Punish the Deed (A Lucinda Pierce Mystery)

by Fanning, Diane

  Jake stuck his hand out past the eaves of the porch. “It’s still raining.”

  Despite the chill, Lucinda felt a warmth coursing through her skin. “It most certainly is,” she said, drawing the warm blanket of her fantasy tightly around her as she plunged off the porch and ran back over to the barn.

  Thirty

  He worried about the long note. It seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, it seemed brilliant. He smiled as he thought about writing it, retrieving the man’s jacket from the car and draping it over the bale in the barn, sticking the folded pages in the pocket just like it was a suicide note even though it was not. It was visual mockery at its best.

  His smile morphed into a creased brow and a frown as doubt flooded his thoughts. Maybe I shouldn’t have left it there. Maybe they can figure out who I am by reading it. But is that such a bad idea? Just ’cause they know who I am doesn’t mean they can find me. Maybe I should have laid it all on the line. Maybe I should have sprawled a great big signature across the bottom of the page. Let them know who I am. Let them fear me and what society has made me.

  To him, society was an ugly word dressed in a pretty suit. It looked good on the outside but it was a mean, arbitrary place where the rules changed without warning and caught him by surprise. He hated prison but, at the same time, he felt safe there. He knew what to expect. He always knew where he stood. Out here, though, he found it confusing. People said one thing and did another. And simple survival required such monumental effort. Gathering food, finding shelter – it was almost impossible.

  They made it so hard. They needed to be punished. His mind drifted back to the barn. He had been surprised at how well his first abduction had gone. The stupid Goodie Goodie didn’t even fight when I tied his hands behind his back before we left his car. All he wanted to do was talk. Talk about getting me help. Finding me services. Helping get me back on his feet. “I’m standing just fine on my own two feet, thank you. You’re the one tied up and in trouble,” he told him. Then he kicked him from behind and sent Agnew sprawling on the ground. Idiot. Hypocrite. Talk, talk, talk. In the end, he would have left me behind just like all the rest.

  He had no problem getting the rope over the beam and around Agnew’s neck but then he encountered an obstacle when he attempted to finish the job. The stupid goodie two shoes stopped his sweet talk, struggled and tried to run. I didn’t want to hit him in the head with the shovel. He made me do that. Then it was easy to tug on the rope and pull him up. Easy to tie it off to a pole.

  He was especially proud of his innovative touch at the end. When he broke all of Agnew’s fingers, the hands just dangled at the end of his arms. So disappointing. No sense of drama at all. The addition of the ropes to Agnew’s wrist, pulling them upward, putting his fingers on display, made him laugh with joy when he did it and made him smile now.

  He had to admit, though, there just wasn’t enough blood to satisfy him. He loved it when the deep red saturated every surface. There was some bleeding when he hit Agnew in the head but nothing like the torrent produced when he sliced a throat. Then it flew everywhere, drops fell on his face like rain warming him with their fresh spilled heat. Or that chaos of blood flying and oozing everywhere when he unleashed his fury in a good, long beating where time stood still. He let images from his bloodiest kills run through his mind as he drifted away into a peaceful sleep.

  Thirty-One

  Halfway between the house and the barn, the rain intensified again. Lucinda and Jake entered the shelter dripping and shivering. As a rule, Lucinda loved the sound of rain on a tin roof – one of the few pleasant memories from her childhood. But the pounding of the downpour above her head today sounded threatening and ominous. Is it because I’m hearing it at the scene of someone’s violent death? Nah. I’m not that complicated. I don’t like the sound because I’m cold in this unheated barn and ever since I mentioned that nice warm bath to Jake, I’m having trouble thinking about anything else.

  “Whatcha got, Melanie?” Jake asked.

  “The guy from the coroner’s office said that it appeared as if there was blunt-force trauma to the vic’s head prior to his hanging. And I thought you might want to look at this before I move it.”

  She led them back into the corner of the barn where old hand tools hung neatly on rusted nails pounded into the wooden wall. “See the shovel over on the left. I first noticed it because there were no cobwebs on it. Then I crouched down, put my cheek against the wall and looked up, like this,” Melanie said as she got into position, pounding on one knee with her fist as she did. She flipped on her flashlight and shined its beam up the rough wood to the back of the metal blade. “There I see something suspicious – like it might be hair and blood.”

  Noticing the difficulty the tech had getting down on the floor like that, Lucinda asked, “Why don’t you just lift the shovel off the nails and look at it?”

  “Well, excuse me for thinking about your case,” Melanie said, then turned to Jake. “Although we took photos of the shovel in place, Jake, I thought you might want to see it there before I collected it as possible evidence.”

  Lucinda winced under the rebuke. Oh jeez, I did it again.

  “Thanks, Melanie, we both appreciate that. Go ahead and secure it for analysis at the lab.”

  After the shovel was covered and stored in the crime scene truck, Lucinda approached Melanie. “I don’t think anyone told you my name; it’s Lucinda Pierce. I want to apologize for my insensitivity. I saw the difficulty you were having and I just blurted out what I was thinking. I definitely should have known better.”

  Melanie looked hard at the damaged side of Lucinda’s face. “Yeah, you should have. I’m sorry for snapping back at you like that, though. Melanie Handy,” she said, sticking out her hand.

  Lucinda grabbed it and said, “Apologies and forgiveness all around. Are you having difficulty with your leg, or hip or back or—?”

  “Kick me in the shin,” Melanie said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Go ahead, kick it, knock on it,” Melanie said, rapping her leg with her knuckles. The sound reverberated in the air. “See,” she said, pulling up her pants leg. “It’s not real. Sometimes in damp weather the joint moves slow and I get frustrated and hit on it a bit – that’s what was going on back there in that corner.”

  “What . . .?” Lucinda began. She shook her head and said, “Never mind. None of my business.”

  “I don’t mind talking about it, particularly not with someone who’s probably been through as much or more crap than I have. In fact, I’m surprised you’re still out in the field after losing your eye.”

  “It was a challenge pulling that one off. And there’s no guarantee I’ll stay here. The mayor’s formed a panel to review policy about monocular officers. That’s a big part of why I’m up here. The captain wanted me out of town and productive while he argued my case. But what about you? What’s your story? You’re in the field with a missing limb. That couldn’t have been easy.”

  “And it wasn’t,” Melanie said. “Talk about fighting on too many fronts for one lifetime – whoa. I was a patrol officer and I was in the National Guard. I got called up and went to Iraq. I hadn’t been there too long before I had a fateful encounter with an I.E.D. While I was recovering from the loss of my leg and going through therapy to get used to my prosthetic device, I was an emotional basket case and pretty much did everything I was told to do. By the time I got my shit together, I was trained in forensics and working in a lab. It took a lot of badgering on my part to actually get out of the lab and out in the field again. I felt so disconnected from what matters when I couldn’t get out and see it all first hand.”

  “I know what you mean,” Lucinda said. “People become statistics when you’re stuck at a desk. I really want to stay out in the field, but sometimes I get so tired of people staring at me and asking me what happened.”

  “That’s where I’m lucky. If I’m wearing pants, no one can tell by looking at me. But th
is past summer, I actually got up the nerve to wear shorts a few times. I got a lot of stares. The ones I hate the most are the people who look away and pretend that they never were looking at you in the first place.”

  “Oh, yeah, I get a lot of those.”

  “So, what’s your story, Lucinda?”

  Lucinda tensed, as she usually did when asked, and then she let it all go. For the first time, she told someone of the horror of the shot to her face without embarrassment, anger or resentment. When she finished, she nearly cried with gratitude. It felt so good to talk to someone who understood what it was like to want to lead a normal existence in law enforcement with a disability that could, without a determination to fight, leave you on the sidelines.

  Both women pulled out business cards and jotted personal contact information on the back, exchanged knowing smiles and firm handshakes.

  Jake wanted to head back to town but he stayed occupied talking to the other techs while Lucinda and Melanie huddled together. He kept his distance, not knowing what was going on between the two women but sensing it was personal and important.

  When Lucinda signaled that she was ready to leave, Jake gratefully slid into the passenger seat of her car.

  As he headed down the road, he asked, “So, was it a good bonding experience?”

  “Oh, you know, girl stuff. Make-up, our favorite depilatory cream and, of course, guys.”

  “Did you talk about me?”

  “Oh, my, wouldn’t you like to know.”

  “You’re not going to tell me?”

  “Of course not. You can’t share girl talk with a guy. Aren’t you old enough to know that by now?”

  “I’m not that young,” Jake objected.

  “A lot younger than me,” Lucinda said. She knew she really said it for her own benefit, in an attempt to put emotional distance between herself and Jake.

  “Not by a lot.”

  “What? Ten, fifteen years?”

  “Twelve, tops,” he argued.

  “And that’s not a lot?”

  “It’s nothing,” he said with a snap of his fingers.

  Lucinda felt a tingling in her breasts and between her legs. Color rushed into her face as she tried to suppress her physical reaction. Not now, Lucinda. We are in the middle of a case. Stow the hormones.

  Jake reached over and lightly touched the inside of her forearm. “You sure you don’t want to go out to dinner tonight?”

  As the skin of his fingertip made contact with hers, an electric charge raced straight up her arm and into her head, making her scalp tingle. She swallowed hard and licked her lips. When she spoke her words sounded unconvincing to her own ears. “Nah, Jake. I’m just too tired tonight. Some other time, okay?”

  Thirty-Two

  Lucinda and Jake stuck their arms into surgical gowns, pulling them over their clothing to protect them from incidental contamination, and took their positions near the autopsy table where the body of Michael Agnew rested. Lucinda found the sight of blackened tongue protruding from the victim’s mouth unsettling. She had an urge to push it back in his mouth to restore the man’s dignity in death.

  Jake had worked with Doctor Angelo DiBlasio on other cases but it was Lucinda’s first opportunity to meet the man. She was curious about forensic pathologists in general. Although her career brought her in close and frequent contact with death, those who performed autopsies seemed to have a darker, colder and yet more intimate relationship with it. It took years before she’d felt comfortable around Doc Sam.

  She knew she should make allowances for her bias and her perceptions but still, when she looked at Doctor DiBlasio, she wanted to keep her distance. She even backed up half a step. His dark eyes appeared to have a matte finish as if a life lived in these corridors of the dead had robbed them of all light and humanity.

  Then she saw the laugh lines around his eyes and was embarrassed by her negative reaction. Despite his occupation, he had a life like anybody else – a life filled with the joys and sorrows that never seemed to be dished out in fair proportions.

  He combed his black hair straight back from his forehead, dramatizing his natural widow’s peak. Grayish-white streaks darted past his temples and nearly consumed his sideburns. A prominent, sharp nose added a harshness to his face that was softened a bit by the plumpness of his lower lip. She wouldn’t classify him as a handsome man but she suspected that in a business suit or a tux, he’d probably cut a dashing figure despite his middle-aged paunch.

  Doctor DiBlasio glanced briefly at her as he weighed and measured the victim, but either he didn’t notice her injury or he had no more interest in her than he had in the box that held his surgical gloves. He began his external examination by carefully slipping the noose with its knot intact over the victim’s head and securing it as evidence. “I must admit, after the thousands of autopsies I’ve done, if you are correct, Lovett, this will be my first homicidal hanging. A lot of suicides by hanging, a few accidents, but murder doesn’t happen that way too often. I’d be most likely to believe that the blunt trauma to the head caused his death but, at least at this point, it doesn’t look like it did.”

  The doctor noted the state of the victim’s tongue, the thin line of crusty saliva running from the corner of his mouth, the small amount of pinkish fluid in his nostrils. He lifted the eyelids and observed no petechiae, the dots of blood normally present in a death by manual strangulation or smothering.

  He put a finger under the chin on the table and lifted. There the distinctive groove pressed in deeply leaving the impression of the rope’s surface embedded in the skin in the typical V-formation of a hanging. “Well, we can eliminate the second most likely candidate as the cause of death. There definitely are no circular markings to indicate that ligature strangulation killed this guy before he was strung up. But the marks on his neck don’t necessarily mean he was alive when he was hung.”

  Removing the ropes from around the wrists proved more difficult. They were tied too tight to slip over his hand. DiBlasio cut them away, snipping the binding cord as far from the knot as possible. After removing them, he handed each one with delicate care to his assistant who taped the cut ends together before bagging the ropes as evidence.

  “Now, I can’t be one hundred per cent certain until I do an internal examination. But I’d say that those ropes were tied to the wrists post-mortem. Which is pretty odd.” He manipulated one of the hands and added, “And I could be wrong but it looks like the breaks in these fingers happened after death, too.”

  Lucinda spoke up. “That, sir, would be consistent with a homicide in my jurisdiction as well as a few others we believe to be connected to the same perpetrator.”

  Dr. DiBlasio looked up over his mask. “You got others where the fingers were broken after death?”

  Lucinda nodded.

  “And no personal connections between the victims? No indications that they knew each other?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Humph.”

  Doctor DiBlasio turned the victim’s head and felt the area around the injury on the back of the skull. “Doesn’t seem severe enough to cause death. But, again, I’ll have to look at the brain to be sure.”

  The tech stepped up with fingerprinting ink and paper, recording the pattern on each of the victim’s fingers and his palms. As soon as the ink dried on the document, another employee delivered it to the fingerprint analysis section.

  Jake looked away when the doctor’s scalpel bit into the flesh to make the classic Y-incision. For some reason, that had never bothered Lucinda. She had been present, though, when other seemingly tough detectives had keeled right over and hit the floor the first time they saw that cut. She braced herself for the moment that filled her with dread, when the autopsy tech snapped the breastbone. She never watched that procedure after her first autopsy observation, but even without seeing what was happening, she knew it by the sound. The snapping, the crunching of the bone as it cracked open to reveal the heart and the chest cavity made her
skin crawl and her stomach lurch. She closed her eyes, held her ground, and winced when she heard the brutal noise.

  DiBlasio removed the body’s vital organs, weighing each one except for the adrenal glands and pancreas. They were both noted as unremarkable and set aside. Although it was unlikely that there would ever be a need for any microscopic investigation in this homicide case, samples of tissue from all major organs were saved on slides.

  Lucinda felt Jake turn rigid by her side. She suspected it was his time for dread coming up. He flinched when the Stryker saw came out to cut off the top of the skull. Lucinda noticed that he swayed in place as if his knees were about to buckle but despite that sign of weakness, he remained standing throughout.

  She’d met other officers who were repulsed by the sight of the brain. They couldn’t explain why. They admitted it wasn’t logical. If anything other organs looked gorier but, for some reason, the contents of the skull that always came closest to making them lose their lunch. It never much bothered her. It struck her as a bizarre curiosity that the convoluted mass controlled so much in life.

  Doctor DiBlasio found no sign of fatal injury to the brain but preserved several tissue sections just the same. The pathologist next turned his attention to the dissection of the neck, looking for any internal signs of injury As with most deaths by hanging, none were found – the thyroid cartilage was intact and the hyoid was not fractured.

  When the procedure was complete, Doctor DiBlasio pulled off his latex gloves and dropped them on the stainless-steel surface. “I’ll wait for the toxicology results before I file my official report, but here’s what you need to do your job: the manner of death is homicide, the means of death is asphyxia, the cause of death is hanging by a rope – definitely not a like a judicial hanging; I do not believe he dropped from a height to hang since there were no broken vertebrae.”