by J. A. Jance
“Do you happen to have LaVerne’s phone number?”
“No. It’s probably in the phone book, but I doubt this has anything to do with her.”
Deb jotted a note, and Joanna knew that one of her detectives would be calling on LaVerne Hartley soon to verify whether or not that was the case.
“What about drugs?” Debra asked. “Was your brother mixed up with any of that?”
“I already told you. As far as Les was concerned, alcohol was his drug of choice-his only drug of choice. He wasn’t into meth or coke or pot or even cigarettes. Just booze.”
Joanna’s phone rang. “I’m stuck,” Guy Machett said when Joanna answered.
He sounded aggrieved-as though the fact that he’d gotten his vehicle mired down in sand was all Joanna’s fault. She turned and looked back over the path she and Ernie had used to drive from the gravel road to the crime scene. Debra had come in that same way, and so had Margie Savage. There was, however, no sign of the M.E.’s van.
“Stuck where?” Joanna asked.
“In the sand,” he snapped irritably. “Where do you think?”
Joanna covered the mouthpiece. “The M.E.,” she told the others. “He’s stuck.” Removing her hand, she spoke into the phone. “I’m looking back toward the road,” she said. “I don’t see any sign of you.”
“I didn’t bother with the road,” Machett said. “I ran into that woman from the truck-the one from the dog pound. She told me you were out this way. I didn’t see any point in following the road when the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.”
Not when you’re driving through sand, you jerk, Joanna thought. It turned out Guy Machett did need a babysitter.
“Where are you exactly?” she asked.
“Somewhere between the gate and where you are,” he said. “Can you come pull me out or send someone who can?”
“You need a tow truck,” Joanna said.
“Then call one for me,” Machett replied.
Months earlier, Joanna’s department had been forced to eat a five-thousand-dollar towing bill when a murder victim’s vehicle had crashed through a guardrail and come to rest on a steep mountainside. She didn’t want to fall into a similar trap. She suspected that if she or someone from her department called for the tow, Guy Machett would somehow find a way to have the costs come out of her budget instead of his.
“I’ll get you a number and call you back.”
“Come on,” Machett said. “That homicide cop of yours has four-wheel drive. I’ve seen it. Couldn’t you just send him over here with a tow chain?”
And get Ernie stuck, too? Joanna thought. Not on your life.
“He’s interviewing a witness right now,” she said. “And I don’t think our insurance covers DIY towing. If something happened to your vehicle or ours, the damage wouldn’t be covered.”
“Have a heart, Sheriff Brady,” he wheedled. “Help me out here.”
But on this matter, Joanna’s mind was made up. “I’ll get you the number,” she said.
She called Dispatch, got the names and numbers of several towing companies, and relayed them back to Guy Machett. Then Joanna called in to Animal Control and spoke to Jeannine Phillips. It was easier and faster to call on the phone than to work with the nonworking radio system.
“Have Officer Wilson take the homicide victim’s dog into custody and bring him back to Bisbee.”
“To the pound?” Jeannine asked. “Does that mean none of the relatives want him?”
“Not so far.”
“Natalie already asked me about this,” Jeannine said. “According to her, Miller seems to be a great dog. He’s been neutered, has all his shots, and is properly licensed. Instead of bringing him to the pound, she was wondering if she could foster him until we find out if the relatives give a final yea or nay. If they don’t want him, Natalie might take him permanently.”
Joanna felt a slight lightening in her chest. In the course of that tough afternoon, not having to lock up a grieving dog seemed like a good thing-a small but good thing.
“Great,” she said. “If you don’t have a problem with that arrangement, far be it from me to interfere.”
Call waiting buzzed, and Joanna switched over to another call. “I just talked to towing company number three,” Guy Machett complained. “They can’t be here in anything less than an hour. What the hell am I supposed to do in the meantime-waste my whole day?”
Of course Guy Machett wasn’t the only one wasting time. Until he made his appearance to examine the victim, Joanna’s detectives were also stuck in a holding pattern.
Joanna covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “The tow truck’s at least an hour away,” Joanna told Ernie. “Want to try pulling him out with the Yukon?”
“What’s the matter?” Margie interrupted before Ernie had a chance to answer. “Who’s stuck?”
“The medical examiner,” Joanna said. “He’s bogged down in the sand somewhere between here and the gate.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Margie Savage said. “Why don’t I just go get him? I’ve been driving these dunes most of my life. I’ve got a tow chain right here on my jeep, and I know how to use it.”
“You wouldn’t mind?” Joanna asked.
“Hell, no,” Margie said. “Why would I mind?”
With that, she headed for her jeep. Ernie moved as if to stop her, but Joanna held up her hand.
“Let her go,” she said. “There’s nothing Dr. Machett will hate more than being rescued by an old lady.”
And nothing I’ll like better.
CHAPTER 5
By the time I got back to the Kittitas County complex, I had no intention of going another few rounds with the receptionist. Instead, I prowled the parking lot. You’ve heard the old adage: Rank hath its privilege? In the world of bureaucrats, no privilege counts for quite as much as having your very own reserved parking place. It didn’t take long to find the spot that was marked: RESERVED MEDICAL EXAMINER.
I kept circling the parking lot until someone finally left a parking place that gave me a clear view of the M.E.’s precious spot. That way, when she finally showed up, I’d be the first to know. I put the seat all the way back, opened my computer, logged on, and indulged myself. For a long time, I had resisted doing online crossword puzzles. Doing them on a computer rather than in a banged-up folded newspaper had seemed sacrilegious somehow.
But I’m over it. That was another change Mel had instituted in my life. Despite her love of fast, powerful cars-she adores the Porsche Cayman I gave her as a wedding present-she’s a greenie at heart. She has managed to convince me to give up on newsprint altogether, including crosswords, which were the only thing I thought papers were good for to begin with.
Just because it was raining in Seattle and snowing in Snoqualmie Pass didn’t mean it was raining or snowing here. Ellensburg is right at the edge of Washington State’s unexpected stretch of desert. So I sat in the clear cold sunlight, squinting at my dim computer screen, and worked the New York Times puzzle. In a little over five minutes. That’s the problem with Monday and Tuesday puzzles these days. Most of the time they’re way too easy.
A few minutes later and an hour and a half after the receptionist had given me the brush-off, a bright red Prius pulled into the M.E.’s reserved spot. A young woman with long dark hair and wearing an enormous pair of sunglasses got out of the car and then turned to retrieve a briefcase. I put down the computer and scrambled to intercept her.
“Dr. Hopewell?” I asked tentatively.
Peeling off the glasses, she swung around and faced me. I was surprised to see a pair of almond-shaped dark eyes, angry dark eyes, staring back at me. “Yes,” she said. “I’m Dr. Hopewell. That was certainly quick. Where is it?”
Excuse me? She seemed to be in the middle of a conversation I hadn’t yet started.
“Where’s what?” I asked.
“My suitcase. The airline called while I was still in the pass. They said they had foun
d the missing luggage and they were dispatching someone to deliver it to me. I thought maybe the airline finally got around to doing something right for a change.”
That seemed unlikely, but rather than telling her so, I managed to fumble my ID out of my pocket and hand it over. “Sorry,” I said. “Special Investigator J. P. Beaumont. I’m here for the autopsy.”
“Oh,” she said. She glanced at my ID and handed it back. “Sorry about that,” she said. “As you can see, there’s been a slight delay. Come on in. I’ve been out of town. I’ve heard about the case, but so far I haven’t seen anything about it. As soon as I get suited up, we can start. You can wait in my office if you like.”
She led me through the lobby. I waltzed past the evil-eyed receptionist without being hit by any incoming missiles and hurried on into the relative safety of the morgue’s nonpublic areas. The first office beyond the swinging doors was labeled DR. HOPEWELL. She ushered me into that and offered me one of two visitors’ chairs. Then she set the briefcase down behind a suspiciously clean and orderly desk.
“Wait here,” she instructed. “I’ll be right back.”
I find that women in positions of authority have a tendency to be at one extreme or the other. Either they’re comfortable with themselves and easy to get along with-like Mel, for instance-or they can be a royal pain in the butt. I had no idea where Dr. Hopewell would stand on the particular dividing line. To be on the safe side, I did exactly as I’d been told and sat where she’d left me.
While I waited, I examined her small but exceptionally neat office in some detail. Eventually my eyes were drawn to a framed photo on the wall-a graduation photo with a smiling cap-and-gown-clad Laura Hopewell standing between a very non-Asian middle-aged couple, a man and a woman. I was still studying the photo when Dr. Hopewell returned.
“Those are my parents,” she said. “They adopted me from China when I was three.”
“They look like nice people,” I said.
She nodded. “They are.”
“And you must make them very proud.”
She shrugged and sighed. “Maybe not so much,” she said. “My mother would rather I was curing cancer or delivering babies instead of solving murders.”
That made me laugh. “Some things never change,” I said. “When I told my mother I was going to be a cop, she felt the same way.”
That broke the ice. “Come on,” Dr. Hopewell said. “Let’s go get this done.”
Which we did.
Standing in on autopsies is tough, but it’s part of my job. Bereaved family members go to funerals. They remember the dearly departed in eulogies and they start the process of saying good-bye. For homicide cops, autopsies are a way of saying hello. What the M.E. uncovers in an autopsy is usually a starting point. By learning everything we can about the victims at the moment of death, we begin trying to find out what happened to them and why. And with unidentified victims, it’s even more basic than that. Before we can find out who killed them, we have to know who they are. And in this case, once we established the victim’s identity, we needed to ascertain if her death was related to the others we were investigating.
“All right, Mr. Craft,” she called to her assistant. “Let’s get started.”
The assistant rolled out a gurney. Rather than a sheet-draped body, the gurney held a sheet-draped box. Inside was what looked like a haphazard collection of bones. This would be an autopsy with some assembly required. One by one, Dr. Hopewell began removing bones from the box, examining the charred and chewed remains as she brought them out, and then laying them out in a rough approximation of a human form.
As I watched this painstaking process I was reminded of something I hadn’t thought about in years. As a high school sophomore, I had used my own hard-earned cash to buy myself a motorcycle at a garage sale. I had dragged it home in pieces, with the frame and tires in one section and with all the smaller parts stashed in an old wooden laundry basket. I had used all the mechanical skill my high school auto-shop teacher had been able to instill in me into trying to put the pieces back together.
My father died in a motorcycle accident months before I was born. Taking that part of my history into consideration, you could say that my mother wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of my having a motorcycle of my own. She didn’t come right out and actually forbid me to do it, but she watched the piece-by-piece reconstruction process with an undisguised lack of enthusiasm.
I’m a lot older now than I was then, and I also have a far greater understanding of what women will and won’t do in order to get their way. Standing in the Kittitas County morgue and watching the bones being laid out on the examining table, I wondered if it was possible that my mother had sabotaged the whole process. Once I finally got the bike back together, I never did make it work. Had my mother somehow managed to remove the one critical part that made it so I couldn’t get the engine to turn over? However it happened, I never managed a single ride.
Something similar seemed to be going on here. Dr. Hopewell could put the pieces back in some semblance of the right order, but no one was going to be able to breathe life back into that body. Whoever was dead was going to stay that way.
“Our victim is a female,” Dr. Hopewell intoned early in the process. “Late twenties to early thirties.”
“Wait a minute,” I objected. “I thought we already knew that. Isn’t that why I’m here?”
Dr. Hopewell gave me what my son-in-law calls “the stink eye” over the top of her surgical mask. “I believe the CSI people made their initial assessment regarding the victim’s gender based on other evidence found at the scene,” she said. “There was an engagement ring, a woman’s boot, and some odd fragments of clothing. But just because someone dresses like a woman doesn’t make her a woman. The bones do.”
I homed in on the engagement ring. That was strikingly different from our other victims, where no identifiable jewelry or clothing had been found.
“No robbery then?” I asked.
Dr. Hopewell shrugged, reached into the box, and removed the skull. As soon as she did so, I saw the other huge difference Ross Connors had already mentioned. This skull still had teeth. The teeth of all the other victims had been removed, if not prior to death, then at least prior to the time the corpse had been set on fire.
Dr. Hopewell examined the skull for a long time before she spoke again. “Lots of signs of blunt trauma here,” she said. “It looks like any number of them could have been fatal.”
“What about strangulation?” I asked. “Any sign of that?”
Dr. Hopewell shook her head. “None,” she said.
That was a point this victim had in common with the others. They hadn’t been strangled, either.
“Look at this,” Dr. Hopewell said. She used a hemostat to pluck a long strand of blackened material out of the box and held it up to the light.
“Rope, maybe?” I asked.
She nodded. “Restraints. Bag, please, Mr. Craft.”
Her assistant stepped forward with an open evidence bag and she dropped the strand of burned rope into it.
“What about hair?” I asked.
“Some,” she said.
“Enough for DNA testing?”
Dr. Hopewell’s eyes met mine. “We don’t do DNA testing,” she said. “And we don’t order it, either. Too expensive. My office can’t afford it.”
“Mine can,” I said with some confidence. It was reassuring to know that I worked for a guy who would spare no expense when it came to doing the job. “Forward what you have to the Washington State Patrol Crime lab. Tell them it’s a Ross Connors case.”
Dr. Hopewell nodded again and returned to her work and her narrative. “The victim was evidently lying on her back when she was set on fire. You’ll notice that the charring is far more pronounced on the top portions of the body than it is on the bottom,” she continued. “I would assume that whoever did this probably expected that the body would burn down to mere ashes, thus erasing all trace evidence. Unfo
rtunately for him, the fire went out prematurely.”
“Due to weather conditions?” I asked. In the Cascades in November, it’s either raining or snowing.
“The weather could be partly responsible in putting the fire out,” Dr. Hopewell conceded. “But remember, most of the people who turn to crime do so because they don’t have many other career options. They aren’t smart and didn’t pay attention in school. The guy who did this-and I’m pretty sure it was a guy-obviously had no idea that the human body is more than fifty percent water. He may have poured on all the gasoline he had, but it wasn’t nearly enough to do the job completely. Unfortunately for us, when the fire was out, there was still enough flesh on the bones to attract carrion eaters. That’s why the bones were scattered around the way they were.”
Suddenly the door to the morgue swung open. A woman who appeared to be in her mid-to-late-thirties strode into the room. She was five-six or-seven and solidly built. She looked tough enough that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she could take me in a fair fight.
“How come you started already?” she demanded of the M.E. “Connie was supposed to call and let me know when you got back. I wanted to be here for this. I was supposed to be here.” Noticing me, the woman stopped short in mid-tirade and stared at me. “Who the hell is this guy?” she added pointedly. “What’s he doing here?”
“His name is J. P. Beaumont,” Dr. Hopewell said. “He’s an investigator with the AG’s office, and this is Detective Lucinda Caldwell, Kittitas County Sheriff’s Department.”
“Homicide,” Detective Caldwell added unnecessarily, since I’d already figured out that much on my own.
It struck me that if Detective Caldwell thought the lady in the outside office was going to lift a hand to help her or anyone else, she was a lot more naive than your run-of-the-mill homicide cop ought to be.
“Glad to meet you,” I said. I wasn’t particularly glad to meet her, but I’m old enough to know that a certain amount of insincerity is necessary to get along in this world. “People call me Beau,” I said. “Or else J.P.”