Particles of Murder (A Shadow of Death Romantic Suspense Series Book 1)

* * *

C
opyright
© 2016 by Charlotte Raine

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

A
ntagonists didn’t exist
; the story simply wasn’t told from their point of view.

Tell that to the other students in my creative writing class, and they would argue all sorts of things from cause and effect, right and wrong, morals and ethics and philosophy. But the truth of it was, antagonists were always protagonists in their own story.

Storytelling had long existed before the written word, but writing down a story helped to ensure that nothing was twisted so the heart of the story remained intact. The heart of the story was what pushed life into every word, what forced the reader to keep reading. That was why I would write down my point of view.

So, please, let me explain. I was not as cold-hearted or evil as the media would paint me one day.

I was sitting in my Introduction to Creative Writing class on a Wednesday. I remember it was a Wednesday because I had already attended three classes and this was my last one. I had a Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of me. All of the other students in my class were chatting with each other, so full of exhilaration that it made me wonder if they skipped all their classes or if I was just missing some part of my brain that allows all of the walls to come down and joy to flood in.

The professor--only distinguishable by the fact that he was clearly not in his late teens or early twenties by his face, though his jeans and white t-shirt weren't that different from some students’ attire--rushed to the large desk in the front and set down his bag. He began pulling out packets of paper. A hush came over the class. Some students perked up, while others leaned back into their chairs with the kind of smile they would save for a close friend. Those students were happier now that the professor was here than when he wasn't, which was something I had never seen before.

The professor clapped his hands together.

"All right. This is Intro to Creative Writing and I'm Dr. John Zimmer. If you're not supposed to be here, I suggest you get up and try to slink away without anyone noticing. There's a hundred percent chance you'll be unsuccessful, but I'll enjoy watching you try."

Nobody moved. Even if someone was in the wrong class, I suspected they would still stay, but not out of shame. There was something magnetic about this professor, like his smile made everyone feel like there wasn't anything but hope in the world. But I supposed that's how a professor could get tenure. The students, after all, were the ones who would judge them at the end of the semester.

"Okay, good. Nobody here is lost--at least, not lost in this academic building," he said. "Now, I know you all hate ice breakers--in fact, I'm sure some of you couldn't care less who the person sitting next to you is, but we're going to do one anyway because this is my class, you have to do what I say to pass, and, quite frankly, it's rather rude when you don't know the names of the people you're going to be around all semester. So, I want you to take out a piece of paper and write down what your biggest fear is."

I took out a piece of paper and a pen. As everyone began jotting their thoughts down, I felt stuck.

What did I fear most?

Losing a loved one, being abandoned, the act of dying, what comes after death--but that wasn’t interesting. That wouldn’t set me apart from what all of these other people are saying, and I detested the idea of being ordinary.

I felt heat rush into my face as some people began setting their pens down. He was going to ask everyone to tell the class their fears soon. I had to jot down something or risk looking like an idiot who thought they were fearless.

I wrote down the first thought that came into my mind:
not being valuable or valued.

The words hurt--this neediness inside me that begged for approval. It wasn’t how writers or any creative person was supposed to be. I should be creating art for my own pleasure, but I didn’t. I wanted to scribble out the words, but Dr. Zimmer clapped his hands again. I hadn't noticed that he had picked up a metal trash can from beside his desk. He held it up near his waistline.

"Good. Everyone is finished. Now I want you to crumple that piece of paper up and throw it into this trash can," he said. "Don't worry, I'll transfer them all to a recycling bin. This is just symbolic."

As I threw my crumpled piece of paper in, it hit against his thigh before dropping down near his feet. As he picked it up, he looked straight at me. He tossed it in the can, making my fears disappear with a simple gesture.

"You didn't think I'd actually make you tell your fears aloud, did you?" he teased. "No, I wouldn't. Let this be a lesson in this classroom: I don't ever want you to feel uncomfortable--unless you want to be. I absolutely endorse all of you to push yourselves and when you're ready, I want you to cross that threshold into discomfort because that's where all the glory is and that's where you'll set yourselves free...but I will never force you to reveal parts of yourself that you don't want to reveal. You have all the power when you hold that pen or pencil. You create world, you create the image of yourself, you create the image of others...you are a god. Remember that."

The girl next to me smiled as she took in my surprised face. Hadn't most of college been about being forced to do things and being told that we had no power because we weren't the authority figures?

The girl offered me her hand.

"I'm Victoria," she said. "I've already taken this class, but I love listening to Dr. Zimmer. Trust me--if you're impressed now, you haven't seen anything yet. He's the best."

She turned back to her bag and pulled out a book. She handed it to me. The title was
Insomniac Rites.

“He wrote this,” she said. “I, uh…I want somebody to read it with fresh eyes and I think you’d really like it. You seem like a really genuine person and I want to know what someone like you would think about the protagonist.”

I nodded. “Sure. I’ll read it. I have a really busy schedule, though—”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “There’s no rush. You can take all semester or even over the summer if you want to. I really want you to absorb it all and not rush through it.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll…well, um, thanks. Thanks for noticing me out of everyone.”

She flashed me a smile. She was a truly beautiful woman. She was the kind of person who was invited to all of the fraternity parties and got into them for free with all of the fraternity brothers trying to get her drunk enough to sleep with, but she would be too respectable to get drunk.

“To tell you the truth, I read your fear while you wrote it down,” she said. “I’ve done this exercise three times and I’ve never been that honest. So…thank you for inspiring me that way.”

She’d peeked at my fear? She knew.

Dr. Zimmer began to talk again, but I didn’t notice what he was saying. My mind was clouded with so much anger, I could almost imagine the room catching fire from my rage.

She knew my secret. She knew my fear. She violated my privacy and for what? To use me to judge her professor’s book?

Fuck her.

T
he young woman’s
body lies slumped against a bookshelf, her chin resting on the center of her chest. Her light brown hair shields her face from view, but as I crouch down beside her, I can see every detail of her face—her long eyelashes, the small scar above the right side of her upper lip, the small bumps of acne on her chin…this is what the body is diminished to after the brain goes dead. This is how it all ends.

“Mira, you’re supposed to be looking for trace evidence,” Dr. Tim Lindhal drawls, his foot nearly touching a pen that lies a few inches away from her fingertips. I glance around the pen, hoping to find that she had written something down that would hint to how she died, but it’s never that easy. “The body belongs to me.”

“I’m just getting a mental picture of her and checking for any hair, blood, fibers, dirt…anything on her,” I say. “Which would belong to me. Or maybe I’m gunning for your job, Tim. You never know.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you were trying to take my job,” he says. “You seem to get along better with the dead than the living.”

His amber brown hair is tied up in a bun and under a scrub cap. His beard is covered as well, so all I can see are his eyes and nose. He peers at me with a mixture of amusement and apprehension. I glance away from him, picking up the victim’s hand. Her nails were painted with blue nail polish, but it’s already chipping at the edges. I flip her hand over and examine underneath the nails.

“There it is,” I murmur.

“What?” he asks.

“She has something under her nails.” I use my scalpel to scrape gold fragments out from under her nails and into a small, metal evidence can. I inspect the fragments. “I think it’s paint. I’ll check it at the lab.”

“Well, her nails are also painted, so…you don’t think it could be from that?” he asks.

“It could be, but this is a lot more than someone would accidentally get under their nails, and it’s the wrong color. Also, from the amount of paint that has chipped off, her nails were likely painted about a week ago…there shouldn’t be any paint under her nails still.”

“When you became a forensic scientist, did you ever think you would be telling the medical examiner about nail polish?” he asks, shaking his head.

Before I can answer, Detective Stolz and Detective Macmillan walk up to the two of us. They both look at Tim—their source of information, their music, their death deity.

“What do you think, Dr. Lindhal?” Detective Stolz asks.

My eyes sweep over the two of them.

Stolz: She’s in her late twenties or early thirties. Her blond hair is pulled into a ponytail. She has only the slightest bit of mascara and lip balm on. Everything from her neck up is perfect except her lip balm is smeared, so she must have kissed someone this morning. She has the slightest trace of white hairs at the bottom of her black pants, which I suspect come from a cat. The elbows of her sports jacket are wearing thin, so she either doesn’t make enough to get new clothes or she prefers to spend her money on other things.

Macmillan: He’s in his sixties. He has a receding hairline with some sparse brown hair. He’s wearing black twill pants and a button-up white shirt. The only thing on his body that tells me anything about him is the sweat stains under his shirt even though it’s December.

I’ve worked side-by-side with them for nearly five years, so my analysis is less Sherlockian and more of a compulsion. Stolz was once engaged for thirteen days and Macmillan had a case of Cuban cigars a few months ago, so sometimes there’s new information to be found, but usually it’s the same old information I pick up. With Tim, most of his body is usually covered, so there’s not much to pick up except the faint smell of marijuana.

“There’s no immediate cause of death that I can observe,” Tim says. “There’s no evidence of head trauma or overdose. There’s no visible wounds…my best interpretation of the facts right now is that she suffered from cardiac arrest, caused by a non-ischemic heart disease, but I can investigate and interpret more once I get her to the morgue.”

“That’s the professor whose office this belongs to…Dr. Zimmer,” Detective Stolz says, indicating toward the open door.

I peer out to see the back of a man with dirty blond hair that’s longer on top and shaved on the sides. He doesn’t look like a professor from here. He’s wearing jeans and a heavyweight canvas jacket.

Stolz continues, “He told us the victim’s name is Victoria Glassman. Dr. Zimmer is the one who found her. She was here because she was his teaching assistant. She has a key to this office and she was supposed to begin his class this morning because he had a doctor’s appointment that would interfere with the first ten minutes of class. We’re going to run down his alibi, but I agree with you, Dr. Lindhal. This doesn’t look like anything malicious.”

“Mira also found something gold—likely paint chips—under Ms. Glassman’s fingernails,” Tim says.

“It’s a college,” she says. “I imagine you two will find a lot of suspicious things on her body. Tell me if there’s something more suspicious like a bullet, bruises, or something strange in her autopsy.”

As she walks away with Macmillan bumbling behind her, she nearly bumps into Dr. Zimmer.

“Sorry,” he murmurs. “Do you mind if I go in and retrieve some work? Or can someone fetch some folders for me?”

“You can go in,” Stolz says. “Don’t touch anything except your paperwork.”

He nods and steps to the side, watching them both leave. Now that I can see the front of him, I can see that he’s in his early to mid-thirties with an average build and denim blue eyes that remind me of my favorite pair of jeans. I can usually pick up more about a person—their home life, their stress level, what they had for breakfast—but I’m distracted from it all because I can see his grief written all over his face and I can’t imagine how a professor could feel that deeply about someone who just helped him at his job. Unless the relationship between them went deeper than that.

Then again, emotions have never been my forte. I reach under my protective plastic suit and rub the tiny plastic beads of my bracelet. Maybe I should say emotions have
almost
never been my forte.

“Her favorite book was
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
,” he says to Tim and me. “She wrote a beautiful story about it, but turned the setting into the Bronx. She made Alice into a street artist and the Cheshire Cat into an anarchist.”

“How is that pertinent to her death?” I ask.

He looks straight at me. “It’s not. I just…it’s one of those moments I remember. Is that unusual? I just…I remember she was practically smiling the whole time she read the story to the class. She really loved the story and it was quite good. I wouldn’t consider it her best work, but she really loved it and I think it could have developed into something amazing. Is it abnormal to be struck with something like that, so close to a friend’s death?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m not a grief counselor.”

He nods, and I notice he’s studiously looking everywhere except for Victoria’s body.

“It seems disrespectful,” he says, when he catches me watching him.

I look away from him, examining the carpet around Victoria’s body. I look for any hint, any trace of evidence that could point to how she died. My eyes scan over Victoria and I can’t help but think again: this is how it all ends. I dissect people’s appearance and, in the end, that’s all that will be left.

I glance over my shoulder. Dr. Zimmer is still behind me. Maybe it’s not all that’s left. There are also the memories that we create with others. I touch the plastic pearls of my bracelet again. We create small legacies. Sometimes they cast a shadow over a loved one’s life until all that is left is dissolution.

* * *

M
y crime lab
is on the edge of the Bronx, which is forty minutes away from Tuskmirth College. It’s a long drive, but I enjoy getting out of the city and observing the differences in a college town.

Still, there are some reassurances to being back in my lab. The steel surfaces, the computers, microscopes. There’s the mass spectrometer, and there’s my favorite tool that analyzes all kinds of products like paper, glass, paint, fibers, and gun residues by using laser induced breakdown spectroscopy.

It means nothing to the layman, but I love it. That’s why I named it Albert.

The substance under Victoria’s fingernails was gold liquid latex—body paint. I wasn’t involved in the crazier parts of college except three frat parties my friends dragged me to, but the only situation I can think of where there would be body paint—especially taking into consideration that Victoria died early in the morning—is at a fraternity or sorority party. I take out my phone and call Detective Stolz.

“Hello?” she snarls. There’s a rumble of noise—mostly people talking—in the background.

“Uh, hey, it’s Solano,” I say. “Victoria Glassman had body paint under her—”

“Have you not seen the news?” she demands. “Senator Holden was killed. I can’t deal with the student right now. I have to get on top of this before the press becomes unbearable. I’ve already got a couple forensic guys here, but there will likely be a massive amount of trace evidence coming your way.”

“We can’t focus on both cases?” I ask.

“That’s not what I said…but you should understand we don’t have enough resources to spend an equal amount of time on both,” she says. “Just—just wait at the lab. I’m going to send one of the guys to you, so you can start looking at the evidence and processing it. There’s blood spatter all over. Hopefully some of it is the killer’s.”

“We can’t ignore Victoria Glassman’s death because of someone the media thinks is more important.”

“There’s no sign of foul play in Glassman’s case. In this case…foul play is certain,” she says. “Don’t worry about it. The last time Dr. Lindhal updated me, there wasn’t anything wrong with her body. Listen—I have to go. Get ready to test a lot of blood.”

She hangs up.

I set my phone down. I put the paint chips back into their metal can. This isn’t the way I want to deal with the case, but if Tim finds something suspicious, they’ll open it back up. Sometimes being part of criminal investigations means things get political—in this case, we’re actually delving into politics.

Unfortunately, politics tends to put the truth and anyone who speaks it to the sidelines, so for this case, I’ll have to remain silent. I sacrificed everything for this job—I can’t lose it.

* * *

I
take
the cherry out of my second whiskey sour and bite off its stem. I spent several hours testing blood with zero to show for it. It’s not the death that gets me or even the murders, though nearly every single one rips into me like I had been the one shot or killed. It’s simply the knowledge that the detectives and I are always there too late. We don’t save lives—we simply dig into their lives in the hopes of finding answers, though we know the murder likely still won’t make sense to us.

“Can I join you?”

I look over my shoulder to see Dr. John Zimmer.

“What are you doing all the way in the city, professor?” I ask, gesturing to the stool at my left.

“One of the other professors set me up on a blind date,” he says, sitting down beside me. “And you can just call me John. I’ve never gotten used to being called Dr. Zimmer or Professor Zimmer.”

“My name’s Mira.” I look around—the bar has a calm atmosphere with faux-wood tables and bar, but it’s not romantic on any level. “Are you meeting your date here?”

He shakes his head.

“I already met her,” he says. “We had dinner at The Glass Oven—highly recommend them, though you have to get a reservation a couple of days in advance.”

“But you’re here now, so it must not have gone well,” I say, taking a sip of my drink.

John orders a jack and Coke and takes a gulp of it as he hands the bartender some money. He seems eager to get as much alcohol into his bloodstream as possible.

I look at him over the edge of my drink. “Was it really that bad?”

“Maybe I just have high standards,” he says, taking another quick gulp of his drink. “But there’s only so long that you can deal with a woman—or any person—talking about how her sister is terrible, her landlord is hostile, and that she believes the weathermen are purposefully misleading in order to make viewers like them. She’s an anthropology professor, so I tried to get her to talk about her research, but she doesn’t seem to care much about it.”