Trace Evidence

by Elizabeth Becka

  When she finally inhaled, there was an overwhelming chemical smell that made her gag. She coughed and tried not to breathe, but her terrorized body couldn’t hold out for long. She breathed in.

  Then there was nothing.

  Later. She was in a different place now, outside, and cold. She could hear the night birds chirping, then falling silent as they heard the sounds of metal and rubber wheels. Then a sensation of movement. Her feet were being pulled out of a car trunk and the open edge of it scraped her body. She protested at the painful burning along her hip, but the shout came out as a murmur. She had tape over her mouth.

  He held her up, his body pressed against hers as he loaded the cement bucket onto a two-wheel dolly. Then he pulled on the chains down her back to keep her upright while he tilted the dolly back. Her knees could not support her. The chain around her neck bit into her larynx and her head ached as it bounced against the bar. The smell of vomit snaked through the air, and her throat burned. He wheeled her over the rough road as if she were a crate of oranges. This is starting to suck big-time.

  The birds became a backdrop to the main noise, one that reached her ears just as the fishy smell reached her nose. They were near moving water. He was taking her to the water.

  Shit!

  Why was he doing this? Why?

  They were not by the lake, but on some kind of a bridge. There were no lights, not even streetlights, and she could just barely see the surrounding trees. She could not get her bearings. Nothing about the area seemed familiar, but she had never been much for the outdoors. No walks in the park for her.

  A giggle escaped. She was losing it.

  Think, girl!

  Her feet, however, felt loose in their cement holes. The chains hung on. Her hands hurt terribly. She tried to push the tape away with her tongue, but it extended all the way across her cheeks and wouldn’t budge.

  They stopped in the middle of the bridge and he pitched her body sideways onto the low, wide wall, not caring that the rough brick scraped the bare skin on her arms and face. Hell, he was throwing her away, why would he care about keeping her in good shape?

  Her hands hurt, she realized, because circulation had been restored. Without the folding chair, the system of chains around her body and wrist had loosened.

  With a terrific grunt he hefted the cement onto the wall, using the handle of the bucket. He straightened her legs, the bucket balancing on its side along the wall’s top, the handle resting on her shins. He paused.

  He was going to throw her into the water.

  She was going to die.

  She was going to die horribly in that frigid water.

  Insane with panic, she began to scream, her voice coming out as a muffled series of pathetic grunts to which he paid no mind.

  He pushed her shoulder back, turning her faceup. In the weak light of a quarter moon, a shadow formed his face, a grotesque empty hole where a face should have been.

  “Please.” Her words escaped the duct tape, loosened slightly by her tears. “Please don’t.”

  Without warning, he pushed her over.

  The shock of the water terrified her more than she could have imagined. It encased her in a tomb of ice, cut off all sound other than her frenzied heartbeat, and stabbed through her flesh straight to the bone. Not to inhale in response to the stunning cold took every ounce of strength she had.

  She sank to the bottom as the chains over her shoulders pulled her down with the block. The pressure mounted in her ears and sinuses. Her lungs ached. She felt soft things around her—seaweed, fish, or her own hair. She knew she would die, but also discovered that her hands were free.

  Insensible with fear, she felt her body function on its own: She slipped each wrist through the links, worked her feet out of the rigid holes one at a time, and pulled the chains off her shoulders as if shedding a negligee.

  The loop around her waist held fast.

  She pushed off the cement block and strained against the bounds, but the chains held on to her hips.

  With pained fingers she undid her belt buckle and yanked her miniskirt down to her knees, managing to hang on to her panties. Then she lost a few more precious seconds working the chain down over her hips before finally kicking free. She didn’t waste time with the tape over her mouth and swam upward, giddy with success. Except that she couldn’t hold her breath any longer.

  She tried to let it out, just a little, just to relieve the pressure, and swam harder. How deep could she be? Which way was up? She opened her eyes and saw nothing, freezing limbo.

  Her lungs had held out as long as they could. She sucked in icy water through her nose, freezing her sinuses; she tried to cough through the tape, thinking, I’m not going to make it.

  One hand reached air, only a few degrees warmer, and she burst through the surface trying to gulp air through her water-filled head. One hand scraped the slimy surface of a bridge pylon and she broke two nails grabbing for it. With the other she pulled the tape off her numb skin and coughed spasmodically, spitting out the water and sucking in lungfuls of the sweet, clear air.

  The river moved along, but not fast enough to rip her from the pylon. She clung to the stone, trying to comprehend what had just happened. She had done it. She had escaped an icy tomb but still had to swim to the shore, visible only as a darker black against the charcoal gray of the water, and get to some shelter or a person who could help. And she had to do all that with no pants and no shoes and without freezing first, a feat that seemed less possible with every passing moment. She could no longer feel any of her limbs, yet they were still moving at her command. Maybe she could make it. The damn polar bear club did it, didn’t they?

  She struck out for the bank. It occurred to her that the man might not have left, he might have heard her furious breathing and splashing, but that was a chance she’d have to take. Anything to get out of the damn water.

  The downstream current carried her away from the bridge—she had only to make her way toward the bank. But it was so cold. Her head slipped under the freezing water.

  Then her foot struck bottom; the water had grown shallower. She stood. The current pushed her down and she crawled over the smooth rocks on her hands and knees. When the water faded to a foot deep she stood again and moved carefully over the stones in her bare feet.

  For a moment the air felt good, warmer than the water by several degrees. But then a breeze came through and turned her flesh to ice. She couldn’t survive out here for long, maybe not at all. She grabbed the branches of a bush and pulled herself up the incline, slipping a bit on the muddy bank.

  She moved blindly, unable to hear anything over her own ragged breathing. She kept her head down to keep her eyes safe as she plowed through the undergrowth. Branches and thorns tore her skin but she barely felt it—the advantage of being numb, although the movement began to thaw out her hands. A monotonous droning sound turned out to be the chattering of her teeth.

  Then the ground leveled out a little, became more horizontal. With another few steps she felt gravel, then hardness under her frozen toes. She had found a road. She stopped, unable to decide which way to turn.

  When she became still, she could hear them.

  Footsteps.

  Steps with a slight crunch, as if someone were walking along the side of the road, partly in the gravel.

  No!

  He moved toward her, the feeble moonlight picking up a white shirt under a long jacket. But his face was hidden beneath a hood.

  She turned in the other direction and started to run, as fast as her frozen, barefoot body would allow, scarcely more than a limping trot. She had covered perhaps five feet when he grabbed her by the back of her sodden T-shirt and tripped her. She hit the ground heavily and felt the biting sting of a scraped knee.

  “What?” she shrieked at him with lips only half thawed, and he hesitated just for a moment as if startled by her voice. “What do you want? Who are you?”

  “How did you get out of there?” he demanded,
his voice full and loud and terrible.

  “Leave me alone!” She struggled to her knees, her mind beyond reason. All she wanted to do was go home and be warm and safe. All she wanted to do was live. “Go away!”

  He kicked her in the stomach as she started to stand, dropping her to her knees once more. “How did you get out of there?”

  “Go away,” she sobbed.

  He straddled her back. She heard an almost gentle clinking sound and then the chain passed around her neck. He pulled the ends taut but not yet tight.

  The touch of the unyielding metal shocked her mind into a new direction. “You can’t do this.” She fought one last time to get to her feet, tearing at the skin of her own neck as she tried to pull the chains away with her right hand. “Do you know what will happen to you?”

  He said nothing.

  “Don’t you know who I am, you son of a bitch? I’m Destiny Pierson. I’m the goddamn mayor’s daughter!”

  The chain tightened.

  Chapter 4

  EVELYN WROTE HER REPORT the following morning seated at her desk, with one eye on the small sign that read: Non illegitimi carborundum est. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. As always, she resisted the temptation to cross out illegitimi and write in Tony. Her desk, a battle-weary metal job with impressive seniority, staggered under the weight of reports to be checked, instrument manuals, a Beavell Scientific catalog and a picture of Angel from when she was still willing to smile for the camera—before the divorce, in other words. Yellowing Far Side cartoons clung to the wall.

  The trace evidence lab occupied half of the third floor of the ME’s office, but that wasn’t saying much. A single large room housed most of the equipment—the atomic absorption spectrophotometer to analyze gunshot residue, the Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (FTIR) for paints and fibers—and areas for preliminary DNA work. Two smaller rooms in the back were reserved for the rest of the DNA process. Boxes of microtubes and disposable pipettes were stacked close enough to the ceiling to violate OSHA regulations. Obnoxious smells from the first-floor autopsy suite wafted up the stairwells. The thermostat had two settings—on and off.

  “Evelyn!” Tony Jessick bellowed from his office in a tone that would have intimidated Attila the Hun, at least until the great warrior had heard it forty-seven thousand times.

  “Yo.”

  “Our girl’s up next,” her supervisor snapped from the doorway, a man to whom the word rotund didn’t do justice. Short blond hair curved over Tony’s head like fingers on a bowling ball. Behind heavy glasses his eyes focused on her, then the ceiling, the filing cabinet. His weight did nothing to slow his hyperactivity. Tony had a bottomless source of frenzied energy, fueled by the burning conviction that someone, somewhere, was talking about him. “How the hell are we going to get that stuff off her feet? Other than using a sledgehammer?”

  Under his glare she snagged the last cup of coffee. “If she had decomposed a little more, her feet would probably slip out.”

  “The doc isn’t going to wait.”

  “How about a Sawzall?” Evelyn suggested.

  “Does that go through concrete?”

  “I think they go through anything.”

  “Come up with something, Evelyn.” Tony’s supervisory style could be summed up in a few words: all of the authority, none of the responsibility. “The powers that be are really interested in this one. You don’t produce some answers soon, you’re out of here. I’ll move Jason into your job as soon as his grant position expires.”

  A weak threat—Tony needed her too much, and Jason was brand-new to the field. But Tony had the instincts of a shark, with less compassion. She couldn’t ignore the insinuation. If Evelyn solved the case, Tony would look good to the ME. If she screwed up, Tony would ladle her out like chum.

  Evelyn spent the next hour renting a Sawzall from Home Warehouse (of course the county wouldn’t buy it) and cringed over the nonsterile blade. With the help of two deskmen, made muscular by lifting bodies on and off of gurneys all day, she managed to get the cement off without removing any toes. This left her with four blocks of concrete, each cast with the impression of one side of a foot, with chains extruding from the top. Some of the dead girl’s skin remained with the stone. Evelyn stored the sections away for further study and returned to the autopsy suite. Tony fled, having already spent too much time away from his phone. David and Riley had not shown up, but cops didn’t always have time to attend autopsies.

  Jonathan Tyler, the most recent addition to the ME’s office and the only African-American doctor on staff, entered the room, yawning. Working full-time and studying for the board exams, he lived in a constant state of fatigue. “You got the cement off? Good job.”

  At least someone appreciated her trip to the hardware store. She joined him next to the stainless steel table. Autopsies didn’t faze her, though friends had a tough time understanding how a woman who never forgot a birthday and loved Disney movies could work among scenes of the most violent depravity and yet remain unchanged. If asked, she said simply, “You get used to it.”

  While Jonathan cut through the woman’s chest wall only inches away, Evelyn examined the woman’s cheeks with a magnifying glass. A slight amount of adhesive residue but no bruising. How did the killer get his victim to sit still while he poured cement on her feet? Why hadn’t she screamed, yelled for help? Had she been drugged, unconscious, or bound? There were discolorations around the wrists, but were they from the chains or a previous binding?

  Then again maybe she did scream, and no one could hear her.

  Jonathan removed the lungs and sectioned them, slicing through the red matter with a knife on a polypropylene cutting board that would have looked more at home in Evelyn’s kitchen. She always expected lungs to look as they did on diagrams, gray colored and filled with bubble-like alveoli, but she couldn’t tell lungs in real bodies from the liver or the spleen—just one more dark red, amorphous mass. Jonathan squeezed them like a kid with Play-Doh. “Plenty of water.”

  “Well, duh.”

  “Not duh,” he gently corrected. “People can drown without aspirating water. A laryngospasm—chest-wall spasm—seals up the airways. It happens in about ten to fifteen percent of drowning cases.”

  “What if she had already died? Would she have water in the lungs?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “But there is significantly less pulmonary edema when the victim is already dead.”

  “And in this case?”

  “Lots of edema.” He squeezed the lungs again to demonstrate and she felt her heart tighten, nudging her stomach. She hoped David Milaski would catch this guy.

  “How can we find out if someone drowned her in the bathtub first and then got rid of the body? Diatoms?” She meant the microscopic silica-coated algae present in Lake Erie water.

  “They usually equal drowning as far as I’m concerned. What makes you think she drowned in a bathtub?” Jonathan dropped sections into a plastic container of formalin. The fumes stung her eyes.

  “I just want a reason to think she wasn’t alive when she went into that river.”

  “Drowning in a bathtub would be easier?”

  “Not having to sit there waiting for the concrete to harden would be easier.”

  “In this line of work it’s not a good idea to have a vivid imagination,” he warned.

  “I agree. But in this case a little imagination is called for. We don’t have anything else to go on.”

  “Unless we find out she died of a drug overdose, a heart attack, a cracked skull, or some bizarre poison, drowning is what we’re left with. I’ll make an educated guess that she drowned in the river we found her in until I can check for diatoms. Which I could do if someone would let me work.”

  “Okay, okay. Anything I can do to help?”

  “Find out where she got the concrete sneakers.”

  Tony filled the doorway like a leftover Halloween costume, looking p
erturbed beyond his usual paranoia. “Evelyn.”

  She looked up.

  “Hate to take you away from the sweet smells in here, but there’s another one.”

  “Another homicide like this?”

  “Well, that’s just it. They’re not quite sure.”

  Chapter 5

  DAVID MILASKI CHECKED HIS watch as he settled into the passenger seat.

  “Got a date?” Riley asked, cutting off a pickup to make the Chagrin Road exit ramp. He didn’t even look back as a horn blared.

  As if. “No. That’s why I jumped at the chance to meet a real-live mobster. Or the chance to breathe in the charming atmosphere of this police vehicle. Have you ever tried a nicotine patch? I’ve heard they work wonders.”

  “I’ve heard that new Homicide cops who whine find themselves transferred to Property Crimes.”

  David dropped it. He did not come to this case with every advantage. Three years in Vice had perfected the cocky shell he showed the world, but it had not prepared him for homicide investigations. The purpose of a vice crime was profit. People sold drugs, sold their bodies, sold their guns—just business. In homicides, however, the motivations were much more varied. More slippery. More personal. He had a lot to learn. “Why are we going to see this guy?”

  “I told you.”

  “Because his company is building a plaza one street over from where we found the body? Doesn’t seem like much of a reason. Isn’t this a little over-the-top dramatic for a mob murder?”

  To his surprise, Riley agreed. “Yes. But I never miss an opportunity to get in Mario Ashworth’s face. And you never know. Young Mario learned the family business from his mother’s grandfather, the oldest, meanest bastard I’ve ever tossed a search warrant at in thirty years of police work. Maybe he’s returning to some of the classic techniques.”

  “How long have you been acquainted with the family?”

  “I’ve been in Homicide ten years. I knew of them before that, when I worked Narcotics.”

  Riley didn’t ask for David’s history, though David could have summed it up neatly: a disastrous choice made to join the Marines instead of attending college, followed by an equally disastrous stint in police Special Ops, followed by a decade in Vice. Forty years of age, unmarried, childless, proud owner of a dinette set, a rusting Dodge, and an eccentric golden retriever.