“There’s a lot of black ink here,” I say. “What are they trying to hide?”
“It’s not unusual to keep things from the press. We do it all the time.”
The tone of her voice tells me there’s more to the story than that.
“What are you not telling me?” I turn a few of the autopsy report pages toward me, scanning the text around the marked-out passages. “Help me out here.”
“Well,” she says, lifting her purse onto the table. “There was one thing that got my attention and that’s why I thought we should meet.” She unzips the purse, reaching in to produce a folded sheet. She opens it facedown on the table, smoothing the crease with her fingertip. “It’s hard to tell from the report what they’re hiding. But when I saw this photo, I think I figured it out.”
She flips the page and slides it across to me.
It’s another crime-scene photo, but unlike the others in which Chad Macneil’s nude body is photographed from the rear, with the head and arms disappearing over the rim of the tub, this one was taken from above so that the entire corpse is visible. The cloudy bathwater, which obscures the body in other shots, has been drained for this photograph. Only the back of his head is visible, the hair damp. The outstretched arms, bent at each elbow, intersect at the wrists, which would place his hands about six to eight inches above his head.
The hands are not visible, however. Around each, someone has drawn a square in black marker and then heavily shaded in the boxes.
“They’re hiding the hands,” I say.
“And why would they do that? Maybe something was done to them, the same thing that was done to Brandon Ford—or whatever the John Doe’s name really is. They could have been skinned.”
“De-gloved.”
“Which would suggest that the two homicides have something in common. Like maybe they were done by the same person.”
If she’s right, if the blacked-out hands in the photo were mutilated, the skin sliced away from the flesh, then the murder in Buenos Aires and the body found in Houston the next year could be related. The work of the same killer. Dr. Bridger needs to see this. He can tell us if what we’re guessing makes sense.
“Theresa . . .” My throat tightens. “People say Reg Keller killed Macneil.”
She looks at me, one eyebrow arched, saying nothing.
She doesn’t have to.
CHAPTER 22
“And what exactly do you expect me to do with this?” Bridger asks. He peers at me across the top of his reading glasses, the faxed pages in his hand, with an expression of amused incredulity. “For one thing, I can barely read them. And for another, so much of it has been crossed out.”
“We were kind of hoping . . .” Cavallo lets her voice trail off suggestively.
“Hoping what? That I could guess what’s underneath the black ink?” He tosses the stack onto the desk in front of him, crosses his leg, and smiles. “Your faith in me is touching, but a little misplaced. As a great man once said, ‘I’m a doctor, Jim, not a miracle worker.’”
“Could have fooled me,” I say.
“Flattery? You must be desperate.”
I know him well enough to realize that this resistance is a mask. The photo of Chad Macneil with his hands blacked out intrigued the medical examiner as much as it did me. His eyes widened the moment he saw it, and he didn’t need me or Cavallo to suggest a motive for the redaction. The same thought popped into his head as mine. But Bridger’s opinions are never offered without qualification, especially not when I’m the one asking. I come to him for too many favors, as he’s always reminding me. When he does speculate, though, you can usually take what he says to the bank.
The reason I first introduced my sister-in-law Ann to Dr. Alan Bridger was because, whenever I tried to explain to her how airtight the forensic evidence was against the convicted felon whose innocence she’d taken up as a cause célèbre, she naturally assumed that as a policeman I simply couldn’t admit the truth. When Bridger speaks, however, he has a way of channeling the voice of objective science circa 1950. Everything he says sounds right, which is why he’s a favored witness for the prosecution, and why from the start he drove Ann crazy, leading to many passionate and protracted disagreements.
I suppose the good doctor was accustomed to people deferring to his judgment. He enjoyed their little debates so much that he started coming over regularly for dinner. Eventually I suggested that the two of them could argue without Charlotte and me having to host. Before long, they were dating, and then Bridger surprised everyone (Ann included) by proposing marriage. The funny thing is, once they tied the knot, the debates pretty much ended. They can be very serene in each other’s presence.
“I figured that if you looked at the autopsy report, maybe the context alone would suggest something to you. And maybe there are other similarities between the two cases, things they didn’t suppress.”
He takes up the pages again, mouthing the Spanish words to himself. Cavallo glances my way, risking a faint smile. The doctor is hooked.
Bridger helped me greatly when I first joined the homicide squad, explaining details of forensic medicine in a way that didn’t put me to sleep, and teaching me that, despite his manner, the science could be far from objective. So much depends on interpretation, and on the context investigators provide. And we rely so much on the science, myself included, that common sense sometimes takes a backseat. The answers, more often than not, aren’t waiting in the laboratory. They’re out on the street. You have to ask the right people the right questions, simple as that.
When you need an expert, though, there’s no substitute for a thorough, analytical mind like Bridger’s. If something’s there, he’ll find it.
“Did you bring a copy of the other autopsy report?” he asks. “No, of course not. Fortunately I have it handy. I had a visit from your FBI colleague yesterday, asking for a similar kind of miracle.”
“Bea was here?”
“She brought some interesting files along, several men the approximate age of the victim. Despite the identification, she seemed to think he might be one of these others.”
“She knew Brandon Ford,” I say. “Intimately. When we came here before, she said that wasn’t him.”
“You might have shared that information.”
“Were you able to find a likely candidate?” I ask, ignoring his remark.
“I did recognize one of the men. It was the one you shot. Interesting that she has a file on him and no one’s made that connection public.”
“Yes, interesting. Maybe there are some questions about the reliability of those files.”
Cavallo scoots her chair closer to the desk, distancing herself from me. “If you’re feeling left out, Alan, you’re not alone. Roland operates on a need-to-know basis, and he seems to think the people who put their careers on the line for him don’t need to know. Everything I get, I have to pull out of him. It gets old after a while.”
“I can relate,” he says.
“Considering how explosive some of this stuff is, maybe I’m doing you both a favor by not burdening you with too much. Have you considered that?” They clearly haven’t, and I know it’s a lame excuse to make. I concede as much with a smiling shrug. “But hey, the important thing is, we may have linked these two cases, assuming you can find something concrete to go on.”
Bridger goes over the John Doe autopsy report quickly, refreshing his memory, then returns to the Argentine report, squinting through his glasses and mouthing more words. Tense with anticipation, I have to force myself to breathe. He goes back and forth again, comparing lines, examining photographs, keeping his thoughts entirely to himself.
“The suspense is killing me,” I say.
He doesn’t look up. After another minute, he pulls a photo from the John Doe report and compares it to the one with Macneil’s hands blacked out. His lips part.
“Yes?” I ask.
“Come with me.”
He leads us back to the cold storage, w
here I’d had him take Bea the morning she looked at the body. He hands me the photos before donning a pair of gloves. After consulting the register, he opens the right refrigerator unit and cantilevers the sheeted corpse out for examination. He glances at Cavallo before pulling the sheet back, forgetting that she’s seen worse, much worse.
Glimpsing the corpse again, I get a flash of memory, a snapshot of the concrete basketball court where we first encountered him, Lorenz and me. The wounds had seemed fresher then, more shocking to behold. The stylized pose, the skinned finger extended.
“Are you okay?” Bridger asks.
“I’m fine.”
“This is what we’re looking at,” he continues, lifting the left arm. Using his pinkie, he draws a semicircle in the air above the wrist, indicating the discolored flesh where some kind of restraint was used to secure the hand during torture. “Tied to an armchair, most likely. See underneath? The marks are on the top of the wrist, but not the bottom, like it was resting on something. Now take a look at the Argentine photo. See that mark there, just below the part that’s blacked out? What does it look like?”
“The same,” Cavallo says.
“You’d want to make a real comparison, obviously, or at least work from a better photograph, but what that suggests—and this is only speculation—but it suggests Macneil may have had similar injuries to his hands.”
I look at the picture again, then the body. Once the ligature mark in the photo has been pointed out, it’s impossible not to see it, not to interpret it as a restraint. Before, it was invisible, bordering so close to the black box. Cavallo double-checks the comparison, too.
“It’s really there,” she says.
“I think so.”
Bridger puts the sheet back in place, rolls the body back into storage. Halfway in, he stops and rolls it back out. “There’s something else,” he says. “Bad news, really. But since this is your case now, Theresa, I thought you should know. Detective Lorenz, before his death, had asked about the marks on the back of the victim’s leg—”
“What marks?” I ask.
He cocks his eyebrow in surprise. “That’s right. You weren’t there. This was at the scene, after you went off on your wild-goose chase into the woods. But it’s in my full report—you have read the full report, haven’t you?”
“I don’t remember anything about marks on the leg.”
He exchanges a look with Cavallo, then extends the body tray all the way out so he can access the legs. “There are three dark streaks running parallel, here on the back of the calf. Like he swiped against something while being moved. Looked like oil to me, and I was right. It’s a 5W-30 motor oil. Nothing to help you there. If the body was transported in a car trunk, maybe a van, there are a thousand ways to get marks like that. Lorenz hoped it might be something more exotic, to help pinpoint a murder scene.”
I hunch down for a closer look at the marks. Three faint swipes across the back of the calf, maybe two inches in length.
“Is there anything else you’re holding back?” I ask.
Cavallo laughs. “Holding back is your specialty, March.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
While Bridger returns the body to the refrigerator, Cavallo and I go into the corridor. She’s biting down on her bottom lip, waiting for me to acknowledge the fact that she’s done good work. I give her shoulder a pat. “Nice job. Do you think there’s any chance of getting the full autopsy report through official channels? That’s what we need to make this stick.”
“It might be possible,” she says.
“Ask Bascombe. He’s good at that kind of thing.”
“If I did that, I’d have to tell him what I’m working on.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh: “He already knows.”
———
When I left Hilda and her files in Bea’s hands for safekeeping, it was an acknowledgment that her resources were greater than mine. But I did not walk away empty-handed. Hilda gave me a detailed outline of the process Brandon Ford used for making contact with Inferno to collect his raw intelligence. She’d never made the journey herself, of course. But Ford had apparently relied on her experience when it came to making operational dispositions. I trusted that her information would prove accurate.
Setting up a watch on the route on the off chance that Ford might make a trip to Matamoros was beyond my capabilities, though. So was hunting down the men in Hilda’s files. With Bea’s team of experienced drug intelligence officers, she could do more on both counts. I had to take it on faith that if anything turned up, she would keep me in the loop.
Bridger’s tip leaves me thinking that faith was misplaced.
I try to call Bea and find out what’s going on, but I keep getting her voicemail. The last time I paid a surprise visit, she wasn’t expecting me, which made following her from the field office parking garage to her suburban cowboy bar a piece of cake. I’m not in the mood to take so much trouble now. Besides, I like to shake things up.
After parting with Cavallo, I drive downtown to Bea’s office, showing my badge at security and explaining who I’m there to see. Nobody bats an eyelid. Phone calls are made and a stout woman in pinstripes with an electronic earpiece assures me that Special Agent Kuykendahl will arrive momentarily. Instead, the door to her basement lair opens to reveal a broad-chested All-American with a blond crew cut and perfect teeth. He beckons me through, leading me down the same path I took the first time, explaining in the corridor that Bea is his boss.
It’s a strange thing to realize that someone as young as Bea, someone who looks so adolescent, can command such men. The All-American speaks of her in hushed tones and with great respect. There’s a note of pride at being a member of her team, reminding me of the esprit de corps that Wanda Mosser once inspired in her tough-guy subordinates.
“Did you know Brandon Ford?” I ask him.
He swipes us through the security door. “I’ll let you talk to her about that.”
Last time, the bullpen was empty. Now half a dozen officers are gathered around the conference table with Bea at the head. Behind her, a large portable whiteboard is covered in photographs and handwritten notes. When she sees me, Bea flips the board over to conceal their work, but not before I see the faces of the six paramilitaries whose new identities Hilda kept on file: the curly-haired Brandon Ford, James Lodge of the skull-shaped ring, and four others. One of the four is circled in red, a question mark next to his face.
It’s a reasonable assumption that one of these men could be John Doe. Six to begin with, then subtract Lodge, who murdered my partner and was killed in turn. That would leave five, but the night they descended on me in the Hummer, there were only four, including Ford himself. So where was the missing man? Could he have been dead all along, cooling off in Bridger’s refrigerator with some oil stains on his leg?
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” I say.
“Everybody, I’m sure Detective March needs no introduction. As you know, he is assisting us on this one, though unofficially thanks to a certain altercation with one of our targets.”
With the exception of one agent who appears to be in his forties, Bea’s team looks as young as they do eager. Like her, they don’t fit my idea of the G-man mold. Maybe that’s because they work in a specialized field, or maybe she chooses underlings who resemble herself. The outlier is the older guy, who has enough starch in his shirt and steam on his creases to make J. Edgar Hoover proud. He stands to shake my hand. When Bea leads me back to her office, he follows behind us, pausing at the door.
“You need anything, boss?” he asks.
“March might want some coffee. No? Then I guess we’re fine.”
He looks me over before pulling the door shut.
“He seems like a very accommodating guy,” I say.
She slumps in her chair like a teenager, crossing one leg over the other, stretching her hands behind her neck. “If it was up to him, he’d be sitting at my desk.”
“So that’s how
it is.” I take a seat.
“That’s how it is. Now, what are you doing here? We agreed that I’d call if I needed anything from you.”
“I remember our agreement a little differently, but never mind. I assume Hilda is tucked away somewhere? The thing is, Dr. Bridger says you paid him a visit. Now he’s wondering what’s going on. You should have included me in that conversation.”
“He told you why I was there?”
I nod. “I assume, looking at your board out there, that the visit was successful.”
She sits up straight, tucks her legs under the desk. “You saw that, huh? It doesn’t matter. I’m not trying to keep you in the dark. In fact, I’m pretty proud of the way my people have come through on this. I doubt Houston’s finest could have done any better.”
“How so?”
“Dr. Bridger was not such a big help,” she says. “He couldn’t match any of the files up to the body on his slab, said there wasn’t enough to go on. But he did throw out an idea. The John Doe died of cardiac arrest, but apparently with the kind of torture he went through, that’s not a given. You can endure something like that without your heart giving out, I guess. This guy may have had a heart condition—”
“Is there anything in the files about that?”
“They’re not that thorough. But we did some checking and we found out that one of these guys, Robert Johnson, was admitted to the hospital two years ago, complaining about an irregular heartbeat.”
Johnson, Ford, Lodge. Such generic names. Designed so their owners could pass unnoticed through life.
“They put him on a monitor and diagnosed it as stress,” she says. “That’s good enough for me. According to his stats, he’s about the same height as Brandon and they’re in the same age range. I think Johnson is who you found on the basketball court.”
“Then why did the database say it was Brandon Ford?”
“Here’s my theory: Brandon saw an opportunity and he took it. None of his paramilitaries were on my radar screen, but he was. If that body was identified as him, he could walk away and none of us would even know to look for him, because we’d think it was him we buried. But after his ‘death,’ he must have gone back to his office for some reason—maybe to pick up the money we gave him. He figured out you were there—maybe you tripped some kind of signal without realizing—and he knew he had to get everything out of there or you’d realize it couldn’t be him dead on the slab.”
Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3) Page 22
