Evidence of Murder Page 4

  “All I know is, he lived in the area.”

  Hardly rich, then. So why-the morning’s conversation with Leo came back to her. “It’s not the kid, it’s me, isn’t it? Leo is sending you along to make sure I don’t screw up.”

  Don rubbed his eyes, stood up, and said nothing, which probably meant that those had been Leo’s exact words. Don would never lie to her.

  “I can be ready in ten minutes,” she told him.

  Don parked the county station wagon on the side of Park Road, behind Frank’s worn Crown Vic, and Theresa pulled her crime scene kit from the backseat. The snowy expanse between the asphalt and the tree line had been reduced to a fractured mess of shoe prints and crime scene tape. One uniformed officer kept watch while the others huddled at the trees. Theresa wore a scarf, earmuffs, and two pairs of gloves, but the air wove through those items as if they were made of mesh. She complained as much to Don as they fought their way through the thick white blanket of frozen raindrops.

  “Yeah,” he said, panting, “but it’s a dry cold.”

  “All the DNA analysts in this country, and I get Henny Youngman.”

  “Who?”

  “You’re too young. Hey, cuz,” she greeted Frank, who waited for them under the boughs of a huge oak. “Do you know what my mother will say to you if I get frostbite?”

  “She’ll say you should have dressed warmer. Hi, Don. Okay, here it is: we got a fifteen-year-old white male, frozen pretty stiff, no signs of OD or violence. He lives right behind here on West Thirty-eighth”-Theresa turned to glance at the street of close-packed homes; even a coating of snow could not disguise the general untidiness-“and there’s sort of a path through here to the baseball park.”

  “Where’s the zoo?” Theresa asked, and realized she’d been hoping for a glimpse of the animals.

  “That way, on the other side of Fulton.” He gestured to his left. “So maybe this kid was heading for the baseball diamond, a popular hangout even in winter, or taking a walk. Either way, he’s pretty dead.”

  “Who found him?” Don asked.

  “His mother.”

  So many questions occurred to Theresa that she didn’t know which to ask first. “Wh-”

  Frank nodded at a woman standing thirty feet away, farther in the woods. Her face had reddened from tears or the cold and she held a handkerchief to her nose, but cried only in occasional gasps. The collar on her quilted jacket had been turned up to meet her short graying curls. She spoke to two officers, one of whom jotted notes in a small book. “The kid, Jacob Wheeler, argued with her after school yesterday and stalked off, then didn’t come home last night. She didn’t call the police because it had happened before. The kid’s not major trouble-he has one arrest for petty theft from the Home Depot at the Steelyard shopping center, charges dropped-but he has flopped with friends when he’s ticked off at her. No drug history, at least according to Mom, but I get the impression he’s definitely not on the honor roll. Anyway, when he didn’t come home from school, his mother called and found out he hadn’t gone at all, and got worried enough to go looking for him.”

  “Out here?”

  “He spends a lot of time out here, she says, especially in the summer. Again, I get the impression he’s enough of a snot to alienate the other kids on the street, so he’d kick around in here by himself. Mom only knows two of his friends and called both last night and this afternoon, but they gave the usual know-nothing answers.”

  “So he comes out here to sulk and winds up freezing to death?” Rachael often left the house to walk off a snit, but had better sense than to die of exposure. At least Theresa hoped so. Sense did not seem to be hardwired into the teenage brain.

  “That, we’re not so sure of. Come on, follow me.”

  The trees should have protected them from the icy wind, but somehow it didn’t feel like that. Snow had slipped into Theresa’s shoes and melted. The air smelled of cold, and trees, even without their leaves, muffled the hum of traffic on I-71. Slush and dead twigs snapped under their feet. “Sort of a path” described it pretty well, since it left room for single-file movement only. A lone officer guarded the body. He stamped his feet, and Theresa hoped he wouldn’t stamp them on anything important.

  At his feet sat a dead, frozen boy.

  Jacob Wheeler wore a heavy Timberland jacket but, like many stubborn teenage boys, no hat or scarf. His arms were crossed over his chest with his hands under his armpits, his knees drawn up almost to his chin, his feet in scuffed work boots. Unkempt brown hair covered his ears and part of his face, but Theresa noted thin lips and high cheekbones, plus a few assorted body piercings. His eyes were closed. The pockets of his coat had been turned out and the contents set on a blank sheet of notebook paper.

  Theresa sighed, her exhaled breath briefly but clearly visible. “Too mad to go home, he stays out here to get good and miserable first so he could think of himself as a victim.”

  “Take a look at his head,” Frank told her.

  She stepped closer, keeping her feet on the path of already-trampled prints. The boy had his chin down, tucked into the shelter of his chest and knees, the top of his head exposed. A drop of blood had dried at the hairline of his right temple.

  Theresa retreated, found a safe spot for her crime scene kit, and turned the camera on. Then she approached the body again, Don close behind her.

  After she photographed the body, she sacrificed her two pairs of warm gloves for latex ones and parted the boy’s hair with her fingers. The blood had trickled from a cut to his scalp, about an inch long but not terribly deep. The area had begun to bruise. “It hardly seems enough to kill him.”

  “Victims don’t usually sit meekly by and let someone slug them either,” Don said. “I’ll bet he got in a fight and then came here to think it over. Perhaps it disoriented him enough that he sat down to rest and never got up again.”

  Frank added, “There are two shoe prints up the trail and more around the back of this tree that the cops swear aren’t theirs, so the scuffle could have occurred here. It’s not a convenient place to dump a body, and he’s one-forty if he’s a pound, so I can’t see someone lugging him all the way in here just to get rid of him. But the guy must have walked back toward Park Road and not the ballpark, unless he could fly. Then Mom and the cops and you and I obliterated his prints. We haven’t looked at the boy’s shoes yet. We were waiting for you.”

  Theresa crouched next to Don and poked at the meager belongings removed from the boy’s pockets. Jacob had carried his wallet with two dollars and fifty-three cents in it, an iPod, and a spring-loaded knife in excellent condition. “So he met someone out here?”

  “His dealer, I’ll bet,” Frank said. “No matter what Mom says, no doubt this kid had some connections. He tries to stiff the guy-no pun intended-or they disagree on terms.”

  Don suggested, “A girlfriend? She took her purse to his head when he tried to get friskier than she was in the mood for?”

  Theresa shook her head. “Not unless she carries a brick in her purse. What about his two friends? I assume you’ve sent a car to their homes?”

  Frank nodded. “It’s kind of weird if you think about it.”

  “What is? I mean, aside from a teenager freezing to death five hundred feet from his house?”

  “This is the second frozen body we’ve found in as many weeks, and both sitting up against something. Usually our frozen people are in cars or apartments where the heat was turned off or something, not usually completely outside.” No one in Cleveland took the weather that casually, not even murderers.

  “She was a black thirty-year-old hooker, and she was strangled. This is a white high school student with a bump on his head. Not too many similarities there. Speaking of his bump, any sign of a weapon?”

  “We’re surrounded by them,” Frank said.

  She looked around. The open spaces between tree trunks bulged with fallen limbs, twigs, and dirt, all melting into the same shade of white-topped brown. Snow penetrate
d the canopy in inconsistent patches, making it impossible to tell what might have been recently disturbed, whether a piece of wood had been flung in from the path or had been lying there since the previous fall. They would canvass, but a needle in a haystack would be a breeze by comparison. She got on the other side of the boy and motioned to Don. “Let’s turn him. I want to get a look at his shoes.”

  The boy wore Nikes with a standard waffle pattern. Stepping gingerly, Theresa noted that the prints farther up the trail matched his down to a worn spot on the right toe, as if he had continued along the path for a few feet and then stopped. Had his attacker called out to him? Then he’d turned back, because he knew who it was.

  The print to the right of the tree, however, consisted of plain tread lines crossing the foot, almost like Keds or some other lightweight wear. It certainly didn’t belong to the victim or any of the large men surrounding her now. “What did the mother do when she found the body?”

  Frank said, “Screamed, touched his face, and checked his neck for a pulse-as if his subzero temperature didn’t tip her off-and ran back to her house to call 911.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I asked her three times.”

  The print looked too large for the mother, anyway. “We’re going to have to cast that.”

  “In snow?” Don asked. “I thought that was, like, nearly impossible.”

  “Just about. But after my last experience with shoe prints I didn’t lift, I’m not taking any chances.” Casting compound generated heat as it hardened, which, obviously, had a deleterious effect on prints in snow. Some precasting sprays provided limited help. But forensic scientists didn’t get to create their scenes; they could only work with what they were given. “I’ll get the tripod and the shutter remote for the camera.”

  Theresa and Don examined Jacob’s bedroom with its worn orange carpeting but found only a few Ecstasy tablets and one well-smoked marijuana roach. A few violent drawings accompanied his sporadic note taking during classes, but no letters or journals turned up and only a few phone numbers, which Frank would run down. Jacob had apparently spent his days playing video games, reading comic books, and not listening to his mother.

  “His father left for good two years ago, but he never had been around much,” his mother, Ellen, had wearily described from the doorway as she watched them work. A tough life had leached away muscles and fat and left a bit of padded skin over bones. Theresa had at least six inches and more pounds than she wanted to think about on the poor woman. “I just never got Jacob. I tried tough love, but as hard as I could be on him, he could say much harsher things to me. I tried talking about his feelings-he ignored me. When I tried restricting his video games, he broke into my room as soon as I went to work and got them back. I got tired of-when he did speak, which wasn’t often, he just wouldn’t give me a kind word. Ever.”

  One of the advantages of cases involving teenagers had to be that Rachael suddenly became an angel by comparison. Theresa decided to tell her so that evening.

  Her phone beeped. A text message, a form of communication she had not yet grown accustomed to-typing on a teeny number pad required too much patience and she couldn’t bring herself to use the shorthand devised by the young and hip. Chris Cavanaugh, the hostage negotiator who had handled the armed-robbery standoff that had killed Paul and nearly herself, had sent a message: Can you meet me for lunch?

  As if on cue, her stomach grumbled. With one thumbnail, she punched out: No.

  She tucked the phone neatly back into its clip on her belt. Then she picked up a baseball glove, nearly hidden under a pile of black T-shirts. “Did he play at the diamond there, the one the path led to?”

  Ellen shook her head. “Not since he was little. His father liked baseball. Never played with him, of course, but liked it.”

  Theresa looked around. “I don’t see a bat.”

  “He lost that years ago.” The words caught in her throat and came out as a mangled sob. “He lost everything, years ago.”

  CHAPTER 5

  FRIDAY, MARCH 5

  Jillian Perry’s body was found at approximately 8:00 on Friday morning.

  Don came down to the amphitheater to tell her, and also to help with Jacob Wheeler. The kid had now thawed out enough for her to remove the clothing and unclench his fists, one of which held a piece of colored paper. As with the dead woman from the Cultural Gardens, Theresa hung his clothes to dry thoroughly before taping. His wallet contained a credit card with his neighbor’s name on it, apparently stolen from his mail earlier that month. That, along with the iPod in his pocket, ruled out robbery. The scrap in his fist, about an inch square, had been ripped from the corner of a sheet of paper with colored graphics on both sides, but without any handy notations like a phone number. Jacob did not have a cell phone-couldn’t afford one, and neither could his mother, hence her return to the house to call 911.

  It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Not every problem could be helped by instant communication.

  Theresa took the county station wagon to Edgewater Park. This time Leo did not insist on sending Don as well, so Theresa arrived, alone, just before nine.

  “I hate to say I told you so,” Frank began.

  “Good.” She carried her camera bag and two heavy equipment cases, stepping carefully over the ice-slick walkway. “Don’t.”

  “But I told you so.”

  “No you didn’t.” A young patrolman took one of the cases from her and she smiled her surprised thanks. “You said if she was dead, then the pimp killed her.”

  Frank waved one hand and led the way along the paved walkway, which continued up a steady incline. Trees lined one side, the white and frozen lake on the other. “Let’s not quibble in front of the help.”

  “You can shoot him,” Theresa told the patrolman, “if you want to.”

  They followed her cousin, a parka clutched over his suit coat, as the path wound past the Conrad Mizer memorial and along the cliffs leading down to the beach. The temperature had warmed to thirty over the past few days, so the lake breeze didn’t instantly numb exposed skin; it took its time about it. Even without the sun, the hazy gray light on the ice forced Theresa to squint. She didn’t know how far out the ice extended, but at a glance it seemed like forever.

  Frank stopped at a curve in the walk, where the land jutted out slightly, and turned his back to the water. “There she is.”

  Theresa saw the shirt first, a flash of brilliant aqua not found in the northeastern woods, just visible through a mesh of pine boughs and saplings. Only after staring a while could she distinguish the head, the face nearly as white as the snow, and the dark pants. “Who found her?”

  “Jogger. Who else? Joggers and hikers find more bodies than anyone…it would put me right off that activity, if I were them. Lucky for me I never exercise. This trail had iced over, kept most people off it all week except for a few crazy people like you who run in subfreezing temps.”

  “But they wouldn’t have their heads turned toward the woods. They’d be concentrating on the icy path, or looking at the lake.” Theresa turned again to the water; too bright or not, she had trouble keeping her eyes off it for any length of time. The brisk, slightly fishy air meant that her family was on vacation in the years before her father died, that they were up at Catawba Island for a whole week, and she and Frank and a passel of other cousins had nothing to do but swim, suntan, and roller-skate.

  If summer ever came, perhaps she’d get out her scuba gear and dive on the wreck of the Dundee, sunk off the coast. Maybe. “Do we have a path we’re taking to the body?”

  “I don’t know where the jogger stepped. Or the jogger’s jogging partner.”

  Theresa breathed out, a pfff of irritation.

  “Sparky here picked the right side of this growth to walk around, and I stuck with him. That’s all I can tell you.”

  “I didn’t see any footprints,” the young CPD officer told her. The tip of his nose had turned red, catching up to the hue in his
ears. Half of her wanted to tell him to wear a scarf, and the other half wondered, absently, if he was single. “I just went in, established death, checked for ID, came out, and called it in.”

  “EMS?”

  “I didn’t call them. An EKG wouldn’t have helped.”

  “Good for you.” The fewer people in the crime scene, the better. She set her cases on the paved walking trail, selecting only her camera and a plastic ruler. “Did you find any ID on her?”

  “No.”

  She asked her cousin, “Then what makes you think that’s her?”

  Frank looked grimmer than he had a moment before; the excitement of the find, of having his suspicions confirmed, had worn off. “You’ll see.”

  She began to approach what was left of Jillian Perry.

  Thin branches, stiffened by the cold, brushed against her legs and snapped under her feet, covering the ground thickly enough to prevent footprints. At least three men had traveled this area, but the growth had not meshed that thoroughly and only an occasional branch hung awry. Four feet from the body she stopped, since her ankles snagged on a wild blackberry bush. She shook off its embrace and aimed her camera.

  The dead woman sat at the base of an oak tree, its trunk supporting her back, her skull nestled into a slight hollow created by the undulating bark. The aqua color belonged to a sweatshirt with BAHAMAS embroidered in white across the chest; a pink collar poked out from underneath it. Her legs, in dark blue jeans, stretched straight out, and the toes of the white tennis shoes pointed neatly upward. Her hands were empty and lay loose at her sides. No gloves, no coat, no hat. Either she had already been dead before arriving in the woods, or didn’t much care that she soon would be.

  Why didn’t you care? Theresa wondered. Did you even think about your daughter?

  In summer, by now, her flesh would be purplish, bloated, beginning to slip and smell very bad, but the winter cold had slowed decomposition to a crawl. The body began to break down from the inside out, causing a darkening under the bluish-white skin, but the outer shell remained intact. The kinds of animals who wouldn’t mind gnawing on dead flesh were all hibernating or staying deeper in the woods, away from the icy winds, near easier sources of food such as garbage cans. Jillian Perry didn’t exactly resemble Sleeping Beauty, but she could have looked a lot worse.