by James Hayman
‘Would you mind calling your friend at Vessel Services anyway? Maybe we’ll get lucky.’
Maggie told him she’d call. McCabe’s mind went back to the scene. The BMW was backed up close to the edge of the pier. Why? Was the killer getting ready to toss the body overboard? If so, why hadn’t he? Maybe it was already frozen into the trunk and he couldn’t get it out. Maybe he was interrupted by someone walking by or someone on one of the boats. Again, a possible witness.
‘Have we learned anything about Goff?’ he asked.
‘Not much. Full name’s Elaine Elizabeth Goff. She’s a lawyer at Palmer Milliken. Twenty-nine years old. Single. Lives’ – Maggie stopped herself – ‘or possibly lived at 342 Brackett Street here in town. Car’s brand-new. Initial registration dated the first of December.’
‘We think that’s Elaine in the trunk?’
‘That’s what we think. Officially, she’s still Jane Doe.’
‘You tried reaching her?’
‘No listed number. Probably only uses a cell. I tried her extension at Palmer Milliken and got voice mail. I’m waiting on the Call Center to come up with a number for the cell. I asked Tom Tasco to track down her landlord.’ Tasco was one of the unit’s senior detectives.
McCabe took another deep breath of cold air. His head was clearing, but he still felt a little sick. ‘Do we know what killed her?’
‘Can’t tell from looking.’
‘No obvious wounds or trauma?’
‘Some marks that look like bruises, that’s all.’ Maggie paused. ‘They don’t look lethal. She’s lying on one side with her knees tucked up tight, so you can’t see that much of her.’
‘Could be a wound on the other side.’
‘Could be. Also her hair’s covering her face, so you can’t see that at all.’
‘Terri on her way?’ Terri was Terri Mirabito, a deputy ME with the chief medical examiner’s office in Augusta, an hour and some away. Because she lived in Portland, Terri was always the first choice when a body turned up at night in the city. She was McCabe’s first choice anyway. He couldn’t stand her boss, Maine’s chief medical examiner, Donald A. Fry, a.k.a. the Donald. A pompous know-it-all who never missed an opportunity to demonstrate to McCabe and his detectives how dumb they were and how smart he was. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mac, it’s obvious what happened here, isn’t it? No, Donald, it’s not obvious. Also he had that habit of calling McCabe ‘Mac.’ It was a nickname McCabe loathed. Even when Fry was right, as far as McCabe was concerned, Fry was wrong.
Maggie nodded. ‘Yeah. I called her cell. She was on her way out for a big evening with some new guy I think she has the hots for.’ McCabe smiled. He enjoyed the image of the short, bubbly pathologist nursing a case of ‘the hots.’
‘Where was she headed?’
‘A night at the opera.’
McCabe smiled again.
‘No,’ Maggie said with a sigh, ‘not the Marx Brothers. The Kirov. They’re singing at Merrill. I caught her just as she was parking her car. Tough ticket to get. She wasn’t real happy hearing from me. Anyway, she said she’d let her friend know and then run home and get her kit.’ Maggie glanced at her watch. ‘Should be here any minute.’
‘Okay. Let’s take a look,’ he said. In spite of Maggie’s concern for his boozy breath, McCabe felt sober, his head clear at last. He slipped under the crime scene tape. ‘You coming?’
‘I’m coming.’
He headed toward the car, watching where he walked, shining Officer Ly’s light on the concrete platform of the pier, flashing left and then right, trying to spot anything that shouldn’t be there. There was nothing visible. Not even any tire tracks on the dirty patches of ice and snow. Too cold. Too hard. He reached the car. He peered in through the open driver’s side door. Moved the light around the interior. Looked clean and new. He noted the key, still in the ignition. No other keys on the ring. No house keys. No office key. Just a plastic membership tag for Planet Fitness, a gym over on Marginal Way. He knew the place. Kyra went there. He wondered if they’d ever run into each other. McCabe squatted down and moved the light slowly across the floor and under the seats. He could just see the edge of a small plastic bag pushed under the driver’s seat. He pulled it out. Pure white powder. Possibly coke. Jacobi could run a field test to be sure, but it looked like either Jane Doe or her killer was a user. Or maybe a dealer? He pointed it out to Maggie. She shook her head, indicating she hadn’t seen it before. Either way, probable cause was established. They just had to let Vodnick know what he’d seen.
A couple of scenarios ran through McCabe’s mind. One, Goff drives here to meet someone. Maybe her dealer. He gives her the coke. She hides the bag under the seat. They have a disagreement. He gets pissed, kills her, and takes off. Possible. But if that was the case, why would the body be naked? Maybe the dealer demands sex for payment. She says no. He rapes her. Panics and kills her and takes off either in a second car or maybe a boat. Again possible, but it didn’t feel right. Not the way the car was positioned in the most public place on the pier. Unless he backed it up to the edge after he killed her to dump the body overboard. So why didn’t he? It wouldn’t have been frozen yet. He could have tossed her into the harbor easily and driven off. Instead, he packs her into the trunk and leaves her. No. None of that felt right. More likely somebody brought the body here already stuffed in the trunk. Somebody who wanted the car to be noticed. Who wanted the body to be found.
Finally McCabe flicked off the light and stood up. He took a deep breath and walked toward the trunk, preparing himself for the first few seconds he’d spend alone with the victim. The cop and the corpse. A unique and strangely intimate relationship. Just the two of them. It didn’t matter to McCabe who the victim was. A gangbanger or an innocent child. Either way, for him, it was this moment of shared intimacy that turned what for some cops was merely a job into an obligation. A sacred trust. To find and punish the killer, to right the wrong, to balance the scales. The Lord may someday get His turn – but for now, McCabe believed, vengeance is mine. I go first.
In the dim light of the open trunk, the woman’s frozen body shone back at him bluish white, her flesh waxen. She was on her side. Head down. Knees and arms curled in. Like the tuck position divers squeeze into after they leap from their boards. Yet even in this position there was something familiar about her.
He flipped on the Maglite and suddenly found himself looking at a body he knew better than his own. Sandy. His faithless bitch of an ex-wife. The one who’d walked out not only on their failed marriage but also on their only child. How many times had he silently wished her dead? Now, somehow, she was. Dead. Frozen. Stuffed in a trunk. What in hell was she doing here? It made no sense.
He moved the beam to the thick waves of dark hair covering her face. It was longer than he remembered, but he hadn’t seen her in a while. He knew he shouldn’t touch any part of her body, not even the hair, until Terri got here. Too bad. Jacobi had his pictures, and there was no way he wasn’t going to look. He felt around in his pockets for the plastic ballpoint he was sure was there. Grasping it by one end, he slid it under her hair, wondering briefly if, like her limbs, the hair would be frozen stiff. It wasn’t. He lifted it off her face, squatted down, and shined the light in. Couldn’t see much, but it was enough. The curve of her lip. The tilt of her nose. Worst of all, one lifeless blue eye staring out. Still mocking him even in death.
‘McCabe, are you alright?’
Maggie’s voice. He didn’t answer. Just raised his left hand and waved her off. The rational side of his brain told him the body couldn’t be Sandy. But if not Sandy, who or what was it? Some kind of delusion? Brought on by what? Too much booze? Too much emotion? Maybe he was going nuts. In his dreams he’d seen her dead often enough. In some of those dreams he even killed her himself. But always with a gun. Never like this. Never without marks. Never left her to freeze in the trunk of a car. Not even a BMW. Though, to be sure, Sandy would rather be found in a Beemer than a Ford
.
He wondered again about calling Richard Wolfe, the psychiatrist. Maybe it was time. He’d first seen Wolfe a little over a year ago, right after the end of the Lucas Kane affair, after Casey’s first one-on-one encounter with her mother in more than three years. It was Kyra who urged him to go. He’d been getting the shakes and having trouble sleeping, and when he did sleep, his sleep was disturbed by violent nightmares that more often than not included Sandy. Kyra thought he might be having a nervous breakdown. Wolfe told him no, it wasn’t a breakdown. Just the aftermath of a high level of stress combined with anxiety about Casey and Sandy getting together again. He prescribed Xanax, which seemed to help, and though Wolfe recommended continuing therapy, either with him or someone else, McCabe decided that was that. He wouldn’t take it any further.
‘McCabe. You feeling okay?’
‘Yeah. Fine.’
‘You don’t look fine.’ Maggie was directly behind him. If he moved too fast he’d knock her right in the water. Once again, he felt her hand on his shoulder. ‘Can you talk to me?’ She was using her gentle voice. So effective in interrogations. All the bad guys fell for it. ‘McCabe?’
He didn’t answer. Instead, he examined the body one more time, finishing up by running the Maglite along her leg, searching for the small mole on the outside of her knee that should have been there. It wasn’t. At least not where he could see it.
No, this wasn’t Sandy. He was sure of it now. Just someone who looked like her. To prove it, even to the doubting little voice that inhabited his brain, he took out his cell and punched in her number in New York. It rang. Once. Twice. Four times. Hello. You’ve reached the Ingrams. Sandy and Peter. Please leave a message, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
‘Sandy, it’s me. McCabe. Call back as soon as you can. It’s important.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘Oh, it’s not about Casey. She’s fine.’ He clicked off and tried the house in East Hampton and then her cell. Same result both times. He left messages.
No, he told himself again, this wasn’t Sandy. She was in New York, safe and sound. On a Friday night she and her rich-as-Croesus husband were probably at the theater. We request that everyone in the audience please turn off all cell phones for the duration of the performance. Thank you very much. Or maybe they were home lying in front of the fire in their West End Avenue co-op, not answering the phone because they were otherwise engaged. He pictured Sandy having sex with Ingram. Without warning, the image changed and it wasn’t Ingram on the floor by the fire, wrapped in the familiar scent and feel of Sandy’s naked body. It was McCabe himself, thrusting into her over and over in a ferocious surge of desire. He was shocked by how much he still wanted her. Equally shocked by how much he hated her. It struck him that the need to exorcise the ghost of Sandy once and for all might be the real reason he kept pushing Kyra toward a marriage she wasn’t ready for. That was something he’d have to deal with. Something he’d have to resolve. He loved Kyra too much to use her that way. Perhaps he should stop seeing her. At least until the exorcism was complete. He wondered what a therapist like Wolfe would say about all this. He wondered if he could even tell Wolfe. But maybe he would. He sure as hell couldn’t tell anyone else.
As suddenly as it began it was over. Even the little voice in his brain accepted the fact that the woman in the trunk wasn’t Sandy. She was a look-alike, most likely one named Elaine Elizabeth Goff. Yes, the resemblance was strong, but that’s all it was, a resemblance. Maggie was still behind him, her hand still on his shoulder. ‘I’m okay,’ he said.
‘I’m not even going to ask.’
McCabe focused the light once more on the body in the trunk, looking this time not for moles but for evidence. For something that might tell him who had killed this woman and how. He noticed reddish marks on the one wrist and one ankle he could see, suggesting she’d been physically restrained prior to death. He saw the bruising Maggie mentioned on the visible portions of her legs, buttocks, and arms. Maybe she’d been beaten as well. Or maybe the marks were nothing more than freezer burn. He hadn’t seen any bruising around her face, and there was no sign of blood, either on her body or in the trunk.
Four
‘Why is it you two always find your bodies on Friday nights? Haven’t you ever heard of Tuesday?’ Maggie and McCabe looked up at the sound of Terri Mirabito’s voice. The deputy state medical examiner was standing at the front of the car holding a small black bag, like a Norman Rockwell doctor making a house call. Even bundled in a heavy sheepskin coat with a matching hat pulled down over her dark, curly hair, McCabe could tell Terri was dressed for a night on the town. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her wear lipstick or mascara or even high heels before. She looked good. The two cops moved out of the way to give her room to look in the trunk.
‘Hmmm. Frozen like a rock,’ she said. ‘That’s what I heard. That’ll make things interesting.’
‘Any sneaky way to estimate time of death?’
‘No. Freezing right after death keeps a body fresh. Like she died five minutes ago. Think Butterball turkey.’
‘What if decomposition already started?’
‘Freezing would have stopped it. We might be able to estimate the elapsed time between when she died and when she was frozen, but pinpointing actual time of death? No way.’
‘So we could be talking weeks?’
‘Sure. Assuming the body froze in position inside the trunk, which I think is the case.’
‘That’s too bad.’
‘Well, yes and no,’ said Terri, pulling on a pair of surgical gloves. ‘Freezing also keeps any evidence we find on the body fresh. Poison, if that’s what killed her. Drugs. Alcohol. Whatever she ate for her last meal. Semen, if the killer left any behind.’ She ran a small high-intensity light over the body and began her examination.
‘She is dead, isn’t she?’ asked Maggie. ‘None of this “Frozen corpse comes back to life. Leaps off autopsy table”?’
Terri looked up, amused. ‘Y’mean, like you see in the Enquirer?’
‘Yeah. Like that.’
‘Sorry, Mag. No leaping for this lady. She’s dead.’
‘Any idea what killed her?’ asked McCabe.
‘Yes.’ Terri was now leaning deep into the trunk. She was holding Jane Doe’s hair up with one gloved hand and shining the light on the back of her neck with the other. ‘It looks like the killer knew what he was doing. Here. Take a look.’
McCabe squeezed in next to Terri. She pointed a gloved finger to a wound in the small indentation in the back of Jane Doe’s neck. Right where the head and the neck connect. A small wound, no more than half an inch across. ‘That’s what killed her?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Looks like the killer pushed a thin-bladed knife or possibly an ice pick up into the base of her skull at the C1 vertebra. Probably went through the foramen magnum and into the brain stem.’
‘The foramen what?’
‘The foramen magnum. It’s a small opening at the base of the skull. The spinal cord goes through it to attach to the brain stem. If the killer gets it right, he severs the spine from the brain; cardiac and respiratory systems stop working. The victim falls to the ground dead.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’
‘Doesn’t look like there was much bleeding.’
‘He didn’t hit any major blood vessels.’
‘Death was instantaneous?’ asked Maggie.
‘Yes. It’s called pithing. It’s one of the very few injuries that cause virtually instantaneous death. Victim goes down like a rag doll.’
‘If he hits the wrong spot?’
‘He ends up with a messy, possibly nonlethal wound.’
‘So the creep knows his anatomy.’
‘Yes. Unless he was just lucky, he knows his anatomy well enough to know the effect. Though, if the victim is immobilized, and it looks like she may have been, it’s pretty easy to put the knife where you want it.’
‘You’re sure that’s what
killed her?’
‘About as sure as I can be until I get her in for the autopsy, and we can’t do that until she thaws out. It’ll be three or four days at the very least. Probably more like a week.’
‘A week? Jesus. Can’t we do it faster?’ asked Maggie. ‘Maybe soak her in a tub under running water? That’s how my mom handled the Butterballs.’
‘Unfortunately, she’s not a turkey. We thaw her too fast and we end up with tissue damage. The outside starts decomposing while the internal organs are still frozen. That’ll interfere with some of the tests I need to run. Plus, soaking her in water could wash away any trace evidence on or in the body. We’ll just have to wait.’
‘A week?’
‘For a total thaw, yes. We’ll put her in the refrigeration unit at the lab, and at a constant thirty-eight degrees, it’ll take about a week. Doing it that way minimizes decomp. Helps us learn more about what or who killed her. However, we should be able to get some information sooner.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, I’ll be able to check the body surface almost immediately, and clip her nails in case she scratched her attacker. If there’s any hair or saliva or skin cells that aren’t hers, we’ll find them. Also I should be able to move her limbs enough in a day or so to do an internal swab and check for semen.’ Even going over the gory details Terri sounded cheerful. She was one of those people who loved her job. Unraveling the mysteries of the dead, as they might have said on the Discovery Channel. McCabe found forensic pathology a strange way to get your jollies, but he guessed that’s what made Terri so good at it.
She went back to her task of looking over the body. She was squatting down, shining her light at Jane Doe’s face, when she called out, ‘McCabe?’
‘Yeah?’
‘She’s got something in her mouth.’
‘Like what?’ McCabe pushed in next to Terri again and looked where her light was pointing. Jane Doe’s lips and teeth were slightly parted. Behind the teeth he could see a small flash of white he hadn’t noticed before.