by Mike Markel
“So Dolores Weston was paying off Hagerty, and Henley Pharma was paying off Weston, and none of this had anything to do with the Hagerty murder?”
“That’s right,” I said. “We closed the Hagerty case. The money changing hands was kinda like professional courtesy. Weston was buying legitimacy from Hagerty’s organization, and Henley Pharmaceuticals was buying access to Weston—plus some nice tax breaks—as a way to open a research facility here in a really red state with cheap land.”
“And you didn’t refer the case to the federal prosecutor here in Montana?”
“I didn’t really have time to—”
“Okay, you went on leave of absence immediately after the Hagerty case was resolved, and Chief Arnold apparently didn’t refer the case.” The chief paused. “All right,” he said. “I want the three of us to go out to the crime scene in a half hour, okay?”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“Ryan, you want to help Seagate get set up in the bullpen?”
“You bet,” Ryan said.
* * * *
Back at our desks, Ryan said, “Sorry about the boxes.” He started to lift one of them. “Let me bring them into the break room.”
“No, don’t,” I said. “I’ll take care of that myself.” When we worked together before, I’d let him hold a door or two, but I didn’t want him treating me like anything other than his partner now. Especially now that I was officially Damaged Goods.
“So,” he said, his smile glowing, “I’m so glad you decided to come back, Karen. How’re you feeling?”
“Tell you the truth, Ryan, it’s more like Chief Murtaugh decided I’d come back. Him and the bank holding my mortgage. Those two, together.”
“Well, whatever, it’s sure good to see you again.” He had a great smile. “Haven’t heard from you since you left.”
I looked down at my hands. I was gripping the back of my chair. “Yeah, well, you know how it is. I was gone. You were real busy.” I tried to smile. “You had a new partner, new cases.” Yeah, that was it: he was busy. Also, I was passed out most of the time.
“Still …” he said, letting it trail off.
“So, catch me up. Kali and the baby, they doing okay?”
“Yeah, they’re fine. The baby’s walking now. I put those plugs in the light sockets. Got that accordion fence to block off the top of the stairs. You remember that stuff?”
Tommy was zipping around at about a year, getting into everything. He’d tear off toward the little fence as fast as he could. I swear he knew it was a game, knew I’d be right behind him to scoop him up by the waist, lift him up over my head. We’d both be laughing. Seemed like twenty or thirty times a day, at least. “Yeah, I do remember that.” Where I was last night? Not quite sure. “And the new baby? When’s it due?”
“It’s going to be a little boy. Three weeks, tomorrow, that’s the date.”
“Kali doing okay?”
“She better be.” He smiled. “Three more to go after him.”
I leaned over and touched his arm. “That’s great, Ryan. I’m so happy for you.” My eyes were a little wet, but I held it together.
Chapter 6
The three of us got out of the chief’s gray Buick. We were parked a few feet from the yellow crime-scene tape attached to stakes driven into the dirt, forming a circle fifty feet across. In the middle of the circle was the white plastic tent Forensic Services had set up yesterday afternoon when they photographed and recovered Weston’s body.
Prairie Industrial Park opened six years ago on a two-hundred acre parcel of dirt and scrub weeds on the west side of town. Less than a half-mile from the satellite hospital of St. Alban’s Regional Medical Center, it already had seven buildings full of medical offices, as well as three with high-end tech and service businesses. The roads snaking between the buildings were shiny and black, all bordered with neat curbs and green sod and new saplings staked to withstand the ferocious spring winds.
I looked around in a three-sixty. There weren’t any buildings within a couple hundred yards that would have been occupied after business hours. The nearest house from a development was even farther than that.
I said to Ryan, “Did we get anything off a canvass?”
He shook his head no.
The crime-scene where we were standing was fifty yards from the newest building being constructed. All we could see was the foundation, with rebar sticking straight up around the edges like a bad punk haircut. The construction site was bare except for three trailers and a mobile home labeled Medway Construction sitting on the dirt. Off in the distance I saw a bunch of other equipment, hulking yellow and orange metal, caked with dirt, and a couple of shiny silver lunch trucks parked near another construction site.
A uni came out of the plastic tent and walked over to brief us.
“That new building.” I pointed to the construction site. “What’s that gonna be?”
She looked down at a clipboard. “That’s Henley Pharmaceuticals.”
I nodded.
The chief said to me and Ryan, “Weston’s body was called in around 1:45 pm by one of the construction guys from the Henley site.”
Ryan said, “So we think the killer drove up and parked on the dirt road we just came in on?”
“Yeah, that’s what we’re thinking now,” the chief said. “There’s no evidence Weston was out here walking around yesterday. There were no scheduled events or anything. And no reason she’d be out here at night.”
“So we think the killer either drove her here and killed her or killed her someplace else and dumped her here, right?” I said.
The chief nodded.
Ryan said, “Any forensics on the road?”
The chief shook his head. “It’s just dirt, hard-packed from two dozen guys’ pickups every day. No tire tracks, no footprints.”
I dragged my foot back and forth. There wasn’t even loose dirt on the surface to take a print from a shoe or boot of a guy carrying a dead woman. “Can we look at the dump site?” I said.
The chief held up the tape as Ryan and I walked under it.
“This is the place.” The chief pointed to the dirt that looked just like all the other dirt on the construction site.
I shielded my eyes from the sun as he opened an envelope and pulled out the photos.
One was Weston’s body, lying on her left side as if she was sleeping. The hair from the right side of her head was covering her face. The top four buttons of her blouse were opened, but the photo didn’t show her bra or anything. It looked like her slacks were unbuttoned at the waist. Another photo showed four buttons scattered on the dirt. A tape measure showed they were all within about three feet of the body.
“If the buttons are on the ground here, doesn’t that mean the guy attacked her here, ripping open her blouse?” I said.
“Probably,” the chief said, “but not necessarily.”
“How’s that?” I said.
Ryan said, “He could have killed her someplace else, dumped her here, then ripped open her blouse.”
I looked at him. “Now why would he do that?”
“We’re meeting with the ME at one o’clock. We’ll talk about it then.” The chief turned and headed back to the car.
* * * *
I waited at my desk till a minute before one o’clock, hoping Ryan would come so we could go downstairs to the ME’s office together. But he didn’t, and I walked out of the detectives’ bullpen, down the central hall, down the one flight of stairs. My heels clicked on the tile floor as I passed the workout room, the shooting range, and the Evidence Tech’s lab. I walked into the ME’s office.
Ryan and the chief were standing off to the side, talking. They looked up and nodded, both looking real serious.
Harold Breen ambled over, wearing a sad smile. He put his big arms around me. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said, giving me a hug. I could feel him kind of holding back, like he’d hurt a few people and someone told him to be careful. “Good to see you.” I
could smell the liverwurst sandwich, wrapped up in wax paper, in his left hand.
I hadn’t seen Harold since I left. He looked about 375 pounds, up from 350, which was his normal inflation rate in recent years. He was wearing his old white lab coat, frayed around the sleeves and where the lapels folded over. It was laundered, but there wasn’t any kind of detergent that could remove the tie-dyed crimson and yellow that covered the front. He had on some kind of baggy, plasticy waterproof pants, with orange Crocs on his feet.
Even though the AC was set on Siberia, like it always was, little drops of sweat dotted the top of his bald head. He had done a below-average job shaving this morning, with rows of stubble visible in the folds between his chins. Loose skin was hanging off his cheek bones a little more than I remembered, and his gray eyes, normally sparkling like a kid’s, looked flat and dull. All in all, he looked terrible, and I loved him completely.
Robin, the Evidence Tech, got up from a busted old office chair missing the back and one of the arms. She came over to me and extended her hand. “How ya doin’, Karen?”
“Good, Robin. How are you?”
“Not bad,” she said cheerfully. “Long as they keep giving me pubes to check for semen, I’m happy.”
“I like the new highlights.” When I last saw her, the streaks in her blond hair were green. Now they were aquamarine, which set off the two small turquoise stones on the horseshoe loop at the end of her left eyebrow.
“Thank you,” she said brightly. “It complements the freckles, don’t you think?”
“Very nice,” I said. Even though Robin and I were from different generations and we were members of the same species only technically, I suddenly felt, for the first time, that I was back on the job.
“Okay,” Chief Murtaugh said. He gestured to the Medical Examiner. “You want to take us through it?”
Harold’s cheeks puffed out with effort as he made his slow way over to the steel table. A white cloth covered the body of Dolores Weston. I knew he’d begin by pulling back the cloth and telling us what he’d seen during the autopsy. But when we’d gathered around the table, he turned and faced us.
“This is case 1019007, Dolores Weston. The body is that of a female Caucasian, aged fifty-nine, with brown hair and green eyes. The body, which is sixty-eight inches long and weighs 123 pounds, is unremarkable, with three scars: one an apparent appendectomy, one consistent with a fracture to the right humerus, and the third consistent with a cartilage reconstruction to the left knee. All three scars appear to be at least three decades old. We took X-rays, which confirmed the fracture to the humerus and the knee procedure.”
I glanced at Ryan to see if he knew why Harold wasn’t lifting the cloth off the stiff. Ryan gave a small shrug.
“The body temperature was eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit when it was brought in after being recovered yesterday afternoon at 2:43 pm. We removed the victim’s clothing, gathered hair and skin samples, as well as sand, dirt, and other substances in the chest wound and under the nails. We checked for fibers and other substances, and we performed a rape examination. For reasons that will become obvious in a moment, we have not yet performed the autopsy.”
Harold looked over to the chief, who nodded for him to proceed. He turned to the table and placed his hand on the cloth near Weston’s head. He paused a moment, then carefully pulled it back.
Long time ago, in the academy, I’d gone through some medical training, the standard three or four-day course. The usual ABC stuff—airway, breathing, circulation—as well as how to recognize possible spinal-cord injuries so we wouldn’t yank the poor bastards around and mess them up worse than they already were. Harold had come in for a morning to talk with us about autopsies, and the Evidence Tech, some dweeb before Robin, to talk about how to gather evidence at the scene.
I’ve seen some stuff. Lots of people with faces full of windshield glass. Guys with stumpy fingers from when the lawnmower suddenly fixed itself. Leg bones snapped at right angles, poking out through the skin. And burns. They’re the worst. The skin, black and crackly like an overcooked chicken on a grill, pulling away from the pink tissue underneath.
I’ve seen Harold lift the cloth maybe twenty times. I can tell if it was a steak knife, a serrated fishing knife, or a screwdriver. Once I even called it as a Phillips head. I’ve seen enough gunshot wounds to know whether the bullet was coming or going, and I’m pretty good at guessing the distance from the shooter, just by looking at the edge of the entry wound. What I’m saying is, I’ve seen some ugly shit. But Dolores Weston’s body was right up there.
I was standing on the right side of the autopsy table, up near her head. I expected her skin would be gray, so that didn’t freak me out. But I wasn’t expecting what had happened to her head. Or, to be more precise, what used to be her head. The left side was all caved in, like she’d gotten it caught in some kind of industrial vice—but only the left side. The skin was pulped up pretty good, with busted pieces of skull, most no bigger than a fingernail, pushing out. There was some pale gray goo oozing out of the skull. That would be brain. The whole mess was held together by bloody ropes of hair.
But the real freakshow was her left eye. The eyeball was popped out, dangling an inch or so down toward the head wound. The ball, pus-yellow with a pebbly texture, was attached by a bunch of red and yellow veins and connecting cords. Blood was pooled near the bottom of the eyeball. I’m usually pretty good at holding it together when looking at bodies, but I could feel my stomach churning around, and I heaved up some acid, which stung the back of my throat.
My gaze was drawn to Weston’s chest, which was all carved up, like the guy took a rock or something and started writing on her. I couldn’t quite make it out, what with all the torn-up skin. But it was definitely some sort of message.
Harold Breen said, “As you can see, the decedent has suffered a massive head trauma. The skull sustained a fracture, probably from a blunt instrument. The trauma blew out her eardrum. You can see the remnants of the blood flow out of her ear.” He gently lifted some matted hair with the tip of a pencil.
“The force of the trauma also deformed the eye cavity on the left side, exerting pressure on the eyeball, causing what is called globe subluxation: the force of the blow pushed the eyeball out of its socket. You’ll notice, also, the mydriasis, the excessively dilated pupil, which was probably caused by the trauma, which could have damaged the iris sphincter, the muscle that controls the opening and closing of the pupil.
“You’ll note, too, the blood at the bottom of the eyeball. This is a hyphema, which means that the blood has pooled in the anterior chamber of the eyeball. Although hyphemas can occur spontaneously, this one is likely a traumatic hyphema. The murderer might have popped her in the eye separate from the skull trauma.”
Harold Breen took a deep breath. “Looking down at the torso, you see a series of contusions on the chest. I’ll let Robin speak to them in a moment. Although the contusions are approximately one-half to one centimeter in depth, there was relatively little bleeding. This suggests that they might have occurred postmortem.” He took another breath. “Robin, do you want to address the torso?”
“When the body was recovered,” she said, her voice soft, “she was wearing a cream-colored silk blouse. It appears to have been torn away, forcibly, popping off the top four buttons. Officers recovered the buttons about three feet away from the body. You’ll notice some bruising here and here,” Robin said, pointing to Weston’s shoulders, “which might be from her bra straps. The guy tore her bra away, ripping it between the two cups, presumably so he could carve up her chest.
“At the time of death, the victim lost bladder and bowel control. After cleaning her up, we performed a rape examination. There was evidence of recent sexual activity, with some tearing of the vaginal wall, consistent with rape. I started typing the DNA, which should take about thirty-six hours.”
Chief Murtaugh spoke. “Dr. Breen, I know you haven’t done the autopsy yet, so you can’t give
us any definitive conclusions, but can you give us your best guess?”
Harold sighed. “With all the usual caveats about how I might find something surprising when I open her up, I’m sure anybody in the room here could call this one. The cause of death was likely a blunt instrument, something like a brick or a big rock. From the extent of the shattering of the skull, I’d say it was at least five pounds, possibly up to fifteen. The only reason I’m giving it that upper limit is that if it were any heavier than that, the guy probably couldn’t have swung it hard enough to do this much damage.
“The mechanism of death was almost certainly massive bleeding into the brain caused by the head trauma. It would have shut down all her systems. Manner of death: homicide. Time of death? That one’s tricky. We didn’t put the body on the table until around 3 pm yesterday, but from core temperature, rigor, and livor, my guess would be sometime between 8 pm and midnight the previous day.”
“Okay, thank you, Dr. Breen. You’ll get the detectives your report?”
“End of the day, the latest.”
“Good. And Robin, you’ll stay in communication with Seagate and Miner about the DNA and any other forensics?”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“All right,” the chief said. “This is priority one. Thank you, Robin.” The chief nodded to them, then turned to me and Ryan. “Let’s do it.”
* * * *
The Chief looked up from his desk. “Got something already?”
“Yeah, I think so,” I said. “And you’re not gonna like it.”
The chief motioned for me and Ryan to sit. “What is it?”
Ryan said, “Karen and I looked at the photos of Senator Weston for a while, trying to figure out what was carved on her chest.” He slid a piece of paper across the chief’s desk.
