“Agreed,” I answer her over the voice-activated intercom. “I’ve got no reason to think it was poured in some other area of the house. No visible drips or splashes of bleach or anything similar between the closet in here and whatever trash receptacle she might have used.”
“And had she been moving around, she would have been dripping.”
“She would have left a trail,” I reply. “And I’m not seeing anything like that.”
“I think it was done right here,” Joan returns to her field case, out of the way on top of a folded disposable sheet in the corner. “And you’re right, it’s not like bleach or some other caustic chemical was rained down from the heavens on top of her head. So, where’s the container it was in? I have to say, I don’t like where this is headed.”
“Me either.” An understatement as I crouch by the bed, turning on my flashlight. “On that note, how are we doing for false positives? We should be okay with chlorine bleach unless luminol is involved, and we won’t be using that.”
“No reason to,” Joan agrees as I shine my flashlight under the bed. “I’m not seeing any injuries that make me think we’re looking for blood someone might have tried to clean up. No problem with false positives, not all that much lighting up. And for what it’s worth, she dyed her hair. When you get up close, you can see dull areas of graying from the chemical, probably bleach messing up the cuticles and removing the dye.”
“A couple banker’s boxes and a lot of dust bunnies,” I let Joan know what’s under the bed, getting off my knees, standing up. “And there was no gray in her hair when I interviewed her yesterday.”
I wander toward the dresser, on top of it the printer and a mobile phone. Noting the wastepaper basket nearby, no bleach bottle in it, while Joan deliberates over how to collect fibers lighting up on the dead woman’s sweatpants. Getting closer, I study the computer cable looped twice around her badly bruised neck, and from there running tautly straight up and down, from the bottom to the top of the door, disappearing on the other side.
I calculate the white cord would have to be at least 20 feet long. It’s probably tied to the inner doorknob. Or maybe the clothes rod. Perhaps a coat hook screwed into the wall. Something sturdy enough to bear more than 100 pounds. Not your typical leather belt or one from a bathrobe, but a mechanically efficient way to relieve suffering or solve a problem. Except I don’t believe for a minute she did this to herself.
Impossible to figure how this petite 54-year-old woman could set up such a horrific contraption before shutting the closet door on her own existence. I try to imagine her on fire with a toxic chemical like bleach while feeling the roaring pressure of the cord around her neck compressing the major blood vessels. What I’m seeing doesn’t at all jibe with that. In fact, I’m fast concluding she was dead when she was strung up like a spider in its own web.
Had she been alive when that closet door was shut on her life, I would expect evidence of freneticism, of panic. I would bet on her thrashing and struggling like mad, digging her own fingernails into her neck, desperate to free herself. I see signs of no such thing, but what I do get loud and clear is an intentionality that’s mocking and loathing. Not her energy but someone else’s directed at her, I can’t help but think as I take in the brownish ribbons and splotches, the burn pattern showing the position she was in when the chemical was poured over her head.
Running down her arms and torso. Soaking her sweatpants and sports bra, bleaching them pink in swaths. Splashing on her feet and the floor around the closet door.
00:00:00:00:0
THE WHITES of her eyes are blood-red from pinpoint hemorrhages caused by the pressure of the thin cord digging into her flesh and partially occluding the carotid and jugular.
“Is it just me, or does she have an unusual amount of bruising?” I reiterate to Joan, because I want to be sure I’m right. “It’s been my experience in working suicidal hangings that the ligature mark is single and angled up toward the ears. With little or no contusion.”
“Whereas in a garroting,” Joan adds, nodding, “there’s little or no angle because the killer’s standing behind the victim, pulling hard from a more level position.”
“Right. Leaving a rather horizontal dry furrow but not all this black-and-blue contusion,” I add. “And typically, there’s little or no hemorrhage in the eyes. It’s more like she was manually strangled. Or garroted really, really sloppily as she tried to pull and squirm away, causing the cord to slip several times, possibly explaining why she looks like that.”
“I’m thinking the same thing, except I’m not seeing any signs of a struggle,” Joan’s voice comes back. “No scratches on her hands and arms, no other obvious injuries. I wouldn’t expect the petechiae if she’s a suicide, but I guess it depends on what happened once she had the cord ready to go, and boom! She pulls the closet door shut, triggering whatever contraption she or someone cooked up that lifted her partially off the floor.”
“Reminds me of what we call a bent pipe. And I’ll just keep saying it, Joan. No way she did this to herself.”
“Bent pipe. Ummmm . . . ? That’s a snowboarding term maybe . . . ?”
“Telemetry. Pulleys and levers, things slingshotting up and down, bouncing off satellites and back to earth. Engineering, in other words,” I summarize.
“Okay, over my head, but even if she could have done this to herself, would it cause the bruising we’re seeing?” Joan leans so close to the body she could kiss it.
“No way,” I repeat.
Not in the usual suicidal hanging for the simple reason that having a blood pressure is necessary for blood to leak out of damaged vessels into surrounding tissue, causing the site of injury to bruise. That requires the heart to continue pumping, meaning you have to be alive. And the longer the heart beats and blood circulates, the more dramatic the swelling and discoloration.
“She shouldn’t look like this if for no other reason than she shouldn’t have survived very long. Not that I’m the end-all when it comes to experts,” I explain to Joan as we discuss and debate over our helmets’ Bluetooth intercoms.
Not looking at each other necessarily or seeing our mouths move, as we play out the mechanism of death. In a normal garroting or hanging, once the ligature completely compresses major blood vessels in the neck, the victim would become hypoxic within seconds. As the oxygen continues to be cut off from the brain, he or she will pass out and within minutes be dead. But such a scenario wouldn’t account for the furrows and dramatic dark discoloration, Vera Young’s neck Prussian blue and black in places like a thunderhead.
“If she were alive when a caustic chemical was poured over her, I can only imagine her panic and pain,” I explain. “She should have flailed and fought like crazy and screamed bloody murder.”
“I don’t know,” Joan’s voice in my head, “it’s more likely she was already dead by then, and for her sake I hope so.”
“That’s what I think too,” and I again bring up the missing bleach bottle or container.
It should be near the body, and there has to be a logical answer why that’s not the case. For that matter, there has to be a sensible explanation for why her SUV was unlocked with the key inside. What about her alleged stolen badge turning up with an alleged suicide note concealed by a laptop that’s not password protected? Why was her apartment unlocked? Did she intend to make it easy for her body to be found? Or did someone else intend it?
Who?
Such questions click against my awareness like freezing rain, like bugs batting against the screen on a Virginia spring evening. Noisily distracting and nonstop as I move about with my handheld analyzer, breathing through the charcoal filter, nothing making much sense. But it never does when someone you meet is alive one day, dead the next, and not peacefully or prettily.
Her eyes stare blindl
y from a purplish-suffused face, tongue protruding as if she’s angry and spiteful. Hardly recognizable as I compare her to the woman I talked to yesterday. Words like small and fragile come to mind, and also haunted. During the 45-some minutes I was with her, she ranged from upset and spooked, to haughty and irritated, to entitled and humble, laced with defensiveness and apologies. And finally, bored, her aura a vibrant hot mess of unsettledness, paranoia, resentment and wounded pride.
I found her defiant and obstinate, but charming when she wanted to be. I knew the instant I sat down with her that she was scheming, genuinely arrogant. And quite vain, not a trace of gray in her short dark hair, wearing pricey designer glasses that I don’t see anywhere. Her pantsuit was dark blue with a red-striped blouse, the heels of her black leather Prada boots impractical for test bed and hot-bench work in a lab.
Unlike her younger team members in jeans and wrinkled shirts, she seemed more their unwilling and precious superior than a peer. In summary, I wouldn’t call the woman I met yesterday pretty but rather attractive in a cold smug way. Not the sort to kill herself while dressed in nothing more than gray sweatpants and a sports bra, the dye bleached out of her graying hair.
An unexpected indignity if you’re going to take your own life publicly, gruesomely, it flashes in my thoughts like a beacon nonstop.
Not what happened.
I suppose we’re to accept this was part of a suicidal ritual.
Not what happened.
To degrade and punish herself.
Somebody else did the punishing.
It wouldn’t have required much if you’re reasonably strong and have the advantage of surprise. Especially if the victim had no reason to doubt the person and see anything so hideous coming.
Someone she knew very well.
All she’d have to do is turn her back on the person for a minute, and I imagine someone attacking her from behind, pulling the ligature tight, instantly compressing the major blood vessels in her neck. I estimate Vera to be about 5 foot 3, weighing at most 120 pounds, petite with very little musculature, not necessarily much of a physical match for whoever might want to overpower her.
Including another female.
But that doesn’t mean that her assailant didn’t lose control of her. Doesn’t mean Vera didn’t try to free herself even if we see no signs of it yet. And I point out that she has moderately long fingernails, and were she attacked, it’s possible the assailant has scratches.
“I’ll get the usual fingernail scrapings and clippings during the autopsy,” Joan replies. “And that’s going to come around way too early with the way this night is going. I’ll probably just crash at the office. I’m going to be up and busy dealing with her. It’s even possible they might decide to take care of her tonight.”
“To make sure the bleach doesn’t continue to do its damage,” I assume.
“Yeah, I don’t want her in the cooler all night with that stuff all over her. But I can’t wash her unless I have permission from the chief, who’s out of the country at the moment, and I doubt she’d agree to it. If one of the forensic paths doesn’t whip out the hose and do the rinsing, it will be used against us in court. Which is plain stupid. All because I don’t have doctor in front of my name?”
“Well I do, and I hate being called Dr. Chase. It just means strangers on elevators, planes and trains, or Uber drivers and waiters volunteer their health problems and complaints to me.”
“You’re also not an MD. And MDs make sure you know it, right?” Joan’s voice edged in snarkiness, sounding inside my helmet. “So, imagine if you also don’t have a PhD.”
“I’d rather you work hard and always ask why,” I tell her as I step back into the living room.
Not seeing anyone as I swap out soiled exam gloves for new ones while Joan checks the bedroom’s ambient temperature again. Just the two of us in here now, Butch and Scottie having left for the hazmat trailer, and Fran has ducked outside again, to do what I don’t know.
Possibly to smoke and talk as she’s gotten increasingly agitated, and I can tell she’s had enough. Constantly on her phone and radio, exam gloves off and on, face visor up and down as she storms around. And whatever is going on, it has her attention in a chokehold and her knickers in a knot.
“Just so you know,” Joan holds up the thermometer, squinting at it, “when I first got here, the temp in this room was 70 degrees. Suggesting that’s what it was until we started opening the front door. She should be cooling down a little more rapidly but not much.”
“And what’s the temp in here now?”
“About 67, her core body temp was 86 a few minutes ago, which we’ll factor into the equation. Slender and barely dressed, she’s going to cool more rapidly. I think we can make a pretty good estimate based on heat loss.”
“About 12 degrees . . . ,” and I begin to calculate. “Hmmmm. That’s more than I would have guessed if she died late this afternoon. In other words, soon after the alleged suicide note was saved at 3:38 p.m.”
“Do you think she wrote it?” Joan’s wary eyes behind her plastic visor. “Because if she didn’t . . . ?”
“I know. Who did?” I agree. “Who the heck are we dealing with?”
“Not someone I’d want to mess with,” her uneasy voice in my head. “That’s for sure.”
22
THE RULE of thumb is a dead body will cool approximately 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit per hour, stabilizing when it reaches the same temperature as its surroundings. But this isn’t an exact science, and many factors can cause misleading variations and anomalies if one is uninitiated and not exceedingly careful.
“Whatever originally happened here, somebody’s rearranged things, mucked it up. That’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it,” Joan decides as I move my spectrum analyzer’s antenna around, watching the display. “In the first place, I’m all but certain she’s been dead longer than we’re supposed to think . . .”
“Supposed to think?” Fran is suddenly in the doorway as if beamed in, face visor down and gloves back on, bringing to mind an ill-tempered Klingon. “Now we’re talking about somebody who’s trying to make us think stuff? We’ve gone from a suicide to Jack the Ripper? From ‘goodbye cruel world’ to ‘catch me if you can’?”
“The file on the laptop was created at 3:38 p.m.,” I remind her, but it doesn’t seem to sink in.
“And?”
“And that’s the exact same time the alert sounded on my phone while we were doing the briefing at headquarters this afternoon . . .”
“Oh crap, I did not make that connection.” Her eyes are glassy, her upper face slick with sweat behind plastic. “Okay, I admit that’s screwed up.”
“Therefore, if the note was saved almost 4 hours ago,” I continue as it’s getting close to 8:00 p.m., “then that may conflict with the time of death based on her postmortem artifacts. Am I in the ballpark, Joan? Does she look like she’s been dead less than 4 hours?”
“Well, admittedly it’s hard to say because of the bleach and everything else,” she answers. “But if I had to guess, I’d say she’s been dead at least 6 hours. And if so, then she couldn’t have written the suicide note. Unless she was undead for a moment. Or the time stamp on the file has been altered somehow.”
I continue sweeping the bedroom with my divining rod, my magic wand, sniffing out electromagnetic energy, looking for bandwidths occupied by signals that could have crept in from anywhere. Perhaps rogues uninvited but unintentional. Or deliberately invasive and unwelcome. Mostly what I’m detecting is what I’d expect when hunting down electromagnetic energy streaking through time and space at the speed of light.
It’s all around us, except normally we can’t see it. Or hear a sound. Not without a technical way to snag such signals, and if my sniffer is my fly rod, t
hen the fish are biting like mad. Hand over fist I’m catching the amplitudes and frequencies of x-rays and optical light, in addition to micro-, radio and gamma waves. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? My NASA educator mom’s favorite medieval quote about having faith in the unseen.
Just because it’s not right in front of you doesn’t mean it isn’t. Just because it isn’t there doesn’t mean it’s not. She would say such things during science homework sessions, assigning exhausting hypotheticals to my sister and me. If a housefly is buzzing about 4.3 kilometers per hour (2.7 mph) inside a jet moving at 515 knots (592 mph), how fast is the fly flying? Is the fly flying the speed of the jet? What about the passengers who are seated? Is the fly moving at a different speed from any of them?
Brain scramblers like that since the time I was out of diapers. For as far back as I can go, our parents have explained to Carme and me that to be in touch with the spectral world is not so different from viewing the visible one through a microscope. It’s not for everyone. Not even for most. Take germs for example. Or bacteria. Would you really want to see everything that’s on your person, food, pillows, toothbrush, the hand you just shook, the hot date’s tongue in your mouth?
Would we choose to visualize everything around and in us, and the answer is no. I daresay that most people today aren’t so different from those in the 17th century when scientific virtuoso Robert Hooke wrote his runaway bestseller on the microscope, Micrographia. Including foldout illustrations of such horrors as a flea, which prior to this had been felt more than seen in the straw and bed linens, on livestock and family pets.
The Bubonic-causing devil wasn’t something everybody cared to meet face to face. Only those socially and personally unbothered who couldn’t put down Hooke’s book, sitting up at night enjoying a good fright that in modern times would have been turned into a franchise of horror films, no doubt. It’s a shame nothing like that would be popular anymore. Hooke wouldn’t top the bestseller lists today, would be considered quite the bore.
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