The Circle of Blood

by Alane Ferguson

  Jacobs clomped over to where Justin stood. The mouth of the backpack gaped open, and Cameryn saw a flash of metal inside. “What is it, Deputy?”

  “Look at this.” From the depths of the backpack Justin withdrew a pair of scissors. The blades were long, silver, and old-fashioned, with a pattern etched on the handle in a delicate engraving.

  “So? Scissors don’t mean much.”

  “Yeah, but check this out.” And then, with latex-gloved fingers, Justin removed a three-foot-long braid of strawberry-blonde hair. It hung, swinging like a rope. “Cutting off a girl’s hair can be an act of vengeance,” he told the sheriff.

  Jacobs inclined his head. “How’s that?”

  It was so quiet in the alleyway that Cameryn was afraid they might hear the pounding of her heart.

  “Haircutting can be a sign of retribution,” explained Justin, his voice eager now. “When a crime is girl-on-girl, the perpetrator sometimes cuts off the victim’s hair.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you just made a giant leap there, Deputy. As far as I can tell, there is no retribution and there is no perpetrator. This girl put a bullet in her own head.” Jacobs squinted at Justin while Justin, still holding the braid, stared back.

  Finally, Justin said, “Maybe you’re right. But there’s a psychological aspect to the cutting.”

  “And you know this… how?” the sheriff asked.

  “From the police academy. And, like Cameryn, I’ve read books on the criminal mind.”

  The sheriff rubbed the back of his neck and let a small stream of air escape between his teeth. “We’re just a small town, Deputy. What I’ve learned is when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”

  Cameryn stood frozen. She watched as Justin held out the braid, which now hung limp from his hand. “You’re right, Sheriff-this might be a garden-variety suicide. But sometimes the hoofbeats do belong to the zebra.”

  “What are you saying, Deputy?”

  “I’m saying we might be looking at a murder.”

  Chapter Six

  “YOU WANT TO tell me what you’re thinking? I keep trying to bring up interesting subjects, but you haven’t said three words. I might as well be talking to Baby Doe. That’s what I’m calling our vic-Baby Doe instead of Jane Doe, since she’s so young,” her father said as he downshifted their station wagon. They had already descended the Million Dollar Highway and were now driving past Hermosa, a small town located on the outskirts of Durango. From the road, the town glittered with bright lights, like jewels against velvet. Cameryn watched it twinkle and wondered about the living that went on inside those houses. In those homes, people were serving dinner and helping their kids with homework, fighting and making up, oblivious to the cargo the Mahoneys carried. Death glided past life, unnoticed in the darkness.

  “It’s… nothing,” she sighed. “Just a long day.”

  “You can say that again. It’s like a bloody war zone.”

  “I know,” she said, distracted. “I’m sorry, I’m just… thinking.” With her head pressed against the glass, she turned Justin’s words over in her mind for the hundredth time. Murder, murder, murder. If that were true, then she, by not telling what she knew, was withholding evidence of a crime. Suicide was one thing-there was no point dragging Hannah into a mess if she didn’t have to. But murder? At this point she’d already gone too far. A plunging, hopeless feeling settled inside as she watched the full moon touch the top of the mountain, balancing on a jagged peak like a golden ball.

  “Well, let me take a stab at this since you’re not talking. Are you worried that Dr. Moore’s going to give you grief for being the lead coroner on this one?”

  In spite of herself, Cameryn smiled. The “guessing game” was one of her father’s strategies to get her to talk when she didn’t want to.

  “No.”

  “Are you worried that you haven’t finished your application for that forensic guru?”

  “No. She’s supposed to e-mail me today.”

  “Okay,” he went on, jutting out a thoughtful lower lip, “are you worried about what Justin said-that this is a murder and not a suicide?”

  It was enough to wake her from her trance. Pulling away from the glass, she turned to look at him. “What did you say?”

  “Bingo!” he said happily. “If you’re concerned whether you covered procedure well enough if the case goes to trial, don’t be. First of all, you did a fine job-everything by the book. Are you worried about a trial?”

  She nodded, thankful for the excuse.

  “But this is not a murder. Deputy Crowley was overreaching. ”

  “Except… Justin said that girls cut hair as an act of vengeance.”

  He smiled to himself. “Well, yes, it’s true that sometimes when it’s a girl-on-girl crime, the perpetrator will cut hair. It happens.” For a quick moment he scoped her face before training his eyes back to the road. “But it’s also true that girls cut off their hair in an act of despondency. Obviously, you have to be pretty darn despondent to kill yourself. And who are these mysterious girls that killed Baby Doe? We don’t exactly have street gangs in Silverton. No, there was a gun in her hand and a bullet in her head. Far more people die at their own hand than are murdered.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Her blood began to flow again as she settled back into her seat. It was true-she’d allowed her mind to dwell on the worst thing it could possibly be, and here was her father, a professional, telling her the case was a suicide. Behind her in the bay of their station wagon lay the gurney. Strapped to it, in the blue body bag that rocked whenever they hit a bump in the road, lay Mariah, her body swaying ever so slightly. Cameryn found the motion, the sounds, unnerving-almost as though Mariah might be alive inside the body bag. But that was just her mind playing tricks-from cutting open bodies, she knew one thing: dead meant dead.

  In her mind she could see Mariah’s face and her wide-set eyes that had stared into the falling snowflakes. Her father, once he’d arrived, had been the one to close those eyes. That was the scene her mind replayed-Patrick’s hand gently pressing against Mariah’s lids while Justin held the red-gold braid.

  “I wish we had an identification on our Baby Doe. Jacobs told me they’ve done a search on missing persons and there’s no hit.”

  “Why call her Baby Doe when she isn’t a baby?” Cameryn asked. “She’s what-fourteen, fifteen maybe?”

  “I told you already, the decedent is Baby Doe because she was just a kid. In my book, that girl’s not old enough to be a ‘Jane.’”

  Although Cameryn understood her father’s reasoning, she couldn’t help but bristle at the name ‘baby’ being applied to Mariah. Mariah had been a thief. She’d carried a gun. And yet Cameryn couldn’t say a word because officially, she’d never seen Mariah before in her life.

  “You know, it’s strange that Baby Doe had no ID in her backpack or anywhere else on her,” Patrick went on. “Don’t you think?”

  “Yeah. But maybe she didn’t want her family to know- that she was going to kill herself, I mean. Maybe she didn’t want to be found.”

  “Maybe,” Patrick agreed.

  The lack of identification, Cameryn realized, had been her one incredible stroke of good fortune. Mariah had ditched Hannah’s wallet before they’d searched her remains, which meant that Mariah must have tossed the wallet somewhere-in a trash can, maybe. The backpack had been strangely empty, too, another point Justin had commented on. Cameryn hadn’t cared about anything except that luck, for now, was on her side.

  Her father turned on to Park Drive, which ended at Mercy Medical Center and the small parking lot of the medical examiner’s building.

  “And… here we are,” Patrick announced. “It’s late.” He pulled around behind the hospital to a small red-brick building dwarfed by the towering center. The poor stepchild of the hospital, the Colorado State Medical Examiner Building looked unassuming and plain, almost windowless, in the shape of a rectangular box. �
��I can’t believe this is my second trip down here in one day,” Patrick said, backing the station wagon close to a metal door. “You know, Cammie, sometimes I hate this job. How about the pep talk-tell me why we’re even doing this.”

  “We do it for the dead, remember? They tell us their stories and we figure out what happened to them and why. Our job is important. We give families the answers they need.”

  He glanced at her. “If you say so.”

  “I do.”

  He tapped the horn twice, and a heavy metal door rolled upward. Ben, the diener, waved them inside the garage. A black man with arms as thick as her father’s thighs, Ben was in charge of the morgue’s most gruesome jobs. As he assisted Dr. Moore throughout the autopsies, it was Ben’s job to x-ray and prepare the decedent, which might include plucking maggots from someone’s mouth or breaking the rigor in bodies already stiffened up. At the very end of the procedure, Ben would crudely stitch the "Y” incision, then carefully wash the body before covering it with a white shroud. Despite the grisly nature of his work, Ben usually had a smile on his face. Tonight, though, was different. He looked uncharacteristically serious.

  “We’ve already got a lot of interest on this case,” Ben said by way of greeting. “Police from all over have been calling, trying to see if this here’s their lost girl-I got one all the way from Maine. Makes you wonder how many strawberry-blonde teenagers have gone missing. Hello, Cammie,” he said.

  “Hi,” she replied, giving him a tiny wave.

  “I got to tell you Moore ’s a bit on the crotchety side, it being past hours and all. But he doesn’t want to wait until Monday to do her, either, since people are yelling at him from every which way. Which means he decided to go ahead and undertake a nighttime chop. Makes for a very long day. His mood reflects that. So, are you all ready?”

  He directed the question to Cameryn. Nodding, she went to the back of their station wagon and pulled up the hatch. “Let’s get her out,” she replied.

  “All right then, on the count of three,” Ben commanded, and soon Mariah’s body got pulled onto the ME’s own gurney. Even through the blue vinyl, Cameryn could tell that Mariah’s body had turned even harder, like a loaf of bread left out to dry.

  Cameryn said, “She’s in full rigor. I think it got accelerated because she’s so small.”

  “All right, girl genius, I can feel it, too. But can you tell me what that means?” Ben asked, a twinkle in his dark eyes. “Word has it, you’re about to get some sort of scholarship. So tell me what you know.” He began to push the gurney up the ramp, his shoulder straining against the thin green cotton of his scrubs. The blood vessels in his arms stood out from beneath his skin as he pushed the gurney to the door. “Are you going to tell me? ”

  “Why?” she said, trotting to keep up. “You already know this stuff.”

  “I know I do. But I want to see if you do.” Knocking the door open with his hip, Ben eased Mariah through while Cameryn and her father trailed behind. Then, like a laying on of hands, the three of them found a spot on the gurney to push. They wheeled Mariah down a long corridor past a ficus tree dropping leaves in a corner.

  “You gonna tell me?” Ben asked.

  “Come on,” her father urged, “show him what you know.”

  “Rigor mortis is caused by the hydrolysis of adenosine triphosphate in the muscle tissue. Basically, ATP keeps tissue soft. With death the body doesn’t generate any more ATP, so the muscles become all rigid.”

  “You’re good, girl! ’Cause that’s exactly right. So now I’ll ask you a second question.” Ben turned the gurney an abrupt right-face so it could roll down another dimly lit hallway. “When does rigor start, Cammie?”

  “Um, that depends.”

  “‘Um’ is not much of an answer,” Ben said, smiling. The rubber soles of his shoes squeaked against tile as he stopped the gurney next to a drinking fountain. “Hold up, I’m dying of thirst.” As the gurney came to a halt, Mariah’s corpse bobbled, and Cameryn reflexively held out her hand to steady it.

  “So when does rigor start?” Ben asked, bending over. Outsiders would never understand the way dieners and medical examiners could drink or eat only inches away from a body.

  “In as little as ten minutes,” she replied.

  “Exactly,” he said between sips. “And how long does it last?”

  “It depends. It depends on how much a person weighs and how much fat they have, and on the temperature and how dry the air is. This isn’t an exact science. I think rigor can go for as long as seventy-two hours. And I think the body’s at its stiffest between, like, twelve and twenty-four hours.”

  Ben stood, and Cameryn noticed there was water on his chin. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. “And then what happens?”

  Cocking her head, she said, “I didn’t know there was going to be a test.”

  “I’m just doing my part,” Ben said. “I’m getting you ready for college. I heard there’s some fancy headhunter out for you.”

  Mariah’s elbow made a knot against the side of the body bag. Cameryn felt its hardness beneath her fingertips. “Once decomposition kicks in, the body reverses itself. It goes soft again as it decomposes.”

  “You get an A.” Ben nodded. “No wonder your daddy hired you.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting a little worried about my job,” Patrick interjected. “I think she’s gunning for it.”

  “Not yours,” she replied. “I’m gunning for Dr. Moore’s.”

  “You’re definitely what’s next.” Ben curled his fingers around the gurney and said, “Let’s get this girl to X-ray.”

  The casual chatting was the way people dealt with death, Cameryn knew. Like Ben and her father and Dr. Moore, she could regurgitate the facts. But as the gurney moved on the last leg of its journey, Cameryn realized the disconnect between her knowledge in her head and the feel of a human turning to stone beneath her hand. You never get used to death, she thought. Never.

  They passed a room with a spindly fern in a large clay pot painted with Hopi flute dancers. Throughout the building, cheap art hung on the walls, mostly pictures of gurgling brooks and sunrays bursting from behind clouds-she guessed those were meant to bring comfort to the bereaved.

  They arrived at X-ray, where, Cameryn knew, Mariah would be filmed through the bag by the machine’s long movable arm. “You all know you gotta stay out here,” Ben told them at the door. “I’m gonna try to get film so we can pinpoint that bullet. If we find it, we won’t have to dig around so much.” He wheeled Mariah inside, and the door clicked softly behind him.

  Patrick sagged against the wall as if the weight of the whole day had suddenly settled onto his shoulders. The fluorescent lights made his skin appear even grayer; Cameryn could see tiny threads of veins at the base of each nostril. She hadn’t remembered seeing them before. There was a redness to his eyes. Squeezing them shut, he pinched the lids with his fingers and said, “I think the day’s finally catching up to me.”

  Just then his phone rang.

  “Why don’t I go on down to the autopsy suite,” she began, but her father held up one finger to signal Cameryn to stop. “Hi, Ma,” Patrick said.

  Cameryn waited, paying close attention to their conversation.

  “We’re down here now… With Cammie… We’re outside X-ray… No, it’s fine, what is it?” His back was hunched away from her, but suddenly he wheeled around to face Cameryn. “All right, I’ll ask her… No, I’m glad you called. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Something had changed in his voice. Cautious, she looked up and saw that his face was grave. Her father rubbed the back of his head, then raked his hand forward, making tufts. “That was your grandmother.”

  Cameryn shrugged. “Okay. So?”

  “So she said you never came home, that you left from the driveway and she got worried. She called Lyric. Cameryn, did you see Hannah today?”

  Her fingers clenched at the sound of her mother’s name.

  Guessing the truth
, Patrick cried, exasperated, “We had an hour-long ride in the car. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know.” Eyes lowered again, she noticed a small nick in one square of the tile. “I guess I didn’t want to get into it.”

  “Did you- Did you talk about Jayne?”

  She planted the tip of her boot onto the notch and pressed it. “Hannah told me what happened.”

  “She did? Can you please look at me?”

  She did. Patrick’s eyes were warm, sad, and full of love. There was so much love in Patrick’s eyes that it was almost impossible to hold his gaze. But she made herself do it. “I-I feel sorry for Hannah,” she said in a thickened voice.

  “You feel sorry for her. Wow.” He blinked hard. “That’s not the reaction I expected.”

  “It’s just, there are worse things… worse people… than Hannah,” Cameryn tried to explain. “Baby Doe put a bullet in her head. Imagine how screwed up her life must have been. Maybe she had problems and everyone abandoned her and then she killed herself. I’m not going to abandon Hannah,” she told him. “I think I can help.”

  “Cammie… there’s more that you don’t know.”

  “But I don’t want to hear any more giant revelations. I think I’ve had enough for one day. Can we just let it lie?”

  The door to X-ray popped open, and Ben pushed Mariah out, feet-first. “All done,” he said.

  For just the barest of seconds, her father held Cameryn in his gaze until, like a cord breaking, he released her. They once again became the coroner and assistant to the coroner, a father/daughter team, the cheerful partners who worked cases together in family harmony. No outsider would ever guess the truth. She wouldn’t let them.

  “You two ready?” Ben asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “We’re ready.”

  They began to walk down the hallway, the worn heels of Cameryn’s cowboy boots reverberating along the linoleum in rhythm with the soft padding sound of her father’s new shoes. Other than the overheads, most of the lights had been turned off. As she walked, she thought of Lyric and how frightened she would be if she were here. Lyric believed the deceased hovered close to their remains-sometimes, she claimed, unaware they were actually dead. But Cameryn didn’t sense any floating spirits here. No, it was the smell that haunted, a reminder of what really went on inside these plain beige walls. As she got closer to the autopsy suite she inhaled it, the sickly sweet odor scrubbed by bleach and covered by ineffective fresheners. The air in the building hung heavy with death. It had entered into the very pores, weaving its own kind of DNA from the hundreds of bodies dissected inside these walls. The hardest thing about her chosen profession, worse than anything Cameryn ever looked at, was this clinging smell of death.