Close to the Bone

by Lisa Black

  Shephard began to fill him in, and Theresa grabbed the opportunity. Mumbling something about needing the ladies room and holding a hand to her mouth as if she were about to lose her last meal, she stumbled up the hallway and went to check on her crime scene.

  FOUR

  The cop standing in the doorway to the deskmen’s office looked at Theresa curiously but said nothing. He also didn’t move, but that was all right – she didn’t want to go in, not just yet. She simply glanced through the windows, to see that Darryl’s body had been moved slightly from where she’d left it, probably by those pesky do-gooder EMTs, and someone’s foot had slid through one of the larger puddles of blood since she had been in there. It could have even been her on her way out – she checked her shoes, but the soles seemed relatively clean. Most of the stains had already been dry upon her arrival – no wonder Darryl’s body had grown cool. He must have been killed at least an hour earlier, probably two, with the chilly linoleum sucking out his body heat as quickly as his dead cells could give it up.

  Theresa’s camera bag and the small paper bags from the hit-and-run remained where she’d dumped them on the counter. Great. Now her equipment was part of the crime scene.

  Theresa went up the rear staircase and let herself into the lab.

  They had a spare camera, and she grabbed some swabs and a few other supplies before returning to the loading dock area. The smear of blood on the wall next to the elevator might not have suggested a hand to anyone else, but Theresa had seen a lot of brownish-red impressions left by hands and feet over the years and could make out three fingers and the outer edge of a palm. The outer edge – it was a right hand – had heavier staining in the upper interdigital area, right below the little finger.

  Theresa applied scaled tape to the periphery of the pattern and took some photos. Then she took a closer look with a jeweler’s loupe, but couldn’t make out any discernible ridges. That didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t there, or that any pattern had been smudged beyond recognition – they might simply be too faint to see. Amido black stain could bring nearly invisible blood prints to life.

  Theresa moved over to the other stain, at the edge of the doorway into the front hallway area. A small blot that didn’t give her much to go on – it could be from the left hand of someone walking toward the front, or the right hand of someone walking toward the loading dock, but something about the curve of what could be a finger above the most visible part of the stain made her think of a right hand. Given that it contained less blood than the other stain, she made a guess that might be educated or wild depending on one’s level of conservatism: that it came from a wound on the right palm instead of a palm stained with Darryl’s blood. Otherwise there would be more blood on the more interior stain, with some wiped off by the time he made the second stain by the elevator. But a wound would make the palm more bloody as time went on. A handy piece of logic, with no guarantee of accuracy.

  Theresa dampened a swab with a vial of sterile water and collected a sample from the very edge of the badly smeared spot. The swab went into a tiny paper box. The cop at the door to the deskmen’s office watched her curiously but said nothing. It seemed remarkable to her how much easier it was to breathe with someone else in the building, other people who were tall and armed and tasked with protecting civilians like herself. Of course, under normal circumstances she would be counting, except for the armed part, on the deskmen to fill that role.

  She went through the same process with the stain next to the elevator.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the cops or her own co-workers; it was simply that the building was awash in biohazards. At any moment another deceased person could be brought in, wet and wild, to contaminate any existing stains.

  Speaking of which—

  Theresa turned around. The gurney that had been against the wall when she first arrived had not moved.

  But there was no longer a body on it, just a rumpled, deflated white sheet.

  Theresa felt almost afraid to tell Sergeant Shephard.

  She reached him just as Stone finished their confab and went off to make phone calls. He would have to make quite a number, Theresa knew. Almost all the staff would be given the day off, as much to keep them out of the crime scene as in sympathy for any grief they may feel at the death of a co-worker. One or two pathologists would need to come in to do Darryl’s autopsy – one to do the autopsy, and one to act as their diener, or assistant. If the deskmen were at the bottom of the totem pole, the dieners were only one step above; plus both groups spent all their time on the first floor and got to know each other pretty well. Not even perpetually cash-strapped Cuyahoga County would ask someone to make a Y-incision into someone they considered a friend.

  ‘What?’ was Shephard’s response when Theresa told him about the gurney. As they hurried to the loading dock he asked if she had looked under the sheet. How big was the person? How tall? Weight? Of course, she couldn’t answer. This was a morgue. She had barely glanced at the body – or person, as the case appeared to be.

  He strode up to the gurney, vacant except for a single pristine sheet. As he reached out toward the gleaming metal she cried: ‘Don’t touch it!’

  He glared at her.

  Theresa shrugged. She couldn’t help it. She would have to process the gurney for fingerprints, and that officers would keep that in mind is not something she could take for granted.

  He picked up the very edge of the sheet with finger and thumb, as delicately as Queen Victoria’s maiden aunt, and peeked underneath. Nothing.

  Then he pointed out that he might have a picture of who had emerged from underneath the sheet – if the building had cameras.

  ‘Do you have cameras in your office?’ Theresa asked, and he shut up.

  She took a closer look at the metal surface – gleaming and clean except for a few smears. Fresh gurneys were always left in the loading dock, to be front and center for any new arrivals, but unless someone had gotten very sloppy in the hosing area … ‘He left some blood here. Just a few swipes – it’s either from Darryl or himself.’ Theresa explained her ‘small wound in the right palm’ theory. Shephard went off to relay the narrowed timeline to his men, and Theresa slipped to the front again in search of Justin Warner’s locker.

  In between the deskmen’s office and the viewing chamber sat a row of metal cabinets. The doors had become decorated over the years with peeling stickers of rock bands, refrigerator magnets and the occasional political comment, but above this din each had been labeled with an old-fashioned punch-style label maker, and finding Justin’s proved easy. Theresa pulled on fresh gloves and lifted the latch, careful to use only the tip of one finger should they want to process for prints later. None of the lockers had a lock on them – perhaps the deskmen felt it would show a lack of trust, and besides, lunches were the only thing subject to theft at the ME’s office and the deskman had a refrigerator in their office, where they could keep an eye on theirs. Theresa had to use the general staff lunchroom and had lost a number of candy bars and leftover stromboli over the years. Not even injecting some decoy mini Milky Ways with Tabasco sauce seemed to help.

  Justin’s locker seemed as unremarkable as he had been. With a mini flashlight she took a closer look, but found only a hairbrush, a windbreaker with nothing in the pockets but (hopefully) clean tissues and a quarter, expired bus passes (county employees got them at a discount), two front page sections of the Plain Dealer from two and two-and-a-half months previously, and three loose but unopened foil Pop-Tarts packages, no doubt reserved for dire emergencies and of sufficiently low value to risk losing to the lunch thief. When Theresa moved the Plain Dealers – none of the stories suggested a connection to Darryl – a piece of paper fell out. The three-by-four white square had a series of numbers on it in distressing penmanship: 1432, 1433, 1555, 1830. They were two digits too short for case numbers and one digit too short for evidence numbers. They might be bets of some type for his bookie, but she wouldn’t know, spor
ts so not being her thing.

  Theresa pulled two Manila envelopes out of yet another of her pockets and scribbled down the numbers on one, then collected a bundle of hairs from the brush into the other. She had wondered all along if the police would decide to handle the entire investigation or even call in the state, shut the ME’s office out entirely. That would be more or less standard procedure – if a cop is involved in an on-duty car crash resulting in injury, cops had the state Highway Patrol do the report. But the Medical Examiner’s staff fell into a sort of gray area. Technically, they weren’t an investigative agency. Theresa examined and processed crime scenes only when asked to by the police agencies, and had no authority of her own. On the other hand, the Medical Examiner was the highest official in the county, outranking even the Sheriff, so if Stone decided to dig in his heels there could be no telling what might happen.

  In any event, if the cops needed a DNA sample there were plenty more hairs in the brush, and the paper remained unmolested.

  The uniformed officer appeared at Theresa’s shoulder, and she nearly dropped both her envelopes. ‘Ma’am? Someone wants to see you.’

  ‘Uh … yeah, okay.’ His set of handcuffs remained clipped to his belt. Maybe he thought it was her locker.

  It turned out that Stone had issued the summons, and he led the way from the first floor to his office on the second with Theresa and Shephard in tow. Apparently, they were going to powwow. They could have powwowed in the lobby, but then Stone wouldn’t have been able to show off his office, and Theresa figured he felt more secure inside it. Medical Examiner Stone didn’t believe in the austerity and stripped-down professionalism of other county offices and had enough of his own and his wife’s money that he didn’t have to. His workspace, while small, had been outfitted with suitably crammed bookshelves in deep cherry, a desk with just enough clutter to look authentic but not enough to hide the granite inlay, leather wing chairs and a beige alpaca-fur rug. Theresa didn’t know people actually bought those. Next to this opulence, a glass shelf holding specimen jars of hearts and spleens seemed discordant, but perhaps it maintained his autopsy-room street cred.

  Stone moved behind his desk but did not sit, giving them the benefit of his six-four frame, broad chest and hair with its perfect combination of wave for the ladies and gray for the jurors, and got right to it. ‘I’ll put out a press release but I don’t want to publish Johnson’s name for another day, maybe two, and certainly not Warner’s. Is that understood, Sergeant?’

  Shephard gave him a look, one of those alpha-dog-circling-the-other looks, each deciding how much of the marked territory they really wanted. Only on TV do police agencies fight to control a case. In real life if a case looks like it will develop into a pain in the butt, they’re just as happy to let the other guy have it. But Shephard hadn’t made up his mind about this one yet.

  Theresa left them to it. She worked for Stone, and for once she actually agreed with him.

  ‘That’s fine with me,’ Shephard said.

  ‘What were you doing here?’ Stone then demanded of Theresa, as if she had somehow invited bloody murder into the building by trying to pad her overtime.

  ‘Hit-skip,’ she said.

  ‘And you didn’t see anyone else in the building besides Johnson?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you think Justin hid under a sheet while you entered the building?’

  ‘Someone did.’ Though this didn’t make a lot of sense to her. Darryl had been practically cold, and most of the blood had dried, implying that at least an hour or more had elapsed since the murder. Why was Justin or whoever still hanging around?

  ‘All right. Despite being a witness in the case, you’re still acting supervisor for Trace.’

  Ever since the previous supervisor had covered up a homicide and then tried to kill her, yes. The temporary promotion – which, incidentally, did not come with a raise in salary – could not be taken to indicate any particular confidence in Theresa’s abilities or sympathy for her near-death experience. Stone simply didn’t have a lot to choose from. Since the county’s budget had been whittling departments by attrition for years, Trace Evidence now consisted of Theresa, DNA analyst Don Delgado, a part-time intern from Case Western and the secretary, Neenah – and not one of them wanted the supervisor job. At least, Theresa didn’t think she wanted the job.

  And the county, or Stone, seemed in no hurry to fill it. The work still got done, and the funds budgeted for the salary Leo no longer drew went – where, exactly? An excellent question, and not one she would likely ever learn the answer to.

  ‘The Police Department will need to process this crime scene,’ Shephard said, with a nice balance of firmness and impartiality. ‘That’s standard practice in such cases—’

  Theresa blurted: ‘I’ll want to look at the blood spatter. Other than that I’m all right with it.’

  Stone glared at her, certainly for presuming that her opinion had been asked for in any way, but Theresa wanted to be clear. Normally, she hated to give up any control of a crime scene, but she also wasn’t eager to spend a day swabbing up pieces of Darryl’s dried cells. However, this was her own co-worker in her own workspace – of course she wanted to wrap her fingers around every aspect of the crime and never let go until she understood every blood drop and timeline and trajectory. But time would always be a luxury denied. Nothing happened in a vacuum. In short, nothing about this situation would be as she preferred, and everything would be awkward, uncomfortable and just plain bad.

  But she didn’t have much choice about the bloodstain pattern analysis, being the only expert in the county. Blood spatter can be the picture that’s worth a thousand words, and Theresa did want to see it, comfort be damned.

  The two men continued to argue oh-so-politely, a stance that did not come naturally to either of them. Shephard plopped himself into one of the leather chairs without waiting for an invitation, but Theresa browsed in the less luxe and more familiar territory of the specimen jars. Some organs do not look like an anatomy diagram, and some do. A set of lungs from April 2007, for example, did not look gray and puffy but wetly, deeply red, more like a liver. A spleen removed during the second month of 2011 resembled a red amoeba. But a uterus from 9/23/04 while soaking in its formalin bath appeared as expected, a pink, rounded triangle. It had some sort of cancer on it that looked like a cigarette burn and made her wince.

  ‘Fine,’ Stone said at last. ‘CPD can process the crime scene. I trust you’ll have it wrapped up by lunchtime so we won’t have to lose the entire day. In the meantime two of my pathologists are coming in to do the autopsy. CPD won’t be able to do that, will they?’

  Shephard could have insisted that they send the body to another county, but must have assumed that immediate results trumped any possible conflict of interest.

  The conference broke up, and Theresa went to process the gurney. Assuming that Sergeant Shephard would consider the deskmen’s office the crime scene, then the gurney sat outside CPD’s purview. Fingerprint powder brought up a nice palm print.

  Before moving on to the bloody handprints on the walls she made herself a badly needed cup of coffee and checked her watch. Five a.m. – too early to call Don and go over recent events with him, especially since he had been told to stay home. Theresa would let him sleep.

  Amido black is a dark, watery liquid that turns blood to a dark purplish black color, throwing a faint fingerprint or shoe print into startling relief. The process is easy enough – just dump on the stain, wait a few seconds, then rinse gently with distilled water. However, sloshing all that liquid around on a large, immovable object such as a wall is messy and, since the stain is dissolved in methanol, smelly. A few more ridges came into view, but still not enough to be able to compare to someone’s hand. One of the CPD crime scene techs, Jen, came in while Theresa finished rinsing, gray-colored water coursing down the tile to be collected by a few soggy paper towels. Jen carried three separate metal cases and hadn’t bothered to put on mak
e-up, either.

  Caught red-handed, Theresa said, ‘I did the amido black staining,’ as if she were being helpful instead of interfering.

  ‘Oh good. I hate working with that stuff.’

  Crime-scene techs don’t bother with jurisdictional jealousy. They leave that kind of crap to the cops.

  FIVE

  By seven thirty a.m. Theresa stood in the autopsy suite watching two doctors putter around and get their instruments in order before beginning the procedure. She had spent the previous two hours watching Jen process the crime scene. The CPD tech had collected all the samples and would write the report, but chain of custody would not be affected if Theresa watched over her shoulder, and besides, Jen did need to confer with her on what the bloodstain patterns could tell them. Their conclusion: not much.

  The struggle apparently began in one corner, where a stack of papers had fallen from the top of a desk and a stapler had been knocked off the edge of the counter – signs of activity, perhaps from the first few blows. Apparently, the blood did not start flowing until the fight had moved to the floor and stayed there. They found no sign of a weapon nor any cast-off from one, and from the splashing patterns found near the largest pools they suspected that the floor had been used to cave in Darryl’s head rather than any blunt instrument. They found patterns left by the men’s pants, sleeves, knees and hair, but not a single usable handprint. Prints left by hands, yes, but nothing with a sufficient amount of discernible ridges. The hands had been too wet with blood, and the marks were just smears left by slippery flesh.