“In the middle of the night?” O’Kelly wanted to know. “Was she mental, or what?”
“She always took the torch we found on her,” Sam said, “unless the night was bright enough to see without. She was mad for the old walks, went out almost every night; even if it was lashing rain, she mostly just bundled up warm and went anyway. I wouldn’t say it’s exercise she was after, more privacy—living that close with the other four, it’s the only time she got to herself. They don’t know whether she ever went to the cottage, but they did say she liked it. Just after they first moved in, the five of them spent a day wandering all round Glenskehy, getting the lie of the land. When they spotted the cottage, Lexie wouldn’t move on till she’d gone in and had a look around, even though the others told her the farmer would probably be out with his shotgun any minute. She liked that it had been left there, even though no one was using it—Daniel said she ‘likes inefficiency,’ whatever that means. So we can’t rule out the possibility that it was a regular stop on her walks.”
Definitely not Irish, then, or at least not brought up here. Famine cottages are all over the countryside, we barely even see them any more. It’s only tourists—and mostly tourists from newer countries, America, Australia—who look at them long enough to feel their weight.
Sam found another piece of paper to add to the whiteboard: a floor plan of the cottage, with a neat, tiny scale at the bottom. “However she ended up there,” he said, pressing the last corner into place, “that’s where she died—against this wall, in what we’re calling the outer room. Sometime after death and before rigor set in, she was moved to the inner room. That’s where she was found, early Thursday morning.”
He gestured to Cooper.
Cooper had been gazing into space, in a lofty trance. He took his time: cleared his throat primly, glanced around to make sure he had everyone’s full attention. “The victim,” he said, “was a healthy white female, five feet five inches in height, a hundred and twenty pounds. No scars, tattoos or other identifying marks. She had a blood alcohol content of .03, consistent with drinking two to three glasses of wine a few hours previously. The toxicology screen was otherwise clear—at the time of death she had consumed no drugs, toxins or medications. All organs were within normal limits; I found no defects or signs of disease. The epiphyses of the long bones are completely fused and the inner sutures of the skull bones show early signs of fusion, placing her age around the late twenties. It is clear from the pelvis that she has never delivered a child.” He reached for his water glass and took a judicious sip, but I knew he wasn’t finished; the pause was for effect. Cooper had something up his sleeve.
He put down the glass, aligning it neatly in the corner of the desk. “She was, however,” he said, “in the early stages of pregnancy.” He sat back and watched the impact.
“Ah, Jesus,” Sam said softly. Frank leaned back against the wall and whistled, one long low note. O’Kelly rolled his eyes.
That was all this case needed. I wished I had had the sense to sit down. “Any of her mates mention this?” I asked.
“Not a one,” Frank said, and Sam shook his head. “Our girl kept her friends close and her secrets closer.”
“She might not even have known,” I said. “If her cycle wasn’t regular—”
"Ah, Jaysus, Maddox,” said O’Kelly, horrified. “We don’t want to hear about that carry-on. Put it in a report or something.”
"Any chance of IDing the father through DNA?” Sam asked.
“I see no reason why not,” Cooper said, “given a sample from the putative father. The embryo was approximately four weeks old and just under half a centimeter long, and was—”
"Christ,
” said O’Kelly; Cooper smirked. “Skip the bloody details and get on with it. How’d she die?”
Cooper left a loud pause, to show everyone that he wasn’t taking orders from O’Kelly. “At some point on Wednesday night,” he said, when he figured his point was made, “she suffered a single stab wound to the right chest. The probability is that the attack came from the front: the angle and point of entry would be difficult to achieve from behind the victim. I found slight abrasions to both palms and one knee, consistent with a fall on hard ground, but no defensive wounds. The weapon was a blade at least three inches long, with a single edge, a sharp point and no distinctive features—it could have been any large pocketknife, even a sharp kitchen knife. This blade entered on the midclavicular line at the level of the eighth rib, at an upward angle, and nicked the lung, leading to a tension pneumothorax. To put it as simply as possible”—he threw O’Kelly a snide sidelong glance—“the blade created a flap valve in the lung. Each time she inhaled, air escaped from the lung into the pleural space; when she exhaled, the flap closed, leaving the air trapped. Prompt medical attention could almost certainly have saved her. In the absence of such attention, however, the air gradually accumulated, compressing the other thoracic organs within the chest cavity. Eventually the heart was no longer able to fill with blood, and she died.”
There was a tiny silence, only the soft hum of the fluorescents. I thought of her in that cold ruined house, with night birds keening above her and rain gentle all around, dying of breathing.
“How long would that have taken?” Frank asked.
“The progression would depend on a variety of factors,” Cooper said. “If, for example, the victim ran for any distance after being stabbed, her breathing would have accelerated and deepened, hastening the development of the tension pneumothorax. The blade also left a minute nick in one of the major veins of the chest; with activity, this nick grew into a tear, and she would gradually have begun to bleed quite heavily. To give a tentative estimate, I would guess that she became unconscious approximately twenty to thirty minutes after receiving the injury, and died perhaps ten or fifteen minutes later.”
“In that half hour,” Sam asked, “how far could she have got?”
“I am not a medium, Detective,” Cooper said sweetly. “Adrenaline can have fascinating effects on the human body, and there is evidence that the victim was in fact in a state of considerable emotion. The presence of cadaveric spasm—in this case, the hands contracting into fists at the moment of death and remaining clenched through rigor mortis—is generally associated with extreme emotional stress. If she was sufficiently motivated, which under the circumstances I would imagine she was, a mile or so would not be out of the question. Alternatively, of course, she could have collapsed within yards.”
“OK,” Sam said. He found a highlighter pen on someone’s desk and drew a wide circle around the cottage on the map, taking in the village and Whitethorn House and acres of empty hillside. “So our primary crime scene could be anywhere in here.”
“Wouldn’t she have been in too much pain to get far?” I asked. I felt Frank’s eyes flick to me. We don’t ask whether victims suffered. Unless they were actually tortured, we don’t need to know: getting emotionally involved does nothing except wreck your objectivity and give you nightmares, and we’re going to tell the family it was painless anyway.
“Restrain your imagination, Detective Maddox,” Cooper told me. “A tension pneumothorax is often relatively painless. She would have been aware of mounting shortness of breath and an increased heart rate; as shock set in, her skin would have become cold and clammy and she would have felt light-headed, but there is no reason to suppose that she was in excruciating agony.”
“How much force went into the stabbing?” Sam asked. “Could anyone have done it, or would it take a big strong fella?”
Cooper sighed. We always ask: could a scrawny guy have done it? What about a woman? A kid? How big a kid? “The shape of the wound on cross section, ” he said, “combined with the lack of splitting in the skin at the entry point, implies a blade with a fairly sharp tip. It did not encounter bone or cartilage at any point. Assuming a fairly swift lunge, I would say that this injury could have been inflicted by a large man, a small man, a large woman, a small woman, or a strong pubescent child. Does that answer your question?”
Sam shut up. “Time of death?” O’Kelly demanded.
“Between eleven and one o’clock,” said Cooper, examining a cuticle. “As I believe my preliminary report stated.”
“We can narrow it down a bit,” Sam said. He found a marker and started a new timeline under Frank’s. “Rainfall in that area started about ten past midnight, and the Bureau’s guessing she was out in it for fifteen or twenty minutes max, from the degree of dampness, so she was moved into shelter by around half past twelve. And she was dead by then. Going by what Dr. Cooper says, that puts the actual stabbing no later than midnight, probably earlier—I’d say she was well on the way to unconscious before the rain started in, or she’d have gone into shelter. If the housemates are telling the truth about her leaving the house unharmed at half past eleven, then that gives us a half-hour window for the stabbing. If they’re lying or mistaken, it could’ve been anywhere between ten and twelve.”
“And that,” Frank said, swinging a leg over his chair, “is all we’ve got. No footprints and no blood trail—the rain got rid of all that. No fingerprints: someone went through her pockets and then wiped down all her stuff. Nothing good under her fingernails, according to the Bureau; looks like she didn’t get a go at the killer. They’re going through the trace, but on preliminary there’s nothing that stands out. All the hairs and fibers look like matching either her, her housemates or various stuff from the house, which means they don’t cut either way. We’re still searching the area, but so far we’ve got no sign of the murder weapon and no sign of an ambush site or a struggle. Basically, what we have is one dead girl and that’s it.”
“Wonderful,” O’Kelly said heavily. “One of those. What do you do, Maddox, carry a crap-case magnet in your bra?”
“This one isn’t mine, sir,” I reminded him.
“And yet here you are. Lines of investigation?”
Sam put the marker back and held up his thumb. “One: a random attack.” In Murder you get into the habit of numbering things; it makes O’Kelly happy. “She was out walking and someone jumped her—for money, as part of a sexual assault, or just looking for trouble.”
“If there had been any sign of sexual assault,” Cooper said wearily, to his fingernails, “I would, I think, have mentioned it by this point. In fact, I found nothing to indicate recent sexual contact of any kind.”
Sam nodded. “No sign of robbery, either—she still had her wallet, with cash in it, she didn’t own a credit card and she’d left her mobile at home. But that doesn’t prove it wasn’t the motive. Maybe she fights, he stabs her, she runs, he goes after her and then panics when he realizes what he’s done . . .” He shot me a quick, inquiring look.
O’Kelly has definite opinions on psychology, and he likes to pretend he doesn’t know about the profiling thing. I needed to do this delicately. “You think?” I said. “I don’t know, I sort of figured . . . I mean, she was moved
after
she died, right? If it took her half an hour to die, then either this guy spent all that time looking for her—and why would a mugger or a rapist do that?—or someone else found her later, moved her, and didn’t bother ringing us. They’re both possible, I guess, but I don’t think either one’s likely.”
"Fortunately, Maddox,” O’Kelly said nastily, “your opinion is no longer our problem. As you pointed out, you’re not on this case.”
“Yet,” Frank said, to the air.
“There’s other problems with the stranger scenario, too,” said Sam. “That area’s pretty well deserted during the daytime, never mind at night. If someone was looking for trouble, why would he hang around a laneway in the middle of nowhere, just on the off chance that a victim might wander past? Why not head into Wicklow town, or Rathowen, or at least Glenskehy village?”
"Any similars in the area?” O’Kelly asked.
“No knifepoint muggings or stranger sexual assaults,” Sam said. “Glenskehy’s a small village, sure; the two main crimes are drinking after hours and then driving home. The only stabbing in the last year was a group of lads getting drunk and stupid. Unless something similar turns up, I’d say we put the stranger on the back burner for now.”
“Suits me,” Frank said, grinning at me. A random attack would mean no info within the victim’s life, no evidence or motive waiting to be discovered, no reason to send me under. “Suits me down to the ground.”
"Might as well,” said O’Kelly. “If it’s random, we’re bolloxed anyway: it’s luck or nothing.”
“Grand, so. Two”—Sam ticked off a finger—“a recent enemy; I mean, someone who knew her as Lexie Madison. She moved in a pretty limited circle, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find out whether anyone had any problems with her. We’re starting with the housemates and working our way outwards—staff at Trinity, students—”
“With no luck so far,” Frank said, to no one in particular.
“It’s early days,” Sam said firmly. “We’re only at the preliminary interviews. And now we know she was pregnant, we’ve a whole other line of inquiry. We need to find the father.”
O’Kelly snorted. “Good luck with that. Girls these days, he’s probably some young fella she met at a disco and shagged down a laneway.”
I felt a sudden, confused spurt of fury:
Lexie wasn’t like that.
I reminded myself that my info was out of date, for all I knew this edition had been a five-star slapper. “Discos went out with the slide rule, sir,” I said sweetly.
“Even if he’s some fella from a nightclub,” Sam said, “he’ll have to be found and eliminated. It might take time, but we’ll get it done.” He was looking at Frank, who nodded gravely. “I’ll ask the lads from the house to give us DNA samples, to start with.”
“We might want to leave that for a while,” Frank said smoothly, “all depending, of course. If by any chance her acquaintances should end up under the impression that she’s alive and well, we don’t want to rattle their cages. We want them relaxed, off their guard, thinking the investigation’s wound down. The DNA’ll still be there in a few weeks’ time.”
Sam shrugged. He was starting to tense up again. “We’ll work that out as we go. Three: an enemy from her previous life, someone who had a grudge and tracked her down.”
“Now that’s the one I fancy,” Frank said, straightening up. “We’ve got no indication of any problems in her Lexie Madison life, right? But wherever she was before, something obviously went wrong. She wasn’t going around under a fake name just for the laugh. Either she was on the run from the cops, or she was on the run from someone else. My money’s on someone else.”