Code 61

by Donald Harstad

  “Just her lame excuse for a mother,” said Melissa. “That's been happening for years, I guess. Not new. Why? Do you really think she didn't commit suicide?”

  I shrugged. “We have to treat every unattended death as a homicide, until we're sure it isn't.”

  “Sure,” said Melissa.

  “Okay,” I said, “now, I don't want you to take this in the wrong way at all. But I'd like to know if either of you could tell me if Edie was doing any dope, or alcohol, or anything even prescription, that could affect her moods.”

  “Is that really your business?” asked Melissa. “Not to be taken in the wrong way, of course.”

  “Fair question,” I said. “The answer is, probably wasn't my business yesterday. Now that she's dead, and my problem for now, yep, it is.”

  “Aren't you going to do a blood test? I mean, won't you know from that?”

  “Sure. But it won't be back for a few days, and when it arrives, it only gives the chemical information, not the substance. You know … it might say acetaminophen, but not a brand name. So if she took Tylenol for a headache, say, it would be a help to know that. That sort of thing.” I was also fishing for a known substance, although I didn't say that. A blood scan for everything cost a fortune, and took forever. You had to give them parameters.

  “Oh,” said Hanna. “Oh, sure. Well, I know she'd drink a beer now and then, maybe some wine. No dope …?” and she looked at Melissa.

  It was hard not to grin.

  “She smoked clove cigarettes,” said Melissa quickly.

  “That's it.”

  “Okay,” I said, making a note. “You do know what those are?” Melissa wasn't being insulting, she was just a sincere twenty-something talking to a fifty-something. Usually, the only people my age she'd be likely to know were her parents, aunts, and uncles.

  I smiled. “Either of your parents cops?”

  “What?”

  “I strongly suspect that your folks and I have vastly different, oh … What? Life experiences?”

  “My father's a minister and my mother is a music teacher.” She paused as it dawned on her. “Oh.” A small smile started forming on her lips.

  “Right. I think we definitely move in different circles.” The small smile grew larger, into a full-fledged one. “I'd say so.”

  “And the real point's this: If she did occasional dope here, that's something we have to know. If there's a fair concentration in her fluids, and she did it here, that's one thing. If there's the same concentration and she didn't do it here, that's another thing altogether.”

  Both the young women looked away from me as soon as I said that. I attributed it to the fact that there was probably at least some dope in the house, even as we spoke.

  The phone in the hallway rang, and Hanna answered it. It was for me. As I left the room, I could hear both young women talking to each other in low tones. My best guess was that they were discussing narcotics.

  I answered the phone. “Houseman.”

  “Hey, no kidding?” Sally, at the office.

  “Yeah. What's up?”

  “There was a man here, came to talk with Lamar. Lamar said for you to talk with him instead, because he was going to have some family things to attend to.”

  “Sure, okay.” Great. Not that I didn't understand, but I really didn't need the distractions, either. Ah, well. I could never say that Lamar didn't delegate.

  “Man's name is”—she paused just an instant, so that I knew she was reading from her notes—“William Chester, from Milwaukee.”

  My first thought was a pathologist that Harry had contacted regarding the death of Randy Baumhagen, late boyfriend of Alicia Meyer. “What does he do? Or want?”

  “Beats me. He looks pretty straight arrow, though. About forty, but that's not all bad. Nice eyes. Slender. Still has all his hair…. ”

  “That's not quite what I wanted.”

  She laughed. “I don't know. Not an attorney, that's for sure. I asked Lamar that, 'cause I knew you'd just shit—pardon the expression—if we sent somebody like an attorney up there.”

  “You sent him here?”

  “Well, to Freiberg. He'll get hold of Byng or somebody, and connect up with you later on. Not at the Mansion, though.”

  “Okay.” That was a relief. “Anything else?”

  “Nope. Lamar just said to let you know. He's over at his sister's, I think.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, and guess what?”

  I was too tired to play. “Tell me.”

  “I'm assigned to duty as a reserve tonight, up there!Isn't that just so cool?”

  I grinned to myself. “It's cool. Just remember to bring cookies.”

  At that point, Hester and Toby came back. Hester was holding a legal pad, making the final touches to a diagram of the second floor. She handed it to me. According to her diagram, Edie's room was the first one at the top of the stairs, on the right. The northeast corner. The next room on her side of the hall was Toby's; the room after that was Hanna's. Across the hall from Edie was Melissa in the southeast corner, then Holly, known as Huck, and then Kevin.

  “They're all about the same,” she said. “Basically thirty-six-foot by eighteen-foot rooms, with a dividing wall for the individual bathrooms at about ten feet from the end.”

  Like I said, it was a big house. Over a hundred feet long, and about forty-five feet wide.

  Hester handed me the pink copy of the “Seized Property” form, listing the knife from the tub. “It's from a set in the kitchen,” she said. “No doubt at all.”

  As they sat down, Melissa handed the copy of the Freiberg Tribune and Dispatch to Toby. “Seen this?”

  Toby looked a bit surprised, said he hadn't, and opened it up. He looked up at Melissa, rather startled.

  “That's freaky,” he said, mostly to her.

  I was curious. “What?”

  “The bit about Dracula,” he said. “Just floating outside the second-floor window, I mean. Wow.”

  “I'm sure he had help,” I said.

  Melissa joined in. “In what way?”

  “Oh,” I said conversationally, “I'd think a rope, for example.” I forced a chuckle. “He wasn't flying.”

  “Did you, you know, find a rope?” Her large eyes were very steady on mine.

  “No, but we found ringbolts.” I shrugged. “It's just a matter of the mechanics of the thing.”

  “I'm sure you'll find an explanation,” said Melissa.

  Hanna suddenly apologized for being a bad hostess, and asked if anyone else wanted coffee. We all did. We spent the next half hour discussing suicide, death, and how friends should deal with it. To me, it seemed that Hanna was by far the most affected by Edie's death. While she was telling Hester just how she'd found the body, I started to think about the possibilities we had. Somehow, it seemed to me that it just damned well shouldn't be this hard to determine the cause and method of death. What had we missed?

  Hester interjected a new item. “Did you know the whole third floor is sealed off?”

  “No.”

  “Yes. It's the owner's private apartment, and nobody can go there unless she's here. According to Toby, here.” She shrugged. “The doors to that floor are both locked, anyway. Keyed. New.”

  “That's right,” said Melissa. “We just never go up there unless Jessica's here.”

  Hester looked up toward the ceiling. “Must be a pretty damned big apartment.”

  The whole third floor would be about four thousand square feet. I could only agree.

  There's a rule of thumb in homicide investigations, whereby you either solve the murder in the first forty-eight hours, or the investigation will drag on for months before an arrest is made, if ever.

  It was beginning to look like we'd be lucky to know whether or not this was even a suicide in forty-eight hours.

  Then some people arrived who would irrevocably tip the scales.

  EIGHT

  Saturday, October 7, 2000

 
; 14:50

  I could see, through the glazed entrance, three vehicles pulling up to the front of the house. One of our marked squads, being followed closely by a dark blue SUV that just had to belong to my favorite forensic pathologist, Dr. Steven Peters. Third in line was an older, silver-gray Plymouth Voyager. That one I didn't recognize.

  Since it was officially my crime scene, I went to the door with Hester, while Borman stayed with the three residents in the parlor. Although they were far from suspects at this point, it was always a good idea to have somebody about to gauge reactions, and to prevent any lengthy conversations. Just in case.

  Our squad had turned around, and the driver, Deputy Norm Jones, lowered his window and stuck out his head. “These guys live here.” He indicated the Voyager.

  “Right!” I looked at Hester. “Must be our residents who work on the boat.”

  “Good.”

  “Thanks, Norm,” I said. He waved, and headed back down the lane. That was one thing about this location: It was nice and easy to seal the place off and keep anybody but the invited out.

  I turned back toward the SUV, as Dr. Peters emerged. He shook hands with Hester and myself. “Two of my favorite officers,” he said, “who always manage to throw a challenge my way.”

  “This one,” I said, “may take the cake.”

  He glanced around. “Marvelous place here. I never knew it even existed.” Dr. Peters was from Iowa City, about a hundred miles south of us.

  “Don't feel bad,” I said. “There are some people who live in this county who don't know of the place.” I saw the two occupants of the older car heading toward the house. “ 'Scuse me a sec, Doc,” I said.

  I quickly introduced myself to the male and female who were headed up the steps into the house.

  “Excuse me,” I said. They stopped at the foot of the steps. They were both rather pale complected, and wore their gaming boat uniforms: white frilled shirts, black slacks, black bow ties, black suspenders, black shoes. They were carrying their black jackets. They looked like a mime act. “I'm Deputy Houseman, and I have to talk with you for a few seconds, before you go in.”

  The male was about six feet, slender, with black hair. He had a hole in his earlobe and one in his nostril. Took the jewelry off for work, apparently. The female was about five feet eight, and thin. Dark brown hair pulled back tightly, with ears pierced on the upper curve as well as the lobe. Her jewelry was in place. She, too, had large, dark eyes. Her high cheekbones both had some sort of tattoo, in an exceptionally delicate swirling pattern. I suspected they were temporaries, because they didn't look thick enough to be real.

  “Do you have some identification?” the male asked. For some reason, lots of people seem to think that asking you to produce some form of ID is going to put you on the defensive.

  I opened my badge case, and held it wide for them to see, as if the gun on my hip hadn't told them everything they'd wanted to know. “Sure, here. There's an ongoing investigation inside right now. I'm afraid there's one room that's been closed off for the time being.”

  “Edie's, I assume,” he said.

  “Yep.”

  “Well, I wasn't going up there, anyway.”

  “And,” I added, before they could move, “we're going to have some routine questions for you, as well.”

  “About?” The female. Abrupt. It was time to break the ice.

  “You're Holly Finn, aren't you? The one they call 'Huck'?”

  That seemed to surprise her. Using nicknames will do that when people haven't told you what they are. It implies you know more about them than you really do.

  “Holly's right,” she said. “But you might as well call me Huck. Everybody else does.”

  “Sure,” I said. Then I looked at him. “Stemmer, isn't it? Kevin Stemmer?” Just as if I'd actually recognized him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You're both aware, I take it, of the, ah, event this morning?” I had to ask, because I certainly didn't want either of them just walking in, maybe thinking Edie was sick or something, and finding out that she was dead. Just to be sure.

  “We know,” she said. “Terrible, but not unexpected. At least,” she added, “not by those of us who knew her best.”

  Knew her best? Didn't go too far in explaining why they hadn't just rushed home, but I was willing to bet that she didn't have any idea that Toby and Hanna had been so talkative.

  “A bad thing,” added Kevin. “But death comes to us all.”

  Well, sure. But it was the second time I'd heard that kind of sentiment that day, and both times it seemed to be designed to minimize Edie's death, not to deal with it. Not so much of a philosophy, but more like a dodge, really. It irritated me just a bit.

  “It's the ones death sneaks up on that I feel for,” I said. “I hate surprises, myself.”

  Hester and Dr. Peters passed by, going on into the house. “Join us as soon as you can?” I saw that Hester had retrieved her laptop from her car. She and Dr. Peters were both carrying black cases as they entered the house.

  “You bet.” I looked back at the two gaming boat employees. “If you two will just check in with Deputy Borman in the parlor … he'll need some information from you, just as soon as you're ready … ”

  “I'd really like,” said Huck, “to use the bathroom, upstairs. If that's all right.” A little sarcasm crept in there. I really couldn't blame her. She did live here, after all.

  “Oh, that's just fine,” I said, advancing past them up the steps, and holding open the door for them. “Just don't go into Edie's room until we're ffnished, okay?”

  “Of course,” said Kevin. Sarcasm again. “Like I said, it's not the first place I'd normally go.”

  “So,” I continued, “just check in with Deputy Borman, and be available in a while.”

  They turned off into the parlor. I watched the reactions of the other residents. Kevin and Huck got sort of deferential treatment. Toby, especially, seemed not so much glad as relieved to see them back.

  I went on upstairs, to Edie's room. I thought we'd just pretty well established the pecking order in the Mansion.

  Dr. Peters and Hester were talking in low tones as I got to Edie's room. Dr. Peters gestured toward the bathroom. “My.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I really wasn't looking forward to another complete tour of that place.

  “I told him about our little discovery of blood under her butt,” said Hester. “And the Conception County incident.”

  Dr. Peters nodded. “Not conclusive in and of itself. I really think we might need the lab team to give us a thorough workup here,” he said. “And I'll talk to my opposite number in Wisconsin as soon as I finish up with the autopsy.”

  “Agreed,” said Hester.

  “So Carl,” said Dr. Peters, “you have some prelim stuff on a digital camera?”

  I did. Hester opened her laptop case. “JPEGs?”

  “Yep,” I replied. “Standard format. You got a USB port?”

  She did, and I produced a USB cable. Plugged one end into the digital camera, the other into her laptop, and in a few seconds, we had photos of Edie in the tub.

  The three of us peered at the laptop LCD screen for a few minutes, moving back and forth between the establishing shots and the close-ups of the wound. Not the resolution I'd get either at home or at the office, but good enough for our purposes. Very good, if you considered the fact that we usually had to wait three days to get film developed.

  Dr. Peters stepped back from the laptop. “And you have the weapon?”

  Hester snapped on a pair of latex gloves, retrieved the knife, and showed it to him by holding it up by the very tip of the blade. He stared at it for several seconds, and she slowly turned it, letting him see all aspects of it.

  “Thanks, Hester,” he said. She put it back in the paper bag. You always use paper bags on anything that has biological material on it. Allows it to breathe, to dry out, as opposed to decomposing and rotting in the airtight seal of plastic. “Can
you enlarge the shots of the cut?”

  Hester removed her gloves, and went to her laptop. “You have a bunch of gloves, Carl? I've got maybe one pair left.”

  I indicated my camera bag. “Oh, yeah.”

  She smiled, and began fiddling with the laptop. “I can enlarge it a hundred and fifty percent,” she said, “but then we start to lose so much detail…. ”

  Dr. Peters bent down, peering at the screen again. “That's fine,” he said, straightening up. He took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Then silence. “And the shots of her backside, please?”

  No problem. He looked at them, and the shots of the bottom of the tub. Silence again.

  Hester and I exchanged glances. We waited a few more seconds, but Dr. Peters said nothing. Then, just as I was about to ask, he spoke.

  “I'm not sure, and I want you to take what I say with a precautionary grain of salt,” he said. “But I want to be on the safe side on this.” He let his eye roam about the room, and he noticed the “Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow Fonder” embroidery on the wall. A smile flickered over his face.

  He got quiet on us again. Then, after what seemed an interminable time, he said, “We want the area gone over very thoroughly.” He looked back toward the bathroom. “Very thoroughly. I don't think we have a suicide here. The postmortem will tell me what I really need, but I don't think she died from a self-inflicted wound.”

  Ah. It was out.

  “And,” he went on, “judging from the photos of the wound, I don't believe you have the right knife there.”

  “It was stuck to her leg,” I said, speaking just a half second before the real meaning dawned on me.

  “I have no doubt of that,” said Dr. Peters, smiling, “but I don't think it was the one used on her neck. From the protruding muscle, I would expect it to be shaped more like a gutting knife, with a hooked point. The muscle in her neck was pulled from the wound, I should think, not forced out from the inside.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And, I should expect to find some arterial damage,” he said. “The external carotid, or a branch. Largish artery, at any rate.”