Defiled: The Sequel to Nailed Featuring John Tall Wolf (A Ron Ketchum Mystery Book 2) (10 page)

John Tall Wolf caught up with Ron and Keely just before they could enter the hospital’s morgue, where Dr. Dahlgren awaited them.

“I put a call in to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” he said, “asked them to estimate what the damage might have been to Lake Adeline and Goldstrike if the bomb had gone off.”

Ron gave a soft snort. “Guess there’s no question what the damage would have been to me.”

No one argued that point.

Tall Wolf said. “What I was thinking, we ought to know how big the bomber thinks. Might give us a clue as to how he makes his plans. What he might try next time.”

Keely said, “So you think there will be a next time? The guy who called the PD wasn’t just blowing smoke.”

Tall Wolf nodded. “I think it was real. Bet there won’t be any more technical glitches either.”

Ron took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “The bastard who called to claim credit said we wouldn’t be lucky again.”

None of them wanted to speculate whose luck would prevail.

“Let’s see what your ME has to tell us,” Keely told Ron.

Hale Tibbot’s body had been put into cold storage. Dr. Dahlgren received the three cops in the small office she borrowed on the occasions she was called to Goldstrike. She looked at the others and said, “Let’s not all inhale at the same time or we might risk asphyxiation.”

Pathologist humor. Everyone smiled politely. Perri Dahlgren zeroed in on Tall Wolf.

Wearing his sunglasses indoors.

She asked him, “Light sensitivity or terminal cool?”

“Sensitivity.”

“Do you ski, downhill?”

He shook his head. “Sun reflecting off snow, that’s hard for me even with the glasses.”

“Shame,” she said.

“Doc,” Ron prompted.

Assuming a professional demeanor, Dr. Dahlgren described how Hale Tibbot had been killed. The amount of blood that had been taken from him.

She said, “I think you’re looking for someone with at least some medical training. A doctor, a nurse or a tech who worked at a blood bank. Someone who not only doesn’t mind plunging a needle into a blood vessel but has the eye and the experience to make a clean stick the first time and not spill a drop.”

Keely said, “Not too many people make blood donations from their necks, do they?”

“Well, no.”

“I always use my left arm,” the retired detective said. “So I can still shoot with my dominant hand, if I need to.”

Dr. Dahlgren conceded, “Arms are the most common donation sites, and people do tend to use their secondary limbs.”

Continuing her line of thought, Keely said, “Wouldn’t it be more likely that someone with medical experience and a background in, say, trauma care or surgery might be less squeamish about going for an artery in the neck?”

“I suppose,” Dr. Dahlgren said.

“Well, you’re a physician, but you work with bodies not people. Would you have more apprehension about going for a throat than a forearm?”

“I … I. Yes, I would.”

“So we’ll look for someone a little higher up the medical food chain than a tech.”

“Or maybe it’s someone who just likes to stick pointed objects in things,” Tall Wolf said. “Has liked to do that since he was a kid. Worked his way up to needles and people.

Everyone looked at Tall Wolf, uneasy with the prospect he’d raised.

Ron turned the questioning back to a more practical consideration “Wherever blood is taken,” he asked, “isn’t it much easier to do if someone’s holding still?”

Dr. Dahlgren said, “Of course, it is. Making a clean stick on a moving body part would be pure luck.”

All three cops looked at each other.

None of them believed Hale Tibbot’s pin-neat homicide had been a matter of chance.

Tall Wolf asked, “So how did the killer clamp the victim’s head down.”

Dr. Dahlgren said, “I wondered about that, too, and I found the answer.”

She led them out of the office into the morgue and rolled Tibbot’s body out of the refrigerated compartment in which it rested. His head had been shaved clean. For a moment, Ron was dismayed that the victim had lost his meticulously coiffed hair. Then he relaxed, remembering that Officer Benny Marx had taken photos of Tibbot at the crime scene.

Dr. Dahlgren rotated the cadaver’s head so the right-hand profile was up. She stepped back and allowed the three cops to take a look. What they saw was a pre-mortem bruise in the shape of a hand. The margins of the fingers, thumb and palm were not clean lines, but the approximate size of a man’s hand was there plain as day.

Ron said, “You didn’t get any fingerprints, did you, Doctor?”

Perri Dahlgren shook her head.

“The victim’s hair was too thick to leave prints on his scalp.”

“Did you find any flakes of skin among the hair you shaved off his head?” Tall Wolf asked.

“I didn’t look yet,” Dr. Dahlgren said. “But I made sure I collected and bagged every strand. When I get back to my own lab, I’ll do a search.”

Keely told Ron, “Scrunch down a little.”

The chief intuitively knew what was coming, but obliged.

Keely wrapped her left arm around Ron’s head, placed her left hand flat against the side of Ron’s head. She leaned forward and pointed her right index finger at his throat and gave it a light jab. She let go and Ron stood up straight.

“That’d work,” she said. “The killer must have been strong to leave a bruise like that through a thick covering of hair. He could have immobilized the victim to get the needle in, if he knew what he was doing.”

Tall Wolf said, “If he collected Tibbot’s blood, where would the plastic bag have been? Wouldn’t the weight of the blood filling the bag pull it free from the needle line?”

Dr. Dahlgren thought about that. It was a question she hadn’t considered. But she came up with an answer all the cops could buy.

“If the bag were attached to the inside of the killer’s forearm, just below the hand he used to make the stick, it wouldn’t have been dangling. It would have been fairly secure.”

Ron still had a point he needed cleared up.

He said, “Even if the killer held Tibbot still long enough to get the needle in quickly, how did he keep the man from flopping around, yanking at the needle, pulling
something
loose and spilling blood? Were there any signs of death throes?”

Dr. Dahlgren said, “The victim’s blood alcohol content indicates he was highly intoxicated at the time of his death.”

That fit with Tibbot being foolish enough to attack Ron’s father, the chief thought.

“In addition,” the ME continued, “the estimated time of death was after midnight. So besides being very drunk, he may well have been fatigued. A brutal physical attack from behind had to be physically shocking, perhaps even paralyzing, and when you’re hemorrhaging like, well, a stuck pig, you lose strength very quickly.”

Ron and Tall Wolf looked at each other.

Keely saw the silent exchange and asked, “What?”

“There was no urine or feces at the crime scene,” Ron said.

Dr. Dahlgren nodded. “The victim’s bladder was empty upon examination and his bowels at the anal terminus were clear.”

John Tall Wolf said, “We wondered if the killer was in the house long enough to have seen Tibbot use his bathroom, waited for him to take care of business before going to work.”

Keely said, “That’d fit in with wanting to keep the scene neat.”

Ron added, “Now, I think the special agent and I are wondering whether the killer was in the bar where Tibbot was imbibing, saw him drink to excess.”

“Making himself an easier mark,” Tall Wolf added.

“You guys are pretty smart,” a female voice said.

Standing just inside the entrance to the morgue was a woman in a business suit and sensible shoes. The outfit was stodgy; the woman was anything but. She had dark brown hair worn in a pageboy style, high cheekbones, an olive complexion and a raptor’s unblinking gaze. She looked fit enough to compete in a triathlon and crowd the top male competitors at the finish line.

“You must be Special Agent Tall Wolf,” she said to John.

“And you’re the FBI?” he asked.

She nodded. “Special Agent Abra Benjamin.”

“Chief Ketchum?” she asked Ron.

“Yes.”

She handed him a manila envelope.

“The photos of Mr. Tibbot you requested. Sergeant Casimir Stanley asked me to pass them along.”

Ron took notice that the manila envelope holding the photos was still glued shut.

The newly arrived feeb hadn’t been snooping.

Special Agent Benjamin stepped over to Tibbot’s mortal remains and looked at the bruise thereon. She bobbed her head, making the others think she’d overheard their entire dialogue.

Turning to Ron, she said, “When it rains it pours, huh?”

Abra Benjamin had cabbed it to the hospital so she rode back to the chief’s office at the Muni Complex with Ron. Keely Powell, who seemed even unhappier than Ron to have a feeb on hand, and this one in particular, rode back to police headquarters with John Tall Wolf.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” Benjamin told Ron.

Sparing her a glance, he said, “And yet here you are.”

“I’m really not that bad.”

“We’ll see.”

“I could have begged off, even though Deputy Director Byron DeWitt asked me to come out here.”

Keeping his eyes on the road, the chief said, “You can blow off your bigshots?”

“I just completed a long, difficult assignment. I’m overdue for time off.”

“I won’t ask what the case was. Spare you saying you can’t tell me.”

“Thanks. I was in the deputy director’s office with Special Agent Sharon Kilbride when a call came through. The head of the BIA’s Office of Justice Services, Marlene Flower Moon, asked if Sharon might represent the bureau on the matter of the dirty bomb you found.”

“But she’s not as good as you?” Ron asked.

“Every bit as good and more. Sharon trained me. But she’s also eight months pregnant with twins. The deputy director thought that might slow her down a little.”

No doubt that was the point, Ron thought. Bring in a feeb who was all but immobilized.

“Sharon’s due to go on maternity leave any moment now, and Deputy Director DeWitt thought she shouldn’t be too far away from her own doctor, hospital and, of course, her husband.”

Ron nodded. “Perfectly reasonable decision.”

Abra gave him a look, decided he’d meant what he said.

It was a point in the local cop’s favor, the new fed decided.

She continued, “If the request had come in one day later, Sharon would have been on leave and I would have been on vacation. You’d have had some guy from the end of the bench to deal with. He probably would have been happy just to sit back, take in the scenery, scrounge a little credit for the bureau at the end of things.”

Ron pulled into his summer parking space, the one outdoors, and looked at Special Agent Benjamin. He asked, “Is this where I’m supposed to snap my fingers at my bad luck?”

“I heard about the problems SAC Francis Horgan caused you when Reverend Isaac Cardwell was killed up here. So I wouldn’t blame you if you
gave
me the finger. But I hope, in the end, you’ll see you’re better off with me.”

Ron looked at her and laughed.

“You want to tell me the
real
reason you’re not on vacation right now?” he asked.

Benjamin kept a poker face for ten seconds and then she laughed, too.

“John Tall Wolf has a habit of finding his way into cases the FBI considers to be ours. I thought I’d —”

“See if you can give him a run for his money?” Ron asked.

“Eat his lunch,” Abra Benjamin said.

There was room in Ron’s office for two men and two women to work, but he thought the egos involved might be a little happier with more elbow room. He commandeered the department’s conference room, had sparkling water, ice tea and nutritionally correct snacks sent in. He also called in Mayor Steadman’s press secretary, Annie Stratton.

He had the room’s miniblinds closed by the time she arrived.

“Everyone, this is Annie Stratton. She’ll handle media relations for us as necessary.”

The chief introduced Keely, Tall Wolf and Benjamin to Annie. Everyone understood she would be the mayor’s pipeline into their activities. If anyone got too far out of line, they’d find out who had the real clout in town.

Ron didn’t think Tall Wolf would push things. If Keely got ticked off at Clay, she’d just go back to L.A. Benjamin was the wild card. Her mention of the connection she had to the bureau’s deputy director was a none too subtle way of saying she wouldn’t be easily dislodged.

Ron asked Annie, “Any clamoring from the press about the bomb?”