Evidence of Murder (21 page)

“And without her baby? Not likely. And does Georgie strike you as clever enough to murder someone without leaving a trace?”

“How did Evan kill her without leaving a trace? What did she die of? I thought she froze to death…I’m not hearing an answer. You still don’t know why she died?”

“No, and that’s just it. Do you know how difficult it is to kill someone without leaving any trace? It could only be done by a control freak who’s trained himself to plan every last detail. A former chemistry major who needs that million and a half for his new company.”

“Absence of proof is not proof of absence.”

“That’s cute.”

“It’s also true. Can you prove Jillian didn’t walk out into those woods and freeze to death? Yes or no, Tess.”

She could hear the
schtick
of the revolving doors as he walked into the police department side of the Justice Center, the sudden deadening of the outdoor sounds, the frustration in his voice.

“No,” she said, hating the word.

“What you want to do is go fishing, and a judge isn’t going to let you. You have to have probable cause to show that A, a crime occurred; B, this person is likely to have committed that crime; and C, evidence is likely present on the property that would help you prove same. You don’t even have A, much less B or C.”

She sat at her desk with the phone pressed to her ear, her forehead held up by the palm of her hand. Frank was right, and she knew it. “So he’s going to get away with it.”

“A search warrant is definitely out unless you can get me some probable cause. Now consider an alternative theory for me, just for a minute. Have you found any trace in common between Jillian and Sarah Taylor?”

“None. Sarah favored jewel tones over Jillian’s pastels. Pieces of vegetation were consistent with the location of the body. No diatoms. Sarah smoked, and ash and tobacco particles were consistent with her own brand. No mysterious smears of phenol,” she added.

“What?”

“Long story. Did she own a dog? A good-size black thing, maybe a Doberman?”

“Honey, Sarah Taylor barely had a place to live. She flopped in a one-room no-tell motel off of East 117th without a toothbrush and about ten articles of clothing, all told. No pets allowed.”

“Then I’ll bet your killer does. The press is still connecting these murders, the two women and the boy.”

“I’m wondering myself. Word on the street is, Sarah Taylor used to work for Georgie. In his less reputable days.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Years. But now Sarah Taylor finds she’s down to her last dime. If she knew where a body or two were buried, she might have tried to shake down her former pimp. I know exactly how Georgie would react to that.”

“Possibly. But she was a hooker, Frank. Their daily work is to get in a car with some stranger and drive off without telling anyone where they’re going. They’re tailor-made for sick and violent men. And if Georgie killed her, then why did he kill Jillian? She certainly wasn’t down to her last dime.”

“Yeah. I know. But you’re getting yourself stuck on Evan, and you’re not usually so…inflexible. Do you have any results on Sarah Taylor?”

“The rape kit came up positive for semen. So say your prayers tonight for a CODIS hit. We should know in a few days. But it’s not a serial killer, Frank—the MOs are different, and then there’s the kid—the boy didn’t have any connection to the women, right?”

“Nope. He stuck to his own neighborhood, and if he could have afforded Georgie’s rates, then he could have afforded a damn cell phone. I’m getting into the elevator, in case we get cut off. Hang in there, Tess. It’s nice to see you—” The rest of his sentence disappeared into a cloud of static and broken syllables. Theresa hung up the phone.

She prodded her chin with the top of a retractable pen. She did not put it in her mouth. One learned very quickly at a medical examiner’s office never to put a writing implement in one’s mouth. You never knew where it had been.

The rules of Sarah Taylor’s life also applied to Jillian Perry. Her clients might have been more nicely dressed and had better table manners, but they were still a group of strangers often with less-than-laudable purposes. She could have met her killer through the same channels as Sarah Taylor, and Evan could be merely unlikable, but innocent.

But she didn’t believe it.

Don dropped himself into the chair at the opposite desk and eyed her over a short bookshelf littered with texts, family photos, her Beanie Babies, and a box of disposable pipettes. “What’s the matter, babe?”

“I got nothing.”

“I wouldn’t say that. You’re beautiful, intelligent, relatively young—”

“I’ll ‘relatively’ you, you supercilious—”

“Did I mention beautiful?”

“I need proof, and I don’t even know what it is I’m trying to prove.”

“Jillian Perry?”

“Yep.”

“So what’s your plan?”

She moved a bean-stuffed tiger to see him better. “What?”

“Don’t you have a plan?”

She stared at him for a few more moments before speaking. “I don’t. That’s been my whole problem.” She dug through a desk drawer and pulled out a legal pad. At the top she wrote, in block letters, MEANS, OPPORTUNITY, MOTIVE. Then she added a fourth column, PROOF.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to show Evan Kovacic that he’s not the only detail-oriented control freak in this city.”

“What do you want?” Oliver discouraged visitors to his corner of the toxicology lab. He kept all the spare gas tanks clustered in a fencelike barrier. He had removed all task chairs except his own, which he rarely left, his extra flesh overflowing the seat and his ponytail brushing the armrests. He displayed printed epigraphs such as I’LL TRY BEING NICER IF YOU’LL TRY BEING SMARTER and IT MAY BE THAT YOUR ONLY PURPOSE IS TO SERVE AS A WARNING TO OTHERS. He varied neither wardrobe nor hygiene. But he seemed to know everything in the world, particularly the chemical world. “I suppose you’re here about that piece of solder.”

“What?”

She’d seen Halloween masks with less of a scowl.

“That tiny sphere you gave me, the one you just
had
to have analyzed. I suppose you’re going to tell me, after I’ve done all this work, that it isn’t important and I can forget about it.”

“Not at all. It’s very important. It’s solder wire, the stuff you melt to hold metal things together?”

“Solder paste, actually. Tin, silver, a touch of bismuth. No lead. Water soluble.”

He did not continue. She strove to look properly awed by his abilities in inorganic analyses. “What does that mean?”

“Probably used in electronics.”

Suspicious, but not conclusive. Jillian Perry had been surrounded by electronics. “Thanks, that’s very helpful. Regarding that same case, I need to know about Jillian Perry’s blood work. Did she have anything in her system?”

“Normally we put such information into reports. You might have seen them, pieces of paper with words and multicolored graphs. These reports are given to the pathologist, who in this case is Christine Johnson, and since you two seem to be best friends, I’m sure she would share it with you if you asked nicely, or maybe took her some candy.”

“You did, and she did. The problem is—”

“Because otherwise I can’t release tox results, even to trace evidence staff, even though you passed biology, which I’m sure is an admirable achievement in some circles. Tox results are confidential. I’d have to kill you.”

“I’m trying to solve a murder here, and it’s not my own. Christine said you found a small amount of barbiturate?”

Oliver nodded. “I can confirm that, partly because you have already obtained the official results but mostly because I don’t give a shit about confidentiality. Diphenhydramine, forty nanograms.”

“Not enough to kill her?”

“Definitely not.”

“Enough to knock her out?”

“No.”

Theresa leaned against a gas tank. It shifted, and she jumped away. Explosions were
so
not her favorite thing. “Are you sure? She wasn’t a big person.”

“Doesn’t matter. She’d need at least thirty nanograms per milliliter to even feel drowsy.”

“Is there any way to tell what medication it was?”

“Other than clairvoyance? Unlikely. It could be anything that contains diphenhydramine hydrochloride—Sominex, NyQuil, a hundred other formulas. Did she have any such items in her medicine cabinet or nightstand? Prescription or over the counter?”

“I don’t know.”

Oliver raised one eyebrow. It gave her the distinct impression of a caterpillar trying to escape. “I beg your pardon, I thought you went to the scene.”

“I did. Nothing in the medicine cabinet except Tums and aspirin P.M.”

“Nightstand? Purse? Engraved wooden box on the coffee table?”

Theresa occupied herself with scraping loose paint from the compressed gas tank with her thumbnail. “I didn’t look.”

The overweight toxicologist gazed at her. Examining a victim’s home for drugs and medications would be done in all cases, from heart attack to homicide, by rote. The pathologist always needed the information, whether the drugs had caused the death or not. “You didn—”

“No. You can beat me later, but right now I need to get this straight. She
didn’t
have enough narcotics in her to put her to sleep?”

“Enough to make her sleepy, certainly, but not enough to make her sleep through her own killing.”

“And/or abduction?”

“And/or abduction.”

“What about the powder in her back pockets? Was that cocaine?”

“No, young woman, it was not cocaine. It wasn’t heroin or even aspirin. That powder you so thoughtfully threw on my pile of work to do contained various calciums—sulfate and hydroxide—and lime.”

“Plaster?”

“Got it in one. And with just a biology degree, no less.”

She thought about this long enough to forget about her previous experience and lean on the gas tank again. She grabbed the top valve to keep it from tipping over. “Don’t drugs, like, metabolize?”

“They’ve, like, been known to.” Oliver worked in sarcasm with the flair of a toddler in finger paints. All drugs metabolized, meaning they broke down into their components during the digestion process. In testing, some of those components might appear as normal by-products of the body and some might not. “And these did, to nordiphenhydramine, DM—never mind. I extrapolated from those to calculate the original dose.”

“So she might have had more in her system originally? Maybe enough to make her unconscious, but then her body absorbed part of the dose before she actually died?”

“Someone doped her, and then let her sleep most of it off before they killed her? Doesn’t sound very smart.”

“No. And he’s pretty smart. But he did have to transport the body. How long would that take?”

“Let me understand your question. You think Jillian Perry consumed enough narcotic to pass out, but then her killer left her alive long enough to metabolize some of the drug?”

“Exactly.”

“Why?”

“Because he didn’t want it to look like an overdose. Because he used the time to transport her. Because he was busy, I don’t know. How long would he have?”

Oliver frowned, but she ignored it since he almost constantly frowned anyway. “I’m not some kind of idiot savant who can break Vegas, you know. Those kinds of numbers would have to be worked out carefully, depending on her weight, activity level…a lot of work to establish a—what, guess?”

“Timeline. It’s important, Oliver. It might be the key to the whole case. Now, what about her gastrics?”

“What about them? No drugs, no undigested capsules.”

“So it had already passed out of her stomach? The narcotic?”

“Affirmative.”

“Did she have anything else in her stomach?”

“How should I know?” He shuddered in distaste. “That’s your job.”

Now Theresa shuddered. “I know. And I hate it.”

Forensics involved getting up close and personal with a great deal of icky, smelly, completely gross substances, but Theresa’s least favorite, by far, was gastric contents. The examination of same also lacked any great scientific certainty. The trace evidence department did not use a gas chromatograph or a mass spectrometer to detect chemical compounds like toxicology did. The trace evidence department used a plastic kitchen strainer, some running water, and, occasionally, nose plugs.

Jillian Perry had not had much in her stomach when she died, and the tox department had already consumed some of it. Theresa placed a cloth mask over her face, started the water running, and swirled the goop at the bottom of a quart-size Nalgene jar. She had to work quickly, to minimize the amount of time the contents were exposed to the air. Otherwise the whole lab would retain the sour odor for the rest of the afternoon.

She poured half the contents of the jar into the strainer, and immediately rinsed the liquid with a gentle stream of tap water. When the strainer and the odds and ends caught in its mesh were clean, she turned off the water, placed a paper towel under the strainer, and layered an open petri dish under the towel.

“Hey!” the secretary protested. The smell had traveled to her workstation.

“Sorry. S’got to be done.” Theresa moved to the stereomicroscope and placed the strainer and its accompaniments under the lens. A stereomicroscope used incidental light—light shining on the object from above—instead of light transmitted through the item from below. It viewed larger, opaque items that could not be mounted on a tiny glass slide, essentially a powerful magnifying glass. Plus, it left her hands free to poke at the strainer’s contents with a thin metal prod.

This was the other part she didn’t like about gastrics. The lab had scientific means for identifying bodily fluids and select inorganics, like gunshot residue and paint. Not food. To draw any conclusions from a gastric-contents examination they were reduced to poking at a bit of it and asking each other, “Do you think that could be a piece of tomato? It looks like a piece of tomato.”

Theresa dutifully poked. Jillian’s stomach had contained, indeed, a piece of translucent red skin that could be tomato, surely an odd food considering that the last meal she consumed would have been breakfast. Unless she liked southwestern omelets. Or the skin could be from a dried cranberry or strawberry, common breakfast food additives for the health conscious. Or, Jillian had lived past lunch.