The Lost Witness

by Robert Ellis

  “How was New Haven?” she asked.

  “A bit frightening.”

  “Lots of slide shows?”

  “The conference was about the food supply. The Feds have cut the number of inspectors by half because of the war. No one’s minding the store.”

  “What’s the food supply have to do with pathology?”

  “For the past twenty-five years, the first thing we looked for was HIV, Lena. But now it’s Mad Cow disease. You can’t kill it by cooking because it isn’t alive. And there’s no cure. No drug cocktail to see the patient through.”

  “It’s that serious?”

  “Like I said, no one’s minding the store. You eat much beef?”

  She gave him a look, then noticed the jar of Vicks VapoRub on the shelf.

  “Pass me the ketchup,” she said.

  Madina smiled, handing over a pair of goggles, a surgical mask, and the jar of Vicks VapoRub. He was a slim man, no older than forty, with bright, curious eyes and black hair cropped so short it probably qualified as a buzz cut. Madina had become the DA’s favorite when presenting evidence at trial. Lena noted his one-day beard and the dark circles cutting into his cheeks. Although he may not have had much sleep last night, she still felt lucky that he was performing the autopsy.

  “What did the chief say?” she asked.

  Madina shrugged. “The plane landed at six-thirty I didn’t bother going home. The X-rays are done. She’s on a table and everything’s ready to go. You’re a half-hour early.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  They pushed open the doors. Three autopsies were under way in the same room with a staff photographer moving from one dead body to the next. Lena could hear a technician working the skull saw. The zap lights buzzing off and on as bugs hit the dense air, then crashed and burned. She took a deep breath, concentrating on the gel she had wiped beneath her nose. The mentholated odor wasn’t working today and she wondered why. When she gazed across the room, she realized that the body closest to the rear door was in a state of heavy decomposition.

  Autopsies were never easy. Not even when you really needed one.

  Madina pointed to the far corner. Lena’s eyes jumped ahead, and for a moment, she thought that they might have brought out the wrong corpse. The young woman lying on the steel operating table appeared whole, while the victim found in the trash bag had obviously been dismembered. But as she moved closer, Lena could see that Madina had pieced the parts together. The fit was so good, so tight, that by all appearances Jane Doe was a whole woman again. A twenty-plus-year-old woman with a small heart-shaped tattoo placed between her shaved vagina and her bikini line.

  Lena counted the breaks where the body had been severed. Three in each leg, then cuts above the wrists, elbows, and shoulder sockets. After keying in on the decapitation wound, her eyes rose to the victim’s face. Jane Doe No. 99 had been beaten, her face disfigured. Her soft brown eyes had been spared, but not much else. She was hard to look at, yet she seemed so vulnerable that it was difficult for Lena to turn away.

  “Did you measure her?”

  “Five-foot-seven,” Madina said. “A hundred and twenty-two pounds. She’s had a boob job and her belly button is pierced. The ring’s over there on the table. I’m gonna guess that if we reconstructed her nose and cheekbones, she’d be beautiful. All the way gorgeous. And that whoever did this to her is very strong.”

  Lena stepped aside as Madina selected a scalpel and began opening the woman’s chest. She remembered the first time she attended an autopsy. It had been in this room, and she found the process so difficult that she spent most of the time counting ceiling tiles. There were 729 before the lighting fixtures were changed last year. After that, the count dropped to 715.

  Madina gave her a look, laying out the victim’s lungs in an extra-large plastic container.

  “She grew up in the city,” he said. “Jane Doe’s not a country girl.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The black spots on her lungs. Look at these carbon deposits. They’re not from cigarettes. They’re from air pollution. Thirty years ago, only a coal miner’s lungs would’ve looked like this.”

  Lena examined the tissue. Jane Doe’s lungs were peppered with dark gray spots that had the look and apparent texture of cinders.

  “But she’s young.”

  The pathologist laughed. “She’s been breathing every day for twenty years, Lena. Twenty years without a break. Why do you think so many kids have asthma? It’s not like it’s a mystery. Just follow the freeways.”

  Madina moved back to the body. Lena watched him complete the operation, then helped as he rolled Jane Doe’s hands with ink and made a copy of her palm and fingerprints. Oddly enough, Lena thought that she could smell the clean scent of the woman’s perfume somehow rising above the stench of the room. But the fragrance seemed to vanish as quickly as it appeared. When they were finished—and the house photographer made his final pass—the body was no longer whole. No longer the sum of its parts. No longer a pretty girl with her entire life ahead of her. As Lena gazed at the victim’s remains, she couldn’t help but think of the murderer.

  He had committed the ultimate violation and shown no mercy.

  “What about time of death?” she asked.

  Madina shrugged off the question, then jotted something down on his clipboard. “Yesterday,” he said. “Right now that’s as close as I can get. But we’ve got a problem, Lena.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “No, I mean we’ve got a real problem. This wasn’t a sex crime. And this wasn’t done by some slime bag living on the streets.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Madina didn’t answer her. Instead, he started piecing the body back together until the breaks were almost invisible and Jane Doe looked whole again.

  “Let’s start with the cause of death,” he said. “There’s a laceration here on her neck. It’s not just in any spot. The cut was made in exactly the right spot.”

  Lena moved in for a closer look. “The right spot for what?”

  “He didn’t slice open the jugular vein. He went for the carotid artery. And he knew exactly where to find it.”

  “What’s the significance?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Arteries move blood away from the heart,” she said. “Veins carry it back.”

  “Exactly. The man you’re looking for cut the carotid artery because he wanted to move blood away from the heart. He wanted to drain the blood out of her body. You see the ligature marks around her legs and ankles. He hung her upside down and kept her alive, Lena. He kept her heart beating until she bled out. That’s why I’m saying we’ve got a real problem.”

  Lena turned to the worktable and eyed Jane Doe’s organs laid out in those oversized plastic containers. In every other autopsy she had attended the internal organs were rich in color. Jane Doe’s organs were a pale brown. It wasn’t time that had changed the color. It was the lack of blood.

  “You see it, don’t you?” Madina said in an urgent voice. “Look at her liver. It should be a deep purple.”

  Lena glanced at the container, then turned back to the body. The killer bled her out while she was alive. She tried not to picture the moment, but the horror was sharp enough to cut through. This was a special kind of madness. A new brand drawn from the other side of the road.

  “What can you tell me about who did this?” she said.

  “I can tell you a lot. I can tell you almost everything you need to know except for his name and address.”

  She met his eyes, steady and even.

  “Then you definitely think we’re looking for a male.”

  “No question about it,” he said, pointing to the ligature marks. “And he’s strong. He was able to lift her by her ankles.”

  “What else?”

  Madina pulled away his face mask. “He’s a surgeon, Lena.”

  A moment passed—deep, and long, and rising out of the darkness. When M
adina finally spoke again, his voice was tainted with bitterness and a mix of fear and disappointment. The killer was one of his own. Someone who attended medical school and took the Hippocratic oath.

  “He’s a skilled surgeon,” Madina said.

  Lena remained quiet, watching the pathologist pull Jane Doe’s body apart again as if the victim had become a mannequin.

  “It’s not easy cutting up a body, Lena. A lot of people try. More than you’d think. And most of them don’t have a clue. They leave evidence behind. Hack marks. Saw marks. Ragged edges from the knife. Rips and tears that anyone could spot from a mile away.”

  Lena remembered her first impression of the body as she entered the operating room. Jane Doe’s arms and legs fit together so well, she thought the pathologist had brought out the wrong corpse.

  Madina pointed to the cut above the victim’s left wrist, then the elbow. “This was done by someone who cared about what it looked like when he was finished. Only a surgeon would care about that because only a surgeon would be thinking about the scar.”

  “But she ended up in the trash. No one was supposed to find her. No one was supposed to see.”

  “That’s irrelevant. The location for each cut is made exactly where it requires the least effort. He’s a professional. There aren’t any hesitation marks. See how straight they are. How clean. These are incisions, Lena. Incisions made by a skilled surgeon.”

  “So, what you’re saying is that where she ended up doesn’t matter. He wasn’t thinking about it when he dismembered the body.”

  “Exactly. The two acts are unrelated. When he severed her hand away from the wrist, he was thinking about the incision and possible scar. He was keeping it clean and neat. It’s in a surgeon’s nature. His DNA. It’s instinctual. He wouldn’t know any other way.”

  “Because of his training,” she said. “His experience. He’s done amputations before.”

  “So many that I can’t believe he didn’t spend time overseas. Iraq or Afghanistan. You don’t get this good without practice. And this guy’s had a lot of practice.”

  Lena took a step closer, gazing at the victim. The evidence was overwhelming. Jane Doe’s body had been drained of blood and dismembered by someone who knew how to do it, and for whatever reason, had done it many times before. As she thought it over, a chill moved up her spine. Jane Doe’s murder was performed by someone who liked it. Someone with a medical degree who cared about the quality of his work… .

  6

  Lena ordered an extra-large cup of Colombian, spotted an empty table by the far window, and cut across the room. Digging her laptop out of her briefcase, she found an outlet under the table, hit the power switch, and waited for the computer to boot up.

  In spite of its close proximity to Parker Center, the Blackbird Café wasn’t exactly a cop hangout. Nor did many tourists wander through the door. Instead, the café catered to artists and musicians who had migrated downtown over the past decade and sought a quiet place to sip what was probably the best cup of coffee in town. The place was hidden on a side street halfway down the block—an old brick building with vaulted ceilings that was originally built as a horse stable, served as an auto-repair garage for more than fifty years, and now had the look and feel of a community reading room. The lights were dim, the walls lined with books, paintings, and photographs. Last month a patron donated three prints by Minor White to the café’s art collection, three views of the world cast in light and shadow that Lena couldn’t stop looking at.

  She had been a regular since her brother turned her on to the place after a gig at the Palladium. The Blackbird Café was open 24/7 every day of the year. Since her transfer from Hollywood to downtown, the place had become an oasis for her, and she needed it right now. One or two sips worth of high-end caffeine before she stepped back into the grind.

  Klinger had called. Chief Logan wanted another briefing in an hour. Lena wasn’t looking forward to the meeting and thought it a complete waste of time.

  And the autopsy had been an ordeal. The condition of the victim, worse than anything she had ever experienced before. Lena had worked with Pete Sweeney at the homicide table in Hollywood for two and half years. Her introduction to the Robbery-Homicide Division ten months ago had been a brutal murder case with multiple victims.

  But this one was different. A lot different.

  As she thought it over, it was the murderer’s expertise that made it different. The precision he exhibited with the knife. His obvious skills and physical strength. The cuts that weren’t really cuts, but so well executed that Madina had called them incisions. It all pointed to a level of coldness and brutality that felt like it came from another world, a very dark and lonely world.

  Lena glanced at her computer, still booting up. Lifting the lid off her coffee, she let the steam rise into her face and tried to forget about the foul odor she endured at the autopsy. The smell of death had permeated her clothes and ruined them. Even though she had showered and changed in the locker room at Parker Center, she could still smell it. Not in her clean pair of black jeans or her sweater, but lurking in the deepest recesses of her memory. She knew from experience that it would take two or three days, maybe even a week, before it faded into the background.

  She took a first sip of coffee, glanced around the room, and turned back to her laptop. She had filed a preliminary report and created the murder book last night—a three-ring binder often called a Blue Book that would serve as the complete record for the case. But her concern right now was the chronological record. The program on her computer mirrored the first section in the murder book and amounted to a journal. Every step she made in the investigation—what she was thinking, planning, or had ruled out—would be included. And she wanted to update the file and print it so that she could give the chief and his adjutant copies when they met.

  She had come up with the idea last night when she couldn’t get to sleep. The only way to beat the micromanagers on the sixth floor was to flood them with paper. Keep them occupied with something tangible or nearly tangible so that she could work the case.

  She checked her watch and started typing. After hitting the locker room, she had walked Jane Doe’s fingerprints up to the Latent Print Section on the second floor. Someone must have prepped the way because SID agreed to make the run immediately. Lena was well aware of the backlog and assumed that the call to bump her to the head of the line had come from the chief, or even Klinger. Still, she would have the results within a day—not a week—and that’s all that really mattered.

  She wanted to push Jane Doe through the system as quickly as she could. Hit the speed bumps fast with the hope that just maybe something would shake out.

  She wasn’t counting on anything. She knew the odds of SID identifying the girl were handicapped. In order to get a hit, Jane Doe’s fingerprints would already have to be in the system. One look at Jane Doe’s clear brown eyes told Lena that she was an innocent. The chances of her committing a crime or working a job that required fingerprinting was just short of nowhere.

  But at least she finally had an accurate physical description. Lena typed in the victim’s height and weight from her notes jotted down at the autopsy. On the way over, she had made another call to Benson at Missing Persons and given him an update. Madina’s office had already sent over the autopsy photos, including close-ups of the victim’s belly ring and heart-shaped tattoo. Benson would make a run through the database and have results for her in an hour or two. But that only covered Los Angeles. The California Department of Justice would make a second, more extensive run. And with any luck, Lena would have their results in a couple of days.

  She moved the cursor up to the menu bar and hit save. When she reached for her coffee, she looked up and saw someone walking toward her from the other side of the room. It was Denny Ramira, the crime-beat reporter from The Times.

  “What are you doing here, Ramira?”

  “I saw you on the street,” he said.

  “You followed me
?”

  “Yeah. I’ve never been here before. Nice place.”

  “Don’t make it a habit, okay?”

  He smiled, still looking around. “Senator West digs you, Lena. You made his day by taking that picture with him. Did you see the paper?”

  She shook her head. She had left the house early this morning and didn’t open the paper.

  “You guys are friends?” she asked.

  “His office is helping me research something on the side. Maybe a book; we’ll see. It’s not that far along yet.”

  “A book about what?”

  Ramira smiled again. “You might steal my idea.”

  “Yeah, Ramira. I’ve got a lot of time on my hands. I really want to steal your idea.”

  “Okay, so I’ll give you a hint. It’s about crime. White-collar crime. You know, the kind where nobody goes to jail because everybody’s rich enough to buy their way out.”

  Lena followed the reporter’s gaze to her laptop. He was trying to get a look at the screen, but his angle was off. As he stepped to his left, she closed the file, shut down her computer, and started packing up.

  “Sorry, but I’m not real sure I want to find my reports in one of your stories.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t looking. Besides, if you had anything real, you’d give me a call. We’ve still got a deal, right?”

  He gave her a look, and she shot it back at him. Ramira was thin and angular, about her height, and probably five years older. He was a handsome man with an intelligent face framed by dark hair and a pair of glasses that seemed to sharpen the light in his eyes. Although he may have been one of the best reporters Lena had ever known, that didn’t make him any less dangerous. The deal he was talking about had been struck after her last case. The doer had worn a badge, and the brass on the sixth floor wanted to keep it buried at the expense of an innocent man’s reputation. Lena needed an insurance policy and had given Ramira an exclusive “off-the-record” account of the investigation. Getting the story in print was the only way of ensuring that everyone involved lived up to the truth. When it was over—when the official record became straight and true—Ramira won an award, and Lena’s plight with Chief Logan was born.