Skin Deep
Page 5
“Laurel Whitsen,” Greg Sanders said. “She’s thirty-one and lived out in Bracken.”
He was studying the driver’s license in a window wallet he’d retrieved from the dead woman’s slouch bag. They’d found the bag behind the very front desk where Catherine and Lindsey had accepted a single brownie from the older librarian, reasoning that if they split it between them, it would only amount to halfway breaking their diets.
This morning, the CSIs had arrived to find the desk covered with blood, the slouch bag sitting open atop it, smeary red fingerprints all over its strap, outer and inner leather, and zipper pull.
“Does it look like anything was stolen from her bag?” Catherine asked.
Greg shook his head. “I found over sixty dollars in the billfold. Plus credit and debit cards and her driver’s license. There are keys, a checkbook, a makeup compact… everything right where it belongs.”
“And her smart phone? Where was that when you noticed it?”
“On the floor behind the desk,” Greg said. “I think she might’ve gotten it out of the purse, made her call, and dropped it there.”
“After she got shot in the head?”
He shrugged. “Don’t forget skinned.”
They traded perplexed glances.
“Libraries charge late fees and hold fund-raising events,” Catherine said after a moment. “Did you see a register up front?”
“Just a wooden cash box under the counter that’s straight out of Mayberry,” he said. “The lock wasn’t exactly high-security. I opened it with one of her keys and found thirty dollars and change, with calculator printouts matching the total amount of money.” His face creased. “Plain vanilla holdup men don’t carve out pieces of their victims, Cath.”
She frowned, raised her camera, and circled the body to photograph it from every visible angle, careful to sidestep the copious blood spills and numbered, color-coded evidence markers all around it. Before she and Greg took their samples, Catherine would snap close-ups of each bloodstain relative to the body, the room’s fixtures, and other stains, establishing their precise measurements and spacing with six-inch crime-scene rulers from her kit. Meanwhile, she had advised the antsy uniformed policemen who’d responded to Laurel Whitsen’s baffling 911 call to get comfortable in the reading room. She hoped they would seek out long, thick novels with plenty of twists and turns, because she did not expect to finish her work anytime soon.
It was now a few minutes past nine o’clock on Saturday morning. Although the library’s regular weekend hours did not begin until ten, Laurel must have arrived early to prepare for the day. The rest was as enigmatic as what she’d calmly told the emergency operator: “I’ve been shot in the head at the Basin Road library. Help me, please. I have to return Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle to the shelf before we open.”
Minutes after she ended the call, the police arrived, found the library’s door ajar, and went inside to investigate with their guns drawn. Besides finding the gory mess on the desk, they saw a confused trail of blood and bloody footprints running from the circulation desk to the research room, where they soon came upon Laurel Whitsen’s gored and mutilated remains in the natural history aisle.
Catherine lowered her camera’s viewfinder, studied the bloodstains between the dead woman and a shelf stack about ten feet to the left. There was a rolling cart piled with dozens of books over by the shelves, which she noted had some available spaces on them. A few more books were strewn around the cart.
She contemplated that for a moment, then brought her gaze up to the books lining the aisle at about eye level. They were drenched with blood, hair, and bits of scalp and brain tissue. One of them was protruding over the edge of the packed shelf. The title printed on its cover along the spine was Voyage of the Beagle.
Laurel Whitsen had been about Catherine’s height. When the bullet tore through her head, the material would have burst out the exit wound and sprayed the shelves.
“She was putting away that book when the killer surprised her,” Catherine said. “See those large drops of blood running from the stack?”
The oval drops on the floor, with their narrow leading edges throwing off spatters in the direction of the corpse, meant that Laurel Whitsen had been standing at the shelf when she was shot up close—and briefly remained standing before she went down. Catherine was thinking Laurel was slightly built and might have weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds. But that was still a lot of weight to support, and not many women possessed the strength. Most likely, her killer was a male.
Catherine continued to study the blood patterns. She’d noticed tiny red speckles around some of the parent drops, which told her that Laurel, or whoever was holding her upright, had paused long enough for blood to splash down into blood. From there, the blood smeared across the floor to where it widened out into a large, wet pool, as if that was where Laurel had been dragged and laid out… for a while.
She was now in a different puddle about six inches from that spot.
Catherine looked down at her body. Shot up close. That much was a sure thing. It was apparent from the charred edges of the bullet hole above Laurel’s right eye and the star-shaped flaps of skin where the blowback gases from the gunshot escaped in an explosive rush.
Catherine imagined Laurel wheeling her book cart into the research room, stopping at a shelf, pulling a return from the cart. The Darwin book. Laurel had been handling it, trying to fit it onto the tight shelf, when something drew her attention. The sound of the killer’s footsteps, maybe. Or he might have said something to make her turn and face him. The rest must have been a blur for her. The weapon in his grip or appearing suddenly from under a shirt or jacket, its muzzle rising, then pressing against her forehead, and finally the click of the trigger and the near-instantaneous blast of gunfire.
“The killer caught her off guard,” she said. “Put a slug in her head, skinned her, left her there on the floor.”
“And then what?” Greg said. “She gets up with her head half gone and the flesh sliced off her arm to the bone. Goes over to the desk for her cell and calls the police. Then she comes back to finish putting away her book and finally drops dead.” He scratched behind his ear. “I might not have a problem if this was some zombie movie.”
Catherine shook her head, trying to reconstruct the sequence of events. Laurel Whitsen’s killer might have lingered after closing time and found somewhere to lie in wait. Then snuck up on her while she was preoccupied, leaving her with no chance to react. Or could she have known him? Let him in early? It was possible he even arrived with her, accompanying her as she made her rounds. There was no sign that she’d struggled or tried to run.
Catherine stared at the book sticking partially out from the shelf and frowned. That was where the images stopped clipping across her mind’s interior screen. Where they veered from any logical, orderly progression.
“Hey, Catherine, I found something.” Greg had moved a foot or two down the aisle. He crouched inches from where she stood, picked a hollow brass cylinder up off the floor, and turned it in his fingers to inspect it. “It’s a nine-mil… and look at the impression on the bottom.”
She knelt as he showed her the brass. “Teardrop-shaped,” she said.
Greg nodded as they exchanged glances. Most guns used circular strikers. When a shot was fired, the striker left a rounded indentation where it hit the primer cap. Except when the shot was fired from a gun that used a rectangular striker and consequently left a rectangular impression. Except, again, when that gun was a Glock, which used a patented rectangular striker, not to mention other unique design features. When the gun was a Glock, the recoil from the striker’s percussion gave its barrel a slight downward tilt, and a small amount of the ignited primer flowed back out of the cap and distorted the rectangle, turning it into a teardrop-shaped identifying mark that forensics experts could recognize, if not a mile away, then without fail at the distance Greg was holding the spent brass shell from Catherine’s eyes.
Greg dropped the casing into an evidence bag. “The aisle’s kind of cramped,” he said, looking around. “He must have been practically right up against her when he pulled the trigger.”
Which Catherine had already decided was a fair assumption.
She stood there silently looking over the smudged, overlapping bloody shoe prints running to and from the aisle. They would need close analysis in the lab before Laurel’s could be conclusively distinguished from her killer’s. But they might help clear up several unknowns.
“One way or another, Laurel stays on her feet, or half on her feet, for maybe four, five steps. Then falls to the floor.” Catherine pointed to where the drag marks began. “That’s when she’s pulled to where she is now, where whoever murdered and butchered her went to work…”
And where things stopped making sense.
Greg was looking attentively down at the body. “She’s got tunnels,” he said. “A tat on the side of her neck.”
Catherine had already noticed the hollow metal plugs in Laurel’s stretched ear piercings. But the tattoo was partly covered by a clump of bloodied hair. She knelt and plucked back the matted strands with latexed fingers. “Red stars and blue butterflies,” she said. “Colorful.”
Greg crouched beside Catherine as she took more snapshots. “See how the sleeve was clipped away from the arm he skinned?” he said. “No tears or loose threads anywhere… most likely, it was done with a good pair of scissors.”
Sewing shears, she thought. Somebody had been painstakingly conscientious.
Greg was gesturing at the blouse’s pleated left sleeve. “Mind if I pull it up?”
Catherine nodded, and he rolled it back above the wrist. A second later, he’d exposed a tattoo corsage of vibrant yellow, purple, and pink five-petaled blossoms.
“Plumeria,” Catherine said. She caught Greg looking impressed. “Little boys know frogs, little girls flowers. In Hawaii, they symbolize birth and life.”
“Too bad Laurel wasn’t in Hawaii,” he said.
She gave a small, morbid smile. “What do you think we’ve got here?”
Greg stared at the victim’s arm with its missing flap of skin. “One insane robbery after all,” he said.
LVPD undersheriff Conrad Ecklie was hardwired for career self-preservation, which meant that appeasing his departmental and political bosses was always foremost among his priorities. Add occasional twitches of irritation when he was overloaded with conflicting demands and a certain preset vindictiveness if his sensors detected a real or perceived threat to his sphere of authority, and you had the model bureaucrat.
When the sheriff’s office was given oversight of the criminalistics bureau some months back, Ecklie had become its chief liaison with its supervisor, Catherine Willows. She wouldn’t have said she particularly liked or disliked him; it seemed too strong to measure her reactions to Ecklie in those terms. Willows tended to gird herself for their meetings as she would getting ready to deal with bank loan officers or utility company service reps. Her wish was only that their encounters were brief and professionally courteous and passed with a bare minimum of trouble. The idea was to coexist with him and avoid pushing his buttons by any dignified, reasonable means.
Driving back to the lab from the library, Willows had gotten an e-mail on her cell requesting her immediate presence in Ecklie’s office. The summons was copied to Nick Stokes, whose path she had crossed early that morning as he’d hoofed toward the autopsy room after returning from a four-nineteen on Koval Lane.
A shapely, long-legged, strawberry blonde who spun heads mostly without acknowledging the looks, Willows had reached headquarters first and gone hustling through the corridors to Ecklie’s office. She owed her good genes to her mother, Lily Flynn, once a cocktail waitress and showgirl who had performed across the Western states. Jumping from school to school, Willows had become unsettled at her core, toughened on the exterior. Her ex-husband’s bad habits acquired and mercifully kicked, she had danced like her mother to support their child and pay her own tuition at UNLV, earning her bachelor’s in medical technology.
But Catherine had followed in Lily’s footsteps only so far—and right now, she could not have been further from them, her own hurried steps having led her to the heart of Ecklie’s domain, where she sat beside the second-to-arrive Stokes, both CSIs listening to the undersheriff give his bit from behind his desk.
“I’ve heard some discussion about the possibility of a link between the library killing and the Tattoo Man probe,” he said. Lean, balding, the skin of his face taut over his cheekbones, he peered at them with the expression of a gliding raptor.
Catherine knew how quickly word spread through the grapevine. Still, she was puzzled. “What sort of discussion?” she said. “Greg and I haven’t even filed our report.”
“Sergeant Ayers radioed headquarters from the scene.”
Ah-ha, Catherine thought. One of the uniforms she’d sent off to the reading room. It appeared he hadn’t found any literary diversions.
“The victim was seriously into tattoos,” she said. “She had a lot of work done on her.”
“Her name was Laurel Whitsen, correct?”
Catherine nodded. “Our on-site examination of her body showed more than ink. She had scarification designs on her shoulder, strike branding on the chest—”
“What was that?”
“Strike branding,” Catherine repeated. “The same process used on cattle.”
“Scars and brands… wouldn’t this be masochistic?”
“I suppose it depends whom you ask.”
Ecklie formed a cradle with his hands and rested his chin on it. “Is it accurate that a tattoo was removed from her arm?”
“We think it was cut around the borders and then peeled away,” Catherine said. “Greg unlocked Laurel’s smart phone. There were pictures of her in short sleeves, so we know what it looked like.”
“Can you describe it?”
“Yeah, the art’s very distinctive,” Catherine said. “A rabbit riding a deer… well, a buck, actually. The rabbit’s waving a handsaw in the air and has antlers and a bandage around its head where they were transplanted. It looks happy.” She paused. “The buck has stumps where the antlers used to be, and there’s a teardrop coming from its eye like it’s sad.”
“Do you infer any special meaning there?”
Catherine ignored her better judgment. “If that buck had gotten hold of the saw first, the rabbit might not be smiling.”
Ecklie frowned, unamused. “The tattoo might tell us about the victim’s lifestyle. It isn’t unreasonable to think there’s some symbolism, or message, call it what you want, in the imagery.” His eyes beaded in on Nick. “Captain Brass feels it’s probably true of what was done to Quentin Dorset and the rest of Tattoo Man’s victims.”
“It’s one theory.” Nick shrugged. “But I don’t see how that’s got anything to do with the librarian.”
“You think it’s a coincidence that we had two similar crimes in a single night?”
“If similar’s only about tats for you, sure. The judge turned up dead last night, but he was snatched weeks ago. The woman at the library’s a consenting adult into body art and whatnot. I’m hearing from Catherine that her tattoo was removed, the opposite of what happened to Dorset.”
“Nick’s right,” Catherine said. “There are different MOs and not a single piece of evidence tying Laurel Whitsen’s murder to the Tattoo Man abductions.”
Ecklie unmeshed his hands, set them flat on the desk, and leaned back. Catherine heard the springs of his chair creak in the silence. “We have to be concerned with perceptions,” he said slowly
. “I shouldn’t have to explain.”
She looked at him. “Maybe you’d better. Because I’m a little confused.”
“Really, Catherine?” Ecklie’s eyes met hers. “None of us in this room just fell off the turnip truck. The press hasn’t gone too crazy starting an uproar over the Tattoo Man, maybe because there weren’t any killings to this point. But that changed overnight. Once these stories circulate through the media, Sheriff Mobley’s going to feel the heat.”
“With all due respect to the sheriff, that isn’t our problem—”
“Mobley already spoke to me this morning. He believes the cases might be somehow related. Or that a relationship is at least worth preliminary consideration.”
“Somehow?” Nick said. He made no attempt to conceal his disdain for Ecklie. “You worked the field once upon a time. Let’s hear what you think.”
Ecklie tightened his lips. “When there’s a buildup of pressure within a closed system, it does damage at the point of greatest vulnerability. Mobley is an elected official who recently suffered a very public embarrassment. He’s eager for his office to rebuild its credibility.”
Embarrassment, Catherine thought. As in her dear friend and teammate Warrick Brown getting murdered by Ecklie’s corrupt predecessor. She felt her molars grit but kept her gaze leveled on the undersheriff, unwilling to let Nick into its periphery. He would be openly seething, and that wouldn’t help her hang on to her own poise. “You’re asking us to jump to a conclusion and work backward from it. Violate every sound investigative principle—”