Evidence of Murder (13 page)

“No problem.” He slid the door open for her and she escaped the cabin. Frigid air slapped her cheeks, woke her up. The deck swayed under her feet.

Still think he’s harmless?
Theresa asked herself.

Now Drew looked up at the gray haze that represented the sky. “You’ll let me know what the doctors say, right?”

“I’ll ask them to call you.” This didn’t guarantee that they would—normally medical information would be released only to the next of kin—but there was nothing she could do about that. From the rear deck she could see the copse of woods where the body had been found, and again felt that frisson of worry. Jillian Perry had practically died on her stalker’s stoop. “You said you thought that Jillian might have been coming to visit you?”

Drew had already followed her line of sight. “Yeah. I mean, it’s right there. I could have seen her from here.”

“Were you home all day on Monday?” A nice way of asking if he had an alibi for the time of the alleged crime.

“No, I was at the shop. I’m open nine to seven.”

“Did Jillian often walk here to visit you?”

He thought about this, holding his body tighter in his too-thin coat. “No, she always drove.”

“Always?”

“Yeah. Jillian wasn’t into exercise, believe it or not, despite her figure. She always told me, ‘I’ll jog only if someone’s chasing me with a gun.’” The laugh faded from his lips as quickly as it had appeared; obviously he thought someone
had
chased Jillian, right into an icy death.

She climbed onto the back of the boat. “Does this…craft…have a name? I don’t see one.”

“It’s on the front.”

She waited.

“What else? It’s
Jillian
.” He shrugged as he said it, with a wry smile that seemed so reasonable, so normal, that her anxiety dissipated like a wisp of hot air on an icy day. Drew Fleming was not the only man who had ever carried a torch for an unattainable woman. And if Drew Fleming had killed Jillian, why wouldn’t he sit back and let her be written off as a suicide? Why show up at the lab insisting on murder? Obsession could turn every bit as murderous as greed, but not as often. Greed remained the far more common motive.

“Thanks for talking to me,” he added. “I’m just glad that someone else cares about her besides me and Cara.”

Theresa placed one foot on the two-by-four, preparing to make the leap to solid ground. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and Jillian’s parents will win custody.”

“I told you—they’re not going to ask for it. They may not even know Jillian is dead, unless Evan told them. I certainly didn’t.”

“They’ll be told. They’re the official next of kin, so they’ll have to at least be informed of Cara’s guardianship.”

Drew frowned. “But Evan is already the guardian. Isn’t he?”

The two-by-four bent under Theresa’s weight. It would hold her for a quick leap, but if she tried to balance on it for any length of time, it would bow too deeply, and she would fall to the frozen ice below.

“Not exactly,” she admitted.

Theresa picked at the red tape stuck to her fingertips. She had sealed up no less than fourteen bags from the victim of an early-morning shooting, including two pairs of pants and four shirts of varying thicknesses. This by no means represented the record. Layering remained the best way to stay warm through a Cleveland winter, and those who spent many hours out of doors, like drug dealers, had to dress for the weather.

She tossed the last of the tape into the wastebasket, exited the amphitheater without watching where she was going, and bumped into the corner of a gurney parked in the hallway, sending it, with its occupant, sliding into Chris Cavanaugh. The Cleveland police department’s star hostage negotiator and all-around great guy, if you read his book jackets.

“That’s a hell of a greeting,” he told her. Even the dim light in the hallway couldn’t mitigate the dimples, the twinkling eyes, the gloss of each dark hair receding from his forehead.

“What are you doing here?”

“That’s a hell of greeting too. I’m sorry you couldn’t make lunch on Wednesday. Maybe another time.”

She didn’t respond, but he had already turned his head, watching through the open autopsy room door as two dieners swung a heavyset man onto a stainless-steel table in one well-practiced heave. The man appeared to be about forty, with a tattoo on one arm and a round, seeping hole in his chest.

“What are you doing here?” she asked again, but gently this time, guessing that she didn’t want to hear the answer any more than he wanted to say it.

He continued to watch the activity around the dead man. “We had a domestic standoff this morning. It didn’t end well.”

A snotty comment about his formerly perfect no-bloodshed record would probably put an end to the sporadic lunch invitations, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She thought about asking why he had come to attend the autopsy, but he would probably point out that detectives attended the autopsies of the cases they worked, so why not?

Besides, she thought she knew why he had come. “That’s going to happen, you know,” was all she could think of to say. “Things going bad.”

“I know.” He smiled and for a moment she could fool herself into thinking that she had cheered him up. The fact that she hadn’t was made apparent by his brisk tone when he said he supposed he shouldn’t keep her from her work and strode into the brightly lit autopsy suite as if counting on momentum to get him over the threshold.

Pride or guilt? She couldn’t tell.

And she didn’t care, right? The next door along the hallway led to the stairwell, and she climbed one flight to Christine Johnson’s office.

The young pathologist had inherited the cubbyhole from a predecessor and wasted no time in filling its walls with medical texts and photos of her younger siblings. Theresa would have leaned on the writing counter—the office had room for only one chair—but it already swayed from the collection of knives, guns, and blunt instruments spilling over from a cardboard box. She leaned on the doorjamb instead. “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

The doctor sat back in her chair and ran long fingers through her raven hair. “It has twenty-year-old carpeting and no window, but at least I don’t have to share it. I don’t share well.”

“Really? You seem so sweet to me.”

“You haven’t ticked me off yet.” Christine didn’t smile when she said this, either.

“I’ll keep that in mind. I need to ask you about a case.”

“The kid? I have something for you, by the way—here are the wood flakes I pulled out of his head wound.”

Theresa took the tiny envelope, feeling the fold of glassine paper inside it. “So the killer hit him with a wood object? Like a baseball bat?”

“I doubt it, the wound had some irregularities. But all I can really say is that it’s wood, and you’ll have to figure out the rest. Sign here and it’s yours.”

Theresa signed the evidence form. “Actually I wanted to know about Jillian Perry. White female, came in late Friday?”

For such a pretty face, Christine’s could produce a scowl that would have stopped an army of advancing Huns. Perhaps Theresa had finally ticked her off.

“Her,”
the pathologist seethed.

“What about her?”

“She’s driving me crazy, that’s what. Insane. I sped up the tox results, looked at everything, histology sections, skin samples, history. Everything.”

“Okaaay…and?”

“And I can’t figure out why she’s dead.”

“She didn’t freeze to death?”

“She might have.”

“Or OD?”

“She might have. You can have a seat on my ammo locker, there.”

Theresa sat on a small khaki-colored box next to the wall. With a handle on the top, it didn’t make for the most comfortable seating, but she’d been on her feet all morning. “I don’t think I’ve ever worked a freezing death before. Though I could have—if it’s not a homicide, I don’t pay much attention.”

“I’ve seen a few, usually the homeless or drug addicts who tried to stay outside too long. Jillian Perry shows some of the signs of it, the bluish-white skin, slightly reduced lividity. It would have taken only a few hours—right next to the lake, which would put moisture and wind in the air and speed it up. She was slender and not warmly dressed; that would speed it up too. Were the branches around her broken as if she was stumbling around?”

“Not really. I think she took the same path into the woods that we did. I noticed two broken branches that had ice on the broken parts, so it wasn’t the cop or Frank who broke them. Nothing else within sight.”

“She didn’t have bruises, scratches, or tears in her clothes either, so she probably sat down before the disorientation set in. After that her heart would have stopped. Was she frozen to the ground when you found her?”

“She was pretty stiff. It’s not like we had to chip her away or anything, but then several days had passed. The temperature rose and fell a few degrees.”

“True.”

The doctor drummed her fingernails, coated in a chocolate color that nearly matched her skin, on a copy of
Medicolegal Investigation of Death
for so long that Theresa finally interrupted, “So did she freeze to death?”

The drumming stopped. “A few things bother me.”

Theresa leaned forward, pressing her shoulders toward her knees. The handle of the ammo box deepened its impression into her buttocks.

“Freezing is, by nature, not an obvious diagnosis. You don’t have any hard-core proof of it as a cause of death. Kind of like drowning—if you find someone in the water and no other signs, you assume they drowned. You might find water in the lungs, or you might not. In freezing, you might find cherry-red lividity, petechiae in the peripheral muscles, abrasions of the skin, or you might not.”

“And in Jillian?”

“Nothing. The only unusual thing about her body was a kind of weird smell to the organs. But I could have been imagining that for all I know, so unremarkable was her autopsy. Meanwhile, I’m having tox check for amylase in the vitreous humor and elevated levels of catecholamines. That might tell us something.”

“It might tell
you
something.
I
have no idea what you just said.”

“Those are chemical indications of hypothermia. Sometimes. Did she have a white residue around her nose and mouth when you found her? Maybe it looked like she’d eaten a mouthful of snow?”

“No. Though the temperature had warmed up some.”

“But it never went above freezing all week. I checked. Most victims will have a white rime on their faces; their respiration freezes once outside the body.”

The significance of that flooded Theresa’s brain, expanding the set of possibilities. “So she wasn’t breathing as she sat in the cold? She didn’t freeze to death?”

“I don’t know. All these indications might be present, might not be. They don’t prove or disprove either way. Human bodies vary a lot in their responses; no matter how science advances, there’s still so much that we don’t know. That’s why if you’re going to bring me victims, give me a good shooting or stabbing any day. I know what to do with that.” She stroked the twelve-inch blade of a large knife serving as a paperweight.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Supposedly she walked to this spot by the lake?”

“We found her car in the garage.”

“Two or three miles away?”

All this talk of cold made Theresa feel overwarm. “Depending on the route she took. That’s not very far, really, I jog two miles every day.”

“Ever try it in six-degree weather with no hat or gloves?”

“No.”

“Want to know what your extremities would look like if you did?”

“Something tells me I don’t.”

“I did my residency at Metro. I had a rotation on Christmas Eve—”

“Bummer,” Theresa interjected without thinking, knowing how important holidays were to someone from a big, close-knit family.

“Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. You can’t get much lower on the department totem pole than that. Anyway, this mother and her teenage daughter came in with frostbite to their hands and the tips of their noses. They had decided to make an after-dinner convenience store run in nearly zero-degree weather without gloves. Now their situation was worse—the walk was nearly two miles each way, and the freezing, then thawing when they reached the store, then freezing again on the way back, then thawing when they got home and tried to help themselves by putting their hands in warm water, definitely aggravated the situation. But their hands were blackened and the skin shrunk against the fingers. It looked as if they’d held their hands in a campfire.”

“Ew.”

“I’d been working on accident victims and homicides for three months, and it still made me want to throw up. Now here we have Jillian Perry. Perhaps she had five or six more degrees of temperature in her favor, but still. They lost fingers and toes. Her skin is unblemished.”

Theresa agreed. She had examined Jillian’s hands and face thoroughly, and seen nothing like the damage Christine described. “So you’re thinking she was already dead, and someone placed her body in the woods?”

Christine picked up the knife, wiggling it toward Theresa in a vague gesture. “Same problem. What did she die of? There are no obvious signs of hypothermia, but there are no obvious signs of anything else either. No violence. No needle marks. No pulmonary emboli or even congestion. I even looked for birefringent crystals. I had to drag the polarizing microscope out from behind Banachek’s filing cabinet.”

“You could have used mine.”

“I’ll remember that next time.”

“So she didn’t OD.”

“I don’t know yet. I’m having tox run the blood and gastric again for lower levels of narcotics, something that might have gently slowed her down until she simply stopped breathing. Was she taking anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“You went to her house, right?”

“To collect for DNA comparison only.” Theresa tried to stamp the defensive tone out of her voice. “Frank checked the kitchen and I checked the bathroom medicine cabinet. Nothing but the usual household stuff.”