Defensive Wounds

by Lisa Black

  “All aggressive alpha males.”

  Neil Kelly, waiting around for the autopsy to begin, spoke up. “That’s what my partner thinks. Power junkies.”

  Theresa patted a piece of tape onto a sheet of clear acetate, frowning at her supervisor. “What, are we profilers now? Sure, guys from out of town, looking for some adventures where their wives can’t catch them. But there are guests who aren’t at the convention. There’s the Tower City Mall—so who’s to say someone didn’t take a stroll through the Ritz, then go to the basement and catch a rapid to the airport and be out of town long before anyone even found Marie’s body? Then there’s the substantial staff, who, incidentally, should be the only ones capable of getting into the Presidential Suite in the first place.”

  “ ‘Should be’ being the operative phrase,” Neil said. “The hotel insists that all of their key cards are accounted for and their staff members are vetted before hire. We were there until ten o’clock last night interviewing every last one of them, and so far nobody stands out. A cook with two DUIs is the shadiest character we’ve found so far.”

  “There’s got to be a way to trace those key cards, see who swiped that one last.”

  “We’ve got the computer-crimes people working on it now. But I’m not holding my breath. They’re trained to look for child porn in hard drives, and the Ritz is not jumping up to hand over all their codes. What are you thinking, about that shirt?”

  Theresa had been folding and scrunching the blouse in various conformations. “I was trying to see if maybe someone wadded it up with one bloody hand, or even two. I wondered yesterday but don’t think that someone dried his hands on it, at least not after washing them. The blood is undiluted. But if I had to make a guess, I’d say the killer hit her first and then removed this, so blood from a wound got on it as he pulled it off.”

  “So he beat her to death and then undressed her?” Neil suggested. “What? You’re hesitating.”

  “Her skull had some deep lacerations. I can’t prove it, but I would think there would be more blood on this if she’d had all those injuries when it was removed. I’m guessing she had only the first one or two. Otherwise the whole back of this thing would be solid bloodstain. And he didn’t unbutton it first, either.”

  “Don’t sound very sexy, does it? Hitting her on the head before she’s even got her clothes off.”

  “Unless that’s why he hit her on the head. Because she wouldn’t take her clothes off.”

  “Bingo,” Neil said thoughtfully. “So we’re not looking for someone she wanted to have sex with. We’re looking for someone she didn’t.”

  Leo snorted. “If she didn’t want to have sex with him, why was she there? She said she would and then changed her mind. Nothing more likely to enrage a red-blooded male.”

  The phone rang, and then the department secretary told them that the pathologist wanted to begin the autopsy. Neil Kelly pushed himself off the counter he’d been leaning against and asked Theresa if she would be attending.

  “I’ll be right there. Just want to package these tapings first.”

  The detective left with the slightest air of reluctance.

  “I think he wants you to hold his hand,” Leo said.

  Theresa placed the sheet of acetate under the stereomicroscope. “I’m not catching him if he faints. I’ve got a nerve under my shoulder blade that still hurts from the last time I got in the way of a weak-kneed detective.”

  “He likes you.”

  “Not you, too.”

  Leo chuckled and shuffled away, now humming “If I Only Had a Brain.”

  Under her breath Theresa muttered, “If only.”

  Between the rows of overhead lights and the tiled walls and floors, washed down at the end of every day, the autopsy room was the brightest, cleanest room in the building. And, as the dieners could go home when the day’s cutting had been completed, whether that was sooner or later, the most efficient. The assistants had no reason to lollygag and every reason not to. Plastic jars were labeled, flesh cut open, tables hosed down with the highest possible proficiency.

  At the center of this pool of dispassionate science, Marie Corrigan lay on a steel table with gutters at its sides to drain away her blood, her vitality, her beauty, and her malice. And she had had plenty of all three. Even in the courtroom, constrained on all sides by laws and traditions and unwritten rules of conduct, Marie Corrigan had lit up the air like a fallen high-tension wire, throwing out sparks with unpredictable abandon. And you never knew when that wire might twist in your direction.

  Only four weeks earlier, Marie had demanded to know why England and Germany and Australia and “every other civilized country on the planet” required a set number of points of minutiae—the spots in a fingerprint pattern where the ridges end and divide—and the United States did not. No one had seen her client shoot the store owner into a coma, the gun had never been found, and a mother couldn’t recognize her only child from what passed as the surveillance video. Only an impression of the suspect’s index finger on the store owner’s glasses, which he had pulled off before delivering a 9-millimeter bullet to the man’s chest, tied her client to the scene. Marie had to destroy that print.

  Theresa had explained that other countries required points as a convenience, that was all. Reducing quality-control measures to a number made everyday life much simpler, but those numbers did not have any scientific significance. Ten points were not necessarily better than eight, or twelve better than both. “It’s like being pregnant,” Theresa had said. “You’re not more pregnant at six months than you are at three. You might be more noticeable, but you’re not more pregnant. You either are or you aren’t.” Marie Corrigan had glared at her from in front of the jury box, pacing up and back, distracting the jury from the testimony with her raven-black hair and her exquisite suit, wrapped around her impressive body as if it longed for her touch.

  “Examiners in the United States use eight as a standard, though, even though they won’t admit it. Don’t they?”

  “Traditionally it was a rule of thumb. But the number still doesn’t confer any special significance on the match.”

  “And Great Britain uses thirty-six?” Marie went on, giving a look of surprised alarm to the jury and repeating the number for emphasis.

  “Never,” Theresa said. “They used to use sixteen, and they stopped that in 2001. Now they have no set number required for an identification, just like the United States.”

  An obscure factoid that the jury surely didn’t care about. They seemed much more interested in the defense lawyer’s style than in the equally obscure objection she’d invented. The men wanted to possess her, and the women wanted to be her. Most anyway. One portly middle-aged housewife in an ill-fitting cotton blazer peered at Marie through eyes narrowed to slits.

  Marie, however, cared very much about this obscure factoid, both because it worked against her case and because she hadn’t known it. In revenge she kept Theresa on the stand another fifteen minutes with a list of renowned experts who had written in protest of a single-fingerprint conviction. Unfortunately, none of her experts were fingerprint analysts and all were defense attorneys. As Theresa stepped down from the stand, Marie Corrigan stood back and gave her a long, ultimately pitying look, from Theresa’s few graying strands down to her Payless shoe-store pumps.

  Marie Corrigan had been a bitch, pure and simple. And she’d been bloody good at it—and therein lay the tiny hint of admiration Theresa could never help but feel for a woman with power. She might despise that woman but would always be too honest not to admit that to walk into a room and command the attention of everyone there, to risk their ire, to risk their challenge, to refuse to be the good girl, that took a certain type of courage. And Theresa always admired courage.

  All the same, when she now gazed at the pale, still form on the steel gurney, she felt absolutely nothing. Certainly nothing like regret, or even pity.

  “So girlfriend didn’t have a good day yesterday, eh
?” The pathologist interrupted her thoughts. Christine Johnson, tall and black and brilliant and blunt enough to take on Sonia Battle in a cage fight—now, that would be an interesting encounter, Theresa thought, and vowed to get the two together for lunch one day—raised one eyebrow at Theresa as if she might be at least partially responsible.

  “She was dead when I got there,” Theresa protested. “Besides, I think it may have been the night before last. What do you think?”

  Detective Kelly watched the body, his face stony, only the deep swallowing motion of his Adam’s apple betraying his discomfort. Some people never got used to it. Theresa knew guys who had been Homicide detectives for twenty years and still turned green at the sight of a body. But they dealt, as Neil was dealing. At least he hadn’t turned completely pale—yet. She’d meant what she said about not catching him.

  Christine prodded the lividity, checked the intake sheet for the core temperature at reception, and poked around one eyeball. “I’d say you’re probably right. Where’s the ligature?”

  Theresa held up the paper bag containing the cut pair of nylons. “SuperSheer, size B, so I’d say they were hers. Unless she likes to go the fashionable bare-legs approach.”

  “I doubt it, not with these veins. How does someone who looks like her have varicose problems?”

  “Standing in front of a jury all day in three-inch heels,” Theresa guessed. She took another look at Marie Corrigan. Like the detective, she’d trained herself to view another person’s nakedness quickly and thoroughly, to think of it as just skin, epidermis, a double layer of lipid molecules, and a canvas on which the killer might have left his mark. The woman’s breasts still perked upright, the surest sign that they were fake, but Marie had somehow resisted the tattoo craze. No other injuries or bruises had come to light, no defensive wounds on the small hands. Theresa saw nothing new, and the diener began to wash away anything that might have remained.

  She asked Christine, “Did you ever have a case with her?”

  “Did I. Once she wanted me to agree that the damage to an eighteen-month-old’s genitals could have been a birth defect. Another time she sneered at my med-school credentials and told the jury I’d graduated fourth-last in my class.”

  Theresa worded her response carefully. “Somehow I suspect that’s not true.”

  The doctor nearly pinned her to the other steel table with one scalpel-sharp glance. “You suspect?”

  Theresa thought fast. “How did she make such a mistake?”

  “Two Christine Johnsons. Somehow she didn’t notice the one on the list noted ‘valedictorian.’ The point is, she went and looked that up, because she had no other way to attack my testimony.”

  “Yeah.” Neil Kelly spoke up. “That’d be her.”

  “So what’s your story?” Theresa asked him.

  “What? How did I get to be a cop or how did I draw the short straw to land this case? If the former, I’m a cop because my dad, my uncle, and my older brother were all cops, and I guess I lack the imagination to break away from the pack. If the latter, because my partner had the bad sense to pick up his phone when it rang.”

  Theresa laughed. “No, your Marie story. Anything more recent than her police-brutality complaint?”

  The spark left his eyes faster than a cigarette tossed into the lake fizzled out. “No.”

  Things we won’t admit, even to ourselves. Theresa let it go and instead watched Christine hover over the back of Marie Corrigan’s ravaged skull, cleaning the wounds, having a photograph taken, then a photograph with a scale. Then she sketched, shaved the hair away, cleaned again, had it photographed again. The straight black locks that Marie Corrigan liked to swirl around her shoulders as she mesmerized those in the jury box were tossed into a large red-lined box to be burned in a biohazard incinerator.

  Christine pressed the shaved areas with two firm fingers. This produced a creaking sound almost like crumpled cellophane. “We have at least four blows here that split the skin and cracked the bone underneath, and I think one or two that only bruised.”

  Christine’s assistant took a stainless-steel scalpel, installed a fresh blade, and, without ceremony, cut Marie Corrigan open from her shoulders to her belly button. A smell of blood and offal filled the air; it was like being in a room full of raw meat—not horrible, but certainly not pleasant.

  A second circuit of activity commenced in the other half of the room as a second team unloaded a car-accident victim with one mangled leg onto the next table.

  Neil Kelly paled.

  Theresa tried to distract him with a preliminary report of what she’d found on Marie Corrigan’s clothing. “Some fibers, gray wool, black spandex, pink synthetic, tan stuff that probably matches the rug, and the ubiquitous white cotton. The hair caught in the knot of the nylons is brown and has something on it.”

  “ ‘Something’?”

  “A light coating of some sort of hair product, like gel. There’s also some globules sticking to the black spandex. I’m guessing wax. Then there’s two cat hairs, one gray, one tan. Did she have a cat? Did you go to her apartment?”

  “We were there most of the night.” He sucked in only as many cautious, shallow breaths as necessary.

  Christine pulled out the saline bags that had so enhanced the victim’s figure and set them aside so a note could be made of the serial numbers.

  “She didn’t have so much as a goldfish. A lot of clothes, nothing in the fridge except vodka and diet pop, and a collection of DVDs.”

  “What kind of DVDs?”

  “Chick flicks, believe it or not. I mean … uh,” he stammered as both women glanced at him. “I mean, things like Sleepless in Seattle and Nights in Rodanthe.”

  Theresa said, “Don’t tell me our girl Marie was a closet romantic.”

  “Apparently so. They seem to be the only things in her closet. We didn’t find any bondage porn, no dominatrix outfits in the closet, no bullwhips next to her thong underwear. Not even a little black book.”

  “E-mail contacts?”

  “Tons of people, but no way to distinguish acquaintances from family from very special friends. No salacious e-mails, no threats. Work, meetings, and fashion consultations with her sister in Wichita. If she had secrets, she didn’t put them in writing.”

  “Cell-phone directory?”

  “No phone. We found her purse, which was in her car, which was in the Tower City garage. Locked, apparently unmolested, and badly overdue for an oil change. The care she put into her appearance did not extend to her vehicle. No home phone.”

  Theresa pondered this as she watched Christine remove the liver and slice it into sections, using what looked like a bread knife.

  “Lungs were good,” the doctor reported. “Liver might have given her problems in another twenty years.”

  “Vodka,” Neil said solemnly.

  And little else in her apartment. “So maybe her boyfriend came up with the bondage idea. She didn’t cooperate, he gets mad, hits her, then figures he might as well finish the job.”

  “You know what else we didn’t find?” Neil went on. “Work. Files, briefs, affidavits. What kind of lawyer doesn’t have thirty pounds of paper with them everywhere they go?”

  “She kept work and home separated?” Theresa suggested. “Lord knows I do. Not only because of Rachael, but because I’m not allowed to take anything out of the building. It’s all confidential.”

  “According to everyone up to and including her landlady, she only cared about two things: trying cases and screwing guys. And she doesn’t bring any work home with her? No, one of her colleagues got to her place before we did and cleaned it out. Her desk had only some scraps of paper, a lot of dust, and two speakers that should have been plugged into a laptop. They took it back to the illustrious firm of Goldman & Jackson, Esquires, and when Powell and I showed up there this morning, they wouldn’t admit it and wouldn’t let us in to her office. Attorney-client privilege.”

  “You must have expected that.”
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br />   “We did. But what do you do when someone’s offed? You round up the usual suspects, who they slept with, who owed them money, who should have gotten their promotion. That law firm was her life. How are we supposed to find those suspects when they’ve put her life in a file drawer and locked it?”

  Theresa sighed with him.

  “Powell is still there. They said they’d let him in after they removed all the open case files. I’m betting he’ll find two paper clips and a pad of blank Post-it notes.”

  Christine moved back to the body. “Nice teeth. Somebody used bleaching agents until she could signal the Ninth Fleet.” Then she left the diener to work on the larynx while she took the stomach and opened it up on the polyethylene cutting board. Empty, which did not come as a surprise.

  “She should have gone to Michael Symon’s place,” Theresa said. “She’d probably still be alive, or at least have had a great last meal. What? Christine, you’re hmm-ing.”

  “Lesions in her esophagus. She must have had some stomach troubles—acid reflux or an ulcer. Defending a bunch of scumbags for a living would give me an ulcer.”

  Theresa remembered what Sonia had said. “Could it be bulimia?”

  “Possibly. She’s a little underweight.”

  “That would fit with the white teeth. Don’t their teeth usually turn yellow from all the vomiting? She would have to bleach them.”

  “Possibly. Or she wanted to look like a toothpaste model in front of the jury. Who knows?” The pathologist removed the uterus, which always looked so much smaller than Theresa expected it to, a smooth, dense-looking little sac.

  Neil Kelly frowned at it as if he were not quite sure what it was but sure as hell wasn’t going to ask, and said, “Corrigan’s assistant told us of a few threats she’s received over the years. She got some juvenile off for killing a girl in his class, and the girl’s mother left her nasty messages for months. She defended the guy who shot the pizza-delivery guy and got a pile of hate mail on that one, mostly from the victim’s grandmother, even though the guy pled and got life without parole anyway. Then the black lobby filed an ethics complaint with the board when she got that redneck a reduced sentence after he beat that college football player into a coma. And supposedly the New Nazis put a price on her head for getting a homeboy off with time served after he held up their treasurer and helped himself to a year’s dues. Go ahead and snicker. I did.