07 - The Shake and Bake State

The Shake and Bake State

Chapter 01

         It was a mild temblor, only 5.6 on the Richter, and occurred at 11:13 in the morning. Californians looked up when they felt the earth move under their feet, and then calmly returned to what they had been doing. A 5.6 might ruffle the nerves of tourists to the Bay Area, and most definitely did to some. Those who made it through the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake unscathed, however, shrugged and moved on.

         Randall had been walking into his office when the temblor struck and reached out to a nearby shelf to keep his balance. Containers, some filled with forensic specimens and others with rocks he’d collected from various crime scenes, slowly crab-walked to the edges of the shelves. He caught a glass jar before it fell to the floor then let out a small sigh of relief when the floor stopped moving. Even after all these years of living in San Francisco, Randall still didn’t like the feeling of not being in control that earthquakes brought out in him.

         Simon, a newcomer to the Golden State, ran into his office. “Did you feel that? Was that the big one everyone talks about?” This was the first quake the young man ever felt, and his wide-eyed excitement of this new experience made Randall smile.

         “When the big one comes, Simon, you won’t have to ask.” He returned the jar to its place on the shelf and continued over to his desk. “How’s that case you’re on going? Anything new to report?” Simon, the newest member of his staff, was working on evidence from a simple robbery that occurred earlier that morning.

         A man, either Hispanic or light African-American, walked into a convenient store and robbed it in daylight. He’d been wearing a florescent-orange vest over his plaid shirt and worn and faded jeans. The baseball cap with an Oakland A’s logo on the front, he’d pulled down low in a feeble attempt to hide his face. The man hurt nobody during the robbery, and the store’s clerk sensibly gave him the money from the cash register’s till without any argument.

         Simon, delighted about being on his own for the first time, methodically dusted for fingerprints, took the videotapes from the surveillance cameras back to the lab, and spent the next few hours processing the data. One of the tapes showed the man with his left hand on the glass counter as he waved the gun in his right hand at the clerk. Plainly nervous, he left behind all sorts of clues, and Simon had no doubts at all that he’d identify the robber soon.

         Sure enough, AFIS kicked out a match on the fingerprints found on the counter within a few minutes. Now, Simon placed the printout about Al Perez with the accompanying picture on Randall’s desk. “He’s got a record for petty theft, breaking and entering, and other nonviolent crimes like that,” he offered as his supervisor skimmed over the information. “His picture also matched what I could see on the videotapes even though he tried to not appear on them.”

         “Good job, Simon. Call Captain Steele and have him pick this Al Perez up.” Randall shook his head in disgust. “When will these people learn that video cameras are everywhere now?” He stood up and started towards the door.

         Before Simon could reply to Randall’s rhetorical question, the building started to shake again. However, it wasn’t just a gentle temblor as before, over in a few seconds. This time the shaking jerked the two men off their feet. As they fell to the floor, both instinctively covered their exposed heads from the flying and crashing objects around them. They heard outside the office the sound of the many glass walls shattering from the strength of the earthquake that seemed to go on endlessly. Cries of pain and terror mingled with that sound as the shaking continued.

Chapter 02

         The jerking motion of the earthquake lasted for a long 45 seconds. In Randall’s office, his crowded bookshelves toppled their contents onto the floor, some books slamming painfully onto the two men. Glass jars shattered around them while the desktop computer teetered for seconds before falling off the side of the desk to the floor. Dust from the supposedly clean room rose then drifted slowly down to land on the debris now scattered all over the room.

         Finally, after what seemed a lifetime, the earthquake slowly diminished then ended. Randall, shaken but unhurt, got to his feet then dragged a shocked Simon to his.
”Now THAT was a big one,” he managed to get out before the younger man pulled away and headed for a dented wastebasket to lose his recently eaten breakfast. Leaving him to his misery, Randall headed out into the corridor to check on the rest of his crew.

         He found Mary and Anthony trying nonchalantly to pick up dropped evidence from the floor. Their shaking hands, however, gave them away to the observant supervisor. Seeing they were unhurt except for some minor cuts and bruises, Randall went looking for Angela and Jake whom he knew were in the lab’s garage processing a car that recently contained a dead body. He got there just in time to see the two agents crawl out from under the car where they had ducked when the quake started. They also were mostly unhurt, though filthy from the oil now dripping under the car. Randall next tried his cell phone to check on both Dr. Burke and Captain Steele but got only dead air.

         As he went from lab to lab, finding the various lab technicians undamaged, he became aware of the smell of smoke. It did not come from any of the rooms but drifted in from outside through the many broken windows of the building. Walking carefully through the shards of glass under one window, Randall looked out. Shocked, he saw the building just down the street from the labs, a small family run restaurant, engulfed in flames. Evidently, a gas line had broken, and the lit stove set off the fire. People already gathered outside trying to put out the flames with handheld fire extinguishers, an impossible task.

         In the distance, the sirens of fire engines became louder, but none came this way. As Randall watched, the small building caved in on itself sending the rescuers out on the street scuttling back to safety. He hoped the owners and their customers managed to get outside but knew that probably didn’t happen.

         In the coming hours and days, Randall realized he and his crew would be busy. In times like this, the crazies came out of the woodwork and tried to slip in their murders among the naturally caused deaths.

Chapter 03

         The first call for their assistance came less than an hour after the earthquake. A warehouse off the Embarcadero near Pier 24 had collapsed trapping three workers inside. When trying to reach them, their coworkers accidentally dislodged some floorboards exposing the currently unused basement. The grisly discovery they made had them calling the police who in turn notified Randall.

         It took him half an hour to navigate his SUV through the debris that had landed on the streets between the lab and the warehouse. Simon sat quietly in the passenger seat, still embarrassed by his involuntary reaction to the quake. He hoped his supervisor, a man whom he admired and wanted to emulate, wasn’t too upset about the ruined wastebasket.

         “Did they go into detail about what they found?” he asked, breaking the long silence. All Randall had told him when assigning him to work on this case was there were some bodies found in a basement. Before answering, Randall spent a minute or two slowly maneuvering around a delivery truck that had overturned in the middle of the street, its content of freshly caught fish scattered on the ground. Already cats were congregating on this sudden feast with the unhurt driver just standing there helplessly watching them.

         “No, they just said they’d found two bodies, nothing else.” A few minutes later, Randall pulled the SUV up beside a police car. A waiting officer, a balding man probably in his late 50s, walked over as the two forensic agents got out of their vehicle. The man had been on the force for many years and no longer was upset at the sight of dead bodies, even those that had a strong stench of death still on them. The same wasn’t true for his partner, a young rookie just out of the academy. Randall and Simon saw him on his knees at the side of the warehouse, retching loudly.

         “New guy?” asked Randall, looking at the younger man who was finally standing up, but talking to the seasoned officer. “Is it really that bad inside?”

         The officer shrugged. “Stan’s okay, just a bit green.” He headed for the building with the agents following close behind. “We found two bodies, one there for some time, the other just starting to stink.” The three men reached the building and started down a hastily created entrance down into the basement. The previously trapped workers were already long gone, leaving only the two policemen behind.

         At the bottom, lying on the damp earthen floor were two bodies. Rather, there was one skeleton with only bits of flesh and pieces of clothing left and a second one of a person more recently deceased. “Someone at least attempted to bury the first body,” said Randall, walking around the dirt disturbed by the recent quake. “The other one, they just dumped, not caring if someone found it. I wonder why.”

         “Could he just be a homeless guy who came here to get out of the cold and died naturally?” asked the policeman. He put a handkerchief to his nose but otherwise seemed undisturbed by the two bodies.

         “Possibly, but I doubt it.” Randall pointed at the left hand on the body. “See that tattoo by the wrist? Mean anything to you, Simon?” He looked over questioningly at the young man who stood on the other side of this body.

         Simon thought for a minute then slowly asked, “Wasn’t there a case some time back where you found a tattoo like this at the chocolate factory?” At Randall’s encouraging nod, he continued, “You never found the rest of the body, if I remember right.”

         “Correct, we only found the left hand of a young man.” The ever-observant supervisor then pointed towards the skeleton a few feet away from the second body. “What do you see there, or rather don’t see?”

         The other two men looked to where Randall was pointing. “Well, I’ll be damned.” This came from the officer, while Simon started grinning.

         “There’s no left hand on that body.”

         “Very good. Now, how can we find out if it’s our missing Bobby?” Ever the teacher, Randall asked this question of Simon. He then gave him a look of satisfaction when given a quick answer of matching DNA. The match would be between the bone marrow in the skeleton against that of the hand saved in one of Dr. Burke’s autopsy vaults, if possible.

         Turning to the other body and examining it more closely now, he noticed something unique about the body of what was a young man in his early teens.


Chapter 04

         While Randall and Simon were out in the field on the double DB run, Anthony heard a phone ringing in his supervisor’s office. It took him a few minutes to track the sound down in all the mess caused by the earthquake, but he finally found the phone miraculously undamaged under the desk. On answering it, he recognized the gruff voice of Captain Steele on the other end of the line and was glad the man had survived the quake.

         “Where’s Randall? We need one of you up at Coit Tower.” This building constructed in the shape of a fire hose nozzle stood at the top of a hill and was a popular tourist attraction. During the summer months, a line of cars wound up the curved road to allow the people a spectacular view of the San Francisco Bay. The view was even better after the climb to the top of the monument, and the earthquake caught a dozen or so people inside.

         “The tower is holding up okay,” replied the captain to Anthony’s question about its condition, “but we got a report there were three deaths there.”

         “Do you know how they died?” Anthony tucked the phone under his chin to leave his hand free to take notes. He found a pad of paper and a pen in Randall’s desk drawer but frowned when he also found a pill bottle half filled with small tablets. Putting them aside for the moment, he wrote down what Steele next told him.

         “Tell Randall one DB had a heart attack. We already identified him as a 68-year-old man from Iowa out here on vacation. His wife is in shock, but one of my female officers is with her right now. The second one cracked his skull open when he fell off the ledge at the edge of the parking lot. He’d been standing on it taking pictures of the Bay Bridge when the quake hit and tossed him off to land hard on the concrete. According to the license in his wallet, the man’s a local.” Steele paused for a moment, supposedly referring to his notes.

         “What about the third one?” As Anthony asked the question, he was looking again at the pill bottle but wondering about the silence on the other end of the line.

Chapter 05

         “Well, Simon?” asked Randall, “What do you notice about this body?”

         “He’s big, quite big. Is that it?” Simon was being tactful as the young man was morbidly obese, nearer to 500 than 400 pounds. This was on a frame of around 5 feet 8 inches or thereabouts.

         “That’s right.” Randall started for the doorway. “It’ll be up to Dr. Burke to find the cause of death, but I doubt if it was from natural causes.” Once outside, he now found his cell phone worked and called the medical examiner’s phone number for a body pickup. The two forensic agents already had collected, bagged, and tagged any evidence left in the basement that could help identify the two bodies. This might also include clues to their causes of death. They left the two police officers behind to wait for the ME’s vehicle to arrive.

         On their way back to the labs, they passed scenes of devastation from the quake, but San Franciscans in general were coping well. Smoke rose into the afternoon sky down in the Marina, also the site of previous fires back in 1989. Driving back on the Embarcadero, Randall looked up at one of his favorite places in the city, Coit Tower. Many mornings after a hectic shift at work, he’d ridden up to the still empty parking lot and sat there recharging his emotional battery. He found it soothing to look out on the two bridges, not yet filled with commuters.

         He suddenly pulled the SUV over to the side of the street and sat there staring out the window up towards the tower. “Simon, would you mind a little side trip before we go back to the lab?”

         “What do you have in mind?” Upon hearing where Randall wanted to go, Simon sat back, a bit confused but more than willing to put off processing the evidence on the two bodies until later. As the SUV crossed over the streets to the hill leading up to Coit Tower, Randall could feel himself relaxing the closer they got.

         He finally drove up the hill and pulled into the almost filled parking lot. It surprised him to see his old friend, Captain Steele, standing near the bottom of the tower. The captain spotted him and walked over as the two men got out. “You sure got here fast,” Steele said. “So Anthony was able to get hold of you.”

         Randall looked at him as if he were crazy, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Bob. We just came up here to take a short break. What’re you doing here, and what’s it got to do with us?”

         Realizing the others weren’t here because of his request, Steele wordlessly motioned for them to follow him back to the tower. There they saw a man’s body lying on the ground, face up. Simon looked at the captain, puzzled as there was no overt reason for his death. There was no blood, no sign of trauma, just a man stretched out as if peacefully asleep instead of dead. Steele reached down and turned the man over onto his stomach.

         Steele smiled mirthlessly and said, “You see it, don’t you, Jeff?” Randall nodded that he did. He knew their short break would not happen now.

Chapter 06

         The two bodies, well, one body and one skeleton, arrived back at Dr. Burke’s autopsy lab within the hour. Putting aside the skeleton for further research, the chief medical officer gave the body of the morbidly obese male a quick preliminary look, noting no obvious cause of death at first glance. The cause of death might be something as simple as a stroke or heart attack, although it seemed unlikely in such a young male.

         Just as he was doing the initial Y cut of the man’s chest, Anthony walked into the morgue. He glanced at the body Dr. Burke was cutting, but stopped at the second table that contained the skeleton. Memories of that stormy day when he and Randall had found the hand in the vat at the chocolate factory came back to him in a rush. Finding Randall near death after their wild ride during the flash flood had made him aware of how much he would miss the older man. Randall had brought Anthony into the SFPD lab right out of college and helped him to be the excellent forensic scientist that he had become.

          “Are these the two bodies Randall and Simon found?” Anthony asked, leaving the skeleton and going to stand next to the table where Dr. Burke was finishing up the incision on the obese man. “Any COD for either of them yet?”

         Dr. Burke raised his face shield and stepped back from the body. “Well, he has all the signs of Prader-Willi syndrome. Given the diminished body tone and morbid obesity caused by extreme overeating, it’s a safe preliminary diagnosis.” Dr. Burke started pulling out the various internal organs and weighing them. “I’ve sent blood to the lab to check for drugs and signs of diabetes mellitus. If he also has DM, I might rule in Royer’s syndrome instead.”

         Anthony again turned back to the skeleton. I wonder if this is our missing Bobby, he thought. He leaned down further to examine something that had caught his attention. “Dr. Burke,” he said over his shoulder, “would you look at the right femur?” When the doctor joined him, Anthony pointed out a deep gouge in the long leg bone. “Could that have been cause by a knife?”

         Dr. Burke closely examined the bone and the location of the cut. “If it is a knife wound, this might possibly be how the person died. The location is where the main artery would be, and he could have simply bled out.”

         Satisfied that Dr. Burke would keep him informed about any further discoveries, Anthony left the morgue and headed back to Randall’s office. Seeing pills in Randall’s desk had been bothering him ever since he found them, and he wanted to check out what they were. He also needed to contact his supervisor and pass on the information Dr. Burke had given him about the two bodies now in the morgue.

         Unknown to him, Anthony’s curiosity about some unidentified pills was not satisfied for quite some time. Randall had another mystery for his night crew to solve with the third body at Coit Tower.

Chapter 07

         Randall stood by the autopsy table, his patience starting to erode with each passing minute. On the other side were two of his forensic agents, who glanced at each other for help. In between them, lying on his back with a Y shaped chest incision, was the body of a naked man. Finally, both Mary and Simon shook their heads and waited for their supervisor to explain what they should be looking at.

         “Do you see the tattoo on the man’s left hip?” Randall said, pointing to that portion of the body.

         Mary moved to get a closer look. “Yes, it’s a donkey. What’s important about that?”

         Randall smiled but said nothing else. He just waited, silent as a Buddha for her or Simon to continue. When neither did and still looked puzzled, he pointed to the man’s right hip.

         “So he’s patriotic,” Simon’s comment made Randall’s smile get even wider. “It’s well done and beautiful, but it’s only a tattoo of the American flag.”

         “Come on, you two. He was definitely murdered. Cui bono?” At this Latin question from Randall, his agents sighed in exasperation. Too often in the past, Randall had thrown terms in various languages at them, expecting them to know what he meant.

         “Okay, forget that for the moment.” Randall started pacing back and forth. “Have you identified him yet, or is he still a John Doe?”

         Simon answered quickly, trying to gain back some of Randall’s good opinion of them. “Well, I ran his fingerprints through AFIS, and they came back for a Wilber Hemminch from the SeaCliff area of San Francisco.”

         Mary interrupted with, “Oh, he has money! SeaCliff is a pricey place to live.”

         As if he hadn’t heard her, Simon went on. “Years ago, he worked in a bank, with his fingerprints taken at that time, for bonding purposes.”

         “Can you tell me anything else about the man from his body?” Randall looked over at Dr. Burke, who was standing away from the table after doing the autopsy, the third since the earthquake only hours ago. The doctor watched with amusement but kept silent while his longtime friend taught the younger agents by making them research the evidence. Mary and Simon slowly walked up and down beside the body, examining every inch of the man.

         “He’s young,” Mary said, almost to herself, “probably in his early 30s. He’s Caucasian, about six feet tall, 190 pounds.”

         Simon added, “I’d take him for a yuppie businessman except for his long blonde hair. Tying it back with a long piece of rawhide doesn’t quite fit that image, though. Guess he no longer works at the bank looking like that.”

         “His nails were recently manicured, so he’s probably not a homeless person.” Mary added this bit of information after checking his hands. Both she and Simon looked over at Randall to see if this was enough information to satisfy him. From the look on their supervisor’s face, they gathered there was still more for them to learn from the man’s body.

         “Let’s see,” continued Simon, giving Wilber Hemminch a closer look. “Um, he’s uncircumcised so probably not Jewish, and he has blue eyes, probably of Nordic descent with that last name.”

         Randall motioned Dr. Burke over to the table. “Help me turn him over, Doc. Maybe that will help these two.” The doctor nodded, and the two men got on one side of the body and turned him over onto his stomach.

         Simon frowned at his boss, “You could have shown us that to start with, Randall. Is that how he died?” He asked this last of Dr. Burke.

         “Yes, cause of death is instantaneous cardiac arrest, probably because of a laser beam, as evidenced by the signs of cauterization caused by such a beam". The doctor again moved back out of the way to let Randall take over his teaching exercise.

         Mary looked more closely at the small wound, remembering an article she had recently read. “Randall, in one of my forensic magazines there was a web site listed selling laser ray guns, or rather plans to build them.” She looked off in the distance, her eyes unfocused, trying to remember the article. “It was hand held and battery operated. The 500 joules of pulse energy produced an intense burst of light capable of burning holes in most materials.” She looked back down at the hole in the man’s back. “This included, it seems, a human body.”

         “Is there any way to track down who might have bought one of these laser guns?” asked Simon, once again impressed with Mary’s photographic memory.

         “I think so. To buy the plans to build a dangerous class IV laser, the purchaser has to sign a hazardous equipment affidavit.” Before Randall could suggest she look into this, Mary smiled and said, while leaving the room, “I’ll get on that right away.”

         Simon looked over at Randall. “Are we done here?” When the other man nodded, Simon gave a sign of relief, premature though it was.

         “Now,” Randall said, heading with his young colleague out of the morgue after saying good-bye to Dr. Burke, “we have to check out the other evidence. The main question still is unanswered about this man’s murder. Cui bono?”

Chapter 08

         With Mary in one lab researching online to find the list of recent hazardous equipment affidavits, Randall and Simon went to another room to check out the bag containing evidence found on and around Wilber Hemminch’s body hours earlier in the parking lot of Coit Tower.

         Another agent, Angela Starkey, came into the room to join the two men. The tall blonde woman was waving a piece of computer printout in her hand. “I found something interesting about our victim after AFIS identified him. On a whim, I checked the public records office regarding wills for people named Hemminch. Since it’s a very uncommon name, I only found one that had recently gone through probate. Guess who it was and who the only beneficiary is?”

         “Well,” said Randall, smiling his pleasure at the woman’s initiative. “I’m guessing the beneficiary is our man in the morgue. Whose will is it?”

         Angela looked down at the paper to refresh her memory before answering him. “Do you remember months ago the banker who died under suspicious circumstances, Ernest Hemminch.? He was only 67, but Dr. Burke found a lethal amount of botulinal neurotoxin in his body. We never determined how it got there, Jeff, and his sons both had rather shaky alibis. It’s still an open case.”

         “I remember that,” said Simon, before Randall could answer. “He had a son and a stepson, Stanley Hodgson, from his wife’s previous marriage. She died two days before her husband, from the same cause, didn’t she?”

         Nodding her head, Angela continued. “Yes, and she was the primary beneficiary. However, since she died first, her husband’s natural son, Wilber, got the whole estate, the house, his father’s massive wealth, everything.”

         “The stepson?” Randall asked this obvious question. “What did he get?”

         “Nothing, nada, el zippo. Ernest Hemminch left Stanley out of the will, probably because he’d disowned his stepson months earlier. No reason given, as far as I could find out.” This from Angela put a frown on Randall’s face. It was not due to her initial flip comment but because she had just given him another clue into the death of Wilber Hemminch.

         At that moment, Mary returned, just in time to overhear Angela’s last statement. “Is that Stanley Hodgson you’re talking about?”

         “Yes, it is.” Angela, who didn’t know what Mary had been researching, looked at the other woman in surprise. “How did you know his last name?”

         Instead of answering her, Mary walked over to Randall and said, “I think I can answer your question, ‘cui bono?’”

         Randall’s sudden grin confused everyone except for Mary. “Okay, Mary, who?” he asked.

         “The stepson, Stanley. He is on record as buying the plans for the laser gun. He now gets his stepfather’s estate since there are no other living relatives. Once he murdered his stepbrother, Wilber’s inheritance passes to him automatically as the next of kin.”

         Simon, who had been searching online during this conversation, turned to the others. “I think I can tell you all why Stanley was disowned. Mr. Hemminch was an ultra conservative Republican, according to an article in the San Francisco Examiner. Wilber must have convinced his father that he, too, was a Republican, never revealing he was, in fact, a Democrat, as evidenced by the donkey tattoo on his hip.”

         Randall asked, “What about Stanley? He wasn’t as sneaky as Wilber, just homicidal?”

         “Evidently Wilber told his father he saw Stanley at a Democrat presidential rally,” said Mary, with a shake of her head at the spitefulness of some people. “The next day, out went Stanley from the will.”

         When Randall and Angela left to turn over all the facts and evidence to Captain Steele of the SFPD, Simon pulled Mary aside. “Okay, what’s with that cui bono stuff? Don’t tell me you knew what he was saying.”

         “Nope,” said Mary, with a laugh. “I Googled on a Latin-to-English translation site while I was in the other lab. Cui bono is a Latin phrase that simply means, “Who benefits? In this case, the only person to benefit was Stanley.”

Chapter 09

         The body on the morgue’s slab was unremarkable. There were no outward signs of violence, no bloody knife wound, and no blossoming hole from the impact of a bullet. He was simply a naked young man, dead about 12 hours.

         “Okay, Doc,” asked Randall, confused as to why Dr. Burke had requested his presence at the morgue. “There isn't any evidence of murder, so why do you think it was foul play?” Randall had just put in a triple shift processing multiple deaths from a riot at a heavy metal rock concert held in Golden Gate Park. He was cranky and totally exhausted. All he had wanted was a large cold beer and a warm bed. He had managed to get the drink, but Dr. Burke called him back to work while Randall was just starting to undress for bed, sadly alone.

         “Don’t you recognize who this is?” The rotund doctor rarely got the chance to stump his friend and took delight in the few times like this when he did. “Try to think back two years ago, the big gang war between the SF Brothers and that new group trying to take over their turf.”

         “Yeah, I remember.” Randall pulled up a tall metal stool and sat down, his legs starting to shake from weariness. “The SF Brothers completely wiped out that new group down to the last member. Was quite a busy night here, wasn’t it?” He smiled tiredly at the memory of his forensic agents having to process the scene where seven young men had died. “We all earned our pay that night.”

         “It also was the first time San Francisco heard about the SF Brothers but not the last.” Dr. Burke also remembered what the SFPD called the Chocolate-Covered Hand case. The hand, and only the hand, of a young man turned up about a year ago. It was swirling around in a vat of dark chocolate in a nearby Petaluma candy factory. The ghoulish sight startled a bunch of out-of-state tourists and put many of them off chocolate for life. Just a month ago, an earthquake in the city had uncovered the remainder of the body in a deserted warehouse.

         “So?” asked Randall, wanting to get this discussion over and done with so he could return home. “What does all that have to do with this kid?”

         “Check this out.” Dr. Burke reached down and turned the body’s left hand over, palm side up. On the inside wrist was a small tattoo. Randall immediately recognized it as the SF Brothers gang sign and was suddenly wide awake.

         “Oh, damn. This guy’s about 18, isn’t he?” It was a well known fact to Randall and everyone else in the SFPD that no one lived beyond 18 in that particular gang.

         “His driving license was in his jacket pocket when they brought the body in.” The doctor handed Randall a plastic evidence bag containing various small items. “His clothes are in the evidence room, but I thought you’d like to see these first.”

         Randall opened the bag and took out a laminated California license. It was for a Russell Simpson, who just turned 18 two days ago. After checking this information, he put it back in the bag. “Okay, how did they kill Simpson? Was it easy or painful?” He knew the standing of the person in the gang determined the type of death he would receive when he reached the age of 18. The higher up in the gang’s hierarchal food chain, the more humane the manner of his death.

          “Not sure how painful it was, but he died from hyponatremia or so-called water intoxication.” Dr. Burke handed Randall a sheet of paper. “When we tested his blood, we discovered he had severely depleted electrolytes. Look at the sodium and potassium levels.”

         “Are you saying he drank too much water?” Randall looked at the figures on the paper, then over to the body. “That can cause somebody to die?”

         “There have been a few college hazing deaths this way over the years, so, yes, a person can die from too much water intake.” Dr. Burke took the paper back from Randall and continued with his explanation. “Body systems start to fail when the electrolyte levels get dangerously out of balance. Eventually, the person is in trouble with swelling of the brain, also known as cerebral edema. If unchecked, this can lead to brain damage, paralysis, and even death.” He looked at the 18-year-old on his table. “Sadly, that’s what happened to Mr. Simpson.”

         “How do you know this was murder and that he didn’t do this to himself?” Randall was grasping at straws in the hope of it being an accidental death and not one that would mean even more hours of work.

         “The tox screen just came back and showed a large amount of the sedative Ambien in his system. The other gang members must have drugged him first so he wouldn’t resist the water as they poured it down his throat.” Dr. Burke thought for a minute. “Come to think of it, it sounds like a painless way to die. He must have been a high muckity-muck in the gang then.”

         Randall stood up and sighed before heading for the morgue’s door. “You realize, doc, we’ll never find out who killed him. We never do with the SF Brothers, no matter how hard we try.” Knowing it would be futile, he also knew he and his staff would have to spend wasted hours following up dead-end leads before adding Russell Simpson’s death to the still-open case list.

         Sometimes, Dr. Burke thought, watching his friend leave, shoulders again slumped in weariness, the way people kill each other makes no sense, no sense at all.