by LS Sygnet
Johnny’s fingers raked through his hair. “I get it, Helen. Crevan, why did you wait to tell me all of this until now? Oh God. Please tell me this isn’t something I knew but forgot.”
Crevan shook his head. “Helen knew, and Belle. That’s it. I didn’t tell either one of them.”
“And now Belle’s sniffing around for a story.”
“A dead body turns up at a concert by one of Darkwater Bay’s more infamous former residents, and yeah, Johnny,” I said, “it’s bound to draw a little attention from the media. The problem is that it’s Crevan’s case, and now it’s a little more complicated that a dead girl.”
Johnny’s hand dragged slowly over his goatee. “Shit is an understatement. Maybe OSI really should take the lead on this case. It would remove you from Belle’s line of fire, Crevan. And you know how I feel about Tony, but if he catches wind of any of this other stuff…” he shook his head.
My newfound disrespect of Tony Briscoe became a little more entrenched.
“I don’t think Tony would let it affect how we investigate this case,” Crevan defended his partner again. “We’ve been partners for ten years, Johnny. Don’t ask me to believe that even if the truth came out that he’d treat me any differently.”
“Care to test that theory?” I jerked my head toward the burly detective making his way toward us. “I’d strongly advise that you agree to let OSI take the lead on this case and Downey assume an assisting role. If for no other reason that to take off some of the heat that Belle is bound to apply. Please, Crevan.”
Some of his confidence leeched away at the sight of the gleam in Briscoe’s eyes. He clutched a cell phone in his right hand and grinned broadly. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Winslow already broke the news to somebody and you heard.”
Crevan unconsciously stepped closer to me. “Heard what, Tony?”
“We got ourselves a bonafide he-she murder.”
The air I’d been holding in my lungs began to burn. Did I not see this coming? No one could’ve convinced me that I was wrong about Tony Briscoe after seeing another side of him last week. I felt the surety that my father must’ve known before a kill ignite in my veins.
“The correct term for our victim is transgendered,” Johnny sounded stern, maybe even a little defensive.
“Ain’t no reason to get in a huff, old man,” Briscoe grinned. “Ought to make this case a hell of a lot of fun though, don’t you think?”
I had to walk away before the urge to draw my gun overwhelmed good common sense. Witnesses were a detriment to depleting the world of its unsavory characters. Johnny’s voice followed me away from the unscheduled meeting.
“OSI is taking over the case officially, Tony, and in the future, I’d appreciate it if you’d refrain from expressing joy over any victim of a homicide. Did you finish talking to the potential witnesses?”
The rest was lost on me, out of earshot, out of interest. In its place boiled an oddly familiar emotion. I hadn’t seen red so vividly since the night I killed my ex-husband. This time, Tony Briscoe was in the rifle scope of my mind’s eye and heart’s vengeance.
Chapter 9
Crevan rode shotgun from the amphitheater to the Bay County Medical Examiner’s Office. The sun’s first rays streaked the eastern sky in a muted clam shell pink, more gray than I could almost bear with the mood of the man beside me.
“Let Johnny deal with him,” I said.
“Hmm?” His gaze drifted from the window in my direction. “Oh, Tony. I know you won’t believe this, Helen, but what he said was just the way Tony deals with things that make him –”
“Uncomfortable? Homophobic? A nasty specimen of the human race?”
“I was gonna say nervous. You were right about how the city as a whole will feel about this case.”
“That’s what I find so hard to believe, Crevan. We’re well past the turn of the millennium. For crying out loud, there’s more than one state in the union that has even gone so far as legalizing gay marriage. Yet this place inhabits some puritanical time warp, a bubble that has encased it in ignorance and intolerance.”
“That ought to explain a few things,” he said softly. Crevan picked at the cuticle of his thumb. “Me, Weber, a lot of other people too, I’m sure. Not many are willing to be out and proud around here, and those who are have to suffer the slings and arrows of loud mouthed bigots. Like my father.”
“He’d come around, Crevan. I cannot accept that a man who raised someone as wonderful as you are would turn his back on you.”
I signaled and turned into the parking lot at the morgue.
“Believe me when I tell you that my father and I couldn’t be more distant opposites. Sometimes I wonder if we really came from the same gene pool.”
“Seriously?” When I thought about Wendell and me, there was no doubt. I was an absolute chip off the old block.
“Well, obviously he’s my father. I look just like him. Where personality is concerned, we’re like night and day.”
“I don’t think that’s unusual.”
“Isn’t it? I’ve heard you talk about Wendell, Helen. Aside from the criminal parts, it sounds like the two of you were very close and shared a good many things.”
More than he knew. I cleared my throat. “I once believed that, but like you said. It turned out to be something different than what I believed.”
“Right,” he mumbled. “Sorry.”
“Hey, let’s stay focused on something we can accomplish, figuring out who killed Kyle Goddard. Are you ready to see what Maya’s got for us?”
He shrugged. “Guess we don’t have much choice.”
“Crevan, don’t let Briscoe or people like your father make you feel like this case doesn’t deserve our best effort. It doesn’t matter who the victim is or what he did. He was a human being, and someone took his life. Let’s solve the crime.”
“I wasn’t doubting what needs to be done.”
We made our way to Maya’s autopsy bay with little more than silent reflection. My friend mopped a damp brow and grinned when we walked through the door.
“Well, I see it didn’t take much prodding to get your head back into work where it belongs,” she said. “I hope you haven’t had breakfast yet, kids. Wait ‘til you get a load of this.”
Kyle Goddard lay on the stainless steel table flayed open like the catch of the day. I sensed Crevan’s cringe at my side. “If we must look at guts, I guess we must. What’s the cause of death?”
“Mr. Goddard, a nineteen year old Caucasian male, died when his abdominal aorta was transected by a very sharp object.”
“A knife?” Crevan stepped forward and peered at Maya’s handiwork.
“Sharp, but not a blade. If I had to make an approximation based upon the entry wound, I’d go with a screwdriver,” Maya said. “For the life of me, I can’t figure out why someone would want one with a razor sharp tip, but that’s exactly the evidence I found on the slice into the aorta. Damn thing was nearly cut in half.”
“Why didn’t we see some sort of spray at the crime scene?” he asked. “From what I saw, there was barely enough blood on the grill of that stack to indicate something might be wrong with the equipment.”
“Think in terms of a cork in a bottle, Crevan,” Maya said. She made a thrusting motion with one arm toward his belly. “I shove this weapon in, but if I don’t pull it out before the heart stops pumping, any blood loss is going to be a leak around the plug.”
“You’re saying that whoever killed Goddard stabbed him and didn’t remove the weapon until his heart stopped beating,” I said.
“That’s right.”
One fist pressed to my lips.
“Does that tell you anything you’d care to share, Helen?” Crevan asked.
“Maybe. I’m not sure yet,” I said. “You know how I hate to speculate.”
“Yet you do it with such great accuracy,” Maya chuckled. “I’ve yet to hear your instincts fail to pan out in the end.”
“It
could be a sign of premeditation,” I said. “Obviously, if the injury had been accidental, the natural inclination would’ve been to pull the weapon out. Leaving it in until death could’ve been a sign of intent. On the other hand, if the killer knew anything about trauma like this, he or she might’ve known that removing an object that has impaled someone could kill him.”
“Want to hear what else I discovered?”
“Don’t dole out the facts with your typical flair for drama,” I said. “Tell us the whole thing.”
“Her panties were – how shall I put this – askew, as if she at one point, planned to remove them,” Maya said, “and there was evidence of ejaculate in the urethra.”
Crevan winced. “You didn’t cut him open there, did you?”
“Simple swab,” she grinned. “So I’d say that this guy was either in the act of gettin’ some when she died, or she had hastily finished and was careless when she redressed. But I don’t think the panties ever came completely off. No evidence, just gut instinct.”
“Is that the victim’s real hair?” The long blond tresses fanned out around Goddard’s head.
“It’s all natural,” she said. “Natural hair, natural length, natural color. Our vic was clearly committed to his lifestyle as Kylie.”
“Kylie?” Crevan echoed.
“Tattoo across his lumbar spine,” Maya said, “or in the more common vernacular, our boy has a tramp stamp.”
“With his own name?”
“He’s nineteen years old,” Maya said. “By most standards, that’s old enough to consider permanent sexual reassignment through surgical means. It’s certainly old enough to receive poorly conceived tattoos.”
I noticed that Crevan seemed to roll into himself a little bit. “Why would he want to do that?”
“The tattoo?” Maya asked. “It’s really not that hard to understand, Crevan.”
I cleared my throat and ignored her trademark irreverence. “If he identified as female instead of male, it would be a natural progression for him to transition into that identity, Crevan,” I said. “Clearly he was comfortable appearing as a woman in public. Maya, did you find any evidence that he was taking steps toward gender reassignment?”
She shook her head. “Hormone levels are as male as your typical horny teenage boy’s. So I’m leaning toward less gender identity for him, at least at the time he died, than maybe a fetish.”
“Do we know if this kid –?” Crevan stopped abruptly.
“If he what?” Maya asked.
“Was he gay?”
“I’d go with the affirmative given the other findings on exam,” she said. “Like I said, it could’ve been a matter of role playing for him to dress as the opposite sex, who knows? That’s the job for the intrepid police detectives.”
Crevan nodded. “Anything else?”
“He seriously bled out, aided mostly by gravity and the wound track. I believe that the reason there wasn’t much blood on the outside of that speaker cover was because whoever dumped the poor thing into position only removed the weapon right before he used the speaker to collect the blood.”
“Time of death?” I asked.
“Well, there’s the rub,” she said. “Didn’t the guitar tech guy, obnoxious troll that he was, say that he did his sound check at three yesterday afternoon?”
I nodded. “He claimed that the equipment was in perfect working condition.”
“Lie,” she said. “Big one too. Time of death was closer to noon based on lividity and body temp,” Maya said. “Which got me thinking about why the blood at the crime scene looked so fresh. Hell, it was downright runny when I got there close to midnight. Even a large pool of blood wouldn’t look that fresh for half a day. Our vic is certainly tall enough to fit the standard issue size of boys in Darkwater Bay, but I noticed immediately when everyone but me had no clue that she was really a he.”
“Well, he was rather convincing as a woman,” Crevan said.
“Except for the Adam’s apple. That’s not what struck me after I peeled off the clothes. Look at him. He lacks muscle definition. I ran a test for hormone levels before the Y incision,” she said. “I figured he had to be taking female hormones in preparation for gender reassignment. He is thin and well, sort of built like a girl.”
“Could he be an XXY?”
“No, it’s not Klinefelter’s syndrome,” Maya said. “His hormone levels were normal, but that blood, and the absence of bulk in his muscle mass got me thinking. I did another test on the blood. Billy shot some x-rays. Our boy had hemophilia type A. I’m making a wild assumption that his lack of muscle definition might’ve been owed to an overprotective mother.”
“She didn’t want Kyle bleeding, so he wasn’t allowed to engage in normal childhood activities.” It made as much sense as anything else I could imagine. “Some sort of strange coincidence that he ended up looking feminine and having a bent toward dressing like a woman.”
Crevan shifted his feet.
Maya frowned. “What’s going on here? I keep reading some weird subtext between the two of you. Did you learn something about this boy that I should know about?”
“It’s not that,” nor was it my secret to share. “We live in a land of cavemen for the most part. If you’re picking up some weird vibe from us, it’s probably worry that nobody but a handful of people will be interested in actually closing this case, Maya. Briscoe’s going to be worthless.”
“Really?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Crevan interceded on behalf of his partner again. I couldn’t help but worry that it would come back to haunt him if certain facts became well known through the course of our investigation.
In general, I don’t walk through life with much doubt. At least I didn’t used to feel normal insecurities. My impression of Crevan from day one had been that he was an exceedingly sensitive man, that his job was personal to him for some reason. In all of our conversations, I never got around to asking him why I read that from him so clearly. This case was obvious. It danced close to something he understood, to a truth he had concealed about himself that might be exposed in the process of doing the right thing and finding out what happened to someone whose life should be at its beginning, not its end.
“And ... she’s gone again,” Maya chuckled. She jabbed one elbow into my bony side. “Did you solve the case already?”
“Hmm, no. Did you say something?”
Crevan dangled his phone in front of me. “Johnny called. Something about Pan Demon’s management company closing ranks and refusing to let any of the members of the band cooperate with our investigation outside the presence of legal counsel.”
“Fantastic,” I felt irritation rise in the form of acrid bile in the back of my throat. “So it looks like Dev and I will have no choice but to go back to this stupid super-fan event tonight.”
Crevan shuffled his feet again. “Uh, looks that way.”
“Johnny’s pissed, isn’t he?” Men. What did I have to do to convince any of them that women simply think and feel differently than they do? And where the hell had all of this raging jealousy come from in a man who literally couldn’t remember specifically what we shared?
Temptation to sneak over to the jail for Bay County and splatter Mitch Southerby’s brains against a wall for his role in Johnny’s amnesia tickled the periphery of volitional action. I couldn’t turn back time and undo this complication with Johnny, but it sure as hell would make me feel better to have a little revenge.
Maybe later.
“What does Orion want to do next?” I asked.
“He wants us to get together and compare notes. I guess that they did get a hell of a lot of witness statements from the folks hanging on, hanging out being the little groupies that they are all day. No luck finding Goddard’s parents yet. Johnny and Tony talked to the neighbors. Seems like the Goddard family packs up for some sort of holiday cruise every year. They take out the yacht and don’t come back until after New Year’s.”
�
�They could conceivably be back in short order,” I nodded. “We should get together and try to figure out how to find them before this story breaks in the press.”
Maya held up one hand. “We’ve already been getting calls from the local media about the victim’s ID. The only people who have that information are me and Billy. I promise you, they will not get his name from us.”
Crevan’s pace became frantic in speed and frustration. “I know Belle. She won’t let a little thing like our lack of cooperation stop her. Helen, we need to figure out a way to make this notification to Goddard’s parents before Belle has it splashed all over the front page of the Sentinel. I’m pretty sure Johnny has the same concern based on...”
“Based on what exactly?”
“He called Ned and asked him to go over to your place and get Devlin. We’re meeting at OSI’s headquarters.”
My sixth sense started itching. If Johnny wanted all hands on deck, he must’ve uncovered something else, information that would make him include even the man that had borne the brunt of some serious anger. I nodded slowly.
“We should head over there right away. Maya, I know you don’t have to stress this to Billy, but I have a sinking feeling that Johnny needs to hear that an absolute gag order has been issued out here on this victim.”
“Say no more,” she said. “I’ll call you if we get any hits on toxicology.”
Chapter 10
One thing was blatantly clear to me the instant we were ushered into the conference room adjacent to Johnny’s office at OSI’s headquarters. The table was round, but that was in no way indicative of equality for those assembled around it. Johnny wasn’t sitting. Chris, Tony and now Crevan and I were.
Johnny kept glancing at his watch. Ned and Devlin were holding up the game plan.
“Shit,” Briscoe muttered. “Maybe we should get started without them, John.”
Chris leapt to Devlin’s defense. “We’re gonna need them here if this thing is really moving away from cooperative witnesses, Tony. Helen and Devlin already have an in with these guys.”