Cruel & Unusual Read online

  “Well, I'm thinking about how this thing was staged. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make us think she gassed herself. But then the lady's dead before he even gets her into her car. What I'm considering is that he didn't mean to whack her inside the house. You know, he applies a choke hold, uses too much force, and she dies. So, maybe he didn't know her health was bad and that's how it happened.”

  I started shaking my head. “Her high blood pressure has nothing to do with it.”

  “Explain how she died, then.”

  “Say the assailant is right-handed, he brought his left arm around the front of her neck and used his right hand to pull the left wrist toward the right.”

  I demonstrated. “This placed pressure eccentrically on her neck, resulting in fracture of the right greater cornua of the hyoid bone. The pressure collapsed her upper airway and put pressure on the carotid arteries. She would have gotten hypoxic, or air hungry. Sometimes pressure on the neck produces bradycardia, a drop in the heart rate, and the victim has an arrhythmia.”

  “Could you tell from her autopsy if the assailant started using a choke hold that ended up a yoking? If he was just trying to subdue her and used too much force, in other words?”

  “I can't tell you that from medical findings.”

  “But it's possible.”

  “It's within the realm of possibility.”

  “Come on, Doc,” Marino said, exasperated. “Get off the witness stand for a minute, okay? Somebody else in this office besides you and me?”

  No one was. But I was unnerved. Most of my staff had not shown up for work today, and Susan had acted bizarrely. Jennifer Deighton, a stranger, apparently had been trying to call me, then was murdered, and a man who claimed to be her brother had just hung up on me. Not to mention, Marino's mood was foul. When I felt a loss of control, I became very clinic.

  “Look,” I said, “he very well may have used a choke hold to subdue her and ended up applying too much force, yoking her by mistake. In fact, I'll even go so far as to suggest that he simply thought he'd knocked her out and didn't know she was dead when he placed her inside her car.”

  “So we're dealing with a dumb shit”

  “I wouldn't conclude that if I were you. But if he gets up tomorrow morning and reads in the paper that Jennifer Deighton was murdered, he may be in for the surprise of his life. He's going to wonder what he did wrong. Which is why I recommended we keep this away from the press.”

  “I got no problem with that. By the way, just because you didn't know Jennifer Deighton don't mean she didn't know you.”

  I waited for him to explain.

  “I've been thinking about your hang ups. You're on TV, in the papers. Maybe she knew someone was after her, didn't know where to turn, and reached out to you for help. When she got your machine, she was too paranoid to leave a message.”

  “That's a very depressing thought.”

  “Almost everything we think in this joint is depressing.”

  He got up from his chair.

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “Check her house. Tell me if you find any feather pillows, down-filled jackets, feather dusters, anything relating to feathers.”

  “Why?”

  “I found a small feather on her gown.”

  “Sure. I'll let you know. Are you leaving?”

  I glanced past him as I heard the elevator doors open and shut. “Was that Stevens? “I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I've got a few more things to do before I go home,” I said.

  After Marino got on the elevator, I went to a window at the end of the hall that overlooked the parking loon back. I wanted to make sure Ben Stevens's Jeep was gone. It was, and I watched as Marino emerged from the budding, picking his way through crushed snow lit up by street lamps. He trudged to his car and stopped to vigorously shake snow off his feet, like a cat that's stepped in water, before sliding behind the wheel. God forbid that anything should violate the freshened au and Armor All of his inner sanctum. I wondered ft he had plans for Christmas and was dismayed that I had not thought to invite him in for dinner. This would be his AS Christmas since he and Doris had divorced.

  As I made my way back down the empty hall, I ducked into each office along the way to check computer terminals. Unfortunately, no one was logged in, and the only cable tagged with a device number was Fielding's. It was neither tty07 nor tty14. Frustrated, I unlocked Margaret's office and switched on the light.

  Typically, it looked as if a fierce wind had blown through, scattering papers across her desk, tipping books over in the bookcase and knocking others on the floor. Stacks of continuous-paper printouts spilled over like accordions, and indecipherable notes and telephone numbers were taped to walls and terminal screens. The minicomputer hummed like an electronic insect and lights danced across banks of modems on a shelf. Sitting in her chair before the system terminal, I slid open a drawer to my right and began rapidly walking my fingers through file tabs, I found several with promising labels such as “users” and “networking;” but nothing I perused told me what I needed to know. Looking around as I thought ,I noticed a thick bundle of cables that ran up the wall behind the computer and disappeared through the ceiling. Each cable was tagged.

  Both tty07 and tty14 were connected directly to the computer. Unplugging tty07 first, I roamed from terminal to terminal to see which had been disconnected as a result. The terminal in Ben Stevens's office was down, then up again when I reconnected the cable. Next I set about to trace tty14, and was perplexed when the unplugging of that cable seemed to illicit no response. Terminals on the desks of my staff continued to work without pause. Then I remembered Susan. Her office was downstairs in the morgue.

  Unlocking her door, I noticed two details the instant I walked into her office. There were no personal effects, such as photographs and knickknacks, to be seen, and on a bookshelf over the desk were a number of UNIX, SQL, and WordPerfect reference guides. I vaguely recalled that Susan had signed up for several computer courses last spring. Flipping a switch to turn on her monitor, I tried to log in and was baffled when the system responded. Her terminal was still connected; it could not be tty14. And then I realized something so obvious that I might have laughed were I not horrified.

  Back upstairs, I paused in my office doorway, looking in as if someone I had never met worked here. Pooled around the workstation on my desk were lab reports, call sheets, death certificates, and page proofs of a forensic pathology textbook I was editing, and the return bearing my microscope didn't look much better. Against a wall were three tall filing cabinets, and across from them a couch situated far enough away from bookcases that you could easily go around it to reach books on lower shelves. Directly behind my chair was an oak credenza I had found years earlier in the state's surplus warehouse. In drawers had locks, making it a perfect repository for my pocketbook and active cases that were unusually sensitive. I kept the key under my phone, and I thought again of last Thursday when Susan had broken jars of formalin while I was doing Eddie Heath's autopsy.

  I did not know the device number of my terminal, for there had never been occasion when it mattered. Seating myself at my desk and sliding out the keyboard drawer, I tried to log in but my keystrokes were ignored. Disconnecting tty14 had disconnected me.

  “Damn,” I whispered as my blood ran cold. “Damn!”

  I had sent no notes to my administrator's terminal. It was not I who had typed “I can't find it.” In fact, when the file was accidentally created late last Thursday afternoon, I was in the morgue. But Susan wasn't. I had given her my keys and told her to lie down on the couch in my office until she recovered from the formalin spill. Was it possible that she not only had broken into my directory but also had gone through files and the paperwork on my desk? Had she attempted to send a note to Ben Stevens because she couldn't find what they were interested in? One of the trace evidence examiners from upstairs suddenly appeared in my doorway, startling me.

  “Hello,” he muttered
as he looked through paperwork, his lab coat buttoned up to his chin. Pulling out a multiple-page report, he walked in and handed it to me.

  “I was getting ready to leave this in your box,” he said. “But since you're still here, I'll give it to you in person. I've finished examining the adhesive residue you-lifted from Eddie Heath's wrists.”

  “Building materials?” I asked, scanning the first page of the report.

  “That's right. Paint, plaster, wood, cement, asbestos, glass. Typically, we find this sort of debris in burglary cases, often on the suspects' clothing, in their cuffs, pockets, shoes, and so on.”

  “What about on Eddie Heath's clothes?”

  “Some of this same debris was on his clothes.”

  “And the paints? Tell me about them.”

  “I found bits of paint from five different origins. Three of them are layered, meaning something was painted and repainted a number of times.”

  “Are the origins vehicular or residential?” I inquired.

  “Only one is vehicular, an acrylic lacquer typically used as a top coat in cars manufactured by General Motors.”

  It could have come from the vehicle used to abduct Eddie Heath, I thought. And it could have come from anywhere.

  “The color?” I inquired.

  “Blue.”

  “Layered?”

  “No.”

  “What about the debris from the area of pavement where the body was found? I asked Marino to get sweepings to you and he said he would.”

  “Sand, dirt, bits of paving material, plus the miscellaneous debris you might expect around a Dumpster. Glass, paper, ash, pollen, rust, plant material.”

  “That's different from what you found adhering to the residue on his wrists?”

  “Yes. It would appear to me that the tape was applied and removed from his wrists in a location where there's debris from building materials and birds.”

  “Birds?”

  “On the third page of the report,” he said. “I found a lot of feather parts.”

  Lucy was restless and rather irritable when I got home. Clearly, she had not had enough to occupy her during the day, for she had taken it upon herself to rearrange my study. The laser printer had been moved, as had the modem and all of my computer reference guides.

  “Why did you do this?” I asked.

  She was in my chair, her back to me, and she replied without turning around or slowing her finger; on the keyboard. “It makes more sense this way.”

  “Lucy, you can't just go into someone else's office and move everything around. How would you feel ft I did that to you?”

  “There would be no reason to rearrange anything of mine. It's all arranged very sensibly.”

  She stopped typing and swiveled around. “See, now you can reach the printer without getting up from the chair. Your books are right here within reach, and the modem is out of your way completely. You shouldn't set books, coffee cups, and things on top of a modem.”

  “Have you been in here all day?” I asked.

  “Where else would I be? You took the car. I went Jogging around your neighborhood. Have you ever tried to run on snow?”

  Pulling up a chair, I opened my briefcase and got out the paper bag Marino had given me. “You're saying you need a car.”

  “I feel stranded.”

  “Where would you like to go?”

  “To your club. I don't know where else. I'd simply like the option. What's in the bag?”

  “Books and a poem Marino gave me.”

  “Since when is he a member of the literati?” She got up and stretched. “I'm going to make a cup of herbal tea. Would you like some?”

  “Coffee, please.”

  “It's bad for you,” she said as she left the room.

  “Oh, hell, “I muttered irritably as I pulled the books and poem out of the bag and red fluorescent powder got all over my hands and clothes.

  Neils Vander had done his usual thorough examination, and I had forgotten his passion for his new toy. Several months ago he had acquired an alternate light source and had retired the laser to the scrap heap. The Luma-Lite, with its “state-of-the-art three-hundred-and-fifty-watt high-intensity blue enhanced metal vapor arc lamp,” as Vander lovingly described it whenever the subject came up, turned virtually invisible hairs and fibers a burning orange. Semen stains and street drug residues jumped out like solar flares, and best of all, the light could pick up fingerprints that never would have been seen-in the past.

  Vander had gone the gamut on Jennifer Deighton's paperback novels. They had been placed in the glass tank and exposed to vapors from Super Glue, the cyanoacrylate ester that reacts to the components of perspiration transferred by human skin. Then Vander had dusted the slick covers of the books with the red fluorescent powder that was now all over me. Finally, he had subjected the books to the cool blue scrutiny of the Luma-Lite and purpled pages with Ninhydrin. I hoped he would be rewarded for all of his trouble. My reward was to go into the bathroom and clean up with a wet washcloth.

  Flipping through Paris Trout was unrevealing. The novel told the story of the heartless murder of a black girl, and if that was significant to Jennifer Deighton's own story, I could not imagine why. Seth Speaks was a spooky account of someone supposedly from another life communicating through the author. It did not really surprise me that Miss Deighton, with her otherworldly inclinations, might read such a thing. What interested me most was the poem.

  It was typed on a sheet of white paper smudged purple with Ninhydrin and enclosed in a plastic bag:

  JENNY

  Jenny's kisses many

  warmed the copper penny

  wedded to her neck

  with cotton string.

  It was in the spring

  when he had found it

  on the dusty drive

  beside the meadow

  and given it to her.

  No words of passion

  spoken.

  He loved her

  with a token.

  The meadow now is brown

  and overgrown with brambles.

  He is gone.

  The coin asleep

  is cold

  down deep

  in a woodland

  wishing pond.

  There was no date, no name of the author. The paper was creased from having been folded in quarters. I got up and went into the living room, where Lucy had set coffee and tea on the table and was stirring the fire.

  “Aren't you hungry?” she asked.

  “As a matter of fact, I am,” I, said, glancing over the poem again and wondering what it meant. Was “Jenny” Jennifer Deighton? “What would you like to eat?”

  “Believe it or not, steak. But only if it's good and the cows haven't been fed a bunch of chemicals,” Lucy said. “Is it possible you could bring home a car from work so I could use yours this week?”

  “I generally don't bring home the state car unless I'm on call.”

  “You went to a scene last night when you supposedly weren't on call. You're always on call, Aunt Kay.”

  “All right,” I said. “Why don't we do this. We'll go get the best steak in town. Afterward, we'll stop by the office and drive the wagon home and you can take my car. There's still a little ice on the roads in spots. You have to promise to be extra careful.”

  “I've never seen your office.”

  “I'll show it to you if you wish.”

  “No way. Not at night.”

  “The dead can't hurt you.”

  “Yes, they can,” Lucy said. “Dad hurt me when he died. He left me to be raised by Mom.”

  “Let's get our coats.”

  “Why is it that every time I bring up anything germane to our dysfunctional family, you change the subject?”

  I headed to my bedroom for my coat “Do you want to borrow my black leather jacket?”

  “See, you're doing it again,” she screamed.

  We argued all the way to Ruth's Chris Steak House, and by the time
I parked the car I had a headache and was completely disgusted with myself. Lucy had provoked me into raising my voice, and the only other person who could routinely do that was my mother.

  “Why are you being so difficult?” I said in her ear as we were shown to a table.

  “I want to talk to you and you won't let me,” she said.

  A waiter instantly appeared for drink orders.

  “Dewar's and soda, “I said.

  “Sparkling water with a twist,” Lucy said. “You shouldn't drink and drive.”

  “I'm having only one. But you're right. I'd be better off not having any. And you're being critical again. How can you expect to have friends if you talk to people this way?”

  “I don't expect to have friends.” She stared off. “It's others who expect me to have friends. Maybe I don't want any friends because most people bore me.”