Exercise Is Murder

by Carolyn Arnold

  “I had no idea…about runners doing that with their laces.” Needham rubbed the back of his neck. “And her earphones…one of them was out of an ear.” He met Jimmy’s eye. “Maybe it wasn’t pulled out by the fall but rather was yanked out during an altercation.”

  “It would help to have a look at her body.” Jimmy glanced around. He’d expected that Needham would have had her set up on a metal gurney, ready to go. “Where is it? Can we get it out?”

  “I released her body to the funeral home.”

  “When was this?” Jimmy’s voice was a few octaves higher than normal.

  “Just a couple hours ago.”

  “Who claimed the body?” Jimmy asked. The dead were held in the city morgue until claimed or taken care of by the city.

  “They identified themselves as a friend of the deceased.”

  “Name?”

  “I’d have to go look it up.”

  “Do it.” Jimmy swung an arm in the direction of Needham’s computer.

  The ME pecked on the keyboard and, a few seconds later, said, “Chandra Goodwin.”

  What reason would Levi’s assistant have to claim the body? Was it to hide evidence? But if that was the motivation, why not claim it the moment the case was closed?

  “Can you get the body back?” Jimmy rushed out.

  “I can see.” Needham was staring at Jimmy, but he didn’t make a move for the phone.

  “Are you going to call them?” Jimmy’s insides were jumping, and he kept flexing his hands into fists.

  “Nope.”

  “No?” Jimmy was ready to take a trip down the ME’s throat and out his—

  “You and I are taking a little road trip.” Needham got up and grabbed his jacket from a hook on the wall.

  “Okay, to where?”

  Needham looked at Jimmy like he was an annoying fly that he wanted to swat. “The funeral home. And if I messed up, missed something, I’m taking full responsibility.”

  “All right, then.” Jimmy liked the sound of that, but he was feeling a little hesitant. Sort of like he’d been dropped into another dimension or the twilight zone. He never would have imagined the Good Doc handling the situation the way he was.

  EVERGREEN FUNERAL HOME WAS A sprawling mansion set on a manicured property. Even for September, the grass was short and bright green. Golf courses would be envious. Jimmy had talked Needham into taking separate cars and meeting up there. They were getting along, but why push it?

  Jimmy called Sean on the way and told him and Sara that Chandra had claimed Katie’s body.

  “We’re headed to her place now,” Sara said. “We’ll ask her why.”

  “I don’t think you should rule out the possibility that she did it because she wants any evidence against her buried,” Jimmy said.

  “Her or Levi,” Sara countered. “There are also other variables to consider.” She didn’t bother to clarify what she meant, but she did tell him about a pink piece of fabric they’d found on the hillside.

  For Jimmy, the cloth only cinched further that Chandra might be the killer, but he let it be.

  He pulled into the funeral home’s parking lot. Jimmy didn’t know what Needham drove, but he found the ME inside talking to a tall, pale man with brown hair and a cleft chin. He introduced himself as Leslie May, the home’s manager. After some credential checks, he led them into the home’s morgue.

  “Katie Carpenter’s body,” May said, staring at a tablet he carried, “was going to be prepped for burial this afternoon.”

  “We’re just in time, then,” Needham said, obviously having a different definition of just in time than Jimmy did.

  May got the door and led them to a wall with ten refrigerated steel drawers. Some people referred to them as morgue freezers or coolers. No one would ever hear Jimmy calling them that, as his mind went right to ice packs, beer, and deli-meat sandwiches. May pulled out the drawer labeled KATIE CARPENTER.

  “Here she is.” May flicked a wrist like he was presenting a masterpiece, not a decomposing corpse.

  Jimmy was saddened for the life that had been cut short and wished that the many years he’d spent on the job had hardened him, but death never got easier to face.

  “I’ll need a place to look her over.” Needham surveyed the spotless morgue and came to rest his gaze on the embalming station. “That’ll do.” He bobbed his head in the direction of the steel tray.

  Needham and May worked to get Katie transferred over, and Needham removed the sheet. He stepped back and eyeballed May and Jimmy. “I’m going to need some space.”

  Both May and Jimmy moved farther away, giving the ME a wide berth. He pulled out a pair of gloves from a back pocket of his pants and a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket. He perched them on his nose and bent over Katie’s body.

  Jimmy had never seen him wear spectacles before and resisted the urge to make a jab about Needham’s age and how he resembled a real-life Geppetto. The only reason he didn’t was a morgue didn’t seem the appropriate place to make a dig about age. Some weren’t so lucky.

  Jimmy watched the hands on the clock go around and around and around. May had excused himself at about the half-hour mark and hadn’t returned. After an hour, Jimmy’s knees throbbed like a toothache.

  Needham scoured every part of the girl’s body. He was looking at her hands, her fingernails, her arms, her legs, her abdomen.

  “I’m not seeing anything that I didn’t the first time.” Needham sounded more deflated than triumphant, which surprised Jimmy. “And I’m not changing my conclusion unless I have strong reason to do so.”

  Jimmy nodded, understanding.

  “Help me turn her over, would you?”

  If I have to…

  Once they had her facedown, her back revealed a myriad of abrasions. The poor girl looked like a human pincushion, only all the pins were missing. Needham would have already processed any trace and cleaned the wounds.

  Needham pulled a magnifying glass out and was inspecting the back of her neck. “Huh.”

  Jimmy butted right against Needham, and the ME stepped a foot to the side and gave Jimmy a look of condemnation for invading his personal space. Jimmy didn’t move.

  “What did you find?” he asked.

  “Now, this wasn’t here when I did the autopsy. It must have affected the deep tissue.”

  “What did?” Jimmy was about to strangle Needham.

  Needham looked at Jimmy. “You have zero patience,” he huffed.

  Jimmy tapped a foot, certain he could hear the clock ticking on the wall.

  Needham eventually pointed out some patches where the skin was darker than the surrounding area at the base of Katie’s neck/top of her spine. “See that?”

  “What am I seeing?”

  Needham sighed in exasperation. “It’s—”

  “How’s it going, gentlemen?” May stepped into the room, his gaze settling on Needham.

  The ME kept his focus on the body, angling his head this way and that, like a bird staring down from its perch.

  “He’s found something,” Jimmy replied.

  “Ah, I see.” May moved closer. “What might that be?”

  Needham lifted his eyes from the body and glared at May. “Back away.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “He was just about to tell me when you—”

  “I don’t know if the victim had an altercation before going in the Hudson,” Needham began. “None of the wounds are giving up that story, but these contusions are not consistent with the fall.”

  Ah, so it was bruising, but— “I didn’t think the dead—” Jimmy stopped talking under Needham’s glare. “What are you telling me?”

  “PI Voigt, someone held this girl’s head under the water. What
you’re looking at are palm prints.” Needham demonstrated by placing both his hands at the base of her neck. “And whoever did it had very small hands.”

  When he’d heard Needham use the word story just a few moments ago, he’d thought any hope of having forensic proof of murder didn’t exist. “Small hands? A woman’s?”

  “Someone with small hands— a man or a woman.” Needham regarded him like the village idiot again.

  Jimmy fired the same look back. “I didn’t think the dead bruised, so why didn’t you notice that before?”

  “Simple. The trauma happened perimortem—at or near the time of death.”

  “I know what perimortem is.”

  “Huh. The damage to the underlying tissue also must have been rather deep, so it took time to rise to the surface. It would have happened after I’d conducted the autopsy. Look at the pictures again if you don’t believe me.”

  “Let me just reiterate what you’ve told me. We have proof that someone held Katie’s head down—face down—so she drowned.”

  “Yes,” Needham said sourly, “that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  Jimmy could have used this moment to rub it in the ME’s face that he’d been wrong, but any fun in that had been deflated by Needham’s willingness to cooperate. Jimmy actually found himself respecting the man.

  -

  Chapter 27

  BALANCING ACT

  Sara led the way to the front door of Chandra’s parents’ house with Sean trailing behind her. The door was opened before she had a chance to knock.

  “Mr. and Mrs. McKinley.” Chandra took them both in. “Surprise seeing you here.”

  But Sara didn’t get the impression it was a surprise. Rather, Chandra had been expecting them. She was dressed in a black pantsuit with an orange blouse, and her hair was tousled and rested beautifully on her shoulders.

  “Can we come in for a minute?” Sara asked.

  “Certainly.” Chandra let them inside. The place was modestly decorated and attested to the tastes of an older generation.

  “Are your parents home?” Sara inquired.

  “No, we’ll be able to talk in peace.” Chandra took them to a small living room with overstuffed chairs and a matching couch. She sat in a chair and gestured to the couch. “Please, sit. Make yourselves comfortable.”

  Sara hadn’t expected such a hospitable welcome. Sara sat down, Sean beside her.

  “We just have some questions for you,” Sara started.

  “I figured you would.” Chandra pressed her painted lips together and tilted her head slightly. “I do apologize for the scene last night.” She took a deep, dramatic sigh. “Levi just gets under my skin sometimes. He’s known that I’ve had a crush on him for as long as we’ve known each other. He just likes to play dumb.”

  “He did admit he was aware of your feelings after you left,” Sean said, rather seriously.

  Sara glanced at him to cut back just a bit. They didn’t want her shutting them out, and they’d agreed before coming that Sara would lead the questioning.

  “You’ve known each other a long time,” Sara put out there.

  “Since grade three. I just always figured we’d end up together, ya know?” Chandra ran a hand over her pants and picked at an invisible piece of lint near her knee. “But it wasn’t meant to be.”

  “He never returned your feelings,” Sara said.

  Chandra shook her head. “He was always looking at other women. It was like I was right there in his face, but I was invisible.”

  “That would have hurt.”

  “Oh, it did. Every single day. But he paid me quite well to work for him, to manage his calendar.” She shrugged and sighed. “I might be fired now. I don’t know. But after walking out like I did last night…”

  “He seems to think you quit, so you might want to talk.” Sara gave her a reassuring smile.

  “Well, I don’t know if I can go back.”

  “Last night…you and Levi…I noticed the lipstick on his neck,” Sara put it out there as delicately as possible.

  Chandra flushed. “I stupidly made a move. It was just before you got there.”

  “That was why you were so mad when Levi denied knowing how you felt about him,” Sara reasoned.

  Chandra nodded.

  Sara didn’t want to get right into grilling Chandra and thought it best to stick with more neutral ground. “How long did you work for Levi?”

  “Since his career took off. A few years now.” She paused to smile, but it was wistful, and her mind appeared to be miles away. “We ran into each other in a bar, after not seeing each other for years. Isn’t that how all the good stories begin—a reunion in a bar? Well, except for mine. Levi went home with someone else that night. And every night since.”

  “But you stuck around,” Sara started. “Your love for him goes above and beyond.”

  “I truly love him and care about him. I want what’s best for him.”

  Now, Sara felt she had her nibbling the bait. “What did you think of Katie?”

  “I’m surprised my feelings about her weren’t made clear last night.” She tucked her chin into a shoulder, and Sara wasn’t sure if it was to cover embarrassment or an attempt to disguise her anger.

  “You didn’t think she was right for Levi,” Sara concluded.

  “Not at all. Now I come to find out he was going to propose to her. I admit I knew that Levi was aware of Katie seeing someone else. I might have blown things out of proportion last night. But Levi would rather live in denial and told me I was making a big deal out of nothing. He even said that the other guy and Katie went way back and were just friends ‘like us.’”

  Sara winced inside. Levi was constantly reminding Chandra he didn’t have romantic feelings for her. Chandra liked to point out that Levi lived in denial, but it would seem so did she.

  “Where were you the morning Katie died?” Sara asked.

  Chandra batted her eyelashes and sat back as if she were appalled by the question. Her body stiffened. “I was with Levi.”

  Sean leaned forward. “What time was that?”

  “I think I got to his condo about nine.” Chandra uncrossed her legs and then crossed them in the other direction.

  Sara nodded. Nine o’clock was what Levi had said, but that meant neither of them had yet provided an alibi for the time of the murder. If Sara pointed that out right now, Chandra might shut down.

  “New evidence concludes that Katie was murdered,” Sean said bluntly. Apparently, he wasn’t afraid of sealing Chandra’s lips.

  Her gaze snapped to him, and tears pooled in her eyes. “Neither of us had anything to do with her death.”

  “Is that what you’re telling yourself because you think Levi killed her? You love him, you want to protect him,” Sara said, feeling a bit anxious. What if she was feeding a defense to a killer?

  Chandra started trembling, and tears snaked down her cheeks. She swiped them away. “He’d never…” She sniffled.

  “But you think he did,” Sara pressed.

  “I don’t know what to think,” she blurted out. Tears were falling in rapid succession, but she made no more moves to wipe them. “I know he was horribly hurt when I told him about Katie seeing that other guy, and he did what he could to hide those feelings from me. But he can’t hide from me. I’ve known him far too long.”

  “You thought by trying to make it appear to us as if Levi didn’t know about Mitch, Levi wouldn’t look like he had motive.”

  “Yeah, I just know he wouldn’t have killed her.”

  Sara let Chandra’s claim sit out there for a few seconds before saying, “But you have your doubts.”

  Chandra bit on her bottom lip, and she nodded. “I’d like to think I know him better than that. That he wouldn�
�t be capable of killing someone. But he was humiliated when I told him about Katie running around on him. He gets this little tic in his cheek when he’s upset.” She pointed to the side of her face to indicate where. “It’s sort of the catalyst before he blows.”

  “He has a bad temper?” Sara asked.

  Chandra nodded. “He can.”

  Even though the evidence early on pointed in Levi’s direction due to a couple factors: no verifiable alibi and no way of knowing he legitimately had Katie’s phone. His temper combined with the small palm prints veered them away again.

  “Why did you claim Katie’s body?” Sara asked.

  “I did it for Levi. He couldn’t stand to see her left to the city for burial. He has the money.” Chandra wiped her damp cheeks. No more tears were falling.

  “Levi asked you to claim her body?” Sean inquired, nosing into the conversation.

  Chandra shook her head. “No, but I know it’s what he’d have wanted.”

  “Even if he had killed her?” Sara asked.

  “Especially if he had.”

  Sara angled her head and narrowed her eyes.

  Chandra explained. “If there was evidence the police missed…that could have pointed in his direction.”

  “You could have aided and abetted a murderer,” Sean stated coolly.

  She paled. “I didn’t really think of it that way.”

  “We have to ask,” Sara began. “Before you went to Levi’s the morning Katie died, where were you?”

  “I have a solid alibi, if that’s what you’re curious about. I was here with my parents until eight thirty, then I set out and hit the Starbucks near Levi’s condo.”

  “We’ll need a number for your folks,” Sara told her, and Chandra provided it. One thing was for sure: she and Sean and their team needed to regroup.

  -

  Chapter 28

  GETTING A SOLID GRIP