by Megan Goldin
That was never more true than with the Kellers Way case.
Chapter Three
Julie
No matter how much I try, I can’t stop thinking of the smug expression on that bitch’s flawless face as Matt flirted with her during yesterday’s lecture. Every detail runs through my mind in an endless loop: the way she self-consciously flicked her dark hair as Matt looked in her direction, the secret, self-satisfied smile on her pretty lips as she took notes, the faint blush on her fresh, young cheeks as she walked past him after the lecture. Most of all, I remember the thinly veiled hunger in Matt’s eyes as he turned to watch her leave. I knew that look well. It was the same look he once gave me.
As if to rub salt into my wounds, he came home late last night. No explanation. I was in bed with the lights out when he slid in next to me. I could swear he smelled faintly of another woman. I pretended to be asleep when he pulled me to him, and when he ran his fingers over my breasts, and even when he slid his hand between my thighs. I held out for as long as I could. I am tired of sharing him. But Matt is nothing if not persistent when he wants something. I gave up the pretence of sleep and turned to him.
I wipe away a tear and pull my jacket hood over my dark-blond hair as I run downhill. The drone of a mower on an anonymous lawn is the only sign that I’m not alone in this pretentious street of ours where the neighbours don’t even know one another’s names. Where each morning driveway gates are locked and burglar alarms set, and bored, neglected dogs bark to each other across backyard fences. Where children pedal bikes up and down the street after school in a desperate bid to escape their regimented suburban lives.
I’ve lived in this leafy neighbourhood of lavish homes and manicured lawns for almost five years and I can say with confidence that it’s all spun sugar. It’s perfect from a distance. When you finally taste it, it’s cloying and unsatisfying.
I turn a corner into an arterial road. Cars pass in blurs of washed out metallic hues. Their engines soothe and frighten. I count to myself as I turn another corner. When I reach twenty, I start again. I focus on my breathing, my stride, the pump of my arms. I inhale and exhale in audible bursts.
Two blocks later, a courier van pulls over right in front of me. The driver jumps out and opens the sliding door as I pass. Further down, a woman leading three yapping mixed-breed dogs walks as if in slow motion. She smiles, I nod. And then she’s gone.
When I’ve passed all the houses and I’m on the edge of the forest, I turn down Kellers Way. It’s rare to see cars along this narrow, mountainous stretch. There are faster roads. More convenient routes. As it happens, a car passes me on the road today. Its tyres grate against the asphalt. Its engine whines as it overtakes me.
I sprint until my throat burns and my legs feel like they’re about to buckle. When I reach the bottom of the steepest hill, I drink from my water bottle at my usual stopping point, under the branches of a poplar tree. It’s the only one of its kind along this strip of forest.
I tighten my shoelaces with fingers stiff from cold. I’m about to run up the last hill, to the road leading to the university, when I hear a rumble. Like rolling thunder. It’s loud enough to scare a flock of blue jays out of a tree. I look up to see the birds flap their wings to escape.
A car emerges from around the bend. It’s driving too fast for such a narrow, winding road. I wait for it to brake. It doesn’t slow down. It accelerates and veers towards me.
Is this what it feels like to be dead? I lie on the ground and watch the sun’s rays creep around the clouds in an ungodly halo. I vaguely remember the crack of my skull after I dived over an embankment to escape the path of the car hurtling towards me.
My whole body aches when I get up. My head throbs. Yet I don’t care about the pain. Adrenalin surges through me as I climb the muddy slope, using plant roots to pull myself up. I smell the wreckage before I see the cloud of smoke pouring out of the bent hood. The windshield is shattered into a spiderweb of cracks.
With a shaking hand I pull open the front passenger door. The driver lies slumped over. He moans faintly, like a wounded animal before the kill shot. Blood drips from a gash on his forehead, down his chin onto his shirt.
My voice is tight from fear. I try to speak. No words come out. I swallow and try again. ‘Are you alright?’
The only response is a movement so faint I might have imagined it.
‘You’re going to be fine,’ I reassure him. I try to sound convincing but it falls flat.
He opens his eyes. Very suddenly. His pale irises strike a chord in the deepest recesses of my memory. His hair is wavy, shot with auburn.
‘Julie?’ he says in a cracked voice. ‘My God. I didn’t know —’ His words cut off abruptly as he is hit by a spasm of pain.
‘Didn’t know what? Who are you?’ I ask through tears. He is a faceless man with a scrappy beard and covered in blood. He almost killed me. So why am I crying?
‘I would never have done it if I’d known it was you.’ His words are barely more than a whisper.
‘Done what?’
He doesn’t answer. He’s bleeding badly. I tell him that I will run for help. That it won’t take long for an ambulance to come. That he will be alright.
‘No,’ he rasps. He coughs blood. It sprays onto the dashboard. ‘I’m sorry.’ He squeezes my arm hard, smearing blood across my sleeve.
‘It’s not your fault. It was an accident,’ I tell him. ‘The brakes probably snapped.’
‘No.’ He shakes his head. ‘You’re wrong. It wasn’t an accident.’
He whispers something. I can’t make out the words. My face must register confusion for he lifts his head and, mustering all his strength, he rasps: ‘You’re not safe, Julie. You need to get away.’
Those words reverberate as I limp into Matt’s unlocked office half an hour later. I have a splitting headache and a bruised shoulder from the fall. I am still trying to process what happened. He died so quickly, that man in the torn-up car. His breathing became thin and shallow. And then it stopped abruptly and his head slumped against the window with a thud.
‘You need to get away,’ he’d told me before he died. So I ran. I ran through the forest, slaloming around trees and up the hill, cutting through wild brush towards the university campus. I came directly here to look for Matt. He’ll know what to do. Except he isn’t in his office. I stand by his office window and watch students moving like ants across the rectangular lawn between the faculty buildings. Classes are over. Matt should be here soon.
I try to rub the blood off my clothes but it has set into the fabric. A permanent stain. The last time I’d seen that much blood was the night I woke with the feeling that something was wrong. I went to the bathroom to pee and instead watched with morbid fascination as my white satin pyjama pants turned bright red.
Matt called an ambulance. The paramedics strapped me to a stretcher and shoved maxi-pads between my legs. They’d soaked through twice over by the time we reached the ER. I was half-conscious by then, but I knew it was bad in every way. Even a D&C wasn’t enough to stem the bleeding. The surgeon performed a radical hysterectomy. Matt gave permission as my next of kin. I had no say. I wasn’t conscious.
Damn it, Julie. Stop thinking about the haemorrhage.
I move a pile of books off Matt’s office couch and rest my head on a velvet cushion. I’m overcome with exhaustion. The click of a woman’s stilettos in the corridor lulls me to sleep.
When I wake it’s to the smell of Matt’s distinct citrus scent. He leans over me, concern etched on his face.
‘Honey,’ he says softly. ‘What’s happened? Julie, you’re hurt.’
‘There was an accident. I fell and hit my head.’
He checks my skull. I wince when he rubs his thumb over the bump.
‘You might have a concussion. I should take you to a doctor.’
‘No, I’m fine,’ I protest. ‘Matt, a man almost hit me with his car. He said something strange about me being in danger. And the
n he died. Matt, he actually died.’ I burst into tears, all that pent-up fear and shock pour out in great gulping sobs. Matt pulls me towards him to comfort me. ‘We need to go to the police and tell them what happened,’ I tell him as I rest my head against his chest, relieved that I am safe.
‘Julie.’ Matt kisses the crown of my head and gently caresses my hair. He talks to me patiently, like I’m a child. ‘You had a fall. You probably have a mild concussion, which can often cause confusion. I want to take you home and make sure you’re alright. After that, I’ll speak with the police.’
At home, Matt gently undresses me while he runs a hot bath. He sits on the ledge and lathers my hair with shampoo. His fingers gently rub against my scalp. He runs the bar of soap over my abrasions and the bruises that discolour my shoulder and thigh.
Neither of us speaks as he rinses me clean with the shower nozzle and wraps me in a towel. In the bedroom he dresses me in fresh pyjamas and helps me into bed.
‘I forgot. I need to get Alice from school.’ I sit up with sudden urgency.
‘I’ll get Alice today,’ he reassures me. ‘I’ve taken the afternoon off from work to take care of you.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ I say. ‘It’s just a bump.’
‘It’s more than a bump, Julie, honey,’ he says. ‘You may have a concussion from the fall. And you’re badly bruised. We should get you looked at.’
Matt goes downstairs. He talks softly on the telephone. He must be speaking to the police. I’m relieved. The stairs creak as he returns upstairs. He sits on the bed next to me, holding a glass of orange juice and two capsules in his palm.
‘For your headache and to help you sleep,’ he says firmly. My heart sinks.
I’ve been off my meds for weeks. I don’t want to go back on them. I want to say this to Matt but I don’t have the strength to resist as he lifts the tumbler to my lips. He puts the capsules in my mouth, one by one, as if I’m an invalid. All I need to do is swallow.
‘You’ll be fine.’ Matt takes the glass away and lowers my head onto the pillow. ‘You’ll be just fine.’ He repeats it like a mantra until my body is floating and my mind is disconnected from the rest of me.
Chapter Four
Mel
Don’t judge a town by the size of its morgue. Our morgue was huge. It had two dozen fridges. I couldn’t remember a time when it’d been even close to capacity.
But never say never. Over the past year or so there’d been a marked rise in murders induced by methamphetamine and chemical cocktails with equally unpronounceable names. It was bad enough for our department to request funding to hire two more detectives. It’s never a good sign for a town to be expanding its homicide unit.
The morgue was located in a white building with protruding windows of smoked black glass. It was a failed eighties design style more reminiscent of a rundown casino than a government facility housing the regional forensics institute.
I swiped my access card and entered a passcode on a keypad at the reinforced door near the rear vehicle bay. The door opened with an abrupt click. I walked down an empty tiled corridor that smelled of disinfectant.
I’d spent most of that morning going over the Wilson case with the assistant district attorney. He told me he wanted to reach a plea bargain so he could clear the case from his load. He gave me some line about not having the bandwidth to take the case to trial. He motioned towards a pile of files on the floor heaped so high they were on the verge of toppling over.
Mary Wilson had been bashed by her boyfriend at a trailer park south of town. She was twenty when she died, a mother of three children by two men, one of whom shoved her head through their bedroom wall during a bust-up over the television remote control. She died three days later of a blood clot that the pathologist said was likely caused by the head injury.
The assistant DA told me the defence attorney could claim the clot was unrelated to the head injury. That she would have died anyway. I couldn’t argue about the medical stuff, but I had pulled together enough evidence to prove the boyfriend had been abusive for months. And that more than once he’d threatened to kill Mary Wilson.
There was no way this guy should be walking the streets until he was old enough to need a walking stick. That’s what I told the prosecutor. I could tell he was torn between doing what was right and what was expedient. I hoped to God that I’d convinced him to go the distance.
While we were wrapping up, I received a text message from the chief pathologist saying the autopsy on the body from Kellers Way would begin shortly. He’d done an initial examination on Friday, when they had brought the body into the morgue late in the evening. It mostly involved taking tissue samples and collecting maggots and other insects to help the forensic entomologist date the death and figure out if the burial site had changed.
There was no rushed weekend autopsy. I didn’t request one. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure the overtime would have been approved even if I had. It was hardly an urgent job. The victim had been dead for a while.
At the antechamber to the autopsy room, I pulled scrubs over my clothes. I put on a disposable hat, mask and rubber gloves, and dipped my finger in a jar of extra-strength vapour rub that I keep in my purse to mask the smell of autopsies. Death has a sickly scent, but the decomp cases are the worst.
We’re vigilant about preventing even the shadow of a doubt of cross-contamination, ever since we lost an open-and-shut murder case a few years back. The defence attorney, a high-priced lawyer from Charlotte, claimed cross-contamination on forensic findings that were so damning that under normal circumstances, hell, under any circumstances, his client would have been found guilty.
His client was likeable. White, a church pastor. He had a pretty wife with a heart-shaped face and four blond, slightly hyperactive sons who sat behind him in court during the final summation. They wore matching cream suits and light blue ties that matched their eyes.
When the prosecutor spoke I heard one of the kids whisper to the other, ‘What is rape?’ It was inappropriate for them to be in court. But protecting children wasn’t exactly a priority for the defence team. Those kids were props. They were there so the jurors could look into their precocious blue eyes before going into the jury room to determine their father’s fate.
Their daddy, the pastor, had raped a teenage prostitute and then strangled her to death. We’d found traces of his semen on her clothes. He’d worn a rubber but it dripped. We were lucky that his DNA records were on file from a rape case that never made it to trial when he was at college. That information was inadmissible to the jury, but it helped us find him.
He had a good lawyer who did what all good criminal attorneys do: he threw dust into everyone’s eyes. He obtained the forensic facility records and found that while the evidence from the victim and the accused were examined in two different labs within the building, a low-level technician was present in both laboratories that afternoon.
He had the nerve to claim cross-contamination. The jury was looking for an excuse to acquit. The defence attorney gave them one on a platter. Reasonable doubt. He knew the jurors would rather believe his client’s claims of innocence than deprive four flaxen-haired boys of their daddy, and face the reality that even church pastors are capable of bestial acts.
I’ve heard prosecutors say that juries place too much emphasis on forensic evidence because of TV shows that have them believing forensics has an almost god-like power. This trial was a case in point. There was even a witness – a gas station attendant – who had seen the victim in the pastor’s car on the night she disappeared. The defence used the witness’s past as a drug addict to tear his testimony to shreds. It should have been a slam dunk case. Instead the defendant walked out of court with his name cleared, despite the detailed testimony of a witness and damning DNA evidence.
The internal inquiry set up after that case established strict protocols around handling evidence. None of us wanted to lose another case over some bullshit defence tactic.
That’s why I was covered in plastic protective gear as I walked through the antechamber into the autopsy room where the Kellers Way body lay on a slab covered by a white sheet.
Mike looked up briefly from the computer screen where he was examining scans to acknowledge my presence. Mike and I had worked together long enough for me to know that he didn’t want to lose his train of thought while he looked at the X-rays.
I used the time to examine the victim’s belongings. They were set out on the counter in a long row of plastic evidence bags. Each had its own number and description written in indelible black ink.
The first bag contained a left black boot, a zip-up, the type that came to just below the knee. The right boot was in a separate bag alongside it. They were both partly caked in mud, though there was enough leather exposed to see it was well-made footwear, possibly hand-stitched. Boots like these did not come cheap. The heels were thick. Sturdy. Not stilettos. These were not fashion boots.
There was a pair of women’s underwear in another evidence bag; black, bikini. Nothing fancy. I held the bag to a strip of fluorescent light in the ceiling to get a better look at the underwear.
‘There are no deliberate rips or tears.’ Mike spoke without taking his eyes off his computer screen. ‘We’ll check it for semen traces in the lab.’
The bra was taupe and flecked with dirt. There was a white shirt that looked grey through the plastic of the bag. Another bag contained a red jacket, single-breasted with brass buttons down the lapel and, from what I could see, no label. It had a tailored quality you can’t buy in stores. I guessed it was custom-made.
Two gold stud earrings with diamond insets were packed in a small evidence bag and a gold chain necklace with a semiprecious pendant was in a separate clear bag. There was also the wristwatch I’d seen at the crime scene, sleek and stylish. I jotted down notes so I could cross-reference the victim’s belongings with missing persons lists.