by Megan Goldin
‘No wallet, I gather. No ID?’ I turned to Mike. It was a superfluous question. He would have called me straight away if he’d found any identification. He shook his head.
‘Have you done the dental scans?’
‘Sure have,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t much dental work done except braces as a kid. A couple of minor fillings. Wisdom teeth were removed when she was a teenager. Bring me the dental records of possible victims and we’ll be able to confirm identity.’
That was the problem with dental records. They were only useful when you had potential victims to identify. The reverse didn’t work so well.
‘Any identifying marks on the body?’
‘Nothing that stands out,’ Mike answered as he stood up and pushed back his stool. ‘There is a surprising amount of tissue left on the body given the estimated passage of time. But we’ve found nothing so far that can help ID her. No tattoos or anything like that. We’ll get to work on facial recognition later in the week.’
He unrolled the autopsy kit as he spoke and fixed his metal probes in a neat line on a table next to the body.
‘What about the clothes? Is there anything that might identify her?’
‘The labels were too faded to read,’ he said. ‘Dennis will examine them in the lab. The gold earrings are eighteen carat, by the way.’
‘Was she wearing a wedding ring?’ I asked.
‘No rings,’ he said without looking up. ‘The lab will sift through the soil this week. They have thirty-four bags of soil to go through,’ he said. ‘You still have search parties at the scene?’
I nodded. We had cadaver dogs out over the weekend and again this morning. The crime scene team was using metal detectors and ground probes to examine a wider area around the burial site in case there was additional evidence, or bodies.
‘Any idea when she died?’
‘I don’t have a definitive timeframe,’ Mike responded. ‘I doubt that it was less than five years ago. It’s unlikely to be more than ten years ago. So that gives you a five-year window to work with for now. I’ll get you something more concrete when we get the tests back.’
‘What about her age?’
‘Her age,’ he said, as if contemplating it for the first time. ‘Judging by her teeth, I’d say mid-thirties. Early forties, maybe. She’s white, or possibly Hispanic.’
‘Do you have any idea of the cause of death, Mike?’ I asked the question even though I knew his answer before he gave it.
‘There’s nothing obvious,’ he shrugged. ‘Once I’ve done the autopsy and I’ve gone through the scans thoroughly, I’ll give you a working theory.’ It was the standard answer.
‘Damn,’ I said under my breath.
‘Sorry Mel,’ Mike said without looking up. ‘With the body this badly decomposed, I’d be grappling in the dark if I told you anything else.’
Mike lifted the sheet. The victim was lying with her legs pulled up to her chest. Her right hand was over her face.
‘From the position of the body, it looks as if she was trying to protect herself when she was killed,’ Mike said.
Whoever she was, she knew she was about to die.
Chapter Five
Julie
It’s almost 6 p.m. when Matt’s car pulls into the driveway and the wrought-iron gates close automatically behind it. He’s an hour late. The effect of the gin and tonic I drank earlier for Dutch courage has dissipated. I half wish I could pour another, but then I’d be in no fit state for the evening ahead.
I watch through the curtains of the upstairs bedroom as Matt walks towards the front door carrying a leather briefcase. It bulges with what I guess are student papers to mark over the weekend. He looks preoccupied. I tie my satin robe loosely so that it gapes open and I knot my hair above my head the way Matt likes.
When we first dated, Matt would press his thumb along my cheekbones and tell me that he’d like to have my face cast in bronze so that my beauty would last forever. He said my face was the epitome of ancient Greek beauty, with perfect symmetry and features so delicate that he was afraid of crushing them. These days, when I look in the mirror, I see threads of age forming in the corners of my eyes; a portent of my eventual decay. Matt notices as well.
Despite all my efforts, Matt doesn’t so much as glance in my direction when I come down the stairs in my half-open robe. Instead, he checks a pile of mail on the hall table with an inordinate amount of fascination, given that he knows without looking that it’s mostly junk from car dealerships and the like. My cheeks burn with humiliation from acting like a dog in heat, from trying to seduce my own husband. And from failing miserably.
Ever since my fall, he treats me like fragile glass. He talks to me like I’m a child. He doesn’t ever touch me. We’re like characters in a stuffy fifties movie, sleeping on separate sides of the bed and platonically kissing the other on the temple before we go to sleep. I’ll lose him if things stay this way.
Matt eventually acknowledges my presence. He mutters some sort of greeting and then absent-mindedly leans over to give me a rote kiss on the forehead. He’s been doing that all week. He treats me like I’m an unwanted house guest whom he must grudgingly tolerate out of sheer good manners.
To hell with that. I move my face at the last second so that his kiss lands on my mouth. I deepen the kiss, putting my arms around his neck. I press myself against him until I know for certain that he wants me.
‘Where’s Alice?’ he asks in a husky voice.
‘Sleepover,’ I mumble. ‘We’re all alone.’
Pretty soon we’re sliding up the stairs in each other’s arms. I untuck his shirt. He runs his fingers up my thigh and wraps them around the elastic of my lace panties. By the time we reach the landing my panties are hanging off the balustrade. Matt is unzipped and his shirt is lying somewhere in the hall.
Later, when we’re showering together, Matt touches the bruise on my shoulder.
‘Does it still hurt?’ he asks.
‘A bit.’ I try to pretend I don’t care, but tears well in my eyes.
‘What’s bothering you, Julie?’ he asks as he helps me out of the shower, wrapping me in a soft towel. He lifts my wet hair off my shoulder and kisses the back of my neck. ‘You’ve been down lately.’
‘I can’t stop thinking about the man in the car. I should have done something to help him.’ I wipe away an errant tear.
‘Julie,’ sighs Matt. His expression is grave. ‘How much do you really remember about that day?’
I shrug. ‘Bits and pieces. Not a whole lot.’
‘I took you to the hospital. You were diagnosed as having a grade three concussion. The symptoms of which include confusion and memory loss.’ He talks to me slowly so that each word sinks in. ‘I know it’s hard to process, but you’re imagining the incident with the car. It didn’t happen. You had a fall when you went running. You hit your head. When you came to, you ran the rest of the way to the university. It wasn’t the smartest thing to do with a concussion, but you’d left your phone at home and you panicked.’
‘Matt, I’m not making it up,’ I snap. ‘The driver was covered in blood. It got on my clothes. I remember that clearly. Before he died, he said something that terrified me. Something about me being in danger.’
‘If that’s the case,’ says Matt, his eyes steadily on mine, ‘then why is there no record of a car accident?’
‘No record?’ My voice cracks in surprise.
‘Nothing,’ Matt says definitively. His blue eyes are serious as he meets mine. ‘I spoke to the police right after we arrived home that day. They sent a patrol car to check and called me back later to say there was no car crash anywhere in that vicinity.’
‘How can that be?’ I say almost to myself. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s a false memory,’ Matt explains patiently, as if I am one of his students. ‘You’ve superimposed the trauma of your fall at Kellers Way with memories from Roxy’s death,’ says Matt. ‘It wasn’t a dead man in a car, it
’s Roxy that you’re remembering. You were covered in her blood after she was hit by that car. You held her in your arms until she died. You’re using this phantom driver as a substitute for Roxy. It’s a coping mechanism.’
My heart broke when our labrador Roxy was killed a week before Christmas. Roxy lunged ahead on her leash and was knocked over by a car that came out of nowhere. The driver didn’t even stop to help. Roxy died in my arms. Things were rough afterwards. I was put on a higher dosage of meds. To tell you the truth, I don’t really remember much about the weeks that followed.
‘It seemed so real, Matt. The car, the smoke. I can almost smell the blood. It got all over me. Don’t you remember, when I came to your office my clothes were covered in blood?’
‘Julie, there was no driver. There was no car accident. There was no blood,’ Matt says. ‘Your running clothes are still in the laundry. Take a look at them yourself.’ Matt goes downstairs and comes back with my running gear. I put the clothes to my face. They smell of sweat. They’re grimy. But when I look closely, there’s not a single bloodstain. Not even a drop.
‘The sooner you accept this car accident didn’t happen, the sooner you can move on. Darling,’ he says, lifting up my chin, ‘I don’t want it to drag you back to the way you were after Roxy died. You need to accept what really happened. You slipped and fell while you were jogging. That’s it. Stop eating yourself up!’
Everything about the day of my fall is hazy and surreal. Trauma plays tricks on memory. Matt has authored psychology journal articles on this exact topic. He pulls me against his chest and runs his hand reassuringly down my back. His gentleness overwhelms me. It makes me think for a fraction of a second that maybe everything will work out.
‘You should have reminded me this morning that Alice is out tonight,’ he teases me. ‘I would have come home earlier.’
‘I asked Lucy’s mom if Alice could stay over for the night because we have that dinner with Stephen and Chelsea,’ I remind him.
‘Let’s make an excuse,’ he says, kissing the nape of my neck. ‘We can stay in bed and order takeout. I promise we’ll have more fun than talking shop with Stephen.’
‘You know we can’t.’ I reluctantly wriggle out of his grip. ‘Anyway, it’s too late to cancel.’ I look at my watch. ‘Oh, my God, Matt, we have to be there in forty minutes. The Marshals are punctuality freaks.’
I stand in my lace panties and bra, applying lipstick in the bathroom mirror, while Matt puts on a freshly laundered shirt. I see his expression in the reflection. There’s no lust or tenderness as he runs his eyes over my half-naked body. There’s something clinical about the way that he watches me that leaves me feeling unsettled.
Chapter Six
Mel
Time covers up a multitude of sins. None more so than murder. I left the morgue before the whirring screech of electric saw on bone, well aware that chances were slim I’d ever catch the Kellers Way killer.
The likelihood of finding a killer erodes over time, just like the body of the victim. Decomp cases defy the cardinal rule of homicide investigation: if you know your victim then nine times out of ten you will find your killer. I knew nothing about my victim. The odds were against me.
I walked back to headquarters past squat office buildings of pristine mirrored glass to put whatever scant information I had through the missing persons database. I needed to give a name to that woman lying on the slab in the morgue. Once I had her name, the rest would follow.
The cobbled pedestrian mall of converted tobacco warehouses was filled with the lunchtime office crowd eating at outdoor cafes in the early-afternoon sun. As I walked past, I wondered what little secrets they were hiding as they ate their burgers and fries. What vices, passions and lies were hidden beneath the surface of their seemingly mundane lives. Most people’s secrets die with them. In a homicide investigation, no secret is safe. Every transgression is pored over and documented in detectives’ notebooks, and case files, and court transcripts.
By the time I’m done with a case, I know more about the victim than his or her closest relative; a fondness for fetish porn, a penchant for stealing hotel bathrobes, an addiction to Vicodin or slot machines, a predilection for cross-dressing or callgirls. I know what the victim last ate, what the victim last wore and what the victim last searched for on the internet. I am privy to the most intimate details of the victim’s sex life, no matter how mundane, or kinky. What, when and, most importantly, with whom. I wondered what secrets the girl from Kellers Way was hiding before she died.
The squad room was empty when I arrived, holding my lunch in a brown paper carrier bag and sipping from an oversized disposable coffee cup. I turned on my computer and drank the rest of my coffee while I contemplated how I should run the search.
On any given day there are 80 000 to 90 000 people listed as missing in the United States. Of these, 50 000 are adults. Roughly half that number are female adults. I had a potential pool of 25 000 victims to sort through on the national database of missing people.
The pitfall with running these searches is that if you narrow a search too much, you risk excluding the victim. If you keep it too broad, you get a list so long and unwieldy that it’s of little value.
I opted to start broad and then narrow the search in subsequent rounds. I inputted the gender – female – and a broad age range of thirty to forty-five. Then I narrowed the search by focusing on those who went missing between five to ten years ago. It gave me 71 376 profiles. Of these, most would be women who’d disappeared of their own accord. Women who didn’t want to be found for whatever reason; escaping an abusive partner, debt collectors, mental illness. There were plenty of reasons why a person might disappear and change their identity. Less than five per cent would be missing because they were dead.
I unwrapped my cheese and pickle sandwich and took a bite. I had to find a way to narrow the results further. I decided to look for women missing within a six-state area. Now I had 4131 potential victims. That would take me a week to go through. I ran another search with descriptions of the red jacket and other clothes and jewellery found on the body. Zero hits.
I pulled the desk phone over and called the forensics lab. Dennis answered on the second ring.
‘It’s Mel. I’m working through the NamUs database. Do you have a shoe size for the victim? Also, any idea of the victim’s height?’
‘Let me check,’ Dennis said, putting the phone down with a clatter. I took another bite of the sandwich while I waited with the phone pressed to my ear.
‘I just measured the victim’s boot. I’d say her foot size is a nine, nine-and-a-half,’ said Dennis a couple of minutes later. ‘With a foot that large it’s unlikely the victim would be shorter than five foot five.’
‘Do you have anything else that might help with a missing-persons data search?’
‘Maybe.’ I heard the rustle of papers as Dennis flicked through the file. ‘The pendant the victim was wearing,’ he said finally.
‘What about it?’
‘We believe it’s morganite.’
‘That’s a semiprecious stone. It’s quite common, isn’t it?’
‘This one isn’t at all common. It’s a bright pink variety only found in Madagascar,’ Dennis responded. ‘It’s called Zambezia morganite. They’re rare and expensive. They’re sometimes called pink emeralds.’
‘Thanks,’ I said to nobody but myself. Dennis had already hung up.
Once I entered the minimum height and shoe size that Dennis had given me, the list of potential victims immediately dropped to 291. By the time I logged out of the database, I had a thick pile of missing-persons profiles to go through. Bedtime reading. My biggest concern was that the database was only as good as the information that was inputted into it. That’s why I don’t like relying only on computers.
I looked up to see Casey walking into the squad room for his afternoon shift. He wore the same deadbeat clothes as his drug-dealing perps: torn jeans and a long-sleeve tee
under a plaid shirt. Casey worked homicide on and off for years with my partner Will before I moved here. Then he was transferred to the drug squad.
‘Hey, Casey. You’re just the guy I was looking for.’
‘What’s up, Mel? Are you missing Will already?’ he teased. Will had gone on his honeymoon and left me to run the homicide department alone during the busiest time of the year.
‘Will’s the only one around here who knows how to make a decent coffee,’ I joked. ‘Actually, I have a new case from before my time here. Do you recall a missing person, a woman in her thirties who disappeared wearing a red jacket and expensive jewellery? Around five or ten years ago.’
‘Nothing jumps out,’ he said, rubbing his wispy moustache, which gave him the emaciated air of an addict. ‘That could mean nothing. Ever since we had the baby, I’m getting three hours sleep a night. I can barely remember my own name most days. If anyone would know then it would be Lenny. You should speak to him.’
‘Lenny? I thought he moved to Florida.’
‘He did. Believe it or not he likes it better here. Moved back just after Christmas.’
Lenny Miller handled all missing-persons investigations in this part of the state up until he retired four years ago, not long before I was hired. Lenny was better than any database. Just about every missing-persons case went through Lenny. He was old-school. He knew them each by heart.
‘Lenny’s a golf nut,’ Casey said, jotting down a phone number on the back of an envelope. ‘If you can’t get hold of him by cellphone then I’m betting he’ll be at Twin Lakes.’
There was no answer on Lenny’s phone when I called. I left a message on his voicemail. Then I telephoned the Twin Lakes golf club directly.
‘Yeah, Lenny’s here. He’s on the fourteenth hole, so you’d better get here quick. He’s having a lucky day,’ drawled a guy called Dave, before the phone went dead.
