Skeleton Justice

by Michael Baden

  “Yeah, it’s like a hotel room,” Todd agreed. “Kinda creepy.”

  Jake led the way to the kitchen and looked into the refrigerator. “The contents of the refrigerator can also help you establish the time of death.” Jake smiled at Todd and shook a carton. “The milk expiration date is your friend.”

  Todd peered over Jake’s shoulder. “Jeez, there’s even less food in her fridge than in mine. English muffins, low-fat margarine, juice, and milk. She must’ve eaten out a lot.”

  Jake glanced into the garbage can—empty. Dishwasher—cleaner than a showroom model. “The killer didn’t leave anything behind in here.”

  The living room revealed nothing more than it had on first glance—no clutter, no photos, no soul. Looking down at the coffee table, Jake’s eye was drawn to a single round clean spot, where no fingerprint powder had fallen. The CSIs must’ve removed something from here, he thought, a mug or a glass. In the average home, he wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but in Amanda Hogaarth’s home, it seemed extraordinary.

  Now Jake moved toward the body. Amanda Hogaarth lay on her back, her knees slightly bent to the right, her arms splayed to either side. A brown tweed skirt covered her stocky legs to mid-calf; a beige sweater met the skirt demurely, leaving no flesh exposed. She had the stiff Margaret Thatcher-like hairstyle typical of a woman in her late sixties, and not a hair had been disturbed as she fell.

  Todd crouched down beside the body. “Look at this,” he said as Jake joined him. He pointed to a tiny needle mark and a speck of dried blood inside the elbow joint of the victim where blood had obviously been drawn.

  That alone was not suspicious. The woman might simply have been to the doctor’s and had blood drawn for tests the day she died.

  “And,” Todd continued with rising excitement, “look at her mouth.”

  Ms. Hogaarth’s perfect white top teeth were false, and the denture had been knocked askew in her mouth, giving her a slightly grotesque expression. Around the corners of her lips were tiny abrasions.

  “She was gagged,” Jake observed. He glanced down. Her legs were bare, and her feet, contorted with the bunions and calluses of old age, lay uncovered on the rug. He had been in her home for only ten minutes, but Jake felt strongly that this was not a woman who would have padded around barefoot. “Have you found her panty hose?” he asked Todd.

  “I told the criminalists to look for it, but I doubt they’ll find it. The killer probably took that with him.

  “Rigor is receding,” Todd continued. “She’s been dead about twenty-four hours.”

  “Maybe more, Todd. The algor mortis will provide more information. Check her core body temperature, and take the ambient air temperature, too. That may have prevented some decomposition.”

  “The air conditioner has been running on high. It’s sixty-five degrees in here,” Todd reported.

  “Yes, her body temperature would have dropped more rapidly in this cool room,” Jake explained, “making it seem that she’s been dead longer than she really has been.”

  “Her livor mortis is fixed.” Todd pressed his thumb against the maroon pooling of blood on her back and could not produce a white pallor. “There’s no doubt she’s been dead for more than eight or nine hours at least, and she hasn’t been moved at all since she died.”

  “Good work, Todd.” Jake rose and signaled to the two morgue workers lounging by the door. “Go ahead and take the body to the morgue. And keep her in this same position, or you’ll destroy any trace evidence on her back. I’ll do the autopsy first thing tomorrow morning. If you want to assist, Todd, be there by eight a.m.”

  Jake watched as they transferred the body, the extremities still partially stiffened with rigor, onto a gurney. If this was truly the work of the Vampire, why had his methods changed? Why had he found it necessary to kill this victim, when he hadn’t seriously harmed the others? The case had morphed. What had been a fascinating academic puzzle for him to decode had escalated to murder. He’d gotten what he wanted—the chance to work on the Vampire case—but it had come at the cost of Amanda Hogaarth’s life.

  “Have you contacted the next of kin?” Jake asked the detective.

  “Doesn’t seem to be anybody. Her apartment application lists a lawyer as the person to contact in an emergency. Least I don’t have to break the news to some heartbroken daughter or sister.” Pasquarelli grunted thanks to a passing stream of CSIs.

  “We didn’t get much,” the oldest one said. “Cleanest apartment I ever saw.”

  Jake thrust his hands deep into his pockets. “Something’s here, Vito. We have to look with our eyes wide open. I’m going to nose around again.”

  “Be my guest.”

  Jake did the roundabout again, but if anything, the apartment seemed even more nondescript than before. Then in the kitchen, amid the spotless cabinets and appliances, Jake found it. There, pushed back behind the gleaming pots, was one clue that Amanda Hogaarth had lived a real life and knew someone else on the planet—a battered book with a faded cover and spidery handwritten notations in the margins: Recetas Favoritas.

  Jake cradled it in his hands. A cookbook, a Spanish-language cookbook, not placed on a shelf for easy reference, but hidden away. Like love letters, Jake thought. Or pornography. He gently put it down.

  Manny stormed up the steps of the federal building in Newark, New Jersey, her heels rapping out a battle cry. Tossing her red leather tote on the conveyor belt to be x-rayed, Manny charged through the metal detector, which immediately began hooting out a warning.

  “Step back out, ma’am,” the marshal instructed. “Any keys or change in your pockets?”

  “Of course not,” she snapped. Her sea green Donatella Versace suit didn’t even have pockets, and if it did, she certainly wouldn’t destroy its sleek lines by carrying around lumps of keys.

  “Unbutton your jacket.”

  Manny did as she was told. “Whoops! I forgot I was wearing that.” She undid the vintage double-link chain belt from her waist, dropped it in the guard’s basket, and stepped through the metal detector without incident.

  On the other side, the guard was holding the belt, calling for a tape measure.

  “C’mon, give that back,” Manny commanded. “I’m in a hurry. I’ve got an urgent meeting with a client.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but security regulations prohibit lengths of chain longer than four feet. Can’t let metal belts longer than forty-eight inches into the building. Same regulations as on a plane.”

  “That accessory set me back a few hundred dollars. Do you honestly think I’d use it to chain a federal prosecutor to his desk?”

  “I need to measure it first,” the guard insisted. “I gotta find a tape.”

  Manny opened her mouth to howl in protest at the absurd delay. But before a word escaped, she stopped, grinned, and held open her suit jacket. “Look, Xavier,” she said, reading the guard’s name tag, “you’re insulting me here. I know I’m not a size two, but does it look like I need four feet of chain to go around this waist?”

  Xavier flushed as he studied her hourglass figure. “Um, I guess not. Sorry, ma’am. Here you go.”

  “This terrorism stuff is getting ridiculous,” Manny fumed to the man riding the elevator with her. “They spend all their resources hassling average citizens, and there are probably Al Qaeda operatives camped out a mile from the Pentagon.”

  The man said nothing, but he took a step away from her as she pounded the button for the seventh floor yet again. When the elevator finally delivered her, Manny was in a fine state, and woe be unto the federal prosecutor who crossed her.

  “Philomena Manfreda here to see Brian Lisnek,” she told the receptionist ensconced behind the bulletproof glass window.

  The young woman started to gesture toward a chair in the waiting area, but one look at the set of Manny’s jaw changed her mind and she buzzed Lisnek immediately. “You’ll have to sign in. And wear this tag at all times.” She spoke as if she carried a gun.
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  Lisnek, a stocky sandy-haired man in a rumpled gray suit, opened the secured door. Manny soon found herself seated with him in a typical government office—windowless, crammed with unfiled papers, furnished with a metal desk and old scarred wood chairs, and equipped with a computer whose screen dissolved into the American bald eagle.

  “Where is my client, Travis Heaton? I want to talk to him before I talk to you.”

  “He’s in a holding cell downstairs with one of our agents. I’ll have the guard take him to a lawyer’s window. His mother is in the waiting area down there, in case she’s needed.”

  “You mean in case she’s needed to sign a statement giving her son permission to confess to a crime he didn’t commit. Well, there will be no statement. Tell your homeboy not to question him any longer. My client is exercising his Fifth Amendment rights.”

  Lisnek seemed unperturbed, as if this was just another day in his life dealing with a run-of-the-mill defense attorney. Manny didn’t care for the look of smug self-confidence on the prosecutor’s round face. “What are the charges against him?”

  “Terrorist attack on U.S. government property. There will be a number of charges of violation of Title 18, then double that for violations of the U.S. postal code. And, of course, attempted murder. Assume twenty, thirty main charges, a few related subsidiary charges, a number of conspiracy charges, and maybe a racketeering charge, give or take a few.”

  “Oh, come on. Whoever did this, you know it was just a prank with a regrettable unintended injury.”

  “Ms. Manfreda, the attempted assassination of a federal judge is not a ‘regrettable unintended injury.’ And there are no pranks in the metropolitan area these days.”

  • • •

  “Thank God you’re here!”

  Manny would not have pegged the woman who greeted her in the visitors’ area as the mother of a Monet Academy student. Slightly overweight, with deeply etched worry lines in her forehead, she wore a plain gold band on her right ring finger, indicating she was a widow, and jeans and a sweatshirt that she must’ve thrown on when she got the call that her son was in jail. No diamonds, no Cartier, no tightly Botoxed skin. Mrs. Maureen Heaton looked too normal, and too hardworking, to be the kind of mother who could produce the money and the connections necessary to get her son into the city’s most exclusive prep school.

  Manny extended her hand. “Philomena Manfreda, Mrs. Heaton. I’d like to sit down with your son and find out exactly what’s going on. But it’s hard here. We have to talk through a wired-glass window by phone. And now, under the Patriot Act, even my conversations can be monitored if they think I am passing messages on to his accomplices.”

  “But that’s only if he’s guilty,” Mrs. Heaton protested. “My Travis is a good boy. You’ve got to get him out of this place. They can’t keep him here. And you can’t let them take him to a prison. He’s only a child. Please.”

  “How old is Travis, ma’am?”

  “He just turned eighteen, in his senior year at Monet. He’s always been small for his age, and a little immature, but very bright.”

  Inwardly, Manny winced. Eighteen was bad—the kid would be charged as an adult, and if she didn’t manage to get him off, he’d face a prison term and a criminal record that would follow him all his life. A really bad trade-off for the momentary thrill of watching a mailbox explode.

  Manny checked her watch. “They’ll be bringing Travis in any minute, Mrs. Heaton. You’d better step out into the hall.”

  “What? I want to see my son. I need to be with him when you talk to him.”

  “That’s not possible, Mrs. Heaton. It would violate attorney-client privilege.”

  “But I’m his mother,” Maureen Heaton wailed.

  “Even so, now that Travis has turned eighteen, he’s considered an adult. The government could call you as a witness against your son.”

  “I’ve been working my hospital job during the day and doing private-duty nursing at night to keep him in school. Do you understand? He’s my child.”

  Manny felt her own eyes well with tears, but she blinked them back furiously. Getting emotionally involved with a client and his family did no one any good. Travis would be best served if she kept her emotions in check. “I’ll make sure he’s okay. I promise.” Manny turned her impulse to hug into a brief pat on the shoulder and gently urged Travis’s mother toward the dispassionate uniformed guard waiting to escort her out.

  Another guard led Manny to a folding chair outside one of the confessional-like booths lining the wall of the narrow room. The door behind the Plexiglas partition opened and Manny watched a guard escort a thin, hunched young man with the makings of a scraggly beard up to the window.

  He stared at Manny, managing to convey both belligerence and sullenness. From the dark rings under his eyes, he must have been awake all night.

  This was one of the Preppy Terrorists?

  Even if you replaced the orange prison jumpsuit with a navy blazer and club tie, this kid was not going to be appearing in a Brooks Brothers ad anytime soon. Where was the air of nonchalant entitlement? Where was the cocksure self-confidence? That’s what parents sent their sons to places like the Monet Academy to acquire. Algebra and biology you could get at lesser institutions; Monet prepared boys to be masters of the universe. Travis might have been a straight-A student academically, but he hadn’t acquired that Monet panache.

  Manny picked up the telephone receiver, which would allow them to talk with limited privacy, while keeping her eye on the glowering guard by the door. She gestured for Travis to pick up his receiver.

  He held it gingerly an inch or two from his ear, as if he suspected her of being able to transmit poison through the line.

  “Travis, I’m a lawyer. My name is Manny Manfreda and your mom has asked me to represent you.”

  At the mention of his mother, Travis’s shoulders slumped even more and he looked down at the floor.

  “You need to answer my questions truthfully, or I won’t be any help to you at all,” Manny said. “Do you understand?”

  Travis nodded, but he still wouldn’t make eye contact.

  The first thing Manny wanted to know was how much damage her new client had done to himself. “Have you been talking to the police and the FBI since you were brought in? Did they advise you of your rights?”

  Travis nodded. “A police car came around the corner right after the explosion. They must’ve been patrolling right around there. The cops stopped us and said they just wanted to get some information from us down at the station. We went because we didn’t want them calling our parents. We weren’t even supposed to be out that night.”

  “So they didn’t arrest you at the scene, but you agreed to go with them to the police station.” Manny leaned forward. “This is important, Travis. Did they threaten you?”

  The boy shrugged. “No, but they’re cops, ya know. You do what they tell you to do. Besides, I didn’t do anything wrong, so I figured I didn’t have anything to worry about.”

  Manny tried not to think about how many wrongfully convicted people had spoken those words before being hauled off for long prison terms. Before she could ask her next question, Travis asked her one.

  “When the cops were driving away with us, I saw an ambulance pull up. Did someone get hurt when the mailbox exploded? Later, the cops kept asking me about some man with a dog.”

  Manny studied her client. For the first time since they had started talking, he met her eye. Was he being sincere? Was he really not aware that the explosion had nearly killed a federal judge? The subtle cues you got when you spoke to a client face-to-face were hard to read when his face was obscured by scratched Plexiglas, his voice distorted by a primitive sound system.

  “The man walking the dog was Judge Patrick Brueninger. He was seriously injured by a flying piece of metal.”

  Manny watched as Travis absorbed this news. His face didn’t register any of the emotions she would have expected: shock and fear if he were innocent
, or if he really had intended to kill the judge, elation at having hit his target, disappointment at not having killed him. Instead, Travis seemed just mildly concerned.

  “What about the dog?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “The dog—did it get hurt in the explosion?”

  “Uh, not that I’m aware.” Manny looked down and made some notes on her pad to give herself a moment to think. Her new client seemed utterly unfazed by being involved in an incident that had nearly killed a judge, but he was worried about the victim’s dog. She had no experience representing juveniles—would a jury believe he was screwy or that he merely had his priorities straight?

  She resumed the interview. “Do you know who Patrick Brueninger is?”

  Travis shrugged. “No. Why would I?”

  The truth or a lie? Manny couldn’t be sure. That bored teenage demeanor was so hard to read. For a newshound like her, Brueninger’s name was instantly recognizable. But teenagers, even smart ones, were famously self-absorbed. Maybe Travis really didn’t have a clue about the prominence of the man who’d been injured by this stunt. She moved on. “How many kids in your group?”

  “It was just Paco and me from Monet. We met these four other guys at the club. They were a little older. They bought us some beers.” Travis’s voice got softer and Manny had to strain to hear. “After the music was over, we all went to the deli for some food. We passed the mailbox, and one of the guys bent down, like he’d dropped something. The next thing you know, everyone was running, so Paco and I ran, too. And then the mailbox exploded, the cops came, and here I am.”