Until the Final Verdict

by Christine McGuire

  “Don’t want to talk about it anymore, right?”

  “ ’Bout what?”

  “I—”

  “See you in thirty minutes,” he said, and hung up.

  “Love you,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER

  * * *

  4

  “DOC NELSON ’S WAITING FOR YOU in the Hellhole.” The security guard recognized the District Attorney and slipped into law enforcement slang for the morgue in the basement of County General Hospital. Edward McCaffrey was a retired Santa Rita cop.

  He held the door open for Mackay and added, “Sheriff’s already there.”

  “Thanks, Ed,” Mackay answered.

  Like most hospitals, County General’s entrance conveyed a serene cheerfulness with pastel colors, soft abstract artwork, comfortable furniture, and lots of glass and skylights.

  Mackay crossed the lobby, punched the elevator Down button, and tapped her toes impatiently. When the door swished open, she drew in a deep breathand scrunched up her nose. The morgue’s environment stood in stark contrast to the lobby, with its rancid odor of antiseptic and death that ventilators couldn’t get rid of, deodorizers couldn’t cover up, and she never got used to. Worse was the eerie quiet—as if all living sounds, especially hers, were unwelcome interlopers.

  At the far end of the spotless tile hallway was a set of heavy double doors through which hearses loaded and the coroner’s wagon unloaded. Putrefying bodies or those with infectious diseases went directly to the isolation suite, where a sealed atmosphere prevented the escape of offensive or infectious gases until high-power exhaust fans sucked them up and blew them into an incinerator.

  Other bodies stopped first in the adjacent coldstorage vault. There they were preserved until a morgue attendant known as a “diener” cleaned, weighed, measured, and photographed them in the staging room, then placed them on gurneys and rolled them into one of the autopsy suites.

  The largest suite contained three slanted stainless steel tables with high rolled edges to contain blood and other fluids. Each was equipped with faucets, sluices, scales, lockers, a set of autopsy tools, and a soundproof booth where the pathologist dictated notes.

  The last suite, called the VIP Room, was used to study special cases and had only one table. Bodies that came to this room often belonged to victims of heinous crimes, and Mackay always approached it reverently.

  Granz and forensic pathologist Morgan Nelson were leaning against the wall. Nelson wore bloodsplattered green surgical scrubs and plastic covers over his green rubber-soled shoes. A fringe of short gingery hair stuck out around his green skull cap. Years before, he designed and oversaw the morgue’s construction, then wrote the operating rules. Like its creator, the morgue operated around the clock with consummate professionalism and efficiency.

  Mackay spotted the dark, heavy stubble on Nelson’s face and the bloodshot eyes behind his wirerimmed bifocals and knew he hadn’t slept recently.

  “You look awful,” she greeted him.

  “You’re a real sweet talker, Katie,” he retorted. The nickname was his special privilege as her closest friend. “Worked last night and today, but I knew you’d want this done ASAP.”

  “TOD?”

  “Only way to be exact about time of death is to be there when it happens, but the court building’s cold, which slowed down the processes we use to establish time of death—algor, livor and rigor mortis. Body temperature at the scene was sixty degrees, same as ambient. Body temp drops two to four degrees an hour in cold air, so it happened before one-thirty this morning.”

  “Can you narrow it down a bit?”

  “Fully developed livor mortis was present,” he told them, referring to the fact that gravity pulls blood to the lowest part of a dead body, where it pools into reddish blotches. “But lividity occursquickly; besides, there wasn’t much blood left, she lived until her heart pumped most of it out.”

  “Jesus,” Granz muttered.

  “Body was in total rigor, so she died at least twelve hours before the body was found. Rigor hadn’t started to resolve, so I’d say it was closer to eighteen hours, considering room temperature.”

  “Best guess?”

  “Between four o’clock yesterday afternoon and midnight.”

  “Would vitreous potassium testing firm it up any?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Refresh my memory,” Granz said.

  “I extract about an ounce and a half of vitreous fluid from the eyeball, and the lab runs a potassium test. Could narrow it down a little, but not much.”

  “You’ll do a rape kit?” Mackay asked, referring to an examination that established whether the victim was sexually assaulted.

  “Yeah, of course we need to know if she was raped before death.”

  “Or after.”

  “True. The vaginal swabs will tell us if there’s seminal fluid present in the vaginal tract, but I can tell you now that there were no external indications of forced vaginal intercourse—no contusions or torn tissue.”

  “So she wasn’t raped?”

  “I’d say not, but we’ll know more after closer examination of the genitalia.”

  Nelson pulled two paper scrub suits and four shoe covers from a drawer, which Granz and Mackayslipped into, then they followed him into the autopsy suite where a body lay on the surgical table under a sheet. They had both observed hundreds of autopsies over the years, but neither had ever seen a friend’s body stretched out on the table. When Nelson pulled the sheet away from Jemima Tucker’s ashen gray corpse, they both gasped audibly.

  “I’ve done more than eight thousand autopsies, and I had the same reaction,” Nelson confessed. He slipped on a headset, switched on a recorder, and started dictating the external examination.

  “The body is that of a mature, well-developed black female in her midforties, five feet two inches, weight approximately one hundred twenty pounds.”

  He rolled the body from side to side to examine the back of the torso, then lifted each arm and leg to check underlying tissues. He looked into the ears, nose, mouth, and eyes, then visually inspected the other body openings.

  “No visible scars or tattoos, no abnormalities. Outer genitalia normal—no obvious trauma.”

  He rolled the body onto its right side and slid a brick-shaped, black plastic body-block under the back, forcing the chest to protrude and the arms and neck to fall back. Then he pulled a black-handled Buck knife from a leather case, sharpened it on a sheet of extrafine sandpaper, and drew the razor-sharp blade down an eight-by-ten sheet of paper.

  The paper sliced cleanly into two pieces, which he tossed in a trash basket. “Better than a scalpel.” He looked first at Mackay, then Granz. “Ready?”

  He cut deepV -shaped incisions starting at theshoulders, curving beneath each breast and meeting at the xiphoid process, or bottom, of the sternum. Another deep cut connected the point of theV to the pubic bone, diverting slightly around the navel. The final cut ran from hipbone to hipbone, intersecting the leg of theY . He laid back the abdominal skin and peeled skin, muscle, and soft tissue off the chest wall, exposing strap muscles on the front of the neck and the rib cage, then pulled the chest flap up over the face.

  “The final insult, losing her identity,” Mackay said softly. “Damn, I hate that part.”

  “Me, too,” Nelson acknowledged.

  They all pulled masks over their mouths and noses before Nelson ran two quick cuts up the outer sides of the rib cage with a Stryker saw. He lifted out the breastplate comprising the sternum and ribs and laid it on the table, then cut the pericardial sac and pulmonary artery, stuck his finger into the artery and, detecting no thromboembolism, removed the heart. He tied strings to the carotid and subclavian arteries and snipped out the larynx and esophagus. Finally, he cut the pelvic ligaments, bladder and rectal tubes and lifted out the organ block. He inspected it briefly.

  “Nothing unusual.” He glanced at Granz, who averted his eyes. “I’ll weigh and examine the intern
al organs, but preliminary cause of death is massive hemorrhage from the neck wound. I’ll let you know if anything else turns up.”

  He gave a small flip of the head to Mackay. “Why don’t you two get out of here.”

  Granz sighed. “Gladly.”

  CHAPTER

  * * *

  5

  “I’LL HAVE A TALL DECAF, ” Kathryn Mackay told a skinny young woman with a purple, green, and yellow buzz cut.

  “Gimme a venti dark roast, please.” Dave Granz studied the pastry display and reconsidered.

  “Since when did you start drinking coffee at tenthirty at night? It’ll keep you awake.”

  “Prob’ly, but drinking decaf’s like washing your feet with your socks on—what’s the point? Besides, after what we saw thirty minutes ago at the morgue, I won’t sleep anyway.”

  He paid for their coffee over her objections, and motioned to a lone table at the rear. “Let’s sit there so we won’t be overheard.”

  The same table Robert Simmons and I shared our first time together, she thought, then added silently, What a screw-up.

  “Overheard?” She glanced around the empty Starbucks and picked a table by the front window. “No one comes here after the mall closes. Wonder why they stay open until eleven.”

  “Dunno.” Granz dropped into a chair across from her. “She was black. Think it was a hate crime?”

  Mackay sipped her decaf. “No, there were no racial slurs—no swastikas, no white-power symbols, no n word scribbled on the walls.”

  “Racists leave their calling cards out in plain view, for the shock value, hoping some ignorant editor’ll plaster the pictures all over the front page of the paper, get some free publicity.”

  “If it wasn’t racial, what was it? Sex?”

  Granz contemplated. “No, the crime scene was too sterile for a crime of passion. She was executed.”

  “I agree.” Mackay nodded. “Sexual sadists usually disfigure a woman’s distinctively female features—the breasts or vagina, the inside of the thighs, maybe the face. There was none of that. How does her husband check out?”

  “Name’s Alejandro Sanchez, an ER doc at Española Community Hospital. As soon as we cleared the crime scene this morning, we drove to their home, but he wasn’t there. We contacted him at the hospital to notify him of his wife’s death.”

  “What time?”

  “About fifteen minutes before noon.”

  “How’d he take the news?”

  “He asked about the details like he was gatheringinformation to treat a patient in the ER. Afterward, we offered to drive him home, but he said he wanted to finish his shift and could drive himself. Weird reaction under the circumstances, if you ask me.”

  “ER docs are trained to stay calm in a crisis. He was probably dealing with it on pure instinct.”

  “Maybe, but I have a feeling about him. Call it a hunch.”

  “Where did he say he was late yesterday?”

  “He started a twenty-four-hour ER shift at noon.”

  “Did you run him through National Crime Information Center computers?”

  “NCIC turned up nothing.” He shoved a sheet of paper across the table. “We need to toss their house.”

  Mackay glanced at the search warrant. “You’re the affiant?”

  “I can swear to facts that establish probable cause to search as well as any of my detectives, besides it gives me an excuse to see you.”

  “Run through your PC with me.”

  “The spouse is always a suspect until eliminated.”

  “That won’t get you in the front door.”

  “Whoever killed Tucker knew she was working late, and there was no forced entry. Her husband would know when she was working, and he could easily dupe her keys to the court building and her chambers without her knowledge. Nelson says her throat was cut with something very sharp. Could’ve been a scalpel. Sanchez is a doctor.”

  “So was Berroa. Maybe he dropped by Tucker’s office.”

  Granz shook his head. “Berroa’s in Mexico by now.No way he’d chance going back to the joint. Besides, the court building was locked—how would he have gotten in?”

  “Maybe he learned a trade at Soledad.”

  “No way. It all points to Sanchez.”

  “It’s pretty thin, but if we lay it out to the right judge, it might fly. What about her family?”

  “None locally. Her parents live in Texas. They told Waco cops Sanchez is originally from Mexico.”

  “Makes it easy for him to flee. That’ll help convince a judge.”

  “Detective Miller’s standing by Tucker’s home, waiting for the warrant.”

  Mackay scanned the warrant and supporting affidavit and signed it. “Who’re the on-call judges?”

  “Jesse Woods and Reginald Keefe.”

  “Keefe’s a civil lawyer, a political hack, his elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor, and he’s ornery as hell to boot. Woods is an ex-prosecutor and damned smart. He’ll cut us some slack on close calls.”

  “I didn’t figure it was that close a call. I called Keefe.”

  “Jesus, Dave, are you a masochist? The only thing Keefe hates worse than cops and prosecutors is being contacted after hours. Why’d you call him?”

  “To piss him off.” He stood and started to slip on his black leather jacket, still wet from the rain. “Let’s go do it.”

  She grabbed his hand and pulled him back into his chair. “Can we talk for a minute first?”

  “Sure, Babe.” He studied her solemn expression. “What’s wrong?”

  “Seeing Jemima Tucker on that stainless steel autopsy table, and remembering our phone conversation before we went to the morgue, I got to thinking—that could easily have been one of us.”

  “Nice thought. Do we have to discuss this right now?”

  “Yes. Life is short, and for the past couple of years mine has felt incomplete. Each day slips away and leaves a void behind that even Emma can’t fill—and shouldn’t have to try. Someday she’ll go away to college and I’ll be alone. I don’t want that.”

  He leaned forward, still grasping her hand. “What do you want?”

  “Another chance at being a family, if you’ll—”

  “Kate—”

  “Let me finish, or I’ll never work up the guts to say it again. What ruined our relationship was both our faults, and I’ve been afraid to get close again. But protecting myself is making both of us miserable, and being dead inside isn’t a solution.”

  She cleared her throat. “Were you serious when you asked me to marry you?”

  “I was never more serious about anything in my entire life.”

  “Then, I’d like to talk about it.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.” She laughed. “But not until we get our search warrant. Keefe’s liable to lock us both up for ruining his Saturday evening.”

  CHAPTER

  * * *

  6

  REGINALD AND BONNIE KEEFE LIVED in his family’s old estate in Beach Flats, once an exclusive address, more recently the domain of drug dealers, thieves, hookers, and illegals hiding from the INS in rundown shacks where the idle rich once weekended.

  Motion sensors detected the unmarked Jeep Cherokee as soon as it turned off the street into the chain-link–fenced entrance and ignited a bank of xenon floodlights. Closed-circuit cameras tracked it to a weatherproof, electronic guard station where Granz punched a button on the keypad marked please announce yourself.

  The squawk box answered, “Who’s there?”

  Bonnie Keefe had a sexy, thick southern accent anda body that caused car wrecks when she walked down the street—and the way she dressed gave men plenty to gawk at. She was also a fine lawyer whose opponents in land-use cases called her the Georgia Cobra. In built-out Santa Rita County, her clients’ goal was to bulldoze sensitive habitats in favor of tract houses or big-box chain stores. Her job was to make sure they got to do it, and she was very good at her job.


  “Sheriff Granz and District Attorney Mackay, Mrs. Keefe,” he answered into the speaker.

  “Come right in.”

  The heavy, barbed-wire-topped chain-link gate rolled open. Granz eased the Cherokee up the gravel drive, which ended at a low, single-story cottage covered with wood shingles. Over almost a century, addon bedrooms, bathrooms, and entertaining spaces had created a hodgepodge of incongruent architecture that somehow worked. Heavy, untended native shrubs and redwood trees shaded the cottage, a detached garage, a swimming pool, and two tennis courts, creating a gracious but untamed environment that couldn’t be duplicated by the best landscape architect.

  Granz punched the doorbell. “I’ll bet this place is worth at least five million bucks.”

  When the door swung open, Bonnie looked like she’d just stepped out of the shower. Her shoulderlength blond hair was plastered to her head and her strikingly perfect face was devoid of makeup. She wore a clingy red silk robe with a plunging neckline.

  “Sheriff Granz, District Attorney Mackay, come in,please.” She stepped aside and raised her right arm in a welcome gesture that pulled the top of her robe partly open, exposing a large purple nipple. She pulled it closed with long, manicured fingers. “Would you like something to drink?”

  “No, thank you,” Mackay answered, “we’ll only be a few minutes.”

  “All right. Reggie is waiting for you right down the hall, in the kitchen.” She turned and walked across the living room, the damp robe stuck to her buttocks. “Then, I’ll finish drying off.”

  Judge Keefe sat at an old chrome-trimmed Formica dining table in the kitchen, sipping an Anchor Steam beer. He was dressed in a pair of faded Levi’s and an open-necked denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. Mackay grudgingly admitted to herself that he was a goodlooking man, in spite of the ugly scowl that distorted his face.