Unpunished

by Lisa Black

  Outside, the dog gave up, turned his back to them with an air of dismissal, and lay down, nose across its front paws.

  Some memory sparked to life in Stephanie’s head. “He argued with someone a few times last week. Always around seven o’clock or so, after dinner. I didn’t think it was Roger—when it’s him he says, ‘Look, Roger—’ a lot. But Bob was angry, that controlled kind of angry he’d get when his voice would get quieter instead of louder. Something about Wilson. . . .”

  “He was talking to someone named Wilson?”

  She frowned. “No, I think they were talking about someone named Wilson. I overheard bits and pieces and I wasn’t even paying attention. I figured it for more Herald drama, and I’ve got my own problems with work and the boys and running this house by myself, more or less. Bob thought everything he didn’t want to do was women’s work.”

  “Do you know anyone named Wilson? First or last?”

  “No.”

  “Any idea what they were arguing about? Even an impression?”

  She said no, but then added, “Bob said, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ more than once. It seemed like he said no, and that’s not true, and that sort of thing. I figured one of the reporters had been chasing some wild rumor he wanted Bob to print and Bob wouldn’t do it. They’re all trying to do investigative pieces these days, working on their own, since the paper can’t afford to pay actual investigative staff now. They figure if they break some huge scandal, win a Pulitzer, they’ll get the immunity idol and finally have job security. Nice theory.” She sipped tea that must have grown cold, her shock wearing off. “When can I plan the funeral for, what day? When will we have his . . . his body . . . back?”

  Riley gave Jack a glance. This part could get tricky. Then he informed Stephanie Davis that there were some questions to be answered about her husband’s death. Mainly that they believed it to be a deliberate act by someone other than her husband.

  If she had been surprised at the death, the idea of murder stunned her. “You mean he was killed?”

  Riley tried once more while her mind still reeled. “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted your husband dead?”

  She pinched the bridge of her nose and then, eyes still shut, waved her hand around with quick, chopping motions. “Wait, wait. You mean to tell me Bob was murdered? Someone murdered him?”

  “We have reason to believe that, yes, ma’am.”

  She stared at him, eyes wide, one hand covering her mouth in horror. All she said was, “I hope he wasn’t afraid.”

  Riley pressed. “Can you think of anyone who wanted your husband dead?”

  In a tiny voice she said, “Me.”

  Chapter 8

  Maggie rubbed one eye and noted that her coffee cup had again, mysteriously, gone dry. Were mice sneaking up and drinking from it while she stared at her computer screen? She hit Pause on the progress line and went for a refill, blinking as she left the dimmed video analysis room for the harsh fluorescent light of the lab.

  The crime lab, indeed, most of the building, rested under an early-morning calm before the bulk of the staff, cops, and, in other parts of the Justice Center, judges, lawyers, defendants, and reluctant jurors made their way in for a day’s work. Maggie’s boss, Denny, remained on leave following the birth of his third child. For reasons of seniority he had left Maggie in charge, a position she neither wanted nor cared for.

  It had been a relatively quiet few weeks with only an occasional drive-by shooting (shooting, not hitting) and one grow-house bust, but now that trend faltered. Josh had called in sick with a migraine, and Amy had gone straight to a smash-and-grab in Tower City. Maggie would be watching black-and-white images move around the screen until the ME’s office called with a time for the autopsy. She looked forward to the interruption. This kind of TV watching was not fun.

  Carol, the DNA analyst, came in armed for the day with a newspaper, homemade granola, two pairs of reading glasses in case she misplaced one, fresh pictures of grandchildren, and enough snacks to stock a Super Bowl party. And more coffee.

  “You look beat,” she said. Carol had long since appointed herself den mother of the forensics department, and had been especially solicitous to Maggie of late.

  “I’m tired because I had a call-out.” She filled in her coworker and finished by asking to see that day’s edition of the Herald. She hadn’t been home to get her own. Together they pored over the pages, trying to find something that might explain a man’s murder. Maggie read articles about the relationship of the city treasurer to a construction firm, the shortage of qualified applicants for math teachers in northern Ohio, and a lively debate over whether restaurants should have with-kids and without-kids sections just as they used to have smoking and nonsmoking.

  “That’s an idea whose time has come,” Carol said. “My husband keeps suggesting that we dine in strip clubs, because at least there won’t be any kids. I’m almost ready to take him up on it.”

  Maggie refolded the paper. Maybe Robert Davis’s murder had nothing to do with the paper and everything to do with Robert Davis. Or maybe it had to do with a story that had not yet been printed.

  Maybe anything, she said to herself, and went back to the video analysis room.

  * * *

  The small space did not live up to its grand title. It had originally been a supply closet, and later was chosen for the video equipment because it lacked windows. They kept the lights low since Josh insisted it made the videos easier to see, though Maggie thought its only effect was to make it easier to fall asleep.

  The Herald’s surveillance system gave her a grid of twelve camera angles, eight entrances, two parking lots, the loading dock, and the inside of the public lobby. The resolution was not bad—not NASA quality, but in keeping with modern technology. But most of the cameras were outdoors and exposed to the elements, which left dust, grime, and water spots to obscure the lenses. These did not affect the frames much during the day, but at night they aggravated the lack of light. Of course, the spider remained the star of the show over the visitors’ parking lot.

  The video was not multiplexed, when the recorded images flicked rapidly from camera to camera resulting in a series of separated stills rather than a movie, so that made things easier in a way. Nothing would be missed because the video had rotated to some other camera. The cameras were motion-activated, which reduced, somewhat, the sheer amount of video to look at because the camera went dark during the periods when nothing moved. Unfortunately during the day something was always moving in a busy, well-populated structure, and at night even a passing gnat would activate the lens.

  Carol wandered in carrying a coffee mug and a timer to look over Maggie’s shoulder. The timer would remind her when to return to the DNA lab for the next step in the STR—short tandem repeats method of analysis—process. “What are you looking for?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  “Might make it tough to know it when you see it, then.”

  “We don’t know if someone broke in to kill Robert Davis, or came in to work and got into a fight with Davis, or they don’t work there and Davis let them in, or if they were there the whole time and were still there when we showed up.”

  “Mmm,” Carol murmured into her coffee cup. “Usually you have choice words for detectives who give you such open-ended tasks.”

  “Yeah, I know. It probably isn’t a good use of my time. But I keep hoping I’ll see Davis let someone in. Or maybe see a person running away like the hounds of hell are chasing him some time between ten and one-thirty.”

  “But you can only see the outside of the doors. You can’t even see who let somebody in when somebody lets somebody in.”

  The cameras were mounted over the center of the exterior doors, aimed straight down. They showed about five feet of the outside sidewalk, but nothing of the inside. “I know. And so far no one has been let in at all. People walk up, flash their key card at the proximity reader, and enter. Ev
eryone in that building was allowed to be in that building.”

  “What about the loading dock? That looks wide open.”

  “Supposedly that entire corner of the building is secured by keyed doors, so that loading staff can only access that area. But reporters and admin people go into it all the time to use the vending machines and get fresh coffee, so it wouldn’t be hard to find someone propping a door. Someone on the dock could follow a reporter back in. But the dock area isn’t opened at all until halfway through the print run, when a supply of the papers is done and ready to go on the trucks.”

  “So the truckers and loaders are cleared.”

  “It would have required pretty dicey timing for one of them to have done it, yeah.”

  “Another triumph for the blue-collar set.”

  “You could say that.”

  “No one bolting from the place because he just killed someone?”

  “Nope. Besides, this person was tough enough to manually strangle a grown, healthy man, then heft him over a railing to make it look like a suicide. They might have had to lug his body up four flights of steps beforehand, unless they somehow convinced him to make the climb as well, come with me and never mind about the length of rope sticking out of my pocket. None of that sounds like the bolting type. I’ll bet this person left Robert Davis dangling and then walked casually back to his workspace, chatted with coworkers, maybe had a smoke and a bag of chips before heading off to his car as if it were the end of one more completely ordinary day.”

  “You think this was premeditated?”

  “I don’t know. It could be two people—that would certainly make getting his body up those steps much easier. But who plans to strangle someone? It’s not an easy or sure way to kill.”

  “But it’s quiet,” Carol pointed out.

  “Wouldn’t have mattered with those presses running. You could fire an UZI in there and no one in the next room would hear it.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t planned, then. He used a strap because it happened to be there.”

  “But it wasn’t,” Maggie argued. “The editor said they didn’t use strap like that for anything in the building. String, yes, not ropes or mesh straps. Of course it could have been hanging around—”

  “Badump-bump.”

  “No pun intended! Hanging around for some other reason, a quick fix, a gag gift, something left over from a story—who knows what when you’ve got a building full of people who deal with every topic under the sun. But it seemed clean to me, almost pristine, as if it had just been cut off a roll at the hardware store that afternoon.”

  “So we’re back to, who plans to strangle someone?”

  “Unless they brought the strap in for some other reason.”

  “Which puts us back to unpremeditated,” Carol said, then glanced at the phone display as it rang. “ME’s office.”

  “Good. I was about to go blind.” Maggie answered the call, picking up her coffee cup. It had again gone dry.

  Chapter 9

  “That was weird,” Riley said as he turned a corner onto Euclid and waited for three CSU students to amble through the crosswalk, each one carrying books under one arm with a cell phone glued to the opposite ear. “Think they’d get off the phone if I hit them?”

  “Maybe,” Jack said. “But then they’d just switch to texting.”

  “I can see my wife saying she wanted me dead—just like Stephanie Davis did. She’s not angry, she don’t want him to feel bad or hurt or anything, and of course she’s sad for her babies. But yeah, frankly, my life would be a hell of a lot better if he simply disappeared from the face of the earth. That’s why my wife divorced me. She didn’t sit there every day doing my laundry and fixing me a hot dog and gazing across the table listening to my war stories while thinking, Gee, it would be nice if you stopped breathing. You ever been married?”

  He had, but it would be best not to get into that. “No.”

  “Smart man. You buy it?”

  “The wife?”

  “Yeah, her ‘I didn’t love him and am just waiting for you to leave so I can break out the champagne, but I didn’t kill him and don’t know who did.’ That.”

  They passed under the chandelier over the street in front of Playhouse Square. “I don’t see why she would tell us that if she had killed him. She would have sobbed and moaned and insisted her life had ended with his.”

  “She wants out of the marriage, bet it’s another man. Lover killed the husband, but she doesn’t know it, so she’s honest. Noodle Shop for lunch?”

  “It’s nine-thirty.”

  Riley, solemn, said: “Planning. It’s the key to time management.”

  “If you say so. She didn’t seem dumb to me. She would have figured out her lover’s hand in this pretty quick.”

  “We caught her off guard.”

  “Yes, but people are unhappy for all sorts of reasons.”

  Riley crossed East Ninth, giving Jack a sidelong glance that said he guessed there might be a lot behind that statement. Riley wasn’t dumb, something that made Jack worry with a low-level gnawing rumble that never quite went away.

  But Riley said only, “If the wife doesn’t pan out, then we’re back to his job. What the hell was going on at that paper?”

  “You know what I think?”

  “Noodle Shop is good?”

  “No, I—sure, Noodles is fine—I think we should talk to this Roger Correa guy.”

  * * *

  Robert Davis had been stripped of his clothing, washed clean, and now lay flat on a steel table that drained into a sink along the wall. The lights were operating-room bright and the staff fitted out with plastic aprons, Tyvek sleeve guards, and double layers of latex gloves. Maggie stood far enough away to avoid contact with his bodily fluids as the deiner, or assistant, finished dousing the man with a soft rubber hose.

  The pathologist assigned his case was a man of medium height and age, a pale complexion, sandy-blond hair, and a not terribly friendly personality. But Robert Davis no longer needed friendliness. Efficiency would be more to his liking at this stage.

  The doctor began with an external examination, noting every fact about the condition of the body—an appendectomy scar, bitten nails, a bruise on his right ankle, a mole that might have needed a check for basal cell carcinoma in another half a year or so, and of course, the deep furrows in the neck. Davis had no other signs of injury. He had not fought with his attacker. He had been caught off guard as the strap came around his neck from behind, pulled and scratched at it, probably bruised his ankle while kicking his feet around. But he had not fought a prolonged battle.

  Maggie left the autopsy room and went to the amphitheater, where a forensic tech had spread out Davis’s clothing. There Maggie “taped” the items, using clear packaging tape to pick up any stray hairs, fibers, or other trace evidence that the killer might have left as he pulled Davis’s body close to get the maximum pressure out of the strap. The ME’s office didn’t work with hairs or fibers anymore, so they let her have it. She made her collections from the outside of the shirt and pants and shoes, skipping the undershirt and underwear, especially since the latter had been filled during the death throes and now smelled very bad. The forensic tech would photograph them—quickly—and then bind them up in a red bag for disposal. If Davis had soiled his shorts with vital evidence it would be lost, but the ME’s office had a limit to their willingness to store fermenting biohazards. Besides, the odds of that were slim.

  She and the tech examined the strap, and Maggie’s impressions of it did not change. It nearly glowed in fresh white perfection, except for a few smears around the knot of such a faint color that Maggie could not guess if they were blood, dirt, or printer’s ink. The forensic tech collected “touch” DNA for her, scrubbing the twists of the nylon with two moistened cotton swabs.

  Touch DNA was always a crapshoot—there might be a sufficient amount of skin cells present to get a profile, or there might not. What they thought looked like a stain might
be a smudge of dirt from the kid at the hardware store. Any residue on the noose might be from the victim’s own fingers as he fought to free himself, and they couldn’t be sure what section of the strap had been used for the murder as opposed to the hanging.

  The killer might have used the center of the strap to strangle Davis, putting the most pressure on the skin of his hands, after which tying the knots for the noose and around the railing would have been relatively stress-free once the victim was dead or unconscious. But they couldn’t swab or test every inch, so the tech started with the two knot areas—obviously the killer had to have touched those. If those swabs didn’t pan out, they could put the strap under some UV light and try to pick up bodily residues on the rest of the length. She thanked the forensic tech, wished her luck on the upcoming delivery, and went back to the autopsy room.

  She had timed it well. By this time the pathologist had removed and sectioned the internal organs, and the deiner had cut and pulled the scalp. He now used a bone saw to make a neat incision around the top of the skull, so it could be removed to reveal the brain—like popping the lid off a roaster to reveal the turkey. Maggie asked the pathologist if there had been anything interesting in the rest of the body, and he answered with his usual loquacity, “No.”

  Then he reconsidered. “He had some kidney stones brewing. He would have been in agony sometime next month, probably. And a small ulcer in his duodenum. Not very big. He probably thought it was acid reflux.”

  “He was stressed,” Maggie concluded.

  “Everybody’s stressed,” the pathologist said, and moved to the exposed skull.

  The deiner pointed to a spot on the inside of the scalp and muttered something. The pathologist murmured agreement.

  “What?” Maggie asked.

  “A bruise. Some sort of blunt trauma to the top of the head, just below the crest.” He fluffed the hair at the back of his own head in illustration, apparently forgetting that his gloved fingers were covered in someone else’s blood.