Pushed Too Far

by Ann Voss Peterson

  Monica was the first to speak. “What do you see?”

  “Some bones. Well done.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Anything that could help us identify her or lead to her killer?”

  “No teeth, no flesh, most of these bones aren’t even in one piece, dried out and shattered from the heat.” He glanced over a copy of his original autopsy report, then peered up at Val. “I don’t know what to say, honey bun. Don’t see anything to change or anything to add. Maybe you need to show these to an expert on fire deaths, like a forensic anthropologist. Maybe call down to Madison.”

  “It’s a good idea, but I’m afraid I’m short on time.” Only one day left, twenty-four hours, and she had nothing more than she’d had in the original investigation. She hoped Schneider and Olson had found a lead in their calls to Kelly’s family members.

  “How about the body you took fingerprints from yesterday? Have you gotten a chance to examine her?” There was no telling how Kelly factored in to Jane Doe’s death, or if she did at all, but Val needed anything she could get.

  “Still frozen as a Thanksgiving turkey. Well maybe not quite, but it takes a while, you know. I took some x-rays and did the external exam. I think I might have something you’ll want to see.”

  The external part of an autopsy was always the most interesting to Val, since in her experience, most evidence in a homicide tended to be found on the outside of the body. And although she would never admit it to anyone, whenever the cutting began, she was never sure if she was going to be sick or simply faint. Between that and severe time constraints, she was relieved the internal exam would wait for another day.

  “I’ll get her out of the cooler.” Harlan padded across the small room, the soles of his Keds squeaking on the tile.

  Val followed, but when he pulled open the door, she was sorry she had. Two sheet-covered gurneys and miscellaneous paper grocery bags and black evidence bags filled nearly half of the tiny space. Cold sweetness engulfed her in a wave. Her stomach gave a shudder.

  Monica lagged behind, looking as if she might have to make a run for the restroom at any moment.

  “Sorry about the stink. One of these was a lady who lived alone. She wasn’t found until the neighbor heard the dog yelping. A week after the lady died, and the poor thing finally ran out of food.” He pushed his way between the gurneys and grabbed the one near the wall, chuckling to himself. “Funny thing. Neighbor lived next to her twenty years, yet couldn’t identify her. Not without her face.”

  Monica turned a deeper shade of green.

  Even Val was wishing she’d stayed back in the autopsy theater. Or better yet, outside in the car. “Thanks for sharing that image, Harlan.”

  “I’m sure you saw worse things in Chicago.”

  “That’s why I moved here.”

  “Once we’re done, I’ll put the old girl in the freezer, solid her up a little and clear the air in here.” He wheeled out his chosen body and closed the door behind him, cutting off the stench.

  Or most of it.

  Val pushed the image of pets eating faces to the back of her mind and focused on the shape under the autopsy sheet.

  Harlan positioned the gurney in front of the oblong stainless steel sink. In Chicago, the morgue had been huge with many people working under the medical examiner. But in a small county like this one, the coroner was an elected position, and often didn’t even have a medical degree.

  Harlan was an actual forensic pathologist, but he had only a handful of people in his entire department and space to perform one autopsy at a time. It was a good thing the body count was low. Three bodies in the morgue, counting Jane Doe’s bone fragments, made for a huge back up.

  He clipped x-rays to the lighted board. “My daughter’s son broke an arm, and the hospital had x-rays right there on the computer screen. Of course with all the budget cuts around here, I’ll be dead before we get more than this damn light box.”

  Val squinted at the gray outlines of bones. “Is anything broken?”

  “Nope.”

  “Find any fibers? Material under her nails?”

  Pete Olson had bagged her hands at the scene, and they’d wrapped her in a sheet before loading her into the ambulance to preserve any trace evidence. Of course, since she had been in the lake, the odds of them finding anything useful were slim.

  “Fingernails looked clean, but I’ll send samples of everything to the crime lab. In fact, I could use a gofer.”

  Wisconsin had three crime labs, the closest in Madison. But as with everything else, budgets were tight. It was hard to say how large a back log they were dealing with or just when Val might see reports on what they found.

  “I’ll send my newest officer. As long as you promise not to scare her away.”

  “Oh, I’d never do that, sugar lips.”

  “Seriously, be polite.”

  He held up a hand. “I swear.”

  She focused back on the gurney. “You have photos?”

  “Yep. But this you should see in person.” He removed the evidence sheet, uncovering Kelly’s head and naked shoulders. Like at the lake, her skin was the color of freezer burned chicken, her once blue eyes colorless.

  “Hold on.” Harlan pulled on a new pair of gloves and gently probed along the top of her cheekbone with an index finger. Grunting as if in answer to a question posed by his own thoughts, he picked up a syringe from the tray of instruments. “Still frozen, but she’s thawed enough now to take fluid. This’ll take just a sec.”

  Realizing what he was about to do, Val glanced toward the ceiling.

  “What you looking at? You got to see this.”

  Swallowing into a tight throat, she forced her eyes to return to Kelly’s face.

  Harlan pushed the upper and lower lids of one eye back to more clearly reveal a dull, ghostly gray eye. He held the syringe in his other hand, the needle poised only centimeters away. “See that?”

  She leaned forward. “See what?”

  “Subconjunctival hemorrhage. The capillaries in the eyes. They’re broken.”

  “A sign of strangulation.”

  “Could be. Likely just from struggling to breathe before she drowned. No bruising at the throat. No sign of any other injuries. Maybe I’ll find more when I cut her open.” Before she could look away, he plunged the needle into Kelly’s eye and drew fluid into the syringe. “Yup, looks like she’s thawing nicely.”

  Val’s face felt hot, her head light. She breathed through her mouth to keep the smells from adding to her misery.

  On television, cops were so tough, never flinching at the sights and smells of death and the more than distasteful procedures in the morgue. She’d known real cops like that, but she’d never been one of them. She’d always had to work hard just to keep it together.

  “Uh, let me know what you find.” Monica bolted out of the autopsy suite. The bathroom door down the hall slammed shut.

  Val hoped she wouldn’t have to join her. “The eyes, is that what you wanted me to see, Harlan?”

  Having noted and logged his sample, Harlan returned to the gurney. He peeled back the sheet, exposing Kelly’s bare body. “There’s also this.”

  He moved his hand over her belly and pointed to the thin, red line stretching like a smile above Kelly’s trimmed strip of pubic hair.

  “Oh my God,” Val heard herself say. “She had a C-section.”

  Harlan nodded. “Looks like our girl here was somebody’s mommy.”

  Chapter

  Six

  “You have to, Val.” Monica stared her down over evidence files that had failed to yield anything they hadn’t seen before.

  Val stifled a yawn. Except for a short dinner break, she and Monica had been holed up in her office since leaving the morgue, and in all those hours, they’d gotten exactly nowhere on their quest to identify Jane Doe and tie her death to Hess. A glance at her watch showed almost three in the morning.

  Jeff Schneider, with Olson’s help, had tracked down a male cousin
on Kelly’s mother’s side who’d supplied them with a list of family members. Unfortunately they’d come up with the same result as Val had the first time. The women who would have shared mito DNA with Kelly had been dead and buried for years. The cousin had even supplied lists of three cemeteries where the past few generations were buried, the one on Sunrise Ridge and two in northern Illinois. The rest of her relations were either not part of her maternal line or male, facts which struck them from contention.

  In addition to the Jane Doe case, she’d been trying to juggle the investigation into Kelly’s death. She’d arranged for two SCUBA divers with the sheriff’s department to check the area where Kelly was found, but there was no sign of a baby. If the child wasn’t with Kelly when she died, it was alone, someone was watching it, or the killer had taken it. They needed to find that baby. Just one more urgent thing to add to the list.

  And now Monica had gotten the idea into her head that Val should make one last ditch effort to confront Hess before he became a free man.

  “Hess’s hearing is on the afternoon docket, so he’ll be brought down to the jail tomorrow morning.” Monica took a sip of coffee, shooting Val a strong stare over the rim of her mug.

  “What are you hoping to get from this? He’s not going to confess.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short.” She raised her eyebrows and nodded in an attempt at encouragement. “If not a confession, maybe something just as good. A slip up. A detail we missed. It doesn’t have to be gift wrapped, just something we can use to arrest him before he walks out the door.”

  Val wanted to buy into Monica’s seemingly endless optimism, but the fact was, she knew Hess much better than the DA did. “I’ve talked to him before, remember? Hess doesn’t slip up, and he only hands out details that help him.”

  “So use the baby.”

  Val brought her own cup to her lips. She couldn’t even taste the coffee, it was so weak, but it gave her a chance to stall a beat, to think.

  “Come on, Val. Harlan said the caesarean scar is less than a year old. The baby fits the timeline.” Monica counted off points on her fingers. “Kelly gets pregnant, then disappears. We find Jane Doe and believe she’s Kelly. But even though Kelly’s alive, she doesn’t come forward. Not even through a sensational trial. Why?”

  She could see where Monica was heading. “Kelly was glad Hess was arrested. She left because she was afraid of him.”

  Monica gave an enthusiastic nod. “Maybe because the baby is Hess’s.”

  “Or maybe it’s not.”

  “Either way, Kelly chose to let the world believe she was dead so that Hess would go to prison. He has to have some kind of reaction to that.”

  Val set her cup on the desk. “It is something we didn’t know before.”

  Monica perched on the edge of her chair. “You think it might work? Shock him into saying something he normally wouldn’t?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “But you’ll give it a shot?”

  Val checked her watch again. She had only a few hours to figure out how she would approach Hess, and time relentlessly ticked away. “I guess I’ll have to.”

  In a room full of average men, Dixon Hess would win a prize for being the most average.

  His light brown hair was short, but not too short. His clean-shaven face was pleasant at first glance, but not too pleasant. He was already dressed for court, wearing a suit, his shirt a crisp white, his tie disarming pink. To a casual observer, he probably looked like any upstanding guy on his way to any office job in any city across the country. In a word, generic.

  But only if they weren’t close enough to see his eyes.

  Ice blue. Hard. So sharp, Val could feel them cut.

  He sat next to his lawyer, a stylish-on-a-budget public defender named Tamara Wade. But though she was leaning close, talking in his ear, he didn’t seem to be listening.

  All of his attention was focused on Val.

  She nodded to the two deputies in the room, took her chair, and plunked the heavy file she was carrying on the table top. She would have preferred a room with no table, leaving Hess more exposed so she could better read his body language, but at short notice, this small conference room was all she could get.

  At least the table would also hide her vulnerabilities from him.

  “Chief Valerie Ryker,” he said, slowly running his tongue over her name. “Congratulations on the new title.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Aren’t you going to congratulate me on my freedom?”

  She forced her lips into a smile but didn’t say a word. Often the simple act of saying nothing was a more effective interview technique than all the words in the dictionary. Silence increased the pressure, made the subject eager to fill the void, to explain away his guilt.

  Val wasn’t sure that was going to work with Hess.

  He seemed too relaxed, almost at ease, leaning against the back of his chair as if slightly bored. Where people under stress carried a smell about them, a cross between sweat and a visceral edge of fear, the only scent she could detect was Tamara’s perfume.

  If there was anyone in this room feeling pressure, it was Tamara. Or Val herself.

  She held his gaze and waited, seconds feeling like minutes, but nothing seemed to change. Voices rumbled out in the hall. One of the bailiffs shifted his shoes on the floor, the keys in his belt jingling.

  “Police Chief Ryker?” The lawyer broke the standoff, addressing the camera looking down at them from the corner. “I’ve advised my client not to talk to you. In fact, I am entirely opposed to this meeting.”

  “Noted,” Val responded to Tamara, but she kept her eyes on Hess. “If you have nothing to hide, why be afraid to talk to me?”

  “Actually I’m more in the mood to listen.”

  “Fine.” She flipped open the folder, although there wasn’t a word or image in it that she didn’t know in excruciating detail. “We have uncovered a number of additional facts since this case was prosecuted.”

  “Is this a preview of what you’ll be presenting at the hearing?” Tamara asked.

  “That depends.” Val gave a non-committal tilt of her head. Unless Hess slipped up, the prosecution wouldn’t have anything to present.

  “Depends on what?” the lawyer asked.

  “On what your client has to say.”

  “Don’t tell me. The person you say I killed wasn’t Kelly Lund after all?”

  Tamara shot Hess a nervous glance. “He’s doing you a favor by listening to you. He’s not answering questions.”

  “Fine.”

  “So what are your issues?”

  The way she phrased it, you’d think Val was coming to her for counseling, not interviewing her client.

  Val had been right. Questioning Hess had been a bad idea. It would have been one thing if she was talking to him alone. Then she might be able to use the baby to goad him into slipping up. Maybe. But Tamara Wade was no dummy. The more Val talked, the more likely the lawyer was to notice that she had little new information that pertained to the Jane Doe murder and nothing that implicated her client.

  Best to keep the exchange short and shocking. “The most interesting thing we’ve found was at Kelly’s autopsy.”

  “You’re not planning to accuse me of her murder, are you? Because I have a pretty convincing alibi.”

  “No, I don’t think you killed Kelly.”

  “Finally. Guess a guy’s got to be locked in prison before you believe him.”

  “But we did find that during the time she was gone …” Val paused for a beat. “… Kelly gave birth.”

  “A child?” Tamara’s voice spiked. She turned wide eyes on her client.

  Hess’s sharp eyes remained steady, his face a mask of calm. “Where is the baby?”

  “I thought you were in the mood to listen, not ask or answer questions.”

  “My mood has changed.”

  Tamara Wade held up her hand. “I have to advise—”

  “Shut i
t,” Hess said.

  The defense lawyer visibly cringed.

  Hess’s ice pick eyes drilled into Val. “Where is he?”

  “He?” At no time had she referred to the baby as he.

  “The child.”

  “How do you know the child is a boy?”

  “You don’t know where he is, do you? You don’t have a clue.”

  Of course, she didn’t, not that she hadn’t tried. Not that she wouldn’t keep trying. But at this point, she hadn’t even found the hospital where Kelly had given birth, provided it was in a hospital at all. “We’re following up some leads.”

  “Games. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? It’s a game to you. Trying to get me to talk, get me to tell you something you don’t know, because you’ve hit a dead end.”

  “I don’t play games.” Sure it was a lie. But that was part of the game.

  A smile curled the corners of his lips, but his eyes remained cold. “Neither do I. That’s one of the things I learned in Waupun. Life is too short. I play for keeps.”

  “How do you know about the baby?”

  “That’s easy. Kelly told me. We were both very happy about the news.”

  In preparation for the interview, Val had checked a list of his prison visitors. Beyond his lawyer, Hess hadn’t had any. “When did she tell you?”

  “The day she disappeared.”

  “How far along was she?”

  “A couple of weeks.”

  “That’s awfully early for her to know the gender. How do you know it’s a boy?”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “I always wanted a son.”

  Right. Val had an idea where the news might have come from. She stole a glance Tamara’s way. “Who told you about the baby, Tamara?”

  The attorney’s face grew pale. “Excuse me?”

  “You were his only visitor. I checked the records.”

  She shook her head, strawberry blond bob swinging like a shampoo commercial. “He received mail, too.”

  “And it’s monitored. I checked. No, the news had to come from you.”

  “Whatever I talked about with my client is protected.”

  Hess’s chuckle grated on Val’s nerves.