There were some additional notes saying that Dr. Harrison had done CPR on his son after he’d called 911, because he’d claimed he’d felt a shallow pulse. There was Harrison’s description of finding the boy at the base of the tree in the backyard. Six-year-old Finn had purportedly climbed a ladder made of two-by-fours nailed into the trunk that led to a wooden platform in the tree’s crotch.
Finn had been unsupervised. Dr. Harrison admitted to being on the telephone and had not seen his son go outside. The boy had reportedly fallen from the platform onto the ground below. He had never regained consciousness.
Jo could find no reports of X-rays or CT scans of any body parts, but she knew why they hadn’t been done. The boy was a goner. What was the point? Finn’s father was a surgeon at the hospital to which he’d been transported. The staff likely knew him, respected him, and the ER doc who’d examined and pronounced had seen nothing funky, at least not enough to warrant an autopsy.
There was a notation in the chart that Finn had been taking the prescription drug Ritalin.
“He had ADHD,” she murmured.
“Which probably explains a lot,” Adam said. “The fall, I mean. If Harrison was alone with the boy, and he ignored him, even for a little while, maybe an accident was bound to happen.”
Jo closed the chart. “He should’ve known better. He should’ve been watching his son, not talking on the phone.”
Adam had the gall to laugh. “If you want statistics, accidents are the leading cause of death in children under twenty-one.”
“I just wish they’d done X-rays,” she said.
“To look for what?”
She shrugged. “Other fractures.”
“They wouldn’t do a CT if the boy had no pulse, much less take films. It’s unnecessary.”
“But it doesn’t give me . . .” Much to go on, she almost said, but she stopped herself.
“Give you what?” Adam narrowed his eyes at her.
She slipped the thin file back into the envelope. “You said these were copies? Can I hold on to them?”
“They’re yours.”
“Thanks.” She seemed to be thanking him a lot these days.
He sighed, running a hand over his ruffled hair, and she knew he was trying to play it cool, not tell her what to do, no matter how hard he had to bite his tongue to keep from giving her advice.
“Stop looking at me that way,” she said softly.
“You just seem really hungry to nail someone to the wall.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
He touched her shoulder, and she leaned against his arm. “Maybe what you’re looking for isn’t in that file. Maybe it’s somewhere else.”
“I’m not sure I even know what I’m looking for.”
“If you want to talk about it, Jo, it won’t go past here. I promise,” he said.
She shifted her eyes back to his, not certain of what she had to tell him. It was early still. She didn’t even have the autopsy results yet, though Hank would know the preliminary findings soon enough.
It was just this uneasiness that crept through her, a chilly uncertainty, like a touch from the grave. Almost as if Jenny Dielman were looking over her shoulder, making sure she followed through, that she didn’t let anything slip between the cracks.
“I don’t know what it is.” She shook her head. “I’ve just got this hunch that we’re not seeing something.”
“Like what?”
“I have questions about Jenny’s first marriage to Kevin Harrison. Did it just fall apart because of Finn? Or was it not a good marriage to begin with?”
“You’re not suggesting abuse?”
“Jenny’s sister seems to think Harrison pushed her around.”
“You have any proof?” Adam asked.
“No.” Jo didn’t have squat.
“Did she ever press charges?”
“No such luck,” she said and drew away from his hand, sinking into the chair and hearing its gentle creak as disapproval. Hank had run a computer check on Harrison and, other than a handful of speeding tickets—uncontested and fines paid promptly—they’d found zip.
“Have you found any medical documentation of injuries?” Adam pressed.
“No.”
But Jo knew that was so often the case. Wives bleeding and bruised often denied abuse when police appeared to check out a domestic disturbance. They feared even worse if they put their spouses in jail. It happened every day.
“Jenny’s husband mentioned her being afraid. She was scared enough that he bought her the twenty-two used to kill her.” Jo quietly added, “Or else she was just paranoid, like the neighbor keeps telling me.”
Adam stared at her, his expression frighteningly sober, and she saw something click in his face. “That’s why you wanted Finn Harrison’s file? Why you were hoping for X-rays on the boy? You thought if they revealed old fractures, it would prove that Dr. Harrison beat his wife and his child, that he had a violent streak, maybe a murderous one.”
She felt her cheeks burn and wished she’d kept her thoughts to herself.
“It’s just a theory,” she said. “One of many.”
“I hope so, because you can’t go around slandering a guy like Kevin Harrison without proof, or you’ll get your balls ripped off.”
“My balls?” she scoffed. “Harrison’s a surgeon, that’s all. He’s not the mayor.”
“That’s all?” Adam stepped away from the desk, stood in front of the chair, and bent toward her. He trapped her with his arms on either side, close enough so that she could see the worry, wild in his eyes. “Google his name when you have a minute, if you haven’t already. He’s up for chief of surgery at Presbyterian, and he’s married to Jacob Davis’s daughter.”
Jacob Davis.
Jo sucked in a breath. Damn.
She might not have heard of Kevin Harrison before, but she was well aware of Jacob Davis. The guy was Big D’s version of Donald Trump, only more genteel and less mouthy. He’d built half the skyscrapers in downtown Dallas and had his fingerprints on countless new developments outside the city. He was also big into charities. Jo had rubbed shoulders with him once—well, more like glimpsed him across the room—at a gala for the Dallas PD’s Widows and Orphans Fund.
Talk about connected.
“Kevin Harrison may have been a lousy husband to your victim, but he’s got a lot of powerful friends,” Adam said. “Everything’s politics. Remember that.”
What was she? Stupid? A rookie who needed a lecture?
“Thanks for the tip.” It came out more sharply than she’d intended.
But he wasn’t done yet. “Tread lightly, Jo. Harrison isn’t someone you want to publicly accuse of wife-beating or murder unless you’ve got video of him doing it or a full confession.”
“I’m not accusing him of anything,” she said.
Adam pulled away. “Be careful.”
“I know how to do my job.”
“Yes, you do.” He nudged his glasses. “But you’re just so dogged when you get something stuck in your head.”
A dog with a bone.
She sighed, feeling tired and sore and frustrated. “I’ll be careful,” she promised, not for the first time.
“That’s all I’m asking.”
He was right. She had nothing on Kevin Harrison. She had nothing on anyone. Only hearsay and a coffee-stained page ripped from a dead woman’s notebook.
He leaned over the arm of the chair until she felt his breath on her skin. And then he kissed her. She closed her eyes, his mouth on hers, sweet and warm.
He released her with a little moan. “You drive me crazy.”
“I know.” She pressed her lips together, still tasting him.
“I gotta go,” he said and cleared his throat.
All she could do was nod.
He headed for the door, stopped there to look back at her. “You can wait here for Phelps. Tell him I hope he feels better.”
“I will.”
“See you later?”
She wanted to tell him yes but hesitated, unsure how long their interview with Dr. Harrison would run and if they’d head back to the station afterward. There was still so much to do. “It might be late.”
“How about we play it by ear?”
“Okay.”
He patted the doorjamb before he turned to go.
“Hey,” she called out and felt herself blush. “I owe you one.”
“Just one?”
“A million and one.”
He looked at her across the room, such raw emotion on his face.
Then he took off.
Jo glanced at the clock and willed the hands to move faster. Closed her eyes and wished that Hank would show up as soon as she opened them.
But when she did, he wasn’t there.
She used Adam’s phone again, putting in a call to the parking office at the building where Dielman worked. She told them who she was and what she wanted. They asked her to read a ten-digit number off the back of the card Dielman had given her. She was put on hold, listening to an oldies station for a good three minutes before the voice returned to the line.
Jo took down what she was told: Patrick Dielman’s card had been used to exit the parking lot at 6:50 p.m. on Monday evening. Depending on traffic, he would’ve arrived home in Plainfield within forty-five minutes.
Exactly what he’d told them.
So maybe Dielman would defy the statistics. Maybe the guy had nothing to do with what happened to his wife. Though a car leaving a parking lot didn’t prove much, not when they knew Jenny’s killer had to have an accomplice.
Maybe it was Kevin Harrison, who thought Jenny had brought on whatever happened to her, or Lisa Barton, who blamed a dead woman for a brick chucked through her window, one Jenny couldn’t have thrown.
Shit.
Just plain shit.
I saw their photo again in the paper, K and his wife. What did the caption say? Something like, “Dr. Kevin Harrison has more than a few reasons to celebrate—which is probably why he and his better half broke out the champagne at Bistro 31 last night! Harrison is tagged to be Presbyterian Hospital’s next chief of surgery, and he’s going to be a new daddy as well! Hope you’re as good with a diaper as you are with a scalpel, Doc!”
How nice for him that he moved on so smoothly. How easily he wiped his slate clean, like Finn and I never existed.
I think that’s what gave me the courage to call him last night while Patrick showered. This time, I didn’t hang up after the first ring. I waited until I heard his voice, and then I started in.
“Tell me the truth this time,” I said. “Not that bullshit story you had everyone at your hospital believing.”
He tried to get me off the phone. He said I was being irrational. Finn is gone, he said, as if I needed reminding, Stop obsessing. Move on, take a hike, and don’t call again.
I dug in my heels and threatened him. If he didn’t tell me what really happened, I would go to the police with the yellow shirt, Finn’s glasses, and all my questions. I would stir things up, make things look bad for him, smear his reputation.
“All right, all right, calm down,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I remember.”
He went through his version of how Finnegan died as if it was a script he’d memorized. There was never more, never less. It never varied, never changed.
When I called him a liar, he got angry. “Stop calling me, Jennifer, or this will get ugly.”
He hung up as I laughed.
How much uglier could it get?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Hank tracked her down in Adam’s office a full hour later.
He shuffled into the room, bum knees dragging, looking tired and older than his forty-five years. She wanted to tease him about the “bug” he’d mentioned when Adam had caught him taking a breather in the hallway of the morgue.
But she didn’t have the heart.
With a loud sigh, he plunked down into a chair on the other side of Adam’s desk. “Can you smell the stink on me? Christ.” He sniffed a sleeve and grimaced. “I should shower and change before we meet with Harrison, if there’s time. If we hurry, we can get to the station and back.” He half rose from the chair, then hesitated. “So you wanna talk now or in the car?”
“Sit,” she instructed, and he planted his butt firmly in the seat.
His shower could wait. She had plenty to tell him but gestured for him to go first.
“I almost hate to say it, but your gut called this one.” He leaned his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands together, lifting his head so his eyes met hers. “It’s definitely a homicide.”
She already knew but let him explain.
He cocked a finger to his temple. “Contact wound left a bruise in the shape of the muzzle. The impression of the front sight ramp was at about three o’clock.” He tried to turn his arm to demonstrate but dropped his hand to his thigh when he couldn’t do it. “Too awkward a position for our vic to have shot herself.”
Jo nodded.
“Lividity had settled in on her left side. Doc Baldwin thinks she was probably kneeling when she was killed. She fell into the water, which was cold enough to preserve her corpse rather nicely.”
Jenny had been kneeling.
Jo swallowed down the dreadful taste in her mouth. “Was there evidence of sexual assault?”
Hank shook his head. “No.”
She wasn’t raped.
As if being abducted and murdered weren’t torture enough; Jo felt relieved nonetheless.
“Was there any indication she’d been tied up?” she asked. “Any marks on her wrists?”
“There was faint adhesive residue. Baldwin figures it was duct tape. There was negligible bruising. He doesn’t think she was bound for long.”
Just long enough, Jo thought.
“There wasn’t duct tape found at the scene, right?” She didn’t recall it being on the list of evidence recovered at the quarry.
“No.”
Jo figured that explained one thing at least. “I think the duct tape’s in the same location as Jenny’s coat,” she said. “They probably took her coat off to make it easier to bind her wrists. I mean, who cares if she was cold? They were going to kill her.” She raised her eyes to his. “If they’re as smart as they seem, they’ve already disposed of both.”
Hank didn’t respond. He had a funny look on his face, so she knew he wasn’t done.
“There’s something else?”
Her partner let out a slow breath. “Okay, listen. It might be nothing, so I don’t want you to read too much into it. It might mean squat.”
Read too much into what?
Between Adam advising her to “be careful” with the investigation and Hank telling her not to jump to conclusions, she wanted to pop the both of them.
“Tell me,” she said.
He wrinkled his brow. “Baldwin found some old fractures on X-ray, hairlines in a couple ribs and fingers, a healed spiral fracture of the right ulna.”
Jo knew a spiral fracture meant a twisting injury. It was pretty damned hard to twist your own arm.
“You said old fractures? How old?” she asked.
He shrugged. “More than a couple years and healed over pretty good.”
Left over from Jenny’s growing up, when her father had used her as a punching bag?
“He knew how to hit in all the places that wouldn’t show.”
Or were they remnants of her marriage to Dr. Harrison?
“I think Kevin pushed her around.”
“What about a tox screen?” she said.
“Should be back in a week, and I’d expect we’ll see the antidepressant in her system and not much else. Stomach was empty. No visible syringe marks. Nothing that would indicate she was doping it up.” He jerked his chin at her. “So? I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
“For you to say I was wrong, and you were right.” His wiry eyebrows peaked. “What? You’re not gon
na gloat?”
She shifted forward in the chair and placed a hand on the piece of paper Emma had given her. It lay atop Finn Harrison’s file. “I’d rather tell you what the crime lab turned up, if that’s all right.”
He relaxed. “Lay it on me.”
She went over everything Emma had told her: the position of the driver’s seat in the Nissan, the absence of prints on the .22 Jennings, the lack of skin beneath Jenny’s nails or any sign of defensive wounds, the grease on the fleece pullover, the watch that had stopped on Monday night sometime after Jenny hit the water.
She shared what the parking attendant had confirmed about the time Patrick Dielman had left the lot. Then she showed him the torn page from Jenny’s journal and the slim file on Finn Harrison’s death.
When she finished, Hank ran his fingers over his head, smoothing the thin strands trained to cross his pink crown. “Makes me wish this one had been a suicide.” He slowly rose from the chair, drawing his keys from his pocket and weighing them in his hand. “We could’ve closed it this afternoon.”
“You don’t really mean that,” she said, gathering her things as she stood. She followed him out of Adam’s office.
“It’s an opinion, that’s all.”
“Well, it stinks.” She sniffed the air around him. “And so do you.” She waved an arm and put a few extra feet between them as they walked through the hall. It was like he had cooties, and she didn’t want to catch them.
Hank held out a small tube, which he’d removed from his jacket pocket. “You want some Vicks for the car ride?”
“Can I just put the pine-tree air freshener on you?”
He shot her a drunken grin. “It depends where you want to hang it.”
She managed a smile but kept her distance until they got to the parking garage, and she realized she’d be riding inside with him. He reeked of Vicks VapoRub and death, a combination Ralph Lauren definitely wouldn’t want to bottle as aftershave.
Walk Into Silence Page 18
