All the Secret Places

by Anna Carlisle

  “Spit it out,” Jake said, his hands clenched into fists.

  “The crew dug trenches out along the edge of the woods there.” He pointed to the area past the houses where the officers were gathered along the mounded dirt. “I guess they were afraid that if that other house caught, it could jump to the woods. Anyway, they stumbled on something interesting. Buried only a few feet down—kind of surprising you didn’t run into it when you cleared up here. If you’d built just a few feet over, you probably would have.”

  He paused, eyes bright with anticipation as he delivered the punch line: “Crosby, it looks like you built your little nouveau-riche neighborhood right on top of a burial ground.”

  3

  The crime scene unit was carrying equipment from the van toward the cluster of officers at the edge of the site while the local cops helped mark off the area. Peter Haimes came puffing up the hill on his ancient Schwinn; the old man spent his days monitoring the police scanner and was usually the first on scene to view anything from a shooting to a traffic accident. It was only a matter of time before the looky-loos returned, the downhill neighbors who’d heard the sirens and come to see the firefighters in action, then wandered back down to town when it was contained. Once they realized that the fire had now turned into a crime scene, they would return in force along with many more.

  Gin and Jake reluctantly followed Stillman.

  “They had three other departments turn out,” Stillman explained. “They had enough guys on the house, how it was explained to us, they had a bunch of them working to contain it in case it spread. Way the winds were this morning, they were most worried it could hit the woods over there.” His finger traced the arc from the edge of the woods back toward the rest of the Rudkin land. Somewhere back there were the estate buildings—the main house, guest house, pool, and garages for the antique automobile collection that had been Howard Rudkin’s passion before he died a decade ago. Early in Gin’s career at the Chicago ME’s office, Madeleine had sent Gin an article from Pittsburgh magazine that showed Howard and Corinne Rudkin standing in front of what seemed like an entire fleet of old cars, their three teenage boys—the eldest barely old enough to drive—looking embarrassed in their prep school uniforms.

  Corinne and Howard were both dead now, and the boys were grown. They probably had families of their own. The thought saddened Gin; it was a reminder of the inevitable march of time, the tarnish that faded even the brightest memories as they slipped into the past.

  “Were they afraid it would carry back to the rest of the estate?” she asked.

  “They were worried it would burn the shit out of fuck-all,” Stillman responded disdainfully. “That’s what firefighters tend to focus on.”

  “Hey,” Jake snapped.

  “Oh, excuse me.” Stillman rolled his eyes. “I forgot there was a lady present. Pardon my French. The point is, they were digging that trench as a firebreak that turned out not to be needed. Only it was just sheer luck they picked that location. Got a few feet down and hit something they weren’t expecting. Body decomposed beyond recognition in some sort of old military uniform. Good thing they didn’t go at it with the pickax, or they would have done even more damage than they already did.”

  Gin was well aware of the friendly—and sometimes not-so-friendly—competition between firefighters and police, each of whom tended to view their own professions as the more dangerous and demanding, so she let the comment pass, but Jake muttered a curse of his own.

  “Look, I’m sorry that this happened. I understand the need to figure out who the body belongs to and give it a proper burial and find whoever was responsible for putting him there in the first place. But look, it’s not enough that my jobsite’s burned down—now it’s going to be tied up in the investigation too?” Jake was doing his best to control his frustration, but his voice bristled with tension. “Look, Stillman, like you said, if it had been found just a few yards over, it wouldn’t even be on my land. I’m not asking to interfere with what you need to do, but you have to understand that I need to get my guys in here and start cleanup. I mean, leaving it like this”—he gestured at the still-smoking hulk—“is not only structurally dangerous, it’s opening me up to attractive nuisance claims if you people can’t keep the crowds under control.”

  “Oh, we can control the crowds,” Stillman shot back. “It’s just too bad you can’t seem to control the dead bodies that always seem to end up connected to you.”

  “That’s enough,” Gin said, exasperated. Stillman had been among the officers who’d pushed hardest for Jake’s guilt, but the rift between them went further back than that. Jake—raised by his father when his mother left the family when he was only a baby—had been a troublemaker in high school, and many in the county police department believed that his father had pulled strings to keep him from paying the consequences.

  Gin knew that wasn’t the case, but small-town politics were what they were. Stillman had been a cop for as long as Jake had been working in construction, and while Stillman’s career had taken him to the county offices in Pittsburgh, he’d grown up in a river town just a few miles up the road. Until last year, their paths hadn’t officially crossed, but each knew of the other, and neither had any reason to expect anything but the worst from each other.

  Gin had no intention of playing peacemaker between two grown men. And besides, she had to admit, Stillman had a point. What were the odds that, less than six months after the discovery of Lily’s body under the Trumbull water tower—where Jake and the rest of them had once gone to hang out—another body would be found buried just a few miles away, with Jake connected at least peripherally to the location?

  “What do you know so far?” she asked, hoping to focus attention on the facts rather than the two men’s tempers.

  Stillman, who had been leading them toward the firebreak, stopped shy of the tape the officers had strung between sawhorses to isolate the scene. He turned to face them with his arms folded across his chest.

  “What I know so far is that Crosby’s got some questions to answer,” he said coldly. “As for you, I understand that you’re cozy with the ME’s office and you’ve made a few friends up there. But unless there’s something I don’t know about that connects you to the dead guy, you can turn your little Spandex ass around and run back the way you came.”

  “I’m not ‘cozy with’ the ME’s office,” Gin snapped. “I’m officially consulting to them, as you know. My relationship with everyone on the staff is purely professional. As is my relationship to you,” she couldn’t resist adding.

  She knew that there were still those who felt she’d overstepped professional bounds in her sister’s case when she had asked to be allowed to sit in on the autopsy, and later when she and Jake had done their own investigating when the official case veered off in the wrong direction.

  Still, without her specialized experience, critical evidence would have been missed and Lily’s killer never found—which was why the ME’s office had called upon her to help out on several more cases. So far, her consulting work had amounted to little more than a pastime; still, it grated to have her professionalism questioned.

  “So they say,” Stillman said. It wasn’t much of a comeback, but then again, as Gin reminded herself, men who were put off by working with competent, strong women weren’t often all that clever.

  “The body is male?” Gin asked, refusing to take the bait.

  “It’s a goddamn decayed corpse,” Stillman snapped. “It’s got no parts left, if you catch my drift. Look, until I’ve got official notification that the ME’s office has invited you into this one, don’t start thinking you can walk into my investigation and go nuts with the theories and the amateur detective work.”

  “How about this,” Gin said, finally having had enough. “Since we’re both on the county payroll, I suggest we exhibit a spirit of cooperation. Since this is a decomp case, I’m bound to be called in sooner or later—so you might as well let me do my job.”

>   “Maybe he’s right,” Jake spoke up. He’d been watching them spar, glowering, his hands jammed in his pockets. “I don’t think you should be part of this case, Gin. It happened on my jobsite—it’s a conflict of interest.”

  Stillman looked at him in surprise but nodded. “Yeah, since we’re going to have to clear you, Crosby, it won’t look good for you to be banging anyone involved with the case in any way.”

  Even for Stillman, the comment was vulgar. Jake’s face darkened with fury. “I’ll forget you said that,” he said in a low voice, “but you’d better learn to tone it down, my friend.”

  Stillman turned and swung his leg over the crime scene tape, effectively putting a barrier between them. The two technicians had suited up and were kneeling next to a long mound of dirt next to the unfinished trench. One bent to peer into the hole as the other set up lighting equipment.

  “Wait—don’t let them disturb the body,” Gin said.

  “Don’t worry, they’re just setting up for photos for now,” Stillman said over his shoulder. “Believe it or not, none of us want to contaminate the scene.”

  A man in a county windbreaker jogged over. He looked vaguely familiar to Gin: lean and rangy, several inches over six feet tall, with sandy hair cut military-close. His eyes were a startling clear green, and his jaw was chiseled as if from stone. Only the faint lines around his eyes hinted at his age, which Gin took to be midforties; he had the physique of a younger man.

  “You Crosby?” he said, stepping over the crime scene tape as though it wasn’t even there.

  “I’m Jake Crosby.”

  “Tuck Baxter.” He offered his hand, and Jake stared at it a moment before shaking it.

  “You’re the new chief?” Gin asked.

  Baxter stared at her thoughtfully for a moment, as if deciding whether to answer her question. Finally, his features relaxed.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I should have introduced myself properly. It’s my first day on the job, though, and I’ve got a few other things on my mind. If you don’t mind my asking, how did you know? As I understand it, the press release is going out this afternoon.”

  “News travels fast in a small town,” Gin said. “But I should explain that my mother is Madeleine Sullivan. She’s—”

  “—the mayor,” Baxter finished. “She was on the search committee. I interviewed with her several times. Sharp lady.”

  “Jake,” a voice called, and everyone turned toward the road, where a man in a weathered barn coat and Steelers cap had gotten out of a white Silverado parked next to the collection of official vehicles.

  “Excuse me,” Jake said. “That’s my foreman. I need to talk to him.”

  “Not so fast,” Stillman said, holding up a hand to stop him. “I’ve got questions for you.”

  “And I’ll answer them,” Jake said tersely. “But this is my goddamn livelihood at stake, and that’s my goddamn employee, and—”

  “I’ve got questions for him too,” Baxter said. “Besides, there’s not much either of you are going to do here at the moment, from the looks of it.”

  “I’ve got this, Baxter,” Stillman said. “It’s our scene now. You’re not county anymore, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  The way law enforcement was structured in Allegheny County, local police focused on peacekeeping efforts, including traffic control, domestic disputes, and minor infractions; their involvement ended at more serious crimes, when the county police came in and took over. In cases of murder, arson, rape, assault—anything bigger than a simple robbery or drug charge—they stepped aside, participating to the extent that the county requested.

  In Trumbull, when Jake’s father was the chief, their cooperation had been mostly uneventful. As gangs and the drug trade infiltrated the town over the years, Chief Crosby worked closely with the county, helping out wherever he could, giving them space to work and manpower to augment their own.

  “Good.” Baxter looked at Gin. “I know about your work. The Srinivasan case—that was mine, last one I worked on before my transfer. You did some good work for the department.”

  Gin nodded. The cause of Eric Srinivasan’s death would have remained a mystery if it weren’t for her input. The young man’s moderately decomposed body had been found in the marshy end of a pond in a remote area of North Park, where he’d sometimes gone to fish, and no one on the county ME’s staff had been able to identify the cirrhosis of the heart, given its state. When Gin was brought in to review the autopsy results, she was able to identify the heavily scarred tissue from photographs. Reviewing his medical records revealed that he’d likely suffered from a rare heart condition that led to its failure.

  For Gin, it had been a relatively easy catch—but that was because she’d had experience that none of them had had: a six-month tour volunteering with the Red Cross, exhuming mass graves in Srebrenica where victims of Bosnian ethnic violence were buried. There, she had helped exhume hundreds of bodies and learned more about decomposition than she ever would have in an entire career at Cook County.

  She didn’t like to talk about it with anyone but her colleagues. Most people tended not to understand.

  “Thank you, but—”

  “So if you want to take a look, I’m sure the county would be obliged,” Baxter said. Evidently he wasn’t one of those who were impressed to the point of volubility by what she did. “Detective Stillman, you can make that happen, can’t you?”

  Stillman looked at Gin with obvious distaste. “I’ll consult with Captain Wheeler on that.”

  “She’ll be fine with it, Bruce,” Baxter said with an exaggerated show of patience. “Just tell her you talked to me. Interdepartmental cooperation—there’s apparently been too damn little of it since you lost your old chief. When the mayor interviewed me, she let me know it was one of the city council’s top priorities.”

  “Thank you,” Gin said stiffly.

  “Tell her hello, won’t you,” Baxter said as he began walking toward Jake’s foreman’s truck. “I’m looking forward to working with two generations of the legendary Sullivan family.”

  4

  “I just want it on record that this wasn’t my idea,” Stillman said. They had been joined by one of the techs, who’d handed Gin booties, gloves, and a hair net, which she put on with practiced ease. For twenty years, since the first day of medical school, donning the gear had been as much a part of her day as brushing her teeth. “All that’s going to happen, with you getting involved so early, is the site’s going to be compromised that much more.”

  “This isn’t my first crime scene, you know,” Gin sighed. She considered calling him “Bruce,” as Baxter had, but she got the feeling that would only further antagonize him. “In fact, I used to get called to them regularly in Cook County. They seemed to think I was capable of behaving myself.”

  “Well, that was when you were officially on staff. In my book, that’s a different story. I personally would never have given an outside consultant the kind of latitude you evidently believe you have. Opens the department up to all kinds of liability.”

  The thing was, he had a point. Gin herself wasn’t sure she would have approved a similar arrangement back at her old job. A key part of the job of medical examiner—one that took up far more time than the average lay person ever realized—was to testify in court. If any of the cases she’d consulted on went to court and she was called as a witness, there would be a nightmare course of legal hoops to jump through to get her testimony accepted into the record.

  “Fine,” she sighed. “Look, I’m here to help, okay? Baxter clearly thinks I might be an asset to the case or he wouldn’t have asked me.”

  “Baxter doesn’t work for the county anymore,” Stillman pointed out. “And as I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, arson and murder cases are under county jurisdiction. Baxter’s just the liaison.”

  And he stepped on your insecure little toes, Gin thought to herself.

  “Gin. Glad you’re here.” Fred Rappaport, the count
y coroner, emerged from the tarp that had been set up near the scene, where he’d been consulting with one of the technicians. Detective Witt was with him. “This one might be right up your alley.”

  “Hi, Dr. Sullivan,” Witt said, dusting grime off his pants. “I talked to Jake earlier. Hell of a thing to happen here.”

  Gin was grateful for the effort Witt made to be civil. “Thank you. It took us both by shock, obviously.”

  “These are quite possibly the oldest remains I’ve ever dealt with,” Rappaport said, evidently relishing that fact. Though short on social graces, Gin had found him to be knowledgeable and thorough. “Dry as a box of sawdust—barely any skin fragments left. Can’t wait to get them on the table.”

  Gin was surprised; it was generally almost impossible to determine the age of skeletal remains with only a visual assessment. “Advanced decomp, obviously?”

  “Oh, my, yes. They’re taking soil samples now, but it’s pretty obvious that these evergreens are old growth.”

  Gin knew what he was implying: The forest was thick with hemlocks, which—in addition to being the state tree—grew best in acidic soil. And acidic soil provided ideal conditions for decomposition of organic matter . . . including the human body.

  “Not much left but the bones,” Witt concurred, without bothering to mask his relief. He was well known in the department for his unease in the autopsy room; he had yet to develop the hardened tolerance for the grislier aspects of the job that the more senior detectives possessed. Gin suspected he took a fair amount of ribbing for his sensitivity.

  “I’d like to take a look,” she said. “Are you ready for me, Fred?”

  “Sure thing, doll. Let’s not make it a party, though—the team’s trying to reconstruct the upper soil layer near where they were digging. Kind of hard to tell what it looked like before they went at it with the axes and shovels. Best if we stick to where they’ve marked off, but there isn’t much room.”

  “No problem,” Witt said. “Glad to let you handle it.”