Code 61 ch-4

by Donald Harstad

  As we placed Edie on the stretcher, we saw that the knife was stuck to her right thigh by the congealed blood. Congealed, but not yet clotted. We took photos, made another note, and then Hester carefully pulled it free. I got a paper bag out of my camera case, and we placed the knife in that.

  “Your camera bag reminds me of my purse,” she said.

  I snapped three shots of the interior of the tub. The blood under where her buttocks had been was very apparent. It even showed a slight wrinkle pattern from the flattened flesh.

  Edie couldn't have weighed more than 125 pounds alive, and having lost all that blood volume, she was down to about a hundred or less. The blanched and flattened areas of her buttocks were very obvious, the result of her weight pressing her into the tub. Her mouth, which had been hanging open as she sat there, now looked as if she were about to cough. Interestingly, her eyes no longer had that “alive” appearance that had startled me before. Must have been the light, that first time. Whatever it was, it was a relief.

  Now I was able to get a really good look at the wound in her neck. “Deep” hardly did it justice. But it was a cut, all right. Even, smooth edges.

  I took several more photos before she was finally covered.

  While Borman and the two attendants maneuvered the gurney to get Edie out of the room, Hester and I had one of those fast chats that, if you hadn't known we were talking about the blood in the wrong place, you'd never have guessed.

  “You caught that, too?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Conclusive?”

  “Possibly. Very possibly. But maybe not.”

  “Really?” It looked pretty conclusive to me.

  “Reflex lunge or hip thrust.”

  “Ah.” Well, sure, she could have spasmodically arched her back, for example, and then sat back down in the blood she was leaving. Except… “No fountain, though.” I said that because there surely should have been secondary evidence that there had been a forceful gush or spurt, or something to deluge the tub area sufficiently for blood to flow under her when she might have moved. Something that very likely would have squirted past the perimeter of the tub, and onto the floor and maybe even the walls. Especially since the knife had been pulled free.

  “True.” She grimaced. “Not enough data.”

  “Think it could have slipped free? I'd say pulled out. You agree?” I was referring to the knife.

  “Agree. I think it would tend to stay in.”

  She finished her sentence as we emerged into the hall to help get Edie down the stairs.

  We'd zipped up the white body bag, covered the lump that had been Edie with two blue blankets, and strapped her tightly to the stretcher with all three belts. We had to lift her and the stretcher to about shoulder level to clear the banister at the first landing, but from then on it was a piece of cake. We went by the parlor, and the three residents saw her. They followed us out to the hearse, and watched while we pushed the stretcher into the back.

  “Remember,” cautioned Hester, “there will be an autopsy done there. Under no circumstance is she to be embalmed until we say so. There will be a forensic pathologist up shortly.” There had been an instance several years ago when a funeral home had embalmed a murder victim before the pathologist got there. Ever after that, the officer always made very certain that the funeral home understood the situation.

  “Yes, ma'am,” said the elder of the attendants. He was lucky. Hester hates that term, and if it had been the younger who'd said it, he would likely have had to ride down the hill in the back with Edie.

  As the hearse drove off and we turned back in toward the house, I felt this familiar urge. I really wanted a cigarette, and this was the stage in an investigation where I'd normally have one. I looked up toward the porch. The three looked pretty dejected.

  Toby spoke up. I was beginning to think he was compelled. He was smoking again. “Why do you need an autopsy? Isn't it pretty obvious what killed her?”

  Hester took that one, while I tried to smoke his cigarette vicariously. “There's a big difference between 'pretty obvious' and certain,” she said.

  “Why are you coming back into the house? Aren't you done?” There was no malice in Toby or his questions. Just the same sort of question you always heard from the one kid in class who always had his hand in the air. Questions designed to focus attention on the asker, not the subject.

  “Ask us again in five or ten hours,” I said. “In the meantime, we can't leave the scene unprotected, and the best way to protect it is to have one or more of us here.”

  “Oh. But, why-”

  Hester cut him off. “Done with your written statement yet?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then, would you be kind enough to show me just where everybody's bedroom is?”

  Toby, being the compulsively cooperative sort, immediately launched into his task. “And the kitchen,” she continued, as they headed up the stairs.

  In the meantime, I sat down with Melissa and Hanna to have what turned out to be an interesting but pretty fruitless chat about Edie that lasted nearly an hour. Regrettably, they both smoked, as well.

  Melissa and Hanna seemed quite a bit more self-possessed than they had appeared even an hour before. A good sign, and I thought it was due to seeing Edie leave, and the relief that seems to come to the household when the body is finally removed from the premises.

  We walked into the parlor. Hanna offered coffee, which I accepted. As I sat on the couch, I felt a jab in my hip. The copy of the Freiberg Tribune and Dispatch that I'd put in my back pocket. I pulled it out and laid it on the coffee table in front of me. Melissa reached out for it.

  “Do you mind? Is it today's?”

  “Yep, it is. Feel free.”

  She sort of browsed through it as we sat and talked. Interesting.

  Neither of them could offer much insight into Edie's character, at least not much that I didn't already know from Lamar. She did have a daughter, about three years old, who lived with Edie's mother. Edie didn't like her mother at all, and according to both Melissa and Hanna, with good reason.

  Edie had lived, or had been living, at the Mansion longer than any of the rest of them, and she was the one that the owner would talk with if anything needed to be taken care of. According to Melissa, it wasn't anything particularly special, but Edie was a pretty reliable person, and could be counted on to attend to things.

  Edie didn't appear to have been noticeably depressed the last few weeks, and hadn't shown any remarkable signs of mood changes. Both acknowledged they had no idea why Edie would take her own life, although they both thought she had plenty of reason to be depressed. Hanna shared the fact that she, herself, had attempted suicide once before, with what turned out to be something less than a fatal overdose of her sister's phenobarbital.

  So, my questions about Edie's emotional state had elicited suicide-oriented thinking among others in the household, with the assumption I was on a suicide track. They seemed very sincere in their efforts to help, and almost apologetic that they hadn't observed any of what they termed “suicide triggers.” I did think it a little unusual that both of them were that familiar with the subject of suicide. I said as much.

  “We've read about it,” said Melissa, “because some of our friends have been really depressed sometimes. We worry about them.”

  “But Edie didn't fit in that category?” I asked.

  “No. I mean, there's depressed, and then there's depressed,” said Melissa. “Things not going right, that can depress you, but it's something you get over. Lover leaving, grandparent dying, that sort of thing. You know. But, the kind of thing where you just have to end it, that's much deeper, and much more prolonged. Oppressive, always there.”

  “Okay.”

  “I'm afraid I'm not saying this very well,” she said, and looked toward Hanna.

  “It feeds on itself,” she said, helping Melissa. “It controls you. The suicide kind.”

  “But Edie didn't sho
w any sign of that?”

  She hadn't, and according to them, Edie really seemed to have her life under control. They were both sorry they hadn't been more help.

  What they'd actually done was to inadvertently add another bit of weight to the side of the scales that was labeled “murder.”

  “So, then,” I said, “let's just say for the sake of it that it wasn't a suicide. Do either of you know of anybody who might be, say, an enemy; that would want to kill Edie?”

  Absolutely not. They were both in complete and emphatic agreement on that point.

  I persevered. “Anybody threaten her? Been bothering her? Harassing her?”

  “Just her lame excuse for a mother,” said Melissa. “That's been happening for years, I guess. Not new. Why? Do you really think she didn't commit suicide?”

  I shrugged. “We have to treat every unattended death as a homicide, until we're sure it isn't.”

  “Sure,” said Melissa.

  “Okay,” I said, “now, I don't want you to take this in the wrong way at all. But I'd like to know if either of you could tell me if Edie was doing any dope, or alcohol, or anything even prescription, that could affect her moods.”

  “Is that really your business?” asked Melissa. “Not to be taken in the wrong way, of course.”

  “Fair question,” I said. “The answer is, probably wasn't my business yesterday. Now that she's dead, and my problem for now, yep, it is.”

  “Aren't you going to do a blood test? I mean, won't you know from that?”

  “Sure. But it won't be back for a few days, and when it arrives, it only gives the chemical information, not the substance. You know… it might say acetaminophen, but not a brand name. So if she took Tylenol for a headache, say, it would be a help to know that. That sort of thing.” I was also fishing for a known substance, although I didn't say that. A blood scan for everything cost a fortune, and took forever. You had to give them parameters.

  “Oh,” said Hanna. “Oh, sure. Well, I know she'd drink a beer now and then, maybe some wine. No dope…?” and she looked at Melissa.

  It was hard not to grin.

  “She smoked clove cigarettes,” said Melissa quickly.

  “That's it.”

  “Okay,” I said, making a note. “You do know what those are?” Melissa wasn't being insulting, she was just a sincere twenty-something talking to a fifty-something. Usually, the only people my age she'd be likely to know were her parents, aunts, and uncles.

  I smiled. “Either of your parents cops?”

  “What?”

  “I strongly suspect that your folks and I have vastly different, oh… What? Life experiences?”

  “My father's a minister and my mother is a music teacher.” She paused as it dawned on her. “Oh.” A small smile started forming on her lips.

  “Right. I think we definitely move in different circles.” The small smile grew larger, into a full-fledged one. “I'd say so.”

  “And the real point's this: If she did occasional dope here, that's something we have to know. If there's a fair concentration in her fluids, and she did it here, that's one thing. If there's the same concentration and she didn't do it here, that's another thing altogether.”

  Both the young women looked away from me as soon as I said that. I attributed it to the fact that there was probably at least some dope in the house, even as we spoke.

  The phone in the hallway rang, and Hanna answered it. It was for me. As I left the room, I could hear both young women talking to each other in low tones. My best guess was that they were discussing narcotics.

  I answered the phone. “Houseman.”

  “Hey, no kidding?” Sally, at the office.

  “Yeah. What's up?”

  “There was a man here, came to talk with Lamar. Lamar said for you to talk with him instead, because he was going to have some family things to attend to.”

  “Sure, okay.” Great. Not that I didn't understand, but I really didn't need the distractions, either. Ah, well. I could never say that Lamar didn't delegate.

  “Man's name is”-she paused just an instant, so that I knew she was reading from her notes-“William Chester, from Milwaukee.”

  My first thought was a pathologist that Harry had contacted regarding the death of Randy Baumhagen, late boyfriend of Alicia Meyer. “What does he do? Or want?”

  “Beats me. He looks pretty straight arrow, though. About forty, but that's not all bad. Nice eyes. Slender. Still has all his hair… ”

  “That's not quite what I wanted.”

  She laughed. “I don't know. Not an attorney, that's for sure. I asked Lamar that, 'cause I knew you'd just shit-pardon the expression-if we sent somebody like an attorney up there.”

  “You sent him here?”

  “Well, to Freiberg. He'll get hold of Byng or somebody, and connect up with you later on. Not at the Mansion, though.”

  “Okay.” That was a relief. “Anything else?”

  “Nope. Lamar just said to let you know. He's over at his sister's, I think.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, and guess what?”

  I was too tired to play. “Tell me.”

  “I'm assigned to duty as a reserve tonight, up there! Isn't that just so cool?”

  I grinned to myself. “It's cool. Just remember to bring cookies.”

  At that point, Hester and Toby came back. Hester was holding a legal pad, making the final touches to a diagram of the second floor. She handed it to me. According to her diagram, Edie's room was the first one at the top of the stairs, on the right. The northeast corner. The next room on her side of the hall was Toby's; the room after that was Hanna's. Across the hall from Edie was Melissa in the southeast corner, then Holly, known as Huck, and then Kevin.

  “They're all about the same,” she said. “Basically thirty-six-foot by eighteen-foot rooms, with a dividing wall for the individual bathrooms at about ten feet from the end.”

  Like I said, it was a big house. Over a hundred feet long, and about forty-five feet wide.

  Hester handed me the pink copy of the “Seized Property” form, listing the knife from the tub. “It's from a set in the kitchen,” she said. “No doubt at all.”

  As they sat down, Melissa handed the copy of the Freiberg Tribune and Dispatch to Toby. “Seen this?”

  Toby looked a bit surprised, said he hadn't, and opened it up. He looked up at Melissa, rather startled.

  “That's freaky,” he said, mostly to her.

  I was curious. “What?”

  “The bit about Dracula,” he said. “Just floating outside the second-floor window, I mean. Wow.”

  “I'm sure he had help,” I said.

  Melissa joined in. “In what way?”

  “Oh,” I said conversationally, “I'd think a rope, for example.” I forced a chuckle. “He wasn't flying.”

  “Did you, you know, find a rope?” Her large eyes were very steady on mine.

  “No, but we found ringbolts.” I shrugged. “It's just a matter of the mechanics of the thing.”

  “I'm sure you'll find an explanation,” said Melissa.

  Hanna suddenly apologized for being a bad hostess, and asked if anyone else wanted coffee. We all did. We spent the next half hour discussing suicide, death, and how friends should deal with it. To me, it seemed that Hanna was by far the most affected by Edie's death. While she was telling Hester just how she'd found the body, I started to think about the possibilities we had. Somehow, it seemed to me that it just damned well shouldn't be this hard to determine the cause and method of death. What had we missed?

  Hester interjected a new item. “Did you know the whole third floor is sealed off?”

  “No.”

  “Yes. It's the owner's private apartment, and nobody can go there unless she's here. According to Toby, here.” She shrugged. “The doors to that floor are both locked, anyway. Keyed. New.”

  “That's right,” said Melissa. “We just never go up there unless Jessica's here.”

&
nbsp; Hester looked up toward the ceiling. “Must be a pretty damned big apartment.”

  The whole third floor would be about four thousand square feet. I could only agree.

  There's a rule of thumb in homicide investigations, whereby you either solve the murder in the first forty-eight hours, or the investigation will drag on for months before an arrest is made, if ever.

  It was beginning to look like we'd be lucky to know whether or not this was even a suicide in forty-eight hours.

  Then some people arrived who would irrevocably tip the scales.

  EIGHT

  Saturday, October 7, 2000

  14:50

  I could see, through the glazed entrance, three vehicles pulling up to the front of the house. One of our marked squads, being followed closely by a dark blue SUV that just had to belong to my favorite forensic pathologist, Dr. Steven Peters. Third in line was an older, silver-gray Plymouth Voyager. That one I didn't recognize.

  Since it was officially my crime scene, I went to the door with Hester, while Borman stayed with the three residents in the parlor. Although they were far from suspects at this point, it was always a good idea to have somebody about to gauge reactions, and to prevent any lengthy conversations. Just in case.

  Our squad had turned around, and the driver, Deputy Norm Jones, lowered his window and stuck out his head. “These guys live here.” He indicated the Voyager.

  “Right!” I looked at Hester. “Must be our residents who work on the boat.”

  “Good.”

  “Thanks, Norm,” I said. He waved, and headed back down the lane. That was one thing about this location: It was nice and easy to seal the place off and keep anybody but the invited out.

  I turned back toward the SUV, as Dr. Peters emerged. He shook hands with Hester and myself. “Two of my favorite officers,” he said, “who always manage to throw a challenge my way.”

  “This one,” I said, “may take the cake.”

  He glanced around. “Marvelous place here. I never knew it even existed.” Dr. Peters was from Iowa City, about a hundred miles south of us.