The Cold Blue Blood: A Berger and Mitry Mystery

by David Handler

  Besides, she did not want to go running to the Deacon. Not unless she absolutely had to.

  From the moment she sat down at her desk, she was totally focused on her caseload. Nothing interrupted her concentration.

  On this morning, Des was zoned in on the Torry Mordarski file. The shooting had attracted considerable media attention. When a young, attractive white woman was found shot to death in the woods, it inevitably did. And, just as inevitably, there was considerable pressure to find her shooter. It had been Des’s top priority for several weeks. She, Soave and up to a dozen uniformed troopers had expended hundreds of man-hours on the search. But it had grown cold. And Des could not accept that.

  So she pored over the ongoing investigative report one more time, sifting carefully through the details from beginning to end. The autopsy findings continued to puzzle her. In Des’s experience, when a pretty girl died violently it was about sex. Always. But Torry was clean. No traces of semen. No vaginal secretions. No bruises or abrasions. No bites. No saliva. No scratches. No tissue or blood under her nails. No hairs not her own. No one else’s fingerprints were found on her skin. There was no evidence of human contact whatsoever. When toxicology had come through a few days later, it showed no trace of drugs or alcohol in the dead girl’s system.

  A botched robbery attempt? Not a possibility. The first troopers on the scene had found her purse on the front seat of her 1987 Isuzu sedan, which had been parked nearby in a gravel parking area. There had been ninety-seven dollars and credit cards in her wallet. And no other discernible tire marks in the gravel.

  No one had seen or heard a thing. The body had been discovered by a jogger early the following morning. Time of death was estimated to be between midnight and one A.M.

  After a painstaking search of the primary crime scene, technicians had recovered one .38 caliber slug embedded in the base of a tree eight feet behind the victim. Based on the trajectory of the entrance and exit wounds—the shot had entered her frontal lobe from above, angled sharply downward through the temporal lobe and exited through the cerebellum—it appeared that she had been seated while the shooter had been standing. A laboratory examination of the twists on the slug yielded characteristics consistent with it having been fired by a Smith and Wesson .38 caliber revolver. No similar markings had been found on any .38 slugs recovered in any other major crimes listed in the computer’s database. Nor was there a record of any killings of a similar nature that had gone unsolved in the state in the past three years.

  A search through the victim’s car revealed a few fibers caught in the wheel hub of the spare in her trunk. The fibers were a coarse wool-nylon blend typically used for inexpensive blankets. No blanket had been found at the scene, but a few matching blanket fibers were found snagged on twigs on the ground near the body. The underbrush and dead leaves adjacent to the body appeared to have been flattened, consistent with a blanket having been laid across them. It was Des’s belief that Torry had come to the Reservoir with the intention of meeting a man she knew. She had carried the blanket from her car into the woods and stretched out on it. Instead of joining her, he had shot her. Then he had taken the blanket with him because it might contain traces of his hair or semen from previous trysts.

  Her killer had been careful. But he had left one piece of transient evidence behind—a man’s partial shoe print had been discovered in the damp earth next to Torry’s body. A plaster cast of the impression had been made. The pattern of the sole was consistent with that of a Vibram sole used on work boots made by numerous manufacturers. The depth and length of the impression indicated that the wearer had weighed between 180 and 200 pounds and wore a size eleven or twelve shoe. Based on this information a common formula was applied to yield the wearer’s probable height—in this case, six foot two. But Des had never placed much stock in this formula. She felt it misled an investigator just as often as it proved helpful. There were, after all, plenty of short men around who were overweight and had big feet.

  She had not released the shoe print information to the media. Nor had she revealed that two of the primary crime scene technicians had come down with a vicious case of poison ivy. One of them had experienced such a severe outbreak that he’d gone to see his doctor, who had prescribed betamethasone dipropionate in cream form. On a hunch, Des had canvassed the area’s clinics and drug stores for any adult males who might have sought similar treatment or medication in the days immediately following the murder. The search had proven fruitless.

  Torry Mordarski had worked two jobs—cashier at an Ames in Waterbury and barmaid at the Purple Pup, a roadhouse on the outskirts of Meriden. She’d had male admirers at both places—the Purple Pup’s owner, Curtis Wilkerson, and her immediate supervisor at Ames, Wade Stephenson. She had spurned both of them. However, each man could account for his whereabouts at the time of the shooting. Wilkerson was behind the bar at the Pup. Stephenson had gone to a microbrewery in Willimantic with three friends, where they remained until closing at 2:00 A.M. Wilkerson had a gun permit—for a Baretta .9 mm semi-automatic. Stephenson had none. Neither man had a police record.

  The crime scene technicians had scoured Torry Mordarski’s apartment for evidence, but the search had turned up nothing. No trace of a man was found there. Not even in the girl’s vacuum cleaner bag. In fact, her apartment was uncommonly free of personal effects. She’d kept no address book, no letters, no photographs. There were no business cards, no scraps of paper with phone numbers scrawled on them. They did find bank statements and cancelled checks. She’d had a checking account with Fleet Bank that held a current balance of $271.16. No savings account. She’d had a Visa card that she used sparingly—to buy gasoline at the Amoco minimart down the street or toys and clothing at Ames, where she enjoyed an employee discount. She had never fallen behind on any of her payments. And currently owed nothing. Her wardrobe was modest and casual. She owned no furs and no jewelry of any value. In fact, she owned nothing that cost more than a hundred dollars. A check of her phone records revealed a handful of toll calls—to the Ames in Waterbury—but no long-distance calls whatsoever.

  Des had started to think Torry Mordarski had had no life at all. Until she’d knocked on the door of Torry’s next-door neighbor, Laura Burt, who turned out to be the dead woman’s closest friend. And Des’s most valuable source of information.

  It was from Laura Burt that Des learned that Torry had dropped out of high school in New Britain when she’d gotten pregnant with Stevie. Torry’s mother had not spoken to her since, according to Laura. Laura was reluctant to volunteer why—but one look at Stevie’s dusky coloring gave Des a pretty good idea. She sent Soave to talk to the mother, figuring she’d be more candid with a white officer. She was. She told him that Torry’s ex-husband, Tyrone Dionne, was “ghetto trash.” Dionne’s own family likewise had little use for him—he was presently serving time in North Carolina for armed robbery. Neither the Dionnes nor the Mordarskis would consider taking even temporary custody of the boy. It was, Des felt, quite deplorable. Only Laura Burt, who’d frequently baby-sat for him, seemed at all concerned about what would happen to him. Des referred her to the Connecticut Department of Children and Families, the agency that would be charged with placing him in a foster home.

  Whoever killed Torry Mordarski had also destroyed the life of an innocent child. That was one reason why the case bothered Des so much.

  Soave had worked the North Carolina angle. There was a possibility that Torry’s killing had been a reprisal by a criminal associate of her ex-husband’s. Someone he had cheated out of money or ratted out in exchange for a reduced sentence. But neither the arresting officer nor the prosecuting attorney could offer any encouragement in that direction. Tyrone Dionne was not known to operate with a crew. He had not given evidence against anyone. There were no vultures circling him. He was a loner.

  Des, meanwhile, had kept after Laura Burt. Even induced her to adopt Sir Mix-a-Lot, a long-haired adult male. It was Laura, with extreme reluctance, who
finally turned Des on to the boyfriends. They were older men, married men. Laura suspected that some money had changed hands, although she insisted that Torry was not a prostitute. Torry had never had more than one of them at a time. And she had never told Laura their last names.

  Laura knew them only as Al, Dominick and Stan.

  Al and Dominick had been somewhat careful. Just not real careful. They had been worried about their wives, not the law. Al had bought Torry a new sofa bed. Laura, who was home during the day, had let in the deliverymen. They were from Bob’s Discount Furniture, she recalled. By tracking down the delivery invoices and matching them to Torry’s address, Des was able to determine that the sofa bed had been purchased by Albert Marducci, the embattled state legislator from Waterbury. Al Marducci was already under fire for having been stopped twice for DWI in the last six months, the second time after leaving a strip club. Des had shown the legislator the courtesy of questioning him at his office, rather than his home, so as not to humiliate him in front of his wife. Yet she still found him to be belligerent and deceitful. He claimed he had never heard of Torry Mordarski. He claimed he had never bought a sofa bed at Bob’s. The man was pure sleaze. He had even busted a move on her—invited Des out on his boat for a little nude sunbathing some weekend.

  “Since you have no connection to the case,” Des had stated coolly, “you won’t mind if I give this element of my investigation out to the press, will you?”

  He was real cooperative after that. Admitted he’d known Torry. Claimed the relationship had ended two years prior. Gave Des a full accounting of his whereabouts the night of the murder. He could not have been more helpful. Although he did phone his old pal Carl Polito, her district commander, to complain about her insolent manner. Polito, in turn, had called her into his office to deliver a stinging lecture on the meaning of the word “professionalism.” A rebuke she had suffered in smoldering silence. In the end, it had all been for naught. Al Marducci had been home with his wife and family the night of Torry’s murder. Two neighbors had seen him out walking his dog at around midnight.

  Dominick had been easier to find. On several occasions Laura had seen him pick Torry up at her apartment in his electric-blue vintage Corvette Stingray. The Viagramobile, Torry had called it. Laura had no trouble recalling his personalized license plate: 65 RAY. Soave tracked the plate to Dominick Salerno, a principal partner of the Jolly Rubbish Company in Middletown. Yes, he had known Torry, Salerno admitted. But their affair had ended a year ago. He had been in Boca Raton the night it happened. And could prove it.

  Neither man had expressed the slightest bit of sorrow over what had happened. Their only concern was in protecting their own reputations. To them, Torry Mordarski was a piece of human Kleenex. Someone to use up and discard.

  This, too, Des found deplorable.

  The trail led her to married boyfriend number three, Stan. But Stan had been much more careful than the others. He had never come to Torry’s apartment. Laura had never seen him. Did not know what kind of car he drove. In fact, knew virtually nothing about him. The owner of the Purple Pup, Curtis Wilkerson, thought he might have seen Stan once, on a rainy night a month or so prior to the murder, but he was unable to give Des any description of him beyond the fact that he’d been white and middle-aged.

  Des liked Stan for it. She liked him because he had gone out of his way to leave no traces of himself. It was almost as if he’d been planning to kill Torry. But why? And how on earth was she going to find him? Who was he? Where was he?

  She was still poring over the report, looking for answers, when Soave came sauntering up to her desk with his morning coffee. At age twenty-eight Soave was, in Des’s opinion, a man who simply could not outgrow being someone else’s shorter, twerpier kid brother—no matter how hard he tried. And he did try. He had lifted so many weights to pump up his chest and arms that he bordered on reptilian. He had grown a scraggly moustache that he thought made him look older but actually made him look like a petulant little boy with fuzz on his lip. He dressed in dark suits that he thought whispered class but actually shouted low-rung and cheap. If Des had seen him on the street, she would have made him as a limo driver for a funeral parlor. He had picked up the nickname Soave from a Latino rap song by Gerardo that had been a hit back when he was coming up.

  “Morning, loot,” he grunted at her. Calling her loot—as opposed to Lieutenant—was his own little way of refusing to acknowledge her authority over him. Rico was not comfortable dealing with Des. She was not his mother. She was not his girlfriend. She was someone who filled a role in his life no woman had ever filled before.

  “Back at you, wow man,” she said. “How’s Little Eva?”

  “You mean Bridget? She hates me.” He showed her the fresh set of cat scratches all over his hands.

  “You’ve got to be more gentle with her, Rico,” she informed him, not unkindly. Spoon-feeding was required with Soave. He was a work-in-progress, not unlike one of her strays. “A feral cat is like a woman. You work your way into her good graces and she will be loyal to you until the day she dies.” Not that he understood a thing about women. He’d been dating the same girl since high school, a manicurist named Tawny. Here is how Des had described her to Bella: picture Lisa Kudrow, only dumb.

  “You still wigging on the hooker?” he asked, glancing over her shoulder at the report. “It’s ice cold.”

  “Torry was not a hooker, Rico.”

  “Well, she wasn’t exactly Suzy Homemaker either.”

  “Um, okay, I’m thinking there must be like some kind of point to this,” she said, an edge creeping into her voice. Sometimes Des ran out of patience.

  Soave stuck out his lower lip, chastened. “No point, loot. No point at all.” Red-faced, he returned to his desk.

  Des went back to scanning the report, chewing on her own lower lip. Maybe he was right—maybe she was wigging on it. But with good reason. It wasn’t just that Torry Mordarski was a young single mother who had fallen through the cracks and had paid dearly for it.

  It was Stan. He frightened Des. He was calculating. He was careful. He was good.

  And he was out there somewhere, roaming.

  CHAPTER 5

  “FRANKLY, I WISH DOLLY had rented the place to someone else,” Kinsley Havenhurst declared flatly. “Nothing against you, Mitch. I just would rather have seen the carriage house go to someone we know.”

  Mitch was seated in Havenhurst’s law office, where he had come to sign the lease and pass inspection. Which he clearly did not. When they’d shaken hands, Havenhurst had told him that everyone except his late mother called him Bud. It was the only cordial thing that Dolly Seymour’s lawyer said to him. Bud Havenhurst was too well bred to be overtly hostile, but he was chilly. Clearly, he saw Mitch as the point man for an invading army of loud, pushy New Yorkers bearing cell phones. Clearly, he felt threatened by him.

  His law office was over an art gallery in the center of Dorset’s Historic District. The building had once been a grain and feed store. The office was quaintly old-fashioned, with a roll-top desk, potbellied stove and decidedly nautical air. There was an aged brass ship’s barometer mounted on the wall. Also a number of maritime charts and architectural drawings of sailboats. Havenhurst’s Yale Law School diploma hung in the outer office where his secretary sat. She evidently walked to work. There had been only one car in the rear lot where Mitch parked—a mud-splattered Range Rover.

  “To be perfectly honest,” Bud Havenhurst added, “I’d rather she simply hadn’t rented it out at all.”

  Bud Havenhurst was in his early fifties and he struck Mitch as someone who had always been rich and good-looking and sure of himself. He was tall and tanned and sleekly built, with closecropped salt and pepper hair, a long, patrician blade of a nose and a big, forward-thrusting chin. He wore a blue button-down shirt, striped tie, khakis and a pair of scuffed Topsider boating shoes. He had an air of privilege about him. Also an air of authority. He was Somebody in Dorset.

&nb
sp; “She did seem a bit reluctant,” Mitch allowed.

  “Young fellow, it’s important for you to understand the caliber of individual you’re dealing with here. Dolly happens to be the product of an exceedingly distinguished American family.”

  “She told me about how the Pecks founded Dorset.”

  Bud sat back in his sea captain’s chair, narrowing his gray eyes at Mitch. “Did she tell you that her father was the U.S. ambassador to Japan during the Carter Administration? That her grandfather, Harrison, was a U.S. senator from the state of Connecticut from 1948 until 1960? That her great-grandfather was chief justice of the state supreme court? That her great-great-great grandfather was a vice president of the United States under Benjamin Harrison?”

  “Why, no. She didn’t.”

  “My own family has been here since the early seventeen-hundreds,” Bud pointed out loftily. “The Havenhursts came here to fell the white oaks. Milled them for barrels and boats and sent them back to England, where lumber was scarce. As the colonies grew, the Connecticut River became a major shipping artery. Dorset grew into a bustling port. General Washington slept here en route to New York after taking command of the American Army in April of 1776. And that’s no joke. Lafayette marched through here with his troops. His men slept out on Peck’s Point before they were ferried across the river.” Bud got up out of his chair and went over to the window and looked out at the carefully preserved mansions lining Dorset Street. “Nowadays, this is a place for people who want to live somewhere lovely and quiet. Somewhere that isn’t as trendy and touristy as Newport or the Hamptons. I happen to serve as town counsel. I’ve fought hard to preserve Dorset’s small-town flavor. And, believe me, it has been a fight. We’ve had to keep out the condo developers, the hamburger franchises, drive-through windows, motels … Every day there’s a new fight. And every day we take it on—because Dorset is a gem. And we want to keep it that way.” Now he turned away from the window and stared down his long narrow nose at Mitch. “Dolly Seymour is a gem, too. And she’s on her own now. And I don’t want to see anyone take advantage of her.”