When life hands you a house with a secret space, fill it with bodies!
They climbed up into the attic, and from there they could see down into the three foot by seven foot gap between the bedroom walls. There appeared to be three bodies, wrapped in plastic tarps, carelessly dumped in the middle. The inside of the walls were unfinished, and there didn’t appear to be any sort of entry into the space, apart from the opening in the attic.
“We should probably open up the wall at one end, and maybe we can get some pictures from there before – and as – we move them,” a tech told Grant as he busily snapped pictures from over the Sergeant’s shoulder. “I’m not getting any detail on the faces from up here. Too much reflection on the plastic.”
Grant nodded, and the tech hurried off to get help and start removing a section of the wall. “So who do you think these poor souls are?” he asked Detective Campbell and Sergeant Riggs.
“Not a clue,” Detective Campbell said. “Probably one… no, two of them are the missing bodies from Dr. Curtis’s morgue. The other is very likely Mr. Pearson, if Mrs. Mollycoddle is right about him not being the one there on Halloween.”
Sergeant Riggs groaned. “I suppose we have to go talk to her again?”
“No, I don’t think there’s any more she could add,” Detective Campbell said, grinning when relief broke over Sergeant Riggs’s face. “Come on, she’s not that bad.”
“Says you,” Sergeant Riggs muttered.
They climbed out of the attic and watched as the bodies were carefully removed from the wall space, photographs taken at every step. It was slow and tedious work, but in the end they had three bodies laid out on gurneys in the living room. All male, one of which fit the approximate description of Mr. Todd Pearson. And one of which had been in the wall long enough to partially mummify.
“This one probably isn’t part of this crime, but based on the condition of the body I would say it was placed here while Mr. Pearson owned the house,” Grant said, pointing at the older corpse.
“Okay, we’ll deal with that one later. If he’s been dead more than ten years,” Detective Campbell said, looking to Grant for confirmation.
“Most likely in that time range, give or take a few years,” he said.
“If he’s been dead that long, another week isn’t going to matter. Leads will be cold, especially if that is Mr. Pearson and he’s the killer. Right now we need to focus on the current crime, and you know what that means.” Detective Campbell shot Sergeant Riggs a sympathetic look.
“What?” Sergeant Riggs asked.
“Now we have to go talk to Mrs. Mollycoddle again,” Detective Campbell said. “See if she can give us a positive identification of the body.”
He snapped a picture of the face of the corpse with his cell phone and he and Sergeant Riggs went over to talk to Mrs. Mollycoddle. She answered the door in a voluminous housecoat and giant fuzzy slippers, her hair already set in curlers for the night. Detective Campbell checked his watch and was surprised to find it was already 8 o’clock in the evening.
“Sorry to disturb you so late, ma’am,” he started to say, but she cut him off, holding up a hand and, to her credit, letting her glance slide over the wet splotch on his trousers without comment.
“No, no, no… no problem at all, come in, come in!” She stepped back from the open door and ushered them into a living room that could only be described as… tacky. Cheap figurines and loud pillows and throws combined to create the feeling of being in a carnival tent, complete with that slightly unpleasant odor you can’t really identify and aren’t sure you’d want to, anyway. They sat on the edges of a swirled blue and orange velour sofa, trying to touch as little as possible. What didn’t look sticky was covered with a coating of cat hair. Sergeant Riggs felt his nose start to wrinkle into a sneeze.
“We’re going to ask you to do something,” Detective Campbell said. “But feel free to refuse. It’s not for everyone. But it would really help us out. I have a picture here, of a dead body. We’d like to know if it’s Mr. Pearson.” He held up his phone, but so that the picture of the corpse’s face was turned away from her.
She looked momentarily shaken, but composed herself quickly. “That poor, poor man,” she said. “Of course, of course.” He held out the phone to her and she took it, looking intently at the little screen. She stared at it for a few moments before handing it back. “Is the body still over there?”
“Yes, it should be,” Detective Campbell said. “Why?”
“I would like to take a look at it in person,” she said. “Based on that little picture, I can’t be sure, but my first inclination is to say that no, that isn’t Todd Pearson. It looks a lot like him, but I don’t think it is.”
“The body is not in the best shape,” Sergeant Riggs said gently. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Can’t be any worse than what I saw spread over the lawn, could it?” she asked.
He had to admit she had a point there. In comparison, Todd Pearson’s body was nearing funeral home viewing ready. They led her over to the gurney in question, and Grant peeled back the body bag, exposing the face.
“No, now I’m sure of it. Pretty sure, anyway. That’s not him.” She shook her head.
“How sure are you?” Grant asked. He made a note on the clipboard tucked into the gurney under the body bag.
“Hmm, probably 90% - the bruising and puffiness makes it a little hard to tell. But if you pull back the bag a little farther, I could be 100% sure,” she said. He pulled back the bag to reveal the chest, which was a mottled mess of bruised underneath the tattered shirt. “A little farther than that.”
Grant edged the bag down more, and Mrs. Mollycoddle got impatient and jerked the bag down to the corpse’s knees. Then, before anyone could stop her, she grabbed his right leg and pulled the raggedy pants material aside to peer at his inner thigh. “Nope, definitely not him,” she said as Detective Campbell dragged her back.
“What were you doing? You can’t just grab the body!” he said. “There might be evidence on that body, and you’ve just contaminated it!” She shrugged him off.
“I had to see if his birthmark was there. Todd had a large, splotchy birthmark on his inner thigh. It’s not there, so now I’m 100% sure it’s not him,” she said.
“You should have just said something. We would have checked,” Detective Campbell said through clenched teeth.
“How…” Sergeant Riggs stopped himself before he could ask a question he really did not want to know the answer to. But she was to fast for him.
“Old people have needs, too, young man. You’ll see someday,” she said tartly. She shot Detective Campbell a withering glance, then included Sergeant Riggs and Grant in to for good measure.
Detective Campbell put a stop to the conversation before they learned what positions Mr. Pearson and Mrs. Mollycoddle had preferred, because he had a sneaking suspicious a trapeze swing and a leather mask might have been involved. And some things are just better left private.
“Thank you, Mrs. Mollycoddle. We appreciate your help.”
She looked like she wanted to stay and say more, but reluctantly allowed herself to be led off the property by a crime scene technician. She looked back a few times, though, and Detective Campbell had a strange feeling she still knew more than she was telling them. He shook himself. First Isabel Curtis is in on some nefarious plot, and now he suspects harmless old Melinda Mollycoddle. He was off his game.
“Find out what we can about this Todd Pearson, would you? I want every scrap of information on him. Job history, bank details, everything.” Detective Campbell paced back and forth as he spoke, and Grant and Sergeant Riggs exchanged worried glances. There was something bothering the normally cool and collected Detective, and that did not bode well for anyone working with him.
“We’ll get right on that,” Sergeant Riggs said. Then he pretended to smother a yawn. “I think we’ve done just about all we can for the night, wouldn’t you say?”
“No, we still have to get a look in that coffin,” Detective Campbell snapped. “Have you heard back from Porter and Jones yet?”
“No, I,” Sergeant Riggs was cut off by the shrill ringing of his telephone. He glanced at the caller I.D. “Well, that was some timing.”
Detective Campbell fidgeted as he listened to Sergeants Riggs’s side of the conversation. “Riggs. Yeah. Yeah. What? Really? So they… Okay, what about… they’re sure? Positive? How… Okay, sure. Gotcha. We’ll check. Thanks.”
“Well?” Detective Campbell didn’t bother to wait for Sergeant Riggs to elaborate on his own. “What was that?”
“That was Porter, they got permission from the family and opened the coffin. At first, they thought everything was in order, but one family member said something looked off, so they, uh, looked into it, and apparently the body in the coffin was a wax sculpture. But the funeral home swears they had the real body, at least at some point. The undertaker who prepared the body probably would have noticed if he’d been working on a wax replica.”
“And someone would have to have sculpted the replica after the undertaker did their work, anyway,” Grant said. “Otherwise it wouldn’t have matched. If they were fooled for even a minute, it means they had the hair and makeup exactly as it should have been.”
The stood around the corpse of the faux Todd Pearson and pondered the new development in the case for awhile, none of them saying anything. A few times Grant opened his mouth and started to speak, but shook his head and fell silent again.
“I’m not entirely sure this case could get any stranger,” Detective Campbell finally said softly.
“Then I probably shouldn’t mention the talking penguins,” Sergeant Riggs said.
“Very funny, Riggs.” Detective Campbell scowled at him.
“They’re holding the wax body in the funeral home tonight, we can go look at it, and question the undertaker, in the morning.” Sergeant Riggs said.
Detective Campbell momentarily looked as if he wanted to argue, to demand that they head over there right this instant, but then his shoulders sagged and he brushed at the nearly-dry coffee stain on the front of his trousers that had managed to retain an impressive number of cat hairs. “Tomorrow it is.”
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