by Lisa Black
As they bustled, excited as archaeology students outside KV63, she tried to explain her idea to Shepard. ‘I just said we used to inventory everything we received using a system our first director devised. Every piece of evidence, or sample, or clothing, or whatever, was written down and assigned a number. The number started with two digits for the year, then a letter or letters – E for evidence, A for autopsy sample like blood or gastric contents, C for victim’s clothing, etc. – and then the number of the item. We started at one on January first and they simply went numerically until the next year. We kept a tally sheet so you could see what was the last number used when you went to enter something, to avoid duplicates.’
‘Sounds complicated,’ Shephard said.
‘A little more cumbersome than having the computer simply generate the number for you, yes, but, again, it worked. You could pick up something from ten or twenty or thirty years previously, pull out the ledger for that year—’ she hefted the book in her hands to demonstrate – ‘and simply follow the numbers up to the correct entry.’
‘And you think those digits are evidence numbers?’
‘Or sample numbers, or something. About seven years ago we went to a computerized inventory—’
‘Only seven?’
‘It took a while to find the right system. The Powers That Be hemmed and hawed over each proposal – can’t really blame them, they had to decide between two computer systems once before and wound up choosing what could be called the Betamax over the VHS. Once burned, and all that. Plus, scraping up the funding is always a challenge in our county, especially in a down economy.’
‘So—’ he prompted.
‘So we went to the RMS system – Report Management System. All nice and digital, relatively paperless. Bar codes and scanners instead of staples and Sharpie markers. But, of course, we no longer needed the old system with the year and the letter categories. All samples and items are numbered in order regardless of type.’ She scanned the pages of the 2005 ledger as she spoke, sprawling the book open across Don’s desk. He stood next to her with 2004, their shoulders bumping.
‘And these numbers from Warner’s locker couldn’t work in the new system?’
‘They could if they’re old, and if he left out the zero as the first digit – when we came online we started with 00001 and went from there. So zero1462, zero1463 etcetera could be RMS numbers, but I just checked and in RMS those numbers correspond to three different cases; three of the items are blood and toxicology samples from a traffic accident and a heart attack, and the fourth is a pair of shoes from a suicide by hanging. I didn’t see any similarities or connection between the three cases at all. And Reese didn’t autopsy any of them.’
‘But this list of numbers might have nothing to do with the murders.’
That stopped her for a moment. ‘That’s true, but I don’t have any better ideas at the moment. Do you?’
‘And there’s no year. Or letter.’
‘Because Justin already knew the year and the type. He didn’t need to write it down. Or,’ she admitted, ‘because these aren’t evidence numbers and have nothing to do with anything.’
‘So you’re going to go through every single book?’
She didn’t answer that, since obviously they were. ‘Starting with the last year before we went to RMS. As you can see, it doesn’t take that long. The system did have its advantages.’
Beside her, Don made a hmmm sound.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘What?’ Shephard asked.
Don held his finger down on the pale-green, lined sheet. ‘The first two numbers could be evidence from this case, a ligature and vaginal swabs. The third, fifteen-fifty-five, is here too … her fingernail scrapings.’
Theresa checked her slip of paper, because she couldn’t remember a number for more than half a nanosecond. ‘And the last? Eighteen-thirty?’
He slid his finger down as she read over his shoulder, the paper crammed with tiny writing, their notations as to the results and disposition of a number of items from the same case. His finger stopped under a crammed-in notation, in Theresa’s handwriting, of a set of tapings – hairs and fibers collected from the surface of the victim’s shirt.
Theresa’s gaze traveled to the beginning of the entry, to the name next to the five-digit case number, and it sucked the breath out of her lungs.
‘What?’ Shephard demanded.
‘It’s Diana,’ she said.
She had known Diana Allman would be trouble the first time she saw her, on Diana’s second or third day at the ME’s office. She had to be; it would not be possible for those kinds of looks to get through the world without attracting way too much attention, both the good kind and the bad.
Diana had been hired for the secretarial pool, or rather the more professional-sounding administrative assistant pool (which everyone still called the secretarial pool), to spend her days typing the doctors’ scribbled notes and transcribing their dictations at a small desk among other women doing the same thing. Her reception at first ranged from neutral to downright chilly, but she soon thawed her fellow secretaries. She listened to their tales of husbands and children and cats. She brought in home-made brownies. She did her job well, her typing speed the envy of anyone who heard her fingers flying over the keys as if possessed. And she never let on that her social life included clubbing and celebrity events to which she found herself invited, or that her photo occasionally appeared in the society columns (as much as Cleveland has society columns; the city prides itself on being down-to-earth); she never let on that her nightlife might be vastly more interesting than everyone else’s. She told Theresa because Theresa didn’t care; Theresa wouldn’t have been interested in clubbing even if she’d had the energy ten years ago. Especially ten years ago, when she had still been married and her daughter was young.
But the looks, Diana couldn’t do much about. Flawless, caramel-colored skin, high cheekbones, ridiculously slender thighs and healthy but perfectly proportional breasts – she couldn’t hide all that, and didn’t try.
They would eat lunch together in the med school cafeteria, across the tiny courtyard from the ME’s office. Theresa was only ten years older than Diana but they were critical years, full of marriage and child raising, so she probably felt the gap more than Diana did. The younger woman took Theresa back to her college days, full of laughter and outrageous conversations, keeping her up on current events and attitudes with hilariously apropos summaries. Other lunches were typical workplace gripe sessions – Theresa knew better than to trust anyone (other than Don) with her true opinions of the place, but she had learned, carefully and over time, that Diana could be trusted with a secret. Diana had a number of her own, and most of them revolved around her husband, James. Not Jim, not Jimmy. James.
They had been married only a year. James wasn’t a bad guy, Diana said – always a matter for concern when someone began a description of their spouse by damning with faint praise – he just didn’t have a particular trade or profession, and he fell too easily into the typical pitfalls of coming from a not-great area of town. Didn’t know his mother. Father good-hearted but drank too much. Barely graduated high school. Worked as a car mechanic or assembly-line grunt here or there but always wound up on the wrong end of a conflict with the boss. Champagne tastes, beer budget. Craved respect without any interest in putting in the effort to earn it.
But he could be so great, too, Diana told her in more cheerful moods. He would bring her donuts from Presti’s and remember her go-to choices at their favorite restaurants and sing to her in the kitchen and basically do all the sweet things that a young man in love does, sometimes, and not for very many years. But he did them. And he didn’t beat her, or sleep with her sister, or even flirt with her friends, not much. James’ only real flaw was his inability to hold a job and his inability to adjust his finances accordingly. And the drug use.
Still, Theresa didn’t give their future great odds. Diana didn’t need much but
she did want stability, and though she might be sweet, she wasn’t stupid. Eventually, she would do the old Dear Abby test: are you better off with him or without him? and Theresa doubted the answer would come up in James’ favor.
She thought Diana had reached that point one day when Theresa found her on the loading dock, face turned up to the snowflakes as they fell gently from a dull gray sky. The deskman – it was Darryl, as Theresa recalled – stamped out his butt and went inside, leaving them to their girl talk. Neither woman smoked, but they still utilized the dock whenever they felt the need to get outside, step away from the phones or their supervisors and breathe some fresh air. Plus that day there had been an autopsy going on in the special room set aside for decomposed bodies. Everyone in the building felt in need of fresh air.
Diana stared at the clock on the med school, a frown wrinkling her brow. ‘He pawned my Prada bag.’
‘I didn’t know you had one. Of course, I wouldn’t know a Prada bag if Ms Prada gave it to me.’
‘You mean mister. It was real, too, not a knock-off. Tim – I dated him before James – gave it to me. His sister-in-law got a discount or something, but it was real.’ She stamped her feet, probably burning off nervous energy since it wasn’t that cold, even with the snow. ‘He’s been going on about needing a new tire on that thing he drives, and I just don’t have it. Not if I want to pay the rent and the utilities in full. He’s always, oh, just pay partial this month and we’ll make it up next month – but we won’t make it up! There won’t be anything to make it up with! Why does he not get that very simple math?’
She practically shouted the last few words, a real outburst for a woman who had learned to keep her head down – the dangers of beauty, how to fly below the radar of vitriolic envy. Theresa opened her mouth to say something comforting, but Diana had already gone on.
‘Then I come home yesterday, and it’s gone. And he’s got a new tire. He won’t admit it, that’s the really irritating part. He says he fixed a guy’s car on the next street, that’s where he got the money. And my bag? He’s got no idea where it is, it just disappeared right off my closet shelf into the Twilight Zone.’
Then Theresa did say something comforting, something purely eloquent like that sucks or that’s a real bummer, and thought to herself that this may be the beginning of the end, and maybe that was a good thing.
But nothing happened immediately, and they went back to talking about movies and food and rumors of office affairs. The next month James pawned an old gold bracelet of Diana’s and she got angry, angry enough to rush to the ladies’ room in the middle of lunch and return pale and sweaty, but after another day she decided that the bracelet had no real sentimental value to her, and so that incident passed as well. Diana only wanted security – her own childhood had not been the most stable. She must have kept hoping she would find it in James, a plan doomed to disappointment. She never actually said the word divorce, while her conversation circled ever closer to it.
Theresa never saw Diana outside of work, only because of simple convenience; she lived on the opposite side of town from the younger woman and took public transportation to get there. Once the workday ended, Theresa had to rush home to make dinner and do laundry and pay bills, and the last thing she felt like doing was making the commute in the evening as well, just to hang out with someone much younger than herself and talk over all the things they had already talked over at the lab. It was a work friendship only, sincere but limited. She truly liked Diana, and felt it important to have someone there besides Don whom she could trust with her thoughts, but if either of them had moved on to another job they would not have stayed in touch.
Then, on a Tuesday in the fall, Theresa came to work and Leo, her boss at the time, had said that he and some homicide detectives needed to talk to her.
Now she said, to Don and Shephard, ‘We’re going to need to get into the vault again.’
Don shook his head. ‘Janice isn’t going to like it.’
TWELVE
Diana’s file was an inch thick, which didn’t seem like much for the murder of one of their own but still outweighed the surrounding files by at least seventy percent. After all, beyond the autopsy and accompanying toxicology, histology and trace reports there was not much that could be done. The police officers would conduct the rest of the investigation, interviewing witnesses, apprehending the suspect, checking alibis. A good portion of the file consisted of clipped newspaper stories. Theresa read silently and the two men with her did the same, rotating the scraps of print among them.
On that Monday afternoon a neighbor heard a heated argument coming from Diana’s house. The weather was still nice enough for windows to be open, and she had heard a man and woman shouting at each other – not for the first time, so the neighbor, Wanda Simmons, simply tsk-tsked to herself and went on making dinner. She had glanced up from her kitchen window after hearing a door slam and seen James stalking across the lawn, crossing from his own grass on to hers, and she thought to herself that at least it would be quieter on the street. Then her son came home from work, they ate her meatloaf, and she took out the garbage. It was her son’s job, but he was on the phone and she wanted to be sure they didn’t forget. While dragging the cans from the side of her detached garage, she noticed that the rear screen door of Diana’s house gaped open about a foot. Behind it the inner door stood well ajar. This was not all that unusual – it was a warm night, and Diana wasn’t the everything-buttoned-down type – but somehow she felt wrong about it. And, she admitted, she was also nosy and wanted a chance to ask Diana what the fight had been about; Diana had been much more chatty than usual lately, perhaps due to the increasing pressures of her marriage. So Wanda Simmons abandoned her cans and walked through the unfenced rear yards, telling herself she only wanted to remind Diana that garbage day had arrived once more.
So Wanda rapped on the loose, open screen door. It didn’t shut right, and unless one paid attention to the latch it would swing outward; yet another household repair that James never quite got around to fixing. She called Diana’s name and slipped inside.
It seemed immediately obvious that there had been a struggle in the cramped, eat-in kitchen. The table to her left had been shoved off-center, and a chair lay on its side. A mug had fallen from the short counter on her right, scattering brown liquid across the linoleum. Wanda called her neighbor’s name a second time as she moved forward, the last syllable dying off as she saw a bare foot just past the edge of the counter.
Wanda Simmons told the reporter how she’d told the police that she could never remember in exactly what order the next event occurred, but she had moved around the counter until she could see Diana’s body lying equidistant between the breakfast counter, the sink and window to the back yard, and the oven range and refrigerator. She lay on her left side, but Wanda, hoping her friend had simply passed out, pushed the upright shoulder until Diana fell open, on to her back, sightless eyes staring at the ceiling, tongue swollen and protruding. Wanda jumped back and stumbled away, too horrified by the sight to touch her friend again but equally horrified to think that she should be doing CPR or artificial respiration or something before Diana died completely and left this life for good, just in case that hadn’t happened yet, in case there was still some chance, but there wasn’t a chance because she couldn’t bring herself to go near that being on the floor, much less touch it …
Finally, her brain calmed enough to realize that Diana had, indeed, truly died and no amount of CPR would help, so she could stop beating herself up enough to find the phone – a cordless, scattered among the overdue bills and neighborhood flyers on the counter – and call 911. She gave the address and the situation easily enough, but it took another few minutes to convince the dispatcher that Diana was truly dead and Wanda had already worked through the CPR debate. They established that the victim had probably been strangled. Then the woman on the phone asked if there were anything still around Diana’s neck. Afraid she would be asked to touch the body
to remove it, Wanda hesitated in answering. She also couldn’t make much sense of the incongruently bright object wound so tightly into the dead woman’s flesh that it had partially disappeared into a furrow of its own making. Aqua blue twined with a bright purple, assaulted by occasional patches of brilliant red. It wasn’t until she deciphered a tube of red plastic as a handle that Wanda recognized it for a jump rope. She reluctantly told the dispatcher and flat-out refused to touch it. Diana was dead, she insisted, and the dead had germs that she didn’t want anything to do with.
The patrol cars arrived so promptly that Wanda hadn’t even had time to wonder if the killer could still be in the house; when it did occur to her, the idea gave her nightmares for weeks. But the house had been easily cleared, and Wanda wasted no time in providing the police with their most likely suspect – the ne’er-do-well husband she had seen marching across the grass shortly after a screaming match with the dead woman. The same husband – the reporter added – who had a history of assault (narrowly avoided a conviction regarding a bar fight shortly after his high school graduation) and drug abuse (several small possession charges; James had a bad habit of hanging around his dealer instead of making his purchase and going). The same husband who callously pawned the sapphire ring he had taken from the hand of his beautiful wife after choking the life out of her. Conviction seemed assured, so James Allman listened to his lawyer and pled guilty. The prosecutor had started out at murder, aggravated by theft (of the sapphire ring), but perhaps concerned by the absence of any slam-dunk physical evidence he agreed to voluntary manslaughter. Extrapolating from her voluminous media interviews, Theresa wondered if the prosecutor had reservations regarding the testimony of the perhaps too-helpful Wanda. Diana had no family to enrage, and James did go to jail for ten–thirty years, so it seemed a satisfactory resolution.