by Jen J. Danna
For a moment the older woman simply stared at her blankly, her back ramrod straight and her only movement an occasional flutter of her eyelids. When she finally spoke, there was a tremor behind her words. “I don’t understand. ‘Victims’ families’? Was he mugged? Kidnapped for ransom? There was no request for money.”
“I don’t know why he was killed, but my team and I are hard at work on this case. Your son was found in a building down by the Central Square train station in Lynn. He was found with his wallet in his pocket and still wearing an expensive watch, so it doesn’t appear to be a robbery. But he’d been shot.”
The facade of cool sophistication crumbled slightly as the older woman’s hand rose shakily to cover her mouth and her eyes went wide.
“Can you tell us if your son was having any difficulties in his personal or business lives? If he had perhaps argued with anyone lately, or disagreed with anyone publicly or privately? Anyone at work or in the family?”
“No, not that I know of.” Bracing one hand on the desk, Evelyn Holt rose unsteadily on slender high heels and crossed the room to the circular brass bell pull installed near the door under an aged black and white photograph of a man in a dark suit and stiff white collar. As she pulled on the handle, the faint peal of a bell shimmered through the air somewhere down the hallway. Returning to her chair, she sank down, some of the starch leaving her as she sagged back weakly.
A moment later the door opened and Hilary leaned in. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Bring the Hennessy with the tea.”
The younger woman’s brow furrowed with concern, but she simply said, “Yes, ma’am.” She disappeared from sight.
Mrs. Holt took a breath, a deep, jagged inhalation. “Peter was an only child and we have no other family in this area anymore. It was just the two of us after cancer took my husband ten years ago. Peter was a good man and an even better son. Some might have considered him boring, but he was truly dependable and reliable. He was just never one to blow his own horn. I would consider that admirable, not boring.” She paused for a second, her fingernails digging into the arm of the chair as she fought for control. And won. “He was in finance, working at Rutherford and Fisk. Well-respected in his community and by his coworkers, but he wasn’t a risk taker. It wouldn’t be within Peter’s personality to have a problem with anyone that could lead to murder. He wasn’t aggressive enough.” A shudder went through her at the last word. “You’re sure it was … murder?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Leigh pulled out her notepad and pen. “What about his personal life? Friends, lovers … is there anyone who might wish Peter harm?”
“Peter was married once when he was in his twenties, but he and his ex-wife went their separate ways after only a few years. She was killed in a boating accident about six years ago. Nice enough girl, but she wanted more than Peter was capable of giving, would ever be capable of giving. But it scared Peter off marriage. He’s had a casual girlfriend for years—Cheryl Ballantine—but it’s not anything serious, more a relationship of convenience. Someone to take to company functions, that sort of thing. We Holts are an independent lot, and we’re usually happiest in our own company.” Her eyes closed briefly and Leigh imagined that she was realizing that her own company was all the family she had left now.
Hilary entered the room and set the tea tray down on the desk. She deftly poured tea into a delicate china cup for Mrs. Holt, adding a large splash of amber brandy from a crystal decanter before handing it to her. The cup rattled violently in the saucer, sloshing tea over the rim before the older woman set it on the desk. Raising the cup to her lips, she took a long sip.
“No, thank you.” Before Hilary could even ask, Leigh waved her off, and then waited until they were alone again. “Mrs. Holt, there’s another aspect of this case I wanted to discuss with you. The lack of evidence at the location where your son’s body was discovered indicates that he was killed elsewhere and then moved.”
The china cup clicked sharply as it lowered to the saucer. “Why would someone do that?”
“We’re looking into that. But does the location mean anything to you?” Leigh rattled off the address on Union Street, her heart sinking at the expression of confusion on the woman’s face as she shook her head.
“I’m not familiar with it. Peter spent all his time in Boston; there was no reason for him to go back to Lynn.”
Leigh drew in a breath to ask her next question when a single word struck home. “Go back to Lynn?”
“My family was from Lynn. I was born there. But my father died when I was a young girl. In the years following, as the Depression continued, as factories closed and the unemployment rate skyrocketed, my mother didn’t like being so close to the water and away from the center of town. She felt we were isolated and could be the target of a desperate laid-off factory worker or even a drifter. So we moved to Boston to be close to her family. When she remarried, we stayed. I still own the family home back in Lynn. We used to use it as a summer home for trips to the beach but it’s been over ten years since we’ve gone there. Lately there’s never been any reason for us to go, and certainly no reason for Peter to go on his own. It’s so … blue-collar.”
Some of Leigh’s sympathy dissipated as irritation rose at the thread of snobbery in Evelyn’s tone. “And so it was beneath him? Even though it was your hometown?” The questions slipped out before Leigh could stop herself.
“It was a different city when I lived there. Before the Depression, it was a booming business town. After the Depression, after the jobs disappeared, it became the lower-income area it is today. There’s nothing wrong with the working class. We just have so little in common with them. They don’t move in the same social or financial circles as we do. Peter would have had no connection to any of them.” At the sound of her son’s name on her own lips, the older woman swayed for a moment and laid her hand on the desk to brace herself. Leigh half-rose to her feet, but Mrs. Holt held out a hand to hold her back. “I’m sorry, but I find that I am unwell. You understand that this news has been a shock. I’d like you to go now.”
Leigh quickly crossed the room to the bell pull and gave it a quick turn. Returning to the woman’s side, Leigh leaned over her, genuine concern for the woman spiking at the sight of her pale face and dull, glassy eyes. There was no mistaking the genuine distress. She pulled a business card from her pocket and laid it on the desk. “This is my contact information. Please call me later and I’d be happy to connect you with the medical examiner’s office. Can I get you anything in the meantime?”
“No.” Mrs. Holt rose shakily to her feet, just as Hilary came through the door. “Hilary, please help me upstairs. I’m not feeling well.”
Leigh stood by helplessly as the younger woman wrapped an arm around Mrs. Holt and firmly grasped her elbow. The older woman leaned on her, practically slumping into her arms. Hilary started to lead her out of the room, Leigh following slowly behind.
Hilary looked back over her shoulder. “Can you find your own way out?”
“Of course.” Leigh followed them to the door and was nearly out of the room when the framed photograph on the wall over the bell pull caught her eye. Surprise stopped her dead in her tracks.
The photograph was of a man in his thirties, with slicked dark hair and a confident bearing. But she’d seen those oval spectacles and that shrewd gleam in his eye before. He sat, straight-backed, in a formal armchair, his hands folded neatly in his lap.
It was the man in the photograph with Babe Ruth. And he was wearing the ruby ring they’d found with the remains.
“Wait!” Leigh leaned around the doorway. Hilary and Mrs. Holt were several feet down the hallway, but Hilary stopped and half-turned. “Who’s the man in the portrait here? The one by the door.”
Hilary stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. “That’s Mrs. Holt’s father. Mr. Charles Ward. Now, if you’ll excuse us …” Turning her back, Hilary continued down the hallway, leading Mrs. Holt toward the back of the house.
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Leigh stepped back into the library, pulled out her cell phone, and snapped a quick picture of the portrait. Then she stood slack-jawed in front of the image of Charles Ward, her heart tapping like a military drummer against her ribs.
This changed everything.
CHAPTER EIGHT: FORESHOTS
* * *
Foreshots: the first distillates coming off the still containing methanol and impurities with boiling points lower than ethanol. For this reason, old-time moonshiners would always discard the first bit of shine that came off the still. This part of the run, known as the foreshots, smells like high-powered solvent, tastes even worse, and is potentially poisonous.
Monday, 4:03 p.m.
Boston University, School of Medicine
Boston, Massachusetts
“Right humeral head is 49.1 mm.” Matt waited while Juka noted the measurement before moving to the opposite side. He was just adjusting his calipers around the bone when the lab door opened and Leigh entered the room. Straightening, he set the instrument down on cold steel. “How did it go this afternoon?”
“You remember our discussion last night about how I don’t like coincidences?”
The hair on the back of his neck rose in response to her tone. “Yes.”
“I don’t like them. At all.”
The bottom dropped out of Matt’s stomach at Leigh’s tone. Something was very wrong. “What happened?”
“I just told Mrs. Evelyn Holt that her son was found shot in an abandoned storage space in Lynn.”
“And … ?”
“She was very upset. Her son lives alone, so she had no idea he was even missing. She still thought she was having dinner with him tomorrow night. So, it was a shock. But that’s not the important point. As I was leaving, I happened to notice a framed photograph on the wall. Black and white, circa early nineteen-thirties.” She pulled out her cell phone, called up the photo, and extended it. “If you hadn’t shown me that picture last night I wouldn’t have caught it, but this is the same man. And I don’t mean Babe Ruth.” She paused, as if unwilling to deliver bad news. “Charles Ward was her father. Holt is her married name.”
“No way!” Paul pushed back from his workstation and surged to his feet. “The two vics are related?”
“Grandfather and grandson.” She leveled an index finger at the remains. “Assuming this is Charles Ward, which we haven’t proven yet. But we’re considerably closer considering the man in this picture I just saw was wearing what looked like the ruby ring we found.”
Matt circled the gurney. “There’s no way it’s a coincidence if this really is Ward.”
“No way at all,” Leigh agreed. “And now we have a whole different case.”
“We sure do.” Kiko rose from the bench where she’d been studying the skull under the brilliantly lit magnifying lens. “We thought this victim was just a historical mystery. Now it has to be more than that.”
“This victim could be the key,” Juka said.
“Exactly what I’m thinking. His mother described Peter Holt as dependable and boring, not the type to enrage anyone to the extent that they’d want to murder him. So we’re left with the question of why he was killed.” Leigh slid her messenger bag off her shoulder and dropped it on Matt’s desk before turning to the remains. “I thought this case was going to be a fun challenge—a case with limited evidence and no witnesses, but no real rush because anything older than seventy-five years isn’t really considered a relevant police case. But if this murder is the key to Peter Holt’s death, the lack of evidence and witnesses could hobble us.”
“Hold on,” Matt said. “We have a witness. Or at the very least, we have a source of information.”
“Yes, we do. Whether he’s a witness or not remains to be seen.” She pulled a file folder out of her bag, flipping it open. “The original story came from Mr. Samuel Kain.”
“How old is he?” Kiko asked. “You said he’s in a nursing home, right?”
“Yes. He’s ninety-six.”
“Can we assume that at ninety-six he’s not responsible for your most recent victim?” Matt asked. “He wouldn’t have the means or the opportunity.”
“Or the strength to carry the dead weight of a body,” Leigh said. “Rowe did the autopsy this morning and he’s sure the body was moved after death. No way would a ninety-six-year-old man be capable of that.”
“But he could have been responsible for the man behind the wall.” Juka circled the table to join the group. “If he’s ninety-six …” He paused for a moment as his eyes narrowed and went unfocused. “He was born in nineteen-sixteen.”
“Charles Ward was last seen in February of nineteen-thirty-six, right?” Matt looked to Leigh, who nodded in confirmation. “Kain was twenty in nineteen-thirty-six.”
“He could have done it,” Paul said. “But did he have the skills to brick him up behind a wall? I suspect you won’t be able to ask him any of these questions.”
“It doesn’t sound like he’s lucid most of the time.” Leigh flipped through the pages in the folder. “I have some of the family contact names so it’s a place to start. But that’s for tomorrow.” She closed the folder. “Have you got anything on the remains to prove this could be Ward?”
“We’ve been at it all day, so we have quite a bit.” Matt motioned her over to the gurney.
Leigh tossed the file onto Matt’s desk and crossed the lab to join the team. “Was the preliminary information you gave us on Sunday correct? White adult male and all that?”
“Yes, although now I can be more precise with the age. And it fits right in with what we might expect if the remains really are those of Charles Ward. Pubic symphysis, the sternal end of the fourth right rib, and skull sutures all corroborate an age at death between thirty-seven and forty-five. Palate confirms race as white American. Victim height was approximately one hundred and eighty centimeters or five-foot-eleven.”
“That photo—he was shorter than Babe Ruth by several inches. Anyone know offhand how tall Babe Ruth was?” When the room stayed silent, Leigh’s gaze darted over the three male faces. “I thought you were good ol’ American boys. Don’t you learn these things at your daddy’s knee?”
Juka shrugged. “I was born in Sarajevo. For us it’s all about soccer.”
“Hold on, I’ve got this.” Paul broke away from the group to return to his writing station. He flipped his laptop open and in a few clicks and keystrokes had his answer. “Professor Google says Babe Ruth was six-foot-two.”
Leigh turned to Matt. “That would be about right, wouldn’t it?”
“Pretty much right on. You know, to definitively nail this down, we’re going to need to do DNA analysis. You have a living breathing relative right there. If we could get a DNA sample from her, we could compare it to DNA extracted from this femur. Wouldn’t hurt to take a sample from the grandson for comparison.”
“If we’re building this as the story, we should make it as complete as possible. I’ll let Rowe know you want a sample from Peter Holt. You talked about doing a test for determining the age of the bones. We need to know if we’re looking at the right time period. Maybe whoever this is has been in there since nineteen-twenty-eight, so there’s no way it could be Ward.”
“I’m not going to be able to get you so close that you’ll be able to differentiate over the span of less than a decade. This is a tricky time period. Some isotopes measure well in the last fifty years, post-bomb curve. Others, like carbon-fourteen, are supposedly good from fifty years, but really test at their best when it’s hundreds or thousands of years in the past. We’re in that awkward in-between time frame, but I’ll do what I can. We haven’t had a chance to pull samples yet because we’ve been looking at victim ID and cause of death instead.” He grinned when Leigh lit up like a kid on Christmas morning at his words.
“You have cause of death? I thought you couldn’t see any trauma?”
“I couldn’t then, squeezed into that tiny space with insufficient lighting and
the victim partially rolled over. But once we got decent lights and a microscope on the bones here all that changed. We have two locations of injury, so let’s start with the fatal blow. There are two score marks visible from this injury—one on the inferior surface of the left clavicle and one on the superior surface of the first left rib.” Matt picked up the clavicle from where it lay above one of two arcing columns of ribs. He turned it so the gentle double curves faced Leigh and ran his index finger past the upper edge of a depression that followed the line of the bone. “It’s right here, just beyond the groove of the subclavian sulcus, a muscle attachment point.”
Leigh leaned in, squinting. “It looks like some kind of abrasion.”
“Exactly. This will get a lot clearer when you see it under the microscope.” He moved to a microscope and flipped on the light source before adjusting the focus. “We’ve talked about kerf marks and how different tools leave different shapes. Knives and axes leave a V-shaped trough in the bone, although the kerf a knife leaves is much narrower. Saws tend to leave a squared-off trough.” The defect came into view. There you are. He paused for a moment, fine-tuning the focus before stepping back and holding out a hand, inviting Leigh to look.
She bent over the scope, examining the defect Matt had seen only moments before—a trough cut into the bone with smooth, squared sides. “He was killed with a saw?” She glanced up from the scope at him. “It must have been pretty narrow to fit in there.”
“I kind of set you up there. No, it’s not a saw. Saws leave a similar kerf mark, but because of their teeth, they leave striations in the bone. Do you see how smooth the sides of the walls are?”
Leigh turned to look again. “Now I do. Not a saw then.”
“No. Also note the physical characteristics of the kerf mark. Deeper on the anterior side—toward the front of the body—and shallower on the posterior side. Since we’re seeing the same type of kerf mark on both the rib and the clavicle, that suggests a blade that slants in on both sides.”