by Lisa Black
At least that was what she told herself.
“What are you doing here?” Jack asked as she entered the autopsy suite. The smell of blood promptly assaulted her senses. There were three bodies on three tables and the air felt overstuffed with putrescence.
“Fingernail scrapings.” She reminded him of the Tyvek fibers. “What did the boyfriend say?”
“Went to pieces,” Riley answered for his partner. “Sobbed, then said she griped about her job but never gave him the specifics. He’s some kind of designer, graphic arts, says he never understood what she was talking about anyway so she gave up telling him about it.”
“But she hadn’t seemed afraid of anyone,” Jack added. “More annoyed.”
The pathologist, an older man who seemed medically thorough but also thoroughly cantankerous, glared at them. He didn’t care for chattiness in his autopsy room. Unfortunately, he could not influence the other two tables, where the doctors and dieners engaged in a lively, four-way debate over the Cavs and the NBA playoffs and glares in their direction went unheeded. In his defense, given the damage done to the late Anna Hernandez, it took a great deal of time and concentration to determine, delineate, and document every gouge and slash mark. This also gave Maggie and the two detectives plenty of time to—quietly—compare and contrast every fact at their disposal. Not that it helped much.
Riley told her, “Mearan confirmed the bribe to Bowman—still in enough shock that he didn’t even ask how we knew about it, so we didn’t have to let him know how his little lap dance has probably been viewed by half of the police department by now. I’m sure that would embarrass him more than relatively minor bribery. It’s amazing what these people consider business as usual.”
“Aorta,” the doctor muttered. The policemen asked him to clarify.
The pathologist spread his gloved hand behind one of the many slices in the skin that had covered Anna’s left breast. “This wound severed the aorta. There’s no coming back from that. It may have still been beating up until then, even with the other wounds, but that made the fat lady sing.”
“Not the gash to the throat?” Maggie asked.
“That managed to sever the vocal cords without nicking the carotid. Of course, then she sucked blood into her lungs, so eventually she would have suffocated, but it looks like the breach to the heart soon made that irrelevant.” He finished sectioning the heart, cutting the organ into thick slices with a bread knife. Then he spread the damaged aorta out on a light gray board and bellowed for the photographer to come and get a snap.
Maggie pictured Anna Hernandez trying to pull air into her lungs through a blood-filled hole in her neck, her body burning with piercing wounds, unable even to scream. Maggie had been there, had been flat on her back with a crazed, overpowering weight on top of her doing his best to plunge a knife into her chest, already bleeding from the slash to her throat—a mere scratch compared to Anna’s wounds, now only a thin white line between shoulder and ear. Maggie’s breath grew heavy; her heart began to pound.
“What about the prints?” Jack suddenly demanded of her.
“Huh?”
He had been watching her closely, which seemed odd for him to do where others could see. “The prints. From the apartment. Anything?”
“Um—no. No hits. I’m guessing most of them are Anna’s and Wayne’s, and apparently neither of them have a record. At least in Cuyahoga County. The blood print from under Joanna’s body—my guy at the Bureau promises to call me as soon—”
Her phone rang. Area code 304. She moved out into the hall. The kindly older gentleman at the FBI told her what he could. The print hadn’t been that great, which, of course, she knew. He could give her a top ten and e-mail the individual sets of ten-prints, but she could decide for herself whether any matched or not. He didn’t have time to do it for her.
She thanked him profusely and offered her first-born child, should such a being ever exist. He turned her down, saying he already had three of his own and they were more than enough.
“So?” Riley asked when she returned.
“We have possibilities,” she told them. “He gave me a list of names, but whether they look anything like our blood print, I can’t tell you until I get back to the office and download the ten-prints.”
“Okay, who?”
The pathologist had finished with the heart and now removed the lacerated larynx. Cutting through the tough cartilage produced a crackling sound like crushing a bag of potato chips.
“First up, Maxwell Jacob Demuth, black male, date of birth ten twenty-two ninety-three. Second up, Patrick Jason Caldwell, white male, date of birth four fourteen ninety-six. Third, Aaron Michael Modesto, white male, date of birth six twenty-seven eighty-one. Any of those ring a bell?”
Both detectives shook their heads, disappointed. “None of them work at Sterling,” Jack said.
Riley pulled out his phone. “Mick has been running down all the protesters. I’ll see if he’s got anybody by those names.”
Jack said, “It could be someone at Sterling using an alias. I’ll bet at least half those guys have criminal records. You have photos?”
“Not on my phone.”
“We can check the names in the car.” All cop cars had laptops, which could connect to the law enforcement databases for driver’s license information and mug shots. As a civilian, Maggie had neither a laptop in her car nor access to that information.
The pathologist now had the photographer taking photos of the bloody cylinder that had been Anna Hernandez’s airway and form of human communication. “Yep. Right through the cords.”
“He must be getting really good at this,” Maggie said. “To do that without severing the carotids.”
The pathologist disagreed. “Just lucky, would be my guess. No one could get that close to the arteries on what I presume was a moving, struggling victim and not hit them if it weren’t sheer dumb luck.”
Riley got off the phone. “Zero. None of the names match our protesters or one of Ned Swift’s extended group. And those people will be using their real names since they’re home owners with lawsuits and bankruptcies and documentation behind them.”
“So who the hell are Demuth and Caldwell and whoever else?” Jack asked. “And what do they have to do with Sterling Financial?”
Maggie said, “They might not match the print at all. I won’t know until I can sit down with the ten-prints.”
“So—” Jack obviously wondered why, in that case, she still stood there talking.
“I want to see if she had a blow to the back of the head. Like Joanna and Tyra.”
Anna’s neck rested on a very uncomfortable-looking metal stand, which lifted her head off the table so the diener could cut through her scalp to the bone. Then he would scrape the flesh away from the skull and flip the hair down over the face. This was the most dehumanizing part of the autopsy, when the most personal part of the human anatomy seemed cast aside as unimportant, when the person most ceased to appear as a person and became nothing more than a slightly interesting object. Maggie took a deep breath and steeled herself against the shrieking whine of the bone saw as it removed the top of Anna’s skull.
After it stopped, the pathologist moved in, running his fingers over a glossy blot on the inside of the flesh. “Yeah, someone bapped her on the noggin here.”
“Bapped?”
The pathologist glared at the implied challenge to his terminology. “It didn’t have time to swell much. Probably wouldn’t have done any real damage. Would have hurt, but that’s about it.”
“Just like Joanna and Tyra,” Maggie said. “He smacks her backward immediately, before there’s any time for a struggle or even a scream. Then he’s on top of her, stabs her in the throat. Then he’s got time.” Time to rip her body open, seam by seam.
She felt Jack’s hand on her shoulder. “Go back to the office,” he said. “Tell us whether that print matches somebody or not.”
“Walk me out,” she said. “I have a ques
tion for you.”
Chapter 30
Jack left Riley hovering over the pathologist and followed Maggie with a sense of foreboding. They tried never to have private chats, even on the phone. Normally they had nothing to say to each other.
But in the middle of the small parking lot at the Medical Examiner’s office, with the oppressive humidity increasing the offal smell still in his nostrils, Maggie turned and asked him, “Did you kill Gerald Graham?”
This startled him. He looked around for potential witnesses. “Why are you asking that?”
“It’s an obvious question,” she pointed out. Obvious because she knew who Jack was.
“Do you really want to know? Or are you compelling yourself to ask?”
The breeze lifted her hair away from a somber face. “I want to know.”
He could argue, or lie, or blow her off, but she would see through that. “Yes.”
“Why? He was in court. He was going to be convicted and executed—”
“So I streamlined the process. So what?”
“Why? Why couldn’t you have left it alone?”
“Because he might have gotten off if his attorney’s expert could twist the jury’s mind with that stupid fingerprint—”
“That wouldn’t have happened.” She kept her voice low, wisely, but it trembled with rage.
“You couldn’t be sure of that. This is sure.”
“You didn’t trust me to handle it!”
He considered her. “Is that what you’re pissed about? Not that I executed someone a bit early in the process but that I disregarded your professional abilities? Are your feelings hurt?”
“This isn’t about me!”
“Apparently, it is. I didn’t realize you were so sensitive.” He tried to bite off the sarcasm and stick to the facts. “And you haven’t realized that whoever shot at you two yesterday wasn’t aiming at Anna. We’ve had two different informants finger one of Graham’s—”
He broke off as a secretary exited the back door and stalked across the lot to her car, phone glued to her ear.
Maggie breathed in and out, heavily, obviously trying to keep herself under control. But her next words surprised him in their desperation.
“I can’t do this, Jack. I can’t.”
“It’s not up to you.”
“It is. Because all I have to do is tell the truth, what I should have done in the first place—”
He grabbed her shoulders. “Stop. Just stop. You can’t control me, Maggie—accept that. You can’t control much in life. Few of us can.”
The truth was it hadn’t been her he didn’t trust—only the influence of a paid whore. Who knew what that attorney might have convinced the jury of even though everyone in the courtroom knew the guy was guilty as sin. But he’d be damned if he’d tell her that. Getting Graham off the planet was more important than coddling one by-the-book forensic scientist. “You can’t prove I killed Graham, you can’t even accuse me. The other cops would never believe it and it would only ruin your life, and you have too many good things to do with your life.”
She pulled herself away. “You’re not even making sense.”
“I am, but you don’t want to listen to it. There’s no point in churning your brain up with this. It isn’t going to go anywhere, and you know it.”
She glared. Mightily.
But she had pulled a trigger herself once and couldn’t expose him without exposing herself, so let her glare. He was done justifying himself to Maggie Gardiner.
“I can’t keep doing this,” she said again. Then she turned on one heel and left him standing there, wondering what she meant by that. Or if she even knew herself.
A rumble sounded in the distance.
*
“You look—”
“Don’t say like crap,” Maggie warned him.
Denny said, “Wasn’t gonna. You look, um, tired, that’s all.”
“Look at this instead of me.” She gestured at the screen, where she had used a comparison program to put her blood print on one side of the screen, and one of her ten-prints from the FBI on the other. Colored doodles marked the various information in the prints. “I’ve got an ending ridge, ridge, bifurcation, ridge, ridge, short ridge, ridge, ridge, two bifurcations—”
“Looks good,” he said cautiously. But, like her, not enthusiastic. The tops of fingers are fairly generic areas compared to the middle of a fingerprint pattern, where all sorts of turns and stops and curves usually exist.
“This bifurcation starts a little to the right of where this one does,” she pointed, touching the monitor’s screen.
“Yeah, but that’s not significant.” Skin, pliable and flexible, stretched more or less depending on the surface it touched and how much pressure the finger applied to that surface. That’s why photos of prints were never superimposed on each other—they would never match perfectly, nor should they.
“There’s a little gap right here.”
“That could be dirt.”
“This short ridge here is pretty compelling.”
“I think so,” Denny said. “So who’s our lucky winner?”
“Patrick Caldwell. Of Omaha, Nebraska. Served three years for raping his girlfriend. Used a knife—”
“That fits our crimes.”
“—but didn’t cut her, only threatened. Because of that he made parole. This is him. The FBI sent me their mug shots, too.”
They both stared at the photo of a young man with pale skin and black hair. His eyebrows seemed to overpower his eyes and a full, bushy beard covered his face from the top of his cheekbones on down. Maggie felt sure she had not seen him working at the Sterling offices, or in the group of protesters outside the Sterling offices, or on the bus or the news or in the courtroom.
Denny frowned. “And what is Patrick of Omaha doing at a Cleveland crime scene?”
“I have no earthly idea. Hence, my lack of exultation at this possible match.”
Denny sighed, then straightened. “Well, it is what it is. You going to tell the guys what you have?”
“Yep. Along with my reservations.”
“Okay. Good job. And then—get some sleep. That’s an order.”
She summoned up a smile. “Okay, boss.”
Denny shuffled off toward his office and Maggie picked up the phone. She didn’t want to talk to Jack, so she called Riley. He, of course, wanted a positive answer, but she made her ambivalence clear. They could consider the print an investigative lead, but not a positive identification.
Then she moved on to the fingernail scrapings.
They were full of Anna’s blood, of course, but several fibers were caught in the dried red material. She tried a dry mount, then a wet mount. The water leached away some of the red so that she could see the fibers a bit clearer. A mess of white and dirty white fibers of varying thickness with some clumpy glue binding them together.
Tyvek.
Just as with Tyra.
She called Riley back. “He’s wearing Tyvek. Probably a whole jumpsuit. That’s how he gets away from their houses without some passerby calling the cops about a guy in bloody clothes.”
“But why would these women open their door to someone in a Tyvek jumpsuit? Anna had a peephole in her door and had found a body earlier that day. She had to be jumpy.”
“It had to be someone they knew.”
“I thought you said the fibers probably came from the hand bags? I mean, the bags the body snatchers put on the hands at the scene.”
“Not this time.”
“Why not?”
“Because I asked Nick to use paper bags on Anna. For precisely that reason.”
“Huh,” Riley puffed. “Okay, then. Our guy’s using Tyvek to walk away blood free. Does that mean he works in a lab?”
“You can buy Tyvek jumpsuits at Home Depot. Paint department.”
“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “Okay. Well, let us know if you find anything else.”
She hung up. Like so much forens
ic evidence, interesting, but not particularly helpful.
*
Riley relayed the information to Jack, who from the passenger seat spoke to the Nebraska Department of Corrections regarding the whereabouts of one Patrick Caldwell. Nebraska, it seemed, didn’t know. He had been released, dutifully followed up with his parole officer for several months, and then disappeared. He didn’t check in, didn’t return for his final paycheck at the grocery store, and supposedly had not contacted his aunt or sister. To their relief, they said.
DOC could only give a rudimentary background for him. Apparently he had been a decent student from a tumultuous home and briefly held jobs in commercial construction, assembly line, and food service positions, where employers had always been satisfied with his work. Nothing to do with mortgages or loans. White collar wasn’t really his thing.
Riley pulled into the Sterling parking lot and wondered aloud, “Could our video guys do anything with the mug shot? Maybe erase the beard? See what he’d look like with a haircut?”
“Last time I asked them to do that, they laughed me out of the office. Said I might as well ask if someone has a mole on their butt underneath their clothing.”
Riley got out of the car and slammed the door. “Bet they could do it on TV. Why is Maggie calling me instead of you?”
Jack nearly stumbled over a curb. “What?”
“She always calls you. It’s okay, I don’t take it personally; you’ve got all that rugged manly-man appeal going on. But what happened? You two have a tiff?”