Evidence of Murder Page 5

  And it was Jillian. If the color and the length of the hair didn’t convince Theresa, the necklace spelling out JILLIAN in gold wire would have. It rested on the sweatshirt’s neckband; the short chain had been pulled free of the pink collar and the sweatshirt. Jillian had been left there like a piece of luggage, the tag turned outward for easy identification.

  A faint smell made its way to Theresa’s nostrils as she grew closer, the unmistakable sign that organic cells had succumbed to entropy.

  Why did she assume that someone had left Jillian there? The aqua sweatshirt and jeans had no blemish, no sign that she had been shot or stabbed. No blood stained the blond hair. Theresa pulled at the collar. The neck, with its telltale necklace, had not been throttled or even bruised. There was no reason to think that Jillian hadn’t walked out into the woods under her own power, to purposely end her life. Freezing to death was supposedly painless and, perhaps important to a model, not disfiguring. Shooting or stabbing would tear the flesh, hanging would distort it to grotesque shapes. Even overdoses produced messy vomiting. But this left the victim looking, aside from the skin color, serene.

  Jillian had probably killed herself. Case closed. At least the body had been recovered, so her family wouldn’t have to spend the rest of their lives wondering. All Theresa had to do now was finish her photos, call the body snatchers to collect the remains, get a cup of hot coffee, and call it a day.

  Except she didn’t believe it. Not because Jillian, a beautiful, married mother of a baby girl, had everything to live for. That hadn’t stopped others before and wouldn’t again. They were only a three-mile walk from Jillian’s apartment and the girl was in good shape. She could easily have done that-but not without a coat or hat, not without getting frostbite, and her ears and nose showed no sign of it. Theresa’s cheeks were already tingling.

  It also seemed odd that Jillian would leave her necklace in view but not carry any ID-if she wanted to be identified, why not keep her driver’s license in her pocket? And freezing might not immediately disfigure her, but if her body remained undiscovered, a thaw or two would reduce it to soup. But mostly, Theresa didn’t believe it because she had felt the effects of overexposure at too many northern Ohio bus stops, football games, and sled rides. The last few minutes of freezing to death might be painless, but the hour or so leading up to it would be sheer agony. Jillian would have really wanted to die, which didn’t quite jibe with the image of some flighty, selfish, pretty girl.

  Either there was much more to Jillian than Theresa knew, or someone else had helped the woman to die, to abandon both her own life and that of her infant daughter’s.

  After the first battery of photographs, Theresa donned gloves and turned Jillian Perry’s right wrist outward. The nails were unbroken, perfectly manicured, without blood or even dirt underneath them. The left hand matched the right, an impressive diamond solitaire winking from the fourth finger. Theresa sheathed each in a brown paper bag, pulling it tight around the wrist with red evidence tape. Her toes had gone numb.

  Twigs snapped behind her as Frank approached along their set route. “What do you think? The setup has some similarities to the other hooker, but I didn’t see a mark on this one. You find anything?”

  “No. Of course she could have a syringe sticking out of her arm, for all I know, but we’ll have to wait until she’s undressed. I doubt it, though. I’ve seen a lot of overdoses, and she hasn’t got the look.” She pulled up the bottom of the sweatshirt, just enough for a peek at the pink pullover beneath it. Sections had begun to darken as decomposition fluid seeped from the body, but she saw no defects from bullets or knives. At least in the front.

  “So you think pretty Jillian decided to end it all?” Frank asked. He sounded disappointed, either in Jillian’s abandonment of her family or the loss of a reason to arrest George Panapoulos.

  “I think I’m going to treat her as a homicide until I decide she’s not.”

  Frank digested this as Theresa taped the front surfaces of Jillian’s sweatshirt and jeans. The cold lessened the adhesive qualities of the tape and, in light of the fact that the body had been exposed to the elements for days, made it enormously unlikely that any useful trace evidence would be found, but the process was quick, cheap, and nondestructive. Without a table or work area handy, she didn’t bother pasting the pieces of tape to sheets of clear acetate paper, merely folded the pieces back on themselves and dropped each into a hastily labeled manila envelope.

  “She hasn’t got a mark on her,” Frank repeated. “Unlike Sarah Taylor. But one was a prostitute and one’s an escort.”

  “Sarah was malnourished and poor. Jillian had found her way to a different world.” She combed her fingers through the detritus around the body, lumbering around in short hops, like a short sumo wrestler; ungraceful in the extreme, but she could not kneel or she’d have wet pants as well as cold feet. She had even clipped a few branches from the blackberry bush-if it had caught on her clothes, it might have snatched at someone else’s. She found only a crushed Coke can that appeared to have been there since the last millennium, a gray plastic ring about an inch in diameter, and a broken piece of red rubber, the same width as a heavy-duty rubber band. She bagged and tagged these items, doubting that they would relate to Jillian’s death. They were not on a remote mountaintop; over two and a half million people called Cleveland home, and the Edgewater beach and park were popular, even in the winter months. She could probably find debris from human beings in every square inch of the wooded area if she looked long enough.

  When she had searched the ground with reasonable thoroughness-reasonable defined as longer than she wanted to but not so long that she shrieked with boredom-she turned Jillian Perry onto her side. Frank helped her, but it was not difficult given Jillian’s slender frame and the assistance of gravity. Theresa quickly taped the back surface of the clothing as well. Another peek under the clothes-not difficult since the pink polo-type shirt had not been tucked into the jeans-confirmed their suspicions: Jillian Perry had not been shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned.

  Frank stood up, rubbing his arms, his mustache framed by red cheeks. “Damn, it’s cold.”

  “I’d still rather be here. A brilliant forensic scientist hired by the defense for their poor railroaded client is visiting our lab as we speak.”

  “I take it he’s not a buddy of yours. She could have gotten here on foot from her place,” Frank thought aloud. “It’s not even three miles by car. Less if she walked along the train tracks.”

  “I know.”

  “She disappeared Monday afternoon. The high that day was six degrees. How long does it take someone to freeze to death?”

  “A long time. Overnight would be enough. But if she came here in the afternoon, why didn’t she go farther into the woods? She’s visible from the path. Someone could have found her, even on a cold day. You said yourself there’s always some crazy hiker around.”

  “She is visible from the path, and still it took five days for someone to notice her.”

  “But it’s a risk.”

  “Maybe she wasn’t very good at thinking things through. Maybe she was too drunk or high to think clearly.”

  Theresa looked around, and decided that she had done all that could be done at the scene. She pulled out her Nextel to call for the ambulance crew-i.e., the body snatchers. “We’ll just have to wait on tox for that. No drugs or alcohol at the apartment, you said?”

  “A little Michelob Lite. Of course he had time to clean up for our visit.”

  “Or throw the stuff out, if he knew she wasn’t coming back.”

  Frank considered this, then shook his head. “Nah. The husband’s got no record past a speeding ticket or two. If she’s got drugs in her system, then my money is on Georgie. She was lighting up for old time’s sake with her boss and OD’d. He needed to get rid of the body and dumped it here.”

  “Then it’s not murder, exactly.”

  “I know.”

  “And there are a lot more co
nvenient places for someone on West Twenty-fifth to dump a body, starting with the Dumpsters at the West Side Market and moving about a thousand feet to the river.”

  “So what are we looking at here?” He stood next to the oak, his face turned to the silent woman at his feet. Frustration tinged his voice; they both knew that without more information, they could ask questions of each other from then until the next fall and not be able to answer a single one.

  “A little girl who’s never going to know her mommy,” Theresa told him.

  CHAPTER 6

  The autopsy suite in the sixty-year-old medical examiner’s office, scrubbed every afternoon, was the cleanest room in the building. Or at least it appeared to be-the staff took general precautions against cross-contamination but beyond that placed no particular emphasis on sterility. The patients opened up on these tables did not have to worry about infection.

  The room held three stainless-steel tables, two sinks, a central floor drain; small red ceramic tiles covered the floor and half of the walls. Unless a victim’s organs were currently open, it did not smell bad, more like the humid odor of a seedy bar during the day. Autopsies were performed one after the other until the doctors ran out of candidates; sometimes this would be early in the day and sometimes late. The dieners, or autopsy assistants, would then clean the room and go home, a system that provided every incentive to work quickly and efficiently.

  Any new deceased who arrived after cleanup joined the queue for the following morning’s work. Jillian Perry made it in under the wire.

  “Could have been an early day.” Jesse, a skinny black man who didn’t look old enough to have a driver’s license, absently hosed the body as he grumbled. He did not seem at all enamored of the beautiful model; a hot dead girl was no match for paid time off.

  Undressed, Jillian’s body continued to show no signs of violence. No needle marks, no injuries, not so much as a bruise. Lividity, of course, on the buttocks and backs of the legs, but Theresa expected that. She and the pathologist, Dr. Christine Johnson, had already collected fingernail scrapings, a rape kit, and a few hairs and fibers from the skin. Now the ebony-hued doctor held a small but brilliant flashlight up to the mouth.

  “Her throat’s clear. I don’t see any of the foaming you usually get with an OD.”

  Jesse offered his opinion. “She froze to death.”

  Theresa peered down the throat as well. “That would take a long time. It wasn’t that cold out.”

  “Just long enough to screw up my day. If she’d been here this morning, I’d be going home by now.”

  Theresa had often proposed a law restricting all crimes to only daylight hours to keep from being dragged from bed, and didn’t blame him. “It sucks to be you.”

  “Not as bad as it sucks to be this chick today,” Christine said, clicking off the flashlight with a brisk snap, similar to the way she discouraged potential suitors. The young, black, brilliant pathologist was too interested in studying for her board exams to be distracted by romance. “It seems we have a rash of people freezing to death in the woods all of a sudden.”

  Theresa said, “Not really. We have a thirty-year-old, half-clothed, throttled prostitute, a warmly dressed fifteen-year-old boy with a single blow to the head, and now a lightly but fully dressed twenty-four-year-old mother dead of-what?”

  “Good question. I’ll let you know what I find.”

  Theresa relinquished control of the body and went next door to the old teaching amphitheater which, by virtue of its size, availability, and the fact that it had a table in the middle, doubled as the trace evidence department’s examination room. She covered the table with fresh brown paper and spread out the aqua sweatshirt, noting its size, color, and brand. It smelled faintly of perfume, a light and undoubtedly expensive floral scent. Would a woman intending suicide wear perfume? Sure, why not? No need to save the good stuff for a special occasion, as Theresa did. She still had perfume from high school.

  Aside from a little dirt and some dead leaves, almost certainly picked up when they rolled the body, the shirt was clean. Theresa turned it inside out-more of the same, except for a smear above the right cuff, on the inside of the forearm. It could have been a minuscule amount of oil. Perhaps Jillian had had something in her hand when she pulled the shirt on? But the victim’s hands were clean, and no spots appeared on the shirt’s waistband, where she would have had to tug downward.

  The pink polo shirt under the sweatshirt had become discolored from the seepage of the decomposing tissues. Theresa hung it on a wheeled rack; when it dried she could tape its surface to pick up any loose hairs or fibers. Odd that it hadn’t been tucked into the jeans underneath the sweatshirt, which would have kept her warmer, but perhaps the victim had dressed in a hurry, or it had something to do with the current fashion.

  The jeans were a designer brand, size four, making Theresa think there might be something to the rumor that clothing manufacturers had downgraded all women’s clothing sizes to make customers feel better about their bodies, and, by extension, better about parting with the cash to clothe them. Jillian seemed slender, but by no means undernourished for her height. A close look at the back pockets yielded a tiny dusting of white powder, which Theresa dutifully scraped into a paper fold to be tested for the presence of cocaine. The left front pocket contained some lint. The right front pocket held a single stud earring-a small cubic zirconium, as near as Theresa could figure-and a phone number with a Cleveland exchange scribbled on a piece of paper.

  Don Delgado poked his head in. “What’s that?”

  “This is what we, in law enforcement circles, call a clue.”

  He dropped his six foot three frame into an amphitheater seat too small for him and ran two hands over his shiny olive skin. “Clue to what?”

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe to whoever left Jillian Perry to freeze to death at the base of an oak tree.”

  “I thought she did that herself.”

  “She probably did. I’m just not so sure.”

  “Why not?”

  She did not own up to any guilt over her first harsh assessment of Jillian Perry; Theresa’s ex-husband had taught her the folly of exposing any personal weakness. So she told Don merely this: “I have a hunch.”

  “You don’t get hunches.”

  “I thought I’d start. It will help me keep up with all those TV detectives.”

  “You’ll have to start wearing high heels and low-cut sweaters too.”

  “Forget it.”

  “That’s a pity. You’d look good in them.” He clasped his hands behind his head and watched her work. He did not offer to help, no more than she would have offered to help him. The lab tried to maintain one forensic scientist per case-it cut down on staff time spent in court when the defendant came to trial.

  Jillian had worn white Keds with socks. Not the sort of thing Theresa would have picked to walk three miles in, especially in very cold weather. The treads seemed clean for having traveled through the woods, but then it had been much colder on Monday than today and even mud or slush would have been frozen to an icy solid. “Are you hiding from Leo?”

  “Yep. He has to meet with the companies bidding to handle the move to the new building, doesn’t want to leave his office or the coffee machine, and is looking for a handy substitute.”

  “That doesn’t sound that bad, really. At least you could get away from test tubes for a while.”

  “I like DNA. It don’t talk, just stays in its little incubator and multiplies. Besides, he wants you to take the moving companies-least you could do after bailing on that defense expert. He wants me to search the deep freeze for a piece of bone from a 1994 case.”

  Theresa cringed. The deep freeze, a walk-in subzero room used for long-term storage, smelled bad enough to sicken strong men, and anything placed there before she was hired could not be located without hours of work. Organization, like supervision, had never been Leo’s strong point. She turned on the alternative light source and a blue beam of light
at 420 nanometers flowed out of the flexible head. She donned a pair of orange plastic goggles and said, “Hit the light switch, would you?”

  Jillian’s underwear did not glow, indicating an absence of semen. One errant fiber lit up on the sweatshirt, but the taping had removed most of them. The embroidered words stood out as the optical properties of the threads reacted with the ultraviolet light. Then Theresa turned it over.

  She heard Don approaching in the darkness. “What’s that?”

  The smudge on the right cuff glowed brightly under the light. “I think that’s the smear of oil I saw. Why the heck is it glowing?”

  “It’s not just glowing. It’s signaling the mother ship.”

  She marked the area with a Sharpie in case it became difficult to see in regular light. “Sounds like a job for the FTIR, Robin.”

  “Don’t call me Robin. You can be Batgirl if you want, but I ain’t going to be Robin. Stupidest name for a superhero ever.”

  A knock sounded at the door. The building’s receptionist, an older woman with the physique of a wren but not the sweet voice, cracked it open, turned on the lights, and gave them both a suspicious look, as if wondering just what the two had been up to in the pitch black. “That suicide you just brought in, name of Perry?”

  “Yeah?” Theresa asked.

  “There’s a guy here wanting to claim the body, and giving me the impression he’s going to stage a sit-down strike until he gets it.”

  “He’s working fast. She’s still on the table. Has he made an arrangement with a funeral home yet?”