“Madman” from The Serpent
Commander Madsen “Madman” McGhee enters through the front door in his typical gray suit, pausing to rub his red beard and absorb the scene as a whole before he starts getting buried beneath particulars. He frowns and takes off his gray hat and gives it to the man next to him, keeping his hand extended in expectation. A stopwatch is hurriedly provided, and Madman seizes it and throws its cord around his thick neck, where it comes to rest on his chest. He sucks-in a deep breath before addressing the group in a loud, authoritative voice.
“Alright everyone…” he begins, stomping out upon the plastic. “You’ve been on the scene eight minutes and…” He raises the stopwatch to his hard, green eyes and lets it drop: “…fifty-four seconds. That’s more than a life-time for certain free-borne microscopic organisms. That means that my evidence is literally dying-off as you clowns putz-about. Important facts — vital facts — are disintegrating, are evaporating, before our eyes. We’re not here to fondle the data, people. We are here to capture it. Capture it! Quickly, now. Quickly! Time is not on our side. It never is.”
Madman’s harsh-talking perambulation takes him past a couple of subordinates taking samples from a black-cushioned chair. He pauses to examine both the chair and the men’s handling of it and, not finding anything incorrect about their procedure, moves on. He comes next to where the floor-covering plastic has been rolled-back. Two of his crew are using special chemicals to clean the blood stains from the carpet.
“Please tell me you got a sample first,” he says.
“We got a sample, boss,” says one of the men without breaking from his work.
Madman grunts. He eyes them closely a moment longer, then continues pacing around the room.
“Mistakes, sloppiness, slowness — not options, people. We’ve seen worse than this. And cleaned it up faster.”
Four men emerge from the downstairs, carrying between them a long, heavily weighted black bag. Without breaking stride, they move to a specially constructed couch previously brought into the house. The cushions from the couch have been removed, and the men, straining with the weight, place the heavy bag down inside it. A fifth man, tall and skinny, quickly replaces the cushions overtop the bag so that it remains entirely unseen within the couch.
The first four men then lift the couch and begin with it toward the front door.
“Slim Jim!” says Madman speaking to the fifth man.
“Boss,” returns Slim Jim. Slim Jim’s body is elongated, as if it had been stretched-out by an impatiently pulling doctor at the time of birth. His face is abnormally lengthy, as are the palms of his hands — even his brown hair stands up high and long in defiance of gravity. His dark droopy eyes are those of depressed beagle pup.
“That was Darin in the bag?” asks Madman.
“Yeah, boss,” answers Slim Jim. “Want to hear about the flash autopsy?”
“Whattiya got?”
“Darin was shot through the back,” says Slim Jim, rubbing his long chin with the back of his long hand. “Then he either fell or was pushed down the stairs.”
“What killed him — the shot or the fall?”
“Most directly?” says Slim Jim. “His lung probably filled-up with blood and he drowned. Or possibly — “
“Smedley!” Madman yells, walking away from Slim Jim.
“…it was fairies,” finishes Slim Jim to himself.
A slender older man walks toward Madman’s beckoning bellow. His gray hair is longer than most of the other men’s military style cuts. His posture is straight, and his gestures tight. “How may I be of service, Commander McGhee?”
“I thought I fired you.”
“Not yet, sir. But I do keep praying.”
“Status report.”
“We should be all tidied-up here in a few minutes. As we speak, I have men combing the yard and neighborhood in expanding orbits, looking for anything related to the night’s events.”
“Witnesses?”
“We have no reason to think there are any, boss.”
“Hey!” says Madman as he storms off in the direction of pale, blond-haired man.
“Ah, you’re too kind, sir,” says Smedley to the air. “Only doing my job.”
“What do you think you’re doing, Svenson?” demands Madman of the blond man.
“Uh, scanning the room for clues, boss.”
“A computer on wheels can scan the room. The only reason I pay you and allow you to breathe the same air as me is that — theoretically, at least — about three feet above your hindmost quarters there’s a human brain — the best central processing unit in the world. See that area there?”
Svenson looks to where Madman is pointing with a rigidly straight arm. “Yeah, boss?”
“That looks to be a refrigeration of unit of some kind, does it not, Svenson?”
“It does, boss.”
“I happen to recognize that type of unit, and that is a freezer, not a refrigerator. And if I’m not mistaken, it’s a freezer with a security lock. Now, do you see the discoloration of the carpet beneath it?”
“I do, boss.”
“Do you think that could be moisture?”
“It could be, boss.”
“Now, ask yourself, why would there be water standing beneath a freezer?”
“Why would there be water standing beneath a freezer?” Svenson asks himself quietly.
Madman squeezes his green eyes closed and pinches the top of his nose, where a headache is just beginning. “Svenson… go get that freezer open and find-out what’s inside.”
“Yeah, boss.”
Svenson trots over.
Madman’s mind quickly makes a few connections. He and his team were warned when it received the clean-up assignment that there was a risk of on-site toxins. Fortunately his Crew has found nothing so far. What they had found was a murdered bio-chem researcher and a security freezer which appears to have been recently opened for awhile… He was beginning to form a theory as to motive —
Madman raises his voice to speak to the entire house. “People! I need you to be aware of everything this house has to tell us. Everything! How it looks, sounds, smells, feels — how it tastes. I need to know what this house looks like to God!”
He begins moving the through the room again as he continues speaking.
“If we can know one moment — know it precisely, know it completely — we can extrapolate all the other moments, past and future…” He whirls around and begins moving in another direction. “A crime-scene is like a woman, people. You must understand her head to toe if you are to understand her at all. You must have one moment in which you possess her completely, or else you will lose her entirely.”
At a computer monitor set-up in the kitchenette, a mousy woman in a hairnet rolls her eyes and exchanges a glance with gray-haired Smedley. “No wonder he can’t get a date,” she whispers.
Zephyr Dorsey 