No Way to Die (14 page)

“Exactly,” I said.

“But nonetheless, whoever murdered Thomas Rasmussen—if indeed he was murdered—that person would have had to have been an expert,” he said. “Not just your average run-of-the-mill hit man that you happened to meet at a bar.I’m baffled, professionally, as to how it could have been done,” he said. Richard loves a good mystery.

“Well, we’ll be getting some insight into that at ten o’clock, right?” Inez had sent us the autopsy report yesterday, and Richard had forwarded it on to his friend Dr. Carolyn Valeria. She’d agreed to meet us in our conference room this morning.

“That’s right,” he said. “Maybe that will help shed some light.”

* * * *

Promptly at ten o’clock, Dr. Valeria walked through our front door. She was a tall, distinguished-looking woman in her early sixties. Her short hair was a mixture of blond and gray. She wore a sharp black coat over a white blouse and black slacks. I was sitting at the receptionist desk, waiting (we take turns acting as receptionist). I introduced myself, and when Toni came out of her office a couple seconds later, I introduced her, too.

Toni said hello, and then she stepped back to admire Dr. Valeria’s suit. “I have to say, Dr. Valeria, I absolutely adore your suit. It’s the new Armani Collezioni, right?”

Dr. Valeria turned to Toni, surprised. She smiled and said, “That’s an excellent fashion eye, my dear. I am most impressed.”

Toni smiled back. She did a little pose. “Well, don’t let the casual attire and the Doc Martens fool you,” she said. “Underneath it all, I’m a closet fashion hound. I tried that exact suit on last week, but it didn’t fit me nearly as well as it does you. It looks like they designed it for you specifically. On you, the lines are beautiful—long and elegant and flowing. On me, everything was sort of—how should I put it—bent?”

Dr. Valeria laughed. “That’s one way to put it, I suppose. My dear, if I had half the curves you do, I’d gladly trade ‘long and elegant’ for ‘bent’ any day of the week.”

Toni laughed. “Shhh!” she said. “You’ll have all the boys talking.”

She and the doctor had a good laugh as Toni led her back to our conference room.

“Carolyn,” Richard said warmly as he entered the room. The two embraced, and then Richard said, “Thank you so much for coming to talk with us today.”

“Yes,” I added. “We’re very grateful that you could have a look at the report and meet with us. Before you get started, we’ll have two other guys joining us in a few minutes. They’ve been chasing down some information, and they’re on their way back now.”

“It’s my pleasure,” she said. “I was just delighted to hear from my old friend Richard.”

“The pleasure is all mine,” Richard said graciously. “It’s been much too long.”He turned to us. “Dr. Valeria—”

“Please,” she said, “that’s enough of that. Let’s just make it Carolyn this morning.”

“As you wish,” Richard said. “Carolyn and I first met in the early ’90s, shortly before I retired.”

“That’s right,” she said. “As I recall, I’d been working in the FBI Crime Lab for about ten years or so, and I was conducting a seminar for local law enforcement agencies on the proper ways to preserve DNA evidence. Richard was in Washington, D.C., representing the Seattle Police Department.”

“Because we’d just had a case thrown out for mishandling the evidence,” Richard laughed. “Our chief was quite upset, and he sent me along with three other detectives. It was supposed to be punishment, but we had a great time—actually, we probably had too good of a time.”

“The four of them made quite an impression,” Carolyn said, smiling. “Those were the days, right?”

“Indeed, they were,” Richard said. “We should get together—perhaps this evening if you’re able. I know Maria would like to meet you. How long are you in town?”

“I’m actually here for two weeks,” she said. “I’m meeting my sister, and we’re going up to Vancouver for a week.”

“Excellent,” Richard said. “I’ll speak to you after our meeting, then.”

She turned to me. “Please excuse us. We’ve gotten carried away while we have work to do, am I correct?”

I smiled. “That’s no problem at all. We’re very glad you’re here, ma’am. We can sure use some expert advice.”

“Good. But I caution you, you’ll not get it if you call me ‘ma’am’ again.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Force of habit.”

“Military?” she asked.

I nodded.

“It shows,” she said. “I’ve had plenty of opportunity to rub shoulders with you military men. Almost always unfailingly polite.”

I smiled.

“Today, though, it’s just Carolyn, okay?”

“Got it,” I said.

“Good. I’ll get us started, and the others can join in when they arrive.” She opened up an attaché case she’d set down and pulled out a file. “Yesterday morning,” she said, opening the file, “Richard contacted me and said he’d be sending a file, which I received shortly thereafter.”

She looked down and referred to the file. “This file contains a complete autopsy report of one Thomas Lloyd Rasmussen, date of birth 9 September 1970. The report concludes that the victim died of a self-inflicted, perforating contact wound from a .357 Magnum bullet.” She looked back up at us. “Is this your understanding as well?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly how it was presented to us.”

“And,” she continued, “Richard explained to me that your firm has been engaged by the widow of the deceased to first, determine if the death might have been caused by a homicide instead of a suicide, and, if so, to get the Seattle Police Department to reopen the case. Correct?”

“That’s it,” I said.

“All right, then,” she said, adjusting the file in front of her. “I’ve reviewed the file. I’m ready to answer your questions. How can I help?”

“Danny,” Richard said, “if I may, perhaps I should ask a few questions.”

I nodded.

Richard turned to Carolyn. “Carolyn, would you mind telling us a little about your background?”

“Certainly,” she said. “I should have started with that, I’m sorry. I graduated from the Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1977. I did my internship and my pathology residency at the Georgetown Medical Center. Immediately afterward, I joined the FBI—that would have been in 1981. My official title was Biologist Forensic Examiner. I worked in the FBI Laboratory in Virginia for the next thirty years until I retired two years ago, when my husband passed away. During that time, I rose to the position of Master Forensic Examiner.”

“Very impressive,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m quite happy with the way my career turned out.”

“Sounds like you should be,” I said.

“I’ve been very fortunate. Now, as to the issue at hand . . .”she said.

“Well, let me start by saying you’re right about what we’ve been hired to do,” I said. “The police closed the case, based on the physical evidence. They’ve made a determination that the death is a suicide. We feel that there are enough extenuating circumstances to suggest that what appears to be a suicide might actually be a homicide. But if it was a murder, the physical evidence would have had to have been manipulated—staged even—to make it look like a suicide with no apparent tracks leading back to a murderer.”

“And again, assuming a murder,” Richard added, “the degree to which the physical evidence must have been manipulated is certainly not something I’ve ever seen.I’ve seen it tried—things like ‘she jumped from the window; I didn’t push her’ or ‘she must have mistaken her pills; I didn’t switch them’—those kind of things. But I’ve never seen someone try to disguise a murder as a suicide with a gun and leave no telltale physical evidence—nothing at all. Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

“Well, you’re never completely without tracks,” she said, “without something that would have given a killer away. There’s always something, if you know what to look for. But the problem is that on occasion, the tracks are very subtle or so well hidden that they’re missed. Let me explain.

“If you just shoot somebody in the head and then run over and put the murder weapon in the hand of the victim and expect the police to think it’s a suicide, you’re fooling yourself. That’s an easy murder to spot. The wound angle is wrong. The wound pathology is wrong. Blood spatter, contact burns, powder burns—it’s all wrong. Any halfway-decent crime scene investigation and autopsy will smoke this out. I can say definitively that this did not happen in your case.

“Instead, if you want to make a murder by gunshot look like a suicide, the very distinct forensic and pathological signature of the gunshot wound itself makes it such that, somehow, the victim needs to be the one who actually fires the fatal shot. And, as you can imagine, since that’s not likely to happen voluntarily, the murderer has to be in actual physical control of the victim long enough to be able to manipulate the events. Once the murderer is in control of the victim, the evidence is fairly easy to stage. They put the murder weapon in the hand of the victim and somehow get the victim to raise the gun to their head and pull the trigger. Then all the physical evidence matches up to a suicide. The only possible clue might be a small amount of powder-burn shadowing on the gun hand of the victim, depending on how the murderer actually manipulated the trigger of the weapon. But this shadowing might be very small or even nonexistent.”

“So if that’s happened, how do you figure it out?” I asked. “What are the tracks?”

“The tracks are found in the way in which the murderer put the victim under control,” she said. “Those are the tracks you look for. And that raises the question of how you can get somebody under control long enough to murder them while still leaving the smallest possible amount of forensic evidence. There are three major ways this is done—drugs, mechanical restraint, and electrically induced restraint. The goal in each case is to either incapacitate or at least restrain a victim long enough to manipulate the flow of events so that the resulting forensic evidence seems completely authentic. In other words, get them under control, and then keep them under control long enough to put a gun in their hand and lift it to their head and pull the trigger. And do it such that the end result looks just like a typical suicide. Each of the three methods could be used for this, but each has problems. Let’s look at them individually. We’ll start with drugs.

“If you wanted to kill someone using a gunshot, and you wanted to use drugs to immobilize this person, and then afterward have the act completely undetectable, you’d have to overcome three problems. First, you’d have to be able to administer the drug to an alert, healthy man in such a manner that there’d be no telltale sign. Since alert, healthy men aren’t in the habit of allowing this to happen to themselves, this is not easily done. You can probably remember several cases where nurses have murdered their patients using drugs—usually either something like pancuronium or succinylcholine. But in these cases, the patients are usually elderly, already hooked up to an IV, and very often asleep at the time of the injection. Because the IV's already in place, there’s no new injection site to be discovered by a forensic pathologist in the course of an autopsy.

“Next, you’d have to get a drug that acts fast enough to immobilize someone without them calling for help or making a fuss while the drug sets in. There are some drugs that can do this. Most injectables take a minute or two to take effect. Some inhalants, though, can act very quickly, presuming you are able to get the concentration high enough. The most common way to do this is with a mask. If you dose a person with an ether-family anesthetic like desflurane, they’ll go out like a light. But with the exception of a surgical patient, who’s going to hold still and allow the mask to be placed over his mouth and nose? The ensuing struggle would most likely leave some sort of marking on the victim. There was no mention of any trauma like this to Thomas Rasmussen.”

She paused and took a sip from a bottle of water Toni had given her. “I suppose,” she continued, “it’s theoretically possible that a killer could have somehow piped an immobilizing gas into the interior of the car. This could have raised the concentration of the drug inside to a high-enough level to induce unconsciousness, but it seems that the victim would have probably had time to sense this before he blacked out—most delivery agents have an odor.

“But in all cases, you’d have to use a drug that left no chemical or biological trace—what we call ‘markers’—in the body for a pathologist to discover during an autopsy. Some agents—succinylcholine comes to mind—metabolize very quickly and are thus very difficult to discern. But in this case, the metabolization period was cut short because of the gunshot wound. I’ve reviewed the toxicology report very carefully, and I agree with the findings of the pathologist who did the study—there appears to me to be no evidence of any unusual drug present in Thomas Rasmussen at the time of his death.

“In any case, what I find to be the most troubling aspect of a two-stage murder using drugs to incapacitate and then a gunshot to murder is simply, why bother with the gun? If you’re going to go to the trouble of drugging somebody you ultimately want to kill, it’s probably easier to use the drugs themselves to kill the victim and have it appear, at least initially, to be a death from natural causes. Several drugs can pull that off. Unless the ME knows specifically what to look for, the actual cause of death could go completely unnoticed. No gunshot required.