The Christopher Killer

by Alane Ferguson

  They were only twenty feet away from Sheriff Jacobs when Cameryn heard Justin call out to her father.

  Patrick stopped and Cameryn stopped with him. Turning abruptly, her father said, “Yes?”

  The wind had been blowing, which caused Crowley’s hair to fall across his forehead in tousled locks. He jerked his head at Cameryn. “Sir, do you think this is wise?”

  “Excuse me, I’m doing my job,” Cameryn replied, annoyed by his condescension. “I’m assistant to the coroner, remember?”

  Crowley kept his gaze on her father. “I’m sure you already realize that this isn’t a natural—we’re dealing with a murder. I think it’s too strong for the young lady to see.”

  “Young lady?” Now she was indignant. “Are you serious?”

  Her father’s eyes flashed. “What I do with my own family is none of your concern, Deputy, although you seem to think otherwise. My daughter is here in an official capacity. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got work to do. I suggest you do the same. Come on, Cammie.”

  Justin dug his hands into his pockets. “All right, all right, I understand, but I just need to speak to Cameryn for just one—”

  “I said we’re done!” Her father bit off every word.

  Patrick marched ahead and jerked up the yellow tape, allowing Cameryn to duck under first. With a smooth motion he slid under as well, leaving Justin on the other side. She wanted him to stay there. There was not enough room in her head to deal with murder and Justin Crowley so she let the yellow ribbon do the work for her. Thoughts of Justin would stay on the other side of her mind, cordoned off by the strip of plastic tape. There was no more room for games.

  “Don’t get too close to the body until I tell you,” Patrick warned. “From now on everything counts.”

  Cameryn said nothing. She was glad he couldn’t hear the hammering of her heart. Twenty feet away a murder victim lay in the grass, and Cameryn was part of the case, a part of the team that could put the pieces together. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. She could feel her hands begin to tremble so she clenched them, hard. This was what she’d been working for, what she’d wanted. Blowflies buzzed through the grass like tiny vultures while birds chirped overhead, ready to eat the flies that ate the girl. Cameryn steeled herself now; she was a link in the chain that would hang the criminal who did this, and she was glad.

  And then she saw the body.

  The first thing she noticed were the shoes—regular Nikes like Cameryn and all her friends wore, but the girl’s feet seemed especially awkward, as if she were a ballerina dancing on pointe. The victim’s hands had been tied behind her with duct tape, and her fingers, white as marble, curled like claws. Long, brown hair ended in the middle of her back in a perfect line, as if it had been combed after death, and her face was hidden by a fringe of wild grass. She wore jeans and a T-shirt. A bracelet twinkled from her wrist. From her size and the kind of clothes she wore, Cameryn guessed her to be about her age. About her age and dead. A chill spread inside her and she looked at the grass near her feet.

  “Took you long enough,” was Sheriff Jacobs’s greeting. “I didn’t touch the body, didn’t even go into her pockets. We need to go by the book.”

  “Let me get some pictures before we move anything. Cammie?”

  At the sound of her name, Cameryn snapped her head up.

  “Start with color.”

  “Oh. Right. Sure.”

  Numb, Cameryn reached into the knapsack and brought out the Canon. Focusing on the shoes, she began to snap one picture, then another, like an automated robot. Emotions surged through her in rapid succession—horror, fascination, fear, curiosity, and yet most of all anger. It welled up like bile in her throat—no one deserved to die this way, trussed like an animal and left in the wild. Snap, snap, snap. She began to take the pictures more rapidly now.

  “Did you get an ID on her?” Cameryn’s father asked Jacobs.

  “I already told you I didn’t touch her. Procedure, remember?”

  “Uh-huh. I think I need to bag her hands before we do anything else. I don’t want to lose trace evidence.”

  Patrick placed a medium-sized paper bag around the victim’s hands and secured it with a large rubber band. He had to use paper, Cameryn knew, because plastic could cause any trace evidence to degrade.

  More pictures, and then Cameryn switched to the black-and-white. Her father and the sheriff talked and wrote down notes. Deputy Crowley was beginning to sweep the grass with a metal detector, his brow furrowed in concentration. Police from Durango were on the way to help secure the crime scene, Jacobs told them, and they’d have more folks sweeping for whatever they could find. The three women stood at the yellow tape line, watching, like cattle behind a fence. Her father put on gloves and searched the girl’s back jeans pockets for ID but found nothing; finally he declared it was time to roll the body over. By now, Deputy Crowley had joined them. He tried to look at Cameryn, but she refused to meet his gaze.

  “Ready?” her father asked.

  Jacobs nodded and placed his hands carefully under the corpse’s shoulders while Justin put his hands beneath her hip. Her father held the head.

  “One, two, three!” Patrick said. “Careful, now.”

  The body was stiff, in full rigor, and as it rolled the hair fell forward to cover the face in a chestnut-colored web; gently, her father removed it, and then his eyes grew wide. “Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, God, please no.”

  And then Cameryn saw the perfect oval face and the eyes staring blankly, and she felt her hand fly to her mouth and tears blurred her vision until she couldn’t see anymore.

  “Oh, my God!” she cried. “That’s Rachel!”

  Chapter Six

  THE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S BUILDING looked nothing like Cameryn expected. Located at the south end of Durango, it was an unassuming red-brick rectangle with a flat gravel roof, as plain and utilitarian as a Laundromat. Adjacent to the back end of the Mercy Medical Center, the building had two metal garage doors and only one small window facing the parking lot. Cameryn would not have even noticed it save for the small sign that read, in plain block letters, COLORADO STATE MEDICAL EXAMINER. Turning the car around, her father backed the station wagon until it almost touched the garage door and tapped his horn twice. He’d called from the road and they knew he was coming.

  “You sure you’re all right?” her father asked her again. “The way you’re just sitting there, staring into space, well, I’m starting to think…Why not pass on the autopsy, Cammie? Go get yourself something to eat. You proved how useful you can be with Robertson but…this isn’t about me anymore. I want to do what’s best for you.”

  “I’m fine,” she said flatly.

  “I’d believe it except for the fact that you haven’t spoken two words to me the whole ride down.”

  “That’s because I’ve been thinking.”

  “About Rachel?”

  Cameryn nodded. What else would she be thinking about?

  “It’s always worse when you know them, baby,” he told her softly, and she could feel his hand on her arm, firm and comforting. “The question is, do you still want to do this job?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ve got to learn to detach. It’s the only way to survive.”

  “I understand,” she said. She looked at him, tears welling in her eyes. “But how am I supposed to do it?”

  “By remembering that if we do our job right we’ll find out who did this and bring him to justice. We’re the last line of defense for the victim. You’re the one who said the dead tell their stories to us.” He put his finger under her chin and pulled her face up. “We’ve got to keep it together for Rachel’s sake. Focus on that, and you’ll get through.”

  “I keep thinking that this is the last—” The words caught in her throat. She swallowed, then went on haltingly, “The only thing I can do for her now.”

  Her father gave a faint nod and said nothing more. Turning from him, Cameryn pres
sed her forehead against the car window’s cool glass and watched as a band of small brown birds pecked the asphalt with their yellow beaks. This death felt so different from the bloated stranger in a bathtub. The old, the sick, the drug addicts—they died. She didn’t like it but she could accept it. But this was someone she knew in life, and there was no way to make sense of it.

  Only last week Rachel had been talking about moving to Durango so she could attend college there. She’d graduated in June but, without enough money, had been forced to stay another year in Silverton to save up.

  “I figure I’ll have enough in my account by August,” she’d said. “Rich kids get a pass but me, I got to work for it. But the way I figure, in less than a year I’ll be living in the dorms and out on my own. It’s all in front of me,” she’d said, eager, “you know?”

  The only thing that had been waiting for her was a white body bag. Wrapping her in a plain cotton sheet, Cameryn and her father had slipped Rachel into the vinyl carrier and zipped her up like garments in a suitcase. They’d wheeled her to the back of the station wagon, the wheel protesting loudly, and then they’d slammed the door shut. For some reason the slamming of the door had made Cameryn want to cry. She hadn’t, though, remembering a trick Rachel had taught her when she’d burned her palm on the griddle. “If you think you’re going to cry, then look up at the ceiling,” she’d instructed Cameryn. “No one will ever know you’re crying if you just look up.”

  The birds outside the car window blurred. Cameryn looked up just as the garage door rolled open. A thickly muscled black man in green medical scrubs waved for them to back in, and moments later her father parked and the man unlatched the station wagon hatch.

  “Hey, Pat,” he said. “Man, we’ve already had a bunch of calls on this one—media’s going wild. Oh, I’m supposed to tell you Sheriff Jacobs and his deputy are on their way and he’s sorry they got delayed. What’s the vic’s name?”

  “Rachel Geller, eighteen,” her father said. “Hiker stumbled on her body at approximately oh–six hundred hours. Best guess is she died around midnight. From the petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes I’d say a ligature strangulation. There’s bruising on her neck, too.”

  Shaking his head, the man said, “Poor child. Let me give you a hand and we’ll get her inside.”

  Once again, Rachel’s body was lifted onto the gurney. Cameryn put her hands under the bag and helped to lift it, and even through the white vinyl she could tell Rachel was softening. She must have been entering the second stage of rigor mortis.

  “Whoa, wait a minute, who’s this?” the man asked when he realized Cameryn was sharing the load.

  “I’m sorry, I should have introduced you. Ben, this is my daughter Cameryn. Cameryn, this is Ben Short—he’s the diener.”

  Cameryn knew a diener was someone who assisted the pathologist with his most gruesome jobs, including the repackaging of organs into the body cavity and washing the corpse before sending it on to the funeral home. It was a tough job, but Ben seemed almost jovial until his dark eyes bored into hers. The smile drained from his face. “She can’t come in here, Pat. This is a homicide.”

  “Cameryn’s my assistant,” her father answered. “Don’t worry, the job gives her clearance. She’s got a good eye and I’m grateful for her help.”

  “Okay, if you say so.” Ben still looked doubtful. His eyes seemed to register her jeans and pink hoodie, her dirty sneakers and her plastic mood ring. She wished she hadn’t worn her hair in a ponytail. “Just for a heads-up,” Ben said, “Moore’s in a foul mood today. So—it’s Cameryn, right?”

  She nodded.

  “A word to the wise: Stay out of his way and keep quiet. The man does not suffer fools.”

  “That works ’cause neither do I.”

  As Ben’s face split into a wide smile, she noticed he had beautiful teeth. “So you’re trash-talking, are you? That’s good, girl. You’ve got some spunk. But we’ll see how you do when the dragon master shows. All right, you two—follow me. We got to take this body to the chop shop.” He squeezed his eyes shut, then looked at Cameryn apologetically. “Sorry—sometimes we use gallows humor around here. What I meant to say is we’ll take Ms. Geller down to the autopsy suite. We got one stop to make first.”

  Since her father and Ben could handle the gurney, Cameryn hung back as they wheeled Rachel down the long hallway. The building looked like a regular office, with plain brown carpeting and motel art hanging on the walls. But the air had a faint, oppressive odor, the same smell she’d encountered at the Silverton Motel—except this time it was masked by a layer of disinfectant. Still, the patina of death overshadowed the scent of Lysol and bleach. Cameryn wondered if it had seeped into the building’s very walls.

  A door was open on her right, and as she passed it she peered inside. It was a small room. Three brown chairs with metal legs were arranged in a half-circle. There was a shelf holding a box of Kleenex. It made her shudder to think of those who would go in there to wait for news that was never good, and her mind flashed to Rachel’s parents. Who would tell them their daughter was dead? Don’t go there, she told herself. Not now. Another door on her left said HISTOLOGY LAB and a third, unmarked door remained closed. Her father and Ben were waiting for her in the hallway.

  “Here we are. Our first stop,” Ben announced. He knocked the bar handle with his hip as he stepped into a room so small it seemed no bigger than a closet. Cameryn crowded in beside him while her father stayed in the hall.

  Ben said, “First, we x-ray. Some MEs—that’s what we call the medical examiner—some of them x-ray the body after it’s been processed. Down here in Durango we film straight through the bag. Makes it easier when they’re still wrapped up nice.”

  The machine was large, with a movable arm that ended in a flat plate. “Won’t the bag’s zipper screw up the shot?” Cameryn asked, imagining a jagged, impenetrable line running across the picture.

  Ben looked pleased. “Your daddy’s right—you are a smart girl. But this here body bag is done in what’s called an envelope-style, and what we got to do is put the arm of the machine between the deceased and the bag. Then I’ll zap her with both an anterior and a posterior shot, which means we’ll be able to see everything just fine.”

  She tried not to wince at the casual way he referred to “zapping” Rachel, but she knew people in the forensics used humor to cope. Someday she, too, would be cutting into bodies, and it wasn’t hard to imagine she would make light of it. Right now it felt too raw, too real. “Why an X-ray?” she asked, trying to keep her mind focused. “Won’t the autopsy itself show everything we need?”

  Ben blew out a breath. “Well, there are lots of things the X-ray’ll catch that the plain eye could miss. Now, if this was, say, a gunshot victim, and he got hit right under the right armpit”—Ben touched the area beneath his arm—“that bullet could end up just about anywhere inside the body. I’ve found ’em all the way down in the groin and shot up in the head and in all sorts of strange locations. So if we do the X-ray first, then that bullet will show up on film like a big old star, which means Dr. Moore won’t have to wade through the guts to find it through the trajectory path. Make sense?”

  “But she wasn’t shot.”

  “We don’t know anything for sure. If she was strangled the X-ray might reveal some damage to the interior structure of the neck. Now I’m gonna ask you to wait outside for safety reasons—radiation and all of that. In a few minutes I’ll wheel her back out and we’ll go on down to the suite. This won’t take long,” Ben told her, and the door clicked shut behind her.

  For a moment her father didn’t say anything and Cameryn thought he wasn’t going to. But he leaned close and whispered, “How you holding up?”

  “I’m still here.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “It’s hard, because one minute I feel like I’m blown away by the process and the next I feel like I’m being punched in the gut. I keep thinking she’s only one year older than I am, and it could have been me ou
t in that field. What are her parents going to do without her? What am I going to do?”

  Patrick looked at the floor. He wore heavy leather work boots, and he kicked his heel against the brick wall. “You never know what fate has in store for any of us.”

  “Fate?” Cameryn glared him and at the thought. “Evil trumps fate. I mean, a week ago Rachel told me her life was all in front of her but now she’s got nothing.” Suddenly she clutched her father’s hand. “You think there’s a heaven?” she asked. “Right? You believe, don’t you?”

  “Of course there’s a heaven,” he said, pulling her close.

  “What about hell?”

  He waited a beat before saying, “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe it’ll be like your mammaw says, with all that fire scorching the bad people for eternity, although up until now I thought hell is what we give each other here on earth.”

  “Well I hope Mammaw’s right,” Cameryn said fiercely. “I hope whoever did this will burn forever!”

  Patrick didn’t answer this. Instead, he rested his head on the brick and searched the ceiling. “I can’t even imagine what the Geller family is going through right this very minute. Jacobs said he’d go tell the parents. They were at a friend’s cabin and there was no cell-phone service so they couldn’t call home. The Gellers didn’t even realize Rachel was gone.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. He looked older somehow. The skin beneath his eyes creased more than she remembered while his neck was seamed beneath his ears. Pressing his back against the wall, he crossed his arms and sighed, and she did the same. There was a sudden weariness that seemed to wrap around her bones and then she realized the energy it took to keep her emotions in check. It was hard to remember that Rachel was no longer Rachel—she was now evidence in a crime.

  The door swung opened as Ben pushed the gurney out feet-first, executing a perfect right-face into the hall. “All right folks, we’re going to those big double doors. I gave Moore a buzz and he says he’ll be there in a few minutes. Right this way.”