Cold Case Squad (4 page)

"He had broken ribs where the car was resting on him." The chief
medical examiner had pulled Terrell's file for the detectives. "No
evidence of other trauma, no drugs or alcohol in his system."

The chief didn't sign off on the case himself. He'd been out of the
country at the time, keynote speaker at a conference in Zurich. A
deputy medical examiner, Dr. Vernon Duffy, handled the autopsy.

"The victim had a lethal level of carbon monoxide in his blood,
evidence of smoke inhalation, consistent with death by fire."

The chief squinted at handwritten notations. "Hmmm, interesting.
Normally, identification would have been made through dental records.
It wasn't in this case."

"How's that?" Stone asked.

"This fellow had no dental X-rays. Apparently he had perfect teeth,
no caries. No reason for X-rays if you never have any restorations." He
continued through the report. "The jaw was badly burned. The upper
front teeth were flaked apart due to the heat."

Stone read over his shoulder. "The doctor noted that the victim had
an unusually fatty liver. Isn't that a sign of chronic alcoholism?"

The chief nodded. "A prime candidate for cirrhosis, had he lived
long enough."

"So how
did
they positively identify him?" Nazario asked.

The chief medical examiner readjusted his reading glasses. "It
appears that the victim had lost his right ring finger in his youth. In
a water-skiing accident, it says here. The fellow who died in the fire
was missing the same finger. In addition, the victim was last seen by
his wife, working on his car, alone in the garage. He was also seen
there by a neighbor and the regular letter carrier, who knew him by
sight. The deceased was wearing the victim's wedding ring."

Stone snorted. "So much for Charles Terrell, precise and careful,
skilled and competent. Isn't that what the first wife said? Proof again
that love is blind. The guy was really a hard drinker who lost a finger
and blew up his car. Man was an accident waiting to happen. Must have
been a thrill a minute having him around."

"DNA wasn't in extensive use then." The medical examiner pondered
the pages and frowned. "Today I would have run it. As a precautionary
measure, just to be sure."

"Come on, Doc, don't give us heart attacks here." Nazario shifted
uneasily in his seat.

"You're not saying you doubt his identity, are you?" Stone asked.

The medical examiner shook his head and closed the file. "But one
can't be too careful. In a case out west a few years ago, the crew of a
passing freight train reported seeing a burning car on top of a hill.
The police found a charred body, presumably the owner, in the
still-blazing vehicle. But an hour later a seriously burned man showed
up at the local emergency room. He gave the doctors a cock-and-bull
story about how he was injured. Investigators soon learned that he
owned the car, was deeply in debt, and had taken out a big life
insurance policy. Pathologists decided to take another look at the
burned body found in the car and noticed gas bubbles indicating that at
the time of the fire, the body had already begun to decompose."

"The car's owner had picked up a bum somewhere and locked him in the
trunk, where the man suffocated. The next day he drove the car to the
hilltop and propped the dead man behind the wheel. He doused the corpse
and the driver's seat with gasoline. His plan was to ignite it, then
roll it down the hill to crash into the passing train. It would look
like a spectacular, fiery accident."

"But as he sat in the passenger seat waiting for the train, he
absentmindedly lit a cigarette. The gasoline fumes ignited and the car
burst into flames. By the time the train arrived, he'd fled, badly
burned."

"Mighta worked if he hadn't been a smoker," Stone said.

The chief nodded. "Had he not shown up at the hospital seeking
treatment for his burns, no one might have looked more closely at the
microscopic slides from the charred corpse."

"Why didn't they see it the first time?" Stone said.

"Because," the chief said, "too often, our observations are based on
what we expect to see due to our training and experience. Expectations
modify our observations. In other words, we see what we preconceive.
The indications that the body was beginning to change due to
decomposition were there. Initially they saw them, but failed to
observe them. They observed the fire instead."

"We see what we preconceive," Stone echoed.

Uncharacteristically quiet en route back to headquarters, Stone
didn't even protest when Burch told them it would take more to satisfy
K.C. Riley and April Terrell.

"You don't have to be a shrink to figure this one out," Burch said.

"Right." Nazario shuffled through messages on the receptionist's
desk. "Hey, Sarge, you got a stack over here. Call your wife."

"Toss 'em in the round file," Burch said casually.

"You sure? You got one at one-thirty, another one at one
thirty-seven, another one at one forty-two… could be important. Here's
one at two-thirty. The—"

"I get the picture," Burch said coldly. "My voice mail is full, too."

"—last one at four-twenty."

"Look, I already talked to Connie three times today," Burch said,
"but there ain't no talking to her. She's really pissed. I think it's
hormones. She just wants to bust my chops. And I'm no glutton for
punishment."

"Ain't love grand?" Stone said.

"God bless America," Nazario said.

"Look," Burch said. "It ain't like she wants me back between the
sheets or to join her for tea. All she wants to know is where I'm
staying, so she can come over and cut up what's left of my raggedy
clothes."

He sighed. "I'm calling it a day. You pick up and it's her, don't
let it slip where I'm staying. I'm lucky to find the place I got and I
don't need her coming over to trash it."

He left, but reemerged from the elevator fifteen minutes later.
Nazario was on the phone. Stone glanced up from his computer keyboard.
"What, you checking up on us, Sarge? Thought you left."

"So did I. Could one of you guys gimme a lift?"

"Sure, Sarge." Nazario hung up. "Where's your car at?"

"Who knows?" He sank wearily into his desk chair, his expression
resigned.

Stone whipped his chair around and lowered his voice. "Repossessed?"

"Nah, the Chevy's paid for."

"Somebody steal your Blazer?" Nazario said, voice rising. "Outta the
police garage?"

Emma, the middle-aged secretary at her desk outside Riley's office,
glanced up curiously.

"Keep it down, would ya?" Burch muttered.

"You report it?" Stone asked.

"Nah. I know who copped it."

"Not Connie," Nazario said. "She wouldn't steal your wheels."

"Hadda be. This is guerrilla warfare and Connie is the guerrilla
queen. And don't say it," he warned them. "I've tried talking sense to
her. Won't listen. Turned the kids against me, too. Wouldn't be
surprised if my oldest wasn't the wheel man. Jennifer, the
sixteen-year-old drama queen, just got her license. My big mistake was
teaching that kid to drive. Connie didn't have the patience."

"What does she want?" Stone said.

"Me, miserable. So far she's doing a helluva job. I saw Maureen
Hartley again when we solved her daughter's case and Connie blew it all
outta proportion. Wish to hell I was having the party times she thinks
I am."

"Let's go look for it, Sarge," Nazario offered. "We're detectives,
ain't we? We can find your wheels. You always tell us to think dirty,
like the perp. Who knows this suspect better? Think dirty. Where you
think she'd park it?"

"In her state of mind? The bottom of the bay."

"You in, Stone?"

"Sure," the tall black detective said, as he keyed his radio to
somebody trying to raise him.

"Hey, Stone." It was unit 236, Homicide Detective Ron Diaz. "You
wanted a heads-up on elderly women murdered in their bedrooms? We just
caught one, over in Morningside. I'm headed there now."

"She live alone? Any sign of forced entry?"

"Keep your shirt on, I ain't even there yet."

"What's the address?" Stone waved off Burch and Nazario, who left
without him.

"That I can tell you. Two seventy-two Northeast Sixty-third Street."

"Meet you there."

Stone often wished he had investigated the Meadows murder from jump.
Would this be his chance, at last, to follow the killer's fresh tracks,
instead of hunting a shadow from a twenty-four-year distance?

He had pursued the case of Virginia Meadows with initial optimism,
intent on finding the man who killed the seventy-seven-year-old widow.
What he found, instead, were nine identical murder cases in cities
across America.

Meadows was no isolated killing, as he first believed. In Detroit,
Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Memphis, Cleveland, and Paterson, New
Jersey, there had been other lonely elderly women. Like Virginia
Meadows, they lived alone. Like her, they were strangled and tucked
into bed. All looked strangely peaceful in death, as though sleeping.
How many others, he wondered, had been wrongly classified as natural
causes?

The killer was still active. Stone had found the most recent case in
Paterson, seventeen months ago. After linking the cases, he had been
temporarily assigned to an FBI task force formed to find the serial
killer. But the task force became an early casualty of the war on
terrorism. One by one the federal agents were pulled off the pursuit
for assignments involving national security.

Only Sam Stone was left.

As he drove, he noted the time, the weather conditions, and the
traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, in the neighborhood. The scene,
a typical South Florida home, one-story CBS construction, painted
white, with green shutters. The wooden front door in the center of the
house was also painted green. It stood open.

Two patrol cars and a detective unit were parked out front. The
crime scene van was arriving, just turning the corner.

The front yard, bordered by a hibiscus hedge, was slightly
overgrown. A uniform was stringing yellow crime scene tape between two
palm trees.

A heavyset woman in a housecoat, her hair in big pink curlers, stood
in a side yard with a patrolman. One hand covered her eyes.

Make the scene talk to you, Stone thought, as he always did, then
stepped into the house.

The living room was unremarkable, a comfortable couch on the east
wall, a television set on the west wall. To the north, through the
living room, was the dining room. There he turned left, following the
voices to the bedroom.

Diaz was pulling on a pair of latex gloves. "So, what-taya think,
Stone, she one of yours?"

The room was a bloodbath.

The frail victim lay supine on a queen-size bed, a halo of blood
around her head. She wore only a nightgown, which had been pulled up
around her neck. Blood had spattered across the headboard and the wall.
Her wrists and hands were covered with congealed blood, probably from
defense wounds she had suffered. A bed sheet was wrapped around her
left leg. There appeared to be bite marks on her buttocks and right
shoulder.

A trail of blood led from the bed to the bathroom. Streaks and
spatters were on the walls, sink, and medicine cabinet and bloody shoe
prints tracked the white tile floor. The tub was half full of water.

"Musta happened this morning," Diaz said.

It appeared as though she had been about to bathe when surprised by
the killer, who attacked her there, then dragged her into the bedroom
and onto the bed.

On the wall between the bathroom and the bed, a picture frame hung
askew. An old wedding photo was visible behind the cracked,
blood-smeared glass. The woman petite, the man tall and handsome in
uniform, circa World War II. Someone injured had fallen against it
during a struggle.

"No," Stone said quietly. "This is too messy. Way too messy. It's
not him."

"Hell, I was hoping you'd want to take it off our hands."

"Got anything?" Stone asked.

"She's a widow. Neighbors say there's a grandson, late teens or
early twenties, might be into drugs. A new handyman did some repairs
around the house last week. The victim's car, ten-year-old blue Ford
Taurus, is missing. We put out a BOLO."

"Did you find the knife?" Stone asked. "Is it from her kitchen? Any
burglaries, rapes, or attempts in the neighborhood lately?"

"I just got here," the detective said.

Stone's eyes roved the room one more time. The clothes she had
planned to wear, a dress and fresh undergarments, were draped across a
chair back, freshly polished shoes placed neatly in front. She had
plans, he thought, somewhere to go, people to see.

"Looks like you've got his DNA, footprints, probably even
fingerprints. Hope you find him fast."

"I'm on it," the detective said. "Good luck with yours."

Stone left, relieved that the elusive killer he was seeking hadn't
struck again. Frustrated, that like the killer in this new case, he was
still unknown and free out there somewhere.

The photo lab was deserted after 6:00 p.m. Stone spread the
eleven-by-fourteen enlargements he'd ordered across a long conference
table, studied them, reread the reports, then studied them some more.

Most of the images were in color. Each crime scene had been
photographed repeatedly from different angles.

Stone peeled off his jacket, loosened his tie. Arranging each set of
photos in sequence, he posted the most similar shots from each scene on
a large cork bulletin board that ran the length of one wall.

All spinsters or widows, the victims ranged in age from seventy-two
to ninety-three. All were scrupulously clean, as though washed. Their
hair had been trimmed, their nails clipped. The earliest victims were
dressed in fresh nightgowns, the more recent were wrapped in white
sheets. The killer had posed them in similar fashion, face up, sheets
covering their bodies, hands positioned as though in prayer. The only
contradictory due was a small amount of dirt, less than a handful found
under their heads, in their hair, on their pillows. Analyzed, it
matched nothing in or around their homes. It did not appear to have
come from their own yards. No evidence of forced entry into their
homes. None had been raped. The killer had left no DNA or fingerprints.