With a Twist by Jack Kilborn

Another locked room mystery, this one even more complicated. What’s fun about Jack is that I can put her in different sub genres without changing her character. She can function as Sherlock Holmes, or Spenser, or Kay Scarpetta, depending on the story. This won 2nd place in the
Ellery Queen
Reader’s Choice Contest.
    “H is skull is shattered, and his spinal column looks like a Dutch pretzel.” Phil Blasky straightened from his crouch and locked eyes with me, his expression neutral. “This man has fallen from a great height.”
    I glanced up from my notepad, not having written a word. “You’re positive?”
    “I’ve autopsied enough jumpers in my tenure as ME to know a pancake when I see one, Jack.”
    I stared at the body, arms and legs akimbo, splayed out on a living room carpet damp with bodily fluids. On impulse I looked up, focusing on a ceiling that couldn’t be any higher than eight feet.
    “Maybe he jumped off the couch.” This from my partner, Detective First Class Herb Benedict. His left hand scratched his expansive stomach, his light blue shirt dotted with mustard stains. It was 11am, so how the mustard got there was anybody’s guess.
    I frowned at Herb, then located a patch of dry beige carpeting and knelt next to the corpse, careful not to stain my heels or pants. The victim was named Edward Wyatt, and this was his house. He was Caucasian, 67 years old, and as dead as dead can be. The smell wasn’t too bad—this was a fresh one—but the wake would definitely be a closed casket.
    “What do you make of the blood spatters, Phil?”
    “Unremarkable star-configuration, arcing away from the nexus of the body in all directions. Droplets coating the walls and ceiling. Notice the double pattern—see the large spot here, next to the body? It has it’s own larger radius of spatters.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning he bounced once, when he hit the carpet. Consistent with jumpers, leaving a primary then a secondary spatter.”
    Benedict cleared his throat. “You’re telling us this is authentic? That he fell five stories into a living room?”
    “I’m telling you it looks that way.”
    I’ve been with the Chicago Police Department for twenty years, half of those with the Violent Crimes unit, and have seen a few things. But this was flat-out weird. I almost ordered my team to do a house sweep for Rod Serling.
    “Could somebody have dumped him here? After he died someplace else?”
    “That seems reasonable, but I don’t notice any tissue or fluid missing. If he were scraped off the street, there would be blood left behind. If anything, there’s too much blood in this room.”
    I would have asked how it was possible for him to know that, but Phil knew more about dead people than Mick Jagger knew about rock and roll.
    “Also,” Phil motioned us closer, “take a look at this.”
    He crouched, holding some tweezers, and used a gloved hand to gently lift the corpse’s head. After some prodding and poking, he removed a small fiber.
    “Beige carpeting, deeply embedded in his flesh. The deceased has hundreds of these fibers in the skin, consistent with…”
    I finished the sentence for him. “…falling from a great height.”
    “However improbable it seems. It’s as if someone took off the roof, and he jumped out of a plane and landed in his living room. And don’t forget about the doors.”
    I felt a headache coming on. The house had two entry points, the front door and the rear door. Each had been dead-bolted from the inside—no outside entry was possible. The locks were privacy locks, similar to the ones on hotel rooms; there were no keyholes, just a latch. The first officers on the scene had to break through a window to get in; the windows had all been locked from the inside.
    “Lt. Daniels?” A uniform, name of Perez, motioned me over to a corner of the room. “There’s a note.”
    I watched my step, making my way to the room-length book shelf, crammed full of several hundred paperbacks.