Not Necessarily Murder

The building guard, Pinky Walker, knocked on the flat door. There was no answer. He knocked louder. He hadn’t seen anyone come in or out in three days. He fished out his master key card and carefully opened the door.

He left it open and wandered from room to room, then he saw the bodies on the bed. He reached for his cell phone and dialed 911. Pinky didn’t touch anything and moved backwards, slowly, out into the hall, and waited. He had a chill. The rooms were cold!

Detective Charles “Ham” Hamilton watched as the photographer took shots from several angles. The precinct desk sergeant had ‘rang’ him out of bed. The phone had beeped ten times before Ham rolled over and answered. His wife had only moaned.

Ham looked at his wristwatch. It was almost three in the morning. He snapped on a pair of thin plastic gloves.

The middle-aged man, over-weight, and from the coroner’s office, grunted, got up off his knees, and walked over to Ham—he was breathing hard.

“Ham, it appears like they were killed by a sharp object maybe sixteen or eighteen inches long. It went through both of them. And heavy. Whatever it was, it was pretty damn heavy.”

Hamilton walked over and looked at the two bodies. A beautiful, young, dark haired woman and an older man were still on the bed. The man was just starting too bald.

He could see that the entry holes of the sharp object were aligned in both bodies, “A sword. A bayonet maybe? Affixed to a rifle?”

Jim Lentz, the assistant coroner, said, “Mebbe! Never thought about that. Were you in the Army?”

“Yep! Sure was. Four years. Between wars—MPs. And six years in the Guards.”

Jim said, “Not much blood. I’ll know more in a day or so. It’s been about four days the way I figure it. Hard to tell with the air on at sixty-six degrees. Somebody sure liked it cold.”

“Probably a mistake. Nobody likes it that cold.”