Thrill Kill (3 page)

Sinclair dressed in a cloth gown, paper cap, safety glasses, and booties and pushed through the double doors into the morgue. The ventilation system in the ceiling hummed, but the smells of decaying flesh and disinfectant still hung in the air. Three bodies lay on stainless-steel tables, and Dr. Gorman, one of the pathologists, hovered over the body of an elderly man.

Gorman looked through his plastic splash-protective visor. “Good morning, Sergeant Sinclair. This gentleman can wait. I’ll return to Ms. Gustafson for you.”

Sinclair gestured to the elderly corpse. “What’s his story, Doc?”

“He lived alone and was found dead by his son. He hadn’t seen a doctor in years, so there was no one to sign off on the death certificate. I’ll probably discover his death is of natural causes resulting from one or more undiagnosed medical conditions.”

“As long as you don’t find a bullet in him.”

“If I do, it belongs to Fremont PD, so today will be your lucky day.”

“I’ll see if that’s true after I hear what you have to say about my victim.”

Gorman moved to a flat-screen illuminator mounted on the wall and attached several x-ray films. “You can see here,” he said, pointing to a dark object at the base of the skull in
the image, “we have a single projectile that passed through the anterior portion of the skull, the thick frontal bone, and came to rest at the back of the skull without penetrating the parietal bone. I see no fragments, so it appears the projectile remained intact, which should aid in the ballistics examination by your crime lab.”

Gorman flipped off the light of the x-ray viewer and walked to the table where Dawn’s body lay. Her skin was pale white except for black soot and charred skin on her upper legs and abdomen. Her hands rested alongside the torso, the manicured fingernails short and covered with clear nail polish. The head was propped on a hard plastic rest. “I’ve already done the external, but I wanted to point some things out to you before I proceed.” He pointed to a white line running through the lightly charred flesh on her stomach. “This is a Caesarian scar.”

“She had a baby?”

“There’s no way to know if she gave live birth or not, only that she had the surgery,” Gorman said, as if it were obvious. “It’s well healed, so her pregnancy could have been a number of years ago. If you look at the neck, you can see some abrasion of the skin, apparently caused by the rough fibers of the rope that was used to suspend her from the tree. But what you don’t see is more interesting.”

“The absence of ligature marks?”

“Precisely. The abrasion marks might appear to be ligature marks to the uninitiated, but they are clearly postmortem. She was hung after she was dead. There is some bruising on the neck, which is consistent with manual strangulation, but it’s doubtful that was the cause of death. I’ll know more when I open her up. I also examined the burn marks on her body and concluded they occurred after she was dead as well. They occurred when the body was in an upright position, as indicated by the rising flame marks in the skin that are pointing toward the head. Therefore, my preliminary assumption is there was some degree
of struggle, at which time she was manually choked. She was then shot in the head, which caused her death. Next, her body was suspended from the neck, and finally, it was burned.”

Sinclair watched as Gorman opened the chest cavity with a Y-shaped incision across the chest. He stepped aside to let his assistant move in and cut through the ribs and breastbone with long-handled pruning shears. Even though Sinclair had attended countless autopsies, the crunch of bone still made him wince. Gorman lifted off the breastplate, took blood samples from the thoracic cavity, and removed the organs. He examined each one carefully before cutting off pieces and placing them in marked containers. He used the shears to cut through the pelvic bone and spent several minutes examining that area.

He recorded long medical descriptions into a recorder that hung on a swivel above the table, then turned to Sinclair and summarized. “She was in excellent physical condition. Excellent muscle tone and low body fat indicates a healthy diet and some sort of vigorous exercise program. Liver, heart, and lungs appear healthy. There’s no damage to the outer layer of the vaginal canal or mucosa, despite the insertion of the piece of clothing several inches into the canal. I conclude that no instrument was likely used, because if one had been, some tearing would have been likely. I found no indication of semen, but I’ll collect samples for examination. The burns in the pubic region definitely occurred postmortem.”

Gorman cut into the neck tissue along the line where the rope had rested. “As I suspected, there’s no underlying tissue damage, which means the victim was dead when the constriction around the neck by the rope occurred.” He cut into two purplish bruises on the front of her neck and slowly dissected the windpipe, closely examining the throat and neck region. “Someone strangled her with their hands. Most likely from the front, with the thumbs pressing into the larynx and thyroid cartilage, which fractured the hyoid bone. That injury may have eventually led to her death if the muscles and tissue swelled and
cut off her air supply, but it appears the bullet ended her life before that occurred.”

He looked at the bullet wound with a magnifying glass and snapped a half dozen photographs with a digital camera equipped with a macro lens. “There’s no indication of fouling in the tissue of the wound, nor any on the skin around the wound. I do, however, see signs of stippling on the skin.”

No experienced pathologist would estimate the range of a gunshot based on his examination of the body alone, but Sinclair could tell from the wound that it was not a press contact, where the gun muzzle was touching the victim. Likewise, the absence of fouling—soot or residue from burned gunpowder—indicated that the gun was probably at least six inches away, assuming the weapon was a medium-powered handgun. Stippling, also called tattooing, resulted from unburned gunpowder embedding in the skin around the wound and seldom occurred beyond two feet. But without knowing what kind of gun and ammo was used, he could only estimate the distance from which it had been shot as somewhere beyond a few inches and less than two feet.

Gorman took a scalpel and made several deep incisions through the scalp, pealed the back of the scalp over the corpse’s face, and stepped back as his assistant cut through the skull with a high-speed electric rotary saw. Gorman carefully removed the skullcap, set it in a stainless-steel pan, and made a few cuts through the membrane to remove the brain. He probed the soft brain tissue with a finger, plucked out a copper-jacketed lead slug, and placed it in a plastic container. “Your firearms examiner can tell you for sure, but it appears to be a nominal thirty-eight caliber jacketed hollow point.”

Sinclair knew that could mean a 9mm, .38, .357 magnum, or .380, all very common calibers for handguns. Gorman took a stainless-steel probe and slowly worked it through the wound track in the brain until it came out the back. He held the brain up, shifted it until it was level, and looked at Sinclair. “From the location of the entrance wound, the bullet track, and where it
came to rest at the back of the skull, I’d say the victim’s face was perpendicular to the barrel of the gun as well as close to ninety degrees laterally.”

Sinclair liked the manner in which Gorman explained his findings. Doctors with less experience would try to conclude how tall a shooter was based on the wounds or the direction the person was facing, but there were too many variables to come to quick conclusions. A shot that went directly into a victim’s forehead could result from both the victim and shooter facing each other or the victim being on her knees and the shooter standing and shooting from the hip, or it could just as easily result from the victim lying on the ground and the shooter standing directly over her and shooting downward.

“So, she was looking right at the gun, and it was up close and personal,” said Sinclair.

“That’s about all there is for you to see. If I discover anything else significant, I’ll give you a call. Good luck, Matt.”

*

Braddock was sitting at her desk typing on her computer when Sinclair walked into the homicide office. The office consisted of a large room containing eighteen small metal desks that had been purchased by the city when the Police Administration Building, or PAB, was opened more than fifty years ago. Walls were lined with metal file cabinets. A few windows overlooked Washington Street and the county court building across the street. On the opposite side of the room were two glass-walled offices, one of which belonged to the homicide lieutenant. The other had been converted into a soft interview room, a casual place to talk with family and cooperative witnesses. A table with chairs, a green vinyl-covered sofa, and a small end table with a cheap table lamp that had not worked in years filled the room. Toward the back of the main office were two metal doors that led to the other interview rooms—small six-by-eight
rooms where Sinclair had spent countless hours trying to convince witnesses and killers to tell the truth.

“Was she alive when the killer lit her on fire?” Braddock asked.

Sinclair hung up his raincoat and suitcoat and poured himself a cup of coffee. “She died from the gunshot to the head and was hung and torched sometime later.”

“Thank God for that.”

“Before the gunshot, she was manually strangled hard enough to fracture the hyoid,” Sinclair said. “The gunshot was within a few feet.”

“Sounds like it was personal.”

Sinclair had come to the same conclusion. Other strangulation murders he had investigated were normally crimes of passion—committed during a sudden rage—rather than premeditated. But the firing of a bullet into Dawn’s head didn’t necessarily fit unless the killer just happened to have a gun on him and his anger totally engulfed him. Sinclair began running other possibilities and motives through his mind and finally realized how futile it was with the limited information he had so far.

Sinclair wrote the number ninety-two on a piece of paper from a memo pad, added today’s date and his and Braddock’s initials, and pinned it to the bulletin board. With only a few weeks left until the end of the year, it looked like the city would tally under a hundred murders for the year, something that had only occurred a few times in the last four decades. “I’m guessing the shooting took place somewhere else, and she was transported there and posed,” he said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Braddock said. “The way she was arranged seemed symbolic.”

“Is the RO gone?” Sinclair asked.

“Yeah, I reviewed his report and approved it. With only one witness, there wasn’t much to it. I ran out our victim. Her history begins with her juvenile arrest for the B case you put on her ten years ago. She was counseled and released to her parents by juvenile hall two days after the arrest. It appears they flew to
Oakland and signed for her. I have their address in Minnesota, but I don’t know if it’s any good after all these years.”

“I’ll let the coroner’s office contact them. I doubt the parents will be able to shed any light on her recent activities.”

“You just hate talking to family.”

“You blame me? All they do is babble and blow snot and tears. And for what? If Dawn was close enough to her parents for them to know what she was up to, she probably wouldn’t have been involved in whatever it was that killed her.” Sinclair was angry. Angry not only because she was dead, but angry with her for not staying out of Oakland when she had the chance.

Braddock continued, “She had one other arrest for soliciting six years ago. The report says it was an operation run by the PSA due to citizen complaints of overt prostitution activity on Market and West Mac. Case was dismissed in the interest of justice.”

In one of many departmental reorganizations over the last ten years, the vice unit was disbanded, and the responsibility for street prostitution enforcement fell on the police service areas, which were responsible for all general police services in their sector of the city. At times, the special victims section, the investigative unit that handled sexual assaults and child abuse, conducted prostitution enforcement. But with all their other responsibilities, these units didn’t have the time or resources to do many undercover prostitution operations. As a result, the numbers of street prostitutes and the brazenness with which they flaunted their wares in public had increased dramatically over the last few years.

“Anything in LRMS?” Sinclair asked, referring to the law records management system.

“Only two field contacts for looking like a hooker in a high-hooker area. The last one was a stop by the beat officer two years ago at Brockhurst and San Pablo. She gave the officer the Tennyson Road address. She never did a change of address with DMV from that one.”

“Vehicles?”

“A two-year-old Chevy Camaro is registered in her name. No leaseholder or bank is listed, so she bought it outright.”

“You don’t often see a girl working the stroll with a brand new car.”

“She’s only had one traffic ticket. That was five years ago. She was driving a BMW three series, which was registered to her back then. I don’t know of many street prostitutes who own cars like that.”

“Maybe she was primarily doing outcalls and only hit the streets when her phone didn’t ring,” Sinclair said. “That would explain how she stayed below the radar most of the time.”

“I wonder if she worked the circuit. That could explain her limited contact with the police in the Bay Area.”

“Is that still going on?”

“When I worked the special victims unit, we investigated a ring that rotated girls between Salt Lake City, Tucson, Reno, Sacramento, and Oakland. Some worked the street, some had in-calls arranged for them in apartments provided by the managers of the operation. The girls liked it. They got to spend summers in Salt Lake City, winters in Tucson, and a week here and there in Reno for conventions.”

“They were living the dream,” Sinclair said.

“The rental office of the Tennyson Road apartments called when you were at the coroner. She moved there four years ago. No mention of her reason for leaving and no forwarding address. They did a credit check on her and she looked good. Her rental application said she did public relations for an entertainment company, made five grand a month, and provided the name of her supervisor, a Helena Decker, and a phone number. They made a note on her application that they spoke to Ms. Decker, who gave Dawn a positive reference. I checked the number and it comes back to a Verizon cell phone.”