O’Hara nodded. “Yeah, same as the others.” He stood up. “Pooch, you have an address for this Terry Symes?” Puccinelli glanced sideways at him, hesitating before answering. Jamison understood the hesitation. Pooch was the lead investigator and it was important to interagency cooperation that his control be respected. O’Hara added, “If you don’t mind we’d like to go over there and take a look.”
Quickly scribbling the address, Puccinelli handed O’Hara a slip of paper. “Wait for me, okay? I’ll be over in a little bit. I got a patrol unit sitting on the place to make sure nobody screws with it by accident.” He was looking at Jamison. It was a warning that went with the permission but it was primarily aimed at the lawyer. Jamison was used to it. Cops never forgave you for being a lawyer. The only reason district attorneys got a pass was because they were necessary to the process. But Jamison knew that to cops “necessary to the process” also included going to the can after they drank their morning coffee. Jamison recognized he was only being given permission because he was with O’Hara.
As O’Hara walked away Jamison hesitated a moment, intently concentrating on the face of the young woman on the ground, the features losing definition in the whitish pallor that marked the slow drawing away of the blush of life. He thought, What had her life been like? It troubled him each time he thought about what a killer took away. Everything a person had and everything they might experience in the future—gone in an instant.
These were questions that he could only ask himself. Jamison sighed deeply. Wherever she was now, what was she thinking or was she thinking at all? He had asked himself the same question eight years before when cancer took his father. He hadn’t died a violent death but it had not been easy. Jamison felt a twinge of guilt remembering how little emotion he felt as he had looked down at his father, all of their past finally behind. But he hadn’t wished him suffering. At least the last thing his father had seen had been the faces of people who cared about him and not the face of a murderer. He pushed thoughts of his father to the back of his mind. He would do his best for her. It was all he could do. He turned slowly and walked away.
As he slid back into the front passenger seat of O’Hara’s car, Jamison said nothing. O’Hara started the car and only after they had been driving for a few minutes did O’Hara say anything. It wasn’t dramatic or profound. Jamison turned at the sound of the sharp expletive. “Shit.” O’Hara didn’t say anything else for an almost interminable thirty seconds. “Shee-it,” he repeated, turning the word into two syllables.
There was nothing to add. Both men knew that when people killed someone, except where they acted with scrupulously planned premeditation, they almost always left something. O’Hara always said that killing somebody and getting away with it was a lot easier than people thought. But the reality was that it was lucky for the cops that most murders were impetuous acts caused by any of the usual motives: anger, jealousy, lust, or revenge, with the killer more likely than not fortified with generous amounts of booze or drugs, sometimes both.
Except for those acting with deliberate intent, the other thing O’Hara had taught Jamison was that most killers panic—they don’t think clearly and they make mistakes. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t try to hide what they did, but it did mean that most of the time killers were acting quickly and without careful thought to how well they were covering their tracks.
Both of them understood that what applied to most people didn’t apply to this crime scene. This was an act done in cold blood, an act considered beforehand, weighed, evaluated, and then performed ruthlessly—the worst kind of murder, a passionless infliction of death. The kind of people who did that were rare but they were out there, and Jamison and O’Hara knew one was out there now, waiting and likely watching.
While they were driving to Terry Symes’s apartment a call came over the radio from Puccinelli. He didn’t say much because news organizations monitored police broadcasts. All he said was that he had a positive identification consistent with their discussion. He didn’t say how or why.
O’Hara didn’t ask any questions. If news people became aware of who the victim was they would stumble over themselves trying to be the first one to reach the parents and catch their reaction for the six o’clock news. Puccinelli was just making sure when the victim’s mother and father were confronted with the fact that their worst fears had been realized it would be in private. It was a small accommodation to their dignity, but it was all he could do for them at the moment.
Chapter 3
The white sheriff’s cruiser with gold-and-green stripes down the side was parked in front of Terry Symes’s apartment complex on a street lined with sycamores. The empty branches cut into the gray morning sky that blanketed the Central Valley of California almost daily during the winter and the thin winter skeletons of wood cast no shadow.
The apartment house was fairly typical for a woman Terry Symes’s age, nothing fancy but a step up from the places where many college students lived. There was substantial lighting around the building complex and there was also a single light outside each door. The victim’s apartment, now guarded by a sheriff’s deputy, had the only light that was still on.
Across the apartment complex courtyard were several clusters of young women and men encircling an older woman and man and silently watching the deputy.
The sheriff’s deputy met them half-way. He kept his voice low. “Just a warning. That’s the girl’s parents over there.” He pointed across the courtyard to the older couple and lowered his voice even more. “Is she the one they found by the canal?”
The deputy stepped back as O’Hara nodded circumspectly. “Too bad. I’ll stay here as long as you need me. I had the manager unlock the door so it’s open. I looked around the apartment. Not much to report. The keys were in an ashtray on a shelf by the door, so when she left she didn’t take them. Either she forgot them and walked out thinking she was coming back or whoever took her didn’t plan on her coming back. But somebody hit the lock button on the doorknob.” He stopped talking as the two older people walked across the apartment’s center lawn toward them.
The woman’s face had a pasty pallor. The only color was in the puffiness around her red-rimmed eyes from crying. She was going gray at the temples and her hair was lank and uncombed but her eyes were wide open, expectant. Jamison was relieved when O’Hara brushed past him as the couple approached. Neither of them wanted to be the one to turn her terror-filled apprehension into hopeless grief. Her husband following closely behind her had a look of profound sadness. “Are you police? Do you know what happened to Terry?” she asked O’Hara, instinctively picking the older man.
The investigator’s voice took on a gentle quality, “Ma’am, we’re with the district attorney’s office and we’re doing some follow-up to the missing person report I believe you filed.”
The question came back with more insistence, “Do you know what happened to my daughter?” Her eyes were pleading. Jamison could tell that O’Hara didn’t want to keep her waiting, although he knew the older detective more than anything hated being the one who took away the hope. But it was Puccinelli’s case.
“There’s a detective assigned and he should be here any minute. Meanwhile maybe you could answer some questions for us?”
The mother grabbed at O’Hara, pulling at his jacket with quick birdlike motions. “Our daughter called us every day. She didn’t call Saturday or Sunday. I thought maybe she was out somewhere,” she said, turning to Jamison. “You know, on a date or with friends? When she didn’t call Sunday I drove over and the manager let me in. Her car is still parked in the back. I knew she wouldn’t just not call, so I called the police. The policeman—he said to give it another day, that this often happens. He looked around inside but there wasn’t anything. Nothing was gone—except her.” She waited for some kind of response.
“Was the porch light on when you got here or did you turn it on for some reason?”
“It was on. Terry turned it on at nigh
t and she turned it off in the morning. She always did that. She was . . . she was always afraid of the dark, from the time she was little.” The mother gave a wan smile as if she was divulging a little family secret.
Jamison took a closer look at the door. There was a peephole and no sign of forced entry.
As if intuiting Jamison’s thoughts, Mrs. Symes offered, “My daughter always kept the door locked and the chain attached on the inside.” Jamison nodded. That answered one of his questions: Why would Terry Symes let anyone in?
Just at that moment Puccinelli arrived. Jamison sensed O’Hara’s relief. He felt it himself. O’Hara stepped back to make room for Pooch. “Mr. and Mrs. Symes, this is Detective Art Puccinelli.”
Acknowledging the two men from the DA’s office, Pooch reached out with his hand and put it on Mrs. Symes’s shoulder. “Ah, Mr. and Mrs. Symes, is there a place with some privacy where we can talk?”
When Puccinelli and the parents were far enough away Jamison asked, “Bill, if he took her from here, then either she let him in because she knew who he was or she wasn’t worried about who he was. Either way, she had some reason not to fear him.”
“Or she did the one thing young women are told not to do—open the door to a stranger.” O’Hara’s fingers slowly stroked his upper lip. Jamison could hear the hiss of air escaping through O’Hara’s teeth. “We’re not going to find anything here. I can tell you that right now.”
They kept their eyes on the door while the wailing moan of Terry Symes’s mother echoed throughout the courtyard, the wrenching cry of grief that sounds the same in every language. Once you hear it, you never forget it.
Chapter 4
The bright lights in the University Hospital morgue always seemed to make the place feel even colder to Jamison, leaching the color out of everything in the room, including the institutional green tile and linoleum covering the walls and floor. It didn’t help that the temperature was kept down or, as Jamison wryly commented, they certainly weren’t trying to keep any of the “guests” warm. And then there was the smell, the everpresent faint miasma of death that ventilation could not seem to erase.
Dr. Sam Gupta had already begun his examination of the body of Terry Symes when Puccinelli, Jamison, and O’Hara arrived. Gupta, a short, very dark middle-aged man of Indian descent whose accent bore the lilt of his native India smiled as they walked in. A brush of gray hair circled the middle of his head, sticking out of the surgical cap he usually wore to cover the baldness. He had been doing autopsies for over twenty years and everyone appreciated his medical expertise, if not his efforts at humor. “So I am guessing a knife was used?” He then laughed at his own morbid observation of the obvious. O’Hara gritted his teeth. Puccinelli simply shook his head. Jamison understood the dark humor of the autopsy room and gave Gupta the benefit of a strained grin.
No matter how many times Jamison saw bodies stretched out on stainless steel tables, it jolted him. Perhaps it was the sterility of it or, as he once told O’Hara, the personal violation involved as a bunch of strangers photograph and poke the corpse, and then open the body with the same deference that you would give to a can of tuna. By the time the pathologist was ready to do a post-mortem examination, a “post” they called it, the body had been picked over by technicians removing anything that might be worth looking at. Hairs were removed along with any fibers or debris. Then the deceased was washed down so the pathologist could see what he or she was looking at or for.
Terry Symes’s body reflected starkly against the polished stainless steel of the autopsy table. The pronounced lividity on her body had finally darkened to a purplish hue, painted down her side in the bruised tone of pooled blood that death settled on everyone allowed to lie for long periods. Jamison stared at the ugly red slash that opened half her body. He couldn’t help thinking how cold she looked lying there, her lips almost colorless, her eyes now shut, and her body still.
Puccinelli directed the sheriff’s identification bureau technician to begin taking pictures from different angles around the autopsy table, the tableau a still life of cold flesh and glinting stainless steel.
A man dressed in hospital greens came through the swinging door while Gupta was pointing out various areas he thought should be photographed. The man stood watching for a moment with detached clinical interest before Gupta said, “Ah, Dr. St. Claire, there you are.” Gupta turned to the investigative team. “This is one of the anesthesiologists who does lab work down the hall. He occasionally likes to scrub in.”
St. Claire glanced in Jamison’s direction. “I was here when Dr. Gupta did the autopsy on the slit throat.”
Realizing he meant Maria Ventana, the first of this killer’s victims, Jamison was rankled. He remembered that another doctor had come in, but he had been wearing a surgical mask and Jamison hadn’t focused on him at the time. And while it wasn’t uncommon for medical staff to appear and observe autopsies it disturbed him when doctors didn’t describe people by their name, only by their disease or by the wound that had taken a person’s life. Ventana was a slit throat so maybe that made Symes an evisceration. But Jamison understood that was how the staff on this unit maintained their detachment while they performed what always unfairly struck him as butcher’s work.
In some respects Jamison realized he wasn’t much different. Frequently he forgot victim’s names, the images of the crimes becoming the identity of the victim in his mind. As for his initial revulsion at detectives and medical observers eating pizza during an autopsy, he had now learned that in his business, you ate when you could because you might not get another opportunity for hours.
Gupta’s voice jolted Jamison back to the present when he asked Dr. St. Claire to reach under Symes’s body, turning her slightly as Gupta ran his gloved fingers down her spine. St. Claire glanced at Jamison briefly and then spoke while he pushed against Symes’s back. “I do some work down here with dogs, anesthetic reactions, and that sort of thing. The synergistic effects of the heroin and barbiturate interest me.” Then he added, as if he had perhaps made an inappropriate assumption, “If that’s what killed her like the others. Guess we don’t know yet?” St. Claire looked up at Dr. Gupta who acknowledged that the body was properly positioned, and then he held out his hand in Jamison’s direction. “Alex St. Claire,” he added with a trace of a British accent.
St. Claire must have picked up on the hesitation as Jamison looked at the outstretched hand. “Sorry.” He peeled a glove off. “You a detective? Don’t worry, I washed. It’s Dr. Gupta you have to worry about, not me.” Gupta’s laugh was a clear sign that he didn’t take offense. Jamison finally took St. Claire’s hand. He was surprised at the firmness of the grip.
Gupta explained, “Mr. Jamison is with the district attorney’s office. He’s a prosecutor.” He nodded toward O’Hara and Puccinelli. “These two are policemen.”
Keeping his eyes on Gupta as the pathologist made a deep incision allowing further opening of the chest cavity, St. Claire asked Jamison, “A prosecutor? You handle cases like this?”
“Yeah, I handle major-crimes-against-person cases, take them to trial.”
Gupta interrupted. “Dr. St. Claire, would you mind doing the blood draw? I need three vials.”
Smiling as he looked at Jamison, St. Claire said, “Excuse me.” He turned back toward Gupta and slipped his glove back on. “Of course. Let me get some tubes.” Jamison started to say something about preserving the chain of custody but Gupta was right there, and he nodded, and waved his gloved hand at Jamison. Normally each person who handled evidence was considered “in the chain of custody.” Their names would be recorded on the tag attached to the bagged evidence or in some way so that questions couldn’t be raised about mishandling or contamination—legitimate questions, anyway. Defense attorneys never seemed to run out of things to question and implications to cast.
Jamison had never been a defense attorney and he had no inclination to be one. But that was what his father had been, and through the years
growing up he had heard all the justifications for what his father did. Jamison just couldn’t see himself sitting next to a child molester or drug dealer and rationalizing that he was upholding the Constitution. But he also knew that he couldn’t separate what his father did from what his father was in his eyes, so he knew he couldn’t be objective and he couldn’t tar all defense attorneys with the same brush.
He watched as St. Claire performed the blood draw and carefully placed the vials in a shallow stainless steel tray. Gupta would initial them to document the chain of custody.
Gupta’s initial conclusion was no surprise. Symes was already dead when the slashing wound was delivered, just as Ventana and Johnson. The mutilating wound on each victim, including Symes, was simply a vicious act done to horrify. Without more tests he said he couldn’t be sure, but Gupta suspected that they would find the same toxic stew of heroin and barbiturates in her system that was in the bodies of the other two victims. He also found a small injection site in the cut on Symes’s throat and concluded that was the likely site of injection of the heroin-and-barbiturate mixture. There was bruising at the base of Symes’s head indicating that she had been forcibly grabbed. It was identical to the type of bruising that had been found on the back of the necks of the other two women. Other than that, Gupta had nothing.
Disappointed because they had made so little progress, Jamison was filled with frustration and feelings of impotence. Every hour they failed to find this murderer was another hour that some other young woman walked in the shadow of her own death.
Chapter 5
November, 2005
One week later
Tenaya County, California
The headlights of the car moved with measured familiarity down the pitch-black road, the asphalt a washed-out white in the bright beams, dissolving to silver in the distance. The radio carried a news clip from a press conference. The driver reached over to find music, brushing back the cascade of light brown hair that fell across her face as she turned her head. She didn’t want to hear news. Politics was for her father. She was still young. She wanted to hear the sounds of voices singing about life and the anticipation of the next moment. Life was what she was all about.
Fractured Justice Page 3
