His left hand.I looked at his desk again and noticed the placement of pens, his drink, and the angles of the papers.All indicative of a left-handed person.
I only knew what to look for because Josephine had told me the day before.I wasn’t sure my powers of investigation were strong enough yet to have come up with that on my own.
I set the photographs down on the desk and lined them up in order.
Behind the Polaroids was the paperwork.Two pages.
The first was a handwritten incident report, ten lines long, in Milton’s looping scrawl.The address.The time.The position of the body.Self-inflicted GSW to right temple.I recognized the responding deputy’s name with absolutely no surprise.He’d retired the same year Milton went to prison and was now living in Boca Raton.
The second was a death certificate, signed by Dr.Vernon Keats.Cause of death listed assuicide.Manner of death listed assuicide.In the space for the medical examiner’s notes, Keats had writtenconcurand his initials.
“Well…” I said.“This is certainly brief.”
“Just Milton doing what Milton did,” Dash agreed with a grimace.“Still blows my mind he was in charge of law and order for decades.How is this place not a completely corrupt cesspool?”
“Give it time,” I said.“You’ve only been on the job a few months.You might uncover all kinds of things.”
“Encouraging,” he said.
“Can you scan the photos and send them through email?I want to see if I can enhance them to see if there’s anything unusual about the scene.”
“I can do that,” he said.“Any theories from the photographs?”
“I get the feeling you saw something I didn’t see.”
“You typically see more than you think you do,” he said.“Look at the gun.”
I looked.
“Notice anything weird about it?”
“Not right off,” I said, but I was mostly talking my way through it.“If the gun is gripped in his right hand and he fires, what happens?What does the body reflexively do?”
“That’s the right question,” Dash said.“Generally the body relaxes after trauma to the brain like that, and the gun falls from their grasp in the general vicinity of where the shot was fired from.”
“Oh,” I said, understanding what he was getting at.“So he fires into the right temple and his body slumps to the left like the picture shows.He’s almost completely out of the chair and almost on the floor.But his hand didn’t relax and drop the gun.Somehow when his head and body went left, his right arm kept gripping the gun and ended up away from the rest of his body and on the desk.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“You think someone placed it there and put the gun in his hand after he was dead?”
“It’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility.Especially knowing Henry was left-handed.”
“Yeah, I noticed his desk setup.His pen is lying right there by the papers on the left side.Milton was a dummy.”
“Milton was a lot of things,” Dash said.“He generally knew what he was doing though.He just made bad choices.Now look at the entry wound.”
I grimaced but picked up the correct photograph.
His hair had gone gray at the temples.The wound was dark and ragged where the muzzle had pressed, and the skin around it was peppered with small dark flecks.
“The wound itself is consistent with self-inflicted,” Dash said.“Contact.Those flecks around the entry are stippling.Powder burn from the muzzle pressed flush against the skin.You can see them even on a Polaroid this old.”He let me look another moment.“Which is what made it easy for Milton to call.What we won’t know is if his right hand had powder burns because they didn’t do a gunshot residue test.”
“Is there an estimated time of death on the death certificate?”I asked.
“No.”
“We know he called Josephine around seven o’clock the night he died,” I said.“I can ask her how long their conversation was.But what if he had a guest that night?”
