Blind Spot (6 page)

“We’ve got a public-information guy?”

“Didn’t bother pulling him into this. Let the cops’ PIO handle it.”

“What about our ERT?” she asked, meaning the Evidence Response Team.

“St. Paul’s crime-scene guys are all over it. They want help on that end, they’ll ask for it.”

She stopped several yards from the hearse. “Did they ask for me?”

Garcia stopped ahead of her and turned around. “They didn’t have to. You’re what they need.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? What are they expecting out of me?”

“Don’t worry about what they’re expecting. Worry about what I’m expecting.” He jammed his index finger into his chest. “I’m the only one you’ve got to please.” He turned back around and continued to the hearse, parked in a corner of the lot. She waited a few seconds and went after him.

Along the front passenger’s side of the hearse stood a knot of uniformed cops. As she drew closer, she could feel their eyes on her. She slipped her sunglasses off her sweatshirt, unfolded them, and put them back on. Their voices were low, but she caught fragments of their conversation: “…dragging the feds into this…little blonde chasing after Garcia…crystal-ball crap…”
Great,
she thought. She’d get her usual welcome from the local police. Stares and whispers and shaking heads. The uniforms stopped talking as she came up on the ME’s wagon, but they kept staring. She went around to the driver’s side of the hearse. As she did, she heard muffled laughter. Then a male voice, one of the cops: “Keep it down, ladies. She’s gonna bring out the dead. Send them after us to eat our brains.”
Fuck you,
she thought.
The dead would starve if they had to feed on your brains.
She stood next to her boss. He was talking to one of the ME investigators—a big guy with a shaved head.

“My agent, Bernadette Saint Clare,” Garcia said to the ME guy.

“How you doing?” asked the guy. “Sam Herman.”

Bernadette shook his hand; her small fingers got lost in his grip. “I’m doing good.”

“I hear you wanna see my goody bag,” Herman said.

“You betcha,” she said.

“Let’s head to the back of the bus,” he said.

She and Garcia followed him and waited while he popped open the back of the hearse. The big guy leaned inside and dug around. The group of cops shuffled to the rear of the vehicle to watch.

Garcia tipped his head down and said into her ear: “You mind an audience, or you want me to chase them away?”

Bernadette figured Garcia was expecting some sort of show, but this wasn’t the place for it. She didn’t want to tell him that. “I don’t care,” she whispered. “It’s fine.”

“Here you go,” said Herman, pulling his head out of the vehicle. He turned toward Bernadette and stretched out both arms. A doctor presenting a newborn.

Bernadette peered through the clear plastic while she took out her gloves and snapped them on again. She reached out to retrieve the bundle and then pulled her hands away. She slipped off her sunglasses and leaned closer to the bag. “Holy shit.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Herman. His eyes darted from her bent head to the package and back to her.

She looked past the investigator and over at the officers. “You’d better radio the cop shop. Get more people and boats back down here. There’s a second body.”

One of the officers—a short guy with a ruddy face—put his foot up on the back bumper of the hearse. “Did the hand tell you that?”

“Sort of.” Bernadette tipped her head toward the bag resting in Herman’s arms. “This came off a woman.”

Five

Herman inspected the hand through the plastic. He glared at Bernadette. “What’re you talking about?”

“The index finger, around the cuticle,” she said, hanging her sunglasses back on her shirt.

Herman looked down again. After several seconds: “Son-of-a-bitch. How’d we miss it?”

“What is it?” asked Garcia.

She pulled her gloves tighter over her fingers. “Trace of pink polish. On the thumbnail, too. Same spot. Around the cuticle. The deceased wasn’t much of a manicurist.”

The short cop took his foot off the bumper. His ruddy complexion had turned redder. “Big deal. So maybe Judge Perve wore nail polish.”

Bernadette: “Plus, that’s a woman’s ring.”

“She’s right,” said Herman. “It’s a fat lady’s hand—not a fat fella’s.”

Bernadette: “Plus…”

“Another plus?” moaned Herman.

“Plus, that hand looks a tad riper than the body. The fat lady was killed before the fat fella.” She looked at the short officer. “You’re gonna smell her before you see her.”

“Crap,” spat the short cop. He turned and sprinted to one of the squads. He yanked open the door, got in, grabbed his handset. The rest of the uniforms scattered between the remaining cars.

“Should we hit the woods?” Bernadette asked her boss. “Help them search?”

“That’s not why I brought you down here,” he said in a low voice.

Bernadette nodded. Time to stop stalling and get to it. She eyed the package. She didn’t want the hand; she couldn’t haul it around with her. The jewelry would be good, more substantial than the threads. Surely the killer had touched the band during the struggle, or while chopping off and discarding the hand. “I’d like to take the ring,” she said to Herman. “Run some…tests.”

“What kinds of tests?”

“She just saved your ass,” snapped Garcia.

The gurney team bumped across the parking lot and stopped at the rear of the hearse. “We’re done,” said one of the men.

Herman looked up from the bag. “No, you’re not.”

“The ring,” repeated Bernadette. She and Garcia and Herman stepped away from the hearse so the men could slide the body into the wagon.

“You’ve got to sign for it,” said Herman, his attention again locked on the package in his arms. “Paperwork is back at the office.”

“You guys could be here all day,” she said. “Can we expedite this? Transport the hand to your office ourselves?”

Herman looked up from the bundle and shook his head. “That ain’t kosher. I’ll send one of the guys on ahead to the office with the fat lady’s hand. You go to the office, fill out whatever they want you to fill out. Take the ring from there.”

Garcia: “Cat. You know where the ME’s digs are?”

“Squat building next to Regions Hospital’s parking ramp,” said Bernadette. “Looks like a dental lab.”

“You got it,” said Garcia.

Herman: “How’d we miss it?” He turned around and slipped the bag back into the hearse while his crew gathered around him.

“Miss what?” asked one of the gurney men.

“Shut up,” snapped Herman. He slammed the back of the hearse and looked at his group. “Don’t move. I gotta make some calls.” He went to the front of the wagon.

Bernadette stepped away from the hearse and Garcia followed. “What’re you thinking?” he asked.

“I’ll bet it turns up in the woods or the river. Thrown away, like the other two.”

“The judge’s hand? I’ll bet you’re right.”

“And won’t it be interesting if they find the woman’s body and she’s been tied up all nice and neat like the judge?”

“Interesting as hell.”

“The guy up north. The judge. The woman.” She peeled off her gloves and crammed them back in her jeans. “That would make three—three that we know of. Someone killed each of them. Cut their right hands off. Why? Was there someone somehow victimized by all three of them? Old-fashioned revenge? We were thinking it was a vigilante thing with the judge. Could be the same for the other two. What have you got on the dead guy up north?”

“Hale Olson. The guy’s got his own interesting history. Was tangled up in a home invasion and robbery that went sour some years back.”

“Another bad man, like Archer.”

“Except Hale served his time. Found God in prison and all that. Cleaned up his act, by all accounts. Been behaving since he’s been out. Had a steady job up north. Retired up there and stayed.”

Bernadette: “Let’s say for the sake of argument that, even though Mr. Olson served his time and got religion, someone thinks it wasn’t enough. Let’s also say the dead lady did something naughty and didn’t get punished sufficiently. She’s a bad mom who abused her kids. She poisoned her husband. Whatever. We add that up and what does it give us?”

“Easy math. That gives us three dead debits to society. Why cut off the hands, though?”

Bernadette: “Why throw away the hands? That’s the bigger question.”

Garcia: “What do you mean?”

“Why not take them as sick souvenirs? That’s the usual pattern. In this weirdness, the killer treats the hand like waste. Garbage.”

“A message,” said Garcia. “A symbol of some kind?”

“Maybe the hands themselves aren’t the important thing. The action of cutting them off is the key. A statement about what they did. A public judgment against them.”

“That narrows it down,” said Garcia. “We’ll put out an APB for a suspect.
Believes he has the right to judge others.
”

“I know,” she said. “Pretty much describes the entire human race. Except we can also add:
Knows how to tie a clove hitch.
”

“Meet you at the ME’s.” Garcia turned and went to his car.

As Bernadette watched him pull away, she heard sirens. Additional squads were racing back to the park. She slipped her sunglasses back on her face, and looked across the parking lot to the river and surrounding woods. She wondered:
Who are you? Why the right hands?
She knew what she had to do to find the answers, but she wasn’t looking forward to it.

The ME lab guy was as thin as a broomstick and as tall as one. A white coat hung from his narrow frame, and when he walked the material billowed behind him like a sheet in the wind. The jacket would have been filled out better if it were draped over a coat hanger. “What are you going to do that we can’t? The Ramsey County Medical Examiner is one of the best pathologists in the country. What sorts of tests are we talking about here?”

Garcia: “We don’t care to disclose that information at this time.”

Bernadette gave her boss a sideways glance while she signed on a dotted line. The two agents were sitting at a conference table filling out forms, with the broomstick pacing behind them. They were in the front of the building, in a sunny room—the public face of the medical examiner’s office. The lab, where the real work was done, was in back. So was the hand.