He peered into the plastic cylinder from over her shoulder. “Looks like something was added.”
“And somebody tried to wash it out?”
“Let the lab analyze it, but that’s what it looks like to me.”
She had already swabbed the interior at the scene, but now she carefully poured the rest of the liquid into a container—more was always better when it came to chemical analysis. She covered the dish and labeled it. “Beka hated bourbon. Why’d she drink it?”
“Maybe she didn’t.”
“She drugged him so he was easier to kill, then took an overdose herself?”
“Seems likely.”
She didn’t say anything. On the other side of the lab was a wornout aluminum box with ghostly white specks covering the inside. She placed the bottle inside the tank, covered the top, and poured a small amount of superglue from its industrial container into an opening at the bottom of the tank. It would only take a few minutes for the adhesive to attach to the oily residue from any fingerprints.
Frank sat down to wait the procedures out. He was a good partner, fair and loyal. He had been the first one on the unit to shake her hand and had never acted demeaning toward her. Frank—the most senior detective in the Crime Scene squad—treated her like an equal. It was an enormous change from what she was used to, and what she had gone through before her promotion.
Lochwood had seemed different than the rest of the squad, always asking her what her career goals were, not what she was doing later that night. Despite her better judgment that he was just another cop who wanted to get laid, she had finally gone out for coffee with him one night. They began to meet after their shifts to share stories, drink coffee—that was all. She knew he had a wife. But everyone had a wife.
He liked to run license plates on the police computer anchored to the dashboard of his car. One night the car ahead of them came up stolen, and Loch winked at her as he put on the flashing lights. He took the driver while she sprinted after the passenger and tackled him to the ground. Instead of getting dinner that night they got a collar—that was their first real date.
She had fifteen years on the force when a new sergeant was transferred to her unit who took an immediate dislike to her. He treated her like a rookie, made “dumb blonde” jokes, and refused to acknowledge work that should have been written up for merit. He’d put her on the desk for weeks on end and for no reason at all, or show up at her car in the middle of the night to harass her. She did not tell Lochwood what was going on; she figured she could handle it herself.
She dealt with the new sergeant, but when Loch started noticing that she was not getting the accommodations she should have been, and was spending a lot of time at the desk, he began to ask questions. Finally, she told him how her sergeant was destroying her morale. “I thought this was my niche. You know? Like, I had finally found my place in the world. Now I just feel like resigning.” She dabbed her eyes with a dirty napkin.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out not a handkerchief—Loch was not a hanky kind of guy—but a microcassette tape recorder. “It has a clip-on microphone. He’ll never know. Take the tape to your PBA rep. Don’t play it. Just show it to her. They’ll make him go away.”
She did what he told her. Her sergeant was transferred a few weeks later. One year, two accommodations, and an exam later, she was finally promoted to detective. It was Loch’s quiet response to her situation that made her trust him as much as she now trusted Frank. She had never known a man who could be so strong and courageous, tough and funny, caring and compassionate at the same time. A good partner was hard to find.
Frank was watching her, a trace of concern quickly slipping from his eyes as she looked up at him. He walked over to the sword and peered through the plastic bag to see how the superglue was adhering to any latents. “I wonder how many blood types are on this sword.”
“Well, we know one of them is Gabriel’s.”
“Maybe there’s some ancient samurai’s blood on it, too.” He sounded twelve years old.
“Cool,” she mocked him gently. “We don’t get much call for samurai blood analysis, do we?”
Frank looked more closely at the sword hilt. “How long did you say your friend had this sword?”
“Her parents died in 1974. She inherited it then. Beka was so un-Japanese, she hung it over the doorway of the loft. Then Uncle Bismarck comes to visit and has a fit! It’s bad luck to hang a sword over someone’s door. It means death to the house.” Devon stopped. “Beka told him it was just a superstition and she was American so it didn’t count. Then Todd disappeared.”
Devon opened up the glue tank and pulled the bottle out with a pair of metal tongs. “Look at that.” A nearly perfect print hung, as if suspended, on the inside of the bottle’s neck.
“It’s a beaut,” Frank agreed. “Strange place, though.”
She placed it on her desk, photographed the print, and studied the rest of the area. There wasn’t one bump or smudge on the rest of the glass. It didn’t make sense. The print was wide, like a man’s finger, rather than Beka’s long, tapered digits. Devon put it back in its bag.
“Too bad there aren’t any prints on this.” Frank interrupted her ruminations with the removal of the sword from its plastic entombment. The two of them surveyed the sword scrupulously, but quickly. Prints were so obvious with the glue method of exposure that they didn’t need to search too hard. The sword, aside from the blood, was clean.
Loch speared a pepperonchini with his fork and pushed a calamata olive around his plate with his knife. The three interviews he and Gary had conducted in the aftermath of New Year’s Eve had found nothing even slightly helpful regarding the fates of Gabe and Beka. Secretly, he had hoped that something would appear in their questioning of the employees at the Art Barn that would prove that Beka had not murdered her husband, but everything everyone had told them pointed to the obvious. It sounded to Loch as if Beka was emotionally unstable, and that would fit the profile he was building on her character. All three employees had verified that Beka and Gabe fought a lot, and that often the fights turned physical, with Beka leading the violence. She broke things—doors, windows, bottles, molds—but would those kinds of outbursts have led to the violent aftermath they had discovered?
Lochwood had met Gabriel and Beka a number of times. Of course, he was always with Devon and their encounters were at social events, usually one of the parties the couple threw, but on a rare occasion they had all gone out to dinner together. He’d never been able to peg Gabe and Beka as a unit, though—it was as if they lived two separate lives—but then, who didn’t? Even Devon seemed to be keeping Loch separate from her other life in the Hamptons, and he was no different. He thought about Jenny O’Doherty’s errant husband and popped a chunk of feta into his mouth. He should call his own wife.
Devon wasn’t sure she was ready to hear what Jo had to say. Autopsies were almost like the ritual of Sky Burial in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Hans had once told her that Sky Burial was the most intimate experience one could have with another person. In the ceremony, a monk feeds sacred vultures the body of the dead, then the bones are crushed to powder and thrown to the wind. What was an autopsy other than an American version of Sky Burial? And she and Loch, Gary, and Jo were the vultures looking for tidbits of information. Devon was not Tibetan, though.
Maybe looking at the autopsy as a ritual would help her detach from her emotions, but she wasn’t sure thinking about Sky Burial would help. She just wanted to find the truth, even if it hurt. Devon looked down at the print she was working on and squinted to make sure she was seeing the ridges accurately, then absentmindedly pulled her dark blond hair back and tied it into a knot behind her head without the help of any clip or other hair accoutrements.
“I’ll never figure out how you do that.” She heard Loch’s voice behind her. His own hair was short and graying at the temples, almost exactly matching the gray sky outside the lab window. She wanted him to hold her, right
there in front of the rest of the damn department, but providing their peers with something more than circumstantial evidence of their affair was not high on her list of New Year’s resolutions.
“So, are you going to tell me what you think about this case or keep it to yourself?” she asked.
“You tell me.” Loch faltered at the brusqueness in her voice.
Her eyes felt damp so she blinked, hard. “It’s not her. I know that.”
“Knowing is different than feeling.” His voice was soft and soothing, and she recognized it immediately as the tone he used whenever someone seemed emotionally distraught. She did not appreciate his civilian procedures being applied to her. That was the problem with cops, they always knew too much.
“You’re a therapist now?”
“Let’s just say I’ve done this for a few more years than you.”
She was about to tell him what he could do with all his years, but stopped herself.
He tried again. “If you need anything you’d tell me, right? I don’t know what to do to help, but if you tell me what you need, I can give it to you.”
She smiled. “That’s better, Brennen.” She could see the tension in his neck and shoulders release; he’d finally found the right thing to say.
The morgue was air-conditioned even in the winter, and Lochwood hoped his woolen socks and coat would suffice. Jo, who had been working in the coroner’s office for twenty years, wore a turtleneck. She probably had more turtlenecks at home than the L.L. Bean and Eddie Bauer catalogs combined. Coming from the South had not prepared her for cold weather or morgue life, and the woman seemed to be in a perpetual state of refrigeration—not unlike her corpses. That Jo was a rambunctious, warm individual was probably, in Lochwood’s professional opinion, a subconscious attempt to raise her body temperature
He peeked through the viewing window and knocked on the examining room door before they entered. “How you doing, Jo?”
Her pink turtleneck peeked out from under her lab coat. “Lower than a snake’s belly. How’re you two?” Jo slurped a Jolt soda, specially shipped from North Carolina, through a silly straw and tapped her Bart Simpson eraser-head pencil as if sending a Morse code message to her assistant on the other side of the room. “Where’s DeBritzi? It’s a holiday, you know. I’m only here out of the goodness of my heart, even if I am getting paid double.” She winked at Devon. “Can I start or do I have to wait for that lamebrain partner of yours?”
Gary popped into the examining room. “Sorry I’m late, Jo. Thanks for waiting for me.”
She tapped her watch with Bart Simpson’s head. “I wasn’t waiting for you. We just finished up.” She looked over at Devon and winked again, then nodded as if she’d decided Devon looked steady enough to begin. “Okay, let’s do it. It’s like I said at the scene, the stomach wound killed him. There are precisely eighteen stab wounds, and except for the scribbles, nothing else unusual.” Loch had to smile, only Jo would say that about such a scene.
“What you see is almost exactly what you get,” Jo continued. Loch and Gary made few notes. They hadn’t expected any surprises, but the unexpected was always possible, even in Suffolk County, where there were fewer homicides in a year than occurred in Manhattan in a month. “The depth of the wounds is fairly consistent if one takes into account that there was a struggle. There’s bruising and a few scratch marks to verify a scuffle. Your murderer might have skin under the fingernails.” Lochwood cleared his throat. “Yes, we took scrapings from under both of their nails, and as soon as the lab opens,” Jo looked pointedly at Loch, “we’ll test for DNA.”
“Of course, they could have each other’s skin under the fingers for a number of reasons other than murder. They were married.” Devon pointed out the obvious.
Jo never speculated on the events that might have led up to a death. She simply stated what consequence the wounds, and other telling marks, had on the victim. She continued her recitation of the facts. She could tell the detectives from what direction a foreign instrument (bullet or knife blade) had entered the body, which hand had been used, and what impact the instrument had had on a victim’s vital organs, but she never told them what she thought had happened outside of the physical evidence. “There is something other than skin under his fingernails.”
Gary and Loch looked up at her expectantly. They were used to her springing a dramatic moment on them whenever she had the privilege of finding something unusual.
“Powder?” Devon piped up. She knew she had ruined Jo’s riddle but couldn’t help herself. Jo tapped Bart Simpson’s head on the aluminum examining table.
“What kind of powder?” Lochwood asked.
“We found Norflex at the scene,” Devon said.
“You can’t know anything for sure till we have the lab results though, can you?” Jo gave Devon the stink eye.
“I’m depending on you, Jo.” Loch cast a glance at Devon in the hope that she would let him run the rest of the investigation; she paused long enough for him to ask, “How long?”
“You love to rush me, don’t you, Brennen? You think just cause I’m Southern, I’m slow?” He didn’t answer. “Well, then don’t get all twisted up over nothing. When they get back from their holiday, they’ll run it. Don’t blame my people when it takes all day to get what you want.”
“I hate holidays,” Loch mumbled under his breath.
Jo ignored him. “He hadn’t eaten much of a supper: Brie, French bread, olives, and what looked like roasted peppers. He’d had a bit to drink, and time of death was right around midnight, give or take a few minutes.”
“Any fingerprints in the bloodstains on the body?” Gary asked.
Jo shook her head.
“Could the stab wounds have been made by a woman who’s five foot seven inches, Jo?” That was Beka’s height. Devon knew she should have let Loch ask the question, but she wasn’t about to let it slide. She had to know the answer.
Jo wiggled Bart’s head in the air, held the pencil at a tilt, and squinted her eyes together. “Did the woman have on heels?”
“There were significant foot impressions made by bare feet.” Devon looked directly at Loch, daring him to stop her. “People had to remove their shoes before entering the house. The chance of anyone, even a murderer, wearing shoes in the house is very small.”
“There are seven wounds on the shoulders and chest that come down at this angle.” She demonstrated with her Bart pencil. “He was five foot eleven inches, so, I would say the assailant had to be his height or taller. But if he had been bent over, or on his hands and knees, or even sitting, a shorter person could have inflicted them.”
Gabe had crawled down the hallway, Devon recollected, so five foot seven was not a problem. She could tell by Loch’s face he was thinking along the same lines.
“In fact, the murderer could have been taller or shorter, depending on his position when he received the wounds. Isn’t that right, Jo?” Jo nodded in answer to Lochwood’s question. “Can you tell which wounds were made first? That might help us figure height better, since we know where he ended up on all fours.”
Jo looked at the wounds on the corpse with the help of her assistant and mumbled a few things under her breath that Devon couldn’t hear, then stood up and cussed. “This was done good. Looky here, he was stabbed in the stomach prior to the sword! It’s hard to see, but there’s a smaller entrance wound just to the right here.” She showed Loch and Gary what she was talking about.
“From the scene it looked as if the attack began in the living room by the fireplace. If he was stabbed in the stomach first that might have caused him to double over,” Devon suggested. “Then we get the shoulder wounds.” Jo was nodding as Devon pointed to the wounds she thought came next in the attack. “There were long spatter marks that would not have been initially debilitating, so he tried to escape.”
“The spurting you’re describing probably came from these wounds by the bicep tendon.” Jo pointed to four wounds near the shoulder artery.
“But everything happened so fast, there’s very little time differential here.” Jo maneuvered the flesh around with a measuring instrument. “The angle is downward and into the shoulder, consistent with someone who was taller than the victim. Unless, as Devon suggests, he was doubled over when he received those four wounds.”
“The other stab wounds could have been delivered in the hall where we have proof that he was on his hands and knees.”
“You’ve just proved the murderer could have been Beka,” Loch informed her.
Jo continued reciting a litany of facts. “The stomach wound was circular. It entered under the right rib, came up to the lungs under the left rib, and then into the stomach.”
“Left-handed?” Loch returned to his questioning.
“Possibly. A right-handed thrust would most likely have been in the reverse.”
“Is Beka left-handed?” Loch asked Devon.
“Gabriel was also.”
“Gabriel did not commit hara-kiri and then go hang up the sword after he wiped it down,” Loch said.
Jo countered, “If it is a Norflex overdose, the drug would have caused a coma and convulsions an hour after the drug was in her system. But y’all have to wait until I can tell you for sure if that’s what she took.”
“She took something, though?” Devon urged Jo.
“It’s a possibility.”
“And if she was drugged,” Devon continued, “she certainly couldn’t have killed him in a stupor, walked up that hill, and killed herself.” She gave Loch an I-told-you-so look. “The media is all ready to fry her and serve her up to the public. Let’s not assume she’s guilty just because she’s dead, Brennen.”
“I’m not assuming anything,” Brennen replied. “But I expect you to find the facts and find the murderer no matter who it is.”
“And I will!” she almost yelled at him.
The Weeping Buddha Page 7
