The Deadly Embrace (9 page)

“Where is her brain?” demanded Liza. “I would like to check it for trauma and hemorrhaging.”

“I’m afraid...”

“Afraid of what?” she demanded when several seconds passed in silence.

“It was sent to the crematorium in the viscera bag, I believe.”

“I see,” she said. “Are there any references to its condition in the pathologist’s notes?”

“Let me check,” said Sleeves, scanning the two hand-scrawled pages.

A sixteen-gauge needle was protruding from Joss’s neck above the tracheal tube. Lower down, the pathologist had made a broad lateral chest incision, hacking through her rib cage with what appeared to be the same crude instruments.

“No references to the brain at all,” said Sleeves, getting up from the desk and starting to come toward her. “It concludes that the cause of death was drowning, either by accident or at Lieutenant Dunbar’s own hands.”

Joss’s heart had been removed, along with the lungs. Her stomach lining had been peeled back to remove the stomach. The liver was also missing.

“Where are the rest of her organs?” she angrily demanded.

“The organs?”

“Her heart, the lungs, the liver, her vital organs. If drowning was the probable cause, I need to examine the pericardial sac.”

“They must have gone over in the viscera bag with her brain,” he said, now standing beside her. “Sorry about that. Who could have known?”

“What did they find in her stomach?” she said, beyond outrage.

He looked down at the notes.

“Some sort of brownish fluid, it says here. Apparently, she hadn’t eaten in at least six hours.”

He was standing uncomfortably close to her again.

“I need room to work,” she said, glaring at him with unmasked hostility.

“That kind of tone won’t get you anywhere,” he said, his voice taking on a husky quality as he stepped back a few inches.

Liza began a systematic examination of what was left of her body. Using a small penlight and her own magnifying glass, she began carefully to scan every inch of the girl’s skin, slowly working her way from the face, mouth, and neck down the arms and shoulders to her hands.

If Joss had been murdered, there were no indications that she had tried to defend herself, concluded Liza. Aside from the slashing wounds in her left wrist, there were no contusions or abrasions on her hands or arms to suggest that she had tried to fight for her life.

Liza carefully examined the three parallel slits in her wrist. Two of them were very shallow, as if Joss had only been half serious at her purpose, perhaps just testing the whole idea, or performing a charade for whoever had been with her. The third one, almost certainly the last, had been sliced deep with great force. In the process, the razor actually grooved the wrist bone, which lay exposed in the overhead light.

She briefly considered whether Joss would have had the strength to slash herself after consuming both alcohol and barbiturates. She looked forward to receiving the blood analysis from the SHAEF hospital, knowing that Colonel Gaines or his people could not have tampered with those results.

Almost unconsciously, she found herself silently reciting the words of the Kaddish in memory of her young co-worker. Somehow, the phrases she had learned so long ago from her father gave her a small measure of comfort. At one point, she happened to glance up at Sleeves, who remained standing behind her. A look of almost indecent revelry animated his flushed face, and Liza was repulsed by the thought that he might actually be sexually stimulated by her violated body.

“Stand back,” she shouted, jostling him away from Joss’s body. As if he had been caught by his mother in an indecent act, the officer’s face flushed with embarrassment before he returned to the desk and sat down.

Joss’s pubic area had been carefully shaved, probably no more than a day or two before her death. Why would she have done it? Liza wondered, before considering the possibility that someone else might have shaved her, perhaps with her consent.

As Taggart had pointed out to her after his meeting with General Manigault, her undeveloped breasts, tiny feet, narrow hips, and lack of muscular tone left the indelible image of nothing so much as a beautiful young altar boy.

“Maybe Admiral Jellico enjoyed buggering boys at sea,” Taggart had said to her cynically. “Maybe she was a throwback to his glorious youth.”

Liza put her arm behind Joss’s neck and gently turned her over on her back. A deep lateral incision had been made between the shoulder blades. It was connected to another that ran down to the pelvic bone.

Liza found almost immediate signs of intercourse in the form of swollen tissue around the vagina as well as the anal ring and a distension of the sphincter muscle. She took double swab samples of both passages before concluding a meticulous inspection of Joss’s lower extremities.

Liza concluded her examination with the certain knowledge that whoever had conducted the autopsy had effectively obliterated any chance for her to confirm the cause of death. Perhaps the blood tests would reveal some answers. In the meantime, she wanted to make sure that the body was not destroyed.

She covered Joss with the sheet, then placed the swab samples in a specimen jar and put them in her handbag before walking over to Captain Sleeves.

“As soon as I get back to headquarters,” she said, “I will have Major Taggart issue immediate orders to transfer this body to the morgue at the SHAEF hospital on Curzon Street. Lieutenant Dunbar better be here when they come to transport her.”

Seeing the smoldering menace in her eyes, he just nodded in agreement.

CHAPTER 8

A
t five o’clock that evening, Liza met Sam Taggart at the SHAEF hospital to learn the results of Joss’s blood workup. They were informed at the desk that the testing protocol had been given to a Dr. Cabot, who was still on duty.

Inside the basement laboratory, they found a stocky, boyish-looking man wearing a long-billed fishing cap over his army fatigues. Sitting in an armchair with his feet on the desk, he was surrounded by three young English nurses in starched white uniforms.

“Call me George,” he said with a brash grin. “I’ve just arrived from Philadelphia, girls, and I definitely need some help to find my way around the city.”

“I’ll help you,” growled Taggart, coming up behind him as the nurses hurried off.

Momentarily crestfallen, Dr. Cabot glanced up at the two of them before quickly focusing on Liza. He removed his feet from the desk, stood up, and gave Taggart a casual salute.

“We need the results of the Dunbar blood tests,” said Sam Taggart without bothering to return it. “We’re in a hurry.”

“Sure,” said the young doctor, blowing a perfect bubble through the wad of chewing gum in his mouth. Leaning over his desk, he quickly riffled through a disordered pile of folders, removed one from the stack, and handed it to Taggart, then popped the bubble, revealing perfectly formed white teeth.

“Are you a pathologist, by any chance?” asked Taggart, scanning the file.

“Uh … no,” he replied, grinning at Liza.

“What is your field?”

“Um … reconstructive surgery,” he said.

“What do you reconstruct?” demanded Taggart.

“My practice was largely cosmetic,” said Dr. Cabot. “Female anatomy, mostly.”

“I just wanted to make sure you knew how to test a blood sample,” said Taggart.

“No problem … This person is dead, right?” he said, chewing his gum.

“Why do you ask?” said Taggart.

“Because whoever she was had enough yellow jackets in her system to kill a rhinoceros,” he said.

“Yellow jackets?” asked Taggart.

“Phenobarbital,” said Liza. “Sleeping pills.”

“How long could she have lived with that concentration of drugs in her bloodstream?”

“She was probably already unconscious when she died … definitely close to it,” said Cabot. “It wouldn’t have taken more than another hour or two for her to lapse into a coma. She also had a blood-alcohol level of point two four. Not a fun date.”

“Anything else?” asked Taggart. “Did you screen for anything else?” Cabot’s eyes were still on Liza’s. As if hoping to impress her, he blew out another two-inch bubble and snapped it back in his mouth.

“Everything else looked normal,” he said. “I assume you knew she was pregnant.”

The image of Joss’s fainting spell in the bathroom played back in Liza’s brain. This was the confirmation of what she had then deduced.

“Yeah … thanks,” said Taggart, turning to go.

“You interested in dinner, Lieutenant?” asked Dr. Cabot, taking off the long-billed fishing cap to uncover an amazing thatch of carrot-red hair. “I’m about to go off duty.”

“No thank you,” said Liza, although she was ravenously hungry.

Back outside, night had fallen and it was pouring rain again.

“Let’s eat,” said Taggart, trying to hail a taxi. “We need to talk.”

After standing in the cold downpour for several minutes, Taggart gave up trying to get a taxi and started down the sidewalk with Liza in tow. Without a reservation, they were turned away from the first three restaurants they entered, each of them already packed with Americans. There were even lines of people on the sidewalks waiting outside the pubs. They ended up walking four more blocks to Taggart’s apartment on Jermyn Street.

It was at the top of a set of sagging stairs above a saddlery shop. A hand-tooled English saddle sat in the store window, along with two stuffed foxes and a female mannequin dressed in tan riding breeches and a scarlet jacket.

The apartment consisted of a parlor, two bedrooms, and a small kitchen. Taggart lit a coal fire in the parlor, and Liza warmed her hands in front of it while he disappeared into one of the bedrooms. She glanced at the few pieces of simple furniture and two overstuffed chairs. An old Empire couch rested under the bay window.

Sam returned a few moments later with a large towel.

“Well, this is cozy,” she said, drying her hair while standing at the bay window. People were scurrying up and down the sidewalks, heads bent against the driving rain. “How do you rate an apartment?”

“By getting bombed out of the two billets where I was living. I share this with a navy commander who does Atlantic convoy routing,” said Taggart, hanging their trench coats to dry on two hooks near the coal fire. “We both work odd hours.”

He led her back to the kitchen, bending down in front of an oak icebox to check its contents.

“Tea or coffee—that’s all there is to drink,” he said, apologetically.

“Tea,” she said.

He lit the stove and put water on to boil.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“I would eat my mother’s pickled herring at this point,” she said.

“How does poor man’s Stroganoff sound?” he asked, removing several articles from the icebox.

“Good,” she said. “Whatever that is.”

“It will be done in fifteen minutes.”

He lit the burners on the small gas stove with a kitchen match. After putting a tea kettle on one of the burners, he dropped a large dollop of butter into a skillet pan. Waiting for the tea water to boil, Liza sat down at the kitchen table and watched him unwrap a pound of ground beef from a roll of brown butcher paper. He placed it in the melted butter, over low heat.

“It’s a good thing we’re not on the civilian rationing plan over here,” he said, with a taut grin. “This would be our entire meat allotment for the week.”

After sprinkling the meat with salt, dried basil, paprika, and ground pepper, he expertly peeled and chopped two small onions on the black stone countertop.

“Are you sure you found your right calling?” she asked.

“Yeah, but I’ve always loved to cook, too. My mother was Italian,” he said, pulling three cloves of garlic from a string above the sink, and mincing them with practiced virtuosity.

He started the onions and garlic in another saucepan with some more butter and dried parsley. After pausing to light a cigarette, he threw a small handful of tea leaves into a clay teapot and poured in boiling water. Then he took a packet of GI coffee grounds, dropped them in a separate pot, and added the remainder of the hot water. It was wonderfully warm in the little kitchen, and Liza felt herself beginning to relax for the first time that day. Closing her eyes for a moment, she savored the delicious aroma of the sautéing onions.

“Why would Lieutenant Dunbar have been carrying condoms if she was already pregnant?” he asked, offering her sugar and cream.

Stirred out of her reverie, Liza said, “I don’t know. It makes no sense.”

“Murder cases rarely make any sense until they’re over and the murderer is caught,” said Taggart. “Then they always make sense, no matter how many mistakes are made in the investigation along the way.”

Liza thought back to the obvious signs of both vaginal and anal intercourse she had witnessed under the magnifying glass on Joss’s body. “She may have used condoms with certain partners and not with others,” she said.

Using a wooden spoon, Taggart stirred the contents of the two saucepans and said, “It could have been her regular practice to use condoms with the man she was meeting at the pool. Maybe she didn’t want to change her routine for him.”

He picked up a small bowl full of raw mushrooms from the window ledge.

“That would be logical,” she said, “particularly if it was someone like Admiral Jellico. I think he is the type who would notice any change in routine.”

“Tell me what you discovered during the autopsy,” he said, breaking up the clumps of mushrooms with his fingers and adding them to the onions and garlic.

Liza spent ten minutes describing everything that had occurred at Golders Green, including the butchering of Joss’s cadaver and the very limited physical data she had been able to gather without the benefit of the vital organs. “It would help if we knew Admiral Jellico’s sexual proclivities,” she said, “although I heard him tell you he has a daughter older than Joss.”

“So what,” said Taggart. “I once had a murder case where the father of six girls murdered his homosexual partner and then cut off the man’s testicles.”

“When is dinner going to be ready?” said Liza, with a note of sarcasm.

“Sorry,” said Taggart, stirring the browning meat. “Do you think she was intimate with a lot of men?”

“I’m not sure,” said Liza.

“At this point we know she was involved with her boss,” he said. “And, according to you, she might have been in love with the man who made her pregnant. We can assume that wasn’t Jellico. And you also said that an American general was asking about her and J.P.”

“General Kilgore.”

Taggart remembered Kilgore well. The general had been a dinner guest at one of Manigault’s parties. He had been bragging about his friendship with General Patton and complaining that “Georgie” had been given a raw deal after the slapping incident in Sicily.

“We’ll have to talk to him, too,” said Taggart.

The room filled with the fragrance of the browning sauce.

“I have to cheat a little here,” said Taggart as he opened a can of peeled tomatoes and slowly stirred them into the onions, mushrooms, and garlic.

“So, with what little you have to go on … how do you think she died?” he asked.

In her mind’s eye, Liza tried to reconstruct everything she had observed, both at the death scene and after examining the body.

“Joss almost certainly drowned,” said Liza. “But that begs the question of why she would have employed three different methods to kill herself when anyone of them would have succeeded. Based on the blood results, she would have died from the phenobarbital overdose … and by then she would have already bled to death from the wrist wound.”

“She didn’t kill herself,” said Taggart.

“I agree,” said Liza. “You should have seen her face when she first realized she was going to have a child. This was a young woman who wanted to live. She was crazy about someone, and I believe it was the man she was convinced was the baby’s father. He was almost certainly the one who gave her the gold locket she wore around her neck.”

“Maybe his picture was inside,” said Taggart. “His face could also have been removed from that torn photograph we found in her wallet.”

Liza nodded. “The lover and the murderer could well be the same person.”

“There is always the chance that the man she loved didn’t want the baby … or even her anymore,” offered Taggart. “It could have been a duet.”

“A duet? What do you mean?”

“Maybe she started down the suicide trail for leverage, threatening to take the pills unless he married her. Perhaps she never meant to finish it that way. Lieutenant Dunbar was already drunk. Maybe she expected him to stop her. And then he didn’t. Maybe he just laughed at her. So she went and got the razor. And that didn’t work either. And then he might have just helped.”

“What kind of man would do something like that?”

“Are you kidding? We’re at war with millions of them right now, although the predators are not limited to Germany and Japan,” he said. “Think of something closer to a more elemental form of life—a crab, maybe.”

“A man with the moral convictions of a crab?”

“You asked me,” he said.

“That’s awfully hard to believe,” said Liza.

“Yeah, well, something tells me that whoever did this might have done it before,” he said. “Or tried to … You know … the monster child who starts out removing the wings on a fly, moves up to a sparrow, and then on to gouging out the eyes of a kitten with a penknife. Of course, the good ones don’t usually provide indicators. On the outside, they are all sunny smiles and a perfect disposition. Those are the hardest to catch.”

He held up a pint of sour cream.

“This is the secret,” he said, slowly adding half of it to the sauce.

“There could be something else going on here,” said Liza, as Taggart added the sauce to the well-browned meat. “Someone broke into Joss’s desk early this morning, and Charlie Wainwright’s, too.”

“What does he do?” asked Taggart. “Wainwright, I mean.”

“I’m not sure, exactly.”

“I’ll check him out,” he said, stirring the aromatic mixture, while Liza laid out his meager inventory of plates and utensils.

“You only need a spoon,” he growled as she looked for knives and forks.

“What if the murderer found out something from her that had nothing to do with the two of them?” she asked. “What if it was something involved with Overlord?”

“That’s what we have to find out,” said Sam, cutting several thick slices of dark, crusty bread from a loaf on the window ledge, and carrying the skillet over to the table.

“So what’s next?” she asked.

“Even if Gaines and his people have already gone over it, I want to make a careful search of Lieutenant Dunbar’s apartment,” said Taggart. “He doesn’t impress me as particularly thorough.”

After carefully ladling a large portion of the Stroganoff onto her plate, he watched Liza intently as she took her first spoonful.

“How is it?” asked Taggart, as if the fate of the war hung on her answer.

She smiled and said, “It’s the best meal I’ve had since arriving in London.”

“Where have you been eating?” he asked, and she laughed.

They both made short work of the simple supper. As Liza dipped the last of her bread into the gravy, Sam said, “So your father is a holy man.”

“A holy man?”

“A rabbi.”

She chuckled.

“Not really. Not a holy man in the sense of a Catholic priest. A rabbi has no special privileges, no rank or holiness. When it comes to God, he is simply a scholar in the law … the Jewish law.”

“Well, I’ve seen plenty of rabbis marching in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade,” said Taggart.

“Yes. Well, there are community obligations for any religious leaders,” said Liza.