Dying For Revenge (The Lady Doc Murders Book 1)

by Barbara Golder

  “It took a pretty good beating,” the old man observed, spitting again. “Not much left. Good thing Patterson called. I was getting ready to crush it up and send it off. Not worth much except as scrap metal.”

  Ben peered through the hole that had been the windshield to look at the seats. From what he could see, they were in much better shape than the rest of the car, the leather intact, except for being bent out of shape, bloodstained and flooded by muddy river water, cramped by the intrusion of the front end into the passenger compartment. He craned his neck to see the spot that had caught his interest in the photograph. It was shaded and hard to see, so he retrieved a flashlight.

  “Whatcha looking for?” the man asked, his curiosity aroused.

  Ben played the beam of light on the brown leather. “A hole. I thought I saw a hole in the photograph from the day of the crash.”

  “You don’t say!” The man was clearly intrigued and leaned forward over Ben’s shoulder to look where the light was focused. “Musta been some kind of picture to see something like that.”

  Ben refrained from explaining that the photo was pretty ordinary but his photo-enhancing software was first rate. He kept sweeping across the seat until suddenly he saw it. Right in the seam, a neat little round hole. He hadn’t been imagining things.

  “Bingo!” he exclaimed.

  “I’ll be damned,” echoed the man.

  The dog looked disappointed when Ben emerged from the hulk empty handed, but wagged his tail nonetheless and gave Ben’s pant leg a sniff for good measure. Ben grabbed the camera and dove back through the window to photograph the seat. The dog cocked his head and sat down again to wait.

  Pulling himself back out, taking care not to knock the camera, Ben made sure that the digital images showed the hole in all its forensic glory. Satisfied, he recapped the lens and knelt once again to retrieve a plastic bag and a pair of forceps, then paused to contemplate how best to reach the hole across the expanse of sharp crumpled metal that was once the hood of the Hummer. The old man, caught up in the enthusiasm of the chase for evidence, retrieved a couple of old padded movers’ blankets and laid them across the hood. Ben climbed gingerly on top and leaned in, probing the hole.

  “Yahoo!” Ben’s exclamation was muffled, but enthusiastic. He sat up too quickly, hitting his head on the windshield frame, and very nearly losing the cylindrical piece of metal he held in the tongs of the forceps. It was from a .22 long rifle, unless he missed his guess, almost perfectly preserved by the padding of the seat into which it had been shot.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” the old man said again. “Ain’t that something!”

  With a self-satisfied grin to his crime-scene partner, Ben dropped the slug into a plastic bag and labeled it, then stood back in order to take more photographs of the car itself. Finally, something concrete to show his mother. Real evidence. Someone was killing trustafarians for months, and Ben Wallace was the one to figure it all out. “Hot damn!”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  JUNE 11, AFTERNOON

  Ben had spent the last half hour, between bites of sandwich and gulps of milk, explaining to me what he’d found at the salvage yard. He summed it all up by producing the bullet he'd recovered from the seat with a flourish.

  “That takes care of one car accident,” I admitted, “But not all of them. They were in different places, and we don’t have photos or data or anything else to confirm that there was a shooting.”

  The fact that we had a string of serial murders in Telluride was now crystal clear; the length of the string was the only thing in doubt.

  My last-born screwed up his face in concentration, reluctant, I thought, to admit to a gaping hole in his theory. Instead, he surprised me by presenting another one.

  “There’s a problem with the gas explosion, too,” he said. “I stopped by the propane company on my way back. No way that a .22 could have penetrated one of their tanks. They said that the explosions I saw on YouTube were really pressure explosions—heating the gas caused such extreme pressure that the impact of the bullet causes the explosion. Nothing like that here.”

  I sighed. His theory was so attractive, so tidy, that I really wanted it to be right. I really didn’t want to think that we had unrelated killings, and I was too skeptical to believe that purely accidental deaths occurred on such a regular basis.

  “Get me the file. Let’s take a look at it.”

  The propane tank explosion had occurred on a rare weekend when I was out of town, taking care of the business interests that sometimes threatened to overwhelm me. I’d left the Center in the care of a colleague; he’d done the case.

  Ben scurried down to his office and returned with a manila folder. Somewhere, I was sure, all this evidence was enshrined online, but I am an old-fashioned girl at heart. I think better when I can scatter papers around in front of me. My staff humors me with a hard copy of everything.

  I started with the newspaper reports from the day after. The explosion had occurred just before dawn. A neighbor — a rare commodity on Silver Pick, where the houses were few, far between and, mostly, very expensive — had heard the blast as he was pulling out of his drive, saw the plume of fire and called the local volunteers. The house, a single bedroom cabin with a few outbuildings, remnant of an old ranch, was completely destroyed. The remains, it wasn’t accurate to call it a body, exactly, of the man who owned the house were found ten yards away, propelled away by the blast.

  I studied the sketch of the scene my compulsive tech had included and pointed it out to Ben. “See this? If Norman was right, it made sense that Cooper was on the porch when the blast occurred.”

  I paused. That struck me as odd.

  “Why would he be on the porch at sunup? It would be shaded, there's no view. Why?”

  Ben took the sketch and pondered it, shaking his head. “Coming into town?”

  “The car was off the back porch. Why wouldn’t he leave from there?”

  The cabin’s small back porch opened onto a pasture, another remnant of the ranch. The utilitarian front porch was only steps from a stream house and stand of aspen, a tribute to the desire for convenience of the original builders. Water at the front door, by the kitchen and hearth; work out back. I was willing to bet good money that Cooper had used the back entrance almost exclusively.

  I pulled out another clipping from the file, a newspaper article from the week prior to the accident. It was a profile of Cooper, one of the better-known eccentrics in Telluride’s pantheon. Son of a former TV Western star who made millions by being at the front of the designer vegetable and organic meat wave, he’d convinced his father to let him try his hand at real ranching. Why he’d chosen this forbidding patch of land on the Western Slope was anybody’s guess, but he was earnest in his attempts to tidy up the land and to start “running a few head,” as he put it in the interview. I handed the article to Ben.

  “It wasn’t out of character for him to be up early,” I said. “Looks like he was a real back-to-the-land type.”

  I pointed at the photo which showed Cooper in the light of a kerosene lamp. The cabin had propane for heat and cooking, but apparently he eschewed electricity. Perhaps chopping wood was too energetic and cold baths too off-putting. Cooper looked like a gentle soul, but he was effete. Plenty of the ranchers I knew were short of stature and light of weight, but they had a wiry heft and durability to them that Cooper lacked.

  “Maybe he knew the tank was going to explode.”

  “So why not head for the car, get away as fast as possible? The tank was midway along the side of the house, according to Norman, no easier to go out the front than the back.”

  “Maybe something was in the way.”

  “Like?”

  Ben’s brow furrowed again. Much more and I’d have to send him for Botox. I could tell he was trying to fit all the pieces into his theory, while accounting for the facts. Good for him. At length, he pulled out a photo of the cabin the realtor had provided and spoke, his voice and e
xpression cautious.

  “The cabin had big windows on all the walls. The one that looked over the propane tank was in what would have been the kitchen. Suppose he was at the table reading, and someone shot in the window?”

  Ben was determined to work in a gunshot; but then, so was I.

  “Maybe he’d run out to get away from the shooter. In that case, he’d run for cover — the woods, not the car.”

  “Explosion?” I prompted. “And even if you’re right, how will we prove it?”

  Exasperated, Ben lost his temper. “I don’t know, Mom. You’re the M.E., you figure it out. I just know that it has to be connected.”

  I pulled out the autopsy report. The remains had been mutilated in the blast and charred by the fire. I skimmed through with growing horror. My substitute had just signed out the case, going on the basis of the external exam rather than doing an autopsy. I felt my heartbeat quicken and a pull in my gut, early warning system for my anger. I reached for the phone, punching in Quick’s extension so hard my fingers hurt.

  “Quick, I’m looking at that explosion case from Silver Pick earlier this month,” I said as calmly as I could. “Can you explain why there wasn’t a post?”

  His hesitation told me he knew he was caught in a problem. I waited to see what he would do and as I expected, he took the fall.

  “I told the doc he needed to do one,” he said. “But it was his last day and he wanted to get out of here early. He laughed at me, said it was a waste of time. If he hadn’t left so fast, I’d have done it myself, but without him here, I didn’t think I should.”

  Another pause.

  “I’m sorry, boss.”

  Still another silence, then he redeemed himself.

  “I did x-ray everything, just in case.”

  I struggled with rising emotion. I had policies and procedures and I expected them to be followed, and this was why.

  “There’s no excuse, Quick. Why didn’t you call me?”

  I struggled to keep my anger in check. I hate to be wrong, even by proxy.

  No silence this time.

  “Didn’t want to, boss. You needed to be away from here. I wasn’t going to bother you with something that looked pretty simple at the time. You needed a break.” He paused. “I’m sorry, boss. It’s my fault.”

  Yes, it was, I thought. And dammit, you know better than to let things slide. We never let things slide. When we let things slide, life comes apart. You should know better. Instead I answered in as neutral a voice as I could muster. “We’ll talk later.”

  I turned back to Ben.

  “Pull up the x-rays on this,” I said.

  At least I could take a look at them while I mentally framed the request for exhumation I was destined to submit. One way or another, I needed to know what really had happened to Kyle Cooper. Ben hurried to pull up the films on the giant screen perched amid the bookshelves. This was going to take more detail than my desktop monitor would provide.

  Quick had made a complete series of films, so that no part of Cooper’s remains went unexamined, and from several perspectives at that. I scanned them briefly, confirming that the remains were, in fact, that of a man, of about the right age. Then I started mowing the lawn, taking my gaze from one side to the other in sequential rows, looking carefully at each portion of each film. I was not sure what I was looking for until I found it on the third film, and confirmed it on two others. Deformed and almost lost amid bits of bone and shrapnel, but there it was, a lump of metal that could be nothing other than a bullet, lodged next to one of the upper thoracic vertebrae. Whatever else had happened, Cooper had been shot. I’d never be able to match that bullet to any gun, it was too deformed. But I’d stake my life and I was staking my profession, on it being a .22.

  I pointed it out to Ben. “Bingo.”

  His face lit up. God help us all, forensic experts, even temporary ones, get excited by the most terrible things.

  “So they are connected. I knew it.” His voice was triumphant.

  I agreed, if reluctantly.

  “I still want to know why the explosion,” I said, irritated that that particular piece didn’t fit. Propane tanks didn’t just explode, and the convenience of this particular explosion was eerie. It had very nearly obscured a murder. Much like the climber’s fall.

  Ben started gathering the papers back into the folder. I put out a restraining hand.

  “Leave it. I need to take a closer look at all this. Now scoot—I know you have work to do.”

  I’d put off the call to Tom Patterson until I had a convincing argument for his calling the parents to tell them their son had been murdered. Come hell or high water, there was no way I was making that call.

  **********

  Lucy Cho was working late, finishing up the ballistics study Dr. Wallace requested on the bullet Ben had retrieved from the wrecked Hummer. She knew as well as anyone that the murders of the last few days were all related. She was surprised when Dr. Wallace had come in with something else to match, something from a case they’d all thought was just a terrible automobile accident.

  “See whether this matches the one from Cosette Anira,” she had asked Lucy.

  Unlike most medical examiners she knew, Dr. Wallace always used both names when referring to a corpse under her care, though she was likely to refer to a living, breathing person just by a surname. Quick, Patterson, Wilson, almost everyone except her son and her techs, who, Lucy suspected, she viewed as simply other children.

  She hummed as she seated the two intact bullets in the comparison microscope and adjusted the lenses to her own, nearly perfect eyes. From the tweaking it took, she suspected that Dr. Wallace had been in here playing with it.

  The bullets, same general size, shape and weight, the same sort of ammunition, came into clear focus and Lucy looked from one side to the other, hoping to match the grooves in the base left by their transit down the barrel of the gun. The marks were clear and easy to see; both bullets were in good shape unlike the wad of lead—same weight—that had been recovered from Jim Webster. She peered down the tubes, frowned and sat up straight, not liking what she saw.

  She took a deep breath and looked again. The images hadn’t changed. The marks were there, some similar, most different. The bullets were not from the same gun. Dr. Wallace wasn’t going to like that at all. Lucy sighed, took the photos and uploaded them to the main office drive, then sent an email to Dr. Wallace. This was news she’d rather not deliver in person. She wasn’t sure she liked it herself.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  JUNE 12

  “Dammit, Doc! Don’t you know better than this?”

  Tom Patterson was standing, arms folded across his chest, blocking the way to my desk, his face flushed and the muscles in his jaw working. Tina had warned me he was waiting in my office, but I hadn’t expected this. I suppressed the urge to respond in kind to his provocation. I have learned by bitter and repeated experience that taking up the verbal cudgel too soon has a way of backfiring.

  “This?” I repeated in as calm a voice as I could muster. “Better than what, Tom?”

  I skirted around the far side of the desk and took up my customary seat. Because I did it of my own volition, the fact that Tom loomed over me served not to intimidate me, but to tip the battle-scales in my favor. Calm in the face of a storm is surprisingly powerful.

  Not, however, powerful enough to keep him from throwing well-thumbed copies of the morning’s papers on my desk. The headlines were in larger-than-usual type, all caps, and surprisingly similar: SERIAL KILLER STALKS TELLURIDE from one, MURDER STALKS THE WEALTHY from the other. I reflected for the umpteenth time that I’d never seen a headline in which murderers and death did not stalk. Even in this instance death—and the murderer—seemed more to erupt than to stalk, but who was I to quibble?

  The mental detour gave me sufficient time to scan the first couple of paragraphs. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to string together the murders, so I wasn’t surprised that the
paper had figured out that a dedicated killer was on the loose. What surprised me were the particulars. In case I missed them, Tom’s forefinger punched at the newsprint.

  “Every damn detail. The jeep accidents, the propane tank, all there. What the hell were you thinking, telling him all that? You didn’t bother to share that with me, did you?”

  I cut him off. “Not me, Tom. You know I never talk to that pack of weasels unless I have to. I have no idea where he got this. What makes you think it’s from my shop?”

  “Because the damn thing says so!”

  He stabbed his finger at the paper again. There it was, four paragraphs into the story: A highly placed source in the Forensic Center….

  I felt my heart rate climb and my skin go cold. As long as I have been in the adversarial business of forensic medicine, I have never gotten over the stomach-dropping fear of being wrong in public. Doing something I ought not. Screwing up. It’s one of the reasons for the redundancy in my policies and in my work. I do not screw up, I reminded myself, even as I remembered that missed bullet hole in the wall of Houston’s bedroom, then added for Patterson to hear, “I do not talk to the press, Tom, and neither does anyone else in this office.”

  My staff knew talking to the fourth estate about anything that had to do, even remotely, with the office was a firing offense with no second chances.

  “Then where did this come from?”

  Give the sheriff credit for persistence; he was not going to be put off.

  “I’ll ask.”

  I tugged the papers out from underneath Patterson’s hand and quickly scanned the rest of the articles. What facts were there were more or less accurate, but it was the tone of the article that made my face flush and my temper rise. Wilson had outdone himself in an attempt to paint both the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office and the Forensic Center as incompetent, corrupt, indifferent or a combination of all three. On the other hand, they missed one important tidbit, one I hadn’t had time to share with Patterson.