by Lis Wiehl
As for herself, she knew that nothing could help her. Religion, faith, prayers—they were all useless. You didn’t need them to be a good person. You didn’t need them to keep you doing what was right. And they wouldn’t help you when you were desperate, when you needed a miracle. Ten years ago, she had screamed in desperation for God to help her, and what had He done? Nothing.
Now she was no longer blinded by faith, unlike her two friends. Nic could tell that Allison, with her steady churchgoing, thought of herself as more grounded than Cassidy, who flitted from belief to belief. But in Nic’s eyes the two women were basically the same. Imagining God—or the universe or karma or whatever—could offer them solace and comfort. Imagining they could influence events with their thoughts and prayers, when nothing could help them and they were powerless. You were on your own in this world, and when your life ended, that was it.
Tony’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “I’m not seeing any injuries other than the postmortem animal feeding.” He lifted the shoulder farthest away from the viewing room, rolled Katie on her side, and inspected her back. “Huh,” he said, his voice so low it seemed pitched for his own ears. “That’s interesting.”
Leif bent down and began to snap pictures.
Owen and Nic leaned closer to the window. “What?” Owen asked.
Tony looked up. “You know about lividity, right?”
Nicole said, “It’s when blood settles into the lower part of the body after death and changes the color of the skin.”
“Right. Lividity is like if I put a wet sponge down on the counter. After a few hours, the top would be dry and the bottom would be wet, because the water would drain to the bottom. Same with the blood in a dead body. Once the heart stops pumping, the blood settles and stains the skin. It won’t show anyplace the capillaries are compressed, like areas that are pressed against the ground.”
Nic still didn’t see what he was getting at. “Yeah?”
Katie’s skin was stained reddish-purple on the edges of her chest, under the tops of her shoulders, and on the sides of her abdomen—just the way it should be, since she had been found facedown.
“Katie has lividity in two different places.”
“What do you mean?” Owen asked.
Then Nic guessed the answer. “Is it because she was hanging, and eventually the branch broke, and she fell?”
“No. If that was the case, you would expect to see staining on the bottom of her feet.”
They all looked at her waxy yellow-white soles.
“But look at this.” He tugged at Katie’s shoulder, shifted the body until Nic and Owen could see what he already had—the fainter purple-red stains between the girl’s shoulder blades and on the small of her back.
“First she was on her back long enough for lividity to set in, and then later she was put in the position you found her in. But not all the blood migrated from her back to her front.”
“That fits with what we found at the scene,” Leif said. “We found a broken branch that might have been used for hanging, but it was thirty feet away from the body.”
“Can you tell when she was moved?” Nic asked. “How soon after death?”
Tony said, “My best guess is three or four hours. For lividity, you’ve got about a twelve-hour window. After that, you can move the body all you want, but it won’t cause any more staining. The question is—why did someone move her after she’d already been dead for a while?”
Suddenly Nic knew. “Her body was half under a bush. Someone killed her, panicked, and left, then returned to the scene and tried to hide her. That would explain the mud on the front of her coat.”
“Or it could be that she died and someone found her, maybe tried to help her, and then realized she was dead and dropped her,” Leif said. “This still doesn’t rule out suicide.”
As Tony and the assistant opened up the body, and Leif documented every step, Nic tried to watch them as she might a documentary. Keep her distance. Not think that a few weeks ago, this had been a girl with dreams and hopes and fears. On the pretense of shifting position, she shot a side-ways glance at Owen and was heartened to see that he looked like he was having a hard time too.
Tony looked up at them. “Basically, what we’re looking for is trauma or other indications of the cause of death. For example, heart disease might turn out to be the real cause of death for a middle-aged man.”
“Not in Katie’s case, though,” Nic said.
“No. Not likely in this girl’s case,” Tony agreed. “I’ll run some more tests, of course, but so far everything looks normal. Now I’m going to expose the neck structures to see if I can figure out what happened.”
He spent a long time examining what he found. Then he raised his eyebrows and murmured, “That’s it.”
Leif started snapping photos.
Nic had no idea what they were looking at, but she leaned forward anyway.
“We’re lucky she was facedown, or her neck might have gotten chewed up, too, and I would never have seen this.”
“Seen what?” Owen asked.
“This is the cause of death right there. She has a fractured larynx—and that obstructed the trachea. She died from asphyxia, since the air couldn’t reach her lungs.”
“But could that come from hanging?” Owen asked.
“It’s very unlikely. This was caused by a blow to the throat.” Against his own throat, Tony made a chopping motion with the side of his gloved hand.
Nic said, “How long would it have taken for her to die?”
“Not long. She would have tried to scream, even just tried to breathe, but since no air could pass through, it wouldn’t be possible. Every time she tried to breathe, her lungs would have collapsed. She might have been able to fight back for a minute or two, but as the oxygen content of the blood dropped, she would have become more frantic and confused. In twenty to thirty seconds—two minutes on the outside—she would become so weak that she collapsed. Death would come pretty quickly afterward.”
That didn’t sound quick at all to Nic. “Could Katie have survived if she had been brought to a hospital right away?”
“She wouldn’t have made it to a hospital. If someone had performed a tracheotomy on her right there in the park, maybe she could have made it. But that’s very much a maybe.”
“Okay,” Nic said. “She died from a blow to the throat. Then that means there’s only one reason she has a leash around her neck.”
“Right,” Tony said. “Someone wanted this to look like a suicide. But Katie Converse was definitely murdered.”
MYSPACE.COM/THEDCPAGE
Trouble
November 24
I think I have a problem. If I’m right, it’s a big, big problem. All I want to do is sleep & not deal with it.
I can’t deal with it.
I mean, what would I do?
GOOD SAMARITAN MEDICAL CENTER
January 5
What kind of shape is the girl in?” Allison asked Dr. Sally Murdoch. They were in her cramped office, tucked into a corner of Good Samaritan Medical Center.
Dr. Murdoch’s dishwater blonde hair had once been caught back in a bun. Most of it had escaped to curl in tendrils that framed her gray-blue eyes.
“I’d have to say excellent. No evidence of sexual molestation, no scars, no bruises, healthy weight, very fit.” As Dr. Murdoch spoke, she tucked pieces of hair behind her ears. “The girl’s even fairly clean, especially when you consider she says they bathe in water from a creek. A creek! That can’t be any fun this time of year. Heck, even her teeth are in great shape. She’s never had a cavity. Starshine says she’s ten, and I see no reason to doubt it.” The doctor flashed Allison a tired smile. “Honestly, the kid’s in better shape than a lot of the ones I see in my private practice.”
“Did she say anything to you about the dead girl? We found her body not far from where Starshine was living.”
“No. And I didn’t ask. I figure that’s your purview. I did talk to her ab
out her father.” Dr. Murdoch’s hands stilled. “The two are obviously each other’s whole world.” She held Allison’s gaze. “If you separate them, it would break this girl’s heart, her spirit.”
Allison sighed. “I wish I could promise you that we could keep them together, but that’s going to depend on what the father tells us. And whether we think he’s telling the truth. Right now, he’s definitely a suspect.” She looked at her watch. “This is really bad timing, but I have a doctor’s appointment myself in twenty minutes. Could you ask Children’s Services to bring Starshine over to my office in two hours?”
“Sure.” Dr. Murdoch looked at Allison more closely. “Is everything okay?”
The two women had known each other for years. “Better than okay,” Allison said, and left it at that.
Allison lay back on the crinkly white paper that covered the exam table. Marshall, who was standing at the head of the table, smiled at her and squeezed her hand. It was still hard for Allison to believe this was happening after all these years. The one good thing about the Katie Converse case was that it kept her from obsessively ruminating about the baby. At least some of the time.
Dr. Dubruski said, “Now if we don’t hear anything today, don’t worry.” She was a tall, thin woman with close-cropped blonde hair. “This is about as early as we can expect to hear fetal heart tones.”
She squirted jelly on Allison’s belly, then picked up the black Doppler wand. Pressing lightly, Dr. Dubruski began to run it back and forth in the area just under Allison’s navel.
There was silence for a few seconds, long enough for Allison to begin to get anxious.
Then they could all hear the sounds magnified through the microphone. Clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp, so fast the thumps were barely separated. Every few seconds there was a burst of static.
A delighted laugh spurted from Allison’s lips. Marshall was squeezing her hand so hard that it hurt, but her mind was on what she was hearing.
The doctor looked down at the readout. “One hundred fifty-eight beats per minute.”
“That’s so fast!” Marshall said, sounding a little panicked.
Dr. Dubruski smiled. “Right in the middle of the normal range.”
“What’s that staticky sound?” Allison asked. She realized she was grinning.
“Fetal movement.”
Marshall’s fingers tentatively grazed the edge of Allison’s belly. “Alive and kicking?”
Dr. Dubruski nodded. “Alive and kicking.” She lifted the monitor. “You probably won’t be able to feel it yourself for another six weeks or so.”
Allison looked down at her still flat stomach. There was something inside of her that was moving around on its own, that had its own heart-beat. It was real. The baby was really real. Tears pricked her eyes.
As she pulled on her stockings after the visit, Allison said to Marshall, “It’s hard to believe there’s a baby inside me. I mean, I know this happens to women every minute of every day, but it feels like such a miracle.”
“I can hardly believe it’s happening myself.” He leaned forward in his chair, put his hands on her hips, and gently kissed her belly.
For the rest of the day, Allison kept a smile tucked away inside. It wasn’t appropriate to smile, not now, not when they were trying to figure out how a girl had died.
In the midst of death, we are in life.
In the lobby of her office, Allison introduced herself to Starshine and to Jennifer Tate, the Children’s Services worker, a plump woman in her midtwenties. Both of them shook her hand, although the girl didn’t meet Allison’s eyes. While Allison would do the questioning, Jennifer would be on hand to serve as a second witness to Starshine’s words.
Thin as a stick, the girl wore her blonde hair in two crooked braids. She was dressed in brown polyester pants, blue sneakers, and a gray sweatshirt layered over a green turtleneck. Nothing brand name, nothing new—but no holes, either. And no obvious dirt.
Allison rejected the idea of taking the girl into one of the conference rooms. Her office was homier, less impersonal and imposing. She led them down the hall, and the three of them sat down around the small round table where Allison sometimes held meetings. She saw Starshine taking in Marshall’s framed black-and-white photos and the plaque on the wall that a group of FBI agents had given her at the conclusion of a particularly difficult case. It read CAN’T SEW, CAN’T COOK, SURE CAN LITIGATE.
Allison decided to approach this obliquely. “How long have you and your dad been living in the woods, Starshine? Do you know?”
Starshine spoke to her hands, folded neatly on the table. “Since my mother took sick. I couldn’t live with her anymore, so my father took me.”
The girl had a formal, old-fashioned way of speaking. What was it like, Allison wondered, living in the woods like some pioneer child, with no running water, no heat, no electric lights? Had she ever played Nintendo, gone to a movie, listened to an iPod? Did she care that her life was so different from that of other kids?
“How long ago was that? When you started living with your father?”
“I’m not certain. Perhaps three years ago.”
“And what’s it like living outside?” Allison asked. “Do you like it?”
Starshine looked up for just a moment. A flash of blue eyes as bright as a summer sky. “But we don’t live outside. We have a house.”
Nicole had described it as a jury-rigged lean-to, but Allison decided not to argue. “Don’t you get cold?”
A shrug. “You wear layers. And no cotton. Father says cotton kills. Once it gets wet, you never get warm.”
“Where do you go to school, Starshine?”
“My father teaches me. And we get books from Goodwill that I read.”
“Could you read something for me?”
“Yes.”
Before Allison could find her a magazine, Starshine turned and plucked a heavy law book from the shelves, opened a page at random, and began to read in a steady voice.
“Causation. Establishing that the defendant’s conduct caused the proscribed result ordinarily is not difficult. If a professional killer shoots the victim in the head and the victim dies, a pathologist can conduct an autopsy and then testify at trial that the bullet fired by the defendant brought about the victim’s death by producing massive injury to the victim’s brain.”
“That’s enough,” Allison said hastily. She and Jennifer exchanged a quick glance.
Starshine replaced the book, lining it up neatly with the others on the shelf. If she realized that the topic of the paragraph in question might possibly apply to her father, not a flicker of emotion betrayed her. She folded her hands again.
“How often do you see people around where you live?”
“Once every couple of months.” Starshine was still not meeting her eyes. “Maybe less. People hiking or running. Less often now, because it’s colder. If we don’t come out, they don’t see us. Even if we are outside, we know how to blend in and stay very still. No one knows we’re there. Father says that no one can know.”
One quick glance up. Her teeth pressed against her lower lip. “He says if anyone were to find out we lived in the woods, I would be taken away. I guess he was right.”
Allison said carefully, “If you answer my questions truthfully, I’ll see if we can get you back there.”
It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the truth either. Even if Starshine’s father was innocent, too many people now knew that the two of them were living in the middle of what was a public park, no matter how wild it might seem. It wasn’t like everyone could look the other way and pretend it wasn’t happening.
She reached across the table and touched the girl’s folded hands. Starshine looked up, startled, and Allison pulled her hand back.
“This is an important question, Starshine, so I want you to think about it seriously. Has anything bad happened recently?”
Allison phrased it broadly enough that it could apply to Starshine’s father beating or mol
esting her. And it could also apply to the dead girl and how she got that way.
Starshine pressed her lips together and looked back down at her hands. “No.”
“There was a girl in the woods, Starshine. Not far from your camp. She was wearing a navy blue coat. She probably came there with a dog, a black Lab. About three weeks ago. She had blonde hair down to her shoulders. She was seventeen. Her name was Katie Converse.”
Getting up, Allison went to her desk and found the photo of Katie and Jalapeño. She held it out. After a moment’s hesitation, Starshine took it. She stared at it, expressionless.
“Have you seen her before?”
Starshine tilted her head to one side. “That photograph is stapled to most of the telephone poles when we go into town.”
“That’s not what I mean, and I think you know that. Have you seen her in real life?”
There was a long pause. Allison waited. Her face was calm, but her pulse was racing.
Finally, Starshine nodded, a nod so slight that it was nearly imperceptible.
“Where?”
“She’s dead. Her body’s under a rhodie by a tamarack tree.”
Jennifer sucked in her breath.
Allison had to take the girl’s word for it. Forest Park was filled with trees, but that’s all they were to Allison. Trees, not cedars and spruces and tamaracks.
“This is very important, Starshine. I need you to tell me the truth about what happened to her. How did this girl die?”
“I don’t know.” She looked up at Allison with pleading eyes. “Father says I have to stay in the cabin. He told me not to ever come out no matter what.”
“Did your father have anything to do with this?” Allison asked softly. “Maybe there was some kind of accident?”
Starshine’s eyes grew wide with shock. “Father didn’t kill her. He just found her body. That’s all. He didn’t kill her! Don’t take him from me, don’t!” She blinked, but the tears that brimmed in her blue eyes remained unshed.
