by D P Lyle
He now toyed with the phone cord, winding and unwinding it around his finger. With a shake of his head, he hung up the phone. “My daughter.” He forked his fingers through his hair. “She and that loser she dates are down in Destin. Went down on his Harley.” Then he immediately changed gears and looked at me. “Good to see you.”
“You, too.” We shook hands.
“You went over to Mike’s, I understand.”
“Yeah. And the other two scenes.”
He nodded. “I just finished Mike’s autopsy.”
Lou never wasted time. He’d only gotten the body a few hours ago and had already completed the post. “And?” I asked.
“Cause of death was the gunshot. Massive brain injury. I’d suspect he never knew a thing. All the rest was definitely postmortem.”
Thank you, Jesus.
“The bullet was damaged but not too badly. Got it down in the firearms lab right now.”
“Let’s go over the others. What do you have on them so far?” I asked.
Lou began to pace. “Petersen died of several blows to the head. Any one of four could have been the fatal blow. Allison, like Mike, from a single 9 mm. His was to the left temporal area. Like Mike, all the trauma was postmortem.
“The blood spatters and the wounds indicate the killer is strong, right-handed, and between six feet and six-two.” Lou leaned against his heavy wooden desk, drumming his fingers against the edge. “Sidau Yamaguchi tells me he probably weighs between one-eighty and two hundred pounds and wears a size ten and a half shoe. That’s based on the shoe prints he found in the soil at Mike’s this morning.”
“No blood or bodily fluids from the killer at any of the scenes?” I asked.
“Correct.” Lou lifted himself and sat on the desk. One foot began a tap dance to some internal drumbeat.
“No evidence of sexual assault?”
“None.”
“The cotton fibers? From plain-vanilla gardeners’ gloves?” T-Tommy asked. “The kind that can be purchased anywhere?”
“Looks that way. We’re sending samples to the FBI lab. Maybe they can pinpoint the manufacturer.” Lou’s fingers continued their monotonous rhythm. “I’m pessimistic, but it’s worth a try.” “Shoe prints?”
“Same deal. Nike sole pattern. Common style. My guy at the FBI says that’ll narrow it down to a few million.”
I heard the door behind me open and turned that way. Becka Cooksey entered, a folder in her hand.
“Firearms report,” she said. “Same weapon used on Mike and Allison.”
CHAPTER 12
MONDAY 12:35 P.M.
“CODE TRAUMA. CODE TRAUMA.” THE PAGE OPERATOR’S VOICE blared from the ceiling-mounted speakers at Huntsville Memorial Medical Center.
Dr. Charlie Beck tossed the remainder of his tuna sandwich into the trash can beside his desk. So much for lunch. He darted out of his office and turned down the main hallway of the emergency department.
“Dr. Beck, that trauma patient we were expecting just got here.” Marcy Clark, the ER head nurse, hurried toward Trauma Room 1.
Charlie hustled to keep up. Entering the brightly lit room, he saw a battered and bloody man lying on a stretcher. Deborah Studen, one of the ER nurses, had already begun cutting away the man’s dirt-stiffened and bloodstained clothes.
Charlie went through a cursory physical exam. The victim, obviously a vagrant, smelled of back-alley filth and urine. Insect bites, in various stages of healing, blotched his skin. Swollen and blood-caked lips surrounded yellowed teeth. Multiple contusions and abrasions discolored his face, shoulders, chest, and arms. “Vitals?”
The valve of the blood pressure cuff hissed as it deflated. “Ninety over sixty,” Deborah said. “Pulse one-twenty-five. Respirations thirty-eight and shallow. 02-two Sat 68 percent on ten liters.”
“Let’s tube him,” Charlie said.
He pulled on surgical gloves and stepped to the head of the stretcher. Marcy handed him a laryngoscope and an ET tube. He inserted the scope into the man’s mouth and lifted his tongue out of the way. The carina and vocal cords popped into view. Charlie easily slipped the tube into the trachea. He inflated the balloon cuff and attached an Ambu bag. “Check for breath sounds.”
Marcy pressed her stethoscope against one side of the man’s chest and then the other while Charlie repeatedly compressed the Ambu, expanding the man’s lungs with each squeeze. “Good sounds on the left. Zilch on the right.”
Charlie rechecked the ET tube. “It’s in good position. Must have a pneumo. Got a chest tube tray?”
“Right here.” Marcy unwrapped the sterile packaging and placed the tray on a surgical stand.
“I’d bet on a broken rib or two and a punctured lung,” Charlie said. He scrubbed the man’s chest with Betadine and then injected Lidocaine for local anesthesia. Using a scalpel, he deftly made a deep cut in the side of the chest between two ribs. He used a hemostat to spread the wound open and then, with a quick pop, pushed the instrument into the chest cavity. Blood gushed out, cascading to the floor.
He inserted a finger through the opening and probed in all directions to ensure the lung was free from the chest wall.
“Chest tube.” He took the finger-thick plastic tube from Marcy and advanced it through the opening. Blood swirled down the tube into the kick bucket Marcy had rolled into position with her foot.
“Suture.” He applied several stitches to close the wound and anchor the tube in place, while Marcy attached the tube’s other end to a suction bottle.
“BP’s up to one-ten,” Deborah said.
“Great.” Charlie peeled off his bloody gloves and tugged on a clean pair. “Now, let’s see what else is wrong.” With the patient stabilized, he went through a more extensive head-to-foot examination. “No localizing neuro signs. Hopefully his coma’s just a concussion. Fractured nose and left forearm. Left orbital contusion. No evidence of internal abdominal trauma, but I can’t be sure.” He turned to Deborah. “Let’s get a STAT CBC, SMA twenty, blood gases, and chest, skull, and cross-table lateral C-spine X-rays. Also type and cross-match for two units of blood. What’s his 02-two Sat now?”
“Ninety-three percent.”
“Okay. Let’s get the lab and X-rays done.”
Charlie dictated his operative report on the chest tube insertion while waiting for the X-rays to be completed. Twenty minutes later a tech brought the stack of films to the ER. One by one Charlie held them against the fluorescent view box. Marcy stood next to him. “No skull fracture. Neck looks okay. Two broken ribs on the right side.” He nudged Marcy with an elbow. “Don’t you just love it when I’m right?”
“Insufferable is the word that comes to mind.”
Charlie laughed and held up another film. “ET and chest tubes are in good position.” Another film went up. “Fracture of the left ulna. Who’s the trauma surgeon on call today?”
“Dr. Sammons. I’ll page him,” Marcy said.
“And for neuro and orthopedics?”
“Samuelson for ortho and, I think, Rigel for neuro.”
“Get them on the phone, too. Let’s get a STAT CT brain scan.”
“Dr. Beck?”
Charlie turned to see Deborah walking toward him, flanked by two sheriff’s deputies.
“Doc, how’s he doing?” the taller deputy asked.
“Don’t know yet. Are you the officers who were on the scene?”
“I’m Paul Rodriguez. This is Hal Oakley.”
“He has a couple of cracked ribs, a punctured lung, a fractured arm, and a trashed nose,” Charlie said. “He’s still unconscious. We have other tests to do before we know the full story. Where’s the guy you arrested?”
“We put him in Trauma Room 2,” Deborah said at the same time Rodriguez was saying, “We didn’t arrest him.”
Charlie couldn’t believe it. “You didn’t arrest the guy? After what he did?”
“He wasn’t the perp. It was the other guy. The John Doe.”
“You�
��re kidding.” Charlie looked from one deputy to the other. “I’ve seen lots of muggings, but this?”
Rodriguez shrugged. “That’s what it looked like to us at first, too.”
“What happened?”
“Apparently John Doe pulled a knife on”—Rodriguez flipped through his notepad—“Brian Kurtz and tried to rob him. Doe fits the ID of a guy we’ve been looking for in a handful of similar robberies. Witnesses corroborated Kurtz’s story, so we’ll write it off as self-defense unless we find something that says otherwise. Of course, we want to talk to Doe as soon as we can. When do you think that might be?”
“No way to know just yet. Dr. Rigel will be his neurologist. He’ll make that decision.”
“Thanks. We’ll finish our report and get back on the road. Another deputy will be here soon to guard him until he’s well enough to go to the jail ward. If you have any problems, give us a call.”
Charlie turned toward Trauma Room 2, but lingered for a moment. He attempted to construct a mental image of the patient who waited inside. What kind of person could have done this?
CHAPTER 13
MONDAY l:34 P.M.
I DROPPED T-TOMMY OFF DOWNTOWN SO HE COULD HOOK up WITH Scotty Simpson and help orient the half dozen new HPD uniforms that had been assigned to the task force. I needed to swing by my lumber company, the one I inherited when my parents died, to sign some checks, Monday being payroll and bill-paying day. I told him I’d be back well before we had to sit down with Luther.
Only took ten minutes to drive over to Walker Lumber. When I pulled into the front lot, I saw Milk, talking with a customer beside a blue pickup loaded with two-by-fours. The beams stuck out the back a good four feet, so Milk was tying a strip of red cloth around the end of one so that anyone behind the driver wouldn’t run up underneath them.
In the South, nicknames are as common as Baptist churches. Some nicknames even have their own nicknames. Bertie Jackson had one of those. To most he was Buttermilk, a moniker given him by family members because of his love for his mother’s buttermilk biscuits. To close friends he was simply Milk.
He had been one hell of a baseball player. Even now, thirty years later, his exploits as a kid on the field of dreams were legendary. Now a bit exaggerated, but not by much. He played a few years of Double-A ball before calling it quits, realizing the pyramid to the big leagues was just too steep. That’s when he came to work for my dad. When the company dropped into my lap, I gave him a piece of the profits and turned the day-to-day stuff over to him.
He slapped the tail of the pickup as the customer drove away.
“How’s it going?” I asked as I climbed out of my car. The sun was hot and insistent.
“Mighty fine. Mostly.” He scratched an ear. “Got another bad load of Sheetrock. Chipped, several cracked.”
“Same outfit up in Tennessee?”
He nodded. “I had a few words with them. Hate to give up on them since they’ve always done right by us. I think the problem is that the company changed hands.” He sucked his teeth. “I got a couple of feelers out just in case.”
“Hopefully it won’t come to that.”
“If it does, it does. Come on.” He nodded toward the office. “I got all the checks ready for you. They’re on the desk. I got to go help the guys load up some roofing tiles. Catch you before you leave.” He walked past the office and out among the stacks of lumber behind it.
The office was cool, the window-mounted AC churning against the heat of the day. Took me only a few minutes to sign the checks and thumb through the books. A good week. I went out back and weaved my way among the stacks. The wood smelled fresh and warm. Nothing quite like that aroma. I saw Milk, instructing a pair of high school kids how to distribute the weight of the roofing materials on the company’s ton-and-a-half flatbed truck. Football players. Getting in shape for the fall. We always hired three or four every summer.
I remembered the summers I did the same thing. All the sweating and lifting and hard work proved to be just the thing when August two-a-days began. I remembered one early August day, temp hovering in the high nineties, joined at the hip with the humidity. Maybe a week before fall football practice began. Milk and I took the tractor-trailer over to the rail yards to unload a boxcar of roofing tiles. The car had been parked off on a spur, and we pulled the truck right up next to the side cargo door and went to work. Forty pallets of tiles. Each pallet stacked with ten squares. Each square was three bundles. Each bundle weighed sixty-seven pounds. Had to be unloaded by hand. Inside the boxcar the temp was 130 if it was anything. I would toss a bundle through the door, where Milk would catch it and stack it. We swapped positions about every ten minutes, neither us able to stay in the sauna longer that that. Took all day. Damn near killed both of us. The silver lining? Made two-a-days a piece of cake that year. If I had ever entertained any idea of not going to college and med school, that day would have melted those doubts right away.
If that hot August day sealed my path to med school, Jill’s abduction knocked me onto a different track. The one I was on now. Instead of taking care of sick folks, I had spent most of my adult life dealing with why. Why did this person rob a bank and that one kill his wife and that other one torch his business? Why did Billy Wayne Packwood choose Huntsville for his hunting grounds? Why had this killer chosen Mike? Why couldn’t I save my sister? Why did I let her down? The only thing I hated more than whys were what ifs.
My life could have been different. Maybe better, maybe not. There is no way of knowing. Not that I would really change it. Not most of it, anyway. Losing my parents, I’d change. Losing Jill, I’d change. The rest of it was what it was. In high school, I’d been a good student and a pretty good athlete. Good enough to start at quarterback and make All City my junior and senior years. Didn’t play ball but did well academically at Alabama. Chem major. Then medical school in Birmingham. Almost finished. Three months from the golden ring. Then Jill disappeared. Bang. Gone. Just like that.
Many people can divide their lives into two distinct parts, demarcated by some time-cleaving event. An event that profoundly changed their life journey. Spun it 180 degrees off-kilter. For me, that moment was 7:13 p.m. on October twelfth, a dozen years ago. I remembered it in slow motion. In great detail.
A cold, drizzly night. I was a senior in med school, doing my ER rotation; Jill a junior at UAB. She planned to study at the library until six, which was when I got off. I would then meet her at my car, and we would go to Mom and Dad’s for dinner. The student lot was four blocks from the hospital and not all that well lit.
I was late. Over an hour late. Just before I was going off call, a gunshot to the chest came in. The internal bleeding was massive. The victim in profound shock. No time to take him to the OR. The surgical resident prepared to open his chest in the ER. Not a common occurrence. I stayed. To watch, to help, to do whatever he and my intern would let me do. It was an educational opportunity I couldn’t pass up.
Later, as I stood in that lot, my life went wobbly. Jill’s shoe. A Mephisto. Brown. Resting on one side. Laces still tied. Her purse. Strap ripped away at one end. Contents strewn across the asphalt. Wallet, cash, a gold bracelet. It wasn’t a robbery.
Months of self-recrimination and isolation followed. Continuing med school was out of the question. Life was almost out of the question.
That Jill’s disappearance was my fault wasn’t debatable. Not to me. Probably not to my parents. They denied they blamed me. Gave me consoling words. But what went unsaid told a different story. The way my mother stared into space, sadness pulling her shoulders downward. The way my father retreated into himself, the light gone from his eyes. The uncomfortable silences that punctuated the next year lay there like a bloodstain on a white lab coat. Impossible to ignore or deny.
When my parents were taken in a car accident, it was almost anticlimactic. Part of me was already dead. Part of me knew this was punishment. Deserved punishment.
It was during this period of depression
that Claire and I married. Not the best start. To this day I love her for saving me. Not that I ever really considered suicide. Not really. It crossed my mind a few times, but I always pushed it away as cowardly. As too final. I knew there was light out there; I was just having trouble getting a fix on it. If Claire did nothing else, she helped me find it.
After we decided to give up on the marriage deal, I joined the Marines. Seemed like the right thing to do, and for me it was. Two years. MP duty. Not a bad gig. Considered staying on but in the end the military wasn’t the right career for me. Too rigid. Too many rules.
I hung up my uniform and returned to Huntsville. T-Tommy tried to lure me to HPD, but I opted to work at the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences. I told everyone that I took the job because I was interested in it and wanted something where I could use my medical training … as incomplete as it was. That was half the truth. The other half was that Jill’s abduction pushed me in that direction. I wanted to find her. To learn how to find her. I apparently wasn’t that good of a student. Maybe not very smart, either. After twelve years this is what I knew:
Jill was abducted.
Three other young women disappeared under similar circumstances.
None of them have ever been found.
That’s it. That’s all I had. No clues, no witnesses, no bodies, no bones, not a damn thing. And I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out.
