Dark September

by Inger Wolf

  The Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory was located on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, not far from the police station. It was relatively new and tastefully decorated with white walls and a large glass mosaic gracing the lobby. It looked nice. That is until you opened the heavy doors and walked into the heart of the laboratory, where reality set in. The autopsy facilities were divided into what Angie thought of as the good and the bad section. The latter was closed off with a separate ventilation system; it was exclusively for seriously decomposed corpses that smelled horrible and whose flies and maggots needed to be held in check. The former handled new corpses without such problems. Due to Alaska's short summers, most autopsies were fortunately performed in the good section. The laboratory often received bones from distant parts of Alaska, where people stumbled onto the remains of humans and wanted them identified. Most were from old gravesites, but once in a while, a person showed up who had been buried underneath the snow and had gone missing for several years.

  Things were hectic at the laboratory. Office girls were busy at their computers when Angie signed in. Some mumbled a hello as she walked past, adding that people were apparently dying like flies at the moment. Angie walked into the autopsy room.

  The pathologist, Jane Lohan, was leaning over a corpse on the steel table in front of her. She straightened up when she saw Angie. "Have you found Marie Vad?"

  Angie shook her head. "No. But we're doing absolutely everything we can. The whole town is on the lookout, we're turning over every rock."

  "I can't bear to think about it," Jane said. "It hasn't been the best of mornings here. You're just in time for the grand finale. The main character, so to speak."

  The room was spacious enough to perform four autopsies simultaneously. For a moment, Angie had imagined the entire Vad family would be lying there, each on a separate table. But Lohan had apparently decided to take them one at a time.

  Angie dried her sweaty palms on her black pants and stared down at the body of Asger Vad. There was surprisingly little blood, and had it not been for the small entry wound on his forehead, he looked as if he might have died of natural causes. Someone must really have been angry, she thought.

  Jane carefully cut the victim's clothes off and put them in a numbered bag, to be sent to the lab for analysis. She was in her late forties, with a small, angular face, clear green eyes, and dark brown hair in a ponytail. Her face seemed frozen in a worried expression, and Angie was always surprised when her face cleared up and she suddenly smiled.

  She raised an eyebrow in Angie's direction. "I've been busy all morning and I've just about had it. I've seen a lot in my time, but this…I think this beats everything. I'm sorry I didn't have time to talk to you earlier; it would've been good for us both. But it was important to get them in here as quickly as possible and get started."

  "I was more or less in shock myself," Angie confessed. "The crime scene. It spoke for itself, way too much."

  The pathologist nodded. She lived within walking distance of Angie, and occasionally they had a cup of coffee together. Even though they seldom talked about anything other than work, Angie considered her a friend, one who knew her deepest secret and had once saved her from going off the deep end and losing her job. A friend she could trust, whose abilities she had the greatest respect for.

  "Anyway, it's time for the last man," Jane said. "Like I said, the main character, the one it's possibly all about. And everything he was supposed to see. But we'll get to that later."

  That didn't sound good to Angie. "What do you mean?"

  "Let's look at him first, then I'll explain."

  Angie studied her; she was hiding something, and that made Angie nervous. But Jane liked to work systematically. She would talk about it when she was good and ready.

  "He was dressed in these clothes postmortem, no doubt about that. The same goes for the other two."

  "Yeah. That had to have been difficult. Some of the clothes might not have fit them all that well."

  "It is difficult to put clothes on a lifeless person," Jane acknowledged.

  She worked slowly and in silence. Took samples, weighed organs, measured distances. Once in a while, she mumbled into a Dictaphone and wrote a note. Angie made an effort to endure the sound of the saw. The sight of blood and inner organs didn't bother her, nor did the smell, but the sounds were hard to handle; despite spending a lot of time at the lab, she'd never gotten used to them.

  She glimpsed her own reflection in a mirror above a sink. Strands of black hair had loosened from her braid under her white knitted cap, and her nervous, brown almond eyes and angular cheekbones made her look like a frightened bird.

  A raven, she thought. Her clan's animal.

  "I can only confirm our theories up to this point," Jane said. "He was shot at close range. There's only a faint trace of gunshot residue, which means the gun was pressed against his forehead."

  She measured the entrance wound. "I would say, forty caliber. The entrance wound is always a bit smaller when a shooting occurs at such close range because the skin stretches some and then contracts. And the exit wound on all three family members is bigger because the bullet hit the skull and tumbled before exiting from the back of the head. I would say from the trauma on all three that the weapon was a common handgun."

  Angie licked her dry lips. The pathologist might as well have said that Asger Vad had been killed with a fork. It wouldn't be any more difficult to find the murder weapon, unless it was found in somebody's yard or some other place the killer had dumped it. Even if they stumbled onto it, proving it was, in fact, the murder weapon would be tough, since none of the bullets had been found. Gun permits weren't required in Alaska, where everyone had the right to defend themselves against the wildlife they encountered, whether at home or out in the country.

  "I wouldn't count on being able to identify the murder weapon," Jane said. "It all seems very calculated to me. A crime of passion is possible, but if that's the case, he had the presence of mind to cover some of his tracks."

  Jane pointed to Asger's wrist. "He'd also been tied up and tried to escape. Fought like a maniac. His skin is flayed in several places, there are wounds. That's not the case with the other victims."

  Angie couldn't erase the image from her mind. "So Asger was tied up while the killer took care of the rest of the family? Is that how it happened?"

  The pathologist pushed a stray hair back under her cap. "Yes. It was probably necessary. He was obviously a strong man, and I doubt it was easy to overpower him. But it also seems that he was supposed to watch it. The violation."

  "What do you mean?"

  The furrow between Jane's eyes deepened. "His wife was raped."

  "No."

  "Yes. He used a condom, and she was bitten repeatedly under her clothes. On her breasts, stomach, and thighs. And there was some bleeding around her vagina. Can you imagine? That he was forced to watch it? It's gruesome." She sighed. "But not as gruesome as watching your own son being killed. In a way, it's the sum of all these gruesome acts that makes this so thoroughly evil."

  Angie felt wretched. Her braid was stuck to the back of her sweaty neck. A silence fell between them as they digested Jane's description of what happened. Someone in the building laughed loudly, and they heard a metallic sound, something being drug across a floor. What would the people of Anchorage think about this if all the details came out? The dollhouse, the rape, the violent deaths? The quiet town would panic. People would keep their children home from school. Everyone was used to dangerous animals, but nothing like this.

  "All of this puzzles me," Jane finally said. "He rapes the mother, but then he takes the daughter with him. Maybe he knew the family, but Marie put up a fight, so he took her away and killed her somewhere else. Some of this doesn't make sense, anyway."

  She looked worriedly at Angie and bit her lower lip. Then she walked over to the sink, pulled off her blue latex gloves, and washed her hands with her back to Angie. "I have to say, I'm pessimistic abo
ut Marie. You know how it is. Every hour that goes by, there's less chance we'll find her alive. It's almost unbearable to think about it. I'm thankful I don't have any daughters that age. Or any daughters at all."

  Angie nodded and glanced at Asger one last time. What suffering had he gone through in the final minutes of his life? Who could possibly deserve that? His face gave her no answer.

  "Maybe," Jane said, "the murderer got a kick out of Asger watching him rape his wife. Maybe you're hunting one of the worst sex offenders we've ever seen in Alaska. That's what bothers me. Not only that he has Marie, but that this family might not be the last."

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