(Un) Sound Mind

by Richard Amico

  14

  4:30 a.m.

  Lieutenant Peirce drove south at high speed along the dark tree-lined county road. His broad face flashed alternately blue and red as it reflected the revolving colors of the portable police dome light magnetically attached to his dashboard. Up ahead he could see a tiny oasis of daylight in the surrounding darkness. An image of an alien spacecraft emitting brilliant light as it hovered just over the road formed in his imagination. The image of the UFO was complete with minions scouring the lighted ground, collecting samples of flora and fauna to bring back to their far-off galaxy.

  As he got closer, he could see the massive glow of bright light transform into two rows of spotlights standing on tall tripods lining both sides of the stone bridge. On the roadway, the tiny alien minions, now full-size forensic investigators, methodically roamed up and down the road, searching for any evidence that might lend clarity to the crime scene.

  He pulled onto the side of the road, stopping just short of the police barricade blocking access to the stone bridge, and surveyed the scene. Two state police cars parked diagonally across the road highlighted the barrier with their headlights. The county medical examiner’s ambulance waited on the side of the road with its back doors open, ready to accept its morbid charge. Several other vehicles sat outside the barrier on the far side of the bridge. They probably belong to the forensic team, he assumed. All was going as it should. Lieutenant Peirce removed his shield from his jacket pocket, clipped it to a black lanyard, and hung it around his neck. He rolled down his window and threw his cigarette out onto the road, then took his notepad and pen from the unmarked car’s console and placed them in his outside jacket pocket. He exited his car.

  Lieutenant Peirce acknowledged the state troopers with a wave of his hand, squeezed between the two wooden barriers, and called out to the forensic investigator taking photographs of tire prints on the side of the road.

  “Did you get this yet?” he asked in a loud voice while pointing at the bridge.

  “You can go through, Lieutenant. We got everything we need from that area.”

  Peirce walked onto the bridge and rested his elbows on the stone wall. Below, two men wearing hip boots were standing in the shallows of the stream watching a third, the medical examiner, knee-deep in the icy water, studying the position of the body. She lay faceup just under the surface, held in place in the fast-moving current by a tree branch wedged against a large stone.

  “Do you want to come down and see the body before we move it?” called Holloway from the shallows, beckoning to the lieutenant to join him.

  “No need, the perp threw the body from here,” shouted Lieutenant Peirce. “You’d like to see me slide down that embankment, wouldn’t you?” he whispered. Disappointed, Holloway joined the other officer and the ME to help pull the body from the water.

  “Did you find anything near the body?” Peirce asked the forensic investigator.

  “We took a cast of a footprint on the shore opposite the body, but the ground was so spongy that I don’t think we got much definition. I’m not sure we’ll be able to identify anything but the size of the shoe—eleven, I would guess. We’ve got lots of tire tracks on the shoulder, maybe four different cars.” The officer pointed at the tire marks leading on and off the shoulder. “No way to tell when they were made, so we can’t tell who wins the prize.”

  “Get me a sample of the mud from the stream bank and some soil from this shoulder,” Lieutenant Peirce said, pointing at the dirt at their feet. “Log it into evidence for me.”

  After a few minutes, the corpse was brought up in a body bag and placed on a gurney behind the ambulance.

  “What have we got, Doc?” asked Peirce as he began to unzip the bag.

  “Multiple stab wounds, probably the cause of death, but I’ll know more later,” said the ME.

  “I’ll assume she doesn’t have any ID on her.” Peirce looked at the naked corpse.

  “Well, actually she does,” said the ME. “A yellow rose tattoo, still visible on her right hip in spite of some slight decomposition.”

  ***

  Sam Peirce removed his suit jacket and tossed it onto the uncomfortable-looking chrome-and-white plastic chair sitting against the wall. A sheet of white paper pulled from a roll at its head covered the examining table. Peirce studied it for telltale wrinkles; it looked unused.

  He slipped his suspenders off each shoulder and let them hang at the sides of his trousers. His shirt came off next. A button popped from his cuff as he fumbled with it. It fell to the floor and rolled to a stop under the chair. It was the third time that same button had come off. Maybe I should find some stronger thread. He laughed. Or better still, get someone else to sew it on. After laying his shirt on top of his jacket, he sat down on the paper-covered table, making a crinkling noise. Sam grabbed the sleeve of his undershirt, pulled it toward his face, and sniffed. A satisfied nod gave outward expression to his feeling that, in spite of a long night, his careful morning attention to daily hygiene would keep him from being embarrassed.

  Sam heard the click of the doorknob turning and immediately flexed his abdominal muscles to pull in his stomach. Sam had been quite athletic in his youth, but the long, irregular hours of police work, catching meals on the run, and long stakeouts in his car had taken a toll on his once rock-hard abs.

  “Good to see you, Sam,” said Dr. Alicia Goodman as she walked in and closed the door.

  Alicia Goodman had been Sam’s cardiologist since she joined her father’s practice five years ago. She had been working for a large managed health-care organization after her residency, but had left the security of that steady salary and bright future to help her ailing father. As his health deteriorated, many of his patients started looking for alternative care, and his practice developed financial difficulties. She took a leave of absence from her job and placed her dreams on hold until she could bring his practice back to solvency. Inheriting her father’s practice was not one of Alicia’s career goals. She had always believed that her medical future would eventually consist of research and the development of new procedures or techniques to reduce or even cure some form of heart disease.

  He died a year later. Since then, through her hard work and a good number of referrals from other medical associates, her number of patients had steadily increased as well as her financial stability. Her old job and her dreams of glory were gone, but she believed that she was making a difference for some patients. She felt satisfied that she had improved and even saved a few people’s lives in the last few years.

  “I had another episode,” Sam said as he unconsciously rubbed his chest with his right hand.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said as she placed a blood pressure cuff on his upper arm and pumped it full of air.

  “Nothing important—I was working, and I felt some pain in my chest. I took one of those little pills you prescribed, and it went away. Probably just something I ate.”

  “Probably angina,” she said sharply as she pressed her stethoscope to his arm and listened to read his blood pressure. “You’re forty-five years old, Sam, and you look like sixty.” She wrote his results on his chart. “You’re thirty pounds overweight, you don’t exercise, your BP is high, and I’m almost afraid to open the results of your cholesterol test. At least you’ve stopped smoking. Have you cut out the fatty foods at lunch as we discussed?”

  Sam Peirce glanced at his jacket lying on the chair, hoping his pack of cigarettes had not fallen out.

  Dr. Goodman followed his eyes to his jacket. “You have stopped smoking, haven’t you?”

  “You know, your father never treated me with this little respect. He didn’t tell me I should quit being a cop, or try to control everything I ate.” Sam began to tear little pieces of the crinkly paper from the edge of the examining table.

  “My father didn’t control his own life. Maybe if he had, he would be watching you kill yourself instead of me.” She placed her stethoscope on his back and said in a loud, de
manding tone: “Deep breath!” After brusquely checking his heart and lungs, she said in an even angrier tone, “If you continue your current lifestyle, the next ‘episode’ you have is going to be a cardiac arrest.”

  “Well, that’s just fine,” he snapped. “Arrests are something I’m good at!”

  “Well, you might as well put your shirt back on,” she said, almost shouting. “You’re just too pigheaded to take good advice.”

  “When I hear good advice, I’ll consider taking it,” he bellowed. “Pick you up for dinner at seven as usual?”

  “I’m working tonight until eight—be on time,” she screeched and stormed out of the examining room.

  “That’s the last button she sews on for me,” he said with resolve. Then he laughed and continued dressing.

  ***

  “The subject is a Caucasian female, approximately forty years of age,” said Tom Craig, the county medical examiner, into a microphone hanging above the autopsy table. He released the button on the microphone and turned to Lieutenant Peirce and Sergeant Holloway as they entered the lab.

  “I was just about to record my findings,” Tom said. “You’re right on time.”

  “Could we possibly get the abbreviated version? We need to get right back out on the street.”

  “OK, here’s what I’ve got. The pair of scissors found at the crime scene is definitely the murder weapon; it matches the wounds perfectly. The time of death is a little harder to determine because of the immersion of the body in the stream, but from the wounds and the amount of blood at the house, I would put the death at the same time as the burglary, sometime on Wednesday.”

  “Well, we know she left work at Stanton’s at five o’clock on Wednesday evening, and a neighbor walking her dog reported a car speeding away from the house at eleven thirty, so I would say that’s our window, minus the twenty minutes or so it took her to get home,” said Lieutenant Peirce.

  He stood and stared at the body for a full minute. He looked closely at the deep punctures in the abdomen and the slashes to the chest. “Somebody really didn’t like her,” he said. He looked closely at the purple ligature marks on her throat and the cuts on her hands she’d received while trying to block the violent thrusts with the scissors.

  “Any sign of a sexual attack?”

  “No evidence of rape or any sexual abuse at all,” said Tom Craig.

  “Could be just a burglar caught in the act. Maybe she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Holloway, standing back from the corpse at least five feet.

  “No, this was a crime of passion,” said Lieutenant Peirce. “I’ll bet he knew her; it looks too personal.”

  “Do you have any leads to go on?” asked Tom Craig.

  “We received a call about a half hour before the 911 call from Silicon Springs Security, reporting a silver Toyota driving near the victim’s house and then leaving by the same road where the body was found. It’s thin, but the woman with the dog said the car she saw leaving the development was silver. Could be the killer returning to the scene of the crime, but that usually only happens in crime novels,” said Peirce. “It looks like we’re nowhere. Holloway, let’s look at the crime scene again and then take another run at the victim’s mother and sister.”

  15

  Ruth Klein was having a pretty good day. All her patients were on time, she stayed focused on each session no matter what distraction competed for her attention, and the blueberry muffin she had with her lunch was the best ever.

  “This is Dr. Ruth Klein, may I help you?” she said with much enthusiasm, answering her telephone on the first ring.

  “Good evening, Dr. Klein, this is Lieutenant Sam Peirce. Do you have a minute to talk?” Sam asked as he sat up straight in his chair, caught slightly off guard by her quick and jovial response. Peirce had made hundreds of calls to tell people bad news, but he still had trouble beginning the conversation. He used to rehearse his opening line: “I’m very sorry to have to tell you that your husband has been injured in a car accident,” or, “It’s with great sorrow that I must inform you of the death of your loved one.” He got most of that last one from a sympathy card sent to him when his father passed away. Over time he learned that the best thing to do was to just say it and get it over with; no one remembered the exact words you used anyway.

  “Dr. Klein, I’m calling to tell you that Sylvia Radcliffe is no longer missing. We—”

  “How wonderful, Lieutenant. When and where did she show up? I was beginning to think she was avoiding my treatment.” She laughed. “Is she back at home?”

  Lieutenant Peirce closed his eyes and tapped his forehead with the telephone receiver. That didn’t work. He would try it again.

  “No, Dr. Klein, she is not back at home. I just spoke to her mother a few min—”

  “Well, I’m surprised that she was at her mother’s house. She—”

  “Dr. Klein, she isn’t at her mother’s house. We took her to the city last night. She—”

  “She isn’t in trouble with the police, is she? I’ll be glad to help her find a lawyer if she needs one. I can come there myself…”

  Lieutenant Peirce placed the telephone receiver on his desk, sat back in his chair, and stared at it, trying to figure out how this call could have gone so wrong. Maybe if he approached from a different angle. He picked up the receiver and held it to his ear.

  “Lieutenant, are you there? Lieutenant Peirce?”

  “She’s dead, Dr. Klein,” he said, a little too loudly.

  “Oh, that’s horrible,” Ruth said, her voice slightly cracking. “How did it happen? Was it an accident?”

  “It’s an ongoing investigation, but considering the burglary at her home and the location of the body, we’ve classified the death as a homicide.”

  “You know, you could have broken the news more gently.”

  “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking,” Lieutenant Peirce said as he slowly strangled the telephone receiver with both hands.

  “Are you sure that it’s her—I mean, has someone identified the body?”

  “Yes, we just got a positive ID from her mother. We had a preliminary from her ex-boyfriend, but that was mostly based on her tattoo. It was hard to identify her with the amount of de…, ah, confusion around the discovery of the body.” He had almost said decomposition. That would have been indicative of his usual lack of sensitivity, which he had been trying to avoid, but she wasn’t making it easy.

  “Tattoo? I seem to remember something about Sylvia getting a tattoo, but I don’t think she described it to me. What did it look like?”

  “It was a yellow rose on her right hip, but that’s not for public knowledge. Please consider it privileged information.”

  Ruth Klein quickly opened Sylvia Radcliffe’s file and began to run her finger along each line of the notes from her last session looking for the description of the tattoo, but it wasn’t there. She saw the note telling her that Sylvia had gotten a tattoo, but not that it was a yellow rose. Yet Ruth distinctly remembered hearing the description of a tattoo as a yellow rose and even the location, on the right hip. Confused, Ruth reread her notes. She still found nothing describing the tattoo. Maybe Sylvia had described the tattoo to her while she wasn’t paying attention, and maybe she remembered it subliminally. That was possible. She recalled being distracted by Sylvia’s rant about her mother and the subsequent daydream about her own mother. That little head trip had caused her to miss half of Sylvia’s session. That was unacceptable, and she vowed never to let that happen again.

  I need to stay more focused on what I’m doing and not get so lost in my own thoughts…

  “Hello, Dr. Klein, are you still there?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m here, Lieutenant. I was, ahh, just picking up something I dropped.” I will never learn.

  Then she recalled that she had a recording of a session that she had not yet played. Problem solved—if Sylvia described the tattoo during the session, it would be on the memory c
ard. With the distraction of trying to remember how she’d heard about the tattoo now past, Ruth began to face the realization that Sylvia was gone. Her eyes began to well up with tears.

  “Lieutenant, I’m afraid I have to hang up now; I have a patient coming in.” She hung up the phone without waiting for Lieutenant Peirce to answer. There were no patients scheduled for over an hour, and she thought that might be just enough time for a good cry.

  She decided that it was not necessary to hear Sylvia’s recording since that was the only place she believed she could have heard about the tattoo, and besides, she felt too sad to hear Sylvia’s voice right now. Maybe she would listen to it at a later date. Ruth stuffed Sylvia Radcliffe’s file, notes, and the recording into an envelope and placed it in her briefcase.

  ***

  The picture on the front page of the morning newspaper looked like a high school graduation photo. It was the only photograph of her daughter that Henrietta Radcliffe could supply. The attractive young woman in the picture was smiling, her eyes bright and her hair pleasantly arranged, albeit not in a style still popular today. One could view this photo, and from its blissful visage, suppose that as she posed in the photographer’s studio, her mind had wandered to the achievement she had just attained. There was a look of pride, satisfaction, and contentment on her face. One might be compelled to believe she was visualizing a long life, a successful career with new relationships, and travel to exotic places in the world. She looked like a young woman who believed her future would soon abound with wealth, excitement, and romance. Franklin imagined that he saw all these things in her graduation photograph, but then felt sorrow, knowing full well that none of them were possible any longer.

  The promise of the future that Franklin could see in the face smiling back at him from the newspaper was now replaced by his memory of a body lying naked, half-submerged in an icy stream. Her eyes cold and sightless, her mind stilled by the violence perpetrated against her.