It took off into the brush and bird-dogged the corpse.”
“Did he see any suspicious cars or pedestrians?”
“Nope. Had his head up under an umbrella and was in
a hurry to get out of the rain.” Marcy shook some of the water out of her hair. “Who could blame him?”
Jack turned to inspect his surroundings. The nearest homes were at least 50-yards away. A narrow, unlit lane ran through the copse of trees growing on the SFFD property. The killers could have approached the victim without fear of being seen. But what was the victim even doing in this remote area in the middle of the night?
Marcy seemed to read his mind. “We’ll have to get confirmation from the coroner, but my take is that he was moved.” She pointed towards the corpse as camera lights flashed. “A scalp wound like that produces a lot of blood, but there’s very little on the ground below him.”
“Yeah, I see what you mean.” Jack scratched his head. “What do you make of the axe?”
“It’s got a weird look. I’m no Daniel Boone, but it definitely isn’t something you’d pick up at a hardware store. It looks really old, like an antique.”
Jack nodded. “You know what I don’t get; why leave it
in his head? Why not get rid of the murder weapon?”
Marcy shrugged. “Ritual killing. We see ninja stars, samurai swords, you name it. Usually, though, it’s done as a warning between two Asian gangs; you cross me and this is what you get.” She nodded toward the corpse. “This guy definitely ain’t Asian.”
“And they usually dump the corpse in the opposition turf.” Jack glanced around. “I mean, what’s the point of leaving him in the middle of nowhere?”
“Maybe their plans were interrupted.” Marcy began to walk back toward the road. Jack followed. She climbed into the driver’s side of an unmarked sedan, indicating Jack to join her in the passenger seat. Once inside, she unbuttoned her coat, lifted a steel coffee mug from its cup holder, and offered it to Jack. He smiled at the intimate gesture. He took a sip, then handed it to back to her.
Marcy took a swig, then activated the lap-top computer mounted to the dash. “I’m lead on the SFPD case. We’ll file a formal co-investigation with the FBI. You going to take it?”
Jack nodded. “How do you want to divvy this up?”
Marcy began punching buttons on the computer keyboard. “We’re going to follow up next of kin, search his San Francisco residence, run a background criminal check and put together a victim profile. I’ll send you the crime scene pix as soon as they’re in and copy you on whatever else we find.”
“Great. What about the axe?”
“Forensics will check it for prints. We got a weapons expert at Berkeley who deals with this kind of weird shit – we’ll see if he can give us some leads on the perps.”
“What do you want us to do?”
“Find out from the NRC what Dag Hammerson was working on. I got a gut feeling it’s going to be relevant.”
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