Next to Die

by T. J. Brearton

  “Almost a year.”

  She could sense Mike’s mind working, but he was silent. He’d traded in his jeans and sport coat for a regular suit today. The time-and-temperature sign at the Main Street bank read eighty-eight degrees and his forehead shined with perspiration. A distant part of her thought he was even handsome – when she’d seen him in the church she thought he looked a bit like Harrison Ford, from his earlier days.

  Something occurred to her. “Do police investigators usually attend the memorial in this kind of situation?”

  “Not always. Or I’d say, mostly, no.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking – why were you there?”

  “You think I made anyone uncomfortable?”

  “Oh, no, I didn’t mean that… I’m… Is that why you do it? See if someone gets uncomfortable?”

  He turned his body toward her, resting his arm on the back of the bench. “What do you think about Jamie texting you?”

  “He’s a controlling person,” she said, having thought about it all morning. “I don’t want to think that he did this. It feels so surreal – I can’t even believe I’m talking about it. It feels possible but so remote at the same time, does that make sense?”

  “Sure. Yes.”

  “I mean, maybe this is just Jamie sensing an opportunity to worm his way back into my life. He saw it on the news; he’s using it as a bridge to get back in touch with me. Start things up again. God… I feel like this makes me sound like such a spiteful person.”

  “He’s the one who grabbed you, harassed you, and it sounds like he used your mother to get your number. I think he has the questionable personality.” Mike’s expression was serious.

  A moment passed.

  “Everyone I can cross off a list,” Mike said, “that’s a good thing. So just think of it that way, like this: We’re getting everything out there, looking at every conceivable angle. Harriet was well liked – she was well loved. But like any good person, there are things in her life she didn’t ask for. Same with you.”

  “I think Jamie could be violent. I have no idea what he’s been doing all this time. And our cars – my car and Harriet’s car – they look identical. If this person… I’ve been thinking about Gavin Fuller, even though he’s in jail. His son Grayson was my case. I can’t even… Even talking about this stuff makes me sick, because these are private lives. But if Gavin Fuller, I mean someone working for him… What if they got into the wrong car, attacked the wrong woman – is that even possible?”

  Mike seemed to mull it over then surprised her by getting up from the bench and walking around behind her. “Let me show you something, okay? Just face forward. It’s alright – bear with me.”

  Bobbi felt her heart speeding up, but she did as he asked. Mike moved behind the bench, his shadow falling over her. Then he lowered down into a squat.

  “Okay.” His voice was soft, but close. “This guy, he’s sitting in the back seat of Harriet’s car. The sun was setting behind them.”

  Bobbi’s heart was knocking so hard she thought it was visible through her shirt. This felt like some kind of exposure therapy, but in one huge dose.

  “She got in,” Mike said, “like anyone would, facing forward, like you are now. He’s sitting behind her. But at some point, she’s more than likely to have turned around. We know because of the wounds. And because he probably reached out…”

  Mike touched her shoulder and she instinctively grabbed his wrist then yanked hard. It happened in less than a second. His chest hit the back of the bench and he gulped a breath of surprise.

  Her next move would be to bash him in the nose with the back of her skull, but she didn’t.

  Mike jerked his hand away when she let go. “Whoa,” he said.

  She quickly looked around at him. “I’m so sorry…”

  His mouth was open, his eyes wide and sparkling. “Holy shit… That’s something… You study that? Since you dated this guy, or something?”

  “Since I was little. Since my foster brothers could get a little rough.”

  He stood, still behind her. “Better not mess with you. Wow…” He finally got himself back together. “My point was that we’ve analyzed the crime scene, taken everything into account. Even if for some reason this guy didn’t recognize who had gotten in the car right away – shortly thereafter, he had to know. If it was your ex, he’d know. And presumably someone working for the Fullers would know.”

  She felt relieved when Mike moved back around the bench, sat down. He had that kindness in his eyes again when he looked at her. “What I’m saying is, it doesn’t support a theory of mistaken identity. So let’s put that to rest.”

  She understood but said, “Well, unless he realized it wasn’t who it was supposed to be and then at that point figured he’d keep going…”

  Mike didn’t have an answer for that. “Like I said, let’s try to cross off your ex. We’re looking into all these other possibilities too. I don’t take any of it lightly.”

  “What will you do? I mean – to cross him off?”

  “Your ex? I’ll talk to him. I’ll just give him a call, talk to him.”

  “He’s not going to like that.”

  “No?”

  She sipped her drink – feeling a bit better now that she’d just turned a grown man pale, that he’d made some sense debunking the mistaken identity – and shook her head. “The stuff that he got in trouble for when he was a kid – he really hated police, thought they liked to humiliate people, acted superior, all of that. How they played God.”

  “I’ll be totally un-Godlike,” Mike said. He was so deadpan it made her laugh. “If Jamie was eight hours away in Rochester on Thursday night, then we’ll know.”

  Twelve

  Mike drove to the medical examiner’s office in Plattsburgh, wishing he could tell Bobbi Noelle that they had another potential victim, one they were having a hard time linking to Steve Pritchard, let alone an ex-boyfriend of hers. But he couldn’t. Not now. Plus, it wasn’t out of the range of possibility that this was some violent ex of hers; that he’d gotten into the wrong car and slashed up Harriet Fogarty by mistake.

  Mike called the state police captain, Gary Walker, along the way.

  “We could post someone near her residence,” Walker said, “but it would be a short-lived detail. Resources are tight, Mike. And as you know from zero hundred to oh five hundred all cars are double-manned. I can’t have two troopers sitting outside this woman’s house all night because she had a bad breakup.”

  “How about a local guy? I’ll call Placid PD,” Mike said.

  “Do that. If you can’t get anybody, call me back. We’ll figure something out.”

  * * *

  He reached the medical examiner’s office, turned in, and parked in one of the available slots. Overton was supposedly on her way. The body had been at the morgue for four days. He’d seen emails from the examiner, Bernard Crispin, on the external autopsy, and what he’d told Bobbi was sound – the victim had definitely faced her attacker at some point, given the wounds. It was hard to imagine a killer realizing he’d gotten into the wrong car and still completing the murder, but then, like Bobbi had said, maybe by then it had been too late to turn back.

  In her picture on display at the memorial, Harriet was beautiful, her short dark hair blowing around her face, the woods out of focus behind her. Mike, something of a novice photographer, had asked Victor about the shot. Victor, who had been rigid and quiet since Friday, had thawed for a moment, explaining that he’d been the one to take it, a few years prior. “Mom always loved that shot,” he’d told Mike. “So when I suggested we blow it up and use it, Dad thought it was a good idea.”

  Victor Fogarty struck Mike as a serious person, even outside the circumstances. He was twenty-eight, seemed highly intelligent, had a good job, and was about to marry a surgeon from Sloan Kettering. Mike hadn’t met her yet – she’d already come and gone, surgeries scheduled for the week. According to Terry Fogarty, Elizabeth, the
fiancée, had attempted to move things around but Victor had implored her not to, to stick to things as they were, and she’d abided by his request.

  “Come on in, Mike,” Crispin said from inside his office. The medical examiner had white hair, liver spots, eyebrows a bit unruly above half-rimmed glasses. He was pushing retirement, temporarily filling a vacancy after the previous pathologist had left. They’d met a month ago on another case – Crispin had worked in Chicago but moved back east after his wife became ill.

  “Thanks, Doc,” Mike said, and took a chair.

  “You want to see it?”

  “I thought we’d just talk, if that’s alright with you.”

  “That suits me fine. Haven’t had my lunch yet. You mind if I eat while we do it?”

  “Not at all.”

  Crispin opened the kind of lunch box Mike thought city construction workers might use: black, shaped like a mailbox. The doctor pulled out an unblemished apple, then a sandwich cut in a perfect diagonal – evidence, perhaps, of his exacting nature.

  “Here’s the full report,” Crispin said, “external and internal,” and he pushed the file across his maple-topped desk. Behind him was a wall of books and there were copious plants in the office, making the place almost tropical.

  “That a Boston fern?” Mike asked, looking.

  “It is,” Crispin said with an approving raise of those considerable eyebrows. “They say it removes air pollutants.”

  “I do a little gardening.”

  Crispin took a bite of his sandwich and nodded. “That’s right,” he said after swallowing. “I heard that about you – you like your hobbies.”

  “Not that the work doesn’t have me running. I have open cases right now – got one B&E I haven’t been able to crack since last October.”

  Crispin nodded, swallowed, looking thoughtful. “I’ve always kept busy too. But I had this friend, Marcus, died a few years ago. Anyway, near the end, he said to me, ‘Bernie, take it slow.’ I sort of nodded, said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ you know, like you do when someone tells you that life is short.”

  Mike smiled, enjoying the sound of Crispin’s voice. Like his father’s used to be.

  “Marcus says, ‘You never know when it’s going to hit you. But it hit me one day when my kids were all zipping around and jumping everywhere… and I just sat there.’ That’s what he says to me – ‘I just sat there,’ he says, ‘and I got it.’ He goes, ‘Otherwise, I was always on the move, and the whole thing went by in a blink, it went by too fast, and I wish I had more moments like that, just sitting there.’” Crispin chuckled. “So, what do I do with this pearl of wisdom? I get some plants. I figure, plants are slow. They’ll slow me down.” He paused and added, “I never had kids. You have any kids?”

  “One. A daughter.”

  Crispin nodded and took another bite, and with a mouth half full of food, waved his hand in the air. “Sorry; none of this rambling is why you’re here.”

  “No, please,” Mike said, but he flipped through the file and scanned the external report first to refresh his memory.

  He lingered over the line on the report where the number of knife wounds were indicated. Time to get into it. “Twelve is a weird number,” he said.

  “You think?”

  “I do.”

  “You ever worked a stabbing before?”

  “Two of them. People say a lot of things about stabbings.”

  “People do.”

  “That they indicate intimacy. That there’s pathology tied to the method.”

  Crispin dabbed his face with a napkin. “Crime of passion. And what do you think?”

  “I think a knife doesn’t necessarily indicate something significant in and of itself. Sometimes it’s just lack of access to a gun. But the number usually means something. Twenty, thirty stab wounds show a lot of anger – the passion you’re talking about. Only a few stabs might mean it was utilitarian. It depends on the victim, though. You’re trying to kill somebody with a knife, there’s a big difference if it’s a small person or some 250-pound guy with a lot of meat on his bones.”

  Mike bent and read the report in more detail, noting the depth of the wounds and the differing classifications. There were more incised or “cut” wounds than there were stabs or punctures. It made some sense, given the killer’s position. And the depth of the three wounds classified as stabbings was important because it gave some character to the murder weapon.

  “And then there’s the intent,” Mike said, half to himself, half to Crispin. “To what extent is inflicting pain the MO, to what extent is the death itself. Is this a display?”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Crispin said.

  “A knife like this, death is going to require either precision or multiple stabs. Pain is guaranteed…”

  He and Overton had gone over this a little already, and were searching for a jackknife with a six-inch blade. The murder weapon would have Harriet Fogarty’s DNA all over it, even if the killer wiped down the blood. It would be nice to locate Jamie Rentz and check out his collection.

  “I feel like you have an idea,” Crispin said.

  “Well, I’m anxious to hear your view on things,” Mike said. “But yeah, I’m wondering about the possibility this was a mistake. It’s just one angle we’ve got on this – that she’s an accidental victim – and I’m wondering if the evidence – this number, twelve knife wounds – supports that.”

  Crispin nodded and Mike said, “But, whenever you’re ready. We can wait until after you’re done eating.”

  Crispin shook his head. “Good to go. So, the first laceration we see is here, along her forearm.”

  “Like he surprised her in the back seat, she tried to get away, and he took hold of her.”

  “Probably that, exactly. He grabbed her arm then made a lateral incision, about three inches across, here.” Crispin dragged a finger across his forearm.

  “The second incision began here,” he said, and pointed to his upper lip. He made a diagonal motion toward his jaw. “Four and a half inches.”

  Mike remembered Terry sobbing when he saw his wife, the way she was disfigured. Victor had just stood there, his initial emotion hardening somewhere inside. “So by this point,” Mike said, “she’s facing him. Maybe looking at him. Can’t really reach around for this, right?”

  “I would say no. Given the depth, the trajectory, this is head-on.”

  “No sign of strangling, right?” Mike asked. “Nothing to show that he grabbed her neck.”

  “Correct. No petechial papules, no bruises behind the ears, nothing like that. No involuntary urination, either. But we found some hairs were pulled.”

  “So she’s trying to escape again,” Mike said, “and he does a downward stroke across her back, from her scapular, down at an angle. Then grabs her hair, yanks her back. What does she do? She reaches back, like anyone would…”

  “Yes, exposing her underarm, where there was a deep gash.”

  “She probably let go immediately. I know I don’t have to ask you…”

  “Nothing under her fingernails but some of the same material we found on her arm which we sent to your lab; some type of leather. Maybe cheap leather, the kind you get at a department store. I’m sure you’re looking into that – sales of leather gloves in the area.”

  Mike nodded. “Or they’re older gloves, sort of disintegrating.” His thoughts returned to the recreation of the crime. “He’s just sort of randomly striking, depending on where she is, but then he gets her neck, the fifth strike with the knife. He’s going for the kill here.”

  “Severing the carotid.”

  “There was blood everywhere,” Mike said.

  “Yes. Her heart is really pumping, and that blood would be getting loose.”

  “And you found that same material, the leather, on her lips. Probably, he clamps his hand over her mouth at some point when he goes for the neck, or maybe to stifle the screams… Okay but there are more cuts on her torso. You note here that you think thes
e came after.”

  Crispin said, “With this type of sharp force injury, mostly cut or chop wounds, these are the shallowest across her chest, her upper legs.”

  “So it’s almost like she’s not dying fast enough for him. Or maybe there’s anger. Anger at her because of who she is, or maybe even anger that he’s made a mistake; she’s the wrong victim. I mean, to some extent, this is planned. Witnesses said they thought Harriet usually locked her car. I’ve suggested the killer programmed a second key fob, but that wouldn’t work if it was the wrong car… Maybe it’s just unlocked…”

  “Maybe she knew the guy,” Crispin said, right on point.

  “There’s that. Someone close enough to get her key fob, clone it, or maybe even someone who used a spare…” His mind wandered back to Pritchard.

  “Or, I meant, she let him in.”

  “Hmm. But if she knows him, why is he in the back seat? Someone you know, and you agree to talk, maybe give them a ride or something, they sit up front, not in back.”

  “He wants to surprise her,” Crispin said. “Make her jump.”

  “Unless there’s tension,” Mike said, still following the Pritchard thread. “Someone who knows her well enough to copy her fob, but not well enough he’d be invited into the front…”

  And so now, he thought, Pritchard or whoever else is sitting there in the back seat. What’s he planning at this point? Take her somewhere? Force her to drive? Or just flat out kill her?

  If he’s expecting to get her to drive somewhere, what’s he done with his own car? Is it sitting up on River Street, or not? Is it a white four-door sedan? Or is he on foot, like Pritchard, and Marlene Blackburn picks him up on River Street after the crime, swerving around a surprised real estate agent – Darlene Bilger – as they speed away?

  The whole thing was a mess, in more ways than one. Mike flipped to the internal report, which had just concluded that morning. It showed the contents of Harriet’s stomach, among other things. She hadn’t eaten anything since lunch that afternoon. Her blood draw indicated no drug use. She was a healthy woman in her mid-fifties.