by Karen Pullen
“One-third of homicides are never solved,” I said.
“Yes. And this case particularly concerns me. It’s bizarre.”
We were interrupted by the deputy carrying the grimy jug of gopher bait in an evidence bag. He showed the jug to Anselmo. “Found this in the barn, sir. Contains strychnine. Actually, she found it.” He pointed to me. “I’m going to take this to the lab, sir.” He marched off, holding the bag away from his body.
“That illustrates why I asked for your help,” Anselmo said. “Good work.”
I demurred modestly. He consulted his notebook. “Other than the victim, there were seven adult guests staying at the B&B. Three staff. Forty-one wedding guests.”
“Are the wedding guests part of the pool of suspects?”
“Good question. Far as we know, none of them went inside the B&B. But they may have seen something. I’m going to have my investigators talk to them. Problem is, most of these folks are neighbors or cousins or buddies with someone in our department, and that could prejudice the investigation. Even me—my wife’s sister-in-law was the caterer. I need an impartial investigator.”
His wife. Of course he has a wife, why wouldn’t he? My Anselmo-fantasy balloon fizzled limply to the floor and I ground it beneath my shoe.
“When the autopsy’s done, I’ll see you get a copy,” he said. “We already know what killed her, so I doubt we’ll learn anything else useful.”
CHAPTER 7
* * *
Monday Late Afternoon
Hogan called as I was pulling away from Rosscairn Castle B&B. He not only had Gia Mabe’s home address, he told me where she worked—at a biotech startup named Psylex. “They specialize in drugs that cross the blood-brain barrier. She’s the comptroller.”
So Gia, the smart, obsessed, spurned girlfriend, worked at a company that made nervous system drugs. “Can you find out more about what they do? See if anyone mentions strychnine,” I asked. Hogan could find anything. The man was born to perform research.Too bad he’d applied those talents so wrongly, so effectively, in his search for a soul mate.
I checked my watch. Gia should be at work.
The walnut walls and marble floors of Psylex Corporation’s lobby had been designed to impress. Through a mile-high window the afternoon sun flooded onto a purpley-blue orchid on the receptionist’s desk. I felt out of place in my black leather jacket, loose enough to hide my holstered SIG. My hair was being particularly obstreperous. I’d run out of frizz control cream and had wrestled it into a braid of sorts. I looked different from the other women passing through the lobby in their tailored suits, neat hair, and comfortable shoes. My ankle boots were awesome but the receptionist couldn’t see them from where she sat.
“Ms. Mabe’s in a meeting,” she said. “Is she expecting you?”
Not exactly. “I’ll just wait,” I said.
She frowned as though she couldn’t think of a tactful way to get me out of her lobby. “Our workday ends in a few minutes.”
“Mine ends around midnight,” I said, making small talk.
“Oh, really? What do you do?”
Okay, smart mouth, think of something. Something not a lie. Searching, searching . . . “I work for the state.”
She raised an eyebrow and turned to her monitor. I leafed through the magazines stacked on a table next to me. Pharma, medical, packaging, test, bioprocess, chemical. Finally, at the bottom, a readable publication, Scientific American. I was deep into an article about smallpox and bioterrorism when I heard a hiss.
“What are you doing here?” Gia’s face matched her attitude—pissed. She wore a black suit, almost nondescript until you noticed the exquisite black beading around the collar and cuffs. Her blond-streaked hair slithered silkily around her face.
“Oh good, you remember me then. Can we talk?”
“Whatever are you thinking, coming to my workplace?”
“It seemed the quickest way to reach you.” I said this softly.
She sniffed, and turned toward the elevator. “Follow me,” she said. To the receptionist, “It’s okay, Rachel. We’ll be in my office.”
She punched a button and the glass box rose, lifting us above the lobby all the way to the top floor. I followed her down a long hall to a corner office nearly as big as my entire house. It was furnished with a soft wool carpet, leather sofas, and shelves filled with binders.
“What do you want? I have very little time for this.” Impatiently, she jiggled her foot, clad in a pleated-toe ballerina flat.
I opened my notebook and leafed through each page. I was practicing the studied pause, a stretched-out wait, to imply that time is required, lots of time, if a murder was to be discussed. “I understand you had a relationship with Mike Olmert at one time.”
“He’s the love of my life. There will never be anyone else.” Her slightly crossed blue eyes stared into mine, not really seeing me, looking somewhere else—into her virtual reality, the only place this star-crossed love currently existed, according to Mike.
I decided to go along. “How long have you two been—you know, a couple?”
“Years. Here, I’ll show you.” She tugged open her briefcase and hauled out a black leather photo album. “Go ahead, look through it. Take your time.”
The album was really a scrapbook. The first part contained memorabilia from their dating period—a pressed corsage, movie ticket stubs, a photo of the two of them dressed up for a big evening. A florist’s card with “To my funny Valentine, from Mike.” Not much, after all. Then pages and pages containing many photos of Mike, alone, interspersed with odd bits—the corner of a pizza box, soda pull-tabs, discarded envelopes with his name on them. Stuff she’d apparently pulled out of his garbage. She’d scored a few pictures of the two of them together, and even an email from him, asking her to leave him alone, decorated with little heart stickers.
She’d scrapbooked her stalking.
“Gia, we met at Mike and Justine’s wedding. Doesn’t that mean he loved her?”
Gia’s perky nose wrinkled with distaste. “Oh, he had to marry her. She was blackmailing him.”
“Enlighten me, would you?”
With that brief prompt, Gia launched an explanation as convoluted and twisted as her thinking. She practically spit out the words—Mike had a criminal past, he spent time in jail, he lied about it on the firefighter’s application, Justine found out and if she told on him, he’d lose the job he loved, he was a reformed man, the only way to shut Justine up was to marry her.
Or kill her? The glint in Gia’s eyes, the way she gazed into the distance as she recited her venomous story, convinced me this woman was losing it, maybe already had lost it.
“Now that Justine’s dead, will he marry you?” I asked.
“He’s lying low right now. He has to pretend to grieve,” she said gravely.
“Are you in touch with him?”
She shrugged. “We text some but don’t see each other. Not yet. He has to let time pass, to protect my reputation.” She dimpled up at this thought. “Here, help yourself.” She pushed a bowl of M&Ms toward me.
“Justine was murdered.” I tilted my head to get her attention.
“You think I did it?” Her eyes roamed the room. She popped a green candy into her mouth, and her foot resumed its jiggle.
“You just told me why you might have.”
She frowned. “You don’t understand.”
An understatement. “What time did you arrive at the Castle B&B on Saturday?”
“A bit early. I wanted to get pictures.” She opened her handbag, took out a camera, and fiddled with it. “Here, look.”
She had taken at least twenty pictures of Mike, from different angles. He didn’t appear to be posing or smiling for the camera; they were long shots with a telephoto lens. In a couple he held up his hand, like he was shielding himself from her.The pictures were time-stamped, beginning at twelve twenty-three, and every minute or so thereafter. If the time hadn’t been reset on the camera,
her camera had been under the tent for the crucial half-hour before the wedding was due to begin. Who else had been there? Or not been there? The pictures might hold a clue.
“Those are great. Can I get copies? Email them to me?”
“No. He’s mine.” She frowned and clutched the camera to her chest. “Find your own boyfriend.”
“He’s so handsome, Gia. You are very lucky. Just let me look one more time?”
She held out the camera but didn’t let go of it. She peered into the tiny screen along with me, advancing it with her thumb. I felt her breath and a strand of silken hair brushing against my cheek, smelled the chocolate candy. Pretty Gia, locked in a metallic cage of high-functioning insanity. I wondered if anyone ever cracked her reality.
Together we watched. Some pictures had been taken through a window—Mike helping Kate attach her corsage to her wrist. Kate inserting his boutonnière into a buttonhole. Mike speaking to a little girl lying back in a wheelchair, the child of Evan and Lottie Ember. Talking with his stepfather, the minister Scoop. Sitting next to his mother, his face half-hidden by her brown straw hat. Kissing Delia’s cheek, shaking Webster’s hand. Mike on the phone, arms folded across his pleated shirt. Evan Ember standing next to him, in a despondent slump. That one was almost artistic, the two men framed by the scarlet fall-blooming camellias. She took six in a row of Evan and Mike, ending at
1:05. Then came the picture taken when I was sitting next to her—Mike, his two groomsmen, and Scoop Scott ready to play minister, all looking past the camera, down the aisle, waiting for Justine. These pictures provided a decent alibi for her, since I was there too and could vouch that they were correctly time-stamped.
Since the wedding day, Saturday, Gia had taken three more pictures of Mike. One, a photo of Mike beside a car, was time-stamped this morning. “You took this today?” I asked. “Where?”
“I take one every day, either at his apartment or where he works. Sometimes at the gym. He’s amazing, isn’t he? I bought him that red shirt.” Her face lit up with a shining smile.
“Everything is working out for us.”
“Gia, were you actually invited to this wedding?”
She grabbed the scrapbook and camera and backed away. “What are you implying? He wanted me there.”
“Convenient of Justine to get herself murdered.”
“I didn’t do it! Nobody liked her—she was a control freak! He despised her! She drove him crazy!” By this time she was shrieking, and her assistant opened the door to see what was wrong. Gia waved her arms, shooing us out of the room. The assistant scuttled backward, and I followed.
So she didn’t want to be friends. The feeling was mutual.
CHAPTER 8
* * *
Tuesday Mid-Morning
I hated paperwork but it wasn’t difficult. No need to be creative or even particularly grammatical, just type fast. I had three reports to write after last night’s rounds with Fredricks. We started at a pizza place where the manager had a little side business in pot. Then Fredricks had a tip on an out-of-the-way barbeque joint selling some unique items not on their menu, where I picked up a chocolate milkshake and an assortment of pills of unknown formulation. Finally, we went into a bar and grill where I traded a hundred-dollar bill for a packet of crystal and two lemonades. Enriching the local economy, one tax-free transaction at a time.
Mid-morning, Anselmo called to tell me that the medical examiner had completed the autopsy of Justine’s body. “He wants to show us something.”
“Huh? Something about the body?”
“He won’t say. Says we have to see it. Meet me there in an hour.”
Curious.
I made a quick call to Wyatt and asked him who took video during the weekend. He remembered that Kate Olmert, Mike’s sister, had used a video camera at the rehearsal dinner. I called her and left a message, then headed out.
It was time to visit a corpse.
Anselmo was already in the lobby when I entered the brick building housing the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. We got into the elevator. “Ten,” he said, and I pushed the button. He was rubbing his hands together, shifting his shoulders, taking deep breaths.
“You’re antsy,” I said.
“It’s nothing.”
“Autopsies bother you?”
“Maybe, a little. The smells, mostly.” He put his hands in his pockets, took them out. Loosened and straightened his tie. His face was putty-colored. I hoped he’d last through whatever the medical examiner wanted to show us.
“Bite your tongue, hard,” I said. “It will keep you from thinking too much.”
“Thanks,” Anselmo said. “Good advice. I’m fine, really.”
I knew the ME, Allen O’Brien, from his appearances in court. He was often called to testify in a homicide trial, and recently North Carolina had had a couple of sensational ones. He was around sixty, bald, with rimless glasses and a red bow tie, and I swear he clicked his heels when he shook my hand. He handed us gloves, gowns, and masks, and after we were suited up, he led us down the hall. On the way, we passed a room full of students crowded around a gurney. The sound of a saw made me wince. Anselmo looked greenish; I hoped it was the lighting.
A wall of windows brightened the general autopsy room, empty except for equipment. I expected Dr. O’Brien to bring Justine’s body out on a gurney but he pulled two chairs together and motioned that we should sit.
“You’ll get a full report, of course,” he said. “But I’ve never seen a case like this. That’s why I asked you to come, because it might have a bearing on your investigation.”
I couldn’t imagine what it could be. I thought about abnormalities that might show up on autopsy. Something upside down or inside out? Duplicate organs? Certainly medically interesting, but not pertinent to the investigation. We already knew about the poisoning, so it wasn’t that.
“Related to the cause of death?” Anselmo asked.
“No. Let me explain.” He stood and clasped his hands behind him as though addressing a class of medical students instead of two impatient cops. “Have you ever attended an autopsy?”
We both nodded yes but he told us anyway. “I remove all the trunk organs in a single block. Then one by one, I isolate individual organs, remove and dissect them. The esophagus, the lungs, the heart, larynx, thyroid. Then I turn the block over, and take out the liver, spleen, intestines. Stomach, pancreas. The last organs I look at are urogenital—kidneys, bladder, uterus and ovaries in females, testes in males.”
He bounced up and down on his toes. “I stopped halfway through with this one. After removing the upper organs, I turned the block over. I examined the viscera carefully, to get a mental picture before I started cutting. And do you know what? Something was missing. Let me show you. Wait here.”
Dr. O’Brien left the room. I looked at Anselmo. The suspense and the smells emitting from the nearby sink were doing him no good. “He’s enjoying this,” Anselmo said. “He’s showing off.”
I was about to agree when O’Brien returned pushing a metal two-tiered gurney. On the top shelf, a body; on the shelf below, a large tray. Both were covered with white plastic sheeting. He leaned down, lifted the tray and slid it onto a dissection table.
“These are the abdominal organs of your poisoning victim.” He pulled the sheet aside.
The pile of innards was messy, red with blood and white with fat, slick and slimy, but they didn’t look human the way the outer body does. Psychologically they were perhaps easier to look at than a cracked-open corpse. The smells weren’t bad—like disinfectant, though slightly sweet, and musky. I peeked at Anselmo. His face was still pale, but he was hanging in there. I couldn’t tell whether he was chewing on his tongue.
“What’s missing? Anyone? Anyone?” O’Brien chuckled at his little joke.
I peered closely at the pile of viscera. The liver was obvious, a dark red slab. The kidneys were easy since they were kidney-shaped. Anselmo pointed to a pinkish thing. “Wha
t’s that?”
“Gall bladder. And there’s the pancreas, and the spleen. All this below is intestines.”
And that was all that was below. “Where are the girl parts?” I said.
“Bingo!” said the doctor. “She hasn’t any. No ovaries, no uterus, no fallopian tubes.”
“Surgically removed?” I asked.
“Nope.” His eyes crinkled as he grinned under the mask.
“Never had any. She’s a he. Well, she used to be, anyway.”
I was speechless.
Anselmo wasn’t. “You sure? How do you know?”
“This gal’s had surgery, vaginoplasty. A surgically created vagina. It’s anchored to this ligament.” We both looked where he pointed. “Once I discovered that, I examined the body for other modifications. Breast implants, of course, but I also believe she’d had facial recontouring. See this?”
He turned around to the gurney and folded the sheet back to expose Justine’s head and neck. Her muscles had relaxed into a flat softness. Her face was still and doll-like, with perfectly sculpted features. Someone had removed the pearl beads from her hair. Dr. O’Brien gently tipped her chin and ran his gloved finger along a thread-like scar.
“Okay,” I said, “got it.” I needed to process this revelation. Justine was transsexual. It hit me, how much her gender colored my thinking about her. I’d had an unvoiced connection with her. We were single American women, about the same age. Now I didn’t know what to think. I knew nothing about her. Nothing.
“He became a she in every way,” Dr. O’Brien said. “Whoever did this surgery knew what they were doing. In my opinion, no one would know without a DNA test.” He handed us each a copy of the autopsy. “She was a healthy person. She would have lived another sixty years.”
I thanked Dr. O’Brien profusely. He seemed happy, his day had been interesting, he’d surprised us with medical sleuthing.