A Faint Cold Fear

by Karin Slaughter

  “I’ll talk to him when I can make the time,” Jeffrey told him, wondering how long he could postpone the meeting.

  “This’n’s pretty straightforward,” Chuck said, meaning the suicide. “Got caught with his pants down.”

  Jeffrey ignored the remark and asked, “Who found him?”

  “One of the other kids in the building.”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “He’s downstairs right now,” Chuck said. “Adams tried to get the story out of him, but I had to take over.” He gave a knowing wink. “She can be a little heavy-handed. You gotta employ some finesse in these types of situations.”

  “Is that right?” Jeffrey asked, looking down the hallway. Frank and Lena were standing outside a room. Guessing from their posture, the two were not sharing a happy moment.

  Chuck said, “She’s the one that found the needle.”

  “Found it?” Jeffrey asked. He had called the scene-of-crime unit less than ten minutes ago. There was no way the techs had had time to process the room.

  “Lena spotted it when she walked in to check on the perp,” Chuck said, using the wrong word for the victim. “Guess it rolled under the bed.”

  Jeffrey suppressed a curse, knowing that whatever evidence they found in the room would be tainted, especially if it was evidence that suggested Lena had been in the room before.

  Chuck laughed. “Didn’t mean to show you up, Chief,” he said, patting Jeffrey on the back like Jeffrey’s team had lost a game of pickup basketball.

  Jeffrey ignored him, walking toward Frank and Lena. When Chuck started to follow, Jeffrey said, “You do me a favor?”

  “Sure, hoss.”

  “Stand at the top of the stairs. Make sure nobody comes up but Sara.”

  Chuck gave him a salute and turned on his heel.

  “Idiot,” Jeffrey mumbled, walking down the hall.

  Frank was saying something to Lena, but he stopped talking when Jeffrey got there.

  Jeffrey asked Lena, “Can you excuse us for a minute?”

  “Sure,” she said, taking a few steps down the hall. Jeffrey knew she could still hear them, but he did not care.

  He told Frank, “Crime techs are on the way.”

  “I went ahead and took pictures,” Frank said, holding up the Polaroid camera.

  “Get Brad over here,” he ordered, knowing that Sara did not want a baby-sitter. “Tell him to bring the camera. I want some clean shots.”

  Frank made the phone call as Jeffrey peered into the room. A chubby kid with long black hair was slumped against the bed. On the floor beside him was a yellow band of rubber like the kind addicts use to help find a vein. The body was bloated and gray. The kid had been there for a while.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jeffrey muttered, thinking that this room smelled even worse than Ellen Schaffer’s had. “What the hell is that?”

  Frank volunteered, “Not much of a housekeeper.”

  Jeffrey studied the scene. None of the lights were on, but the late-morning sunlight was bright enough to see by. There was a combination TV/VCR across from the body, propped up on the mattress of the bed. A bright blue screen glowed, indicating that the tape had stopped. The light gave the body an odd cast, making the skin look moldy, or maybe that particular description came to mind because the room smelled so bad. The place was a mess, and Jeffrey guessed most of the odor came from the food containers left to rot on the floor. Papers and books were everywhere, and he wondered how anyone managed to walk around without tripping.

  The kid’s head tilted down into his chest, his greasy hair covering his face and neck. He was not wearing anything other than a pair of dirty-looking white boxer shorts. His hand was shoved into the opening and Jeffrey could make an educated guess as to what it had been doing in there.

  There was a pattern bruise on the victim’s left arm, but Sara could better assess the mark. Jeffrey assumed from the stiff way the body sat that rigor mortis had taken over, which put the time of death within the last two to twelve hours, depending on how consistent the temperature in the room had been. Time of death was never easy to establish, and Jeffrey guessed that Sara would not be able to ballpark it any better than he could.

  “Is the air on in there?” Jeffrey asked, loosening his tie. The window unit had plastic streamers on the vents, but they were still.

  “No,” Frank said. “The door was open when I got here, and I figured I might as well leave it that way to air the funk out.”

  Jeffrey nodded, thinking the room must have been pretty hot most of the night if the air had stayed off and the door had been closed. His neighbors must have been so accustomed to the bad smell by now that they had not noticed anything out of the ordinary.

  Jeffrey asked, “We got a name on him?”

  “William Dickson,” Frank said. “Far as I can tell nobody called him that.”

  “What’d he go by?”

  Frank smirked. “Scooter.”

  Jeffrey raised his eyebrows, but he was in no position to talk. He was not about to share with anyone what they had called him back in Sylacauga. Sara had used it yesterday just to rankle him.

  Frank said, “His roommate’s back home this week for Easter.”

  “I want to talk to him,” Jeffrey said.

  “I’ll get a number from the dean when this is clear.”

  Jeffrey walked into the room, noticing a broken plastic syringe on the floor. Whatever was in it had dried, but he could make out a clear waffle shoe tread imprinted in what had once been fluid.

  He stared at the tread, telling Frank, “Make sure Brad gets a good shot of this.” Frank nodded, and Jeffrey knelt beside the body. He was about to ask Frank for some gloves when the older man tossed him a pair.

  “Thanks,” Jeffrey said, tugging them on. The fact that his hands were sweating made the latex stick. The light in the room was negligible, and Jeffrey looked around for a lamp Dickson might have used. There was one on the refrigerator by the bed, but the cord had been cut off, the ends of the wires sheared back to the copper. “Don’t let anybody turn on the light switch until we get a look at this,” Jeffrey warned Frank.

  He tilted Scooter’s head to the side, lifting his chin off his chest. There was a leather belt wrapped around the boy’s neck that Jeffrey had not seen from the hall. Scooter’s hair was so long and greasy, Jeffrey was surprised he could see it now.

  Jeffrey pushed back the boy’s hair, which moved in a thick clump. The belt was looped around the neck, the buckle so tight it dug into the skin. Jeffrey did not want to loosen the leather, but he could see a thin piece of foam squeezing out at the top. He followed the end of the belt, finding it looped through another belt, this one made of canvas. The buckle on the second belt was looped through a large eye hook screwed into the wall. The entire length of the belts was taut, the weight of the body pulling on the bolt in the wall. From the looks of it, the eye hook had been there a while.

  Jeffrey turned slightly, looking at the television opposite the body. The unit was cheap, the kind you could get at a discount store for less than a hundred bucks. Beside it was a jar of Tiger Balm edged with crusty white chunks of God only knew what. Jeffrey took out his pen and used it to press the eject button on the VCR. The label had a sexually suggestive scene drawn on it under the title The Bare Wench Project.

  Jeffrey stood up, taking off his gloves. Frank followed him down the hall to Lena.

  “You call anybody?” Jeffrey asked.

  “What?” she said, wrinkling her brow. She had obviously been ready for another interrogation, but he knew his question had surprised her.

  “When you got here,” he said, “did you call anybody on your cell phone?”

  “I don’t have a cell phone.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Jeffrey asked. He thought Sara was the only person in Grant who did not carry one.

  “Do you know what they pay me?” Lena laughed, incredulous. “I can barely afford food.”

  Jeffrey changed the su
bject. “I heard you found the needle.”

  “We got the call about half an hour ago,” she said, and he knew that this was the answer she had been rehearsing. “I went into the room to see if the subject was alive. He had no pulse and was not breathing. His body was stiff and cool to the touch. That was when I found the needle.”

  “She was real helpful,” Frank said, his tone indicating the opposite. “Saw it under the bed and just thought she’d save us the trouble and fetch it for us herself.”

  Jeffrey stared at Lena, stating rather than asking, “Guess your prints are all over it.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Guess you don’t remember what else you touched while you were in there?”

  “Guess not.”

  Jeffrey looked into the room, then back at Lena. “You wanna tell me how your boyfriend’s tread print got on the floor?”

  She did not seemed fazed at all. As a matter of fact, she smiled. “Didn’t you hear?” she asked. “He’s the one who found the body.”

  Jeffrey glanced at Frank, who nodded. “I heard you already tried to interview him.”

  She shrugged.

  “Frank,” he said, “go fetch him up here.”

  Frank left, and Lena walked over to the window, looking out at the front lawn of the dorm. There was trash everywhere, and beer cans were piled into a monument by the bike rack.

  Jeffrey said, “Looks like they had some party here.”

  “I guess,” she said.

  “Maybe this guy”— he indicated Scooter—“got carried away.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Seems to me like you’ve got a drug problem on this campus.”

  Lena turned to look at him. “Maybe you oughta talk to Chuck about that.”

  “Yeah, he’s real on top of things,” Jeffrey said sarcastically.

  “Might want to see where he was this weekend.”

  “At the golf tournament?” Jeffrey asked, remembering the front page of the Grant Observer. He guessed Lena was alluding to Chuck’s father, trying to remind Jeffrey that Albert Gaines could catch him by his short hairs.

  Jeffrey said, “Why are you working against me, Lena? What are you hiding?”

  “Your witness is here,” she said. “I’d better go check in with my boss.”

  “Why so fast?” Jeffrey asked. “Are you scared he’s going to hit you again?”

  She pressed her lips together, not giving him a response.

  “Stay here,” he told her, making it clear she did not have a choice.

  Ethan White sauntered down the hall with Frank beside him. He was still dressed in his usual long-sleeved black T-shirt and jeans. His hair was wet, and a towel was wrapped around his neck.

  “Take a shower?” Jeffrey asked.

  “Yeah,” Ethan said, using the edge of the towel to wipe his ear. “I was washing off all the evidence from choking Scooter to death.”

  “That sounds like a confession,” Jeffrey said.

  Ethan gave him a scathing look. “I already talked to your junior pig here,” he said, staring at Lena. Lena stared back, ratcheting up the tension.

  “Tell it to me,” Jeffrey said. “You live on the first floor?” Ethan nodded. “Why did you come up here?”

  “I needed to borrow some class notes from Scooter.”

  “Which class?”

  “Molecular biology.”

  “What time was this?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “Count backward about two minutes from whatever time I called her.”

  Lena saw the opening. She said, “I was at the security office. He didn’t call me, I just happened to answer the phone.”

  Ethan grabbed the ends of the towel in his hands as if he were strangling it. “I left when they got here. That’s all I know.”

  “What did you touch in the room?”

  “I don’t recall,” he said. “I was pretty unnerved, what with walking in on my fellow classmate dead on the floor.”

  “You’ve seen a dead body before,” Jeffrey reminded him.

  Ethan raised his eyebrows, as if to say So what?

  Jeffrey said, “I want you to make a formal statement at the police station.”

  Ethan shook his head. “No way.”

  “Are you impeding an investigation?” Jeffrey threatened.

  “No, sir,” Ethan answered smartly. He took a piece of notebook paper from his back pocket and held it out to Jeffrey. “This is my statement. I’ve signed it. I’ll sign it again now if you want to witness it. I believe legally I’m under no obligation to do this at the police station.”

  “You think you’re good at this,” Jeffrey said, not taking the statement. “You think you know how to weasel your way out of anything.” He indicated Lena. “Or beat your way out of it.”

  Ethan winked at Lena, like they shared a special secret. Lena tensed but said nothing,

  “I’m going to get you,” Jeffrey said. “Maybe not now, but you’re up to something, and I’m going to nail you on it. Do you hear me?”

  Ethan released the paper and it floated to the floor. “If that’s it,” he said, “I really need to get to class.”

  10

  Sara drove her car from the campus back to the morgue on autopilot, mulling over every detail of last night’s autopsies. There was something about Andy Rosen’s death that still troubled her, and, unlike Jeffrey, she needed more than a coincidence to be able to sign off on murder. At best Sara could say only that his death was suspicious, and even that was pushing it. There was no scientific evidence suggesting foul play. The tox screen had come back clean, and the autopsy had been completely normal. It was very possible that Andy Rosen’s suicide was still just that.

  William “Scooter” Dickson was another deal altogether. The pornography in his VCR, the foam between the belt and Scooter’s skin to prevent marking, the bolt in the wall that had obviously been there a long time—all of these pointed toward autoerotic asphyxiation. Sara had seen only one case of this in her career, but there had been several papers about it in the Journal of Forensic Science a few years ago, when manual strangulation had reached the height of its popularity.

  “Crap,” Sara said, realizing she’d passed the hospital. She continued down Main Street toward the college, then made an illegal U-turn in front of the police station. She waved at Brad Stephens, who was getting out of his squad car. He covered his eyes, pretending he didn’t see her as she nearly clipped a white Cadillac parked in front of Burgess’s Cleaners.

  Sara passed the children’s clinic, the sign outside faded and rotting because Jeffrey had chosen the only sign maker in town to cheat with when they were married. She sighed, looking at the dilapidated sign, wondering if she should attach some greater meaning to its irreparable condition. Perhaps it was foreshadowing what would eventually happen with Sara and Jeffrey. Cathy Linton liked to say that you can never go back.

  Sara slammed on the brakes, almost missing the turn into the hospital again. Working around children all the time, Sara was not given to cursing, but she let loose a couple obscenities as she put the car in reverse. A couple more came out when the front wheel bumped up over the curb. She parked the car on the side of the building and took the stairs down to the morgue two at a time.

  Carlos had not yet returned from the college with the body, and Jeffrey was tracking down William Dickson’s parents, so Sara had the morgue to herself. She walked toward her office but stopped just outside the doorway. A large flower arrangement was on the corner of her desk. Jeffrey had not sent her flowers in years. She walked around the display, feeling a big, silly grin on her face. He had forgotten that she was not crazy about carnations, but there were other flowers, beautiful flowers, whose names Sara could not remember, and the whole office was filled with their fragrance.

  “Jeffrey,” she said, feeling her cheeks strain from the smile on her face. He must have ordered them this morning before all hell broke loose. She slid out the card, her smile fading when she read the not
e from Mason James.

  Sara looked around, wondering where she could put the flowers so that Jeffrey would not see them, then giving up, because she was not a sneaky person and was not about to start hiding things.

  She sat down in her chair, putting the card by the vase. There were plenty of other items on her desk to hold her attention. Molly, Sara’s nurse at the children’s clinic, had dropped off a stack of papers this morning, and Sara could probably spend the next twelve hours going through them without even making a dent. She slipped on her glasses and signed off on a stack of about sixty forms before noticing that Carlos had arrived.

  She watched Carlos through the window as he set out the instruments for autopsy. He was slow and methodical, checking each piece for damage or signs of wear. Sara watched him for a few more minutes before deciding to take care of her phone messages. She noticed Carlos’s handwriting on the first one. Brock had called to see when he could come to get Andy Rosen’s body. She picked up the phone and dialed the funeral home.

  Brock’s mother answered, and Sara spent several minutes catching her up on Tessa’s condition, knowing that the news would spread around town before lunchtime. Penny Brock didn’t have much to do at the funeral home, and between taking naps and greeting the occasional customer, she spent most of her time gossiping on the phone.

  Brock sounded his usual jovial self when he finally came on the line. “Hello there, Sara,” he said. “You calling to talk about storage fees?”

  She laughed, knowing he was trying to make a joke.

  She said, “I was calling to see how much time I have. Is the service today?”

  “Set for nine tomorrow morning,” Brock said. “I was gonna do him last thing today. How bad’s he messed up?”

  “Not bad,” Sara said. “Just the usual.”

  “You get him finished around three, and I’ll have plenty of time.”

  Sara checked her watch. It was already eleven-thirty. She did not even know why she was keeping Andy Rosen in-house. His tissue and organs had been biopsied, and Brock had taken several vials of urine and blood that she could study at her leisure. There was absolutely nothing more she could think to do.