Authors: Elizabeth Gunn
At South Stone, she walked onto the second floor to the rare sound of near-silence, the welcome peacefulness of detectives getting ready to clear their desks. It continued for five more minutes, till Ollie Greenaway walked into the work area and said, ‘Boy, have I got news for all of you.’
‘Go away,’ Leo Tobin said, not looking up, and Jason said, simultaneously, ‘I don’t want to hear it.’
‘What’s the matter with you guys? Sarah, get your head out of the computer and listen to this; it shines a whole new light on Lacey’s motivation.’
‘It does? Let’s see if we can find Delaney then – no use saying it all twice.’
‘He’s in his office,’ Ollie said, ‘on his phone, as always.’
In the end, the insatiable need to know whatever anybody else knows brought all the detectives trooping along behind Ollie. Delaney looked up from the row of stats he was checking with the state budget director and said, with enviable poise, ‘Excuse me, Bernie, I’m afraid the barbarians are at the gate, I’ll have to call you back.’ He took out his ear buds and said, ‘What now, for God’s sake?’
‘I got a call from our very own Animal,’ Ollie said. ‘
Ranting.
“You left too soon, Oliver,” he said, “while your arrogant medical examiner was still busy pre-judging the results of an autopsy.” Even for Greenberg, it was an unusual show of temper. You know how he hates to be wrong about anything?’
‘Ollie,’ Delaney said, ‘are you going to tell me a bullet in the throat didn’t kill Ed Lacey?’
‘No, no, of course that was the immediate cause of death. But at the autopsy, after Greenberg had shown me how the spinal cord was shattered and said that was the cause of death, well, it looked like there was nothing left to do but get all the bits and pieces ready to send for DNA work and toxicology scans and so forth. And I figured I didn’t need to watch all that slicing and dicing so I said, “Doc, this is pretty much it, isn’t it?” And he said, “Sure, run along – we know what killed Ed Lacey.”
‘But after I was gone, when he was prepping a sample of liver tissue he saw something he didn’t like at all, so he ran it over to an oncologist buddy of his and got the diagnosis back in a couple of hours. Lacey had advanced liver cancer.’ Ollie pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket and read, ‘Hepatocellular carcinoma, if you’re curious. Greenburg says it starts in the cells that filter the bad stuff out of your blood. Which Lacey’s liver has had to do quite a bit of, lately.’
‘I don’t see … he still died from getting shot though, didn’t he?’
‘Goes to motivation for suicide, maybe. I asked the doc if Lacey knew.’
‘That’s a good question,’ Sarah said. ‘He’s been living pretty far off the grid, hasn’t he? He may not have seen a doctor in some time.’
‘Greenberg says liver cancer’s a sneaky bitch, often doesn’t show symptoms till it’s too late for treatment. But with this degree of involvement, he figures, Lacey would have been in so much pain he’d know
something
was wrong. Question is, did he see a doctor or did he just up the dosage on the meth? Doc said there was no sign of a biopsy, so Ed wouldn’t have known anything for sure.’
Sarah and Ollie took pains with the report they gave the information officer who released the final story to the news media. They made certain Ed Lacey’s long and honorable service with the Tucson Police Department would be cited. At the end of his career, they explained, family problems, traumatic stress and a devastating illness combined to create a loss of judgment and a series of reckless behaviors. ‘Discharged from the police department two years ago, he was interrupted Saturday morning in the apparent perpetration of a burglary. He initiated an exchange of gunfire, in the course of which he was killed.’
‘We wrapped it up in euphemisms and buried it in a puzzling news story,’ she told her family that night. ‘And we hope it stays buried, because the only person who knows the whole truth is dead.’
Delaney had insisted they were not to suggest ‘suicide by cop,’ which they all thought this was.
‘You can’t prove it,’ he said, ‘and it’s a rude phrase nobody wants to hear.’
They murmured it to each other, though, and Sarah said it aloud in private to Jeffries. He agreed, and had a quiet conversation with the County Attorney to supplement his written report.
Spurling went back to work on schedule. The letter absolving him of blame would follow weeks later.
The crew at 270 South Stone, pleased with the quick resolution of a troubling case, went back to their ever-burgeoning backlog, while Sarah tried to put lingering, unanswered questions to the back of her mind.
Two weeks later, on a bright Tuesday morning when Angela Lacey failed to show up on time at the used clothing store, her employer phoned her at home. Getting no answer, she called the manager of her apartments and told her to go up and check number 214. When the manager called back in hysterics, the employer called 911.
The EMT crew from the Mountain Vista Fire District wasted no time trying to revive Angela Lacey. Their leader called the ME’s office. By 9:30 a.m., Delaney had his whole crew on the site.
T
he smell of death was still faint in the cheap little apartment on Prince Road. Angela Lacey had not been hanging in that closet very long, Sarah judged.
It seemed grotesque and uncivilized that she was still hanging there now. The blunt-speaking divorcee with whom Sarah had lunched two weeks ago was depersonalized, an object hanging in a closet, packed tight into a small space filled with nearly worn-out clothes. Sarah even recognized the smock she was wearing. But now, Sarah was surprised to see, her light brown hair had lost its scrunchy. Angela had treated herself to a neat Dutch-bob haircut, the ends turned under just below her ears. What a shame that now her face was distorted and swollen, hardly resembling the one Sarah remembered.
‘I left her just as we found her,’ the leader of the EMT team had told the dispatcher. ‘I figured the ME would want to see her just as she was.’
And the doctor was in the bedroom closet, sharing uncomfortably close quarters with his victim and the photographer.
‘OK, I’ve seen her just as she is, time to move along. Meg, you got enough pictures? Good, let’s get her down from there. I can’t do anything more in here.’ He pushed his way out, batting aside clinging garments that snapped with static electricity. They’d sent the new guy, a tall, freckled Scot named Stuart Cameron. He was annoyed, Sarah thought, about being cooped up in such a small, dark space between a corpse and a wardrobe – so undignified, and it spooked him a little. But he could hardly protest because the EMT team had followed the book.
The clatter coming up from below proved to be his van drivers, heaving a gurney up the narrow stairway. In the tiny foyer they unfolded its legs and maneuvered it through the cramped kitchen and across the living/dining room, setting chairs and a small table out of their way as they came. At the door of the bedroom they stopped and leaned in, eyeballing the even smaller spaces around the bed.
‘Yeah, all right, it won’t fit in here,’ Cameron said. ‘We’ll have to carry her out. Come in here, both of you.’ The two men sidled in reluctantly as the photographer ducked out. With three men packed around a body and surrounded by clothes, the closet became a suffocating squeeze box. Cameron’s nice, quiet voice, muffled by fabric and taking on an edge of irritation, said, ‘I don’t know, this is a good, heavy nylon line and that’s a helluva knot. Damon, you got a knife?’
‘No,’ Damon said. ‘Ain’t you the knife man?’
‘No way I’m using a good scalpel on this,’ Cameron said. ‘Find something.’
‘Here are scissors,’ Sarah said, passing a pair in from the desk space in the kitchen counter.
Leo Tobin signed in just then with the officer at the door. He ducked under the tape and came in to stand behind her, watching – she felt his breath on her neck.
They heard the doctor say, ‘I don’t think they are sharp enough to cut … Mike, can you lift up a little on your side?’ A good deal of grunting and breathless swearing followed and then, ‘OK, I think I’m getting it now, have you both got a good grip? Because here she comes—’ There was a clatter as many clothes hangers crashed to the floor and then the three of them staggered out under their burden, trailing blouses and belts on their shoulders. None too gently, they laid Angela Lacey’s dead body on the gurney.
Delaney and three more detectives, plus two crime-scene specialists, had come up the stairs during the struggle. Clustered uneasily in the kitchen, they stood by the stove, wanting to come in and start work, but not sure where to put their feet.
The doctor and his two helpers leaned above the victim, breathing hard. ‘No, leave the noose where it is till we get her back to the lab,’ the doctor said. ‘Where’s that body bag now?’
Delaney said, ‘Well! Looks like we’re going to have to organize a quick viewing for detectives and then let the doctor get on his way, huh? So, Ollie and Sarah, have you …?’ The detectives all began filing around the gurney, like caring relatives at a wake.
Angela Lacey had bruises on her neck, noticeable though not as bad as Sarah would have expected. Her eyes were open and the petechiae of strangulation were easy to see on her eyelids and lips. She had voided her bladder and bowels, of course, but again, the smell was surprisingly mild.
Delaney came last in line. He asked and answered a few quick questions with the doctor, who seemed intrigued to see so much quick reaction by so many detectives and lab personnel to what to his eyes looked like the death of a totally unimportant person. Cameron was new in town and had never read a word of the Frank Martin story. Delaney promised to send him some background and warned he would be asking Cameron’s superior for results asap.
Cameron shrugged and said, ‘I’m the new kid on the block. Contact my boss – whatever he says to do, I’ll do.’
They made even more of a racket getting down the stairs than they had coming up. All the tenants watched Angela Lacey’s body leave the building – she was probably getting more attention today, Sarah thought, than she had ever had from any of them while she lived here.
Leo went around opening the meager blinds, trying to get as much sunshine as possible through the small windows. Delaney assigned them each a portion of the apartment to search, and went off to talk to the building manager about the decedent’s car. While he was gone the detectives walked, peered, stooped and scrutinized. But in truth there was very little to see. Angela had kept a meager minimum of household items here. And her employer had not sacrificed much when she gave her this scruffy little apartment.
The one item Sarah could see that seemed to place her somewhere in the mainstream was a small laptop, battered and old, centered on the gateleg table in the tiny foyer. It was plugged into the wall outlet behind the table, and lit up when she tapped the spacebar.
‘Heaven’s sake,’ she said. ‘This building has wifi?’
‘Most of these old apartment buildings in town have it,’ Leo said. ‘It’s cheaper than redecorating and it holds the tenants. Most of the people in this building are probably looking for another job.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Ollie said. ‘Why would she live in a squat like this when she owned a house?’
‘She rented the house,’ Oscar said, not looking at Sarah, ‘to start a nest egg for her old age.’
Sarah could see them all avoiding each other’s eyes, hoping nobody said any more about
that.
It embarrassed them all, somehow, to think of somebody living this poorly on purpose, in pursuit of a goal so easily lost as the future.
The fingerprints tech was busy, busy – prints everywhere, she said. The closet where Angela had been hanging had a set of built-in drawers and Jason spent a long time shining a flashlight beam into each one and taking out the liner paper, looking underneath. His total yield was two shirt buttons and a tiny safety pin.
The whole apartment had an impersonal air, Sarah thought, as if it might have been occupied part-time by someone whose real life was somewhere else. She found one item that seemed to be a keepsake, in a drawer of the nightstand by the bed. It was a faded snapshot, black and white, in a cheap metallic frame, nested carefully in a pile of underwear. A woman who somewhat resembled Angela, and a young man in a US Army private’s uniform faced the camera, smiling, with their hands clasped. She was wearing a hat with a small veil, and had a flower pinned to the lapel of her suit.
Sarah showed it to the other detectives.
‘That’s one of the first camo uniforms,’ Leo said. ‘My mom had one of those packed away. She said it was Dad’s, from when he fought in Vietnam. She let me wear it once in a school play. Talk about oily, that fabric.’
Probably Angela’s grandparents, then, looking pleased with themselves, optimistic about what the future held. Maybe their wedding picture, Sarah decided. But why would Angela keep it in a drawer, instead of out where she could see it?
Holding it by its edges in gloved hands, she took it to the scene techs to be photographed and tested for fingerprints, then signed out for it. She thought about it while she continued the search, wondering, did Angela keep that small, cheap picture near her because it was her best family picture? Or her only one?
The picture merged with her earlier impression about a real life somewhere else, causing Sarah to stand still with her head cocked like a beagle on a scent. Ollie noticed her standing that way and said, ‘What?’
‘This can’t be all there is,’ she said.
‘Of what?’
‘Of, you know,
stuff.
Think about it, they were married for seven years, moved out of Frank’s house into their own after three. You move into a house, you start getting stuff – pots and pans, blankets and towels. Furniture. Ed moved out of that house, but she stayed there till a few months ago. Where’s all the stuff?’
The other detectives, bored with searching empty grids, had gathered around this conversation and began to comment.
‘Maybe she rented the house furnished?’ Ollie said. ‘Easy enough to find out.’ He made a note.
‘And held a yard sale,’ Jason said. Yard sales were a reliable Saturday feature in his churning, up-and-downwardly-mobile neighborhood.