by Mike Markel
“We’re not sure, sir. She was attacked. We haven’t determined the details yet.”
He leaned over so he could take a handkerchief from his pants pocket. He dabbed at his eyes and blew his nose. “I’m very sorry, Detectives,” he said, swallowing hard, trying to get his breathing under control. “I’m going to go home now, tell my wife and my son.”
I nodded. “We’d like to stop by your house early this afternoon if we could. Talk to you a little more.”
“Yes, of course.” He stood and walked over to his desk. “I understand.” He took a piece of note paper from a leather holder and wrote down his address.
“Between one and two o’clock. Will that work for you, sir?”
He nodded and began to sob again.
Ryan said, “We’re very sorry for your loss, Provost.”
“Our condolences, Provost Gerson,” I said. “We’ll stop by early this afternoon.” As we turned and left his office, I looked back at him. He was standing next to his desk, his head bowed, his hands covering his face, sobbing out of control.
Even out by the secretaries, I could still hear him crying. They looked confused and concerned, their eyes locked on me and Ryan as we walked out of the office suite.
Snow had been falling for a half-hour, enough for the parking lot to show a thin white layer broken up by crisscrossing black tread marks. Another half-hour and the tread marks would be white. I got in the cruiser and turned the engine over as Ryan popped the trunk, grabbed a plastic scraper with a brush on the other end, and cleaned off the windshield and back window.
“That wasn’t all that much fun, was it?” I said.
“Not that much, no.”
“Ever see someone get that busted up when it isn’t family?”
Ryan raised an eyebrow and shook his head. “Looked genuine to me.”
The temperature was getting up near freezing, fogging up the windshield. I turned on the wipers and the defroster so I could see. Ten minutes later, we were in the chief’s office.
I said, “The Jane Doe from this morning?”
“Yeah?” The chief looked up from his screen. Robert Murtaugh was about fifty, dark hair going salty. Strong jaw, strong shoulders, strong guy all around. He liked us to keep him in the loop. When he took over less than a year ago, he said to us, if the door is open, walk right in. And that’s the way he’s been. He doesn’t jerk us around or mess up our investigations. He’s a real cop, the best I’ve worked for. “She got a name?”
Ryan looked down at his notebook. “Maricel Salizar,” he said. “A Philippines national, an exchange student living with the acting provost at the university, a man named Albert Gerson.”
“He’s been informed?”
“He just ID’ed her from the photo,” I said.
“How’d he take it?”
I looked at Ryan, who said, “Really bad. Fell apart.”
The chief nodded his head. “How much do we know about Gerson?”
“He’s the head of the foreign-language department,” I said. “Acting provost till the summer, when they hire his replacement. That’s all we’ve got so far.”
“I think he’s LDS,” Ryan said.
The chief and I turned to him. “How’d you get that?” I said.
“I was looking at his bookshelves while we were interviewing him.”
“He’s got LDS bookshelves?” I said.
“The shelves themselves seemed nondenominational.” Ryan smiled a little. “A bunch of the books were LDS.”
The chief said, “That say anything?”
“No.” Ryan shrugged his shoulders. “Just thought I’d tell you.”
“I think we need to learn more about Dr. Gerson,” the chief said.
“You don’t know him?” I said.
“No, I know his predecessor. Good guy. I’m going to call the president now, tell him this is Priority One for us.” The chief sat here, his brow furrowed. After a moment, he said, “This kind of case sends out ripples all over the place. The university has to publish its own crime data. If she was killed on campus, it goes in that report. Plus, there’s the complication of a foreign national.” He looked up at me. “Do you have any questions?”
“No, Chief,” I said.
“Okay, get to it. Keep me informed at every stage. This is going to be high profile.”
“Absolutely.”
We left the chief’s office and made our way back to our desks. I said to Ryan, “You know Gerson from your church?”
“I’ve seen him. He’s the bishop of another ward in my stake.”
“Him blubbering like that, that surprise you?”
He turned to me, a grin starting. “Karen, are you asking whether Mormons are a blubbering folk?”
“Don’t break my balls,” I said. “You know what I’m asking you.”
Ryan enjoys teasing me about my winning combination of ignorance and inarticulateness. “It doesn’t surprise me that an LDS academic like that would be big into student-exchange programs. He might have been a missionary, probably overseas. But his reaction? I don’t know. Obviously, he felt responsible for her well-being. That could be all we were seeing.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s certainly one possibility.” But it wasn’t right at the top of my list.
Chapter 3
“Here’s what I have so far.” Harold Breen lumbered over to the long table that ran the length of the wall in his lab. He picked up a notebook and flipped a few pages. “She was stabbed three times, single-sided blade less than an inch across, in the abdomen. The wounds would fit in a three-inch circle, so I’m guessing the killer and the victim were in close proximity and he stabbed her in quick succession.”
“Explain,” I said.
“If he stabs her,” Harold said, “then she falls back and he comes at her again, and then a third time, the three wounds would be farther apart. Being bunched up like that, it’s consistent with the two of them being very close to each other. If he pulls the knife out, and the handle is very close to his body, and he sticks it in again, it’s going to go in very close to the first wound.”
“So the two of them were struggling before he stabbed her,” I said.
“That’s my guess,” Harold said. “I might be able to tell from the internal damage that he didn’t get the blade all the way in, but he pulled it out and stuck it in again.”
“If one of the wounds is much deeper than the others?”
“That’s right,” he said. “But if they’re all the same approximate depth, then it might just be a short blade.”
I knew working out these details was probably going to waste everyone’s time. Harold didn’t have enough information yet—and there was a good chance he never would—to explain exactly what happened to Maricel. If she struggled with the guy or didn’t have a chance to, that didn’t tell me anything. Didn’t tell me whether it was a man or a woman, or if she knew her killer. Didn’t tell me anything useful. But I owed it to her to get the whole thing in my head, just in case it turned out to be important.
I hated Harold’s lab. It always smelled bad. If there had been a recent delivery, the smell was likely to be a funky cocktail of BO, an eye-watering homeless-guy mold, or the old reliable: the ground-in piss/shit combo. If there hadn’t been a recent delivery, it was a stomach-clawing mixture of alcohol and formaldehyde. Today it was just the chemicals. But add in a temperature in the low sixties, the echoey tiled walls and floors with drains, the annoying hum and clatter of the HVAC system, the shiny stainless-steel tables with squishy red and purple body parts blossoming in trays, the stiffs with their ribs sticking straight up like a raw rack of lamb—the place just seemed like central receiving for victims of Bad Luck and Trouble.
One thing for sure: even if Harold and Robin gave me and Ryan all the information we needed to pick up the killer this afternoon, there wasn’t any undoing what had happened to Maricel Salizar. We’d bag her up, and the catatonic family would accept her remains and spend the rest of their
lives wishing she’d died old.
But she was very young. I walked over to the table where she was lying nude. She was a beautiful young woman, still almost a girl. Her copper skin was now mottled with a sickly gray. Her hair was thick and straight, black, parted down the middle. Her nose was long and thin. The ears small, each with a single piercing hole. Shoulders narrow and perfectly symmetrical. Arms slender, tapering down to tiny wrists and thin fingers with bright red nail polish, cracked and chipped. I glanced down at her toes, which she had also painted.
Her breasts were pointing straight up, too small and light to be pulled down to the sides. She didn’t have an ounce of fat on her, not above her elbows or in her midsection, which showed the arc of her ribs.
Her belly button was pierced, but there was no metal in it. Beneath it, the public hair, shaved to a straight line, an inch across, but with a few days’ growth on either side, led down to the rise of her pubic bone and her vagina. Her legs were thin, but the thigh and calf muscles were well-defined.
The three stab wounds, now a washed-out pink with raised edges, were each rounded on one end and pointed on the other. The blade was facing down as he inserted it. The wounds were small, but apparently big enough.
“And she was dunked in the river, though we can’t say yet for how long.” Harold’s words startled me. “So we don’t know whether she died from the stab wounds or drowning. When I open her up I should be able to call that by looking at where the knife went and by checking her lungs. But there were no GSW or ligatures. I don’t see any defensive wounds, no tissue under her fingernails, but it could have been washed away in the river.” Harold turned to Robin.
She looked at her clipboard before she started to speak. “She had some river crud on her skin under her clothes. The sand all over her back, ass, and the backs of her legs says he stripped her, dragged her into the water, dragged her back onto land, laid her down, then dressed her. We did a rape kit on her. She wasn’t raped, didn’t have any fresh semen in her.”
“Any thoughts on how many people we’re talking about?” I said.
“I think it’s only one,” Robin said, “because we’ve got the tracks where her ankles dragged in the dirt, like it was one guy dragging her down and back up. Plus, both of her ankles are kinda beat up, with sand in the abrasions. If it was two guys, they’d have lifted her up and moved her faster.”
“Can you tell if it was a male or female did it?”
“Definitely a guy,” Robin said.
“Yeah?”
“Her thong was on backwards.”
Ryan was nodding his head. I looked at him. “What’re you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything,” he said. “Just that Robin’s right: that’s a clue.”
“You know a lot about women’s underwear?”
He wore a mocking expression of regret. “Almost nothing. Except for my mom’s and my sisters’ underwear in the washer and hanging on the line, I’ve only seen one woman’s underwear, and there’s no way you can put that on backwards. I’m just agreeing with Robin: only a guy would have trouble with a thong.”
“Okay, Robin, you said she had a little cash?”
She looked down at her clipboard. “Twenty-three bucks, folded up in her left front jeans pocket.”
“No ID?”
She shook her head. “No ID. I checked with the crew out at the scene, after they did the search.”
“No phone?”
“No phone.”
“Anything else?”
“Just this.” She walked over to the table against the wall and lifted a plastic bag out of the evidence box with Maricel’s effects. It was a navy blue bandanna with clubs, like you see on playing cards, in white, around the perimeter.
Ryan was looking at it quizzically. “Let me take a picture of that.” He took out his phone and shot it.
“You recognize it?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said, his brows furrowed. “I think maybe it’s the colors of the Latin Vice Lords.”
Robin said, “The Hispanic gang?”
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Let’s ask Hernandez in Anti-Gang,” I said. “He’s worked with the Latins for years.”
Ryan wrote in his notebook. “You got it.”
I turned back to Robin. “You had a chance yet to see if there’s any prints on any of this stuff?”
She shook her head. “Not yet, but I wouldn’t be optimistic. There’s no surfaces here that would take a print. And bobbing around in the river probably didn’t help. But I’ll see what I can do.”
“Okay, thanks.” I turned to face the ME. “Anything else, Harold?”
“No, I’ll start the autopsy soon as I can.”
“Today?”
“Today,” he said.
Ryan and I left the lab. I took a deep breath to see if I’d escaped the horrible smell of the chemicals, but it was still in my nose. I held my sleeve up to my nose. It was in my blouse, too.
“What kind of guy stabs a girl, hauls her out to the river, strips her down, then drowns her for good measure?”
“I’m guessing that’s not a rhetorical question,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m just saying, I think you’d like us to try to figure that out.”
I stopped and looked at him. He kept walking a couple more steps, then paused and turned toward me, an innocent-little-boy expression on his face. “Sorry?” he said.
“That’s right, Poindexter,” I said. “I think we should try to figure that out.”
“Shouldn’t we get back to our desks, then, and begin the investigation?”
I shook my head. “Glad I didn’t have any brothers.”
He smiled. “I’m glad I had a bunch of sisters.”
Chapter 4
“Ryan, did you put in for authorization to grab her phone records?” In a homicide, our access to the victim’s phone records is automatic.
“I’ll take care of it.” He took a swallow from a bottle of water.
“Who should I call at the university?”
“There’s probably a dean of students.” He looked up at me, and I nodded. He turned back to the screen, clicked the mouse a few times, then picked up a pen, wrote a name and phone number on a slip of paper, and passed it across his desk to me.
“Mary Dawson,” I said. “I’m guessing that’s Dean Dawson?” He nodded.
I dialed her number and hit Speaker. “Can I speak to Dean Dawson, please? This is Detective Karen Seagate, Rawlings Police Department.”
“One moment, please,” the secretary said.
I whispered to Ryan, “Do you know if the chief’s already called the president?”
He shook his head. “No idea.”
“This is Mary,” she said on the phone. I guess a dean of students is supposed to be approachable, but using the first name surprised me.
“Dean Dawson, this is Detective Karen Seagate, Rawlings Police Department. I’ve got some bad news about a student I need to tell you.”
She sighed, like we’d arrested another kid for pissing on a statue. “Go ahead.”
“We recovered the body of one of your students this morning.”
“Oh, my God.” Then there was silence.
“Yeah, I’m sorry. Her name was Maricel Salizar. She was an exchange student, living with the provost’s family.”
“Al Gerson?” She paused. “Does he know?” Her voice was concerned, like she knew him.
“Yes,” I said. “He does know.”
“God,” she said.
I looked over at Ryan, who was studying his screen. He could listen and paw around the university site at the same time. He was young enough to multitask. I’m a monotasker, at best.
“We’d like to come on over and talk with you about this, get some information. Can we stop by now?”
“Yes, of course.” Mary Dawson’s tone was official now. Cops were coming over. She’d be prepared. “Let me just
rearrange some things. I’ll see you in ten minutes? Admin Building, room 215?”
The skies were a dull gray, not a patch of blue visible, as Ryan and I got in the cruiser. The snow had stopped, leaving less than an inch on the ground. If that was it for today, we’d be lucky. Nasty-looking sky like this, we could get two or three more little episodes today. Or it could start and just keep going till we had a foot and a half and people put on their cross-country skis and began sliding across the streets downtown.
We parked near the spot where we’d left the cruiser on our first trip to the Administration Building earlier this morning. Now the snow in the lot was covered with white crunchy tire tracks.
We took the stairs, wet with dirty gray footprints, to the second floor, found room 215, and walked in.
The dean of students’ suite was lower rent than the president’s, but with an outer office big enough for a secretary, a bunch of mismatched file cabinets, and a Formica-covered conference table, it was still a cut above the typical faculty digs.
Mary Dawson stood in the doorway of her private office in the suite. “Detectives,” she said, with a crimped, pained expression. She was about fifty, with bright eyes, skin a little dry and blotchy, no makeup or jewelry, big multi-colored plastic-framed glasses. She wore an outfit she’d probably dismiss as “these old things”: a unisex tan gabardine blouse, brown corduroy slacks, feminine but well-worn, and lace-up rubber and leather boots that came up over her ankles. Except for her unconvincing auburn hair a little too long for her age, she looked like she was easing comfortably into the post-hot phase of her life.
“This way, please.” She led us into her office.
There was another woman standing there. “This is Christine Hardtke,” Mary Dawson said, “our Director of International Programs. Christine oversees our study-abroad programs, as well as the International Students Association.”
Christine Hardtke said “Pleased,” as she nodded at me and Ryan. For some reason, she didn’t extend her hand, which I’m fine with, especially now, at the height of snot season.
