The adoption agency required the parents to send periodic letters and pictures to me in care of the agency, letters that would tell how Kevin was doing, pictures that would show him as he grew. In the first letter they sent, Nancy had said they would put up a Web site with pictures and some information about him, that I could check it any time I wanted. She had also said that if I didn't want the Web site there, that if I didn't want to be reminded, or that if it would cause too much pain, they'd take the Web site down. I had almost told the agency that I didn't think the site was a good idea, that I didn't want that site to become a habit for me. But I didn't.
And once I'd gotten a taste of it, I couldn't let go. I'd go through the day, and by nighttime I'd be jonesing for pictures of my boy.
Their
boy, I should say.
But tonight when I got home, the pictures just didn't satisfy. It gave me a bad feeling, because I knew the pattern: all my life I'd find something, get a taste of it, and then I'd want more. A boy, a job, an experienceâit could be anything. Crank just happened to have been the last, worst thing.
I had minored in computer science during my abortive college career, and I know my way around them. So when I needed another taste of my little boy, I was able to figure out pretty quickly how to go beyond the one page that David and Nancy had provided for me.
Web addresses, like everything else in computers, are structured like trees, with branches coming off of branches, which eventually work back to a root. It doesn't take much work to get from an address like
http://www.massivenet.com/~an11490/kevin/kevin.html
back to the root directory. In this case, they had built some firewalls into the system to make it harder to get back to the root. But I've been through two FBI courses on computer crime. This was a piece of cake.
I managed to find the root directory in about five minutes. I understood why they'd put the firewall in there. After all, it was all part of the adoption arrangements that everything was first-name basis only. Of course, when David and Nancy came to the hospital to get their son, it had only taken a glance at his medical records for them to find out my last name. But their last name had remained behind a cloak. I guess every adoptive parent is afraid of crazy birth mothers, mothers trying to steal their children back, extort money, or God knows what. But still, it bugged me a little that they knew all about me and who I was, while I knew practically nothing about them. Not their last names, not where they lived, what they did for a living, where they went to church, nothing.
The root directory of my son's Web page was for a company called MassiveNet.com. The address for the company was in an industrial park in Alpharetta, a rich white suburb north of the city. I pulled up the “Our Management” page, found that the president of the company was named David Drobysch. It kind of pissed me off. How dumb did they think I was? Any fool could have figured this out. I clicked on his bio, and there was my son's father, a clean-cut man in his early forties with sandy hair and hazel eyes, sitting behind a desk. He wore a gray suit and a red tie with tiny blue spots, and smiled somewhat apprehensively at the camera.
So now I knew. Drobysch. David and Nancy Drobysch.
I pulled out the Atlanta phone directory, looked up David Drobysch. There was no listing for either David or Nancy.
But that's not a problem when you're a detective. I called the phone company. “Yes, hello there,” I said. “This is Detective Deakes with the Atlanta Police Department. I need an unlisted number for a David Drobysch in Alpharetta.” I gave her my badge number, then spelled the last name.
“Please hold for the number,” the operator said.
It was as easy as that. I felt a little chill run through me as the phone clicked, the computer about to feed me the number I'd asked for. I hung up before the voice could tell me the number.
This was bad, I was thinking. This was creepy. I was going to have to quit this, quit it right now.
ELEVEN
“You like dead kids?”
“
Excuse
me?”
Lt. Gooch was looking up at me from his desk as I walked into the office. “Dead kids. You gave me two cases, both of them got dead kids. Then I hear through the grapevine the chief just stomped on you for sniffing around this Jenny Dial thing.”
“Okay, yeah.”
“What was the name of that other case you gave me? The first one.”
“Evie Marie Prowter.”
“Yeah, that one. Where's the file?”
I opened my desk drawer, pulled out the Evie Marie Prowter file. “Right here.”
“All right then,” he said. “Let's go.” Without saying anything, he stood up briskly and walked out the door. I followed him. It was the first time I'd ever seen him get out of his chair. I'd expected him to move slowly, inching along toward his retirement. Instead he moved quickly and gracefully, like an athlete. I had to move fast just to keep up.
“What are we doing?” I said.
“It's called working a case,” he said.
“Yeah?” I said. “I didn't know we did that down here.”
“Lot of things you don't know,” he said.
And that was the last word he spoke until we were standing in the office of Dr. Vale Pleassance IV, Assistant Medical Examiner of Fulton County.
Dr. Pleassance had just finished an autopsy, and was taking off his green medical gown and his green protective booties as we walked in. Underneath the gown he was wearing the full Kappa Alpha: seersucker pants, a billowy white Brooks Brothers shirt, bow tie, white bucks.
“Ah, the ever-cheerful Hank Gooch,” Dr. Pleassance said, smiling at Lt. Gooch. He had one of those drippy accents that rich white people on the coast haveâSavannah, Charleston, someplace like thatâand a smile that went with the accent, the kind that managed the strange trick of seeming both very warm and a little condescending at the same time. “What brings you to my humble abode?”
“Need to dig into your memory banks a little.” The lieutenant handed the file to the pathologist. “Prowter, Evie Marie. Female white. A child. You autopsied her in '92.”
The ME's eyebrows went up slightly. “I've been a trifling civil servant in this sinecure for so long, shucks, I can barely remember that far back.”
Gooch glanced at me. “Vale's one of them people thinks it's funny to pretend he's a damn fool.”
Vale Pleassance, also addressing me, said, “The lieutenant is a man who finds little enjoyment in life's smaller pleasures. Jokes, conversation, human beings, etc.” Then his smirky expression went away as he began leafing through the file. “Huh,” he said finally.
Lt. Gooch crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame of the ME's office.
The ME seemed to be waiting for Lt. Gooch to ask him something, but when the lieutenant failed to say anything, Vale Pleassance finally said, “Cause of death, so far as I could determine it, was a gunshot to the back of the head.”
“So far as you could determine it?” I said.
“The body was found in the woods in July. I don't have to tell you how hot July in central Georgia is. The body had been lying there for some time and was in a state of relatively advanced decomp. As generally happens when dead things lie in the woods, it had not only rotted, it had been munched on by racoons and other happy critters of the forest. All of which complicated forensic analysis.”
Lt. Gooch said, “Talk to us about time of death.”
The ME turned to me. “How long have you been working homicides, my dear?”
“This is my second case,” I said.
“Ah!” Vale Pleassance smiled brightly. “Then you have yet to be introduced to the pleasures of larval infestation.”
“In what sense?” I said.
“When a body lies out on the ground, flies deposit eggs, the eggs hatch, larvae begin to grow,” the doctor said. “A clever colleague of mine did a study to see how quickly larvae would form based upon ambient temperature, length of days, and so on. He developed a chart for estimating how long a body has lain around based upon those studies.”
“You actually count the maggots?” I said. “Boy, where can I sign up to be a medical examiner?”
“Touché.”
“What did you find out from your maggot counting?”
“This body had been lying there for less than a week, but more than three days.”
“But the girl had been missing for three months,” I said.
Vale Pleassance squinted at the file. “You're right,” he said. “Which implies that she was kidnapped and held somewhere for quite a long while.”
“The main suspect in the case had a cabin a couple miles from there,” I said.
“Ah.” He leafed through the file again. “I'm a little surprised they never indicted,” he said. “As I recall . . . Ah, here it is. The suspect had a sex-crime record, didn't he?”
“Multijurisidictional,” Lt. Gooch said. “Body found in Baldwin County, missing from Atlanta. The suspect's cabin, which seemed like it could have been the actual murder site, was in Putnam County. Atlanta PD worked the case, but not before the GBI, the FBI, the Baldwin County Sheriff, and the Putnam County Sheriff had all stuck their noses into it.”
“That's right, that's right, it's coming back to me,” the ME said. “You'll note, Detective Deakes, that my autopsy report is actually on Georgia Bureau of Investigation letterhead, not on Fulton County ME letterhead.”
“Why's that?” I said.
“You might be interested to know that the American Medical Association lists the forensic pathology specialty as the worst-paying specialty in the entire field of medicine. Sadly, I am a man of rather rarified and extravagant tastes. As a result, I whore myself out to anyone who'll pay for my services.”
“What he's beating around the bush trying to say,” Lt. Gooch said, “is that he's a part-time ME for the GBI.”
“Not just the GBI. I've worked for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the State Law Enforcement Division over in South Carolina, and quite a few of the more backwater jurisdictions in the state of Georgia. Have cranial saw, will travel.” Dr. Pleassance gave me his Low Country-aristocrat smile.
“So, what can you tell us about this case that's not in the file?” I said.
“It's been a long time, my dear.”
I studied his face for a moment. There was something he wanted to tell us. “Talk to me,” I said.
“There was a peculiarity that I noticed. As I was doing the autopsy, the decedent's femur shattered.
“And?”
“That's not normal. It could indicate that the child had been suffering from a disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta. A very rare genetic disorder that causes bones to break extremely easily. Occasionally children with osteogenesis imperfecta get brought to emergency rooms with broken bones, where X-rays reveal dozens of healed fractures. The parents are frequently charged with child abuse. Until a correct diagnosis is made.”
“Osteogenesis imperfecta didn't cause no bullet hole in this gal's head,” Lt. Gooch said drily.
“True.”
“So what else could cause this girl's bones to fall apart?” I said.
“Advanced malnutrition causes the decalcification of bones.”
I felt sick suddenly. “You're saying this little girl was starved to death?”
I got the superior smile for that. “No. As the report states, cause of death was a GSW to the head. But she appears to have been starved
almost
to death.”
“Let me see that.” I took the folder from him, leafed through it until I found what I was looking for. “You have a section here where you list the contents of the stomach. I'm reading this, quote, “Contents of stomach, 400 grams of partially digested food, possibly SpaghettiOs.”
“Your question, I take it, is:
If she was being starved, why did she have SpaghettiOs in her stomach?
”
I nodded.
“That would be what we in the death-investigation trade call a mystery.”
“Was there any other evidence of starvation?”
“Hard to say. The body had lost mass both from decomposition and from being munched on by critters. But under the circumstances, it was not unusually light.”
“Is it possible the starvation occurred before her abduction?”
Vale Pleassance shrugged. “I suppose.”
“So maybe her abductor fed her better than her own parents?”
“Again, possible.”
“Probable?”
“I would say not. According to the file, the mother was not in danger of being nominated for the parental Olympics. She was an alcoholic and occasional prostitute. But stillâstarving a kid almost to death? Not all that likely.”
I waited to see if Lt. Gooch had any questions. But he just stood there, arms crossed, holding up the door frame and looking down at his pointy-toed cowboy boots. I started to feel like maybe he was testing me, seeing if I knew the right questions to ask.
“We're trying to go back and dig up old cases that have extant DNA samples,” I said. “Any evidence of anything on this body that we could get DNA off of?”
“I wouldn't think so, no.”
“You didn't use a rape kit on her, anything like that? No semen swabs, no blood stains?”
He laughed pleasantly. “There wouldn't have been any point.”
“Hair?” Hair follicles, if they were properly preserved, also contained DNA.
“Any hair samplesâfrom her clothes, sayâwould have been gathered by the crime-scene investigator. Not by me.”
I had read the list of evidence samples carefully and didn't recall any hair samples listed.
Â
Â
After we'd finished talking to Dr. Pleassance, we went back out to the car. “You think this girl's uncle, this Driggers guy, you think he put her in that cabin and starved her to death?”
Lt. Gooch shrugged.
“But if he did, how come she had food in her stomach there at the end?”
Still nothing from Gooch.
“Hey, wait,” I said. “How about this? Her uncle was the main suspect in the case, right? And he lived here in Atlanta. But his hunting cabin was down in Putnam County. So maybe he's got her locked up down there and he can't get down to the cabin except on weekends. Because he's got to go to his job up in Atlanta during the week. And maybe he doesn't leave her enough food but for a couple of days. So during the week, she starves, then on the weekends he comes down and feeds her. That would explain why she had a meal in her when he finally got around to killing her.”
Gooch drove silently.
“Let me ask you a question,” I said. “Being honest here. Are you testing me? Is this whole silent-treatment deal like a hazing kind of thing?”
“Silent treatment?” Gooch looked over at me briefly, then looked back at the road.
“Silent treatment.”
We drove a few more blocks, then the lieutenant finally said, “If I had something worthwhile to say, I'd say it.”
“What's
that
mean?” I said.
But it was pointless. I got nothing, not even a glance from those lynch-mob eyes.