The Grip (3 page)

Sam’s face was blank.

“He said he wanted someone else to know how it felt to lose something they loved.”

Samantha sighed, tired of her father’s horror stories. “I’d rather take my chances with lunatics trying to push me in front of subway trains than spending my life living in a bubble.”

“You know, your mother and…”

“Can we not talk about Mom like she’s still around?”

He pushed his glasses up on his face. “The day your mother died was the worst day of my life. Thank God you’re too young to know what it feels like to turn over at night and not have that person there anymore. You have no idea. No idea.”

Whatever pity had started welling up within her was squashed flat when she remembered what had happened at the house this morning.

She had gone into her father’s room to ask him for lunch money and had found his girlfriend, Sheila Evans, jiggling the bathroom door handle. The bathroom where her mother’s body had been found. The one nobody went into anymore.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Samantha screamed, her anger fueled more by her hatred for the woman than by what she was trying to do.

Sheila’s face blanched. One of her sagging breasts lolled out of the satin negligee she was wearing. She fumbled it back inside, embarrassed. “I was just…”

“Going to use the washroom… He didn’t tell you, did he?”

Sheila was beginning to regain her composure, and anger was replacing shock. “Tell me what, Samantha?”

“That the day my mother died, the day someone came into our house and killed her, he stopped going in there. Betcha he forgot to mention that ol’ chestnut. No, didn’t want to frighten off his new lay.”

Sheila’s face became a mask of disbelief. No one had ever spoken to her that way before. And if Sam was lucky, it might just be enough to keep her from ever coming back.

She watched her father as he turned the corner, the memory of what happened so fresh she could still smell the trail of Sheila’s cheap perfume as she’d stormed away.

“And of all the people in town, did it have to be the principal of my school, Dad?”

“Life goes on after people die, Sam. It’s a tough lesson, I know, but it’s one we all have to learn. Besides, your mother would have wanted us to be happy.”

Sam clenched her fists. “None of us can be happy, Dad, because the day she was murdered, all that happiness packed its bags and went on vacation, permanently.”

“Your mother was not murdered, goddammit.” A hank of hair tumbled into his face, and he combed it back with a shaky hand. “Sam, you’re gonna have to accept the truth or you’ll end up a bitter and angry person.”

Too late
, she thought, gnawing the black polish off her nails.

“It just doesn’t make sense. Who kills themselves without a note? Who slits their wrists like that? And what she did to her face—Dad, her eyes!”

“Your mother was a sick woman, Sam,” he protested, as he had dozens of times before. “There’s no other explanation. Only a person who needs help would do something like that. My greatest regret is that I wasn’t able to keep the details of your mother’s passing from you. No one your age should grow up with that kind of thing hanging over them.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense, Dad,” she repeated, trying to ignore that truckload of shit about her mother’s mental health that he had just tried to feed her again. “I mean, your marriage counseling was going well. You had just started loving each other again. And then this. I don’t believe it. I’ll never believe it,” she shouted.

The car descended into a moody silence. By the time they arrived at school, Samantha had scraped all of her nail polish off. Even her father’s tobacco chewing—which, for once, he had not tried to hide—had gone unnoticed and unchallenged.

Somewhere out there was proof that her mother hadn’t killed herself. Somewhere the person who had killed her was still free. If there was a way, Samantha would set everything straight once and for all. That was what her mother would have wanted. Samantha couldn’t understand why her dad didn’t too.

Chapter 3

“D
orothy!”

Dorothy Olsen looked up with a start from the liver she was slicing into thin strips.

“Alex, you scared the hell out of me! Shame on you.”

Deputy Alex Morgan shook with laughter.

Dorothy removed her glasses and let them dangle around her neck. Rubbing the corners of her eyes, she headed over to the wall to snap the music off.

“I passed by on patrol last night and saw the light still on. Two in the morning’s a bit late even for the medical examiner.”

She plucked what looked like a heart from a scale suspended from the ceiling.

“The Keenans want to know what Grandma died of,” she said dryly. “I think they’re scared it’s hereditary.”

Alex removed his hat and brushed out his blond curly hair. He had celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday last August, but he looked more like twenty-one. Made it a hell of a lot harder to gain respect in a small town like Millingham. Alex let his hat plop on a nearby stool.

Beside it was a stack of cardboard filing boxes. Printed on each was a name and case file.

“What’s all this stuff?” Alex asked, scanning the containers.

Lowery, Elizabeth: 25487.

Dorothy frowned. “No more room downstairs. Not until they finish that space-age storage area.” As if on cue, two men with jumpsuits and heavy tool belts strolled past the open autopsy room door.

Ames, Tom: 25463

“Early lunch or another smoke break?”

“Take your pick,” Dorothy said, rolling her eyes.

Crow, Diane: 25437

The box was open, and at once a chill rolled up Alex’s spine as a familiar feeling crept over him. Out of nowhere, a shiny white tub appeared—smooth edges, high glossy finish. Droplets of moisture had formed at the edges. The curtain around it folded back like an accordion, pulled by an unseen hand. The tub was full. The water was red and cloudy. It looked unreal, like tomato soup. A female figure lay face forward in the water, her hair floating listlessly. Her wrists were slit wide open, her body bled so clean her flesh looked nearly translucent.

“Alex!”

He looked up at Dorothy slowly, as though emerging from a long, disturbing dream.

“Are you all right?”

“Diane’s box, it’s still here,” he said. Alex remembered reading her death certificate like it was yesterday. Suicide, it had said. At the time he had swallowed his doubts, but he had wondered if Dorothy had allowed her feelings for Sheriff Crow to cloud her judgment.

Dorothy’s hand went to the glasses hung around her neck. “Are you asking me if I’ve been reviewing the case?”

“I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job, Dorothy.” Their eyes met for a sharp moment, and he turned away. “This whole business about Diane losing her marbles doesn’t sit well with me, and I’ve never tried to hide that. I was there when we found her, don’t forget. Hell, her wrists were slashed to the bone and her eyes were gouged out. Not like any suicide I’ve ever seen.”

“No, it wasn’t.” Dorothy looked away too. Down at the box, or at Alex’s feet, he couldn’t tell which.

“I guess I’ve always been surprised at how quickly the decision was made,” he added. “I mean, maybe if we’d spent more time. What if there was something we missed?”

Dorothy’s face grew hard. “Nothing was missed.”

“I’m just—”

“I’m telling you, Alex, nothing was missed.”

The ghostly white light coming from the conference room said otherwise. On the screen was the body of a pale and naked woman in a bathtub, hunched over in a red pool.

A vicious knot formed in his belly from the sight. No matter how many instructional videos you watched, nothing ever really prepared you for the real thing. And it only got worse when it was someone you knew—even when you hated them.

There was a guilty look on Dorothy’s face. “You stubborn bastard! You just don’t know when to quit.”

Alex smiled. “You found something, didn’t you?”

She nodded sadly. “Here, let me show you.”

The projector was humming when Dorothy reached for the remote and clicked to a white sheet with the outline of a woman’s body, front and back, arms and legs splayed. The one medical examiners used to identify important markings on a body. Most of it was blank, except for notes around the wrists, face and others at the top and rear of the neck. Dorothy’s handwriting was characteristically poor for an examiner. Alex could barely make heads or tails of it.

“We never were able to find Diane’s eyes,” Dorothy said thoughtfully.

He nodded curtly, remembering how disturbing her face had looked.

“I know you don’t believe it, but judging from the evidence, she did this herself. The tissue and blood we found under her fingernails all belonged to her.”

Alex craned his head for a closer look.

Dorothy clicked a button and the slide projector went to a close-up of the wrist.

“When a person slits their wrists, the wound is normally quite superficial. But the blood flow can be pretty intense, and a quick laceration, especially with a razor, usually does the job, not to mention the pain.” Dorothy moved to a close-up of the hand and wrist. She aimed a laser pointer toward the screen. “Now look here, where the laceration was made.”

Alex examined the picture and shook his head. “I don’t see anything.”

“It’s difficult to see, but the cut was made at the joint, here. The vast majority of people who slit their wrists cut themselves in the more fleshy area.” She pointed just below the palm on her own hand. “Here or perhaps here.”

“To get the job done.”

“Right. But the lacerations in Diane’s wrists are deep enough that at one point she was sawing into her radius bone.”

Alex winced.

“Here’s the real problem, though. By the time she hit bone, she would have severed enough tendons to render her hand next to useless.”

“She couldn’t have slit her other wrist unless someone else was there to do it for her.”

“Not only that,” Dorothy cut in, “but it looks like the eyes were the first to go.”

Alex shuddered. “Anything from the toxicology you had done?”

Dorothy’s eyes fixed on the screen. “All negative. I can tell you that she smoked and drank, but otherwise she was clean.”

“The razor we found by the tub, could it have done that kind of damage?”

“No, this cut looks like it was done with a thicker blade—an exceptionally sharp hunting knife maybe. But then again, it’s hard to tell, since I don’t have the body anymore or a knife to compare it to. I only have my notes and my memory to go on now.”

Alex tapped a pencil against his forehead, an old schoolboy habit. “Why would she have done this to herself?” he muttered. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either. But there’s more.” Dorothy clicked the remote again. “I found some tiny bruising behind her neck. Now, initially I dismissed them since they were consistent with bruising from a vigorous massage.”

“I’m pretty sure the sheriff wasn’t giving Diane any erotic massages. But I guess you never know. He did say they were trying to patch things up near the end.”

“But it gets a whole lot weirder,” Dorothy said. “Look closely at the bruise pattern.”

Alex leaned forward.

“You see that?” she asked.

“A hand print?”

Dorothy slipped her right hand behind her own neck.

Alex spun to face her incredulously. “You saying she held her own head underwater?”

“Looks that way.”

“It’s also possible that someone else was there that night. If so, they would have had to do one bang-up job to make this look like a self-mutilation/suicide. If you’re right, then she knew this person, and knew them well.”

Dorothy turned the light on and gathered the pages from the file. She was wearing the reading glasses with the beaded string she liked so much and for a moment, she looked to Alex like an old lady clearing away her winnings after a good night at bingo. She placed the bulging folder back into the filing cabinet.

Alex fished out a folder labeled death certificate.

Dorothy’s eyes followed him.

“So I guess believing Diane did this to herself is kinda like believing in the magic bullet that killed Kennedy,” Alex said.

“On the whole,” she said, “the case does look like a suicide.” She paused and Alex looked up at her. “But you’re right, there’s certainly room for… doubt.”

He continued watching her, still not satisfied.

“Look,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “Everyone involved, including the sheriff—hell, especially the sheriff—wanted things to be neat and tidy. I guess at the time and under the circumstances, I just wasn’t ready to dig deeper.” She looked up at him sheepishly. “It was a mistake, I admit that now, and it’s haunted me ever since.” She turned away, and her voice took on a different tone. “Alex, I don’t need to explain myself to you.”

“No. No, you don’t.” She was right. He knew of the affair. Hell, everyone did. It had been a long time in the making and had begun shortly before Diane’s death. For a brief moment, a horrible thought crossed his mind. What if Dorothy and Sheriff Crow were both in on it? Maybe he had been watching too much reality TV, although he had to admit it would have been the perfect crime. One of the most powerful men in town, partnered with the only other person who could expose his crime. He swept away the idea. But the thought had left him with a startling realization. If somehow Diane didn’t do this to herself, then the one who did was still out there.

Alex stood, shaky at first, but trying hard not to show it. Dorothy walked him out to his cruiser and into a blinding burst of mid-afternoon sun. She held her clipboard up over her eyes.

“Alex, don’t let Sheriff Crow know what you’re up to.”

He gave her a puzzled look.

“He still doesn’t accept that her passing was anything but a suicide,” she said.

“I might not accept it either if I was the sheriff and my wife was murdered.”

“Just remember,” she said, crossing her arms emphatically, “no matter how much you respect him, no matter how much you look up to him, he’ll never be your friend on this one. You’re alone.”