“So, you think somebody gave Mr. Hamill the eyedrops to kill him?”
“It’s definitely possible.”
“There are no defensive wounds, bruising, or anything suggesting it was a forcible injection. Nor was there any sort of sedative found in the blood panel,” Swift replied. “I can’t see that this big, strong man would willingly let somebody inject him with poison.”
Spenser looked down at the page in her hands. She, too, doubted that Hamill would sit still while somebody injected him with the tetrahydrozoline, and was struggling to come up with an explanation for it. Perhaps it was suicide. But then, why downplay it? As she puzzled over it in her head, she scanned the page again, trying to understand what she was reading. And as she took in all detailed information, her gaze fell on one line.
“Anadrol,” Spenser said.
“Excuse me?”
“There are traces of Anadrol in his system.”
Swift looked down at the report and nodded. “So, it seems. I suppose he didn’t get that body by clean living after all.”
Working in law enforcement and seeing the things she’d seen, Spenser was used to gallows humor and appreciated it as much as anybody, but she didn’t even crack a smile. She felt like she was onto something. The coroner cleared his throat, rightly sensing that his joke fell flat and adopted his usual sour expression again.
“But the traces are negligible,” he said. “It proves he enhances his physique, but the traces of Anadrol are so negligible I don’t see how it could have contributed to his death.”
“I do,” Spenser said.
“So, you’re saying we aren’t going to be able to close this case.”
“That’s what I’m saying, Doctor Swift,” Spenser said, ignoring his expression of disappointment.
“I told you that guy was on ‘roids. I was totally positive he wasn’t all natural,” Jacob said.
“You’ll have to forgive my brother,” Amanda said. “He doesn’t believe in working out and can’t conceive of a world where people actually treat their bodies like temples.”
“Seth Hamill was pumping steroids. I’d say that’s treating his body less like a temple and more like a Hollywood set piece—it wasn’t real,” Jacob pointed out.
“Well… there’s that,” Amanda admitted.
Spenser took a sip of her coffee and leaned back in her chair. Outside the conference room, the bullpen was buzzing with activity as the shift changed over. With everything else going on at the moment, she hadn’t had much time to go out and search for Alex Ricci, and some small part of her wanted to task a deputy or two to do it, but she resisted the urge. Spenser reminded herself it would be an ethical gray area and one that could come back to bite her in the backside. Giving herself a shake, she turned to Amanda and Jacob.
“What can you guys tell me about Hamill?” she asked.
Amanda leaned forward and looked at her laptop. “Well, in addition to being an aspiring musician, he’s worked as a personal trainer at All Day Fitness for the last six years. He also does some private training sessions and seems to have a pretty large client base. He had some trouble when he was younger—has a light criminal record that mainly consists of drunk and disorderly and a couple of assaults, which I assume stemmed from those D&Ds. But that was all back when he was in his early twenties. Legally speaking, he’s been clean since.”
“He also has a pretty active life on social media,” Jacob added. “He posts videos of himself on IG relentlessly. He’s got hundreds of videos of himself. Like, literally hundreds. This guy is online more often than I am.”
“Yeah, but he’s probably not trolling for porn,” Amanda cracked.
“Shut it,” Jacob replied.
“What kind of videos was he uploading?” Spenser asked.
“Videos of his music and videos of him working out. Lots of exercise tutorials,” Jacob answered. “I’m surprised he doesn’t have a video explaining how to shoot steroids.”
“Like I said, he put in the work. The Anadrol can only enhance what’s there. You’re not going to look like him if you don’t work out,” Amanda said.
“They certainly helped.”
“Sure. But Barry Bonds was already a great hitter. The steroids didn’t make him a better hitter. He’d already hit a lot of home runs when he started juicing. Outside of that year, he hit seventy-three, he was fairly consistent in his home run production,” she said.
“That’s a football thing, right?” Jacob asked dryly.
“Baseball, you godless heathen,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “The steroid thing is science. You’re a nerd. Look it up.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” he replied. “Anyway, to your original question, boss, Hamill has a pretty impressive following. Thousands. And these people seem to revere him.”
Jacob went through a brief sampling of the comments posted beneath some of his videos and it was clear there was an element of hero worship going on with some of these people. It never failed to amaze Spenser—as well as disturb her—how these online cults of personality formed. And they could be rabidly devoted. She’d heard of cases where the mob turned on somebody who dared to defame the object of their affection, sometimes violently, and once in a while, fatally.
She had also seen that these dark turns weren’t limited to those who didn’t see things the way these mobs did. Sometimes, they even turned on the objects of their devotion themselves. Most of these people who put themselves out there, be it for their singing or their athletic prowess, more times than not, were trying to put something good into the world. They walked a fine line where one step in the wrong direction would unleash a firestorm of hate and anger.
“Nobody is one hundred percent loved by all,” Spenser said as she thought about the dark side of internet fame. “Any trolls or people who were vocal in their dislike of the man?”
“There are so many videos with so many comments, it’s going to take me a while to sift through them all, but I will start looking,” Jacob said.
“Good. Thank you,” Spenser replied. “Several witnesses claimed he was blowing a gasket in conversation on his cell phone, so see if you can’t trace his phone and find out who was pissing him off.”
She tapped the end of her pen against the pad of paper on the table in front of her, trying to figure out where to start, trying to unravel this knot. The fact that he had such a large online footprint meant the suspect pool was going to be wider than normal. That dark side of internet fame brought with it an unlimited number of people who might take their hate—or their adoration—to an outlandish and dangerous extreme. And who knows how many of his followers he’d had personal contact with.
“What about the steroids?” Spenser asked.
