Close to the Bone (4 page)

Justin’s locker seemed as unremarkable as he had been. With a mini flashlight she took a closer look, but found only a hairbrush, a windbreaker with nothing in the pockets but (hopefully) clean tissues and a quarter, expired bus passes (county employees got them at a discount), two front page sections of the
Plain Dealer
from two and two-and-a-half months previously, and three loose but unopened foil Pop-Tarts packages, no doubt reserved for dire emergencies and of sufficiently low value to risk losing to the lunch thief. When Theresa moved the
Plain Dealers
– none of the stories suggested a connection to Darryl – a piece of paper fell out. The three-by-four white square had a series of numbers on it in distressing penmanship:
1432, 1433, 1555, 1830
. They were two digits too short for case numbers and one digit too short for evidence numbers. They might be bets of some type for his bookie, but she wouldn’t know, sports so not being her thing.

Theresa pulled two Manila envelopes out of yet another of her pockets and scribbled down the numbers on one, then collected a bundle of hairs from the brush into the other. She had wondered all along if the police would decide to handle the entire investigation or even call in the state, shut the ME’s office out entirely. That would be more or less standard procedure – if a cop is involved in an on-duty car crash resulting in injury, cops had the state Highway Patrol do the report. But the Medical Examiner’s staff fell into a sort of gray area. Technically, they weren’t an investigative agency. Theresa examined and processed crime scenes only when asked to by the police agencies, and had no authority of her own. On the other hand, the Medical Examiner was the highest official in the county, outranking even the Sheriff, so if Stone decided to dig in his heels there could be no telling what might happen.

In any event, if the cops needed a DNA sample there were plenty more hairs in the brush, and the paper remained unmolested.

The uniformed officer appeared at Theresa’s shoulder, and she nearly dropped both her envelopes. ‘Ma’am? Someone wants to see you.’

‘Uh … yeah, okay.’ His set of handcuffs remained clipped to his belt. Maybe he thought it was
her
locker.

It turned out that Stone had issued the summons, and he led the way from the first floor to his office on the second with Theresa and Shephard in tow. Apparently, they were going to powwow. They could have powwowed in the lobby, but then Stone wouldn’t have been able to show off his office, and Theresa figured he felt more secure inside it. Medical Examiner Stone didn’t believe in the austerity and stripped-down professionalism of other county offices and had enough of his own and his wife’s money that he didn’t have to. His workspace, while small, had been outfitted with suitably crammed bookshelves in deep cherry, a desk with just enough clutter to look authentic but not enough to hide the granite inlay, leather wing chairs and a beige alpaca-fur rug. Theresa didn’t know people actually bought those. Next to this opulence, a glass shelf holding specimen jars of hearts and spleens seemed discordant, but perhaps it maintained his autopsy-room street cred.

Stone moved behind his desk but did not sit, giving them the benefit of his six-four frame, broad chest and hair with its perfect combination of wave for the ladies and gray for the jurors, and got right to it. ‘I’ll put out a press release but I don’t want to publish Johnson’s name for another day, maybe two, and certainly not Warner’s. Is that understood, Sergeant?’

Shephard gave him a look, one of those alpha-dog-circling-the-other looks, each deciding how much of the marked territory they really wanted. Only on TV do police agencies fight to control a case. In real life if a case looks like it will develop into a pain in the butt, they’re just as happy to let the other guy have it. But Shephard hadn’t made up his mind about this one yet.

Theresa left them to it. She worked for Stone, and for once she actually agreed with him.

‘That’s fine with me,’ Shephard said.

‘What were you doing here?’ Stone then demanded of Theresa, as if she had somehow invited bloody murder into the building by trying to pad her overtime.

‘Hit-skip,’ she said.

‘And you didn’t see anyone else in the building besides Johnson?’

‘No.’

‘And you think Justin hid under a sheet while you entered the building?’

‘Someone did.’ Though this didn’t make a lot of sense to her. Darryl had been practically cold, and most of the blood had dried, implying that at least an hour or more had elapsed since the murder. Why was Justin or whoever still hanging around?

‘All right. Despite being a witness in the case, you’re still acting supervisor for Trace.’

Ever since the previous supervisor had covered up a homicide and then tried to kill her, yes. The temporary promotion – which, incidentally, did not come with a raise in salary – could not be taken to indicate any particular confidence in Theresa’s abilities or sympathy for her near-death experience. Stone simply didn’t have a lot to choose from. Since the county’s budget had been whittling departments by attrition for years, Trace Evidence now consisted of Theresa, DNA analyst Don Delgado, a part-time intern from Case Western and the secretary, Neenah – and not one of them wanted the supervisor job. At least, Theresa didn’t
think
she wanted the job.

And the county, or Stone, seemed in no hurry to fill it. The work still got done, and the funds budgeted for the salary Leo no longer drew went – where, exactly? An excellent question, and not one she would likely ever learn the answer to.

‘The Police Department will need to process this crime scene,’ Shephard said, with a nice balance of firmness and impartiality. ‘That’s standard practice in such cases—’

Theresa blurted: ‘I’ll want to look at the blood spatter. Other than that I’m all right with it.’

Stone glared at her, certainly for presuming that her opinion had been asked for in any way, but Theresa wanted to be clear. Normally, she hated to give up any control of a crime scene, but she also wasn’t eager to spend a day swabbing up pieces of Darryl’s dried cells. However, this was her own co-worker in her own workspace – of
course
she wanted to wrap her fingers around every aspect of the crime and never let go until she understood every blood drop and timeline and trajectory. But time would always be a luxury denied. Nothing happened in a vacuum. In short, nothing about this situation would be as she preferred, and everything would be awkward, uncomfortable and just plain bad.

But she didn’t have much choice about the bloodstain pattern analysis, being the only expert in the county. Blood spatter can be the picture that’s worth a thousand words, and Theresa
did
want to see it, comfort be damned.

The two men continued to argue oh-so-politely, a stance that did not come naturally to either of them. Shephard plopped himself into one of the leather chairs without waiting for an invitation, but Theresa browsed in the less luxe and more familiar territory of the specimen jars. Some organs do not look like an anatomy diagram, and some do. A set of lungs from April 2007, for example, did not look gray and puffy but wetly, deeply red, more like a liver. A spleen removed during the second month of 2011 resembled a red amoeba. But a uterus from 9/23/04 while soaking in its formalin bath appeared as expected, a pink, rounded triangle. It had some sort of cancer on it that looked like a cigarette burn and made her wince.

‘Fine,’ Stone said at last. ‘CPD can process the crime scene. I trust you’ll have it wrapped up by lunchtime so we won’t have to lose the entire day. In the meantime two of my pathologists are coming in to do the autopsy. CPD won’t be able to do
that
, will they?’

Shephard could have insisted that they send the body to another county, but must have assumed that immediate results trumped any possible conflict of interest.

The conference broke up, and Theresa went to process the gurney. Assuming that Sergeant Shephard would consider the deskmen’s office the crime scene, then the gurney sat outside CPD’s purview. Fingerprint powder brought up a nice palm print.

Before moving on to the bloody handprints on the walls she made herself a badly needed cup of coffee and checked her watch. Five a.m. – too early to call Don and go over recent events with him, especially since he had been told to stay home. Theresa would let him sleep.

Amido black is a dark, watery liquid that turns blood to a dark purplish black color, throwing a faint fingerprint or shoe print into startling relief. The process is easy enough – just dump on the stain, wait a few seconds, then rinse gently with distilled water. However, sloshing all that liquid around on a large, immovable object such as a wall is messy and, since the stain is dissolved in methanol, smelly. A few more ridges came into view, but still not enough to be able to compare to someone’s hand. One of the CPD crime scene techs, Jen, came in while Theresa finished rinsing, gray-colored water coursing down the tile to be collected by a few soggy paper towels. Jen carried three separate metal cases and hadn’t bothered to put on make-up, either.

Caught red-handed, Theresa said, ‘I did the amido black staining,’ as if she were being helpful instead of interfering.

‘Oh good. I hate working with that stuff.’

Crime-scene techs don’t bother with jurisdictional jealousy. They leave that kind of crap to the cops.

FIVE

B
y seven thirty a.m. Theresa stood in the autopsy suite watching two doctors putter around and get their instruments in order before beginning the procedure. She had spent the previous two hours watching Jen process the crime scene. The CPD tech had collected all the samples and would write the report, but chain of custody would not be affected if Theresa watched over her shoulder, and besides, Jen did need to confer with her on what the bloodstain patterns could tell them. Their conclusion: not much.

The struggle apparently began in one corner, where a stack of papers had fallen from the top of a desk and a stapler had been knocked off the edge of the counter – signs of activity, perhaps from the first few blows. Apparently, the blood did not start flowing until the fight had moved to the floor and stayed there. They found no sign of a weapon nor any cast-off from one, and from the splashing patterns found near the largest pools they suspected that the floor had been used to cave in Darryl’s head rather than any blunt instrument. They found patterns left by the men’s pants, sleeves, knees and hair, but not a single usable handprint. Prints left by hands, yes, but nothing with a sufficient amount of discernible ridges. The hands had been
too
wet with blood, and the marks were just smears left by slippery flesh.

Shoe prints, however, were clearer. A few belonged to Darryl, mostly from the toe area as he struggled to right himself and push off the increasingly bloody floor. He wore Nikes, and the circle over the ball of the sole made the pattern easy to recognize. The other set, obviously the killer’s, had a plain zigzag pattern and continued right out the door. Some were Theresa’s, right next to where the body had been. There were a few pieces of something with a heavy tread next to the largest pool, which hadn’t completely dried by the time the medics had arrived to confirm Theresa’s initial diagnosis. Jen tried to wager a buck that those prints belonged to the EMT, but Theresa didn’t take sucker bets no matter how small.

They also checked the sinks, the autopsy room, and the tiny first-floor lavatory, but if the killer had cleaned his hands he had cleaned the basins just as well. Theresa made a copy of the palm print from the gurney for Jen.

The nineteen-inch, black and white monitor continued to beam images of the rear loading-dock as cops stalked back and forth, smoked, chatted and turned up their collars. The April temperature hovered around a mild fifty degrees, but it always felt colder in the small hours. The unmolested camera and monitor bothered Theresa. Either an extremely unobservant killer had somehow made entry, murdered Darryl and kidnapped Justin without noticing or caring that the camera might be able to record, or the killer had been someone who worked at or was sufficiently familiar with the ME’s and
knew
it wouldn’t record. The idea of this someone kidnapping a strapping young man like Justin seemed ridiculous, but then the same someone had been strong enough to crush Darryl. And that one-word warning:
Confess
. This person wanted something. They didn’t get it from Darryl, so maybe they took Justin with a plan to force the agency to hand it over as ransom. A strange plan, but killers often do very strange things for very strange reasons.

After finishing with the floor, Theresa had stood around with Jen in that nerve-wracking, soul-sucking indecision that always comes when deciding to let a crime scene go. Had they missed anything? Should they collect one more bloodstain? Take one more photograph? Fingerprint the tops of the file cabinets? The instant they ‘cleared’ the scene, Stone intended to call in the county HazMat team and have the room sterilized. All HazMat really needed to do was mop the floor with some bleach, but Stone wasn’t going to ask the janitor to handle it. Appearances often to the contrary, he really did have a heart.

But finally Jen admitted that she had done all that could reasonably be expected and took her dozens of samples and hundreds of photos back to CPD in time for Theresa to attend the autopsy.

Theresa had changed into another pair of pants that she kept in the closet for emergencies and given her beat-up BDUs to Jen as evidence, on the extremely slim chance the pool of blood next to Darryl’s body might belong to someone else. Now, tugging at the waistband – how long had these khakis been hanging in that closet? – she went to the autopsy suite. She didn’t particularly want to see Darryl gutted like a deer, but cops still monitored the front and back doors, and she feared that if she left, she might not be allowed back in. As long as Theresa utilized the classic technique of looking busy, no one bothered her.

Now little Dr Banachek pulled the sheet off Darryl without further ado, and Theresa saw more of her ex-co-worker than she had ever wanted to.