9
Friday, September 5 - 9:11 A.M.
As it normally did in Massachusetts during early September, the weather turned. This morning the sun was brutal, bright, and glaring. Fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk hot. The humidity no help, heading off the charts at an unbreathable intensity. The kids near the Mission Hill Playground skipping school danced around an open fire hydrant.
Taking a right on Albany Street in Roxbury, Jake tried clearing his mind of Mo.
… that partner of yours, Detective Shaughnessy. ….
The stressed cop wore a pair of
Fear and Loathing
mirror sunglasses. Jake drove the candy apple red Chevelle he and Casey had restored together as kids. The car still had an 8-track deck, Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours
sticking out of it like a pop tart. The Crown Vic was in the garage getting tuned-up. It hurt to drive the old car. Jake could see Casey sitting next to him, smiling, laughing at some stupid joke of his. Always the big brother.
Jake pulled into the entrance, stopping at the guard shack. The wooden parking garage gate lever was down, a director’s clapboard, prohibiting Jake from passing. To his left stood the towering Officer of the Chief Medical Examiner Building. Not Jake’s favorite place.
Howard Tiegs was one of those routine professionals Jake Cooper crossed paths with throughout his work day. Like many of the others, Tiegs saw Jake as a liability to himself. His own worse enemy. “You’re one of those ‘half-empty’ guys, Cooper, huh?” Tiegs had said the last time Jake came to the CME building.
Jake wondered what cop wasn’t.
“How are you, Howard?” Jake flashed his ID toward the kiosk. Sweat fell from his brow behind his sunglasses. “How’s Tyler? Still hitting those boards like Reggie Lewis, I bet.”
Tiegs laughed. Looked up from his clipboard. Shook his head. Signed Jake in. “Ain’t no matter how long I seen you, Coop, you always remember my boy. Ty is great.” A smile. “Thanks for asking.”
Jake chirped the tires around the corner. A rumbling of the Chevelle’s throaty four-barrel carburetor echoed throughout the two–tiered cement parking garage. He popped the door, walked a few steps, then hit the elevator arrow button DOWN.
There was, after all, no other place for the dead to go.
The sudden drop turned Jake’s stomach to mud. He likened it to that feeling of ingesting too much cake frosting at once. Queasy, they called it. After his insides settled, Jake powered up his iPhone. Typed out a new file name: Mancini. He’d heard of the company, a major contractor for the Big Dig who had hired on- and off-duty BPD cops as part of a deal with the local Teamsters. Jake needed to find out where Mo fit into that mix. Mo was up to something, or would have never mentioned it.
The doors
ding
-ed open and made a Star Trek-like swoosh sliding apart. Jake stepped from the elevator onto the white-tiled floor. As he did, that smell wafted up and hit him square in the sinuses. The awful, unmistakable aroma of decomposing flesh. Heavy and thick, like a landfill.
“Wow,” Jake said, choking, cupping both hands over his nose and mouth. The air conditioning made it worse. Fresher. More pungent.
“Hey, Cooper. How are you?” Dr. Leona Kelsey said. The pathologist had one of those proper, NPR, academic voices. Kelsey was often thrashed on the witness stand by defense attorneys, who chastised her for speaking to juries as if they were children.
Indeed, that was Kelsey. Miss Finger-Wagger.
Kelsey waited by the elevator door to greet Jake. Tiegs had called her to say Jake was on the way down. Kelsey had held off with her autopsy report on Jane Doe, now Lisa Marie Taylor. She wanted to get Jake down into her death suite first to explain a few things in person. From shoes to hairclip, Kelsey looked every bit of her fifty-six years. She was trained as a pathologist in New Hampshire at Green Mountain Institute. Her forensic training was in Albany. The BPD used Kelsey on just about every major homicide it put in front of a jury. She qualified in the state of Massachusetts as an expert by conducting thousands of autopsies.
Kelsey’d had a long day, Jake Cooper could tell, and it was only a little after nine in the morning. “This smell, it doesn’t bother you?” It was worse than Jake could recall.
“We got an accident in yesterday afternoon. A real tar-burner. Some sweet little college intern forgot to put her in the cooler until this morning. Sorry, Cooper. About your gal, Jane Doe …” The doctor pulled a chart out and, having trouble flipping the top page because she was wearing yellow rubber gloves, asked Jake for help. “Lisa Marie Taylor.”
“Right. Missing five days. We think dead for probably four.”
They walked toward the autopsy suite. Orderlies in hospital greens passed. An African-American coroner Jake knew stopped. “Yo, been a while, Coop. What’s up, son?” They bumped fists. “I’m feelin’ the whole Russell Crowe thing you’re rockin’ these days. Suits you, man. Lookin’ good.”
“Not now, Nelsen. Call me, okay.” Jake looked at Kelsey, continued walking. “You find out anything? Something I can use? This is no routine rape-murder here, Kelsey. Am I right?”
“No, definitely not routine. I can establish with ninety-nine percent certitude, however, that there was no rape, or sexual assault.”
This surprised Jake. His man was strictly a killer, which meant the motive was buried deep inside him. Murder meant something to him personally. There was an emotional connection to killing. He wasn’t murdering to cover up other crimes or part of a series of crimes.
“I’ve seen no other killer who cuts with such precision,” Kelsey said, almost as if she envied his knife skills.
“What are we thinking, then? A doctor? Veterinarian? Some sort of medical professional? How ‘bout military? Any of those ring a bell here?” The smell still affected Jake. He couldn’t believe it didn’t bother Kelsey. He pictured her apartment having the same odor, only mellower, like a convalescent home.
Pre-death.
“I won’t take that leap just yet.”
“Where’s Dickie?”
“I’m told he’s on his way. Have a look at the incision here,” Kelsey explained as they approached Lisa Marie’s body. The vic had been scrubbed and washed. Placed under the lights on a stainless steel gurney with large-spoked wheels. There was a sink drain for fluids at one end. “It’s important for me to tell you, Cooper, that Lisa Marie here, she was unquestionably dead when her chest was opened.”
They both sighed. Some consolation that was.
“Tell me again how you ascertain these things?”
“Well,” Kelsey pointed to where the incision in Lisa’s chest started, “there’s something very interesting here that I found.” Kelsey circled an area of Lisa’s stomach with her gloved finger.
“What’s that?”
“My prelims tell me there were no poisons, toxins, et cetera, in her system. We found a minor trace of chloroform on her lips and in one lung.”
“Knocked her out.”
“Yep.”
“Likewise for the legs?” Jake knew better, but wanted to be sure. “I mean, she was dead when those legs were amputated, right?”
Kelsey closed her eyes. Turned slowly to Jake. “No.”
“What?”
Kelsey took off her safety glasses and bit on the end of one of the ear pieces. The doctor had been involved with the dead for thirty years. She liked to tell reporters she could separate her job from her emotions. But that was the public side of being in this game, Jake knew. Dr. Kelsey was beaten down by the disfigured bodies of children and countless other senseless means of death she saw every day. Kelsey’s daughter was a few years older than Lisa Marie. How could she look into Lisa’s listless eyes, photograph and study those stubs, and not see Christine?
“Any mysterious marks on her back?” Jake tried his best to keep the doc focused. Lisa was found face-up. If her body was frozen and then brought to the scene to thaw, Jake figured her killer might have preserved a piece of evidence without realizing it—her back was the largest section of her body left untouched.
The elevator sounded.
Dickie
. Jake wondered how in the hell the guy had ever made it through school or kept a job. He was late for everything.
Jake watched Dickie walk into the lobby, stopping first to pull up his trousers. Front first, then back. After that, both sides together before he tucked in the stray tongue of his dress shirt. Eying his partner all the way, Jake said to Kelsey, “I’m interested in one of the photos I saw this morning, taken at the crime scene. I thought I noticed an imprint of something on Lisa’s back.”
“Funny you should ask. Come over here and look at this.” They stood over Lisa Marie. Stared down at her torso. Fluorescent lights shone on Lisa’s teenage body. Poor thing. So young and delicate.Kelsey flipped Lisa’s body on its side. She was stiff as a mannequin. Then pointed to a small indentation on the right portion of her back, down in the bottom corner, where the curve of her hip held that boomerang shape. It was postmortem, for sure. The indent would have been made after death. “It didn’t bounce back into shape,” Jake observed.
“Exactly. Rigor. Blood sinks. Pools. Coagulates into the lowest part of the body.”
“Tissue hardens like mud in the sun.”
“Right! Before it reverses the process, heats up like compost, and begins to decay. Whatever made the mark in Lisa’s back was pushed into her skin and kept its shape.”
Jake was interested. “Means she was placed on top of an object
after
death. Looks like some sort of light bulb, you think?”
“Not sure. That’s not my thing. But I’d guess no. Just me. But it looks like, oh, this is just an educated assumption now, but it looks like some sort of handle.”
“Get me several angles of that on film. I’ll have someone run it down. Can you make an impression of it, too, with silicone?”
“Alexander?” the doctor yelled. A young Asian man stepped into the room. He carried a yellow legal pad and looked busy. “Do me a midsection tri-quarter-angle on this mark here. Get it done ASAP. Then have it sent over to Cooper this afternoon.”
Jake was impressed by Kelsey’s command. He took out his iPhone and scanned the image himself. Wouldn’t hurt to get it into the database, see if he could come up with a hit. As he waited for the scan to finish, “You made it, I see.”
Dickie had a funnel paper cup of water in his hand. “Bottoms up, Kid.”
“Look at this,” Kelsey said, reaching into Lisa’s mouth, pulling her cheeks out as though she were a dentist, exposing Lisa’s mouth. This took some effort, seeing how tight her muscles were from post. “Morning, Detective Shaughnessy.”
Dickie winked. Jake bent down, turned his head to get a better view. Using a magnifying glass Kelsey gave him, he stared at the crude mark.
“We cannot figure it out.” Kelsey held Lisa’s mouth open with a pair of c-clamps and two hands as Jake studied what looked to be a scratch. “It’s not a bite mark, like when you miss a chomp at a piece of food or gum and clip the side of your cheek. It’s not a burn or a defect from birth.”
“You mind?” Dickie asked.
“Go for it,” Jake said, stepping back.
Dickie took a look. Then reached into his pocket, scribbled something in his notebook.
Kelsey reached above the gurney table and pulled down a square light. It was connected to the end of a metal arm she could maneuver around in an accordionlike fashion. The heat from the bulb as Kelsey pulled the light over his arms reminded Jake of reaching into a hot buffet. Kelsey exposed various areas of Lisa’s torso as she explained things to Jake and Dickie they knew already—technical terms and medical explanations of no interest to the Dynamic Duo. Lisa’s torso was wide open in front of them. Kelsey had used the same incision the killer originally made, but added two additional upward strokes, in a Y-pattern, toward Lisa’s bony, pointed, supermodel shoulders. Then she peeled the two chest flaps back and clamped them down to the sides of the gurney. Lisa Marie had been filleted open.
Jake watched this with a jaded sense of envy, not paying much attention. He thought of the type of person who could do such a thing to another human being. It was not going to be easy to catch this psycho. Nonetheless, there was a clue here somewhere. A hair. Fiber. An imperative piece of the puzzle. All killers slipped up. Some left evidence on purpose.
The signature.
“Her face is in rather good shape, all considering,” Dickie said.
“The inside of the mouth was purple yesterday,” Jake observed.
“That color washed off. She was definitely beaten postmortem. Those bruises along her right cheek”—Kelsey pointed—“are superficial, they do not affect the muscle tissue. I cut a sample off her face out so we could run a few additional tests.”
“Where is it?” Jake asked.
“In the freezer. I placed it on a hockey goalie mask and froze it in the contour of her face to keep the texture and surface as natural as possible.”
“Ah …
yeah
…” Jake said. He and Dickie looked at each other.
Yikes. What an image.
“Boston Bruin fan, I see?” Dickie said to the doctor.
She gave him a cold stare over the top of her glasses.