LIES OF THE PHOENIX (A Lieutenant Cassidy Mystery Book 1) (3 page)

He started his walk back to the restaurant taking a route that took him through the alley behind the restaurant. Several commercial businesses abutted the restaurant and each had a dumpster lined up along the side of the alley. Jordan lifted the lid of the first one he came to. He removed the object from his waistband and threw it into the dumpster. Then he pulled a bag of garbage over the top of the discarded package to conceal its resting place. In a couple of hours the parcel would be hauled away and disappear into the sea of trash generated every day in Chicago. Jordan smiled. The intruder’s gun and the ammo clip for his own gun were gone forever

The police had confiscated the gun he used to shoot the home invader. He had told the police that the gun belonged to the intruder, but it actually was his own. He didn’t want to have to explain why he owned a gun with the serial numbers removed or why he shot the intruder as soon as he saw him. His story of shooting the intruder after a struggle for the gun raised far fewer questions.

He finished his walk back to the restaurant and found Sarah seated at the same table where they had eaten on their first date. She met his gaze with a beaming smile.

It doesn’t take much to please her,
he thought with satisfaction.

D
ETECTIVE NORA CASTLE
paged through her notes, “We’ve searched the upstairs and didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. The husband wasn’t too cooperative when we talked to him. He seemed really on edge. More angry than upset about the shooting. The wife was just in a daze, still trying to take it all in, I guess.”

Lieutenant Alec Cassidy looked at the young detective and nodded. She was still a little green, but she was showing considerable promise and had a sharp eye for detail. “Yes, I had the same impression. Mr. Lawrence really didn’t want to answer any questions. When I talked to the wife, it seemed to agitate him. There is something going on there.”

“Found something a little weird—the dead guy had a bunch of cigarette butts in his pocket along with a sooty looking twenty-five cent coin. Looks like he was crushing out the embers of the cigarette butts on the quarter and then putting them in his pocket. He didn’t want someone to find them.”

“Hmm, sounds like he may have been watching the house for a while,” Cassidy said as he mulled over this latest piece of information. “Maybe waiting for the Lawrences to go to bed and fall asleep before he broke in. This wasn’t just some random break-in. He was specifically targeting them. He wanted them at home.”

“Do you know what he was looking for?”

“No, not yet. But I have a hunch that Jordan Lawrence may. Our dead suspect doesn’t fit the profile of a typical house thief and Mr. Lawrence isn’t acting like our usual victim. We’re going to have to dig a little deeper, I think.”

“Is there something else you would like us to do here?” Nora asked.

“I think we’re about done here at the house,” Cassidy answered. “Our investigation team is finishing up for today. They’ll be back tomorrow to complete processing the scene. I want the reports from the neighborhood canvas as soon as possible. I think we need to talk to Mrs. Lawrence again—this time without Mr. Lawrence present.”

Nora Castle was waiting for her next assignment and Cassidy did not disappoint her. “Our perpetrator is not in the system. I want to know his identity,” he said. “This is not the first time this guy has done surveillance and broke into a house. See what you can find. Look at his shoes, clothes, check his pocket contents again—look for anything we can trace back to a source. The Medical Examiner may have something for us. Let me know as soon as the ME has completed the autopsy and is ready to talk to us.”

Nora made a mental note of everything he said. She would have pulled out a note pad and written it all down, except that she didn’t want to appear as obsessive-compulsive to Cassidy as she actually felt. She had only recently achieved the rank of detective and she had fought hard for an assignment to the homicide division. When she found out she would be working under Alec Cassidy she was overjoyed. She was hoping to learn a lot from him and she was ready to work her butt off to impress him.

* * * * *

Cassidy had been sitting at his desk for the last two hours looking over the reports from the crime scene investigation team. A cup of cold coffee sat next to the pile of papers he had finished reviewing. He was searching for any detail that would hint at who their dead suspect was or what he was after. Nothing significant was jumping out at him. The neighborhood canvas had turned up no witnesses. He was looking for something to freshen the case just as Detective Nora Castle appeared at his office door.

“I just spoke to the ME’s office and they are ready to talk to us. They told me the pathologist on the case was someone named Samson.

“O.K., good. Have you ever consulted with a forensic pathologist over the body in the autopsy lab?”

“Uh, no. I’ve met with the ME’s pathologists a couple of times to discuss findings, reviewed a few autopsy photos, but I’ve never actually been to the morgue to see the body.”

“This will be a learning experience for you then. Probably one you will never forget, but an important one.”

Nora was not looking forward to it, but knew it was part of the job. She steeled herself for what was to come. Cassidy grabbed his suit jacket from the back of his chair and they headed out of his office.

Cassidy began the lesson, “The ME’s report gives you the time of death, cause of death, prior injuries and pre-mortem health of your decedent. It will identify contributing or intervening factors like drugs, alcohol, poisons, and sort out lethal versus non-lethal injuries. If you don’t have a murder weapon, the ME may even be able to suggest a possible murder weapon based on the injuries as well as some information on the distance, force, and angle of injury.”

He looked at Detective Castle to see if what he was saying was sinking in. “But the most important reason you go down to view the body with the pathologist is because you are the only one looking at all the facts in the case from the perspective of a detective. It is your one chance to pose questions to the pathologist that maybe he or she hasn’t thought about. Asking your questions while the body is still available may be your only chance to have your questions answered. It can make or break your case. Remember that.”

They arrived at the Medical Examiner’s offices and were checked in through security. They then were directed to a waiting area while the case pathologist was notified of their arrival.

After a couple of minutes Dr. Barbara Samson walked through the doors to the waiting area. “Hi, Alec. Haven’t seen you for a while. I see you have a protégé with you today.” She flashed a quick smile of acknowledgement to Nora and then directed her attention back to Lieutenant Cassidy. “Ready to go over things?”

“Good to see you, Barbara. Yes, Detective Nora Castle is along for the ride today. We’re ready. Did you find anything interesting?”

“A few things, but I’ll let you be the judge.”

She led the way through several hallways and they entered a forensic autopsy suite. The body was stretched out on a stainless steel table resembling a very shallow sink and covered with a paper sheet. Barbara Samson stood at the head of the table and pulled the sheet down to waist level.

The room was cold, dim, and had an antiseptic smell. Nora took a position at the side of the table next to Alec Cassidy. She looked at the waxy colored corpse and felt everything in her stomach turning over. She swallowed hard to suppress it. She knew she would have to get used to these scenes to succeed as a homicide detective.

She could see the classic Y shaped autopsy incision that ran at an angle from each collar bone to the midline then in a single incision down to the pubis at the lower end of the torso. It had been closed neatly with widely spaced sutures. She took a deep breath and forced herself to focus on the details of what she was seeing rather than a dead body stretched out in front of her.

Dr. Samson reached over her head and turned on a large light that looked like it belonged in a surgical suite. The light illuminated the length of the table. She began to run through her findings. “I would say early 40’s, brown hair, brown eyes, 5 feet 10 inches, 170 pounds. No signs of ecchymosis, hematomas, abrasions, or acute lacerations.” She looked in Nora’s direction and said, “That means no physical findings like cuts, bruises or injuries to suggest much of a struggle occurred before death.”

“Hmm,” said Lieutenant Cassidy. “Our male victim reported a violent struggle before shots were fired. He didn’t have any visible injuries either.” Cassidy shot a look at Nora to make sure she caught a potential inconsistency in Jordan Lawrence’s story. She had.

Dr. Samson continued, “Death was due to a gunshot wound to the chest, 9 millimeter, probably at close range, about five to eight feet. The bullet perforated the left ventricle of the heart. Blew a big hole in it. Would have stopped him dead in his tracks. There is a second gunshot wound to the head, left temporal lobe, close range. That bullet exited the other side and took part of the skull with it.”

Alec was looking closely at the wounds as Barbara described them and then asked, “Would you say the head shot was an afterthought by our shooter?”

“Yes. This guy wasn’t going anywhere after the gunshot wound to his heart. He was already dead. Blood would have been pouring into his chest cavity. His heart had stopped pumping after the first shot so we don’t see any massive bleeding into the brain from the head shot—just some oozing. There are powder burns and stippling of the tissue around the head entrance wound. It was very close range—inches rather than feet.”

Alec leaned forward and silently inspected the area that Barbara was describing. Nora followed suit and did the same.

Nora could see that Alec was making mental notes as Dr. Samson talked. It hit her that a lot of this autopsy table discussion would never appear in the written autopsy report and could be lost as the pathologist moved on to other cases. She made a mental note of that for herself.

“What else do you have for us,” Alec asked.

“Well, the teeth are interesting. There’s a huge number of big amalgam fillings, no composite fillings, a couple of missing teeth, and one poorly made crown. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this guy grew up in an area where fluoridated water was not the norm and the dental work looks old school, like it may have been done outside the U.S.”

“O.K., I’ll keep that in mind. It may provide us with a lead.” The wheels in Alec’s head were turning.

“He had a little bit of coronary artery disease, nothing too advanced. There were some gall stones. Again, nothing unusual. Toxicology was negative for any drugs and just a trace of alcohol was found. Lungs showed some emphysema/chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, he was a heavy smoker.”

“That’s consistent with what we found at the crime scene. He had a pocket full of cigarette butts,” Nora volunteered.

Dr. Samson continued, “You’ll be interested in some old injury scars that we found. This guy had a hard life.”

She leaned over the body and turned the cadaver’s head to the right. “We have an old, five inch long, well healed, horizontal scar on the left side of the neck extending to the front midline of the neck. Looks like a narrow laceration, like someone tried to cut his throat with a thin blade at one time, but it didn’t penetrate deep enough to hit one of the major blood vessels in the neck.” Both Alec and Nora leaned in close to see the area that Barbara was describing.

“Next, there is an old, well healed gunshot wound to the right chest. The bullet penetrated the lung and looks like it was surgically removed. I found some old scaring in the lung, but no retained bullet fragments.” Alec and Nora again took a close look.

Barbara continued with a review of her findings, “On the abdomen, midline, several inches above the umbilicus, uh—navel, there is an old, well healed, one inch scar from a deep stab wound. The guy was lucky with that injury—that wound somehow missed his abdominal aorta, the main artery in the body. If it had lacerated his aorta, he would have bled to death in short order. Instead, the wound perforated his bowel and he had one hell of a case of peritonitis. I found a lot of scaring and adhesions in the abdominal cavity evidencing an old massive infection of the gut. It was so bad it formed a fistula out to the skin.”

Barbara looked at Nora and could see the question on her face, “Don’t worry, all this medical terminology will become second nature to you after a while. A fistula is an abnormal tract or duct. In this case an abscess in the gut caused a tract to form through the abdominal tissue so the infection could drain out onto the surface of the skin. See the scar here?” She directed Nora’s attention to an irregular circular scar on the abdomen that was about the size of a quarter.

Nora nodded. She appreciated the explanation. It also confirmed to her that she had a lot to learn. She focused more intently on what Barbara was saying.

Barbara then directed their attention to the cadaver’s arms. “Aside from that, there are five other old scars of various lengths on his arms and forearms. They look like healed knife wounds to me. Maybe defensive wounds. The only other thing of interest are three large scarred areas from abrasions or burns—one on the neck just above the right clavicle, one on the right knee, and one on the top of the right foot.”

Alec moved from one scarred area to the next inspecting each very closely. “Barbara, can you excise those three skin areas? I’d like Forensic Services to take a closer look at them under spectroscopy and some of their other toys. I think they may be tattoos that our assailant tried to remove. It may help us identify him.”

Nora looked at the three areas that Cassidy was referencing. She could see no evidence of tattoos on the cadaver. There was scarring on the neck, knee and foot for sure, but no ink and nothing that looked like an image. She wondered what made Cassidy think these were tattoos.

“Sure, no problem.” Dr. Samson replied. “I can have the specimens sent over for analysis this afternoon.”

Alec thanked Dr. Samson and they said their goodbyes. When they were outside the building Alec turned to Nora and said, “Did you learn anything in there?”

Nora certainly had. “I found out that talking to the pathologist directly can give you a wealth of information that will never end up in the ME’s final report.”

Alec nodded, “A lot of times, leads come from creative speculation followed by good old fashioned police work. Pathologists will never speculate in their official written report. But talking to you face to face they will tell you what they think
might
have happened. For a good detective, that can be priceless. An educated guess can sometimes give you the lead you need to break open a stalled investigation. So, what do we know about our dead perpetrator that we didn’t know before?”