Unknown Means (15 page)

“I’ll have more before I’m through. Grace Markham, Marissa, and Frances Duarte have to have a point of convergence. The circles have to intersect at some point.”

“I know,” he said and yawned. “But if I don’t get some sleep, I’m not going to be able to find a point on a pencil.”

C H A P T E R

12

EVELYN DID NOT BOTHER GOING HOME. THE ONE, PERhaps two hours of sleep she might have been able to grab—if she could have gotten her mind to shut off that long—wouldn’t have helped. Angel could get her own breakfast. She was, as David often felt the need to point out, seventeen years old.

So Evelyn chugged a Diet Coke and arrived at the lab a few minutes before Tony, then presented him with the new set of DNA samples.

He swore.

For once, she felt a touch of sympathy for her boss. “I know what you mean.”

“How much longer is Marissa going to be on her back?”

The sympathy evaporated. “She’s unconscious, Tony.”

“Tell her nobody likes a crybaby. You think her future motherin-law had her whacked?” he went on. “Or it was her ex-boyfriend’s gang buddies?”

“Where are these rumors coming from?”

“Nowhere,” he said. “And everywhere. But more important, there’s a pile of messages on your desk, OSHA needs to get with you about the salt mine, and viewing starts in two minutes. You’d better get down there.”

“Isn’t viewing the supervisor’s—”

“I’ll make coffee.”

“Okay.”

The pathologists—the doctors who performed autopsies—and the heads of Trace and Toxicology met each morning to “view” the deceased parties who had arrived since the previous day. Each victim was seen and his or her history read aloud by the deskman on duty, so that the doctors could decide which postmortems they wanted to volunteer for, or if a complete postmortem needed to be done at all.

The lab staff, for their part, could see what they could add to their task lists for the day. The scene always felt surreal, especially under the too-bright fluorescent lights, especially so early in the day, especially when one had gone without sleep.

Evelyn would have to test the hands of the suicide-by-gunshot victim for primer residue before the autopsy could be performed.

For a homicide victim, beaten to death by her now-confessed spouse, she would have to call the hospital and get the sample of blood that (they hoped) had been collected before the victim had been trans-fused, before her blood had been mixed with someone else’s DNA, so that a comparison with blood found on the suspect’s shirt would be accurate. Evelyn would also have to tape the clothing, photograph and store it, scrape the woman’s fingernails, and examine her hands. In the case of an accidental fall from a scaffold, she wasn’t sure what she’d have to do—probably nothing except write a brief description of the clothing and have it photographed. And all this work would feel very real indeed.

She turned to one of the toxicologists, Ed Durant, his face moist and pasty. “Did you draw the short straw this morning?”

“No. Our peerless leader can’t get his butt out of bed in time, so it falls to me to do his job for him. Not exactly a first. I’m always at my station long before anyone else in the department punches the time clock.”

Evelyn suspected that Ed arrived to work early because, like

Tony, he had no real life outside the brick walls of the ME’s office, but to say so wouldn’t be prudent. She needed him. “I have this case—”

“No,” he said, either to stop her from asking the inevitable favor or because the two letters made up his favorite word.

“You heard the same guy has now killed two women and nearly killed Marissa in the past week?”

He said nothing, but his scowl ebbed a bit. Even Ed had a touch of empathy somewhere beneath the ponytail and the extra hundred pounds. “I heard this guy likes dark-haired women who drive Volvos.”

“Marissa doesn’t drive a Volvo, and Frances Duarte was blond.

I’ve got this strange grease on Grace Markham’s arm, and also on the threads that I think Marissa’s attacker left behind in the parking garage, but I can’t figure out what it is. It’s petroleum-based, but it doesn’t match any lubricant in the FTIR library.”

“First case,” the deskman boomed, giving her a firm look. Evelyn shut up as he wheeled in a seventy-five-year-old victim of cancer who had died at home. Even those dead by natural causes had to come to the ME’s office if they had not seen a doctor in the prior three months. The assistant ME decided a full postmortem would not be necessary. No one disagreed. They waited for the next gurney.

“Female, thirty-three, MVA, unrestrained passenger versus truck.” This shorthand meant that the victim had been riding in the passenger seat, without a seat belt, when her vehicle collided with a truck. During the ten seconds while one gurney was wheeled away and another took its place inside the circle of white-coated people, Evelyn whispered at Ed.

“And I got samples from the elevator mechanisms because it’s the only way into the apartment, but neither of them match. They all contain mostly petroleum, but the amounts of the other compo-nents are different.”

“Sucks to be you, doesn’t it?”

“Can you run it on the GC/mass spec?” The gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer combined two of the most helpful analyt-ical instruments in a lab’s arsenal, a gas chromatograph to separate organic compounds and a mass spectrometer to separate those compounds further by splitting them into charged molecules.

“Since you already know what it is—that would be grease—I can’t see how that furthers your knowledge significantly.”

“I had hoped your libraries would be more extensive than mine.”

A pause, while Ed appeared to study the fifty-year-old who died of a heart attack halfway through the entrée at his favorite restaurant. Evelyn let the hook set.

“They are quite thorough for each category of samples,” he admitted, after they heard about the housepainter who fell while painting shutters on a four-story condominium.

“I’ll sign it in with Jenny later today,” she promised. Ed insisted that any sample be officially submitted via Toxicology’s administrative assistant, both to maintain the chain of custody and because it made him feel like he had his own personal secretary.

Frances Duarte was the last victim for the day. Her bright white body bag rested on a gurney in the second autopsy room, the one set up for decomposed bodies, and the group of doctors now moved into it to finish up the viewing process. The room had two sets of glass doors with an air-lock corridor between them and a door to the outside, which could be fitted with a screen door should the staff need fresh air more than air-conditioning or heat. The plan had been to keep the odors from creeping through the rest of the building. It didn’t work. On a list of requirements for the new building, air-flow control sat at the top.

The deskman looked around for a pair of gloves. Not used regularly, the room tended to be understocked, mostly with cast-off supplies. Evelyn pulled a pair from her pocket, too small for him, but he used them like rags to unzip the bag and pull the edges down

over the gurney like the corners of a fitted sheet. Then he gave a summary of the case and added that Evelyn had been at the scene.

All eyes swiveled toward her.

She summed up—very briefly—the circumstances surrounding Grace Markham, Marissa, and Frances Duarte. She hated to bring Marissa up and knew that Marissa would hate it as well.

Working waist-deep in dead bodies every day could make one paranoid, and eager to feel a boundary between the staff and the victims.

Us and them—us were alive, them were dead. If one of us crossed the line, others could follow.

She shuddered, maybe just because of her fatigue. Maybe not.

No one wanted to think of Marissa as a victim, Marissa least of all. But if Evelyn tried to avoid the topic, people would assume there had to be more to the story. Nothing beat a good drama like a terrific conspiracy. So she told them all she knew.

To her relief, Evelyn’s friend Jonathan Tyler elected to do the postmortem on Frances. The youngest pathologist on the staff, as well as the only African American, he would devote his full attention to the murder victim despite the uncomfortable working conditions.

A less dedicated doctor might rush a bit. The decomp autopsy room smelled grotesque when unoccupied, and certainly no better now.

But the pathologist had become as accustomed to the smell as she was, and he leaned on the counter with a newspaper and a cup of coffee while he waited for the autopsy assistant to label the specimen jars. Technically, food and drink should not have been present in the autopsy suite, but familiarity bred contempt, and they had all become very familiar with the common pathogens.

Meanwhile, Evelyn removed Frances’s clothes, layer by layer, and spread them on a gurney covered with brown paper. Zoe, the photographer, snapped a picture at each stage, though they would not produce the most salacious slide show in the world. Under the blue knit shirt and navy polyester slacks, Frances wore a 34C bra,

cotton panties, and knee socks. No necklace, only gold stud earrings and the diamond ring, which required soap to remove. Despite taking care, Evelyn also removed a good deal of skin.

Only the bra caught her attention. Possibly white at one time, each cup showed abrupt lines along the outside where the decomposition fluid had not been uniformly absorbed. This could have been due to some irregular design, a flaw in the fabric, but she cut a section for further analysis.

“How is Marissa doing?” Jonathan asked her.

“The same.”

“Don’t worry, Evelyn. She strikes me as pretty tough. There’s an article on her in the Metro section,” the young doctor added. “By a Clio Helms.”

“Let me guess. Marissa used to be an international jewel thief, and her ex-partner tried to kill her because she wouldn’t share the booty. It’s about the only theory I haven’t heard.”

“She talked to Mrs. Gonzalez.”

“I’ll kill her.” Evelyn darted to his side and clutched one edge of the paper.

“Hey! Gloves!”

Her blue-latex-covered hands were coated in decomp fluid, leaving brown smears on the edge of the newsprint. She pulled them off without taking her eyes from the paper. “Sorry. I can’t believe that girl weaseled her way up to Mama Gonzalez. Did she have the nerve to print the gangbanger ex-boyfriend story?”

“Actually, it’s kind of nice. I never knew Marissa had been her high school valedictorian.”

“Me neither.” Evelyn read over his shoulder, or rather next to it.

Jonathan’s height overshot hers by nearly a foot.

“Here, take it. We get any closer and you’ll be sitting in my lap.

I don’t mind, but people will talk.”

“I will,” the autopsy assistant said, lining up the specimen jars.

“I’ll tell everyone. Man, it stinks in here.”

Evelyn barely heard them; she was too busy reading Clio Helms’s crisp account of Marissa—a brave Latina who had worked her way out of poverty only to be struck down two months before her fairy-tale wedding. All true, though Marissa would certainly snort when she read it, and threaten the reporter’s life in two languages.

Clio ended without making any loose allegations, adding only that police were investigating. She did, however, include an account of the second attack in the hospital on both Marissa and Evelyn. No wonder Ms. Helms and four other reporters had left messages for Evelyn. She abandoned the newspaper and joined Jonathan at the autopsy table.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Just a guess.” He tilted the woman’s head gently to one side.

“But I think she’s dead.”

“Everybody’s a comic.”

“A bit cranky today, are we?”

“No, we’re not, I am, and that’s because I’ve had about four hours’ sleep in the past two days and I think I’m going to die. Can one die from lack of sleep?”

“Can’t say I’ve ever seen it. What ailed this lady, however, I’m familiar with.”

“He strangled her?”

“Yep. From the back, I’d say, with something wide.”

“This?” She pulled out the strap that had held Frances Duarte’s shoulders to the armchair.

He compared the fabric mesh to the slightly desiccated imprint on her neck. “That could be it.”

“No way to tell for sure, huh?”

“Not with her skin this decomposed. But I’ll excise the section in case you can analyze it on the SEM or EDX. Otherwise, all I can say is the injury is consistent with the mesh strap.”

“Any other signs of violence?”

He began to wash the woman’s face, trying to see past the discolored, slipping skin. “Looks like she’s got some tiny abrasions here,

next to where the strap was. Probably her own fingernails, trying to free herself. I don’t see anything else. No bruises, no cuts. Nothing on the hands.”

“So he got her from behind. She couldn’t reach him to fight him, and instead spent the last of her energy trying to loosen the strap just enough to get one more breath of air. I scraped her fingernails at the scene, but it was almost certainly a waste of time.” Even if Frances Duarte had scratched the killer as well as herself, his skin cells would be lost in the swell of decomposition fluid.

She hung the victim’s clothing up, piece by piece, and scraped it with a clean plastic Popsicle stick. Hairs, fibers, and other debris—and with luck, some of it from the killer—landed on the brown paper underneath. She picked up the paper, made a fold, and tapped the scrapings into a clear plastic petri dish. The clothes were too damp to be taped. She hung them in a corner of the room to finish drying. Tomorrow she would come back and seal them up in brown paper bags.

Then she went to the vending machine, returned, and sat on a stool to watch Jonathan from a distance, sipping her Diet Coke in direct violation of departmental SOPs. She needed the caffeine.