Buried Evidence (37 page)

“You know I’d never do that,” Jennifer told her. “Look, this place gives me the creeps. Since we’re not going to call the cops, let’s get your stuff together and split.”

Shana found a cloth laundry bag in a corner, then began filling it with jeans, T-shirts, blouses, underwear, several pairs of shoes. After dragging the bag into the living room, she told Jennifer that there might be some empty boxes in the garage. “I want to take as much as I can,” she said. “I don’t want to come back here tomorrow.”

Before they went to get the boxes, Shana picked up the phone and dialed the number for her father’s voice mail, wanting to see if he had received her messages. She listened to two calls from people inquiring about various real estate properties, then heard a male voice identifying himself as Detective Mark Osborne, asking that her father contact him as soon as he received the message. According to the recording, the call had come in Friday night.

Quickly checking her own voice mail, Shana discovered that Hope Carruthers had left a message in her box that morning as well. She rushed into the other room, finding Jennifer stacking some of her school books by the front door. “Th-that guy…” she stammered, “the one my father hit with the car… Antonio Vasquez…he was in one of our classes.”

Because of their friendship, the two girls were enrolled in several of the same courses. “Which class?”

“Philosophy 265.”

“I don’t remember him,” Jennifer said. “But it’s a gigantic class.”

Shana wasn’t aware that she was holding a tennis shoe in her hand. “The police asked me if he was in any of my classes. They thought I’d been dating him, that we got into a fight and it was me instead of my father who was driving that night.”

“From the way it looks,” Jennifer said, walking over and hugging her, “the police have already picked up your father. You have to stop freaking out. The world isn’t coming to an end. You’ve always been tough. I’m the whiner, remember?” She pried the tennis shoe out of her hand, setting it down on the table beside the phone.

“No,” Shana said, crying now, “don’t you understand? My dad was going to leave me here to take the blame. He’s probably left town. I started to feel sorry for him. I tried to call him, see him, tell him I would always love him. He doesn’t care about me. He doesn’t even care if they arrest me. The only person he cares about is himself.”

H
OPE CARRUTHERS
suspected it might turn out to be a slow watch, even though the night was just beginning. Since Osborne held rank over the majority of the officers in their division, his shift ended at eight o’clock every Saturday, giving him a chance to take his wife out to dinner and an occasional movie.

Neither Shana nor John Forrester had responded to their phone messages. Fearing Forrester was the type to skip town, Hope decided to swing by his residence and see if anyone was home. Spotting a young woman carrying what appeared to be a box outside to a green van, she caught Osborne on his cell phone as he was heading home from the office.

“I think you should get your butt over here to the Forrester place.”

“What’s going on?”

Hope was in an unmarked car, parked several houses down from the duplex. She had made a preliminary drive-by, then circled the block and returned. Picking up a pair of binoculars, she peered through them as she spoke. “There’s a short dark-haired girl putting some boxes in what appears to be a Ford van.” She paused, adjusting the binoculars to a higher magnification. “I see Shana now. She’s carrying a green sack … looks like it might be a duffel bag or something. The garage door is open.”

“I’m five minutes away,” Osborne said. “Keep your eyes on
the house, and I’ll have dispatch get a backup unit rolling your way. Do you see the father?”

“No,” Hope said. “But he could be inside the house.”

“Wait for the patrol unit.”

“I’m going in,” she told him. “It’s possible that Forrester and his daughter are attempting to flee. All I see are the girls right now. Even if Forrester’s inside the house, he doesn’t seem like the type of man who would pull a gun on me.”

“Am I mistaken?” Osborne said caustically. “Didn’t you get shot not too long ago? Seems like that would make a normal person exercise a little more caution. Of course, you’re a woman and women just aren’t that smart.”

“At least I don’t talk out the head of my dick.” Hope turned off the phone as she cranked the engine and then slammed on the brakes in front of the duplex. Just to be safe, she reached across her chest and removed her service revolver from her shoulder holster, flicking off the safety and holding the gun with the muzzle pointed toward the ground.

I
CAN’T
believe you don’t have a garage opener,” Jennifer Abernathy said, puffing as she tried to lift the heavy door.

“This is an old house,” Shana told her, walking over to help her. They had found one box on the back porch. It hadn’t been that large, however, and Shana was determined to pack as much of her stuff as she possibly could.

Jennifer said, “Something stinks. Can’t you smell it?”

Shana caught a whiff of something unpleasant. “It’s probably fertilizer,” she said, glancing at the adjacent yard. “The lady that lives next door is out here every day, planting and snipping.”

Both girls jumped when Hope walked up behind them. By the time the detective had determined that John Forrester wasn’t inside the residence, Osborne and the patrol unit had arrived. Her fellow officers at the precinct had dubbed Hope as the resident “nose,” not that she possessed the kind of second sense that many in her line of work did, meaning they could tell in advance when something was about to go down. In Hope’s case, the meaning
was literal. A Frenchwoman had once told her that her highly refined sense of smell could earn her a great deal of money in the perfume industry in her country. But what Hope smelled inside the garage was far from pleasant. It was the unmistakable odor of death.

“Let’s talk over here,” she said, anxiously leading Shana and her friend to the street.

“Are you girls going somewhere?” Osborne asked, the two uniformed officers taking up positions on either side of the two young women.

“I’m just moving some of my clothes out,” Shana told them. “I didn’t get the message that you wanted to talk to me until I came home about an hour ago. I’ve been staying with my mother in Santa Barbara. I have no idea where my father went.”

Advising the patrol officers to detain the girls on the opposite side of the house, the detectives returned to the garage. Osborne yanked his service revolver from its holster on the chance that someone might be hiding inside. Hope flicked on her flashlight, seeing several pools of blood near the front entrance. “Get the crime-scene unit and more officers out here right away,” she said, panning the walls and spotting what appeared to be bloody handprints on the wall near the light switch. “There’s a dead body in here somewhere.”

Osborne asked, “What about the girls?”

She knew better than to touch the light switch. Hope used her eyes like a camera, rapidly sending images and data back to her brain, wanting to make certain these images were firmly set in her memory. The first impression of a crime scene was crucial. The technicians would photograph and collect the various evidence, but things might be inadvertently moved or damaged. Preparing herself for the day she would be called to testify, she wanted to make certain she remembered the scene as she had found it. “I didn’t see any blood on the girl’s clothing,” she said, continuing to pan the flashlight across the garage. “Check them again. If they look clean, get them out of here. We have to find the body.”

Osborne stood with the revolver pointed upward until he felt
certain that whatever was inside the garage was no longer alive. “I’ll have one of the patrol units take the Forrester girl to the station and stash her somewhere. Should we take her friend into custody as well?”

“It’s your call,” Hope told him. “I think she was just helping Shana move her things.”

A short time later, Officer Joe Sisely had jotted down Jennifer Abernathy’s name, address, and driver’s license number and sent her on her way. He waited until the girl drove off to tell Shana that Detective Osborne had instructed him to take her to the station. Shana was terrified. She struggled when the officer tried to get her into the backseat.

“I’m going to have to handcuff you if you keep fighting me,” Sisely told her, placing his hand on top of her head as he helped her into the backseat of the patrol car.

Shana stared at the screen separating her from the police officer. She felt like a stray dog en route to the pound, caged and panicked. Peering out the rear window, she saw several more police units and a white van pulling up in front of the duplex. She began gasping for air, certain now that the awful odor her friend had smelled had not been fertilizer. Unable to accept what her reason was telling her, Shana fainted, her head striking the back of the seat of the police car with a thud.

M
ark Osborne and Hope Carruthers discovered John Forrester’s mutilated body underneath a piece of plastic in the rear section of the garage. Because of the proximity to the window and the fact that it had been exceptionally warm that day, the glass pane had magnified the heat. In a cooler climate, it would have taken a longer period of time before a body began emitting an odor.

John’s stomach was swollen with gastric fluids. What Jennifer Abernathy had smelled near the entrance had not been decayed flesh but human excrement. At the moment of death the bowels and bladder had spontaneously emptied.

The blood near the front of the garage had spread, some being partially absorbed into the concrete, leaving a few rather sizable pools which had already started to coagulate.

While Osborne checked out the crime scene, careful not to contaminate the evidence any more than it had already been contaminated by the two girls, Hope rushed to her car to make the necessary notifications. They didn’t want the medical examiner to respond until they had secured the crime scene and the department’s forensic technicians had started the tedious process of collecting and identifying evidence.

Errors made at the crime scene were where many investigations failed, ultimately leaving a prosecutor without the necessary evidence to convict the killer. Both Osborne and Hope were determined that mistakes wouldn’t be made. They assigned a team of officers to rope off the area, then charged them with checking the credentials of every law enforcement officer who was allowed entrance.

Some people mistakenly thought the medical examiner was in charge of everything related to the crime scene. In reality, their
responsibility was to study and analyze the body of the victim, then correlate their findings with the evidence technicians. When members of the press questioned why an M.E. was not allowed access to the scene as soon as the police determined that a homicide had been committed, the reason was simple. The victim’s body was merely an object to be protected for later examination and dissection, and outside of photographs and outlines related to its position when discovered, it was to be left undisturbed until the M.E. and police official in charge agreed it was time to transport it to the morgue. Once the body was identified and stored, the chief pathologist would schedule the autopsy.

In less than an hour, John Forrester, for whatever his strengths and weaknesses, had now became no more than a name, a number, a memory, a mystery—just another corpse at the morgue.

Hope massaged her forehead, surrounded by the odors and images of death, kneeling as she stared at the multiple stab wounds in Forrester’s back and lower torso. “What happened here, Mark?”

“Did you hear about Shana Forrester?”

“No,” she said, looking up. “Don’t tell me you think she did this? The accident, yeah, I can see how something like that might have occurred, even though I personally think her father got drunk and ran over the boy. This—” She motioned toward the body, shaking her head back and forth. “Not this, Mark. You’ll never convince me that the girl butchered her father this way. Look at the size and number of wounds the killer inflicted. We’re looking at the work of a psychopath. Whoever did this was either completely out of control or they enjoyed it.”

“Anything’s possible,” Osborne said, sipping a cup of coffee one of the other officers had brought to him. “Just thought you should know that the girl passed out in the backseat of the patrol car on the way to the station.”

“Is she okay?”

“They took her to the hospital to be checked,” he told her. “She only fainted.”

Hope stepped aside to let another officer pass. “I’d faint too
if someone told me my father had been murdered. God, Mark, she was only inches away from finding the body.”

Osborne compressed his lips, looking up at the night sky before he turned back to his partner. “Shana Forrester fainted only a few minutes after the patrol officer drove off,” he said. “At first the officer thought she had been knocked unconscious when he hit the brakes and she smacked her head against the back of his seat. The doctor who examined her said she got that bump on her forehead after she’d already fainted.”

Hope grimaced at the growing influx of officers and equipment. They needed to keep their attention focused on what was going on around them. “Why are we talking about a bump on Shana Forrester’s forehead?”

“She didn’t know her father was dead.”

“I’m lost,” she said, stopping to point out the area they had decided to rope off to two officers. “You still haven’t told me what you’re getting at, Mark.”

“Why would she faint?” Osborne said, pausing for emphasis. “It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been brought in for questioning before, or she’s some five-year-old kid that was scared out of her wits because she had to ride in the back of a police car. Of course, if she had just killed her father and you happened to come along, that would make her little fainting episode a lot more significant. What do you think?”

Hope sighed, wishing she’d never transferred into homicide. “I guess you better send a unit over to pickup her girlfriend,” she told him. “We could be looking at more than one killer, isn’t that what you’re saying? That could explain why there are so many stab wounds.”