Code 61

by Donald Harstad

  We'd released the EMTs, prompting Toby to ask why they weren't taking the deceased with them. He got a straight answer. Melissa then asked just how long we were going to keep the body in the tub before removing her. I told her that it would depend on when the scene had been thoroughly processed, but that it shouldn't be too very long.

  It being Saturday, and an urgent call-out to boot, Iowa DCI Special Agent Hester Gorse was more informally dressed than usual, in blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a gray turtleneck, with a blue microweave rain jacket, worn to conceal the gun on her right hip. I saw her head through the window as she started up the steps, and was in time to greet her at the door.

  “Hi, Hester. Thought you'd be here sooner.”

  “Hard to find this place. I must have missed the drive the first time.” She smiled, in sort of a weary way. None of us get enough weekends off. She'd probably been counting on this one. “So, Carl,” she said as we paused in the atrium, “just what do we have here, anyway?”

  I told her, in about two minutes. Told her that it could be a homicide. Told her that it looked like a suicide.

  “So, are you leaning either way?”

  I shrugged. “It doesn't look right. The clothes, or lack thereof. The wound, although that could be self-inflicted, God knows.” I'd told her what Doc Z. had said about the arterial spurts and the bruises. And the Coumadin.

  “But we don't know, yet, if there was any major arterial damage caused by the wound?”

  “Right.”

  She smiled again. “So, do I just sign for the free pathologist and lab team, or am I going to have to work today?”

  “I feel so transparent,” I said, grinning back at her. “No, I'm afraid you're going to have to work on this one.” I told her about the body in Wisconsin.

  We went into the parlor, and I introduced her around. We left Borman in charge downstairs, and I took Hester up to meet Edie.

  Afterward, we compared notes, Hester seated at Edie's vanity, and me leaning against the bathroom door, where I could keep an eye on the door to the hallway.

  “You got an extra pen in that camera bag of yours?”

  “Sure.” I handed her the bag. “Right-hand front pocket, there.”

  “I want the lab team here,” said Hester, peering into my camera bag. “I don't know just exactly what we have here, but we can't wait for them to come up to process the scene until after the autopsy.” The lab team had to come from Des Moines, some four to four and a half hours away.

  “I'm for it,” I said, as brightly as possible. This third visit to the tub had been difficult. “What do you think? Can we move the body out now? I'd like to get her out as soon as practical.”

  “No problem. I don't think the victim has any more to tell us until the autopsy.”

  “Good.”

  She found the pen, and browsed absently through the bag. “You've got just about everything in here, Houseman. Exam gloves, bags, labels, fflm, batteries, pens, scissors, tweezers … ” She unzipped the side pocket, and looked up. “Girl Scout cookies? Are these Girl Scout cookies?”

  “Caught me. Want one?”

  Hester ate the chocolate mint cookie in two swift bites, and then looked for a place to put her notepad on the vanity.

  “Look at the neat stuff.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Her makeup,” she said. “Lipstick colors. Interesting. Like these: Tar, Bordeaux, Garnet, Pulsing Blood … ”

  “Oh.”

  “With foundation names like Porcelain. And glitter for the eyelids. Little stick-on holograms. Neat stuff.”

  “You betcha, Hester.”

  “No, really. This isn't your mother's kind of makeup, chances are. And not the shades and colors that are usually worn around here.” She gave me a smug look. “Sort of a gentle rebel, this Edie. Look more closely. She took very good care of all this stuff. It's orderly. Neat. Her appearance was important.”

  “I caught the neat part right away,” I said. “Always makes me feel out of place. Speaking of makeup, you notice her nails? The multicolored thing. Does that mean something?”

  “Probably not. Whimsy, I'd think.”

  “Whimsy. Like with the frilly clothes?”

  “You mean the brocades, the lace, the velvet and satins hanging over there?” She gestured toward the walk-in closet.

  “Yeah.”

  Hester smiled. “I'd think she enjoyed being a girl.”

  “Oh.”

  She ate one more cookie, then pulled her walkie talkie out of her pocket and went on to the mobile repeater channel. That was so neat. She was talking to her car radio via a secure channel, which, in turn, transmitted to State Radio repeater towers down to Cedar Falls State Radio, also via secure link, and enabled her to order up the lab team without the media getting wind of it.

  Being from the wrong side of the government procurement tracks, I went into the hall, and down the first half flight, where I could see Borman standing in the doorway to the parlor. I caught his attention, and told him to use the residence phone to call our office and get the hearse coming.

  I got back to Edie's room, and couldn't see Hester. I looked around the door frame into the bathroom, and saw her checking the contents of the bathroom cabinet.

  “Got something?”

  She turned. “No, and that's just the problem,” she said slowly. “No open shampoo, no open soap, no razor, just blades.”

  Oh. “Yeah. Doesn't sit right, does it?”

  “Like you said, Carl. Where's the stuff you'd use in a tub or shower?”

  We'd talked about that during her first pass through the bathroom area. Although it was barely possible that someone would run out of everything currently in use at the same time, it was unlikely as hell. The problem was, there wasn't a really good explanation as to why it was gone.

  “I don't get it,” said Hester. “Why isn't it here?”

  She came toward the door, and I backed out of the doorway to let her pass. “It isn't like somebody would enter her bath and cut her throat in order to gain possession of a used bar of soap and half a bottle of shampoo … ”

  “Souvenir?” I just tossed that in.

  “Right.” She shook her head. “First things first. I want to know where that knife came from.”

  “The kitchen?”

  “I'd bet. We couldn't be so lucky as to have it come from anywhere else.”

  “Right now,” I said, “if this case were on a balance scale, I'd have just about a quarter of the weight in the suicide dish.”

  She sighed, pulling off her latex exam gloves. “Maybe a bit less. We really need that autopsy.”

  We moved back into the bedroom.

  “So,” said Hester, “what can you tell me about the group who lives here?”

  I explained that they were local, or very close. Marched to a bit of a different drummer than some, but were known to us as pretty decent people. Those I knew were bright. They caused no trouble, which in cop parlance meant a lot.

  “Some, like the one they call Huck, just strike me as people who would really like things to be different. But who know they can't make it happen.” I considered. “Like, at a party, when some nice person knows that if they join in the conversation, there's going to be an argument. So they sit on the couch, and are pleasant, and pass the dip, and kind of let the flow go around them.”

  “Like the hippies used to be?”

  “This is going to date me,” I said, “but they remind me more of beatniks.”

  “Angry? Intellectually rebellious? Cynical? Depressed?”

  “You got it. All the above. Caused by life in general.”

  Hester smiled. “You sure this isn't a bunch of retired cops?”

  When the hearse arrived, it came complete with two attendants. One of them was about seventy, and the other was a small man in his thirties. This meant that Borman, Hester, and I had to glove up again, and help lift Edie's body from the tub. Messy, if you didn't watch your step. We got the chromed portable stre
tcher up the stairs, noticing how the bend in the stairway at the first landing was going to make this a tough movement on the way down. Once in the bathroom, we tried to position it near the tub and yet not have it be in our way. Not possible. We were going to have to hold Edie up at about chest height while we slid the stretcher under her. Ugh.

  Both attendants were gaping at the body, but neither of them said anything.

  Rigor mortis raised its ugly head at that point. Borman had squeezed between the tub and the far wall, and he and I had linked hands under her knees and behind her back near her buttocks. Hester had her feet, and the younger attendant tried to slide his hands under her armpits. No go; a bit too stiff now. So he had to hold her left elbow and her head.

  “On three … ” said Hester. “One, two, three.”

  We started the lift, and it became obvious that Edie was pretty well stiffened in her sitting position. She also seemed to sort of stick to the bottom of the tub. The cold flesh had flattened at the pressure points, and as she came up, I could see that her right breast and chest bore a large dent from her arm and part of the tub. Some blood, strangely, appeared to have pooled under her buttocks, and that was the cause of the sticking when we started to lift. That should not have been there. Not if the fatal wound had been inflicted when she was in the tub. I caught Hester's eye. She gave an almost imperceptible nod. Evidence like that was not to be discussed in front of noninvestigative personnel, civilian or otherwise.

  As we placed Edie on the stretcher, we saw that the knife was stuck to her right thigh by the congealed blood. Congealed, but not yet clotted. We took photos, made another note, and then Hester carefully pulled it free. I got a paper bag out of my camera case, and we placed the knife in that.

  “Your camera bag reminds me of my purse,” she said.

  I snapped three shots of the interior of the tub. The blood under where her buttocks had been was very apparent. It even showed a slight wrinkle pattern from the flattened flesh.

  Edie couldn't have weighed more than 125 pounds alive, and having lost all that blood volume, she was down to about a hundred or less. The blanched and flattened areas of her buttocks were very obvious, the result of her weight pressing her into the tub. Her mouth, which had been hanging open as she sat there, now looked as if she were about to cough. Interestingly, her eyes no longer had that “alive” appearance that had startled me before. Must have been the light, that first time. Whatever it was, it was a relief.

  Now I was able to get a really good look at the wound in her neck. “Deep” hardly did it justice. But it was a cut, all right. Even, smooth edges.

  I took several more photos before she was finally covered.

  While Borman and the two attendants maneuvered the gurney to get Edie out of the room, Hester and I had one of those fast chats that, if you hadn't known we were talking about the blood in the wrong place, you'd never have guessed.

  “You caught that, too?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Conclusive?”

  “Possibly. Very possibly. But maybe not.”

  “Really?” It looked pretty conclusive to me.

  “Reflex lunge or hip thrust.”

  “Ah.” Well, sure, she could have spasmodically arched her back, for example, and then sat back down in the blood she was leaving. Except … “No fountain, though.” I said that because there surely should have been secondary evidence that there had been a forceful gush or spurt, or something to deluge the tub area sufficiently for blood to flow under her when she might have moved. Something that very likely would have squirted past the perimeter of the tub, and onto the floor and maybe even the walls. Especially since the knife had been pulled free.

  “True.” She grimaced. “Not enough data.”

  “Think it could have slipped free? I'd say pulled out. You agree?” I was referring to the knife.

  “Agree. I think it would tend to stay in.”

  She finished her sentence as we emerged into the hall to help get Edie down the stairs.

  We'd zipped up the white body bag, covered the lump that had been Edie with two blue blankets, and strapped her tightly to the stretcher with all three belts. We had to lift her and the stretcher to about shoulder level to clear the banister at the first landing, but from then on it was a piece of cake. We went by the parlor, and the three residents saw her. They followed us out to the hearse, and watched while we pushed the stretcher into the back.

  “Remember,” cautioned Hester, “there will be an autopsy done there. Under no circumstance is she to be embalmed until we say so. There will be a forensic pathologist up shortly.” There had been an instance several years ago when a funeral home had embalmed a murder victim before the pathologist got there. Ever after that, the officer always made very certain that the funeral home understood the situation.

  “Yes, ma'am,” said the elder of the attendants. He was lucky. Hester hates that term, and if it had been the younger who'd said it, he would likely have had to ride down the hill in the back with Edie.

  As the hearse drove off and we turned back in toward the house, I felt this familiar urge. I really wanted a cigarette, and this was the stage in an investigation where I'd normally have one. I looked up toward the porch. The three looked pretty dejected.

  Toby spoke up. I was beginning to think he was compelled. He was smoking again. “Why do you need an autopsy? Isn't it pretty obvious what killed her?”

  Hester took that one, while I tried to smoke his cigarette vicariously. “There's a big difference between 'pretty obvious' and certain,” she said.

  “Why are you coming back into the house? Aren't you done?” There was no malice in Toby or his questions. Just the same sort of question you always heard from the one kid in class who always had his hand in the air. Questions designed to focus attention on the asker, not the subject.

  “Ask us again in five or ten hours,” I said. “In the meantime, we can't leave the scene unprotected, and the best way to protect it is to have one or more of us here.”

  “Oh. But, why—”

  Hester cut him off. “Done with your written statement yet?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then, would you be kind enough to show me just where everybody's bedroom is?”

  Toby, being the compulsively cooperative sort, immediately launched into his task. “And the kitchen,” she continued, as they headed up the stairs.

  In the meantime, I sat down with Melissa and Hanna to have what turned out to be an interesting but pretty fruitless chat about Edie that lasted nearly an hour. Regrettably, they both smoked, as well.

  Melissa and Hanna seemed quite a bit more self-possessed than they had appeared even an hour before. A good sign, and I thought it was due to seeing Edie leave, and the relief that seems to come to the household when the body is finally removed from the premises.

  We walked into the parlor. Hanna offered coffee, which I accepted. As I sat on the couch, I felt a jab in my hip. The copy of the Freiberg Tribune and Dispatch that I'd put in my back pocket. I pulled it out and laid it on the coffee table in front of me. Melissa reached out for it.

  “Do you mind? Is it today's?”

  “Yep, it is. Feel free.”

  She sort of browsed through it as we sat and talked. Interesting.

  Neither of them could offer much insight into Edie's character, at least not much that I didn't already know from Lamar. She did have a daughter, about three years old, who lived with Edie's mother. Edie didn't like her mother at all, and according to both Melissa and Hanna, with good reason.

  Edie had lived, or had been living, at the Mansion longer than any of the rest of them, and she was the one that the owner would talk with if anything needed to be taken care of. According to Melissa, it wasn't anything particularly special, but Edie was a pretty reliable person, and could be counted on to attend to things.

  Edie didn't appear to have been noticeably depressed the last few weeks, and hadn't shown any remarkable signs of mood c
hanges. Both acknowledged they had no idea why Edie would take her own life, although they both thought she had plenty of reason to be depressed. Hanna shared the fact that she, herself, had attempted suicide once before, with what turned out to be something less than a fatal overdose of her sister's phenobarbital.

  So, my questions about Edie's emotional state had elicited suicide-oriented thinking among others in the household, with the assumption I was on a suicide track. They seemed very sincere in their efforts to help, and almost apologetic that they hadn't observed any of what they termed “suicide triggers.” I did think it a little unusual that both of them were that familiar with the subject of suicide. I said as much.

  “We've read about it,” said Melissa, “because some of our friends have been really depressed sometimes. We worry about them.”

  “But Edie didn't fit in that category?” I asked.

  “No. I mean, there's depressed, and then there's depressed,” said Melissa. “Things not going right, that can depress you, but it's something you get over. Lover leaving, grandparent dying, that sort of thing. You know. But, the kind of thing where you just have to end it, that's much deeper, and much more prolonged. Oppressive, always there.”

  “Okay.”

  “I'm afraid I'm not saying this very well,” she said, and looked toward Hanna.

  “It feeds on itself,” she said, helping Melissa. “It controls you. The suicide kind.”

  “But Edie didn't show any sign of that?”

  She hadn't, and according to them, Edie really seemed to have her life under control. They were both sorry they hadn't been more help.

  What they'd actually done was to inadvertently add another bit of weight to the side of the scales that was labeled “murder.”

  “So, then,” I said, “let's just say for the sake of it that it wasn't a suicide. Do either of you know of anybody who might be, say, an enemy; that would want to kill Edie?”

  Absolutely not. They were both in complete and emphatic agreement on that point.

  I persevered. “Anybody threaten her? Been bothering her? Harassing her?”