by Lis Wiehl
“It could be. She texted us that she was going to be late because she was following a lead. But we don’t know what that story was. Or maybe it had nothing to do with Channel Four. The cops were wondering if she could have surprised a burglar.” Allison sighed, thinking of Halstead’s questions. “But things at her condo were actually neater than they usually are. Nothing was really out of place.”
She scooted closer to the edge of the bed, then rolled on her back and spread out her arms and legs so that nothing touched anything else. “One of the homicide detectives told me they found a knife under her body. If we’re very lucky, maybe there are prints. If not, it’s going to take a lot of work to figure it out. It could be Cassidy’s personal life, her professional life, or just something random.”
She felt Marshall turn on his side to face her.
“But it’s not your job to figure it out, is it?”
“No.” Hearing him echo Jensen’s argument, she made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “That was already explained to us by the lead homicide detective. This is a case for the Portland police.”
“He’s right. Let them work the case, see what they come up with. They’re responsible, Allison. Not you. Don’t take this on too.”
In the dark, her eyes opened. “What do you mean, too?”
“You can’t fix everything, Allison. Or everyone.”
She knew he meant her sister. “But I owe it to Cassidy, Marshall.” She thought of the promise Nicole had made to Jensen, and that she herself had made to Cassidy’s parents.
“You may owe it to her to see that justice is done, Allison, but you don’t have to be the one to bring it about. Try to let go and put this in God’s hands.”
She closed her eyes again and tried to center herself. Marshall was right.
“What do you want?” Marshall asked, and for a second the question seemed global. What did Allison want? Justice? Revenge? To simply forget? But then he added, “Air-conditioning on or off?”
Maybe the rattling would drown out her thoughts, cover her memories. “On.”
But it didn’t work. Every time she was about to drift off, she would suddenly picture Cassidy’s slack face and staring eyes.
Allison tried counting backward from three hundred but made it all the way down to one without relaxing a single muscle. She focused on her breathing, the air flowing into her mouth, filling her lungs and then being pushed back out, but all that did was remind her that Cassidy would never draw another breath. An hour passed, two, and Allison was no closer to sleep. Finally she slipped out of bed and padded downstairs into the living room.
She sat on the couch and picked up her phone.
At 3:13 a.m. Nicole had sent her a text. Rick was best man at Jensen’s wedding. How hard is Jensen really going to look at him?
CHAPTER 9
Hey, Nicole—what are you doing here?”
Tony Sardella, Multnomah County’s medical examiner, looked up at the viewing gallery in surprise. Dressed in blue surgical scrubs, his mask dangling around his neck, Tony had just walked into the autopsy suite carrying a stack of files.
Nic was standing in the special observation room that let law enforcement view an autopsy through a long window set in one wall. A color monitor also offered a bird’s-eye view from a camera positioned over the autopsy table. The distance, the window, and even the monitor helped you pretend that what was happening was a movie. Something you could tell yourself wasn’t real if it got too difficult to watch.
It was a little past eight in the morning, and Nic and Tony were completely alone. The waist-high, stainless steel autopsy table was still empty.
“I want to observe Cassidy Shaw’s autopsy.” Nic had put that on the sign-in form and had been lucky that no one questioned it.
Tony looked through the files in his hands, pulled one out, and opened it. Then he looked back up at Nic, his high forehead creased in confusion. “But that’s a PPB case, right?”
Nic chose her words carefully. “It does belong to the police, but I have a special interest.”
She didn’t say more. Let him think it was a professional interest. She was pretty sure that Tony had no idea that she and Cassidy were friends. Had been friends. She kept forgetting to use the correct tense.
She didn’t know if she could carry this off, but she wanted to try. She wanted to know how Cassidy had been killed, because the how might tell her the why. And with luck, Jensen would be relying on Tony’s report, not watching the autopsy himself.
“Shaw’s not our first case. She’s second.”
“Oops.” Nic shrugged. “I’ll just wait. I have some paperwork I can do.” She had a notepad and pen, but it wasn’t for anything to do with the FBI.
Before driving here, she had argued with Allison on the phone. Rick could have done it, Allison had reminded her, but he was just one possibility. Nic decided to heed her words, or at least that one sentence, while ignoring her next one, which was a reminder that this wasn’t their case at all.
She started a list:
Rape
Burglary
Serial killer
Rick
Another old boyfriend
New boyfriend??
Someone mad about a story
The story that made her late to dinner
When the assistant wheeled in the first body, Nic was still the only person in the observation suite. It was a woman in her late sixties, with lank graying hair and a swollen face. For the microphone overhead capturing everything for the official record, Tony noted aloud that she had been found in the Willamette River and reeled off some particulars about her eye and hair color. Then he and the pathology assistant began to remove the woman’s clothes. They tugged off her T-shirt, rolling her from side to side. Next the assistant lifted up the woman’s legs while Tony pulled off her pants. After they finished wrestling off her clothes, Nic looked away from the poor woman’s pale, bloated body. She closed her eyes when Tony made the Y-incision in her chest and bit her lip when she heard the sound of the circular saw.
Nic heard rather than saw Tony noting no signs of violence, just heart disease. The older woman had died by drowning, but a death investigator would have to look at the circumstances of her life to decide if it was a suicide or an accident. Possibly it would never be clear.
They were still sewing the older woman back up when Nic’s luck ran out. Jensen walked into the viewing room. He didn’t look much different from twelve hours before—rumpled short-sleeved shirt, loosened tie, eye sockets smudged with fatigue.
But his face was red with anger. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw your name on the sign-in list. You have got to be kidding me, showing up like this.”
Nic reminded herself of what she had found last night when she couldn’t sleep. Rick McEwan wasn’t on Facebook, but his sister was. And her photos included some of a wedding three years earlier, a wedding in which her brother had acted as the best man. The wedding of Derrick Jensen. The man who had warned her against running her mouth about Rick.
In the autopsy room below them, a Portland police criminalist Nic knew by face but not name had walked in. Alerted by the sound of Jensen’s raised voice, he and Tony were looking up at the viewing room curiously.
“Hello, Detective Jensen,” Nic said, playing it cool. She looked past him to the two other men who were entering the viewing room. “Sol.” She nodded at Sol Greenburg, the deputy district attorney, then held out her hand for the third man, whose large, light brown eyes were made more prominent by his thin face. “Nicole Hedges, FBI.”
“Sean Halstead,” he said. “Homicide.”
Jensen took a step toward her. “Who told you when this autopsy was scheduled?”
“Is there a problem?” Tony asked from below.
Out of the corner of her eye, Nic could see Cassidy’s body being wheeled in. She was still dressed in the coral-colored suit they had found her in the night before. The blood on the front of the jacket was dried to rust. Her hands
and feet were covered with paper bags and her eyes were half open. Only a few hours ago she had been moving, eating, laughing, talking, typing. Probably all at once.
Jensen walked to the window of the observation room. “This isn’t Hedges’s case, Tony. The decedent is a personal friend of hers.”
Tony’s gaze swung to her. “Is that true, Nicole?”
“Well, yes, but, Tony, I need to know what happened to her. I won’t bug anyone. I’ll just sit here in the corner. You won’t even know I’m here.”
Jensen snorted. “I’ll know you’re here.” He turned to Tony. “She and another woman reported finding the body, and she had to be handcuffed by the first responding officer last night because she flat-out refused to cooperate.”
“How long had that girl been on the job?” The words burst from Nic’s lips before she could call them back. “A day? I was just trying to make sure she didn’t screw anything up.”
“You can’t run a parallel investigation, Agent Hedges.” Jensen looked at her with narrowed eyes. “There is only one investigation. The official one. The one being conducted by Portland Police.”
Tony’s head swiveled back and forth as they argued.
“How do I know you’re going to consider all the options? Including the idea that Cassidy might have been killed by her abusive former boyfriend, who also happens to be a Portland cop?”
Tony’s eyebrows went up. Still, his voice rose over both of theirs. “Look, I don’t really know what’s going on. But it’s my call as to who observes, Nicole. And I’m sorry, but if this isn’t your case, it’s not appropriate that you’re here.”
She could argue, but what would it get her? If worst came to worst, Jensen or even Tony would get on the phone with Lincoln Bond, the new special agent in charge of the Portland field office, and have Bond order her out. That wouldn’t exactly start things off on the right foot with her new boss.
She was fighting a losing battle.
Nic held her hands up in surrender. “All right, I’m going, I’m going.”
As she braved the already blazing sun to walk back to her car, she finally remembered where she and Jensen had crossed paths before. Eighteen months earlier a joint task force had been looking at the illegal drug trade in Portland. Nicole and Jensen had sat around the same table two or three times.
Then Jensen started investigating the death of a Mexican American found shot to death in downtown Portland. Roberto Delgado had taken one in the head and one in the heart, both at such close range they left powder burns.
It wasn’t a murder. It was an execution.
But it turned out that Delgado had been a federal informant, killed before he could testify in a drug smuggling case. The FBI took over the case from Portland Homicide, but they had different priorities. Rather than focusing on solving a single murder, the FBI wanted to connect the dots and clean up a drug-trafficking web that stretched from Portland to Central America.
They were going after the big fish. If the little minnow who actually pulled the trigger on Roberto Delgado was caught along the way, fine—but only after he led them further up the food chain. What was catching one bad guy, when there were so many out there? And the victim had not been a shining beacon of innocence, as Nic had pointed out. Jensen had protested, but had been told he was serving a larger justice.
And soon after that, he asked that someone else from PPB be appointed to the task force.
When Nic’s cell phone rang around one o’clock that afternoon, the display showed a number she didn’t recognize. When she said hello, she wasn’t completely surprised to hear Tony’s voice.
“Do you know who this is?”
“Yes.” There was no privacy in her cubicle. Nic walked down the hall and out into the stairwell. She leaned against the wall.
“This is all strictly off the record—do you understand me?”
Autopsy results were not a matter of public record in Oregon, so Tony was really going out on a limb calling her. But they had worked closely on a number of cases and had come to respect each other. Nic wondered where he was calling from. She bet it was a pay phone nowhere near his home or office. It was what she would do in his place.
“Okay, we weren’t able to establish an exact time of death. We know she was probably alive when you got a text from her. Of course, it’s possible someone could have used her phone. But assuming it was her, there are still too many variables to pin it down. Just her being under the sink with the door closed could have changed things, because the air wouldn’t have been circulating around the body. She could have died any time between when she was seen leaving the television station at six twenty and when you found her body shortly before nine.”
“All right.” This was no surprise. “And?”
“There were fingertip-shaped contusions under her chin, and her airway had been compromised. There were no defensive wounds or marks, and nothing under her nails.”
“So she was strangled from behind.” Nic wondered why she hadn’t fought. That didn’t sound like Cassidy. “What about the blood?”
“That was from a sizable penetrating wound in her chest. The blade was about three-quarters of an inch wide, not quite an eighth of an inch thick, and, based on penetration depth, at least four inches long. It was a single-edged blade, not serrated. All of that’s consistent with the knife found at the scene.”
Allison had told Nic about the knife.
“So which was the cause of death?” Nic asked. “The strangulation or the stabbing?”
“Well, even considering the bloodletting on the clothes and the blood on the floor—that could have been from the way she was crammed in that cabinet, with her head and chest slightly elevated from supine . . .” Tony’s voice trailed off. “It was hard to tell, but there might have been some reactive hemorrhage around the wound. But I’m thinking it was a perimortem strangulation and a postmortem stabbing.”
Nic put it into English. “So you think she was strangled and then stabbed after she was dead?”
“It’s just a guess. I’m listing both as causes of death. The stab wound would have been enough on its own to be fatal. It nicked her aorta. There’s no evidence she was moving when she was stabbed, though, so she was quite possibly already unconscious or deceased. Maybe the killer just wanted to make sure she was dead.”
Nic took a shaky breath. It was bad enough to think of Cassidy being strangled—but to suffer both . . . “I hope you’re right that she wasn’t awake to feel it. For her sake.” Nicole’s own heart was beating so loudly she could hear it in her ears. “How long would it have taken for her to die?”
“Not long. A few minutes. Once you deprive the brain of oxygen, everything starts to fail. She would have passed out before she died.”
A few minutes probably had seemed like an eternity. Nic just hoped Cassidy had lost consciousness quickly.
She leaned her forehead against the cool concrete wall. “Was she sexually assaulted?”
“The rape kit was negative.” Tony took a deep breath. “There was one other noteworthy thing about the body.”
“What?” Nic suddenly knew this was why he had called her.
“We found a circular abraded and contused pattern on her wrists. It suggests she was restrained. My best guess is with metal handcuffs.”
Metal handcuffs.
Just like the ones Portland police used.
CHAPTER 10
Cassidy’s turquoise blue eyes looked directly into the camera. “While I was dating my ex-boyfriend, I felt so isolated. I was in the public eye, but it felt like I was cut off from everyone. Over time, my self-esteem was completely destroyed.”
Her gaze was unwavering as she lifted her chin. “My ex-boyfriend manipulated me and got under my skin. He took every grain of confidence I had. He called me names. He belittled me. And eventually he began to hit me. He also isolated me from my family and friends. And it was the emotional manipulation that took longer to get over than the bruises.”
Ca
ssidy took a deep breath. “I am speaking out about my experiences to help any of our viewers who are being hurt and who hear this broadcast. You need to know that you don’t have to live in pain and isolation. You are not alone. I have stood in your shoes, I have walked the paths you are walking, and I managed to come out on the other side. I’ve reclaimed my life, and you can too.” She nodded once, her expression serene, not quite a smile.
And with that, the clip of Cassidy Shaw on YouTube came to an end.
Allison reached her fingertips toward her computer screen, stopping just short of touching the hard plastic. “Oh, Cassidy,” she murmured. Hot tears filled her eyes, and she was crying again. Crying so hard she worried someone might hear her through her closed office door. She pulled another tissue from the box.
That morning she had finally fallen asleep just as the sun was rising. When she woke around nine, the oppressive heat flattening her to the mattress, at first all she knew was that something bad had happened. For a second, Allison had the luxury of not remembering exactly what it was.
And then it came crashing down on her. Cassidy was dead.
Unable to eat breakfast, she had managed a few sips of coffee, thankful that Lindsay was still sleeping and Marshall was already at work. He’d left a note saying how much he loved her and suggesting she take it easy. She’d paged blindly through the paper without focusing on the headlines. The story about Cassidy’s murder was brief, headlined Woman’s Body Found, Foul Play Suspected. It didn’t mention her name.
Later in the morning, her head throbbing, swollen eyes hidden behind dark glasses, Allison had gone to work, thankful she wasn’t scheduled to be in court. She spent most of the morning sequestered in her office, fending off a blur of people saying they were sorry. Even with little in the paper, details about Cassidy’s murder seemed to have spread like wildfire throughout Portland. In a city where most killings were the result of domestic violence or gang members targeting other gang members, in a city filled with thousands of young women trying to make it on their own, the inexplicable murder of a well-known reporter was a shock.