It all sounded too farfetched, ringing cell phones and computers and televisions that flick on by themselves, so I renewed my decision to pass the buck to H.P.D., and I ventured, “As I said, this is interesting, but it really doesn’t mean anything. You have nothing solid to investigate. Nothing to base a case on.”
“Please, just listen. I never touched the keyboard, but somehow this popped up on the screen,” she insisted, pulling a sheet of computer printer paper out of her purse. “As soon as I saw it, I knew my sister’s death wasn’t a suicide. Billie didn’t pull that trigger, Lieutenant Armstrong. Someone murdered my sister.”
I
’m on my way,” I told Mom when she finally answered her cell phone. “Is Maggie home yet?”
“She’ll be here any minute,” Mom said, sounding worried. “It’s okay that you weren’t here to see Doc, Sarah, but I hoped we’d have a chance to talk before Maggie gets home.”
I knew from the tone of her voice that Doc’s news wasn’t that Emma Lou had made a full recovery. “Maybe you should tell me now, on the phone,” I said. “So I’m prepared.”
It was a bright, warm winter day with a cloudless blue sky, and I drove down one of my favorite stretches of road, not far from the ranch. I crossed a small bridge over a creek and drove under a canopy formed by the strong, gnarled branches of black-trunked live oaks. I maneuvered through an S-curve and passed Libertyville, the post–Civil War settlement where Strings’s dad pastors a white-clapboard church. On the other side of the road sat the Jacobses’ brown brick one-story house and a fenced pasture, where Bruce, Strings’s 4-H project, chomped on high grass growing along a barbed-wire fence. As I passed, the gray Brahman reared its head
back, ruffling the thick flap of skin draped from its chin to its chest and scattering the white egrets at its feet. The birds unfurled their long, elegant wings, and flew off, their slender bodies soaring gracefully overhead.
“Doc was right,” Mom said. “The blood tests show Emma Lou has that bacterial infection he worried about.”
“Damn,” I said.
There was no mistaking the worry in her voice. “Based on when we had her bred, Emma Lou is two-hundred and ninety-eight days into the pregnancy, Sarah. There’s a good chance that the infection will cause the foal to birth early,” she said. After a long, quiet pause, she explained, “If it’s born in the next few days, Doc says the foal won’t survive.”
“Now Maggie, you have to trust that Emma Lou and her foal will be all right,” I said. Mom and Bobby were seated on one bench at the kitchen table, and Strings was beside my daughter on another across from them. The only one standing, I couldn’t see their hands, but I suspected Strings held Maggie’s under the table.
“But Emma Lou could be blind, and what happens if Doc is right and the foal comes early?” Maggie asked, her voice urgent with fear. “The foal could die, Mom. Doc said the foal could die.”
“We can’t guarantee anything, Magpie. I wish we could, but we can’t,” I said, using the nickname Bill and I gave her at birth. “None of us has the power to control what will happen. But we will do everything we can for Emma Lou and her foal.”
“Maggie, honey, your mom, Bobby, and I, we’re all going to take care of Emma Lou,” Mom said. “She’ll have everything she needs. With just a little bit of luck, both the horses will be all right.”
I walked over and slipped my arms over my daughter’s shoulders. She shivered just slightly, I guessed from fear. “Yeah, they’ll be
okay, Mom,” she said, sounding not quite convinced. “We’ve been through a lot, all of us, and we’re going to make sure Emma Lou is okay.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” Bobby Barker said, slapping a thick hand on the hard, bare wood of the table. “Why this family, this group of women, you three could lick anything, couldn’t they, Strings?”
“I think they could even lick us in a fight,” Strings agreed. “Maybe not one-on-one but . . .”
“Oh, we could so,” Maggie said, the prospect edging away her frown. “Couldn’t we, Mom? We could wrestle both of them and win.”
Glad my daughter was up for the fight ahead, I didn’t disagree. “I bet we could, Magpie,” I said. “I bet we could.”
The discussion ended, and Mom and Maggie drew up a schedule listing everyone’s responsibilities, from giving the mare her medicine to cleaning her shed. I suggested we put the baby monitor, the one Bill and I used for Maggie, in the shed. As the lightest sleeper, I volunteered to cover the nights, listening for Emma Lou from my bedroom.
It seemed we were thinking of everything. Maggie and Strings even decided to download music from the Internet, to play in Emma Lou’s shed to relax her and the foal. To my chagrin, what I heard the kids playing were Cassidy Collins songs.
While Mom made ham and macaroni and cheese for dinner, and Maggie coddled her horse, I disappeared into my workroom to make phone calls. Listening to Collins sing had reminded me that I’d run out so quickly after Faith Roberts left, I didn’t have time to follow through on any of the things I’d wanted to do for either of the cases dumped on my lap that first day back at work. Number
one on my list, I called an L.A.P.D. special crimes officer whom Sheila had already alerted. The sergeant who answered listened to my assessment of the stalking situation and agreed to get an L.A. prosecutor to set up traces on landline phone numbers Barron would supply him with later that evening. If the calls were being rerouted, caller I.D. wouldn’t work. Barron had already contacted the cell phone company and asked them to do tower checks on all incoming text messages and calls, to narrow down where the signals were coming from. Meanwhile, Janet, the clerk at my office, was busy writing subpoenas for any information associated with Argus’s e-mail addresses.
Confident that the Collins case was being worked, I dialed the Houston morgue, and asked for Dr. Joe, a.k.a. Joseph Fernandez, M.D., one of the assistant medical examiners. “Dr. Joe, will you check and see if you still have a body there? It’s an apparent suicide from last Friday,” I said.
“What’s the name?” he growled back. A thick-necked, round man, Dr. Joe had been in a foul mood for the past month, ever since he’d crashed his motorcycle into a pickup truck and cracked a few ribs. In his sixties, he was probably too old for speeding through the countryside on his Harley, but I would have paid to see anyone tell him that. This was not a man who pampered those who saw things differently.
“Elizabeth Cox,” I said. “Her sister tells me that the body is ready for transport, but she hasn’t sent a funeral director to do a pickup yet.”
“Just a minute, Lieutenant,” he said. Only silence until he clicked the telephone back on and said, “Yeah, she’s still here, but she shouldn’t be. Anyone planning to claim this body anytime soon?”
“I need to check a few things out,” I said. “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes. After that, I think we can get the sister to call the hearse and transport Ms. Cox.”
“Hallelujah,” Fernandez said. “I’ve got bodies waiting in the wings for a vault. I’ll be glad for the extra room.”
One last thing to do before I left for the morgue, I called an old friend, a retired FBI profiler named Mike Davis. Back in the day, as Mom likes to say, Davis headed the document analysis branch at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. We’d met what seemed like a lifetime ago, when I studied profiling. What had popped up on Billie Cox’s computer screen the day Faith was claiming her sister’s personal possessions was the suicide note. From the form of the note, including the random capitalization, Faith claimed there was no way her sister would have written it.
“My sister was a meticulous woman,” Faith had told me. “She had a masters degree in geophysics, but right out of college, when jobs in the oil industry were scarce, Billie worked briefly as an executive assistant. Her language skills were impeccable, and years later, even as company president, she wrote her own correspondence. She wouldn’t have left something so poorly written as her final communication with her family and friends.”
It was Billie Cox’s suicide note that I wanted Mike to evaluate.
A brief hello and the required niceties out of the way, I suggested we catch up another time, and told Mike what I needed. “I have six documents I want you to examine,” I explained. “The first is a suicide note left by a woman named Elizabeth Cox, the head of an oil company. The other five are documents we know Cox wrote. No question. They’re all personal notes and letters written to her sister.”
“You want me to compare all six and let you know if I think the dead woman authored the suicide note?” Mike asked. “You’re figuring that maybe this wasn’t a suicide?”
“Not necessarily. Maybe there’s nothing out of whack here. Could be this is just what it looks like, a tragic suicide,” I said. “I’m figuring maybe you can clear up the mystery. You’re the best documents-guru I know, Mike.”
“E-mail the paperwork,” he said, not arguing the point. “I’ll get back to you in a couple of days.”
“You’ve got it. It’ll be on its way in a flash,” I said. “And Mike, by the way—”
“Let me guess,” he cut in. “Don’t tell anyone I’m doing this for you?”
“Mike, you are the best. Hell, you can even read minds,” I said with a laugh. “The truth is that this is H.P.D.’s case, and I want to find out if there’s even a crime before I get called on the carpet for poaching.”
W
hat’re you looking for?” Dr. Joe asked.
Hands tucked in his lab coat pockets, he watched with interest as I circled the cold, lifeless body of Elizabeth Cox on a steel exam table. Dr. Joe hadn’t been happy when I asked his assistant to remove Cox’s remains from the refrigerated vault and black body bag. I needed to see her laid out as she was now, under a bright exam light, so I could get a good look. Not that I particularly wanted to. Despite my chosen profession, I’ve never been at ease around dead bodies, at least not those who meet their ends through violent means. The way I see it, these are folks who die unfinished. I’m sure there are those who’d argue it with me, but I’ve never believed deaths like Billie’s are God’s will. Someone else makes the decision, fires the fatal bullet. Was the killer in this case also the deceased? That was what I was there to figure out.
“Lieutenant Armstrong,” Dr. Joe said again. “You want to tell me what you’re looking for?”
“Sure,” I said. The truth was that I didn’t have a clue. That
said, I figured I’d know it when I saw it, so I suggested, “Give me a couple of minutes.”
We were in an autopsy suite on the first floor of the county forensic center, a redbrick building just outside the skyscraper hospitals that make up the Texas Medical Center. In this part of the state, the M.E.’s office is a stop on the way to eternity for not only crime victims but any questionable death. Texas law stipulates that anyone who dies by homicide, suicide, in an accident, or from undetermined causes, anyone who’s not in a doctor’s care, and folks in hospitals for less than twenty-four hours before their deaths must be examined by a medical examiner. About a quarter of the time, an autopsy is unnecessary, because it’s apparent that a terminal disease, like cancer, has reached its logical conclusion. That means that 75 percent of the time, the docs ready their scalpels and fulfill their role as combination physicians and investigators. In this building, pathologists and technicians not only dissect human bodies but conduct DNA and toxicology tests, study recovered bones, collect and process evidence, and in the cold, lonely vaults, the remains of the dead silently wait to be claimed.
For the most part, forensic pathologists are curious individuals, intent on piecing together the clues death leaves behind. What they learn can help the living, hence the Latin motto over the door in nearly every morgue I’ve encountered: “
Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae.
” In a more familiar language: “This is the place where death delights to help the living.”
Two days earlier, Dr. Joe began with a visual examination of Bil-lie Cox’s body, and then cut through her chest in a “Y,” from clavicle to pelvis, opening her up to inspect her insides. He examined and weighed all her internal organs including her kidneys, heart, and liver, dictating his notes as he progressed. Like many who die violently, Billie Cox was a fine specimen, in good health. The
physician found nothing organic to portend an early death. After he documented the outer appearance of her GSW, the gunshot wound, he cut through her skull with a small electric saw and carefully removed her brain, to trace the path of the bullet. There would be no surprises. Billie Cox died of the GSW to the brain. The damage was catastrophic, and death was instantaneous. Finished, Dr. Joe turned her body over to an assistant, who repaired the pathologist’s incisions with V-shaped stitches, the same type used to bind baseballs.
As I patrolled the exam table, I also noticed a few stitches closing a small incision on Cox’s side, the point at which a probe had been inserted on the scene to record liver temperature. At 7 p.m. on the night of her death, in a seventy-degree bedroom, her body didn’t yet show signs of rigor mortis and her liver temp was a nearly normal 98.4, leading to the conclusion that she’d been dead for less than two hours. The M.E. couldn’t be more precise than that.
“You did the GSR testing here at the morgue?” I asked.
Dr. Joe frowned, looking impatient. “Of course,” he said. “The woman’s hands came in bagged from the scene. We did the testing for gunshot residue here, as we always do. What’s up, Lieutenant? Why are you here? Isn’t this H.P.D.’s body?”
Not looking up, I said, “I was asked to consult.” It wasn’t a lie. I had been asked to look over the file, even if this trip to the morgue could be considered extracurricular. “I thought perhaps seeing Miss Cox’s remains might settle some questions.”
“What questions?” Dr. Joe asked.
“Well,” I said. “The death scene looked a little too perfect, almost staged to me. It’s probably nothing, but did you see anything at all that contradicted the conclusion that this was a suicide?”