Lark

by Forrest, Richard;

  He groaned. It had to be done or the system broke down. He rolled out the heavy dumbbells from under the counter, stripped off his pants and shirt, and began.

  Sets of deep knee bends, pull-ups, sit-ups, and curls were the fulcrum of his program, and he forced himself to breathe deeply with each exercise.

  He watched the wall clock as its hands moved with agonizing slowness. When twenty-two minutes to the second had elapsed, he stopped, kicked the dumbbells under the counter, stripped off his shorts, and stepped into the shower. He was exhausted.

  The shower helped, and he was toweling off when he heard a car pull into the drive next to the pickup. He pulled on a pair of pajama bottoms and went to the door.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said without enthusiasm as she left her Olds and came into the shaft of light falling from the doorway.

  She kissed his lips and slowly ran her hands over his bare chest before pushing past him into the trailer. “I drove by earlier and you weren’t here. I think I’m going to give you a telephone for your birthday.”

  “They cost too damn much. Want a beer?”

  “A little white wine.”

  “I think I have some left from last time.” He searched in the refrigerator.

  “What if they want you at headquarters?”

  “They send a car by.” He found the wine and poured half a jelly glass full and flipped a beer from the freezer.

  She took the wine and settled back on the divan. “You don’t seem overjoyed to see me.”

  “It hasn’t been one of my better days.” He drained half the beer.

  “I saw on television that you are handling that dead-girl case.”

  “That’s one of the things that made my day.”

  She seemed tense and began to pace the narrow trailer with loping strides. Faby Winn, thirtyish, was an athletic woman who religiously ran her three miles each morning and scoffed at Lark’s ideas on exercise. She walked as she ran, with purpose and determination and without seductive sway. Tight curls of auburn hair covered her head and she often had a nervous habit of running her hand through it. “This place is depressing, do you know that?”

  Lark finished his beer before answering. “You’ve said that before.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she announced, “we have on the one side”—she peered out the right side of the trailer—“a mountain of old tires, for God’s sake.” She gestured to the left. “And over here we have a pleasing vista of early cement-block construction.”

  “It’s a goddamn factory, for Christ’s sake,” Lark replied as he internally debated over another beer.

  “You’ve got the money to get yourself another house. I’m tired of making love in a slum.”

  “I don’t like houses,” Lark said as he decided on another beer. He opened the refrigerator door and stopped stock-still, as if he were staring for the first time into a vivid scene of several years before …

  He was the one who was supposed to find her. That was the way Margaret had planned it. His shift was due to end at three P.M. that day, but his relief had been late and he had to remain on the stakeout. Cathy was supposed to be at a high-school play rehearsal until after six, but it had been canceled and she had been the one to arrive home first and enter the bloody living room.

  Lark had found them ten minutes later. Margaret’s head was in Cathy’s lap, and his young daughter was swaying back and forth keening for her dead mother. Lark had lifted his daughter in his arms and carried her from the house. They had never returned to that house or to any other.

  “Are you lost somewhere, Lark?”

  He snaked a beer from the refrigerator and slammed the door. “Why don’t you go back to your husband? At least you could go to bed in a decent house.”

  “That bastard. I wouldn’t want to interrupt his lucrative Gyn practice in West Hartford. You know, I’m tempted to take another year getting my doctorate. I’ll just diddle around with my thesis another year and cost him another fifteen thou.”

  “The fifteen thou is the revenge?”

  “You know it. I spent eight years putting him through medical school and his residency, and the whole time he was screwing every nurse he came into contact with and a few of his patients on the side. I’ll never forget the look on his face when the judge ruled that he’d have to pay for my doctorate.”

  “One of life’s joyous moments, huh, Faby?”

  “Well, it wasn’t quite the pound of flesh I wanted, but a few ounces that helped.”

  “I saw Cathy today. She still insists that I killed Margaret.”

  “Why don’t you let me talk to her? I knew Margaret. You don’t teach with someone for five years and not know them. She had problems that had nothing to do with you. You didn’t pull the trigger, Lark.”

  “Stay out of it. She’ll have to come back to me on her own.”

  Faby sipped her wine. “You’re impossible. I don’t know why I stay involved with you.”

  “Why do you?”

  “Probably because, deep inside me, there’s a masochistic streak that likes being around a man who constantly acts like he’s going to explode.”

  “Have I ever hurt you?” Lark asked softly.

  “Of course not, but I have the feeling that you’re sometimes about to.”

  “That’s just something that comes from too much time in the street.”

  “I don’t know about that. I think you’re a hard man, Lark.”

  He stared at her a moment, but decided that he didn’t care to carry the conversation further. He pulled her toward him. “Shut up with the cheap psychology and let’s go to bed.”

  3

  Lieutenant Thomas Lark wondered what it would be like to make love to the chief medical examiner of the state of Connecticut. The long lab coat that draped her body made it presently impossible to see the curves of her figure, but he knew from past meetings that she was an attractive woman in her thirties with a beguiling smile that belied her grim occupation.

  He realized that he was engaging in his age-old game of compartmentalizing to avoid the obscenity of the dead young woman stretched out on the autopsy table three feet in front of him. The diener moved into the space between his chair and the autopsy table and began to remove the corpse’s clothing. The medical examiner adjusted the hanging microphone she would use to dictate her running commentary as she worked. On the wall, midway down the tiled room, was a small plaque with a Latin quotation. Lark read it aloud:

  “‘Taceant colloquis effugiat risus. Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae.’ What does it mean?”

  “What mean?” the medical examiner asked as she made the final adjustment to the stubborn microphone.

  “The Latin on the wall.”

  She laughed. “That’s my Milton Halperin influence.”

  “Who?”

  “For many years Halperin was chief pathologist for the city of New York, he also taught forensic pathology at NYU when I was a medical student. He’s the one responsible for getting me into this work, God save his soul.”

  “Then it’s a joke in Latin?”

  “No.” She turned and traced the words with her fingers as she reverently read the translation. “‘Let conversation and laughter cease. This is the place where the dead delight in helping the living.’ You know the old epigram, don’t you, Lieutenant? ‘A dermatologist knows nothing and does nothing, a psychiatrist knows everything and does nothing, a surgeon knows nothing and does everything, and a pathologist knows everything but a day too late.’”

  Lark laughed. “I hope you’ll be able to tell me about our Jane Doe.”

  The clothing had all been removed and placed in evidence bags for Lark. “No underwear or socks,” the diener announced curtly as he left through the swinging doors that exited the room.

  The medical examiner arched an eyebrow. “That probably means a sexual attack, but we’ll see when we get there.” She bent over the body for the external examination.

  Lark took a pen from hi
s pocket and crossed his legs as he prepared to take down any pertinent facts as she recorded them.

  The medical examiner’s voice droned in a low monotone without feeling or inflection. “External examination. The body is that of an unembalmed, young, adult white female. It is well-developed and well-nourished. It weighs 117 pounds and measures sixty-three inches in length. The hair is light brown, and matted at the external occipital protuberance where an entrance gunshot wound is noted. The wound is surrounded by an area of ecchymosis approximately three centimeters in diameter.” She turned her attention to the lower torso and hip area. “Wedge-shaped burn marks are noted along the transumbilical plane.”

  “What?” Lark stood so abruptly that his chair fell backward and clattered on the tile floor. He clutched his notepad as he took two steps to the autopsy table, where he stared down at the body. “Good God!”

  Their eyes met across the table until the medical examiner turned from the body and faced the plaque on the wall. She continued her monotone. “It would appear as if these are burn wounds inflicted by a heat device of unknown origin over a period of several days.” Her voice changed in inflection. “You know, Lark, she was probably conscious through all of it.”

  Lark nodded.

  The medical examiner turned to face the table again and once more her voice took on its professional drone. “The wounds are in a pattern across the transumbilical plane twelve centimeters in length. We’ll take pictures of this for you, Lark.”

  “Of course.” He continued staring down at the tortured body of the young woman in horrified fascination.

  The medical examiner continued her examination. “You never get used to the children and the tortured. That you never get inured to.”

  “I can understand,” Lark said hoarsely. “It would have been very painful, wouldn’t it?”

  “Considering that the outer and inner genitalia were also touched with the burning device, the pain and suffering must have been beyond belief.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “I’ll get smears from the vaginal area and other orifices, and of course, after we open her, we’ll take liver, kidney, stomach, urine, and intestine samples for a full toxicology study.”

  Lark was still looking at the wedge-shaped burn marks. “What did this?”

  “The marks look like they were made by a stylus of some sort. I’ve seen shapes like that on photographs of Syrian cuneiform writing on clay tablets.”

  “That’s out of my jurisdiction,” Lark said with a tight smile. “I can’t go beyond Hartford without the chief’s okay.”

  “Funny, Lark. Funny.”

  “The patterns seem to spell out something.”

  “I saw it. It’ll come out clearer in the pictures.”

  “The marks across her belly … S-L-U-T,” Lark said.

  The medical examiner kept looking down at the body before continuing her examination. “It would seem so. You’ve got a sex nut on your hands, Lieutenant. After I finish the autopsy, I’ll put the burn-mark configurations on the computer wire to INFORM and see what they have for us.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The International Reference Organization in Forensic Medicine, it’s located in Wichita, Kansas. It’s a data clearing organization for forensic medicine. Thousands of cases are stored in the computer so we can compare patterns like this. If it’s been done before, it will turn up. I hope to God the answer is negative.”

  “Yeah,” Lark agreed.

  She continued her external examination. It began with the victim’s toes, carefully spreading them apart to check for minute puncture or needle marks. She continued her meticulous examination, taking particular care with the elbow areas, which were a favorite drug-addict entry point. “No visible needle puncture wounds,” she said into the microphone, and then took her foot off the activator pedal and turned to Lark. “If they used an extremely narrow hypo more than twelve hours before she expired, we might not find any entry.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m going to check the oral cavity for possible fiber evidence. The decedent was in extreme anguish during the final hours of her life, and she must have been gagged to mitigate the sound of her screams.”

  “I would expect that to be the case.” Lark knew what was coming and he averted his head away from the table.

  The crack of the jawbone made his shoulders twitch. He turned back to see the medical examiner using a light to peer inside the mouth.

  “Strange. There are no fiber remains or bruising around the lips or at the corner of the mouth. That’s not what I would have expected. I’ll take smears for possible semen presence, of course.”

  “Then she wasn’t gagged?”

  “Evidently not. If there was anything in or near her mouth, with the muscle spasms she would have experienced … There should be some evidence.”

  “Uh huh.”

  A photographer entered the room and began to take pictures of the corpse. The medical examiner stood, scalpel in hand, ready to make the long torso Y incision as soon as the photo session was completed. She spoke in the same monotone she used for her dictation of the autopsy notes. “If this is the first, it won’t be the last. You know that, don’t you? Men who do this—and it is a man—get to like this sort of thing.”

  “Yeah,” Lark said again.

  The beer didn’t help. An unpleasant smell permeated his body, hung on his clothing, and filled the cab of the pickup. Lark felt sullied, as if a film of dank cemetery earth had been thrown over him. They had taken him off the street away from the scum he arrested and rearrested, only to fling him into a deeper pit of perversion.

  He pulled up to police headquarters and dropped the empty beer can onto the floor of the cab. The police commissioner’s parking slot was empty, and Lark nosed the truck into the space. Every step saved was a conservation of heartbeats.

  He slammed from the cab and was walking toward the main entrance when he spotted Russo lounging in his Thunderbird. “Wake up, Russo.”

  “Hey, Lark. Come here a sec.”

  “I’m in a hurry.”

  “A second, huh?”

  Lark grimaced. He and Russo had once been drinking buddies, and for a short period of time were partners when the lanky Italian had still been on the force. Now that Russo was a deputy sheriff spending all his time serving legal papers on a fee basis, Lark viewed him with slight contempt. Serving papers for money didn’t seem very coplike to him. He walked over to the shiny Thunderbird and thought that while serving might not be a cop’s job, it surely must pay well. “Whatcha want?” he asked as he leaned toward the car window.

  “Got something for you.” Russo slapped a service into Lark’s hand. “The Méndez kid you leaned on is going for half a million of your hide.”

  Lark looked down at the summons with disdain. “You’re a real pal, Russo. Thanks.”

  The Thunderbird started with a roar. Russo shrugged. “Somebody’s got to do it.” He backed out of the parking place with a screech of tires.

  Lark dropped the service into the trash receptacle by the front door and entered the lobby. He waved at the desk sergeant and communications clerk at the radio panel and walked into the watch commander’s office.

  The lieutenant at the desk looked up from a roster report and scowled. He was a large black man, over six-five and 250 pounds with a massive head and shoulders. “Goddamn it, Lark! Where’s the search-and-seizure warrant for that goddamn piece of concrete out on Mark Street? We’ve had to keep a man out there for three shifts and I’m short on patrol.”

  “I’ll get it, Horn. I had an autopsy to go to.”

  “The stiff’s not going anywhere. You shoulda done your warrant first.”

  “What did they give the papers on the case?”

  “Read it yourself.” Lt. Horn thrust a morning paper at him and went back to glaring at his roster.

  Lark skimmed the front-page article quickly—in Middleburg any homicide was front-page news—and grimaced when
he saw his own name mentioned as the officer in charge of the investigation. Long-standing department policy required that Frank Pemperton be the news source for any major case. Details on the crime were sparse and Lark wondered what significant fact Frank had withheld. It was standard operating procedure on any unsolved crime to omit a vital point in order to have one important piece of information to use to verify the guilt of a prime suspect. He had to read the article twice before realizing that Frank had omitted the gunshot wound to the head. Significant enough, Lark thought as he dropped the paper back on the watch commander’s desk. “Doing the warrant now,” he said in parting.

  Lark’s cubbyhole office on the third floor was covered with computer printouts. He flipped through a few pages. There were dozens of descriptions of young women of the approximate age and physical appearance as their victim. Each entry was a missing person or runaway, and they all seemed to be denim-clad teenagers. Perhaps the National Crime Information Center was too efficient.

  He would have to do his search warrant first in order to seize the pedestal with the bloodstains, and then a separate one to try to gain entry into the house on the property where the body was discovered. He found the CCP-7 green print on white forms in a bottom drawer and inserted the first one into the ancient manual typewriter by the side of his desk.

  He stared down at the form:

  “Affidavit and Application, Search and Seizure Warrant. To: A Judge of the Superior Court.

  “The undersigned being duly sworn, complains on oath that the undersigned has probable cause to believe that certain property to wit …”

  This one would be easy. He typed the sentence carefully with two fingers. “A certain concrete pedestal approximately three feet in height with attached inverted cross on the property of 21 Mark Street, Middleburg, Connecticut.”