When I walked into the bedroom of the house, it didn't look like anything had happened except the guy went to sleep and didn't wake up. He was in bed on his back and covered up from the chest down. The EMT's were packing up to leave and there were three techs from the Crime Lab looking around for whatever evidence might be there, but it didn't look like they were finding anything. I didn't see any of the little angled rulers or plastic numbered tents they put beside something they think might be evidence of a crime.
What it looked like to me was this guy had just kicked off sometime during the night. I couldn't figure out why they'd called me, a homicide detective, to look at the case. Phil Rogers answered that question for me five minutes after he started his investigation. Phil's the coroner for Monroe County and he's not what we used to think of as a coroner.
A lot of coroners used to be elected or appointed, so what you got was usually a funeral home director who'd run for election to a job nobody else wanted. A funeral home director had the means to transport a body, and he was competent enough to tell me if the victim had been shot, stabbed, or beaten to death. Anything beyond that was pretty much guessing, so if he thought there were suspicious circumstances, he'd take the body to a local hospital for a "coroner's inquest" which meant an actual doctor did an autopsy to determine cause of death. If everything appeared to be natural, the body would usually end up on the funeral home director's embalming table. The job was a convenient way to get paid by the community and also increase his personal business.
Phil is a licensed forensic pathologist and he's damned good at his job. He's been in the job for ten years now, and I've worked with him a lot. He's helped me solve some murder cases I'm sure would have been declared natural deaths thirty or so years ago. He's a little odd sometimes, but there's no way I could do his job, so maybe that's understandable.
Phil pushed his thermometer into the stiff's liver and while he waited for it to register, he checked the guy's eyes. A couple of minutes later, he read the temperature on the thermometer and then walked over to me.
"Mark, you got yourself either a suicide or a homicide. I don't know which yet, but it wasn't natural. His eyes look like a roadmap because of all the petechial hemorrhages and he's blue as a Smurf. Something caused him to run out of air, and it was fast. I'm suspecting drugs because there isn't any bruising on his throat or face and there's no evidence of a struggle. He'd have fought back and torn the bed up if he'd been choked or smothered but it looks like he just went to sleep and didn't wake up. I'll know more when I get him back to the lab."
Phil looked at the thermometer sticking out of the guy's belly.
"Looks like he died late last night, like between eleven and one."
Well, unfortunately, suicides from drug overdoses are becoming more prevalent nowadays. I like to believe they are just drug use gone wrong, but I'm sure some of those OD's are because the user said "Fuck it all", and shot him or herself full of dope. On the other hand, there have been more than a few cases where the OD wasn't caused by the user. It was someone else who pushed the shit into the victim's vein and then watched them die. Between Phil and myself, we'd have to figure out what happened.
When I'd entered the residence, a couple uniforms were talking to a woman in the living room. I backed out of the bedroom and went to talk to her.
I guessed her at forty-five, maybe fifty. She looked pretty good for that age, unlike a lot of women who seem to give up once gravity and life take their toll. She was no young girl with a tight ass and perky tits, but I don't really get off on young girls anyway. No, this woman did a nice job of filling out her tight jeans and snug knit top. She had the figure of a mature woman -- heavy tits, a wide ass, and a waist that wasn't fat but wasn't all that small either.
Her face was pretty nice too, and it didn't look to me like she'd had any work done to make herself look younger. There were crow's feet at the corners of her eyes and some smile lines around her mouth. Only her shoulder-length hair, light brown with some gray showing in the part, looked like she'd been fighting getting older.
I told the uniforms I'd take over but for them to send me their reports, then asked the woman to sit down. I thought it was interesting that she didn't appear to have been crying, but for all I knew at that point, she might have been a next door neighbor.
"Ma'am, I'm Detective Mark Robbins. What's your name?
She smiled at me, and that was odd too. Most people get pretty nervous when a police officer talks to them.
"I'm Monica Mitchell. That's my husband Jack in there on the bed."
"Can you tell me what might have happened to him?"
Monica shook her head.
"I don't know. He was all right when he went to bed. He had a glass of wine like he always does, and then went straight to bed. He said he felt tired. I guess he was more tired than he thought."
"What time was that?"
Monica thought for a second.
"Let's see. I was watching a movie that ended at ten and he was still up then, so maybe ten-thirty? I don't really know. I started watching a comedy show then. When the first commercials came on, he wasn't there, so it might have been like ten-fifteen."
I asked Monica if Mr. Mitchell was still OK when she went to bed. She dropped her eyes then.
"I don't know because we don't sleep in the same bed. I sleep in the guestroom. Have for the last six months. Jack told me I was too old and wrinkled for him."
"Mrs. Mitchell, I hate to ask you this since you just lost your husband, but were you two having any other problems?"
Monica looked up at me with a scowl on her face.
"You think I had something to do with this?"
I shook my head.
"Mrs. Mitchell, I don't know how he died. I'm just getting information so I can figure that out. I don't suspect anybody at this point."
"Well, yes, we were having problems. He was trying to divorce me and I wouldn't agree to give him my share of the business. I mean, when a man starts running around with another woman and then tells his wife he wants a divorce and then has the gall to tell her he wants everything they worked for, that's too much.
I didn't want him anymore, not after he started screwing her. I said if he wanted out, we'd have to split everything down the middle -- the business, savings, and checking accounts. I said I'd worked just as hard as he had and I deserved half. Right now, his lawyer and my lawyer are negotiating, but I'm not going to give up what I worked so hard for. He can have his little whore, but he's not going to leave me with nothing."
