by Mike Markel
“No prints, hair, fibers?”
“We’ve got a few strands of hair, from two different males, and some thick polyester threads, curly, maybe from a mat in the trunk of a car. Which would be consistent with her being killed somewhere else and dumped at the river. You get me some hair and some threads from some trunks, I can tell you more.”
“How long would the DNA on the hair take?”
“Thirty-six hours. Want me to do it?”
“Yeah, do it,” I said. “Okay, Harold, what did you get?”
The ME was sitting on a battered, armless desk chair that creaked in protest when he moved. “Robin’s already told you about the BAC and the river water in her stomach. Since the river water is mixed up with beer, we’re not able to state definitively the role of the immersion in her death.”
“What about water in her lungs? Wouldn’t that tell you whether she drowned?”
“Not necessarily,” Harold said. “We found a little water in her lungs, but that doesn’t tell us how she died. If her lungs were full of water, that would indicate she was alive when she went into the river. But if there’s no water, or just a little, that could indicate she was already dead, or just that she had a dry drowning.”
“What’s that?”
“Means that when she hit the water, whether she was conscious or unconscious, the larynx spasmed, closing up the airway. If it stayed closed long enough, she could have gone into cardiac arrest. So she might have been alive.”
“What about the stab wounds?” I said. “They tell us anything?”
He looked down at his clipboard. “Three stab wounds to the abdomen, from what looks like a knife with a blade width of almost two centimeters. One sharp side, one dull side.”
“Like a steak knife?”
“Sure,” Harold said. “For a big piece of steak.”
“What kind of damage did the stab wounds do?”
“I think they killed her. Perforated her stomach and the small intestine, which released a boatload of bacteria, which would’ve made her really sick. But the significant damage was when the knife sliced a big vein in her liver.”
“She might have bled out internally.”
“I think she did bleed out internally. The liver is like a sponge filled with blood. You lacerate that and don’t stop the flow, you’re dead in less than a half hour.”
“Could the cold temperature out at the river have slowed things down a little?”
“No, it wasn’t cold enough to ice her brain.”
“So, your best guess for cause of death?”
“I’d say her brain died within a half hour of the laceration of her hepatic vein. She might have been alive out on the river, and the hypothermia and getting dunked didn’t help. But find whoever stabbed her and charge him with murder.”
“What kind of guy should we be looking for?”
“From the angles of the wounds, a right-handed guy. Taller than five feet, heavier than a hundred pounds.”
“So it wasn’t a left-handed midget? Could you be a little more vague?”
He smiled sadly and shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry.”
“Anything else you see?”
Harold and I have this game he seems to like. He tells me all the boring medical stuff that happened to the vic, then waits for me to ask him whether there’s anything else we ought to know. Then he drops a big one. I don’t generally like games, but I like Harold enough to play along.
“There is something else that you might be interested in. She’d had a rough abortion a few weeks ago.”
“What’s a rough abortion?”
“In an induced abortion, as opposed to a miscarriage, you have to stretch the cervix open to get the instruments in there. It’s easy to tear the cervix muscles. A good ten to twenty percent of women need stitches. In a hospital setting or a good clinic, they stitch it up right there. An iffy outpatient clinic, they don’t do it.”
“And she needed stitches?”
“Yeah, but she didn’t get them.” He leaned back in his chair, which creaked. “The tears were half healed up, with some scarring.”
“She would’ve had bleeding?”
“Probably, and it definitely hurt like hell for a while. But the real damage would have shown up in the future—that is, if she had one. She’d have run the risk of what’s called an ‘incompetent cervix.’”
“English?”
“The next time she got pregnant, if she wanted to come to term, the cervix might have been too weak to stay closed long enough for the fetus to hang on and develop properly. She’d run an increased risk of miscarriage or premature delivery.”
“How big a risk?”
“Three to five times that of a woman who never had an abortion.”
“Anything else?”
“No, that’s all I’ve got.”
I shook my head. “I thought she only had a shitty last day.”
“No.” Harold looked wrung out. “I think her whole last month was shitty.”
I thanked Harold and Robin as Ryan and I left the lab.
“Well,” Ryan said as walked up the stairs toward the detectives’ bullpen, “looks like we’ve got another possible motive.”
“Yeah, but a new motive doesn’t help us with our list of suspects. Assuming they all have working dicks.”
Chapter 15
“Want to pick up Hector Cruz again?” I said.
“I think we have to.” Ryan sat down at his desk. “Odds are it was his baby, which opens up a bunch of scenarios. She didn’t want to get the abortion, but he pressures her into it and now she’s decided he made her kill her baby.”
“Or she wanted the abortion and he didn’t. So he’s decided she killed his baby,” I said.
“Or it wasn’t Hector’s baby,” Ryan said. “Hector finds out, they get in a big fight.”
“It could be one of the fabulous Gerson boys. Dad would have an obvious motive for shutting her up. And the son’s so crazy he doesn’t need a motive. He just goes off his meds for a couple days.”
“We could tell Hector we know about the abortion,” Ryan said. “See how he reacts. And while we’re at it, we could ask him if we could look around his trailer and the trunk of his car.”
I smiled. “I guess we could. And then he could say, yes, she told me she was knocked up, so I told her to get an abortion, which she did, but it hurt a lot and she started complaining, which got on my nerves, so I knifed her three times.”
“Well, you put it like that,” Ryan said, “we should have this case wrapped up by lunchtime.”
I was tapping a pencil on the edge of my desk. “From what Harold told us about the tearing of the cervix and how it wasn’t stitched up, most likely the abortion was done by a coat-hanger guy, right?”
“I don’t know,” Ryan said. “Probably, but not necessarily.”
“How you mean?”
“I don’t know anything about abortions, but I’ve had five operations on my knees—football—and every time I’d done my homework on the Web, but then the doc explained how, yeah, in most cases, this problem would indicate that particular surgery but my situation was a little different because such and such, so he thinks we should come at it some different way.”
“So what are you saying about Maricel?”
“Just that we shouldn’t assume it was a butcher. It could’ve been a real doc, and there might’ve been a legitimate reason he did it the way he did.”
“Which means Maricel could’ve had a legal case against the doc if he screwed something up.”
“Could’ve,” Ryan said. “I’m saying we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that money is involved somehow.”
“Probably a good general principle. But if it was a coat-hanger guy who screwed it up, she could’ve come back at him—not to sue him but to expose him. He could’ve found out, they get into it, he kills her.”
Ryan sighed. “Aren’t we supposed to be narrowing things down at this point?”
“That’d be nice.” I th
ought for a second. “Shit. The only things we can do are try to figure out who did the abortion and see how Hector reacts when we tell him we know about it. You got a better idea?”
He paused. “We could check with Planned Parenthood, the university health center. See if they remember her. They can tell us where they point girls who want an abortion.”
“And if they remember her, maybe they can tell us if she came in with a guy,” I said.
“A lot of maybe’s here.”
I nodded. “Let’s start with the university. Can you get an address on the health center?”
It took Ryan thirty seconds. He wrote it down on a slip of paper and we headed out.
Traffic had thinned. We got stuck behind a girl in a two-door shitcan who was driving real slow and weaving a little. “Is she drunk?” I said.
Ryan leaned forward. “I think I see her looking down. Can you pull up next to her?” I did it. “She’s texting. Want to stop her?” he said.
“No, write down her tag and call it in. Let one of the uniforms get her. I want to get started on the abortion thing.”
“Okay,” Ryan said. He picked up the radio and called in her tag and location.
We parked at the entrance to the health center, which was inside the new three-story Nursing Building that was finished last year. Some pharma had endowed it, and it looked good, more like one of those satellite hospitals than a college health center.
We walked in, across a decent carpet, through a good-sized student lounge with upholstered chairs with little desks built into them. Off to the side were a half-dozen study rooms with big flat-screen monitors on the walls.
Up at Reception, I showed the student my shield and asked to speak with the director. The girl got on the phone. Ryan and I sat on a couple of chairs in the lounge. A minute later, a forty-year old woman wearing a white lab coat, with a stethoscope around her neck, came out. The receptionist pointed to us. We stood and I introduced us to Dr. Evelyn Cordoza. The doctor led us back to her office and gestured for us to sit.
“We’re investigating that murder of the student, Maricel Salizar, and we think there might be an abortion angle to it,” I said to her.
She lowered her head, looking out over her half glasses. “You’re aware we don’t do any abortions here?” Dr. Cordoza said.
“Yes, we assumed that,” I said, “but we’d like to see whether you have a record of whether she came in to talk about it.”
Ryan said, “And we’d like to learn whether you refer students to a particular abortion provider.”
Dr. Cordoza said, “What time period are we talking about?”
“Three to four weeks ago.”
She tapped some keys on her laptop. “That’s S-A-L-I-Z-A-R?” She looked up at me. I nodded. “I don’t have a Salizar coming here, going back to January 1.”
“Any chance she could have talked with one of your people without her name going into your system?”
“No.” Dr. Cordoza shook her head. “Every student has to present herself at Reception and show a university ID.”
“Can’t bluff their way in by saying they want to talk about a cold?” That was how I got birth control when I was a student.
Her expression told me she didn’t like answering the same question twice. “Every student goes through Reception.”
“All right, Dr. Cordoza, let me ask you about where you point students who want an abortion.”
“Planned Parenthood. They’ve got the resources.”
“You don’t name any docs?”
She shook her head.
We stood up. “Thank you, Dr. Cordoza.”
Back in the cruiser, we headed over to Planned Parenthood. Their doc on duty was Kenneth Lawler, who invited us into his office. I explained what we were looking for and slid the picture from Maricel’s ID across his desk.
“Yes, I think I do remember her,” he said.
“Can you look up whether it was her came in?”
“I could, but that wouldn’t do you much good, since we give everyone the option of not signing in.”
“Do you remember if she came in with another person? A guy?”
He shook his head. “She could have, but this place can get pretty busy, and I don’t usually see them till they get back here.”
“So you don’t remember anything you said to her?”
“Sorry, no.”
“If she asked you where to get an abortion, what would you have told her?”
“We’ve got some materials pro and con—pamphlets, books, DVDs—that we offer them, but if they say they want an abortion, we direct them to Montana Reproductive Services, here in town.”
“Why do you recommend them?”
“They’re good,” he said. “And they’re the only ones within a hundred miles.”
“Are there any illegal providers?”
“There are illegal and unsafe, and some that are both. I don’t know them by name, but I know they exist. The ER routinely sees perforated uteruses and intestines. And they see infections and toxic shock from chemical abortions. There are deaths in town every year.”
“And you warn the girls about these providers?”
He looked at me directly. “Every. Damn. Time.”
We drove over to visit with Montana Reproductive Services. Dr. Lester Allenby was finishing a procedure, so we burned through some Rawlings taxpayer money by sitting in his waiting room.
“If we strike out with this guy,” Ryan said, “you want to pick up Hector Cruz?”
“No other option,” I said.
“You can go in now,” the secretary said a moment later.
Dr. Allenby invited us to sit, but I said, “We’ll just need a minute of your time.”
“How can I help?”
I explained the case we were working on. “Can you tell us if you treated Maricel Salizar?”
He looked it up on his computer.
“No record of her.”
Ryan said, “Let me ask a question, Doctor, if you don’t mind. What is the approximate cost of an abortion?”
“About three fifty to six hundred, depending on the length of the pregnancy and a couple of other factors.”
“And do you know if the student health insurance policy at CMSU covers it?”
“All but twenty percent,” Dr. Allenby said.
“Okay, Doctor,” I said, “thanks very much.”
Back in the cruiser, Ryan said, “I don’t get it. Maricel goes to an unsafe abortion provider rather than shell out sixty or eighty bucks? It must have cost her at least that much for the procedure she bought.”
“Only thing I can think of,” I said, “is she was afraid if she did it on the books it would somehow get back to Dr. Gerson—or Mark Gerson—”
“Or Hector,” Ryan said. “But that doesn’t make any sense. She’s twenty-one. There’s no parental consent. How would anybody find out?”
“Makes sense to me. She gets the abortion from a legitimate place,” I said, “they keep records. If there are records, someone with a twenty-dollar bill can see them. Or a person with some influence. A provost at the university? A guy who can move her halfway around the world? In a place like Rawlings, he’s got influence.”
“If that’s why she went with an unlicensed guy,” Ryan said, “she must’ve been awfully afraid of what someone would do if he found out.”
“You mean, like, kill her or something?”
Chapter 16
Ryan called William Saffert, the boss from Buildings and Grounds, and got a current location on Hector Cruz. We drove over to the Life Sciences Building, where he was working on the second floor. I didn’t expect Hector to run. He seemed too smart for that. Still, I walked up to him from the staircase on the east side. Ryan came in from the west side.
Hector looked up when he saw me walking up toward him. He shook his head, an inarticulate gesture that said either “I’m screwed” or “Fuck you,” or some combination of the two. I wish lowlifes would be a little more
informative with their body language. It would save us a lot of time.
“We’re going in to headquarters,” I said, “have you make a statement.”
He stuck out his wrists to Ryan.
“No cuffs, Hector,” Ryan said. “We just need a statement.”
The three of us left the building, walked out to the lot, and drove to headquarters.
We put him in Interview 1, which is the room with the cuffs attached to a bar on the top of the big, beat-up table. I like Interview 1 for violent offenders because it sends a clear message. With its cracked-tile walls, the steel interview table, and an old gray filing cabinet with corners that seemed like they would hurt if you somehow fell into them, the room looked like the one place in the whole building where you definitely want to think it over before lying to us.
I signaled for Ryan to turn on the camera from the controls on the wall near the door. “Okay, Hector, we want to talk with you a little more about your relationship with Maricel Salizar.” I was standing, my back leaning against the big one-way mirror we used for looking in from the hallway.
“Phone call.” He was sitting, his fingers intertwined on the scratched surface of the interview table.
I walked over to the table and faced him. “Excuse me?”
“I want to make my phone call.” His face was blank.
I sighed and sat down opposite him. I leaned in. “Hector, let’s talk. Just the three of us.” I pointed again to the recorder controls on the wall, and Ryan got up and turned off the system. “Hector, we’ve seen the shithole you live in. No way in hell you can afford a lawyer. You call the public defender, you’re getting either a kid with an earring who barely passed the bar the third time around or a middle-aged loser who’s half in the bag most of the time. You ask for a lawyer, we gotta change the way we come at you.”
He sat there, impassively. He looked at me, then his gaze drifted off.
“Wouldn’t it be smarter to just let us ask you a few questions? You don’t like the way it’s going, you can always get the lawyer. But give us a chance to help you see your way through this thing. I don’t know exactly what you did, but I don’t think you killed her. If you did some stupid shit, we can coach you so you don’t end up taking the fall for someone else. Hector, you’ve been straight with us. Your boss says you’re stand up. Whatever you did, you can walk away with a misdemeanor, maybe, or a real light sentence. We know you didn’t kill her, Hector.”