Trace Evidence

by Elizabeth Becka

  TRACE

  EVIDENCE

  ELIZABETH BECKA

  To my mother, Florence,

  who always believed in me

  and my father, Stanley,

  who taught me to believe in myself

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  EVELYN JAMES PARKED THE county’s battered station wagon behind a knot of cars on the side of the road. She pulled her crime scene kit from the passenger seat and stepped out into a puddle of slush, slamming a door with the words Medical Examiner’s Office stenciled on the side. Flakes of snow fell at a deliberate pace, the day’s mood darkening by the hour.

  A maze of construction signs and sawhorses was spread over the bridge. Workers in bright orange safety jumpsuits watched the action as a jackhammer echoed from work at a new plaza on the next block—a forlorn attempt at urban renewal barely visible through the trees. Over their branches, the downtown skyline stretched toward gray clouds. Two marked Cleveland Police Department cars and two unmarked ones—worn Ford Crown Victorias that screamed cop—were pulled onto the softened grass. Except for two unlucky rookies directing traffic, the uniformed guys had long since taken to the warmth of their patrol cars, leaving the detective work to the ones who got paid for it. Each person present turned a wary eye to the riverbank, where the supine form lay as white and still as marble.

  The Cleveland Metropark system covered over twenty thousand lush acres, enjoyed by forty-two million visitors per year, but today the trees were stripped bare, and Evelyn was not there to have fun. She uncapped her camera and recorded the scene—bridge, river, body, the downtown skyline looming beyond the forest—as her socks grew icy wet. Another day in the glamorous life of a forensic scientist. Her lens caught Bruce Riley as he stood on the bank, watching four men in scuba suits pack up their equipment. She moved carefully over the sloping grass to join him. “Afternoon, Detective.”

  Riley grunted in greeting, still the only man in the world who could wrinkle polyester slacks. “The divers got her out—two construction divers and two of ours, but it wasn’t easy. You’ve got to see this. Ten years in Homicide and this is a first. It makes our nail-gun murder last year look positively normal. But hey, what’s up with you? Planning a big Thanksgiving?”

  She shook her head with a rueful smile. “I can’t decide whether to cook dinner for Angel, or be magnanimous about it and tell her to spend the day with her father, or just screw the stupid turkey and go out—though any restaurant that makes its employees work on Thanksgiving doesn’t deserve my patronage.”

  “Hear, hear.”

  “Tell me, Riley—you’ve got two ex-wives and four kids. What do you do on holidays?”

  He lit a cigarette, a questionable practice in light of his pallor. “I go to Flanagan’s Pub in Ohio City, buy a round for the house, and pop in a tape of the last World Series.”

  “Very traditional.”

  “Hey, they have chicken wings. They’re like turkey.”

  Evelyn sighed, flexed her toes, and felt every minute of her thirty-eight years. “My entire family gathering will be my mom and a daughter who thinks it’s entirely my fault that her father left me.”

  Riley frowned. “Why does she—”

  “Because I’ve never enlightened her. So the three of us might meet you at Flanagan’s.” She grinned at him, getting a half smile in return. The Homicide detectives were older guys, white and black, married and divorced, who did a sometimes hellish job for always lousy pay, because somebody had to and it happened to be them. “But no chicken. Angel’s gone vegetarian, unbeknownst to her steak-loving father.”

  No doubt Little Miss Perfect Stepmom would be so understanding.

  Riley nodded toward the body. Beside it, the river formed a small valley through the wooded area. It had been deepened by a rainy fall and melting snow. Although driving a block in either direction would reveal a tightly fit neighborhood of dilapidated wood houses and pockmarked streets, the patch of earth by the river was quiet, isolated. “I don’t think they lost any parts. Maybe the cold water kept her from decomposing. I can’t say I envy our divers—they’ve got to be freezing even in wet suits. Ever pee in a wet suit?”

  “I’ve heard that’s how you stay warm,” she said absently, moving closer. The body lay uncovered on the sparse weeds and mud. The lack of a covering sheet meant that they had not called EMS, and no wonder. The woman was very, very dead.

  Though she was a Caucasian, the dark marbling of decomposition had spread through her limbs like a poison under her skin. In a short period of time she would turn completely black. Dark brown hair lay plastered against her face and neck. Everything seemed to be present—two arms, two legs, nose, eyebrows—and there were no signs of violence other than abrasions and skin slippage, made worse by her rescue from the depths. She wore what had been a pink long-sleeve shirt and denim shorts. Her feet were encased in a cement-filled five-gallon plastic bucket with a wire handle. Bright lettering on the side read Stay-Clear Chlorine tabs, 1 inch.

  A tall man about her age stood beside the body. He had a shock of black hair and the cop look, indescribable but unmistakable. Riley waved his cigarette back and forth in a gesture of introduction. “Evelyn, our forensic scientist, is from the Medical Examiner’s Trace Evidence Department. Evie, this is David Milaski. He’s working with me until he gets me killed. He’s known to be hard on partners.”

  Evelyn assumed this was a joke and smiled. Milaski didn’t.

  “David’s new to Homicide. Real new—as in, today’s his first day.”

  “Hell of a way to start.” She gave him a sympathetic look, but he merely shrugged.

  Riley clapped his new partner on the back, pushing him slightly off balance. “It could be worse, Milaski. On Evelyn’s first day, the boiler at Hanna’s in Playhouse Square blew. Took out the whole restaurant.”

  Evelyn groaned. “Don’t say it.”

  “Three local actresses lost their parts.”

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you a pun is the lowest form of humor?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t believe it. Anyway, the construction divers were working on the base of that middle support, or whatever it is they call it—”

  “Pylon,” Milaski said.

  “Whatever. One of them swam right into her. She was upright, like she was standing on the bottom. Scared the shit out of him.”

  Evelyn crouched next to the dead girl, nostrils pricked by the faint but persistent odor of disintegrating flesh, thinking, She must have been pretty when alive. High cheekbones set off wide-spaced eyes, now filmy and dull. Her slender frame seemed firm, almost the
same height and weight as Angel, with the same delicate wrists. Thin chains bound those wrists and snaked around her waist and neck before plunging into the cement.

  Uncharacteristically, Evelyn swore. Then she said, “Someone wanted to be sure this girl wasn’t found.”

  “Yeah,” Milaski breathed, stooping beside her, his coat hanging open over a stiffly new suit jacket. “But why?”

  “You know what I want to know,” Riley said. “Why is she wearing shorts in the middle of November, that’s what I want to know.”

  The dead woman appeared to be about five-five and in her early twenties, but Evelyn couldn’t be sure. The older she got, the younger everyone else looked—and the more any age at all seemed too young to die.

  A shout of laughter echoed from slightly down the street, where members of the media had congregated behind police barricades. Milaski glanced in their direction and asked the older detective, “Can those cameras get a shot of her from there? I’d hate to have this girl’s parents ID her from the six o’clock news.”

  “Nah, the bank’s too steep. As long as they stay behind the tape we’re okay.”

  Evelyn pulled on gloves and picked up the right hand, restrained by the chains and rigor mortis, the last touches of which still remained thanks to the cold water slowing the decomposition process to a crawl. A veneer of ice had solidified over the prunelike skin.

  Milaski interrupted her thoughts. “Aren’t you going to wait for the medical examiner?”

  “You’ve been watching TV again, haven’t you?” Her joking seemed to confuse him and she relented. “The doctors—the pathologists—never, but almost never, come to the scene. They stay at the office and do the autopsies. Though I’m not a doctor, out here at the crime scene I am the ME’s office.”

  He nodded and she turned her attention back to the victim.

  A piece of duct tape still clung to one cheek; it had obviously been over her mouth but the water’s current had worked most of it off. Evelyn noticed a slight indentation from the middle of her nose to the end of her left cheekbone. Her nails were short and three were broken. The chains had left angry purple marks on her wrists and neck, but the ones around her neck would have been deeper if she had been strangled. She gave the woman’s hair a cursory examination but didn’t see any gashes or other damage. A pathologist would have to determine the exact cause of death, but because the woman had no obvious signs of fatal injury, it looked to Evelyn as if she had gone into the water alive.

  Who could have done this? Who could have been so unspeakably cruel as to kill someone this way, to permit her to feel the frenzied pumping of her own lungs as they filled with water, to let her flesh be tortured by the icy water? Evelyn had worked through stabbings, beatings, the ubiquitous shootings, a deliberately scalded baby, and a teenager whose boyfriend had tossed her off a fourth-floor balcony. But she wanted nothing to do with this. It was horrific, wanton.

  Bet it was cold, Evelyn thought, and straightened up, her foot sliding in wet mideastern clay. Milaski caught her arm.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes,” she snapped.

  “What do you think?” He released her elbow when she found firmer ground.

  Evelyn sucked in a deep breath and summoned a friendlier tone. “She could have drowned. She could have already been dead, drug overdose or whatever, and someone just wanted to get rid of the body. She may be from a warmer state and just have been dumped here. That would explain the shorts. But it must have been a quick trip or she’d be more decomposed. Her epidermis is getting ready to peel off, so she was in there a couple days but not much more than that. If the water had been warm, it would have come off in a few hours.”

  “So how long do you think she’s been dead?”

  “As a general rule, two weeks in the water equals one week in the air, but you’ll have to ask the doctors. And with the cold water slowing things down, it’s going to be tough even for them.” She glanced at the river. It moved along with a whispering sound, taunting her with its secrets.

  “What about that bucket?” Riley asked of no one in particular. “Chlorine tablets?”

  “Maybe the perp has a pool,” Milaski suggested. “Can we trace the chains?”

  Evelyn looked at him without seeing him, wondering about the woman’s family, people who would need answers. “We can hit every Home Warehouse and Lowe’s in the area, sure. If we find him, we might be able to match the chain, the composition, the manufacturing toolmarks.”

  “What about the cement?” Milaski asked.

  She grinned without mirth. “As far as I know, cement is cement. But I’m sure there’s an expert somewhere in the country who charges more an hour than I make in a week, and will be happy to take a look. It tends to be manufactured in large quantities, so it still wouldn’t do you any good unless you have a suspect in mind—a suspect with a supply of cement to compare it to.”

  “Give me time,” Milaski said. “I’ll find him.”

  She raised her eyebrows, unsure if she found such optimism refreshing or foolish.

  “I’ll be honest with you, Miss James.” He leaned forward. “I’m on my fifth life here, and this alley cat can’t afford to screw up his first big case. So I’ll get this guy.”

  If he thought sharing his vulnerability would warm her, he had miscalculated. “This woman isn’t a big case. She was a person with a family and a job and a past, who’s just been robbed of her future. And it’s Mrs.,” Evelyn added, unable to ignore a slight glow of satisfaction as his ears turned redder than the cold air would warrant. “Mrs. James. Now how about getting your guys off the bridge and out of camera range so I can finish photographing the scene before frostbite sets in, Detective?”

  “Shit,” Riley said suddenly, “what’s he doing here?”

  Chapter 2

  HE ISN’T GOING TO speak to me, she thought. He hasn’t spoken to me in seventeen years.

  Cleveland’s mayor, Darryl Pierson, crossed the grass with a skeleton entourage and the county prosecutor in tow. The African-American mayor’s face radiated concern. He stopped on the other side of the sagging yellow police tape and called to Evelyn as if he had last seen her around lunchtime. “Tell me where to stand, Evie. I don’t want to mess up your scene.”

  Evelyn had hoped this reunion, if it had to occur, would have taken place on a balmy day while she wore a low-cut cocktail dress and fire-engine-red lipstick. Instead she stood in her worn blue parka with snow-dampened dull red curls, without a single word for her chapped lips to form. Best-laid plans. I can’t just ignore the man—we loved each other once, even if we were barely out of our teens at the time. She forced her chilly feet to move.

  Riley fell into step beside her, then Milaski. They met the mayor and county prosecutor Harold Rupert at the top of the bank, out of earshot of cops and reporters alike. The entourage maintained a discreet distance.

  For a man of medium height, medium build, medium-dark black skin, wearing a perfectly fitting but conservative overcoat, Pierson somehow managed to tower over everyone present. He straightened his shoulders and took a moment to gaze at each of them. Only his eyes seemed tired, and in them Evelyn saw flecks of yellow like fragile spots, vulnerable areas; they were cat’s eyes, cautious and a bit cold.

  “How have you been?” he asked her soberly, as if a great deal rested on her answer.

  “Good. Fine.” Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. Her nose started to run from the cold and she fumbled in her pocket for a tissue.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your divorce.”

  “Last year’s news. Really, I’m doing great.”

  Riley interrupted, to rescue her from a clearly awkward situation or simply out of impatience. “Have they told you the circumstances here?”

  The mayor nodded. “I hate to say it, but cement shoes go with ‘sleeping with the fishes,’ don’t they?”

  “We’ll be checking out the mob angle,” Riley told him.

  Evelyn applied a crumpled Wen
dy’s napkin to her nose. “Do we even have a mob in Cleveland anymore?”

  “You better believe it,” Prosecutor Harold Rupert told her, supporting Pierson’s theory with brownnosed enthusiasm. “They keep a low profile here, but that’s why they’ve lasted. Remember Danny Green? Libertore? You might want to be careful whose toes you step on.”

  “Since when do I step on toes?” she protested. “And whose feet are we talking about?”

  “Well,” Rupert hedged, careful to keep his voice down and bending over the tape as if he were leaning on it, “I’ve had my eye on two different men, rival families. There’s Armand Garcia, he works the near west side. Every time we get something on him, the witness develops amnesia or the evidence mysteriously disappears. Then, on the east side, we’ve got Mario Ashworth.”

  “Uh-huh,” Riley said. The mayor nodded, still looking at Evelyn. Milaski remained silent.

  She recognized the name—anyone in Cleveland would. Ashworth Property Management. The Ashworth Fund. Ashworth Construction: Current projects included the new Brook Park High School, the aquarium remodeling, and the South Fork Mall Annex. Lots of money, high profile. No wonder the prosecutor and the mayor had abandoned their warm offices for this. “He’s in the mob?”

  Rupert chuckled at her naïveté. “The Big M himself. Why do you think he gets the largest contracts? He’s got a piece of every pie in northern Ohio.” He turned to the senior detective. “Look, Riley, this has to be wrapped up, and quickly. If organized crime thinks they’re going to take the city back, they’re wrong. We have to present a united front and strike back hard.” He spoke with the perfect amount of righteousness, and Evelyn knew he had a mental picture of the cover of Cleveland Today bearing his image with the caption Mobbuster!

  The mayor grinned at her while responding to the prosecutor. “Don’t criticize too loudly. He just might build the new medical examiner’s office.”

  Evelyn raised an eyebrow. “So we can fight crime from a building built by a criminal?”

  “The idea has a certain flair, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know about flair, but to get out of the declared disaster area we’re in now, I’d consider an inferno built by Satan.”