“Is it him?”
Carmen closed her eyes and turned away from the sight of Richard Castor’s dead body.
“What?”
Carmen opened her eyes and briefly looked back at the lifeless body and then she came back toward Max.
“It’s Castor. He’s been shot in the head and the chest and his throat was cut.”
“Damn.”
“Get your camera.” Carmen took out her phone. “And hurry, we don’t have much time,” she said to Max as she dialed a number.
“Hello, Ms. Taylor, what can I do for you?” Detective Harmon asked.
“I need to report a murder.”
“Did you kill him?”
“No, Detective Harmon, I didn’t kill him. He was dead when I got here.”
“Where is here, Ms. Taylor?”
Once Carmen explained where she was and what she and Max found, Detective Harmon gave her another lecture about staying out of it and letting the police handle it, before saying that he was on his way.
When Max got back with his camera, he began capturing the murder scene in photos and video, Carmen called Dan, and told him to get a truck down there.
“I knew you weren’t going on any damn vacation.”
“Shut up, Dan. Just send the truck.”
“Wait!”
“What?”
“Did you kill him?”
“No!”
“Just asking in case somebody, you know, the higher ups, ask me if you did.”
“No, Dan, I did not kill him,” Carmen ended the call and put on her gloves.
Carmen looked at Max. “Why does everybody keep asking me if I killed him?”
“Really, Carmen? I mean, it ain’t like you haven’t dropped a body before and wasn’t one just last night?”
Carmen looked seriously at Max for a second or two and then they both started laughing.
“When you put it like that,” she laughed and thought that the reason the question seemed so foreign to her was that she didn’t kill anybody the night before, Jada did.
Carmen put her phone back in her purse, took out a pair of plastic gloves, put them on and prepared to search the house. When she found Castor’s office, Carmen went in and looked around. The first thing that she noticed was that the computer was still on and the ice in the glass on the desk hadn’t melted completely. It was a safe assumption that the murder hadn’t been committed too long ago and that Castor was in the office and seated at his desk when his killer arrived.
“Did you get it?” Carmen asked when Max came in.
“This may be too disturbing for some viewers,” he said, imitating the station’s anchorman. “That was some struggle in there.”
“I think he was in here, sitting at his desk.” Carmen sat down and began looking in the drawers. “He got up to let the killer in.”