Dead Guilty dffi-2

by Beverly Connor

  leading to the trailer park, Diane saw a police car

  parked out front. The single trailer was lit, revealing

  silhouettes of two uniformed officers moving through

  the length of it.

  As Diane and the sheriff stepped out of the car, the

  two uniforms emerged. One was Janice Warrick. Good thing her eyes aren’t phasers, thought Diane as

  they came face-to-face. Warrick held her chin high and

  jaw clenched and addressed the chief of detectives. ‘‘He’s not here.’’

  ‘‘How’s it look inside?’’

  ‘‘A mess,’’ said Janice Warrick. ‘‘Chairs overturned,

  drawers pulled out and emptied. We’re looking for

  Mayberry now. Officer Wallace is calling his parents

  and friends, and we have an APB out for his car.’’ ‘‘Did you see any blood, drug paraphernalia...?’’

  Garnett asked.

  Janice shook her head. ‘‘Nothing but the mess. We

  only did a casual look through. That’s all we could

  do.’’ Her eyes darted in Diane’s direction and back

  to Garnett.

  ‘‘Stay here and see if he shows up. We need to

  find him,’’ said Garnett. He turned to step back into

  his car.

  There was nothing for Diane to do but go back to

  the crime scene. With three people working, perhaps

  it wouldn’t take the entire night.

  ‘‘Sorry, guys,’’ Diane said to her crew.

  ‘‘No problem. Who needs sleep?’’ said David. The warrant had arrived in her absence, and Jin and

  David, clad in head and shoe coverings, had already started. David was photographing the body, and Jin had begun a fingerprint search, starting at the front entryway and following a path to the bedroom. Whit stood just outside the bedroom door watching David. Garnett stopped beside the body. Whit wore gloves and shoe coverings. Garnett did not.

  On the porch, Diane had donned a hair cap and fresh shoe coverings. Now she slipped on a pair of gloves and examined the knots in the rope that bound and strangled Chris Edwards. Of particular interest was the knot tied in the middle of the rope between the clothes bar and Chris Edwards.

  ‘‘Get good photographs of the knots.’’

  ‘‘Of course,’’ said David.

  ‘‘What about the knots?’’ Garnett stepped up be

  hind her.

  Diane wondered if he had decided to take the lead in the investigation. Janice Warrick hadn’t yet been replaced, and Garnett had stated to the press when he accepted the appointment as chief that he was going to take a hands-on approach.

  She handed him a pair of latex gloves and covers for his shoes. He looked at them quizzically for a moment before he slipped them on.

  ‘‘The rope and knots are different from the ones used with the other victims,’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘That’s significant?’’

  ‘‘It is indeed.’’

  ‘‘Diane is an expert in knots,’’ offered David, snap ping another photograph. ‘‘In that she has had to hang from them herself on many occasions.’’

  David was good at keeping conversational tones, treating people like Garnett as if he was one of the team and not an adversary—which was the way Diane saw him.

  ‘‘Uh, you’ll have to explain that,’’ said Garnett. He gave Diane a sidelong glance.

  ‘‘I’m a caver,’’ she said. ‘‘I work on rope a lot.’’ Diane sniffed the corpse’s hair. ‘‘Shampoo. He’d just come out of the shower. I take it Miss Beck found the body. Why so late?’’

  ‘‘She just got off work,’’ said Garnett.

  Diane studied the body. Chris Edwards was clad only in briefs, and there were bruises on his face, ab domen and arms. Despite the discoloration of his face resulting from the strangulation, bruises were still evi dent on his right temple and the right side of his jaw, as well as his arms. Dried blood was caked on his nose, down around his mouth and in his hair. He had put up a fight.

  ‘‘He looks like he was kicked.’’ Garnett pointed out the bruising on his side.

  ‘‘It looks like it,’’ Diane agreed. ‘‘Who’s going to get the body?’’

  ‘‘Rankin. He’s our medical examiner. You thinking maybe he should go to Webber because of the connec tion to the other victims?’’

  Yes, she wanted Webber to do it. If the cases were related, it would be better if one examiner did them all.

  ‘‘I think it would be a good idea.’’ When the words were out of her mouth, she wondered if she sounded too curt.

  Garnett thought for a moment. ‘‘Webber would make sense, especially if this turns out to be truly connected to the others. However, we don’t need to offend Rankin.’’

  Diane could see that Garnett was going to make a political decision, and started to say something, but Whit beat her to it.

  ‘‘We’ll send them to Dr. Webber.’’

  Garnett looked sharply at Whit Abercrombie, as if forgetting for a moment that it was Whit who had the power to make that decision. Whit’s black eyes spar kled as he returned Garnett’s gaze, and his teeth gleamed against the border of his short black beard.

  ‘‘I’ll talk to Rankin,’’ Whit said. ‘‘I’m sure he won’t mind.’’

  Garnett nodded. ‘‘If you have everything under con trol here, I need to see about finding Mr. Mayberry.’’

  Diane was glad to see him go. He might be the lead detective, but his presence was like a guest who ar rived uninvited for a dinner party and you didn’t quite know where to put him.

  ‘‘How did you get mixed up with the Rosewood police?’’ Whit asked when Chief Garnett was safely away. ‘‘Last time I heard, you weren’t on their Christ mas card list.’’

  Diane explained the complicated scenario.

  ‘‘So you got blackmailed into it, and Rosewood got free space for a crime lab.’’

  ‘‘That’s about the size of it. I have to admit, I rather like it. But I can’t tell the mayor or the chief of detec tives that.’’

  Whit laughed. ‘‘I understand. It’s like, ‘Please, Brer Fox, don’t throw me in that briar patch.’ ’’

  ‘‘Thanks for making the call on Lynn Webber.’’

  ‘‘It makes sense,’’ said Whit. ‘‘Rankin won’t mind. He’s not as political as the people around him.’’

  Lynn Webber arrived with the medical technicians to transport Chris Edwards’ body to the morgue. Diane asked the technicians to wait on the porch while Lynn examined the body and Diane and Jin finished processing a path to the door.

  One of the technicians, a white man about twentyfive with brown receding hair and dark blue eyes, asked if it was all right to sit down on one of the porch chairs.

  ‘‘It’s been dusted,’’ Jin yelled from the living room. ‘‘Might get powder on you.’’

  The other, a black man of about thirty, told him he’d best remain standing. ‘‘No telling what you might sit on at a crime scene.’’ The two of them talked to each other about football while they waited.

  Lynn twisted the neck and jaw of the corpse, and then moved his arms as far as the rope would allow. ‘‘Whit tells me I have you to thank for this.’’

  ‘‘I hope you don’t mind. They may be related.’’

  ‘‘This looks different from those in the woods,’’ said Lynn.

  ‘‘But this is one of the men who found the victims in the woods.’’

  Lynn looked up at Diane sharply. ‘‘What’s going on?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know.’’

  Lynn shook her head, pushed her thermometer into Chris Edwards’ liver and looked at her watch. ‘‘Ninety-four point five. Rigor’s . . .’’ Lynn looked around the room. ‘‘Who’s the detective on the case?’’

  ‘‘Chief Garnett’s taking the lead,’’ said Diane. ‘‘This guy’s partner, Steven Mayberry, is missing—the one who was with him
in the woods when they found the bodies.’’

  Lynn’s frown deepened. ‘‘This just gets worse. Any idea what this is all about?’’

  ‘‘Maybe we’ll find out when Mr. Mayberry is found.’’

  Dr. Webber stood up. ‘‘At a one-and-a-half-degree drop an hour, it’s possible he died two and a half hours ago. He’s already into rigor. That’s a little early, but it looks like he put up a fight and that would hasten it.’’

  ‘‘His girlfriend put the call in about two and a half hours ago,’’ said Whit. He was standing back from the body, watching Dr. Webber examine it.

  ‘‘I suppose Chief Garnett needs to talk with her,’’ said Dr. Webber. ‘‘I’m done here.’’

  She turned to Diane. ‘‘Raymond has one skeleton for you. Blue Doe. He’s delivering it today. He’ll have Red and Green done shortly.’’

  ‘‘Good. Perhaps we can find out who they were.’’ Diane pulled out a coil of orange string to tie off the rope for cutting.

  ‘‘If this keeps up,’’ said Lynn, ‘‘you’re going to run out of colors.’’

  Chapter 10

  ‘‘Looks like autoerotic asphyxia,’’ said the black tech nician when he saw the body. ‘‘I had one about six months ago. Just a kid.’’

  Jin stopped an examination of the chest of drawers and walked over. ‘‘Most instances of autoerotic as phyxia are adolescents,’’ he said. ‘‘This doesn’t look like it. Wouldn’t you say, Boss?’’

  ‘‘I think we don’t need to speculate,’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘His hands are tied awful tight,’’ said the other assistant.

  ‘‘Maybe he had help,’’ his partner suggested. ‘‘The rope is tight around the front where he’s leaning into it, but there’s a lot of give in the back.’’ They held the body while Diane tied off the yellow polypropyl ene rope with orange string and cut it.

  ‘‘He sure looks trussed up around the neck like that kid. The kid’s mother moved all the porn he had in the room,’’ the technician continued. He looked around the bedroom. ‘‘Friends and family will do that, you know.’’ The technician didn’t want to give up his diagnosis.

  ‘‘Let’s get this poor boy out of here,’’ said Lynn Webber. She stripped off her gloves as the technicians placed the remains of Chris Edwards in the body bag. ‘‘Be careful of the ropes,’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘Will do.’’ The black man smiled at Diane. ‘‘Pete and I always give our guest a good ride. Don’t we, Pete?’’

  ‘‘You bet. We’ve never had any complaints.’’ The two of them laughed.

  Lynn left, telling Diane she wouldn’t be getting to the autopsy until the afternoon, so Diane could come then and retrieve the ropes.

  Whit stayed until the body was removed and Lynn was gone. Diane walked him to the door.

  ‘‘I had a talk with his girlfriend before letting her go home,’’ said Whit, leaning close to Diane and speaking low, though only she and her crew were in the house.

  ‘‘She said there’s usually a key under the mat. It was on the desk when she got here. I asked her if anything was missing that she could see. She said she thought his laptop was gone. He usually keeps it on the desk along with a DVD player.’’

  Whit pointed to a pine table against the wall flanked by two speakers. The table was empty, but the dust pattern showed that something had sat there.

  Diane looked around the room for any other ghosts of missing objects. It was a sparse room with walls painted the color of sand. The furniture consisted of a brown futon couch and two chairs, one stuffed and slipcovered in brown corduroy, the other a canebacked rocker. The coffee table was a large roughhewn cross-section of a tree trunk with glass covering the top. The some-assembly-required computer desk sat against one wall.

  On the wall opposite the couch, a tall bookcase held a television and books on forestry and stacks of Na tional Geographic. Beside it was the table where the DVD player had sat. The hardwood floors were bare.

  ‘‘Jin took the girlfriend’s—Kacie Beck’s—fingerprints before she left. She was very cooperative,’’ he said.

  Diane nodded. Whit’s dark eyes looked sympathetic as he took a final look toward the bedroom.

  ‘‘Young guy.’’ He shook his head. ‘‘I’m not sure why I ran for this office. I’m thinking of bowing out the next election.’’

  ‘‘Working with murder is certainly wearing on men tal health,’’ said Diane. ‘‘Sometimes it seems like peo ple have become so used to it, they’ve lost their perspective on the horror of it.’’

  ‘‘Dad thinks it’s movies and television, but I don’t know what it is.’’ He shook his head again as if to shake the thoughts from his mind. ‘‘Tell Frank I said hello.’’

  Frank, thought Diane. He’s due back from San Francisco. She wondered if she’d ever have time to see him again. She wondered if she’d ever have time to get back to the museum again. She sighed as Whit went out the door.

  Neva came marching up the steps just as Whit drove away. She stopped in front of Diane. Diane had seen her drive up and waited for her on the porch.

  ‘‘I heard it on the scanner. Were you going to call me?’’

  ‘‘No. I try not to overload new people with death the first week on the job.’’

  ‘‘I can handle it.’’

  ‘‘It wasn’t aimed at you. It’s just my policy. How ever, I’m glad you’re here. It’s going to be a long night, and I fear we may have another crime scene soon.’’

  Diane assigned Neva the kitchen. ‘‘Jin’s taking fin gerprints. David’s taking photographs, and you and I are doing evidence searches. Start with the back door. We believe he entered through the front door. He may have left through the back.’’

  Neva nodded. ‘‘Vic let him in?’’

  ‘‘Probably got the key from under the mat. The victim may have been in the shower. He’s one of the guys who found the hanging victims in the woods.’’

  Neva’s eyes widened. ‘‘Oh, my God. What’s going on?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know. Hopefully, by the time we finish, we’ll have enough evidence to at least know if they are connected.’’

  ‘‘They have to be connected, don’t they?’’

  ‘‘Coincidences do happen.’’

  ‘‘Yeah, but . . .’’ Neva glanced into the bedroom, where Jin and David were working. ‘‘This is some coincidence.’’

  Diane began a spiral search of the living room be ginning at the tree trunk coffee table. As she worked, the house made noises. Beyond the creaking of the floors and the sound of wind against the windows, the refrigerator turned on and off; so did the airconditioning. Things that were normal now seemed odd, almost ghostly, with Chris Edwards dead. Some one should tell the house that it can rest now, Diane thought as the refrigerator once again came on.

  Jin came from the bedroom. ‘‘I need to turn the lights out,’’ he said. He was carrying a filter and black light to check for fingerprints.

  ‘‘You’re going to like this, Boss,’’ said Jin. ‘‘I found the infamous bloody glove in the bedroom—at least its print. It looks like the index finger on the glove had a tear on the surface of the leather.’’

  ‘‘Leather?’’ asked Diane.

  ‘‘Looks like it. We can ID this baby if we find it. There’s a lot of prints on the coffee table here, but I bet they belong to the victim and his girlfriend. You think maybe they were involved in some kind of kinky stuff that got out of hand? I heard what you guys said about the time of death.’’

  ‘‘You think she also hit him with a hand weight?’’

  ‘‘I did a crime scene in New York where the victim suffered an astounding amount of consensual abuse. What is it that happens to a person in childhood that wires the brain to like that kind of stuff?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know, and we don’t know what happened here.’’

  They worked all night and into the morning— searching, dusting, collecting. The smell of fingerprint powders a
nd reagents mixed with the smell of death that always lingered.

  ‘‘Heard we have a mummy.’’

  Despite the fact that the crime unit wasn’t techni cally connected to the museum, David and Jin claimed the museum as theirs. So did the technicians Diane had hired to work in the lab. Neva was the only one who didn’t appear to feel any connection with the mu seum yet. Diane didn’t know if that was good or bad.

  ‘‘We apparently inherited one while my back was turned.’’

  ‘‘Know anything about it?’’ asked Jin.