Bad Blood (24 page)

He leaned over me and looked again. “I can’t tell. Your folder have the autopsy report?”

I turned several pages of DD5s until I came to the medical examiner’s findings.

“Manual strangulation,” I said, skimming the first page of the document. “The ME thinks those lines on the neck are caused by the zipper of her sweater, caught under the perp’s hands and pressed into the skin. There must be close-ups of the injury in the morgue archives.”

I looked at the Polaroid again. The thick metal zipper had left an imprint like miniature railroad ties as it was pressed against Bex’s throat.

“Sexual assault?” Mike asked.

My finger ran down the paragraphs as I looked for the doctor’s description of the vaginal vault. “No sign of it. Nothing completed, anyway.”

“How does it read, Coop? Like they looked?”

I knew what Mike meant. A sixteen-year-old kid who’d been living recklessly the last few weeks of her life might have been presumed by investigators as well as acquaintances to have contributed to her own death. Perhaps the case had not been worked as aggressively as the murder of a teenage girl on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Perhaps there had been so many homicides the same week that this one was relegated to the back burner by a detective with less interest in his victims than Mike Chapman had.

“Covers the bases,” I said. “Detailed examinations of the external and internal genitalia. Vaginal swabs taken and prepared on slides. Both negative. The UV lamp showed nothing either.”

The presence of seminal fluid or sperm inside the body or on the thighs would have been suggestive of penetration. Since semen fluoresces under ultraviolet light, it was routine to scan the body for matter not visible to the naked eye.

“They did a pubic-hair combing, too,” I said. “Nothing loose, nothing foreign.”

“Bite marks?” Mike asked, referring to one of the classic injuries that often presents in a frenzied homicide in which the motive was sexual assault.

“No. Doesn’t look like there were abrasions anywhere else on Bex’s body.”

“Finger marks on the thighs? I mean, does it specifically say there were none?”

I shook my head. An attempt at a rape often resulted in minor bruising as the assailant tried to pry apart the victim’s legs.

“No, but look at the chart,” I said, referring to the outline of a human body that was part of the autopsy report. “The only notation of any focal point of injury anywhere on Bex Hassett is on her neck.”

I could see Mike’s expression changing as he evaluated the detective’s reports while he listened to me. Bex Hassett was becoming one of his victims. He was Monday-morning quarterbacking the guy who had dumped the case — even after getting a suspect to confess — as Mike liked to do with every unsolved homicide he came across.

Mike was flipping the pages of the second folder. “How about fingernail scrapings?”

I thought of Amanda Keating and her frantic effort to get her killer’s hands off her neck so that she could continue breathing.

“No.”

“No, they didn’t take any?” he asked impatiently.

“The doc scraped the nails. Negative findings.”

He reached across and tried to take the folder from me. “There must be some signs of a struggle. It sounds like the girl didn’t even fight. Why did Trish Quillian think she’d been sexually assaulted?”

“There’s your answer,” I said, passing the papers to him. “Third paragraph from the end. Bex’s blood alcohol level was over .23. That’s why she couldn’t fight.”

Mike answered with a whistle. “Jeez, the poor kid must have been dead drunk. What a target for any scumbag who happened to be hanging around.”

The most commonly abused drug in America is alcohol. The pack that Bex Hassett was running with in the park, if Trish Quillian had been right, had encouraged her to get in over her head once she began to be alienated from her family and friends. If she had voluntarily intoxicated herself — and the ME’s report had no findings of any other illegal substances in the toxicological studies performed — then she could have been either in a stupor or entirely unconscious when her life had been taken.

Mike had grabbed the autopsy report from me so that he could study it himself from top to bottom. I picked up the folder he had placed back on the desk to read through the detective’s follow-up reports to see how his suspect had been developed.

The description of the crime scene included a canvass of the area within the park that surrounded Bex Hassett’s body. An empty bottle of Courvoisier and several cans of beer were found a few feet away. DNA profiles had been developed from saliva left on the glass — including on the lip of the brandy bottle — and matched the genetic fingerprint of the deceased teenager. Results had also been compared to some of the street kids who had been picked up in the neighborhood for questioning, but none of them had been a hit.

“You can copy all this,” I said to Mike, rubbing my eyes. “Maybe I’m just tired — and my heart breaks for this lost child — but can we save this for another day?”

Mike started turning pages more quickly. “Make sense of this for me.”

“What?”

“The detective’s notes from the confession. Nineteen-year-old kid — one of the park regulars named Reuben DeSoto.” Mike stood up straight, obviously jarred by something he had seen in the case file. “Two of the other hoodlums fingered him as the last of the group to be seen drinking with the girl that night.”

“DeSoto admitted killing Bex Hassett?”

“Don’t get ahead of me, Coop.” Mike squinted at the words as though he were trying to decipher them. “Says he knew her from the park. She’d been hanging out with his homeboys for a couple of weeks. Not involved with any of them. But that night Reuben came on to her — tried to have sex with her. She’d been drinking. But beer, he says — only beer.”

“No mention of brandy? Wasn’t her DNA on the Courvoisier bottle?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t sound like that beverage was within Reuben’s budget. Says he tried to hook up with her but she refused. Not drunk at all — just a few pops of brew. Says he actually got on top of her and tried to penetrate.” Mike looked up at me as he asked, “Wouldn’t that have left some kind of physical evidence?”

“It should have. Unless she was so intoxicated that she wasn’t able to offer any resistance. Her muscles would have been so relaxed you’d have no internal injury either. But you’d expect to find some of his pubic hair on her body or clothing, even if he didn’t complete the act. There really should have been some kind of trace evidence if what he admitted is true.”

“Yeah, well, either Reuben was hallucinating or the ME needs a refresher course.”

“What’s wrong?”

Mike slapped the folder closed and picked up the second one that I had left on the desk. “Reuben — the guy who’s been the suspect for more than ten years while this case was sitting on a shelf collecting dust? He claims he killed Bex Hassett all right. Reuben says he choked her to death with a ribbon that he pulled out of her hair when she started to scream.”

“But the pictures of her neck—?”

“You can tell from that lousy Polaroid what those marks are on her throat? There’s no mention of any ribbon in the crime scene report and the autopsy doesn’t say a thing about any kind of ligature.”

I was trying to get us on our way. “So?”

“So you shouldn’t have stopped reading the file halfway through. Listen to this. Reuben had himself an
abogado
because of a burglary case he had pending. He skips back to the DR and the lawyer writes a letter to the commish, claiming the kid’s confession was coerced. That’s why the dick probably stopped investigating.”

“Why?”

“The lawyer also made a complaint to the CCRB. It was probably easier for the detective to just let it go rather than cloud his pension hearing with litigation over the fact that maybe he beat the crap out of Reuben and wound up with a phony confession,” Mike said, pacing the short room back and forth, worked up by the prospect of bad policing in the still-unsolved murder case.

The Civilian Complaint Review Board could have put intense pressure on the department if there was evidence that an officer had used physical force to get an admission.

“So you don’t like Reuben as the killer?”

“You’ve got the day off from court tomorrow,” Mike said. “I’ll be at the cemetery with Brendan Quillian. Call the morgue and have them pull everything on the Hassett autopsy. Get your hands on the physical evidence, if they can find it. This report says there was a speck of blood on the top of the zipper of Bex’s sweater.”

“Could be hers, don’t you think?”

“She didn’t bleed, according to the autopsy. The report says Bex had abrasions, not lacerations.”

“But they did DNA,” I said.

“Not on that bit of blood. There wasn’t enough of it for analysis at the time. Back then, a bloodstain had to be the size of a quarter for the lab to work it up. Maybe the perp nicked his finger on a rough edge of the metal.”

Bex Hassett’s death had occurred when the methodology of DNA had been more primitive, requiring far larger samples of fluid. In the last several years, the shift in technique to STRs — short tandem repeats — meant that the smallest droplets of blood could now be amplified, copying the unique genetic profile until there was enough of it to be mapped and identified.

“I promise you when the trial is over, I’ll jump-start this one for you,” I said. “Save some of your energy for the witness stand.”

I opened the door and turned the light switch off and on to get Mike’s attention.

“It doesn’t interest you that the Quillians make a guest appearance in the case file after all?” he asked. “I knew I could get those eyebrows of yours up a few inches.”

“What’d I miss? Trish told us the cops came to the house. She and Bex were great friends.”

“Yeah, but the fact is, the reason the police knocked on the door is that they were looking for Brendan.”

Mike spread out some papers on the desk and started tapping his fingers as he examined them.

“Why? What have you got?”

“Phone records. Over here are three months of them from Bex Hassett’s house, right through the time she was killed. Every now and then, looks like someone was placing calls to Brendan Quillian’s cell phone. Long conversations — four or five minutes each.”

I walked over to stand beside Mike. I could see that certain numbers had been circled in red ink.

He read to me from the detective’s report. “Says Mrs. Hassett and her sons deny making any calls. Outgoing volume seems to be heaviest in the month before Bex began spending her nights in the park. No way to track her comings and goings, which days she’d actually been in and out of the house.”

“Is there an interview with Brendan?” I asked with renewed interest in the old case.

“Where’s your sense of romance, Coop? Wouldn’t you figure Brendan was on a honeymoon somewhere? Bex was murdered a week after he got married,” he said, pursing his lips. “Forgot about that myself. That’s why the cops went to the house, hoping to talk to him because of the phone activity. I was beginning to lick my chops.”

“How about Duke? Didn’t they question him?”

Mike brushed his hair off his forehead and read on. “Mrs. Quillian was interviewed. Talked to two of her other sons at the house and spoke with Trish, too. Brendan was out of the country and his mother didn’t know where he was or how to reach him. Double-check that honeymoon story with Amanda’s family, will you, blondie? And Duke Quillian was a patient at Sloan-Kettering. He was being treated for cancer. The detective checked that out. Has a phone number at the hospital, too.”

“Hey, it was a long shot anyway,” I said.

“Maybe not as long as you think. You got a date tonight? You didn’t even look at this set of phone records.” Mike was leaning against the desktop, shoving another page of numbers under my nose. “The detective was obviously interested in Brendan — interested enough to subpoena his cell phone information.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“The last phone call made from Brendan Quillian’s cell phone the day before his wedding. It’s to the Hassetts’ phone number. Mrs. Hassett told the detective Brendan had called there looking for her daughter, Bex.”

“I know it’s an old case. I wouldn’t be begging you for help if I could walk into the morgue and chat up the guy who did the autopsy,” I said at eight fifteen on Monday morning to Jerry Genco, the forensic pathologist who had testified for me last week. I had called him from my desk. “Your Bronx office handled it.”

“The doc who performed the postmortem is dead,” he said. “Natural causes. He was an old-timer back then. No way you can talk to him, Alex.”

“I’m not as interested in him as I am in the homicide victim. There are some anomalies in the investigative file, and Mike Chapman thinks it would be useful to look at the physical evidence again. He doesn’t think the police work was kosher — doesn’t like the suspect they were looking at. Wants to check the original ME’s notes and photos — they’re not in the detective’s records.”

“You two are killing me. Agita, that’s going to be the cause of death. Agita by prosecutorial pressure to the gut. What’s Mike after?”

“He found Brendan Quillian’s name in the dead girl’s case folder.”

“Anything else? You know we don’t have the physical evidence here.”

“I understand. Mercer is going out to the NYPD storage facility in Queens to see what he comes up with.” Pearson Place was where all the property from old cases was stored until it was either thrown away or, if it had any independent value, auctioned off to the public. “The case got stalled along the way. The detective settled on a suspect whose admission doesn’t seem to square with the autopsy report.”

“Oh, no. I see where you’re going with this. Is Battaglia pushing you?”

“I haven’t seen him since last week, Jerry. Pushing me where?”

“He called the ME himself. Wanted to know what he needed to allege in order to get permission to exhume a body. That case in Chelsea from a couple of years ago? The cops just caught a killer who said he shot the guy, but the autopsy findings showed knife wounds.”