The Truth Seeker

by Dee Henderson

  Lisa stood up, studying the path. The grove of trees was only about twenty feet from the back of the zoo’s aviary building. Behind the fine mesh of the nearest enclosure hung a row of odd-shaped, red-based water tubes filled with sugar water, nectar to the hummingbirds that were attracted by the color. Lisa knew the zoo, knew those birds, had watched them for hours as a child. They could dart and maneuver and hover with wings moving too fast to see.

  She had enjoyed the zoo. It was one of the few good memories in a cluster so sharp and painful the explosive emotions were hard to contain even after all these years. Follow the dirt footpath and the next block over was St. James Street. She forced the thought away, even as she felt the tension grip her. She’d had enough of this place. “I’ve seen everything I need to.”

  “The bakery is still in business; let’s see if it’s the same owner. I want to know more about Marla’s boyfriend.”

  “No.” She said it too sharply and felt his attention change from the job to her in a fraction of a second. She moderated her voice. “I don’t want to talk to him, not until we review his original statements when she disappeared and when she was found again. I want to be ready to spot any inconsistencies.” And she’d be very sure to have a last-minute conflict so she wouldn’t be available to go along with Quinn for the interview.

  He studied her, then finally nodded. “All right. We’ll wait.”

  Lisa turned back the way they had come, relieved to get out of here.

  Quinn rested one booted foot on the bench in front of the Knolls Park Bank as he ate a turkey croissant sandwich. Lisa, seated at the other end of the bench, was so tightly wound up she started every time the outside book drop for the library was used. Whatever was wrong, the longer they stayed in this neighborhood, the worse it became.

  He’d insisted that they stop at the bakery so he could at least look around inside. Lisa hadn’t wanted a late lunch but hadn’t been able to refuse since he knew the last things she’d eaten were the blueberry muffins over ten hours ago. She was nibbling her sandwich like it was plaster paste while he’d rate his as one of the best sandwiches he’d had in a long time.

  He wished she would tell him what was wrong.

  He considered deliberately stalling them longer to use the situation to probe for the reason. In another situation he would have done it, even though she was a friend. Kate had been that way; he’d had to crowd her to get her to open up. Jennifer had simply called and cried, and he’d had to wait out the tears before she could tell him what had happened.

  With Lisa—the silence was different. She would never allow herself to break, it was a different weight she carried, and knowing that, he wasn’t sure how to proceed. He had learned a long time ago that secrets, even those made to protect someone, always over the years came back to the fact they were lies to maintain and wore a person down. She had her secret buried deep, but this place was resurrecting it.

  He hated the fact she was hurting and he wasn’t sure how to help.

  Quinn wadded the waxed paper wrapper into a small ball and lowered his foot back to the ground, straightening. “Ready to go?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment, then only glanced over at him. “Yes.”

  He didn’t like the quiet of her voice. For the first time there was an edge of defeat to it. The fact she didn’t protest when he dropped his arm around her shoulders and steered her back toward the car bothered him even more. “Let’s go see a movie.”

  She glanced over, caught by surprise, and smiled. “Sure.”

  She could keep her secret; he’d just have to find out the answer another way.

  Under the large lighted magnifying glass, the tweezers designed to pick up a single hair looked big and clumsy. Lisa held her breath to steady her hand as she separated another thread within the edge of the duct tape taken from Rita’s wrists.

  Two of the fours cases she had discovered had duct tape binding their hands. So had Rita’s. It was improbable that the tape came from a common roll because the crimes had happened too many years apart, but if the tape matched to a common manufacturer—that would be useful knowledge. Certain brands were more common for consumer sales while others sold only through industrial channels.

  Lisa carefully used the tweezers to count the threads. Forty-two threads in this tape weave. She groaned. She had hoped for fifty-four. She leaned back from the magnifying glass and closed her eyes to let them relax before she looked again at the tape.

  Was it complete side to side, or had a strip of the tape been torn away? She focused again on the sides of the tape. It had been twisted around the wrist bones, and it took time to flatten it out far enough back to check the side edges. This strip of duct tape was intact. It did not match the tape from the other two cases.

  Heather Ashburn and Vera Wane were linked. The duct tape in those cases had been fifty-four thread, seven millimeter, which typed it as the consumer brand of Triker Duct Tape. But Rita was forty-two thread, eight millimeter, and that made it a different brand she would have to track down.

  If they couldn’t find a pattern in the victims, then it became even more important to find a solid, consistent MO to the method of the crime. A difference in brand of tape was a problem.

  She leaned back, rubbing the back of her neck. She did not need this.

  What about Marla Sherrall? There wasn’t duct tape available to help establish a common MO, but given where and how she had been found, how the excavation had been done—there had been no tape discovered but that didn’t mean she hadn’t been bound.

  The cold storage warehouse was just that: cold. Lisa wished she had thought to grab a sweater from her office before signing through security to come over to this side of the state crime lab complex.

  She walked down the tile hallway of the lower level, stopped at the third door, and unlocked it. While it had an official name nowhere near as descriptive, the room was called by those who entered here for what it was: the bone vault. The florescent lights overhead snapped on, bathing everything in sharp, bright light, intensifying the impact of the room. The skulls looked back at her, neatly lined up on foam circles along the shelf of the back wall—three men, two women, and two children.

  It really felt like entering an open-air graveyard, one of the few places in the building where Lisa felt the silent stillness and foreverness of death. The morgue was not nearly so overpowering in its effect.

  She reached for the evidence log clipboard hanging on the wall inside the doorway; glanced at the clock; wrote down the date, time, case number, the lab ID number next door where she would be working; then signed the log.

  There was a long metal table in the middle of the room. She rolled it over to the storage case and started scanning for Marla Sherall’s case number. Similar to an architect’s storage case for blueprints, the long, flat skeleton drawers were eight inches deep, five feet long, and two feet wide. Finding the right drawer, she adjusted the metal table height and slid out the drawer onto the table.

  Lisa covered the box with a lid, not for the protection of the remains but for the comfort of anyone she might pass in the hallways. She rolled the table from the room, locked the vault, and took the skeleton to the X-ray room.

  “How long an exposure do you need?” Janice asked, holding the door for her to the lead-lined room.

  “Let’s start with ten minutes.” Lisa didn’t have to worry about the radiation exposure a hospital doctor would with a living patient. Ten minutes would give her any clues the bones hid deep inside.

  It had been months since she had last held the bones; they were dry, and over the passage of years had lost their ivory smoothness. She carefully positioned the left hand for the first X-ray, then stepped into the adjoining room and gave Janice the all clear. The X-ray machine began to hum. Lisa watched the first X-ray film print roll from the developing machine fourteen minutes later. She had the clarity she needed. “Exposure time looks good,” she confirmed.

  Janice helped her set up for th
e left wrist picture.

  An hour and forty minutes later Lisa had the images she needed. “Thanks, Janice.”

  “Anytime.”

  Lisa rolled the table with Marla’s remains to the service elevator and took them to the task force room where she had set up an exam table.

  She slid the X-rays onto the light table.

  Was there a way to prove without the duct tape being recovered that Marla’s hands had been bound the same way as Rita’s? Duct tape around the wrists and also around the palms pressing the back of her hands together? It was a signature Lisa had never seen before. Finding it would be enough to link the cases.

  Lisa started with the obvious break in Marla’s left arm.

  The radius bone had been broken by the shovel long after her death: The bone break was brittle, sharp-edged enough to leave splinters, grayish white in color after the dirt had been carefully removed.

  In a living bone the edges of the break would have curls recorded in the bone layers as the pressure built and it finally snapped; the edges of the break would also have deepened in color over the years as the rest of the bones had to match the surrounding soil.

  Marla’s wrist bones were undamaged, but her palm—there were two breaks in the fourth and fifth metacarpal bones, the outer two bones of her palm. Even under the powerful microscope they showed no sign of healing; she’d died within hours of the breaks.

  Lisa moved over to look at Marla’s right hand and found a break in the outmost bone of the palm.

  She leaned back in her chair, thought for a moment, then held her own hands out in front of her, considering the bones Marla had broken. When someone put her hands out to break a fall, normally one or two of the finger bones broke because they were bent back, or one or two of the wrist bones broke if she landed on the base of her palms. And if Marla had struck someone with her fist, she would have probably broken the long bones of her fingers.

  To break the edge bones in her palms but not her fingers . . .

  Lisa leaned forward and put her hands behind her back, pressing the backs of her hands together, and slowly leaned her weight back against the chair but found it impossible to shift her hands around with the backs of her hands pressed together. If Marla had been bound, thrown down to land on her back, she would have broken the small finger bones in her hands just as Rita had done.

  This didn’t make sense.

  Lisa looked at her hands again, turning them palms up. Maybe someone had stepped on her hands? She turned to look at the X-rays only to stop midway in the turn, her thoughts taking a tangent.

  She slowly nodded. Maybe.

  She stood up, crossed over to the desk and put her hands behind her back as she suspected Marla’s had been bound. She turned and let herself fall back against the desk, and felt the sharp sting of contact as her hands hit. It was the outer palm bones and not the finger bones, not even the wrist bones.

  Rita had been pushed back and fallen to the ground. Marla had been pushed back and hit something but had been able to stay on her feet.

  Lisa sighed, facing another dilemma. How did she prove that?

  “Now that is a deep scowl.”

  Quinn turned away from the screen and the report he was trying to write, relieved to have the interruption. “Kate. Thanks for coming.”

  “I see you still hate paperwork.”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  She entered the small room he had borrowed at the regional marshal’s office and cleared a chair so she could sit down. “You called. Here I am.”

  He grinned; she was clearly having a good Friday off work. His call had woken her this morning, still curled up in bed at 9 A.M. While he’d been fighting paperwork all afternoon, she’d been out having fun.

  He offered her the glass jar of jelly beans she was studying. “Orange still your favorites?”

  She rolled the jar to keep stirring the mix as she selected a handful one at a time. “I never could figure out why they would make green. Who wants to eat green candy? They remind me of mold.”

  Quinn chuckled and took back the jar after she was finished; he had to agree.

  “What are you working on?”

  “Do you have any idea how many dark green Plymouths there are in this city, let alone the surrounding counties?”

  “One at every used car lot at least. Do they still even make that color?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. And checking out 826 Plymouths is impossible.”

  “It was probably stolen anyway,” she replied cheerfully.

  “Thanks for pointing that fact out.” Quinn knew she was probably right even though there hadn’t been a stolen car report. “I don’t remember you being this perky back in the days we used to date.”

  “Dave took me shopping.”

  Quinn didn’t react for a moment; he couldn’t. “He took you shopping, and you liked it?”

  His voice was so disbelieving she laughed. “We bought Jennifer’s wedding present. She’s going to love it.”

  “Did you?”

  “It’s this really great plush chair, at least a thousand colors, the most predominant one bright orange, very retro. It had to come straight out of the sixties.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “She’s wanted one for years. She always was a rebel under that perfect decorum.”

  “Kate—”

  “Relax. After Dave about had a conniption fit we bought her a really nice and perfectly acceptable car. Well, we picked it out, at least. It will be delivered from a dealer in Baltimore if she’s still in the hospital, or a dealer in Houston if she’s home.”

  “You bought her a car.”

  “A spitfire-red Corvette. She’s always wanted one of those too.”

  “And you’ll be paying on it for the next century.”

  “It’s on plastic. And Dave owes my debts when we get married. He can afford it.”

  He broke out laughing. She was serious. “Kate, you’re terrible.”

  “I know.” She ate another two of the jellybeans. “Actually, everybody but Lisa is in on it. She can’t keep a secret worth squat. So we’ll tell her about it five minutes before we hand Jennifer the keys.”

  Quinn knew better than that about the secrets but kept his own counsel. “Let me guess, you’re prowling for donations.”

  “Always accepted.”

  “In that case, Lisa’s broke. Put me down for both of us.”

  “I knew I could count on you.” She stretched out in the chair, her voice turning serious. “I know it’s extravagant, and most people won’t understand—”

  “I do. Some people talk about a trip to Hawaii for their fiftieth birthday, a cruise when they retire. Jennifer has always talked about her someday-dream of having a red convertible.”

  “She doesn’t have a lot of somedays left.”

  Six months, a year . . . It wasn’t long if the cancer couldn’t be stopped. “Kate—she’ll love the car. Give her a chance to enjoy her dream. She’ll understand.”

  “I hope so.” Kate slouched in the chair and crossed her ankles. “So . . . back to the start of this conversation. You called. What’s up?”

  “Your shoelaces are untied.”

  “What?”

  He snagged her left foot and lifted it to rest against his knee so he could take care of the problem. “You need new tennis shoes.” These were so beat up this one about had a hole in the sole.

  “Dave’s already bought me at least half a dozen different styles and colors. He just doesn’t get the fact these are my lucky pair. I haven’t lost a handball match against him yet while wearing these shoes.”

  “The first sprained ankle is going to change that.”

  “Not likely. They’re too loose. I’d just slip out of them.” She looked at the very neat knot he had tied. “Perfectionist.” She crossed her feet again, then looked back at him. “Now that you tried that subtle redirect that didn’t do you any good—why did you call?”

  He hated the way she could r
ead people. He had been hoping against hope that he would hear back from someone with the details he was looking for before Kate got here, but his last outstanding query had come back an hour ago. He was out of options and he needed answers.

  “Has Lisa ever mentioned much about when she lived in Knolls Park?” He got straight to the point, knowing that with Kate it was best to be direct.

  Lisa was going to kill him. He had wrestled over what it meant to go to her family for help—to protect Lisa’s right to privacy or to break her implied trust and share her secret. He didn’t have a choice. What he needed to know, not many people could deliver; he’d found that out this afternoon. But Kate could.

  If she knew something and was going to cover that truth, deny it, he’d see it as a slight distance entered her gaze and she shifted subtly into work mode, concealing her thoughts. But her expression stayed open and only turned puzzled.

  “I didn’t know she ever had. Her foster homes were all to the south and west of Trevor House.” Her expression turned to a frown as she picked up on his shift in mood. “Why are you asking?”

  He would have told Marcus first, but he knew the two of them. His partner would have absorbed the news and picked up the phone to call Kate; they were that tight on what was best to do for the family. In the end, he’d made the choice to go first to Kate. Marcus had the nationwide contacts, but when it came to Chicago, Kate knew the system, knew how to find facts buried deep.

  “We were working a lead, a lady named Marla Sherrall who was found buried near the zoo at Knolls Park. Lisa said she once lived a block from where Marla was found.” He pushed his hand through his hair, knowing what he was about to do would have consequences. “Lisa reacted,” he hesitated over how much to say, “badly to the situation.”