Authors: Lisa Black
Shephard kept asking questions, most of which Theresa could not answer. Justin Warner stood over six feet tall, perhaps weighed two-fifty, was a light-skinned black man of about thirty or thirty-five. Some tattoos on his neck, but she’d never looked closely enough to be able to describe them. He seemed cheerful enough but, now that she thought about it, never said much of anything beyond the weather, the state of the victim, or what he might have for lunch. No political commentaries, no complaints of a spouse or girlfriend or children, not even the strengths of the Indians’ starting line-up. Theresa didn’t know where he lived or what he drove. She had no idea if he lived alone, but had heard that he spent time flirting with one of the secretaries up in Records. She could contribute only one useful fact, that his cellphone number would be posted in the deskmen’s office, scrawled on a curling piece of paper taped to the glass.
Meanwhile, other cops poked their heads in once in a while to give Shephard updates. No blood had been located on the outside loading dock or in the parking lot, at least so far as they could establish under the tungsten street lights. They had also checked DMV information. Justin Warner drove a seven-year-old brown Chevy Cavalier, which did not, currently, reside in the parking lot.
Shephard didn’t say a word, but obviously young Justin’s absence made him appear guiltier with each passing moment.
‘Maybe he didn’t even work tonight,’ Theresa pointed out.
‘Is there another deskman who would make a more likely suspect for you?’
She thought of the four other deskmen. The office had only six total, two each on rotating twelve-hour shifts. ‘No.’
‘Easy way to find out for sure – your cameras? Can you cue up the tape for me?’
She gave him her baffled blink again, so he pointed out that he had seen a camera outside the loading dock entrance. Were there more cameras, where were they, and could she operate the system so they could review what had happened?
Theresa hated to tell him that the one he had seen was the only one they had.
She didn’t add that the county had tried to add more, specifically in the deskmen’s office and the Property Department – a much criticized move, since these were two of the lowest-paid occupations in the building and did not attract college graduates or Shaker Heights residents. But the county’s thinking didn’t stem from simple bigotry; these were the only two areas with access to victims’ cash and jewelry. No one thought of adding cameras to other floors because there was virtually nothing in the building worth stealing. And though the paperwork could be considered confidential, there wasn’t much of a black market for autopsy reports and toxicology read-outs. No one in Cleveland warranted that kind of interest. Lacking a bit of wealth also kept the city from having the problems of LA or DC.
But in any case the first-floor interior cameras hadn’t lasted long. They encountered an endless string of bad luck, mysterious power surges that melted their circuits, moisture somehow seeping into their wiring, condensation fogging their lenses, until the county gave up.
‘Fine, the one camera, then,’ Shephard sighed. ‘Can you cue up the tape? Or – well, it’s probably digital, right?’
‘It’s nothing,’ she told him gently. ‘It doesn’t record. It’s just a monitor.’
His face darkened so much that Theresa thought he might yell at her, an experience she had planned to leave behind after signing divorce papers. ‘What?’ he said.
‘The purpose of the camera is to let the deskman see who’s knocking at their door in the middle of the night, that’s all. They’ll either open the door or they won’t. There’s no need for it to record.’
Under the razor stubble his skin flushed. ‘And you call that
security
?’
I
don’t call it anything, Theresa thought but didn’t say. ‘It’s not my job’ never sounded like a mature, responsible thing to express, even when it truly wasn’t. ‘This is a morgue. We’re not a bank, and we’re not the NSA. No one wants to break in here. Why would they?’
‘Maybe to kill your deskman – assuming, just for the sake of argument, that he wasn’t killed by your
other
deskman. Maybe they wanted to break into your property room, or wherever valuables are stored.’
‘Then they changed their minds, because there’s no damage to the door and the keys are not stored on site.’ Something else occurred to her as her brain ping-ponged all over the place. ‘What are you doing here?’
This confused him into speechlessness.
‘I mean,’ she went on, gesturing at the stripes on his sleeve, ‘what are
you
doing here? Why is a sergeant the first responder?’
It was his turn to blink. ‘The call came in, and – an ME’s office employee killed
at
the ME’s office? I—’
‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world?’ She didn’t intend it as criticism. She’d have felt the same way in his shoes.
‘—thought I should supervise in person as a professional courtesy,’ he finished. ‘I came here enough times when I worked homicide.’
He
did
look vaguely familiar – dark hair, dark eyes, could use a shave, tall and solid. And now he was back in uniform as a sergeant. A promotion, a bigger paycheck and more regular hours, but Theresa wondered if he missed the unpredictability of the murder beat. ‘You know Frank?’
‘Yes,’ he said, with a complete absence of inflection. Sometimes that happened when people spoke of her cousin. ‘You don’t need to call him, you know. I mean, the case will be assigned to the on-call detective. Though if you need some moral support I suppose there’s nothing actually wrong with it—’
She put him out of the misery of worrying that another cop might interfere in his case. ‘I would love to, but I can’t. He’s on a Royal Caribbean ship somewhere in the Panama Canal.’ She didn’t add that Frank had gone on his first real vacation in about a decade with his partner, detective Angela Sanchez. Her cousin subscribed to the
don’t ask, don’t tell
policy with his own department.
Shephard looked relieved, and Theresa made a mental note to ask her cousin how he got along with his co-workers. ‘Has this ever happened before?’ he asked. ‘Someone actually killed here?’
She thought, which seemed to require way more effort than it should. ‘Never, that I know of. We haven’t even had a staff member
die
, here or anywhere … not since Diana, I don’t think. That was ten years ago.’
‘She died here?’
‘No, in her home. She was—’
Polished shoes clacked against the floor as Medical Examiner Stone strode into the lobby, trench coat swirling around his calves in a way that would have looked much more impressive on a foggy bridge instead of sixty-year-old linoleum. ‘What the hell is going on?’
His gaze fell from Shephard to Theresa. He didn’t actually
say
, ‘I might have known,’ but it was a close thing. He’d never quite forgiven her for accidentally bringing an unstable explosive back to the lab, which had required an evacuation of the entire building. Make one mistake …
‘Darryl’s dead,’ she said, ‘and someone’s kidnapped Justin.’
His scowl merely deepened, and Theresa couldn’t really blame him. She had never mastered the art of concise summary. At the same time she noticed that his shirt had a few uncharacteristic wrinkles and his usual aroma of too much Axe had been replaced by old-fashioned sweat, so either he was wearing the previous day’s clothing or he had never been home. Perhaps his wife had gone out of town again—
Shephard began to fill him in, and Theresa grabbed the opportunity. Mumbling something about needing the ladies room and holding a hand to her mouth as if she were about to lose her last meal, she stumbled up the hallway and went to check on her crime scene.
FOUR
T
he cop standing in the doorway to the deskmen’s office looked at Theresa curiously but said nothing. He also didn’t move, but that was all right – she didn’t want to go in, not just yet. She simply glanced through the windows, to see that Darryl’s body had been moved slightly from where she’d left it, probably by those pesky do-gooder EMTs, and someone’s foot had slid through one of the larger puddles of blood since she had been in there. It could have even been her on her way out – she checked her shoes, but the soles seemed relatively clean. Most of the stains had already been dry upon her arrival – no wonder Darryl’s body had grown cool. He must have been killed at least an hour earlier, probably two, with the chilly linoleum sucking out his body heat as quickly as his dead cells could give it up.
Theresa’s camera bag and the small paper bags from the hit-and-run remained where she’d dumped them on the counter. Great. Now her equipment was part of the crime scene.
Theresa went up the rear staircase and let herself into the lab.
They had a spare camera, and she grabbed some swabs and a few other supplies before returning to the loading dock area. The smear of blood on the wall next to the elevator might not have suggested a hand to anyone else, but Theresa had seen a lot of brownish-red impressions left by hands and feet over the years and could make out three fingers and the outer edge of a palm. The outer edge – it was a right hand – had heavier staining in the upper interdigital area, right below the little finger.
Theresa applied scaled tape to the periphery of the pattern and took some photos. Then she took a closer look with a jeweler’s loupe, but couldn’t make out any discernible ridges. That didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t there, or that any pattern had been smudged beyond recognition – they might simply be too faint to see. Amido black stain could bring nearly invisible blood prints to life.
Theresa moved over to the other stain, at the edge of the doorway into the front hallway area. A small blot that didn’t give her much to go on – it could be from the left hand of someone walking toward the front, or the right hand of someone walking toward the loading dock, but something about the curve of what could be a finger above the most visible part of the stain made her think of a right hand. Given that it contained less blood than the other stain, she made a guess that might be educated or wild depending on one’s level of conservatism: that it came from a wound on the right palm instead of a palm stained with Darryl’s blood. Otherwise there would be more blood on the more interior stain, with some wiped off by the time he made the second stain by the elevator. But a wound would make the palm
more
bloody as time went on. A handy piece of logic, with no guarantee of accuracy.
Theresa dampened a swab with a vial of sterile water and collected a sample from the very edge of the badly smeared spot. The swab went into a tiny paper box. The cop at the door to the deskmen’s office watched her curiously but said nothing. It seemed remarkable to her how much easier it was to breathe with someone else in the building, other people who were tall and armed and tasked with protecting civilians like herself. Of course, under normal circumstances she would be counting, except for the armed part, on the deskmen to fill that role.
She went through the same process with the stain next to the elevator.
It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the cops or her own co-workers; it was simply that the building was awash in biohazards. At any moment another deceased person could be brought in, wet and wild, to contaminate any existing stains.
Speaking of which—
Theresa turned around. The gurney that had been against the wall when she first arrived had not moved.
But there was no longer a body on it, just a rumpled, deflated white sheet.
Theresa felt almost afraid to tell Sergeant Shephard.
She reached him just as Stone finished their confab and went off to make phone calls. He would have to make quite a number, Theresa knew. Almost all the staff would be given the day off, as much to keep them out of the crime scene as in sympathy for any grief they may feel at the death of a co-worker. One or two pathologists would need to come in to do Darryl’s autopsy – one to do the autopsy, and one to act as their diener, or assistant. If the deskmen were at the bottom of the totem pole, the dieners were only one step above; plus both groups spent all their time on the first floor and got to know each other pretty well. Not even perpetually cash-strapped Cuyahoga County would ask someone to make a Y-incision into someone they considered a friend.
‘
What
?’ was Shephard’s response when Theresa told him about the gurney. As they hurried to the loading dock he asked if she had looked under the sheet. How big was the person? How tall? Weight? Of course, she couldn’t answer. This was a
morgue
. She had barely glanced at the body – or person, as the case appeared to be.
He strode up to the gurney, vacant except for a single pristine sheet. As he reached out toward the gleaming metal she cried: ‘Don’t touch it!’
He glared at her.
Theresa shrugged. She couldn’t help it. She would have to process the gurney for fingerprints, and that officers would keep that in mind is not something she could take for granted.
He picked up the very edge of the sheet with finger and thumb, as delicately as Queen Victoria’s maiden aunt, and peeked underneath. Nothing.
Then he pointed out that he might have a picture of who had emerged from underneath the sheet – if the building had cameras.
‘Do you have cameras in your office?’ Theresa asked, and he shut up.
She took a closer look at the metal surface – gleaming and clean except for a few smears. Fresh gurneys were always left in the loading dock, to be front and center for any new arrivals, but unless someone had gotten very sloppy in the hosing area … ‘He left some blood here. Just a few swipes – it’s either from Darryl or himself.’ Theresa explained her ‘small wound in the right palm’ theory. Shephard went off to relay the narrowed timeline to his men, and Theresa slipped to the front again in search of Justin Warner’s locker.
In between the deskmen’s office and the viewing chamber sat a row of metal cabinets. The doors had become decorated over the years with peeling stickers of rock bands, refrigerator magnets and the occasional political comment, but above this din each had been labeled with an old-fashioned punch-style label maker, and finding Justin’s proved easy. Theresa pulled on fresh gloves and lifted the latch, careful to use only the tip of one finger should they want to process for prints later. None of the lockers had a lock on them – perhaps the deskmen felt it would show a lack of trust, and besides, lunches were the only thing subject to theft at the ME’s office and the deskman had a refrigerator in their office, where they could keep an eye on theirs. Theresa had to use the general staff lunchroom and had lost a number of candy bars and leftover stromboli over the years. Not even injecting some decoy mini Milky Ways with Tabasco sauce seemed to help.