Jasmine (A Lt. Kate Gazzara Novel Book 1)

by Blair Howard

  I turned him loose and he crumpled back down onto the desk, his hands clamped over his goodies… though from what I could feel, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to cover.

  There was a ripple of applause from the rest of the detectives and uniformed officers, and even a couple of appreciative whistles. I smiled, opened the file, and made a big show of ignoring them. Out of habit, I glanced toward Harry’s now-vacant desk. Damn. I sure was going to miss having him around.

  The photographs in the file were of a young girl with long brown hair and a big smile. One was obviously a “Sweet Sixteen” photo. I stared at it for a moment, then set it aside. The other was a full body shot taken outdoors. She was laughing; she’d been a pretty young thing. I shook my head and began to read.

  Seventeen-year-old Jasmine Thomas had been reported missing on Saturday morning, July 12. According to Arlis Thomas, the girl’s mother, Jasmine had returned home from her part-time job at Juno’s restaurant Friday afternoon at around five. She’d eaten dinner, spent some time in her room texting friends, and then decided to go out.

  She’d left home at just after seven in her own car, a pale blue Honda Civic, intending to meet her friends at Hamilton Place Mall. She never arrived. When she didn’t come home that night, her mother called Jasmine several times, but she didn’t pick up. She then called Jasmine’s friends, thinking she might have stayed overnight. When she learned that no one had seen her, she called the police.

  As usual, the officer who took the call figured the girl had either run away or was having a good time somewhere, maybe with a boyfriend, and would return home sooner or later. It was the typical response, especially considering the girl’s age and the fact that she owned her own car.

  But Arlis Thomas hadn’t given up. She’d called Missing Persons every day, telling them that she’d heard nothing from her daughter. Calls to Jasmine’s cell now went straight to voice mail, which meant the battery was dead or the phone was damaged. The phone’s last known location was gleaned from a cell tower at Highway 153 and Shallowford Road, a little more than a mile north of Hamilton Place Mall. That was at seven-twenty-two on Friday evening, July 11, the night she went missing.

  Did she make it to the mall? Where would she have parked? We had searched all the mall parking lots and come up empty. From her home on Wickman Lane, Jasmine would have taken Bonny Oaks Drive to the mall. Was she stopped as she passed the quarry? The 2005 Honda Civic hadn’t been found there either.

  I picked up the phone and called Charlie Peck.

  “Hey, Captain. This is Kate Gazzara, Homicide. Chief Johnston said he’d apprised you… Okay, good. Well, look, I need some help. I’m missing a 2005 Honda Civic, light blue. Could you have your people keep an eye open for it, let me know if it turns up abandoned? We know it’s not at the mall, but could you check the lots at the other malls, maybe the long-term lot at the airport? Thanks, Charlie. I’m also going to need some help with a door-to-door. Can you spare a couple of officers for the rest of the day? Good. Have them report to Detective Foote.” I read him the Honda’s license plate number, thanked him again, and hung up.

  Lovell Field isn’t a big airport. It’s a typically busy regional facility with plenty of parking, and the lots are always well populated. Still, I figured an abandoned car could go unnoticed in the long-term section, maybe for weeks. The malls? Not so much: they have security patrols. But you never know. The river was a consideration, but there must be a hundred and one out-of-the-way spots where a car could be dumped in the water. If it was there, finding it would be almost impossible.

  I looked at my watch; it was after ten. I turned my attention to the kids who found the body. Who were they, and how had they gotten on the property?

  Detective Sarah Foote and I had been friends for a couple of years. She was twenty-six when we met, three years younger than me, and we got along well. She was seated at her desk on the far side of the room. I picked up the phone, buzzed her, and waved her over.

  “The chief filled you in?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Good job on Tracy, by the way.”

  I didn’t comment. I might have winked. A little. “Sarah, I need you to conduct a door-to-door of the houses backing onto the quarry on Bonny Oaks. That would be the 3800 and 3900 blocks on Bonny Oaks itself, and then Young Road, Parkway Drive, Ridgecrest, and Meade Circle. Charlie Peck is sending some uniforms over to help. I’d like it done by the end of the day, if possible. You’re looking for two things: the kids who found the body—apparently there are a bunch who use the quarry as a playground—and any access routes into the quarry. That means footpaths, bike trails, whatever. Got it?”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Great. I have to get to a post; I’ll call you later. Oh, and here’s the file. Take a look at it before you go.”

  “Pretty girl.”

  “Yes. She was.”

  ***

  Tracy was sitting in the lobby at the forensic center waiting for me. He stood when I entered. I looked him up and down. He’d changed into a fresh pair of jeans and a pink golf shirt, and he’d combed his hair. At least he looked clean.

  “Jeans?” I asked. “Don’t you have any decent pants?”

  “Not really.” He looked defiantly at me. “I never needed them in Narcotics. I’ll shop when I get a chance, okay?”

  I nodded. “Be sure you do. No haircut?”

  “I did have it cut! Well, trimmed.”

  I shook my head, exasperated. “Just keep it tidy.”

  “Hey, Kate,” Doc said, appearing as if from nowhere. “Right on time, as always. Who’s your friend?”

  I made the introductions; they shook hands. Doc squinted at Tracy over his half-glasses. I wondered what he was thinking.

  “Suit up then,” Doc said, “and let’s get to it.” He sized Tracy up and smiled thinly. “There’s some VapoRub in the cupboard over there. You’re going to need it. She’s quite ripe, I’m afraid.”

  I looked at Tracy. His face was white.

  “This is your first?” I asked.

  He nodded, “I wasn’t expected to attend overdoses, and we handed homicides over to you guys, so...”

  “You can stay out here in the lobby, if you like,” I said. “But this is what we do; you might as well get used to it.”

  The word “ripe” didn’t come near to describing what we saw.

  “Carol has already prepped and x-rayed the body,” Doc said, his voice muffled by the mask that covered his mouth and nose beneath his face shield.

  “Hi, Carol,” I said.

  “Kate,” she replied.

  Carol Oats was, and still is, Doc Sheddon’s forensic anthropologist.

  “She was able to get a full set of prints,” Doc continued, “which should be helpful. And the teeth are intact; also helpful. So, let’s get started.”

  He picked through the instruments on the stainless-steel tray at his elbow, selected a scalpel. Leaning forward across the body, he made a deep, diagonal incision from the left shoulder to the base of the sternum. As he did so, Tracy staggered back several steps, then turned and headed for the door.

  “First door on the right,” Doc called over his shoulder as the putrefied flesh split and peeled away under his scalpel.

  I have lost count of the number of posts I’ve witnessed during my years at the PD. It never gets any easier, but that one, well. It was memorable. The body was bloated, the skin blistered and peeling away from greenish-black flesh. The smell, something I thought I’d gotten used to, was overpowering. I took two steps back, closed my eyes, and waited for my churning stomach to settle.

  “You all right, Kate?” Doc asked as he set the shears to cut the first rib.

  I nodded and stepped back to the edge of the table. The rib cracked as the shears bit, and Tracy, who had just walked back in, turned and walked out again. And I really didn’t blame him.

  Doc Sheddon systematically dissected what was left of the girl, and I watched him do it; Tracy came and went as his stomac
h allowed. It wasn’t a lot, but he did keep coming back.

  Okay; I guess that’s one point for grit.

  Finally, the good doctor laid down his tools, took a step back, and signaled for Carol to take over. He removed his face shield and mask and began his summary.

  “Caucasian, young, aged between fifteen and twenty. She died, probably mid-morning, eight to ten days ago; closer to ten than eight, I’d say. The heat in the pipe during the day must have risen close to a hundred and twenty. She’s been slow cooked, close to rare.” He grinned across the table at me. I shook my head at him, but he took no notice. Back then, Doc was famous for his gallows humor. Today, not so much.

  “Cause?” I prompted.

  “Strangulation. The hyoid is fractured and the larynx is crushed. Whoever did this has large hands, strong. She was restrained, see here?” He pointed to ligature marks on her wrists, thighs, and ankles.

  “Was she—”

  “Raped?” He shrugged. “Hard to say. Carol took samples, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. The girl lost a lot of fluid, and the corpse is heavily infested, as you can see.”

  Yes, I could see. The maggots were falling off the table.

  “There’s no semen, as far as we can tell,” he continued. “We’ll check for foreign DNA, but I doubt we’ll find anything. There’s nothing under her fingernails and, as I said, she’s lost a lot of fluid. There is some fine dust on her back, buttocks, calves, the soles of her feet, her elbows, and even her hair; she must have been laid down on a dry, dusty surface somewhere. I can’t be sure without a proper analysis, but I’d guess a dirt floor rather than floor boards. Maybe Mike Willis will be able to tell us. She was dressed in shorts and a—” he gestured vaguely at his ribcage, “a crop top, is that what they call them? They’re over there if you want to look—but no bra or panties, or shoes, which makes me wonder…”

  I nodded. “Maybe whoever did this dressed her again after he killed her?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a thought. There’s no way to tell, but the absence of bra and panties…” He looked at me. “Would she go out without them, d’you suppose?”

  I shook my head, “I wouldn’t, but then I’m not seventeen. Who knows what these kids do? If we identify her as Jasmine Thomas, I’ll ask her mother. She’d know.”

  “Yes, well. As soon as we’re done here, I’ll send her clothes to Mike Willis. Her prints should work for you. Carol has emailed the x-rays and photos of her teeth to the local dental association, so maybe you’ll know something later today. DNA, hers, is something of a catch twenty-two. We can’t use it to identify her until we know who she is, unless she has a record. Which, judging by her age, I doubt she’ll have. If she’s not a hooker, of course.”

  “You say she’s been dead for approximately ten days. That would make it the morning of July 17, give or take twenty-four hours. Can we do any better than that?” I looked at him.

  He nodded, “Eight to ten days, I think I said. That would make the seventeenth the baseline date… and no. I can’t do better than that. The wide-ranging temperatures inside the pipe had a devastating effect on her body. Two days is as close as I can comfortably go.”

  “Okaaay,” I said, doubtfully, “but you said she died mid-morning. If you can’t fix the day, how can you fix the time?”

  “That, my dear, was the easy part. In her stomach, I found the remains of a sausage biscuit, probably from Hardee’s. They stop serving breakfast at ten-thirty. Digestion had barely begun, so mid-morning is a reasonable assumption. Then again, the biscuit could have been bought in the morning and saved for later…”

  I made a face.

  He chuckled. “No, they don’t keep very well, do they. Even so, it’s no more than an educated guess. If you can justify the cost, I could have Dr. Wu come down from UT Knoxville. He might be able to narrow it down further, perhaps to within six or eight hours either way, but he’s expensive.”

  Dr. Jason Wu is a forensic entomologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He spends most of his days studying the dead at the Body Farm.

  “The closer we can get to the actual time of death the better, especially when we may be dealing with alibis. Forty-eight hours is a huge window. This kid was murdered. We have to spend the money.”

  “Of course. I’ll call him as soon as we’re done here.”

  “So,” I said. “Ten days. If she is my missing girl, she was alive for at least four days before she was killed, maybe even five. Where the hell was she?”

  “Well, I can tell you this much. The bladder was empty; she must have voided it during asphyxiation, which is common. Find the crime scene and you’ll probably find the urine.”

  I leaned over the table to look at the girl’s face, the skin dark, blistered, and weeping. I shook my head.

  “Jeez, Doc. I need a photo to show the missing kid’s parents.”

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t do it. Not yet. I’ll have Carol work on her face, see if she can make her look a little better, but it’s going to take a skilled mortician to make her look anything like presentable. I’ll have Lilo Ridge come by when I’ve finished with her. That old boy can work wonders with a little makeup.”

  Lilo Ridge? Sounds like a Civil War battlefield…

  “What about birthmarks?” I asked. “Old bone breaks, scars, missing teeth?”

  “She has a c-shaped scar on her left knee, here,” he pointed to it. “Surgical. Meniscectomy scar. Not the result of a fall. There’s nothing else.”

  I sighed. Her knee was in no better condition than her face, but I had to have something to work with. I snapped a couple of images of the scar with my phone, then a close-up of her face.

  “I won’t use that one unless I have to. The scar isn’t much, but it will have to do. If I can get a positive ID on the scar, I’ll get DNA samples from her home. It’s worth a try.”

  “Well, my dear, good luck to you. Now, if we’re done, I have a young man waiting for me… not that he cares if I’m late. He has a bullet in the back of his head.”

  I found Dick Tracy sitting in the lobby, elbows on his knees, face in his hands, looking decidedly worse for his experience.

  “Let’s go, Detective. Places to go, people to see.”

  Chapter 3

  As I walked to my unmarked cruiser in the lot behind the forensic center, I looked at my watch. It was just after twelve-thirty. The post had taken slightly more than an hour-and-a-half. Not bad, considering the state of the body.

  I told Tracy to take his car to the PD parking lot and I’d pick him up. I followed him as he pulled into the back lot, and watched as he locked his car. He climbed into my unmarked cruiser and slammed the door. I looked at him.

  He still looks like a damn hobo.

  “The outfit, Detective,” I said as he closed the car door. “The shirt… is okay, but it needs ironing. The jeans, well, I have no objection to jeans, but they should be clean and pressed. No need for a crease, but the hole in the knee is not going to get it. Do I need to take you shopping?”

  “No. Look, Sergeant. For the last seven years I’ve had to blend in with the low lifes I was dealing with. I do have a suit and tie, and my uniform, a couple more golf shirts. Other than that, what you see is what you get. I’ll do some shopping this evening. That good enough for you?”

  I looked sideways at him as I pulled out of the lot and onto Amnicola. He was still quite pale.

  “Are you married, Tracy? Got a girlfriend? Your mother?”

  “I know how to dress myself, dammit!” He stopped, took a deep breath, then turned to face me, a resigned look on his face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… Look, Sergeant, I’m grateful for the chance. I’ve always wanted Homicide. But you have to give me a little time to adjust. I won’t let you down.”

  I nodded, recognizing the change of tone, but I wasn’t ready to soften up just yet. “See that you don’t.”

  I put him out of my mind and concentrated on the case, what little there was of it. From read
ing the case file, I knew there’d been a tri-state search for Jasmine that had turned up nothing: no sightings of her or her car.

  The Greenway Farms Park—a 180-acre city park along North Chickamauga Creek—had been searched from one end to the other: nothing. Same for the Greenway south of Bonny Oaks. The dead ends were piling up.

  Jasmine Thomas had lived with her parents in an older one-and-a-half story home not more than a quarter-mile from where the body had been found. The house was some one hundred yards north of Bonny Oaks, opposite another home; both houses were set back from the Lane some fifty feet and fronted by neatly-trimmed lawns… well, they were more weeds than grass, but still neatly trimmed. The lane was narrow, with room enough for only one vehicle at a time.

  I turned onto the lane and drove past the two houses, all the way to a dead end some three hundred yards on, at the front gate of a large, two-story home that faced south back along Wickman.

  I made a turn and drove back to the Thomas residence, pulled into the driveway, and shut off the motor. I sat for a moment, thinking, composing myself. This was a first for me. In the past, this had been Harry’s job. Now, it was mine. All mine.

  I turned to Tracy, who still looked green. “Are you coming with me, or d’you want to stay here?”

  He didn’t answer. He grabbed the door handle, put his shoulder to the door, pushed it open, and stepped out onto the gravel driveway. I did the same.

  I waited as he circled the car to join me, then said, “Let me do the talking, okay?”

  He nodded.

  I pushed the doorbell, listened to the chimes, and we waited. I was about to push it again when the door opened, just a crack.

  “Yeah?” a man’s voice asked. “What d’ya want?”

  “I’m Sergeant Gazzara, Chattanooga PD. This is Detective Tracy. I need to talk with Mr. Cletus Thomas, please.”

  “This about Jasmine?” he asked, as he opened the door fully.

  He was a small man, skinny, with a bald head, bushy eyebrows, beady eyes, and glasses with large circular lenses. He was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt, and looked to be about fifty years old, but I could have been wrong by ten years either way.