Inside Out

‘You’re going to want to double bootie for this one.’

I gave Cheryl a raised eyebrow in question, ‘That bad?’

She nodded, her Tyvek protective suit hood crinkling with the movement. ‘Worst scene I’ve ever been on, and I was at the Finsbury knife attack.’

I hesitated, regretting the early lunch I ate at Rinkoff Bakery. Steeling myself for the horror show, I donned the extra set of booties over my shoes, zipped up my Tyvek suit, and tucked my hair into the hairnet. I also put on a pair of latex gloves, but really hoped I didn’t need to touch anything.

Most of the time crime scenes didn’t bother me, as they were usually simple knife sticks – one or two holes and a pool of blood. Occasionally, there would be a shooting. Again, a couple of holes and some blood. But recently, I’d been assigned a vehicular homicide and two jumpers. I was getting worn out on the gore. I don’t consider myself squeamish, but no one wants to see a body that looks like someone dropped a plastic bag full of lasagna from a great height. My stomach flipped in anticipation of what I was about to see.

‘Take this. You’ll need it.’ Cheryl handed me a large empty evidence bag and turned back to the pile of full evidence bags she’d been collecting.

‘What’s this for?’

‘To throw up in,’ she answered as she walked away.

Sighing, I lifted the flap to the tent covering the scene. We didn’t usually erect tents over indoor crime scenes, but since we were in a university laboratory, there was concern that there would be looky-loos sneaking in to take photographs of the former Professor Colley. Stepping into the tent, my brain couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing.

In the center of the area laid a pinkish, white mass, about the size of a man, twisted and lumpy, like a great big wad of chewed gum. Great rents were torn down the length of the lumpy surface, with muscle and chunks of bone making an appearance through them. Smeared all over the mass was a mix of blood and feces. The same fluids were sprayed out in a meter-wide halo in all directions. Sticking out at one end of the remains was a tuft of black hair, slick with blood, and at the other end a pair of mangled shoes. I stepped forward onto one of the footfall panels laid down to keep everyone from stepping on any evidence. The panel slipped a bit, gliding on body fluids, and I tried to steady myself by stepping back, my foot landing on a slick of clotted blood. My lunch tried to crawl back up my esophagus, but I swallowed hard to keep it in place. Then a wave of odor hit me, as I bumped my mask trying to steady myself. The effect was immediate. I wretched and, despite my best efforts to hold my stomach contents in place, the brie and sundried tomato toastie ended up in the evidence bag Cheryl had given me.

‘Alright there, DI Franklin?’

I looked up to see DC Loomis on the other side of the tent, green-faced, holding his own bag of vomit. Great. I lost my guts like the new guy.

‘Better now, you?’ I asked in return. I could see that this experience would stick with Loomis for a long time, even though he nodded in response.

‘What are we looking at?’ I asked.

‘Violent, traumatic death. According to his graduate student, Professor Vincent Colley,’ Loomis pointed at the messy, pink log, ‘was checking some of the equipment settings on his experiment when it went off.’

I looked around the tent area but failed to see what experiment Loomis was talking about. ‘What equipment?’

‘Yeah, I asked the same thing. The whole room is the experiment.’

Alarmed at the prospect of standing in a kill box, I gave Loomis a startled look.

‘Nah, don’t worry. Power has been cut. It’s a plain ol’ room again,’ he said, waving his free hand about to reassure me.

The tent flap opened behind me as I asked, ‘What kind of experiment explodes an adult male into goo?’

Cheryl moved around the body to stand on a footfall panel between Loomis and me. ‘Not explode. Turns inside out,’ she answered.

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Professor Colley didn’t explode, which would be a rapid expansion of gas from within or near him, disrupting his body into pieces. He was turned inside out.’

I could hear Loomis dry heave in response to Cheryl’s clarification of the manner of the victim’s death and my stomach wanted to answer in sympathy. Our silence was the opening Cheryl needed to elaborate on the subject.

‘The human body is, essentially, a tube – mouth and anus the openings on either end. The intestinal tract the inside. Skin the outside of the tube, and bones, muscle, and everything else sandwiched in between. The experimental misfire moved everything on the inside of the tube to the outside and visa versa. That’s why the body looks like that. You are looking at his colon stretched like a sock over the rest of him.’

That was the last straw for Loomis. He quickly leap-frogged across the footfall panels and out of the tent. I briefly closed my eyes to regain control of my autonomic response to also flee, then opened them to look at the body again. Now that Cheryl explained the condition of the corpse, I could discern broken bones and organs just under the membrane surface.

‘How did he end up inside his experiment, if it was dangerous enough to do that to him?’ I asked.

Cheryl looked at me, eyebrows raised, ‘I am a pathologist, not a physicist. I’m not sure I even understand how my microwave works,’ she paused and waved at the body, then added, ‘We’ll bag him up and take him back to the morgue. I will be able to tell you more tomorrow. Loomis said the graduate that found him is in the office at the end of the hall. Very upset. Not sure how much you will get out of him just yet.’

I nodded to Cheryl and left the tent, glad to be out of site of the gore. Removing my protective gear, I exited the laboratory area. Loomis was standing in the hallway waiting for me. He looked better than he had a moment ago. Perhaps the fresh air helped.

‘I had a preliminary conversation with him. Name is Mohinder Chaturvedi. Goes by Mo. Has been a graduate student in the Colley lab for two years and was the one that found the body,’ said Loomis, reading from his pocket note tablet.

‘Do we know if anyone else was in the lab with Professor Colley at the time of the accident? Could that mess in there be two people?’

Loomis shook his head. ‘Mo said that even Colley shouldn’t have been in the lab at this hour. He couldn’t understand why the machine was even on. They run most of their experiments in the evening, because of the amount of electricity it uses. That’s why he looked in the lab to begin with, trying to figure out why the system was drawing power.’

Opening the door to the office area, I saw a skinny kid bent over, head in his hands, in a ratty office chair. He looked like he couldn’t have been more than twenty. Certainly, he didn’t look old enough to be working on a graduate degree.

‘Mr. Chaturvedi, I’m DI Franklin. I understand you are the one that found Professor Colley.’

The kid lifted his head and nodded. He’d obviously been crying but seemed to be out of tears now. ‘Yes. I don’t understand though why Vincent was here this morning. We ran an experiment yesterday. We never run the equipment two days in a row. It doesn’t give the computer enough time to compile the data.’

‘Can you explain to me, in layman’s terms, what your experiments were about?’

The young man gave me a confused look. The shift in conversation from the deceased to his work was deliberate on my part. Mo’s emotions were running high, but if I could get him to think about the mechanics of their research, he would calm down a little and remember details of the scene, without the cloud of adrenaline. He took a deep breath and launched into an explanation that sounded like he’d given it dozens of times before.

‘The project Vincent and Professor Snodgrass developed was a matter decomposer. It breaks down material that is in disuse into its constituent molecules and recovers them, either in the form of raw elements or into structured composites.’

I blinked twice and said, ‘Please explain again, as if you were telling your grandma.’

‘My grandmother is a chemist.’

‘Okay, like you were telling your dog.’

Mo nodded his head and said, ‘It’s a new way of recycling material. Instead of chopping up an old car, it disintegrates the plastics, metals, and fibers into their elemental components and reforms them into raw materials that can be reused. The old car goes in one end and comes out a pile of iron, unrefined polymers, and rubber on the other.’

‘So, Professor Colley fell in and came out the other side decomposed?’

Mo’s forehead screwed up in anxiety again. ‘He must have. We had been working on recomposing more complex materials, but nothing living should have ever gone into the system. The recomposer can’t reconstruct anything as complex as a living organism.’

‘Clearly.’ I wrote down the detail in my notepad and thought for a moment, ‘Where is the intake part of the machine?’

Staring blindly at the floor, Mohinder pointed to the ceiling and replied, ‘On the second floor, in the lab directly above us.’

I looked at Loomis and said, ‘Second crime scene.’

Loomis quickly headed for the door and said, ‘On it, boss.’

While Loomis cordoned off the upstairs lab, I continued interviewing the graduate student. ‘Professor Snodgrass was Professor Colley’s colleague? Can you tell me about their working relationship?’

Mo nodded and replied, ‘He’s in the same department. They co-authored the grant that supports this project…that supports me. Oh, I guess I have to find a new position now.’ Shaking away the thoughts of self-interest, he continued, ‘They have been working together for years, maybe five or six. They have…had a good working relationship. Collaborative, not competitive like most academics.’

‘Now that Colley’s dead, will Snodgrass get all the credit for the project?’

There had to be a lot of money resulting from an invention like theirs, a system that could recycle all the waste of human existence. Glory and riches at a scale unimaginable. Men had killed for far less.

‘No. No, it wasn’t like that. They were close, like brothers.’

Yeah, perhaps brothers like Cain and Able. I didn’t show my doubt to Mo. He would certainly defend his colleagues. It was clear he admired their work. ‘Did Professor Colley have a next of kin? Anyone I should notify of his death?’

Mo shook his head. ‘No immediate family. I don’t know about extended family. He said once that his mother was in a home. That’s all I know. Professor Snodgrass would know more.’

After getting Snodgrass’s contact information, I thanked him and told him he could leave, but that I might have follow up questions.

I headed to the stairwell and made my way to the upstairs lab. Loomis already had the area taped off and the crime scene technician was taking photographs, marking suspicious items with yellow numbered tents. This part was tedious, and I wasn’t as fascinated as Loomis. He may be green, but he was eager to learn. Walking up to the young DC, I asked him if anything seemed out of place.

‘Looks like the only way to get into either lab is by key card. They have a lot of expensive equipment in here, so it is locked down tight to keep things from disappearing.’

‘Who has access?’

‘I’ve been on the phone with the building manager. She said only her and six other people. Snodgrass, Colley, Mo, two post docs, who are at a conference on something I can’t even spell, and another graduate student, who is in a class right now, but will come to the station this afternoon to answer questions.’

I nodded, looking into the lab space from the doorway. It was larger than the downstairs lab, with a row of computers and smaller equipment on one side. On the opposite side were pressurized gas tanks chained to the wall, hoses running everywhere, and plastic crates full of junk, presumably items destined to take their turn in the decomposer. In the center of the room was a steel construction that resembled a rocket engine, the base of its cone resting in the lab floor and the rest of the contraption suspended above that, hung from a frame bolted to the lab’s ceiling.

Loomis gave his assessment, ‘It looks like the testing chamber is in that cone part. The computers to run everything are still on, which Mo said is normal. They only turn off the machine.’

‘If it was on, why would Colley have gone into the chamber? He would have known it was dangerous,’ I asked out loud, more for myself than Loomis.

‘Maybe, he was in the chamber for another reason, and someone turned everything on afterwards.’

‘Hmm. I suppose he could have also been dead when he went in. Not like we would be able to tell.’

Scanning around the room again, I noticed there were high narrow windows on the far side of the lab, large enough to allow natural light in, but not accessible for egress. Noting the position of the windows, I informed Loomis I was going to pay Snodgrass a visit to inform him of the death and take down his statement, then headed outside to see if someone could have entered through the windows.

Walking around to the side of the building that the lab was on, I could see that the windows wouldn’t have been accessible from the outside. No way for anyone to scale up, too far from another building to leap across. Looking at the neighboring building though, I saw a panoramic security camera mounted on the corner. I wonder if it could see into the lab from that angle. I texted Loomis to track down the camera feed and headed to the Snodgrass residence.

***

‘Would you like some tea, Inspector?’ asked Mrs. Snodgrass as her husband, the professor, sat stunned on the couch. I broke the news to him that his colleague had been killed and he took it much harder than I was expecting. He’d been sitting mute in front of me for nearly fifteen minutes. His wife, taking pity on her husband for the loss of his friend and on me for patiently waiting for him to regain his composure, scurried off to the kitchen for tea and biscuits. I scanned around the room and noticed that their sitting room was slightly messy, but in a comfortable way. An open book on the side table, knitting jammed in a basket by a chair, a puzzle half assembled on a little table close to the fireplace. I sat in a second chair adjacent to the couch and picked up a framed photo on the side table. It was Snodgrass with an arm slung over the shoulders of a handsome dark-haired man, both smiling. I held it out to Snodgrass and asked, ‘Is this Professor Colley?’

The question jarred Snodgrass out of his fugue state and he nodded. ‘Yes. We were at a conference in Cologne. Maybe two years ago. We’d just been awarded the project grant.’

‘I’m sorry to have to ask you these questions right now, but do you know why Professor Colley would have gone into the test chamber, given how dangerous the machine could be?’

‘The carbon scoring needs to be cleaned off the collector after each test, so that the decomposed material doesn’t clog it up. He may have been cleaning that off,’ Snodgrass said shaking his head slowly, ‘But he knew the machine should be powered off while doing that. He would have never gone in there while it was on.’

Writing down his statement in my notepad, I asked, ‘Where were you from six last night to ten this morning?’

Startled by my question, Snodgrass looked at me confused, ‘Here. Asleep. Why? You don’t think this was an accident?’

‘I’m just covering all our bases. Who else would have had access to the lab?’

I already knew the answer to my question but needed to hear Snodgrass list off people who could have been there. Maybe the tone of his answer would tell me which of them might have had a grudge against Colley. While he detailed the members of his and Colley’s staff, Mrs. Snodgrass entered the sitting room, depositing loaded tea tray on the table. She smiled at me, glanced at the framed photo her husband held, and gently pulled it from his hands, setting it on the mantle above the fireplace. The briefest flash of disdain played over her features as she sat the frame down. So, not a fan of Colley. Wonder why.

‘Cream, Detective?’ she asked, turning back toward me.

‘No. Just plain tea. Thank you.’ Returning to Snodgrass, I continued, ‘Could anyone have entered the building using someone’s key card?’

‘Well, yes. But who would give their key card to an outsider?’

‘Did you give your key card to anyone?’ I asked, intentionally letting my eyes dart toward his wife.

‘No. It’s on the table by the door, where I always keep it.’

Mrs. Snodgrass sat down on the couch next to her husband, picking up a teacup, and said, ‘Everyone in that lab is incredibly diligent about their badges, Detective. Maybe a member of the cleaning staff?’

I nodded at her and wrote down her comment in my notepad. Why did she feel compelled to chime in and offer up a suspect? Snippets of details flew around in my head, as I formulated my next question. Before I could speak, my cell phone rang. Excusing myself, I stood up and walked over to the fireplace to answer the phone with my back to the couple.

‘Boss, you were right about the camera. It looks right into the lab. Keycard entry records Snodgrass entering the lab at seven this morning, after Colley, but the camera shows a woman. Red-head, late forties. She sneaks up behind Colley while he’s in the test chamber and jams a chair under the door, trapping him. Then she turns on the machine.’

While I listened to Loomis detail the crime, I looked at the framed photo on the mantle. Smiling, arms around each other. Not like brothers. Something more. Turning around, I stared at the dainty red-headed woman on the couch. The look in her eyes showed that she knew she was caught. Unmitigated hatred burned behind them. It may have been a new way of killing, but the motive was centuries old jealousy and rage.