Dead Wrong

by Janice Kay Johnson

  "You know those new houses being built on Crescent Ridge? One of them was torched. When firefighters got there, they found the body."

  "Burned?" She was half-dressed, the phone held between ear and shoulder.

  "Nope. Laid out in the driveway."

  "He wanted to make sure she was found." Her toenail snagged as she tried to tug on a sock. "Okay. I'm on my way. Thanks for calling me, Dave."

  "You're welcome."

  She finished getting dressed, then looked up Lieutenant Patton's home phone number and dialed it.

  The man who answered on the first ring sounded wide-awake and as if he expected a call. "McNeil."

  "May I speak to Lieutenant Patton?" Trina asked.

  "Meg? She's still asleep. Is it important?"

  "Yes, this is Detective Giallombardo. We've been working a murder. There's been another one."

  "Oh, God. Hold on."

  Maybe a minute later, the lieutenant came on. "Another murder?"

  Trina told her what Dave Berman had said.

  "That was fast. No six-year intervals anymore." A muffled thump was followed by, "I'll see you there."

  Bundled up and carrying an insulated mug of instant coffee, Trina stepped outside into a winter wonderland. Dawn had grudgingly lightened the sky. Snow must have fallen all night long. For once, the meteorologists were right. A good six inches blanketed cars, street, rooftops. An SUV passed on the street, chains clanking, making her realize how quiet it was out here otherwise.

  The cold stung Trina's face. Thank God, covered parking for all tenants meant all she had to scrape from her windshield was ice. The driver's side door opened with the snap of an arctic floe splitting. Why, when she didn't want to ski, did she live somewhere with such a crappy climate? she wondered for the nine hundred and seventy-fifth time.

  Backing out, she started carefully down the street, following the tracks of the few vehicles that had gone ahead of her.

  She'd never had to handle a crime scene enveloped in new-fallen snow. Snow that still fell, if only in gentle, scattered flakes. They'd be able to get a good idea how long the body had been left out, she thought, but footprints, tireprints, almost any other trace evidence would have been obliterated.

  It took her half an hour to make a drive that would have taken ten minutes on most days. As early as it was, she found herself in a line of other vehicles heading up the mountain loop highway toward Juanita Butte, most sporting racks of skis and snowboards. Between the falling snow and the splatter from the tires of the Subaru in front of her, visibility was darn near zero even with her wipers going full bore. She might have missed the new road altogether in the all-white landscape if it hadn't been for the column of smoke rising above treetops and the tracks leading into the new development. The sign announcing Crescent Ridge had been buried in snow.

  Many of the lots were still empty. The houses that had been built were hulking big, expensive ones with steep-pitched roofs. From what she'd heard, none were completed yet, which meant no residents. What a place to dump a body.

  The road climbed a quarter of a mile up a ridge she knew was formed by a spine of old lava before the first roof came in sight. She crawled around a bend to see two fire trucks in front of that first house. Over the top of the truck she glimpsed oily black smoke and an arc of water from a hose. Probably freezing by the time it hit the fire.

  Beyond the trucks, parked on the side of the road, were a red Fire Marshal's four-by-four and two Butte County Sheriff's Department Explorers. Trina was chagrined to realize that one was Lieutenant Patton's.

  She parked at the end of the line and stepped out into snow even deeper than they'd had at a lower elevation in town. It wasn't like slogging through wet snow, though; this was dry and virtually weightless, an airy dream for skiers. Unfortunately, powder snow fell only at bitterly cold temperatures. Part of her was focused with a cop's instinct on what lay ahead, but, already cold, she worried about how they'd stand out here for hours.

  A cluster of Ponderosa pines and the row of vehicles briefly blocked her view of the driveway. All she could see was the house, a beauty built of logs with a metal roof and a huge stone chimney. But she forgot it the moment she cut in front of one of the Explorers.

  The body lay spread-eagled in a bed of snow, perfectly lined up with the garage. As much as an inch more of snow had fallen since the victim had been left, dusting her with a pale film. Her flesh was bluish-white beneath the snow, but for crystallized blood on her chest and throat. The white jockstrap engulfing her face made Trina think of the faceless killers in horror movies.

  Lieutenant Patton separated herself from the cluster of police officers and firefighters standing beside one of the fire trucks. Dave Berman lifted a hand and Trina nodded in return.

  Joining Trina, the lieutenant greeted her. "I've sent for a crew. They're supposed to bring a canopy of some kind."

  "I was trying to figure out how we'd keep her from getting buried." Unexpectedly, bile rose in her throat. She swallowed. "Buried too soon, anyway."

  The lieutenant didn't seem to notice Trina's rookie moment. She was staring toward the body. "Have you ever met my adopted daughter, Emily? Her mother's body was found dumped near one of the trailheads a few miles up the road, just about this time of year. Worst kind of crime scene."

  Trina had heard the story about the baby left in the Juanita Butte ski area parking lot after everyone had gone for the night. Scott McNeil, the general manager, had almost decided to bed down at the lodge, as he sometimes did, but instead headed out into a frigid night and found her buckled in her car seat, set on the icy parking lot next to his SUV. She'd have been dead long before morning if he hadn't come out. Everybody's guess was that Emily's mother had persuaded her killer to leave the baby in hopes she at least would survive. Scott and Meg Patton, the lead on the case, had ended up getting married and adopting little Emily.

  "Our guy left footprints all over," Trina observed. Her breath hung in a frosty cloud before her.

  "Yeah, we might get lucky. We can do a cast of them, if somebody gets here quick enough."

  With snow filling them, Trina couldn't imagine that the cast would be able to show much detail. A general shoe size, maybe. Powder snow wouldn't compress well enough to hold an impression, either, she suspected. But she could be wrong; she'd seen evidence techs accomplish miracles.

  The footprints headed toward the front of the house. The bay window was shattered, and the interior a hell of roiling black smoke. Firefighters maneuvered hoses and trampled around the side of the house, trying to avoid destroying those original tracks. Their voices rang out as they called instructions to each other and the engine of one of the two trucks still rumbled.

  "Gasoline," a voice behind Trina said.

  Trina turned.

  "Have you met my sister?" the lieutenant asked. "Abby Patton. She's Ben's wife."

  Trina had seen her from a distance. She and Meg Patton looked startlingly alike, but Abby was the beautiful one, with vivid blue eyes and wheat-blond hair. The red cheeks and nose that made Trina suspect she looked like Rudolph instead added vivid color to Abby's face. The youngest of the Patton sisters, she was married to Ben Shea, the second in command in the Major Crimes unit and the sexiest man Trina had ever seen except for Will. She was also one of only two arson investigators in the county.

  "Abby, Trina Giallombardo."

  "Marshal…"

  She shook her head. "Just Abby, please."

  "He threw something through the front window," the lieutenant observed.

  "Maybe an open can of gasoline. If so, we'll find it." Abby pushed out her lower lip while she thought. "Risky. The air would have been full of gas fumes by the time he tossed in a firebrand."

  "It looks like he did run," Trina pointed out. Damn it, she was shivering. Her body didn't seem to want to stop. "His footsteps are way farther apart coming back than they were going."

  Meg Patton looked more closely. "You're right. I hadn't noticed."
>
  Abby made a humming sound in her throat. "I'm guessing he tossed something that didn't spark for a moment. Or the fire was enclosed, say inside a box. The fumes wouldn't hit it as quickly."

  "But he must have stayed to be sure the fire took. He wouldn't have wanted it to fizzle."

  "You know how quick it goes up when gasoline is involved."

  "Which means, the minute he saw flames he'd want to skedaddle."

  They all looked, as if in concert, toward the body.

  Trina, for one, had been trying not to look since her first, appalled examination. Somehow it bothered her that they were standing around coolly discussing the mechanics of committing the crime without having even uncovered the victim's face first, found out who she was. She knew they couldn't until photographs were taken, permanently recording the positioning of the body and the footprints and drag marks made in the snow around it. Accepting the necessity didn't come easily.

  What if she knew this victim, too?

  "So he laid her out first." The lieutenant stomped her feet, presumably to restore feeling to toes going numb. "He must have come prepared to set a fire."

  "He picked this place because he knew it was deserted," Abby agreed. "He could take his time with the body, then torch the house and bring the troops running."

  "Otherwise, it could have been weeks before she was found, depending on when contractors got back up here to work on the houses." Trina drew her chin inside the collar of her coat and blinked when a snowflake clung to her lashes. "And he didn't want that."

  Lieutenant Patton nodded. "So he killed her because he gets pleasure from it, maybe needs to kill. But there's more to this."

  "He likes the publicity," Abby suggested.

  "Maybe." But the lieutenant wasn't convinced by the theory any more than Trina was. "Hey!" she yelled suddenly. "Watch where you're going!"

  A firefighter advancing toward the front window with an ax retreated.

  It was true that most serial killers liked to read about their crime in the newspaper. But that didn't mean they went to elaborate lengths to be sure the body was found immediately. Thinking aloud, Trina said, "He wants us to know he's the one who killed Gillian Pappas. Not Mendoza."

  Abby shot her a startled glance.

  Meg Patton didn't seem to notice. "Then why wasn't he killing women while the trial went on? Or right afterward, so we'd look like fools?"

  "He was in jail for something else." She could go by rote through the possibilities. "He was scared by what he'd done. Joined the army and was off in Afghanistan."

  "Or he was satisfied," the lieutenant said. "The act was complete in and of itself. Then. But something has happened since to sting his pride. Or trigger his rage."

  "Whoa!" Abby ordered, holding up a gloved hand. "Did I miss something? You two are seriously considering the possibility that the wrong man was convicted?"

  "We have to." Meg Patton narrowed her eyes. "But it's one possibility we're keeping to ourselves for now. Understand?"

  With the same hand, her sister snapped a salute. "Yes, ma'am. Lieutenant, ma'am."

  "Behave yourself."

  "Wouldn't know how to do otherwise," Abby said, only semiseriously.

  "Damn it," her sister growled, "I'd like to get to that body."

  Trina glanced toward the road, where a convoy of black sheriff's department vehicles crept up the steep curving street. "Here they are. Isn't that Ron behind the wheel?"

  The lieutenant grunted. "Where's the coroner?"

  "It'll take a while to get pictures." Unfortunately. Trina tried wriggling her toes and wasn't sure if they were still there. She kept flexing her fingers and tucking her face down inside the collar of her parka like a turtle retreating.

  The department's star evidence techs, Ron Niemi and Sheila King, were wizards, according to about anyone Trina had asked who'd been on the job for long. They didn't just know their stuff, they were creative.

  Both were in their thirties and were divorced. Rumor had it they had something going, even though Sheila at a skinny six feet tall towered inches above pudgy Ron. Watching them work, their concentration intense, Trina imagined them in bed together excitedly discussing immunoblot assays for blood or how best to draw out usable prints from textured surfaces. Not the kind of thing a normal spouse or lover would want to talk about.

  They'd brought several canopies. Crew readied them to set up, easier said than done with clumsy gloved hands, while Sheila took dozens of photographs of the body, footprints, house and shattered window. Trina felt herself turning into a block of ice.

  "No tire tracks," Sheila complained.

  A fire captain turned. "Goddamn it, we were responding to a fire, not a murder! We didn't see the body until too late."

  "Yeah, yeah." She flipped a hand at him. "Okay, let's get those canopies set up. Crap, I wish it would quit snowing."

  If anything, the snow was coming down harder, spreading a white veil over the vehicles parked alongside the road and over the body. Trina thought of all the skiers heading up to the mountain, anticipating fresh powder, maybe idly noticing the smoke and wondering in passing whether someone had knocked over a space heater or whether a wire had shorted. Fresh-fallen snow had a purity that made more hideous the body it was trying to disguise.

  The medical examiner's van joined the lineup and Sanchez hurried to them, looking unhappy, only his eyes and nose showing between a wool hat and the collar of a bulky parka. "Won't be able to tell you much under these conditions," he announced. "But let's get it over with."

  He was right; he had nothing to say they hadn't already heard two weeks ago, when he gave Amy Owen's body a first, superficial examination.

  "Can't have been out here much over an hour, hour and a half, given how much snow has fallen. She's been dead longer than that, but not by much. Look, there's still flexibility." He moved an arm.

  Everyone present winced.

  "With her damn near frozen, I can't give you a good estimate. Couple hours ago, tops." He shrugged. "Depends on whether the body has been outside the whole time. Damn it, I'm looking forward to summer."

  They all stood in a circle around the victim, just under the edge of a bright blue canopy.

  "Let's take a look and see who she is," Lieutenant Patton said. But neither she nor anyone else moved for a moment, as if they were all reluctant to know.

  With long blond hair and her face covered, the victim could have been Meg or Abby Patton. Trina wondered if the two women were conscious of the resemblance.

  The lieutenant finally crouched beside the body, pulling off her warm gloves to put on latex ones. Trina hovered behind her, while the coroner remained on the other side.

  The cup of the jockstrap was frozen in place. It cracked as Lieutenant Patton tried to pull it to one side with fingers that were obviously stiff with cold. She muttered a few choice words and finally wrenched it to one side.

  Trina wasn't the only one who sucked in a breath.

  Tiny hemorrhages from the strangulation disfigured a face frozen in a rictus of terror and desperation.

  "I've seen her," Trina said.

  "Damn, damn, damn." The lieutenant lurched back. "I talked to her two days after the Owen murder. She's a friend of the other victim's. Karin Kristensen."

  With a sick sense of inevitability, Trina said, "Isn't she the one whose phone number you got from Will?"

  Meg Patton breathed an obscenity. "You mean, the one he dated."

  "This is a small town. That doesn't have to mean anything."

  They all stared at the ghastly, frozen face of a woman who had died in torment.

  "Or," the lieutenant said, voice quiet, hollow, "it could mean everything."

  CHAPTER NINE

  "UH-HUH." Phone tucked between shoulder and ear, chair leaned back, Will listened to an attorney explaining why his client should get a deal that included no prison time.

  "He suffers from the disease of alcoholism," the defense attorney said, voice rich with sympathy
. "We all know that. What's important is that he get treatment. Sixty days in jail isn't going to have any impact on whether he'll reoffend. Thirty days in treatment might."

  Rather mildly, Will remarked, "The thirty days of treatment court-ordered the last time he got arrested for a DUI didn't seem to work. Here he was, drunk driving only six weeks later."

  The attorney had an explanation for that. A party his client had to attend, his struggle with all that alcohol around him, a designated driver who left early. Blah, blah, blah.

  Listening with only half an ear, Will rummaged for a particular file, then flipped it open and started scanning a police report on a case of cattle rustling. Not something you saw in Portland.

  Someone knocked on his door. He swiveled in his chair and waved Louis Fein in.

  Not liking the expression on his boss's face, he said into the phone, "Listen, I'll have to get back to you. But my gut feeling is that your client needs to go to jail. We've been lenient twice. Third time's the charm." He hung up. "You don't look like you have good news."

  Expression grim, Fein sat down. "I just got a call from your mother. There's been another murder like Amy Owen's."

  Somehow he'd known it would happen. But he had failed to prepare himself. A sick feeling of dread spread from Will's chest to his stomach and upward to his throat. "Who? Have they identified her yet?"

  Fein watched him with grave eyes. "A Karin Kristensen. Your mother said you knew her."

  His first thought, absurdly, was, Oh yeah, that's her last name. He didn't know why he hadn't been able to remember it.

  With the crushing impact of a rear-end collision, that first trivial thought was obliterated. Images flashed before his eyes, white elastic embedded in a slender neck, small breast ripped by teeth more savage than any wild animal's, eyes speckled with burst blood vessels and glazed in a stare of horror. Gillian. He didn't want to see these other bodies, but God how he wished he could put a different face on the hideous images he would never forget.

  "God," he said hoarsely. "I dated her."

  "Your mother asked me to tell you that she's going to need to talk to you. She said she'd stop by your apartment later. Maybe evening. Will, you need to go home."