by Lisa Black
“Something tells me I don’t.”
“I did my residency at Metro. I had a rotation on Christmas Eve-”
“Bummer,” Theresa interjected without thinking, knowing how important holidays were to someone from a big, close-knit family.
“Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. You can’t get much lower on the department totem pole than that. Anyway, this mother and her teenage daughter came in with frostbite to their hands and the tips of their noses. They had decided to make an after-dinner convenience store run in nearly zero-degree weather without gloves. Now their situation was worse-the walk was nearly two miles each way, and the freezing, then thawing when they reached the store, then freezing again on the way back, then thawing when they got home and tried to help themselves by putting their hands in warm water, definitely aggravated the situation. But their hands were blackened and the skin shrunk against the fingers. It looked as if they’d held their hands in a campfire.”
“Ew.”
“I’d been working on accident victims and homicides for three months, and it still made me want to throw up. Now here we have Jillian Perry. Perhaps she had five or six more degrees of temperature in her favor, but still. They lost fingers and toes. Her skin is unblemished.”
Theresa agreed. She had examined Jillian’s hands and face thoroughly, and seen nothing like the damage Christine described. “So you’re thinking she was already dead, and someone placed her body in the woods?”
Christine picked up the knife, wiggling it toward Theresa in a vague gesture. “Same problem. What did she die of? There are no obvious signs of hypothermia, but there are no obvious signs of anything else either. No violence. No needle marks. No pulmonary emboli or even congestion. I even looked for birefringent crystals. I had to drag the polarizing microscope out from behind Banachek’s filing cabinet.”
“You could have used mine.”
“I’ll remember that next time.”
“So she didn’t OD.”
“I don’t know yet. I’m having tox run the blood and gastric again for lower levels of narcotics, something that might have gently slowed her down until she simply stopped breathing. Was she taking anything?”
“I don’t know.”
“You went to her house, right?”
“To collect for DNA comparison only.” Theresa tried to stamp the defensive tone out of her voice. “Frank checked the kitchen and I checked the bathroom medicine cabinet. Nothing but the usual household stuff.”
“The bedroom was clear?”
“I don’t know,” Theresa said again, kicking herself. Searching a victim’s, or potential victim’s, area for drugs was standard procedure. Even if the items were perfectly legal, the information would be needed for a clear picture of the death. And a cursory search did not always suffice. Theresa had once found a twenty-one-year-old’s heroin kit neatly packed into an innocent-looking sewing kit and left in plain sight on her closet shelf. She had stumbled on it only because she had grown bored waiting for the body snatchers and had nothing else to do but poke around. Jillian Perry could have had a pharmacy in her nightstand for all Theresa knew.
“Well,” Christine comforted, “it’s hard to take enough narcotics to kill yourself without it showing.”
“What if it were a combination of the two? She took enough narcotic, say sleeping pills or something, to depress her bodily functions, but then the cold finished her off? There wouldn’t be any white residue because her breathing became shallow, with no signs of OD because she didn’t take enough drugs.”
“That leaves us in the same boat. There are no definite indications of either hypothermia or overdose, and even working together they’d leave some trace. Something had to have killed her.” She emphasized this last point with the tip of the large knife.
“Would you mind not pointing that thing at me?”
Christine glanced at the knife in her hands as if she didn’t recognize it, then tossed it into the box with a clatter. “So that’s what bothers me. What bothers you?”
Theresa collected her thoughts, and summarized: “This woman had a really weird life. Lived in a factory, worked as an escort, still best friends with a wannabe boyfriend, never touched her daughter’s huge trust fund. The new husband has a motive and an attitude. I can’t help feeling there’s more to the story even though there’s plenty to the story already. Call it a hunch.”
“You don’t get hunches.”
“Maybe it’s time to start.”
The doctor smiled for the first time since Theresa entered the room. “I’ll admit, it’s nice to see something pique your interest. That hasn’t happened in a while.”
Not since Paul died. Theresa knew the other woman spoke the absolute truth, but still resented it. “I’ve been negligent?”
“You’ve been depressed.”
“No, I haven’t.” Theresa stood, smoothing her lab coat down. “I know depressed, and this isn’t it.”
“Grieving, then.”
“Let me know if you find anything further in the Perry case.” She turned to go.
“Theresa.”
She stopped. Ridiculous, since Christine was a good dozen years younger than she was, but doctors were taught that voice-of-authority trick in med school. They were also taught that look, the one that could tell you hadn’t slept a night through, truly enjoyed a meal, been able to concentrate on a movie, or exfoliated your skin in nine months and still cried at every stupid, sentimental thing you saw, from greeting card commercials to a perfect autumn day.
“How are you doing?”
She’d come to dread that question during the past months. Every time, it felt as if she’d never been asked such a question before, one so strange and difficult. She gave the answer she always gave, also strange and difficult because it was a lie and lying didn’t come easily to her. “I’m fine.”
“I saw that hostage-negotiator guy here earlier. Is he still calling you?”
The question surprised her into facing Christine again. “Now and then.”
“Asking you out?”
Theresa cut the topic off without heat. “That would be problematic. I met him the day my fiancé died.”
“Yeah, but…he seems nice. I saw him on TV yesterday, explaining how they tossed a camera into this domestic standoff. Nice dimples. I’m just saying, perhaps you should let him buy you dinner, put him out of his misery.”
Happy to discuss anyone but herself, Theresa pointed out, “A guy who’s seen with as many different women as he is is hardly miserable.”
“But he’s gorgeous,” the young woman persisted, teasing.
No one had dared to tease her for eight months, and it felt kind of good. “Think this through, Christine. This is a man whose entire job is to manipulate people, to get them to do what he wants them to do. Why would I want to date someone like that?”
“Ahem. Did you miss the gorgeous part?”
“I didn’t miss it. I’m just ignoring it. Besides, Rachael keeps me busy enough. She’s got a concert tonight, a school talent show this Wednesday, and she’s working on a ski trip. Doubling as her chauffeur eats up all my spare time.”
Theresa stepped out of the way as another pathologist shuffled in, his nose buried in a thick autopsy report. He began to ask Christine about a victim’s spleen, but she interrupted him. “How about Dr. Banachek, then? He’s cute.”
Theresa couldn’t help but laugh as Dr. Banachek, rotund, bespectacled, and old enough to be her grandfather, blinked at them in confusion. “I can’t go out with Phil. He’s married.”
“But,” he said, “I am cute.”
CHAPTER 11
The lightening of her mood didn’t last one flight of stairs, and by the time she reached the trace evidence lab, she could feel the wrinkle forming between her eyebrows. Don spotted it too. “What are you looking so glum about?”
She perched on a task chair, hoping the hard rubber seat would massage out the imprint on her butt left by the ammo box handle, and rolled a few feet close
r to him. “Jillian Perry.”
“The suicide-by-freezing?”
“Alleged suicide. Maybe accidental. Maybe homicide. I don’t know.”
He unwrapped a sterile, disposable scalpel and used it to cut a tiny square from a swab. The white cotton had barely been stained. “You know, you give me swabs for DNA analysis, you could at least make sure they have some DNA on them first.”
“That’s from the straps of the bra used to strangle Sarah Taylor. No blood, sorry. I’m hoping for some skin cells from the killer’s hands.”
“This was her bra,” he stated.
“Yep.”
“Which she wore right up against her skin.”
“Hey, I don’t make the circumstances, I just react to them. Sure, you’ll probably find a mixture, but the other half of it will most likely be male and then you can do Y-STRs.” She rested her chin on one hand.
“Which we don’t have a database of yet.” Y-STRs were the target strands on the Y chromosome used for DNA testing. They were useful for separating male-female mixtures of the same type of cells, but the results hadn’t been compiled into a database for years and years, as with the older PCR and STR analyses. They would need a suspect to compare to any Y-STRs found, and so far the cops didn’t have one.
“It can’t be that hard. They do it on TV all the time.”
He dropped the tuft of cotton into a microtube, squeezed the flip cap shut, and wrote a number on it with a thin Sharpie marker. “Did your Jillian Perry have any signs of violence?”
“Not a one.”
“Well then.”
Theresa sat up and buttoned her lab coat. “Yeah. I should probably just write it up and forget about it.”
“You probably should.”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re not going to.”
“No one can figure out what she died of. How often does that happen?”
“Lots of times. Heart attacks, SIDS…often there’s no obvious pathology.”
“It’s bugging Christine too.”
He folded the shirt back into its original packaging and pulled out the red evidence tape. “Oh, boy. You and Christine together. Jillian Perry’s case will remain open for the next hundred years.”
She watched him fill his row of microtubes, using a repeater pipette to dispense a reagent to break down the cells and release the DNA. “Don, do you like video games?”
He looked askance at her, but, as always, rolled with her shifts of mind. “They kept me sane during board exams. Why?”
“Jillian Perry’s husband has a game called Polizei. I mean, he created it, owns it, sells it, whatever you call it.”
“The guy who made that lives in Cleveland? I didn’t know that.”
“You’ve played it?”
“I never got all the way through. I get stuck at the banquet hall every time. At first you think these army-guard-looking guys are there to protect you, but once you close the doors they turn on you because they’re actually vampires, and-”
“Whoa. I’m not going to be playing it, thanks.”
“-it’s pretty cool,” he finished after gesturing with the pipette.
“Could I borrow it?”
“I thought you weren’t going to be playing it.”
“I’ll have Rachael handle the shooting and finding the secret passageways. How popular is this game?”
“It’s big. And getting bigger every day. If you’re a teenager and you’ve never heard of it, you’ll probably get beat up at school.”
“What a lovely analogy. So the guy who makes it must be pretty rich.”
“And getting richer.” He finished placing microtubes, one by one, into the incubator. “Why?”
“It kind of knocks out money as a motive.”
“Motive for what?”
“The perfect murder, apparently. One that doesn’t seem to be a murder, and probably isn’t.”
“You’re not making a lot of sense.”
“I know. Tell me more about this game. I promise not to interrupt you this time.”
“I’d love to, but it’s time for lunch and I’m supposed to meet Janelle for a pizza. Want to join us?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got some samples from the clothing that I want to run through the FTIR.”
He slipped a timer into the pocket of his lab coat to remind him of when the DNA samples would be ready to come out of the incubator and stood up. Then he added, without looking at her, “It’s nice to see you semi-obsessing over a case again. But I wouldn’t let Leo catch you after you stuck him with that defense expert’s visit on Friday.”
“Catch me doing what?”
“Breathing.”
She watched him leave. His current girlfriend worked at the Rainbow and Babies & Children’s Hospital next door, and the attached medical school had a food court. Theresa felt a twinge of guilt at not being able to recall the last time she’d accompanied him to lunch; she usually liked to meet his girlfriends. Not one had yet lived up to her standards, any more than had Rachael’s boyfriends. She wanted perfection for the people she cared about, and she cared about Don.
She sat in front of the stereomicroscope and opened the envelope of the tapings she’d collected at the scene from Jillian Perry’s clothing. A second envelope held the tapings she’d collected from the clothing after it had been removed. The stereomicroscope functioned as a very powerful magnifying glass, and the squiggles of color caught in the adhesive turned into hairs and fibers, pieces of leaves, and even one tiny metallic sphere.
The surface of the acrylic aqua sweatshirt had given up, naturally enough, a number of aqua fibers, and also some pink ones, most likely from the polo shirt. Dark blue cotton fibers probably belonged to the jeans, but one dark, smooth fiber lacked the irregular convolutions of cotton. Theresa removed it, cleaned any residue of tape adhesive with xylene, and mounted it on a glass slide. Then she took the housekeeping step of mounting fibers from every item of clothing Jillian Perry had worn on her body. All this took some time, but it had to be done. Evidence meant nothing without a standard to compare it to.
Using the comparison microscope, which transmitted light through an item instead of shining a light onto an item the way the stereomicroscope did, Theresa could magnify the fibers up to forty times. She could even cheat and put the tapings directly on the stage to observe the fibers in transmitted light without mounting them on glass slides first-the quality lacked, but it was good enough for a quick elimination. She took the sphere over to the toxicology department and gave it to Oliver. He had gone into his usual charade of refusing to waste the mass spectrometer’s time on it, as if the large machine had a busy social calendar, but after five minute of goading he relented and said he would get to it when he had time. Oliver also gave her the distinct impression that this condition would not occur in any sort of timely manner.
Over the next hour or so, between the microscope and the infrared spectrometer, she learned that the aqua fibers belonged to the aqua sweatshirt-or rather, in the correct parlance, were consistent with having originated from the aqua sweatshirt. She could never prove they did, since there could easily be two aqua sweatshirts floating around Cleveland’s west side. Some of the pink cotton fibers on the aqua sweatshirt belonged to the polo shirt but some did not, though with Jillian’s penchant for pink there must be plenty of sources at the apartment. The blue cotton had come from her jeans. There were a few other fibers, a purple trilobal nylon, a black round nylon, and two black fibers that confused her at first. Their composition seemed to vary along the length, which eliminated synthetic fibers, but the shaft appeared too regular to be natural. A third strand of the same type of fiber had been snagged by the blackberry bush.
Could Jillian have had a blanket with her, which someone-perhaps a homeless person who figured she wouldn’t need it anymore-later removed? Theresa moved to her computer and clicked on the folder with the photos from the scene, but saw no signs of her temporary theory. The snow had settled on Jilli
an’s body and the surrounding area evenly. If she had originally been covered, the cover must have been removed promptly after her death.
Theresa took a minute to separate out the photos from Jacob Wheeler’s scene and place them in a new folder. Before moving them to the hard drive, though, she took another look at the shots of his bedroom, zooming in on the stacked cases in front of his TV stand. Sure enough, Polizei sat right on top. Don hadn’t been wrong when he said the game had become insidiously popular.
She closed that folder and took another look at the pictures of Jillian’s apartment. She had taken only a few, and only to document from where she had collected the items for possible DNA analysis. All her towels, bedding, and other textiles seemed to be pink or brown. No black. The rest of Jillian’s bedroom appeared as innocuous in the photos as it had in real life. Theresa hit the magnifying glass icon and zoomed in.
Perfume bottles, a bra, the book of crossword puzzles. Pillows in disarray. A few pieces of paper, half folded and tucked behind the baseball cap on one of the end tables. Theresa zoomed in further. The resolution did not allow her to read the paper, but since the information had been arranged in columns she took it to be a financial statement, particularly since the tidy letterhead featured a green-and-yellow circle with a dollar sign. It didn’t seem a bit familiar or like any local bank’s logo. Theresa hit the printer icon, lost in a happy fantasy that she would both find the Kovacics’ accountant and that he would be an extremely garrulous one.
“What are you doing?” Leo asked, his face next to her shoulder. She shot a few inches straight up, bumping his chin and sending her heart rate off the charts.
“Just looking something up…I was working on Jillian Perry’s fibers. I’ve got kind of a strange one here-”
“That hooker who froze to death? You’re still working on that?”
“She wasn’t a hooker, and Christine can’t find a cause of death.”
“She also isn’t a homicide. We have people here who are. Plus your old friend Richard Springer is going to be here any minute, with entourage.”
“I thought he came Friday.”
