Defensive Wounds Read online

  “But these are all a year or two old,” he went on. “That’s why the assistant could discuss them—those cases are resolved. I said I need to know who’s threatening her today. She said she couldn’t help me. Privileged. I think she used the word ‘privileged’ fifteen times in three minutes.”

  “It’s true,” Theresa pointed out.

  “It’s also gonna keep us from wrapping this up.”

  “Uterus is normal,” Christine announced to no one in particular.

  “Can you tell if she was raped?” the detective asked.

  “No—meaning no, I can’t tell. There’s no sign of injury.”

  “Was she pregnant?”

  “No.”

  “She ever have a child?” he persisted.

  “I’d say no.”

  Theresa turned to Neil Kelly. “Why do you ask?”

  “I always ask.”

  When he said nothing more, she did. “Speaking of romance—”

  “What’s romantic about babies?” Christine interrupted. “Puking up formula, screaming all night. Romance? Hah.”

  Theresa said, “That’s a bit … um, vociferous. Is there something you want to talk about?”

  “I’m just saying. Nothing romantic about babies.”

  “Making them?” Neil suggested.

  Theresa said, “I heard she was dating Dennis Britton.”

  Neil nodded. “Yeah, we heard that, too. Unfortunately, he’s about the only one at that whole convention with something like an alibi. He, the convention organizers, and the keynote speaker—the upper tier of the group—”

  Theresa nodded. She’d been to conventions and knew how it went. Throw together a large group of people who’d never met and they would instantly sort themselves out into a decreasing gradient of prestige.

  “They adjourned to the bar after the last session, then adjourned to Morton’s steak house. Don’t ask me who picked up the bill. I’m sure that’s privileged, too. From there they adjourned to the House of Blues, but the music was too loud, and eventually they had to face the fact that none of them are thirty and hip anymore, so they adjourned once again, this time over to the Crazy Horse, where for a fee the girls would pretend they were thirty and hip. Three other guys dropped Britton off at his house in Gates Mills, where I’m betting the missus will vouch for the rest of the night.”

  “Maybe not, if she finds out about him and Marie.”

  Neil raised his voice to be heard over the bone saw at the next table. “Married to a guy like Britton? She knows. Or she’s brain-dead, one or the other.”

  Christine and the diener flipped the body over so he could slice open the scalp. Neil Kelly’s color had returned—after the first few organs are removed, it’s not so bad—but now he winced. Again Theresa tried to help. “I forgot to tell you, I looked at the swabs I took yesterday. No sperm.”

  He made a visible attempt to focus on her words and not on the way the diener used a small scraper to peel the flesh off the damaged cranium. “Yeah? None?”

  “None on the oral, vaginal, anal swabs, or her panties. Nothing. Don will run the DNA, see if we get a mixture of epithelial cells. That’s all we can do.”

  “So he knocks her on the head and ties her up in order to do what he wants, and then doesn’t do it,” Neil mused.

  “Or never intended to. He only wanted to kill her and staged the sex part to throw us off.”

  “But if sex isn’t part of the equation, why’d she go there with him in the first place?”

  “The only other thing she cared about,” Theresa reminded him. “A case.”

  Christine blotted the broken skull with a towel, then said, “Impressive. He did this with a chair? On a carpeted floor?”

  “Nice thick carpet, too,” Theresa told her.

  “That was one angry dude.” The doctor pointed out the individual blows and how two of them had crushed the bone into small pieces. Two more had caused hairline fractures and two a deep bruise. “You’d have the weight of the chair working for you but the cushion of the carpet working against you.”

  “Did the blow kill her?” Theresa asked, ignoring Neil Kelly’s snort at this question. Often the secondary effects of a blow to the head—blood loss, internal bleeding that put pressure on the brain, damage to the cerebellum—were what actually snuffed out the last hope of life. “There could have been a lot more blood under the body. I think her heart didn’t pump too long after the blows.”

  “Pieces of broken bone penetrated her brain, where they most likely cut off the nerve system that tells the heart to beat and lungs to breathe. Then she died,” Christine said.

  All three were silent for a moment, watching the photographer document the damage. She took a myriad of photos—of the skull, the macerated brain under the skull, the skull pieces themselves once removed to the plastic “gray board”—all with a small metric ruler next to the significant area. Theresa wondered if the killer had waited, checked Marie Corrigan’s pulse to be sure she’d died, or if he’d stumbled away, frightened by his own violence.

  It probably depended on whether he’d gone there to love her or kill her.

  CHAPTER 9

  *

  Theresa found the toxicologist in open territory for a change. For the most part, Oliver seemed such a fixture in his corner of the tox lab that she found it hard to believe he even had a home to go to. She knew of no evidence to suggest he ever left the lab, save for court appearances, mandatory meetings, and lunch. Today proved no exception.

  “Do you suppose this room has ever been cleaned?” he demanded of Theresa as he covered the cracked Formica of an ancient table with paper towels. “Since construction, I mean?”

  The lunchroom’s decor marched in step with that of the rest of the building. The walls were a dirtied cream color, and the linoleum had never been stylish even when new. Amenities consisted of two noisy machines that dispensed cans of pop only when in the proper mood, a microwave, and a set of largely empty cabinets grouped around a stained sink. Light on atmosphere, but functional.

  “The floor is mopped regularly. Otherwise people are supposed to clean up after themselves,” Theresa replied.

  “And therein lies the rub. Such an expectation is naïve at best and, in a building crawling with diseases and carcinogens, fatal at worst.”

  “I’ve been here ten years,” she said. “I haven’t developed any loathsome disease yet.”

  “That you know of.” He flicked his scrawny ponytail over one heavy shoulder and unwrapped a sandwich at least four inches thick, containing turkey and salami and tomatoes and who knew what else, keeping the plastic wrap around the bread and its contents. This wasn’t lunch, of course, not at 10:00 A.M. Merely a midmorning snack. “What do you want?”

  “I wanted to know if the vaginal swab I sent you showed any sort of lubricant or spermicide. You know, stuff that would be on a condom.”

  “No little swimmers for you to dissect?”

  “None.”

  “Just as well.” Oliver took a huge bite, then barely paused to chew before adding, “If you do catch the guy, the city will throw him a parade anyway.”

  “Be that as it may, I still want to dot my i’s.”

  “Your little FTIR couldn’t tell you?” Oliver felt his mass spectrometer to be the vastly superior instrument. “Oh, that’s right, it can’t do anything with organic compounds, can it?”

  “I wouldn’t say not anything …” Theresa couldn’t help protesting, but Oliver decided that he would rather give his sandwich his full attention than spar with her. She waited patiently through another two bites and resolved to send him the globules she’d found sticking to Marie’s skirt fibers.

  Then he seemed to notice her presence anew and said, “None.”

  “No such compounds found in her?” Theresa clarified.

  He snorted, which apparently caused a piece of turkey to skirt the epiglottis. A cough turned into a choke, and his face turned from its usual color of rising dough to a more
alarming puce. Theresa thought she might have to attempt a Heimlich maneuver and sincerely hoped not, since that would place her too close to Oliver’s less-than-hygienic flesh. But then he hacked, swallowed, and sucked in air, sparing them both an unwanted intimacy.

  She waited until his breathing and hue returned to normal to ask after his condition, which he ignored and said, “Nothing man-made inside her womanly chamber. A temporary situation, I’m sure. She excelled in making the butterflies in every male’s gonads twirl up a little hurricane.”

  “But not you, huh?”

  “A stupid bimbo like that? I should think not.”

  “That’s a rather strong statement.” Oliver didn’t usually call anyone stupid, only allowed his attitude and phrasing to make it clear he felt that to be the case.

  “Do I make weak ones? I liked testifying in front of her. She at least put some effort into her job, despite the fact that the woman couldn’t even pronounce ‘dimethyloxybutarate.’ And she thought she’d trip me up in that last DUI case? Ha.”

  “Ha indeed. And your admiration had nothing to do with the open-throated blouse and the tight skirt?”

  “Nothing whatsoever. I am a scientist.”

  “Glad to hear it. Gotta go,” Theresa added as her phone popped up with a text message: PC LL—the trace-lab secretary’s code for “phone call, landline.” Theresa hustled across the hall to pick up.

  “Did you see the news last night?” a stressed-out voice nearly shouted in her ear.

  “Sonia?”

  “They announced to the world that Marie was found stripped and hog-tied. Tell me everyone in the city is not getting their rocks off on that image right now.”

  “Sonia, no, I didn’t see the news, but you have to assume they’re going to lead with the most salacious detail—wait, how did they know that?”

  “All the lawyers knew, and I’m sure it went through the cops like wildfire. Most of whom are men.”

  “So are the lawyers!” Theresa pointed out.

  “I’m sure it was the first thing out of your detectives’ mouths when Channel 15 called.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t. It would have been a handy way to weed out any crackpot confessions from the real thing. You have to stop taking this so personally, Sonia. The inevitable gloating over Marie’s death is not an attack on all defense attorneys. It’s an attack on Marie. She was aggressive and abrasive—”

  “So am I.”

  Theresa sat down, closed her eyes. “You are a hard worker and mount a vigorous defense. Marie chose to be a lying manipulator. People would not feel the same way about you if you were murdered.”

  “They would. Have you seen the forums?”

  “The what?”

  “The comments that people post at the end of the Plain Dealer story. Go to Cleveland.com.”

  “Oh, for the love of chocolate, Sonia, you’re not reading those? They’ll make you want to go home and lock your doors and avoid all human contact, even when the topic is as innocuous as flowers outside city hall or the proper way to install a mailbox. Never read forums.” Theresa could only imagine the comments.

  “The most understated one, with the fewest spelling errors, quotes Shakespeare’s Henry VI.”

  “Let me guess: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’ ”

  “Yes—which was only suggested by the character so that their rebellion would succeed without anyone there to support the law.”

  “A rebellion against an oppressive, serfdom-supporting regime. I would think you’d be on the peasants’ side in that fight.”

  Sonia pointedly ignored that aspect of the English king’s reign and went on to read entries that curled Theresa’s hair and surely violated several communications statutes. Several people had written in to say that the person who’d attacked them, stolen their money, even shot them still walked the streets because of one Marie Corrigan. Victims claimed that the woman had convinced juries that they’d been the ones at fault. Marie had been called every designation except attorney, including, by one particularly wordy participant, “a filthy, wretched creature driven by twisted, power-mad impulses, who ground the suffering of others beneath her heel in order to buy designer shoes.”

  Theresa stifled a snicker over that one in deference to her friend as she accessed the Internet.

  “No one points out that she raised money for the United Way or that she mentored with the female law students’ organization at Cleveland State every year since graduation. I don’t even do that.”

  Good Lord, was all Theresa could think. She’d warped young minds—rather, trained more people to be like her? “Again, Sonia, you have to let this go. Marie would not have asked you to be her champion, and she’s beyond all this vitriol anyway. Save your crusading for someone who needs it.”

  The attorney sighed, the long breath rushing through the phone receiver like an electronic tsunami. “All right, I’ll try. It’s just so hard being surrounded by a bunch of Neanderthals who spent their time picturing Marie naked anyway. Now they have an excuse.”

  Theresa skimmed the forum posts. “Here’s a nice one.” She read a short note by a former client who said that Marie had saved him from jail on a “totally bogus” possession charge. This led to other commentators’ opinions on the bigoted and oppressive nature of the police and from there into a flame war between the law-and-order types versus those in the mean streets. Theresa clicked on the X in the upper-right-hand corner.

  The one note of confidence did little to cheer Sonia. “Must be some rich white boy. None of my clients would use such an embarrassingly outdated term as ‘bogus.’ ”

  “No ‘bogus’? Denied!”

  “Besides, most of Marie’s current clients are rich. She wanted to be a lawyer to the stars, and I guess she made it.”

  Yeah, Theresa thought, by riding Dennis Britton’s coattails and her own short skirts. But she kept that opinion to herself, having picked up the wistful tone in Sonia’s words. Who didn’t want to be beautiful, sexy, and outrageously successful? Provided, of course, that you didn’t think about the cost.

  Sonia grumbled on. “No one mentions how she’d go on her own time to talk to inner-city high-school classes about working hard and following your dreams. She didn’t come from money, you know. Everything she achieved, she had to fight for. Look, I have to go. The first session is about to start.”

  Glad to steer Sonia’s attention to any subject other than Marie Corrigan, Theresa said, “Yeah? What’s it about?”

  “Impeaching expert … um … witnesses.”

  “Wow. Learning how to circumvent pesky people like me, huh?”

  “Yeah, well, not exactly.” A pause. “I mean, I’m not attending the session … I’m teaching it.”

  Another pause. Then Theresa said, “Okay, well, when I’m speaking to you again, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  “Oh, relax. I don’t talk about forensic experts—much. Mostly just psychologists.”

  Another pause. “Okay, well, when I’m speaking to you again, I want you to tell me why you got so quiet last night.”

  “I wasn’t,” she said, with such a lack of conviction that Theresa scented blood and pursued.

  “What do you think of Rachael’s friend William?”

  Another pause, a longer one. “Nice kid, I’m sure. I have to go.”

  “Sonia! What is up with you?”

  “Really, it’s about to start, I’m heading for the podium now, and I have to get my PowerPoint loaded. Talk to you later.”

  Click.

  Theresa stared at the receiver for a moment before replacing it in its cradle, then continued to stare, ignoring the blinding summer sun through the lab windows and the fact that Leo had approached with a stack of blue-covered case reports, no doubt marked up with his red pen so he could be seen to be doing his job, and now stood tapping one foot.

  I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.

  She picked up the phone again
and dialed her cousin. Leo dumped the stack on her desk and walked away.

  Frank said, “Just so we’re clear on this, you don’t want Rachael to know?”

  “She’d probably never speak to me again. One year of college under her belt, but she’s still in that teenage ‘I’m an adult with a right to privacy, and you have to respect limits la-di-da’ stage. And it’s all a matter of public record, right? It’s not like I’m spying on the kid.”

  “All right, I’m looking.” She could hear him tapping keys. “William Rosedale. Got four of them. Dates of birth: ’63.”

  “No.”

  “How about ’58?”

  “No.”

  “Or ’93?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Rachael’s dating a black kid?”

  “No, white. And she’s not dating him, not yet.”

  “Then what’s your problem?”

  “I can tell when she’s interested and when she’s really interested. And when a public defender clams up around him and then won’t even deny it, I get worried.” Theresa had lived with Sonia for three years and knew her every mood. Whenever she was less than voluble, that meant uncertainty, fear, or worry. Which, in turn, worried Theresa.

  “Last one’s ’99. Too young to interest Rachael. So no matches—that’s good, right?”

  Theresa drummed her fingers on the Sirchie catalog. “Maybe not. Sonia does mostly juvenile cases.”

  “What is up with that bitch anyway?”

  “Don’t call her that. Ever.”

  “Look, I can understand an us-versus-them mentality, but she goes way overboard.”

  “Sonia has her reasons.”

  “Yeah, you said there was some history with her brother. Is it reason enough to be completely unreasonable?”