“And you don’t think she would have contacted her mother? Or other family members? Or her place of employment?”
He laughed, and I decided I didn’t like the look of his teeth. He said, “Thing about Cassie is, Cassie does what Cassie wants to. And if she wants to run off without telling anybody, including me, I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“I see.”
I made it a point of flipping through the papers and watched to see his expression, but his expression didn’t change. He seemed to be the kind of guy who liked putting one over on officialdom, whether it be a harbor-master or coast guardsmen or the local police.
I stopped flipping through the papers and said, “Could you tell us again the last time you saw Cassie?”
“Lunch, couple of weeks ago. At Jimmy’s Fine Catch, over in Falconer.”
“And you haven’t heard from her since then?”
“Nope.”
“And never saw her again?”
“Nope.”
I looked to Diane and gave her the slightest of nods, to prepare her for what was coming, and she gave me just the slightest nod in return. So much was riding on that quick little gesture, from her career to bringing me in on a case like this, to possible embarrassment for the Tyler Police Department, and up to and including seeing whether or not this charming slug across from me ever got justice.
I flipped another sheet of paper. It looked like he was trying to read it upside down. Good for him. I said, “What would you say, Mister Kosten, if a witness came forth to allege that two Mondays ago, he saw you and Miss Malone enter the Tyler Harbor Fishing Cooperative building, and saw you depart without her?”
His face flushed. “I’d say he was lying, that’s what.”
“So. Two Mondays ago, you were never in that building.”
“No!”
“And you were never in that building with Miss Malone.”
“No!”
Here we go. “And you’ve never been in that building with Miss Malone at any time?”
His face was even more flushed. “Never! Jesus, how many times do I have to tell you? Cassie put up with me but didn’t like fish that much. She’s never been in that building. Not ever.”
He looked to me and then looked at Diane and there was just the faintest hint in his eyes that perhaps he had gone too far. Maybe. But I thought I could tell what was going on there, that he was reviewing what he had done, how he had cut up the body and ground up the pieces and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned, and maybe, if there was something, that they’d be making an arrest, not talking, not then, they’re just bluffing, that’s all, keep cool, they have nothing. . . .
Now he smiled. “No, not ever.”
I looked at him and said, “How long did you know Cassie?”
“Eight, nine months.”
“A number of witnesses said that you had a rocky relationship. Many arguments.”
“So what? Who doesn’t have a fight with his girlfriend?”
I said, “Did you ever strike her?”
“Huh?”
“Did you ever hit her? Or punch her?”
“Never! And anybody who says that happened is lying. And you can count on that.”
I went back to the files for a moment, and then said, “You ever see her at work?”
“Huh?”
I said, “You said you never brought her to the co-op building. Did she ever bring you to the power plant?
He shook his head. “Nah, never. Once she wanted to do it but it was too much of a hassle. Had to do a background check to get in there, even for a quick visit. Give up your birthday and your social security number. Who needs crap like that?”
“Do you know what she did for work?”
“Yeah. Something in the health physics department.”
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Some sort of technician or something—hell, what is this? A final exam or something?”
I made a point of closing the folder. “No, it’s not. It’s an explanation of what’s about to happen next. You see, Mister Kosten, Cassie worked at the power plant in and around certain radioactive materials. She was constantly exposed on a daily basis to these radioactive materials. At no time was she ever in any danger or physical harm. In fact, the radiation that she was exposed to is strictly monitored and measured.”
His face was expressionless. I went on. “But radiation is a funny animal. When you place a radioactive material next to something else, that second material also becomes radioactive. Not as much as the source material but still, it’s a measurable amount. And it never goes away. Do you understand that? It never goes away. It’s always there. It can’t be cleaned. It can’t be scrubbed. It can’t wash off. It’s always there. Forever.”
Samuel shifted in his seat. I said, “And the funny thing is this, due to the different areas of the power plant where Cassie worked, the different types of radiation that she was exposed to, her exposure is unique. Like a fingerprint. It’s all her own.”
I opened up the second folder. “As you can see here, this is Cassie’s personnel file. And enclosed here are her radiation exposure records. Something like a DNA sample. If we can match the radiation that she received with something that she was in proximity with, we can then determine that she was there. Detective?”
Diane got up and left the room, and then came back in with a young man in a dark gray business suit. He had a large black case with him, like the old sample cases from traveling salesmen of years gone by, and he placed the case on the tabletop, and then opened it up. From inside the case he pulled out a small yellow metal box with a digital readout and dial, and a small black probe that was attached to the box by a black vinyl cord.
“Permit me to introduce State Police Detective Joseph Stevens,” I said. “In addition to his regular duties, Detective Stevens has also received training from the Homeland Security Department, and is a radiation health control officer. As you can see, he has brought a sensing device with him today. Detective Stevens, if you would.”
Holding the probe out before him, he swept it near Detective Woods, paying particular attention to her hands. There was the faintest click-click coming from the machine as he slowly did his work. Then he went over and did my hands, and there was the same result. Click-click-click.
When he was done with the two of us, he paused. I looked to him and nodded, and he went over to Samuel Kosten, whose face seemed to be suddenly perspiring.
When the probe reached the fisherman’s hands, the faint click-click started chattering, chattering loud and fast, until it was almost a roar. Detective Stevens made a point of reviewing the digital read outs and dials, and looking at Cassie Malone’s personnel record.
“It’s a match,” he said.
Samuel drew his hands away, like they had suddenly been burnt. “Of course there’d be a match! Hell, I was with her! I touched her! That doesn’t prove anything!”
I said, “Perhaps. But I believe Detective Stevens has one more place he wants to examine with his sensing device. Go ahead, detective.”
The state police detective went back to the large black carry case and reached in and pulled out something wrapped in light blue plastic. He let it fall to the conference table with an audible thud that made Samuel jump a bit. It was about a foot long, six inches wide. Stevens unwrapped it, revealing a screw-type piece of metal.
Samuel was studiously looking at his hands. I said softly, “If I’m correct, this is a piece of the disposal unit system at the Tyler Harbor Fishing Cooperative. It was removed earlier this morning and brought here by Detective Stevens. Let’s see what happens when he examines it, shall we?”
The probe went down to the exposed piece of metal, and the sensing device roared into action. Click-click-click it went, and it was amazing, just seeing Samuel Kosten’s face change color from fleshy red to ghastly white. The state police detective looked to me and then Diane, and then switched off his sensing device.
“Ano
ther match,” he said.
“Very good,” I said. “Mister Kosten.”
“Yes.” His voice was barely audible.
“You’ve said here and in other interviews with Detective Woods that your girlfriend, Cassie Malone, was never at the Tyler Harbor Fishing Cooperative. Yet we now have evidence that not only was she in the building, but that her body was processed through the disposal system. Combine that with the witness who put you and Cassie Malone at the fishing cooperative building just over two weeks ago, I believe there are some questions that need to be answered.”
Samuel murmured something.
“I’m sorry. None of us heard what you just said, Mister Kosten. Would you care to repeat it?”
He looked up at us, face still pale, eyes wide open. “I said, I think I want a lawyer. That’s what I want. A lawyer.”
I turned to Diane. “Detective Woods, I believe you have something to say to that.”
“Yes, I do,” she said crisply. “Mister Kosten, waiting in my office is an assistant attorney general from the New Hampshire attorney general’s office. She is prepared to make a deal. The deal is that when she comes in here, you give a full and complete confession to the murder of Cassie Malone, and the dismemberment and disposal of her body. In exchange for that deal, the death penalty will not be considered during your sentencing. You have thirty seconds to accept this deal. After the thirty seconds are up, the window closes, and you may get an attorney, for however much you can afford, or one that the state will provide for you, and take your chance in front of a jury, where the death penalty most assuredly will be considered in your sentencing. And if you think you can sway a jury with some nonsense story about self-defense or an accident, think of what will happen when the prosecutor goes into details of how you disposed of your girlfriend’s body. Mister Kosten, the clock is now ticking.”
He didn’t use all of his thirty seconds.
In a voice just above a whisper, he said, “I’ll take the deal.”
Later Diane took me to dinner in what she said was the best restaurant in Tyler, and which I didn’t think would make the top twenty list in my previous hometown, and after a second glass of wine, she said, “I can’t thank you enough.”
“Then don’t,” I said. “I’m just glad that Mister Kosten will now be a guest of your state prison system for the rest of his life.”
“Oh, that he will, though I’m sure that his defense attorney will scream like a stuck pig when he sees the videotape and reads the transcript of how the interview was conducted.”
I took a sip from my own wineglass. “The courts have said, again and again, that it’s permissible for police to lie while interrogating a suspect. You and I and that thoughtful state police detective may have approached the line, but we never crossed it.”
She sighed and looked at the wine bottle. A nice Bordeaux, it tasted fine after the day I had just gone through. She said, “We’re lucky that poor Cassie never explained the ins and outs of radiation to Samuel. If she had, he would have known that entire demonstration with the Geiger counter was just so much bullshit. That nothing she was ever exposed to would turn up in an examination like that, and that her exposure would just measure one thing. One thing only. Amount of exposure. Nothing like a DNA analysis. If Cassie ever told him anything, he would have walked out of there laughing.”
I said, “Perhaps Cassie did tell him about it. And he promptly forgot. He seems to be that type of person.”
“True. We were very, very lucky.”
“How’s that?”
“What you said earlier. He came that close to committing the perfect crime, without leaving any evidence behind. You said that there’s always trace evidence left behind at a crime scene. Always. Well, not this time.”
“But there was,” I gently reminded her.
“The blood traces? Not usable and you know it. Nope, Samuel got out of there the night he killed her, clean as a whistle.”
I said, “I wasn’t thinking of the blood traces. No, he left something there, before he left. Something that is going to put him away for life.”
“And what’s that?”
I picked up the wine bottle, poured us each a fresh glass. “He left a trace of a trace. His guilt. Something that will never go away.”
She laughed. “Okay. I stand corrected.”
I put the bottle down, picked up my glass for a toast.
“To justice,” I said, clinking my glass to hers.
She smiled, returned the gesture. “To guilt.”
FIVE SORROWFUL MYSTERIES
BY JULIE HYZY
CLAIRE CORBETT LOOKED UP AS DANNY WHEELED IN the first corpse of the day. “What’ve we got?” she asked.
Haltingly, he read the report. “Female, age forty-four, found dead in the basement of Tus . . . cany Bay Nursing Home—”
“Tuscany Bay?”
Danny’s head bobbed up. “Did I say it wrong?”
“No, no, you did fine. But didn’t we just have another body from there?”
Danny’s brow furrowed. Dutiful, if a bit slow, he’d been her assistant for the past twelve years. She often wondered if he could make more money flipping burgers at McDonald’s than flipping bodies at the morgue. At least at McDonald’s there might be a chance for promotion.
“The day before yesterday,” Claire prompted.
Recollection dawned on Danny’s face. “Oh, yeah. The old guy. He was from that place, too. But he, like, lived there. This lady was one of the nurses.”
“Weird,” Claire said, her voice showing the strain as they shifted the heavy-set female onto the autopsy table. “Maybe we should have taken a closer look at Mr. whatever-his-name-was, huh?”
Danny might not have been particularly perceptive, but he was always eager to please. Especially in trivial matters. Before Claire could get him to reposition the body, Danny had hurried to the files and dug out documents from two days before. “His name was Mr. Pah . . . try . . . zo.”
Claire looked over his shoulder. “Petrizzo.” She pointed. “No need for an autopsy. Eighty-seven years old, being treated for congestive heart failure, emphysema, and early stage Alzheimer’s.”
Danny looked confused. “Why did they bring him here? Don’t the nursing homes just use hearses to go to the funeral place?”
Claire waited until Danny had settled the corpse’s head onto the small wooden stand that kept it steady. “They brought Mr. Petrizzo here because he died on public property. He hadn’t taken his wallet, so no ID. They brought him here until we figured out who he was.”
“I still don’t get why we didn’t do an autopsy.”
“He was reported missing fast enough that we were able to make a positive ID and get his medical history,” Claire said. “No evidence of foul play. Looks like he just died. And from what I heard, he picked a beautiful place in the park, with a view of the gulf.”
“That’s nice,” Danny said, smiling.
“So what about our girl here?”
Danny consulted the notes again.
“Com . . . complained of pain to the abdomen and head. Her super . . . supervisor said she vomited and said she was going to rest for a while. She declined medical assistance and said she thought she had the flu.”
“The flu?”
Danny looked up. “Not the flu?”
Claire sighed. Whenever anyone got sick, they called it the flu. The symptoms this woman complained of were less influenza and more gastro enteritis. But neither should have killed her. “I doubt it,” she said. “Was she under doctor’s care for anything?”
“High co . . . co . . . ”
“Cholesterol?”
Danny nodded.
“Hypertension too?”
Another nod.
“We may be looking at a heart attack or stroke. Let’s see what our victim can tell us from the inside.” She lowered her plastic eye protection and picked up a scalpel.
Danny lowered his eye protection as well and situated himself near t
he corpse’s head. Claire clicked on the tape recorder and spoke into it, providing some of the body’s specifics. She added, “Lividity on right side, consistent with reports of victim being found in a reclining position.”
Claire pressed hard with the scalpel, carving a large Y into the waxy chest. She then stretched it open. Layers of fat made the task more arduous, but as she sawed away ribs, she noticed an enormous volume of blood, much more than she’d expected. With the body tilted on a stainless steel bed, much like a large cookie sheet, fluids ran downhill into the waste sink. Still, there was so much, Claire ran the hose into the body cavity to help clear it out.
Speaking into the microphone again, she noted the profusion of blood and speculated about the root cause. “Massive intraperitoneal hemorrhage. No evidence of trauma. Possible liver cirrhosis.” She shook her head even as she said the words. Although the liver was oversized, the volume of blood was still too much to be explained away that easily. As she spoke she searched for evidence of liver cancer, a ruptured spleen, any type of aneurysm, or pancreatitis. “Nothing present to explain a hemorrhage this extensive.”
Scalpel in hand, Danny cut a long curve from behind the corpse’s left ear, around the back of the head, to behind the right ear. He worked the skin up over the crown of the skull until he turned the scalp inside out over the face.
Claire continued to remove organs from the cavity, weighing them and slicing specimens for further tests. “I’m ordering a tox screening on all these,” she said.
Danny was preparing to start on the skull with the bone saw. Squinting at the doctor, he straightened up. “How come?”
“A hunch,” she said. “Look at this.” She held up the heart.
Danny came around to see. Even though he might not understand, Claire liked to instruct as she worked. She counted on Danny having been around autopsies enough to catch on. He did. “Huh. I thought you said this was s’posed to be a heart attack.”
“Not likely,” she said. “At first I thought maybe. What with the nausea and pain she complained about. But those symptoms are non specific; they could be almost anything.” Claire kept talking, both for the benefit of the recorder and to sort out her thoughts. “The sudden onset of trouble, the hemorrhaging, and the fact that she’s dead with no explanation make me think twice about this one.”
At the Scene of the Crime Page 12