A Simple Act of Violence (12 page)

She half-smiled. ‘What?’

‘Nothing . . . nothing at all.’

‘Bullshit, Tom. You’re trying to get a rise out of me.’

‘No . . . no, I’m not—’

‘You shouldn’t believe what you read in the papers—’ Hemmings started, but was cut short by the telephone on the desk.

Alexander picked it up, acknowledged someone, thanked them, hung up again.

‘They’re here,’ he said.

‘I’ll see them,’ Hemmings replied. ‘Finish up the report, and then you can start hosing the gurneys.’

Hemmings walked from the autopsy theater to her office. She removed her lab coat and took the corridor left to the main entrance. When she arrived she found Miller and Roth already waiting.

She smiled when she saw Miller. He smiled back, awkwardness evident in his expression.

‘Robert,’ she said warmly.

Miller shook her hand. ‘Marilyn,’ he said quietly, and then nodded at Roth. ‘You know my partner, Al Roth?’

‘Detective Roth,’ she said. ‘Yes, we’ve collided a few times.’

‘Good to see you,’ Roth said. He broke the tension between them by adding: ‘So, you’re through the worst of this newspaper bullshit, right?’

Hemmings smiled. ‘Water off a duck’s back.’

‘You’re done on the Sheridan autopsy?’ Miller asked.

‘Just now,’ she said. ‘Come to the office.’

Miller was glad to have Roth beside him as they followed her down the corridor. There had been nothing between Miller and Hemmings, and then the newspapers made-believe there was. It was a difficult thing to experience, would have been easier had they perhaps known one another a little better. Now it was just tension and glances, Miller wondering if she felt as embarrassed as he did, if that embarrassment came from wanting to talk about what had happened, or wanting to pretend it had never occurred.

‘Interesting thing about this one,’ Marilyn Hemmings said, sitting down behind her desk. ‘Close enough to the previous three, but different as well.’

She indicated a chair by the door, another against the wall. Roth and Miller sat down.

‘Either of you study forensics . . . pathology perhaps?’ she asked.

Miller shook his head, Roth as well.

Hemmings nodded understandingly. ‘So a body is found somewhere,’ she said. ‘A dead body, and there are only four classifications of death as far as we are concerned. Those four are accidental, suicide, murder or natural causes. A man cleaning his gun shoots himself in the chest. It opens his aorta and enough blood floods his chest to compress his heart and kill him. The same man could take the same gun, press it against his chest and pull the trigger. The appearance and damage, the cause of death would be the same, but the motivation in that case would be intentional. He meant to kill himself and he did so. His wife, pissed off at him for cheating on her, shoots him in the chest at close range and kills him. Same cause, same appearance, different motive. Lastly we have the guy who smokes too much, drinks too much beer, gets a puncture in a tire while he’s on the highway. He’s stressed, angry, tries to change the wheel by himself, and an inherited weakness in the aorta collapses and his chest is flooded with blood and he dies. What we do in all cases is the same. We determine identity of the subject where we can, we determine the cause of death, the manner, the mechanism or mode, and finally we try our best to work out exactly when the person died. That’s all possible when you have a complete body upon which an autopsy can be performed. ’

Hemmings looked first at Roth, then Miller. ‘We did the first three here. We did tests on the ribbons, the tags, fibers, hairs, the lot. There was nothing of any significance . . . nothing at all.’

Miller nodded. ‘You said that Sheridan was close enough to the previous three, but different?’

Hemmings smiled. ‘I did, yes.’

‘How? Different how?’ Roth asked.

‘That’s why I told you about the four different types of death . . . there’s no question in my mind that she was murdered, more a question of how she was murdered. The mode and the mechanism. They differ from the first three victims.’

‘In what way?’ Roth asked.

‘First three were beaten and then strangled, the ribbon tied around the neck post mortem. This one, the Sheridan woman . . . she was strangled beforehand.’

‘Beforehand? What d’you mean beforehand?’ Miller asked.

‘There is a very specific type of bruising that occurs when a person is alive. It is quite different from the bruising that occurs after a person is dead.’

‘And what do we have here?’

Marilyn Hemmings kind of half-smiled. ‘We have something that even I don’t fully understand, unless I look at it from an entirely different perspective. The subcutaneous bruising - a lot of subcutaneous bruising - and the way those bruises have discolored, it appears that the injuries were sustained post mortem.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Miller said. ‘You’re saying that in the previous three cases the beatings took place before they were strangled, and in this case the beating took place afterwards.’

‘Yes, that would appear to be the case.’

‘And the strangulation . . . she still died as a result of the strangulation?’

‘Yes, strangulation was definitely the cause of death. In the second one it was difficult to tell. Ann Rayner, the legal secretary. The beating was so relentless she could have died moments before she was strangled. There was haemorrhaging in the brain, in the optical cavities, at the base of the neck. It was a very, very brutal assault, and though there were clear signs of asphyxiation I think she would have died regardless.’

‘So what do you see here?’ Miller asked.

‘I see a very similar death but a different sequence to the attack. I see a woman strangled, and then beaten violently, but unlike the others her face wasn’t marked.’

‘And your intuition? Your feeling on this thing?’

‘What do I think? I don’t think I could answer that question, Robert.’

Miller shot her a look at the sound of his name. The way she said it. There was no denying the fact that he felt in some way beholden to her. Her evidence had exonerated him from something that could have been the end of his career. She had saved him from something. Was it simply gratitude that he felt, or was he experiencing some other unexpected emotion?

‘You don’t have to write it down,’ he said. ‘You can deny you ever said anything. I’m just interested in what you think might have occurred.’

Hemmings glanced at Roth. Roth nodded as if to reassure her.

‘I think someone . . . I think someone wanted this to look like the first three. Really wanted it to look like the first three.’

‘But it wasn’t the same person?’

Hemmings hesitated. ‘Opinion, nothing more than that?’

‘Nothing more than that.’

‘It was someone else, Detective . . . I think it was a copycat.’

Miller looked at Roth; neither spoke.

‘There’s three other things,’ she said. ‘First and foremost, there’s the fact that we have not been able to formally identify her—’

Miller started to say something but Hemmings cut him short.

‘Her passport? Yes, we have that. We even have her driving license, but there is no vehicle registered with DMV.’

‘That’s not so unusual,’ Roth said. ‘There’s many people who have a license but don’t own a car.’

‘I know, but that wasn’t all,’ Hemmings said. ‘So far her social security number doesn’t tally with her name. Gives me the name of some Spanish woman or something. I wrote it down over there.’

Miller shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand . . .’

‘What I said,’ Hemmings replied. ‘I have her social security number, at least what is supposed to be her number, and when I put it through the system I come up with someone else entirely.’

‘This is like the others,’ Miller said.

Hemmings looked up.

‘There are identification issues on the others,’ Miller said. ‘Victim identification is the first thing we try and do,’ Hemmings went on, ‘and in this case nothing has panned out. No DNA, no fingerprints, no dentals, and when her social security number came up with a different name—’ She shook her head. ‘I also had a reason to check for her in the county medical database.’

Miller frowned. ‘She was ill?’

‘She was more than ill . . . she was dying of cancer.’

The expression on Miller’s face said everything. A sense of disorientation, as if he was being given too much information to process. ‘How serious?’ Miller asked.

‘In her chest . . . well, in her lung specifically. Right lung. Significantly advanced, but more importantly she wasn’t registered on the CMD, and that means she wasn’t seeing a registered practitioner.’

‘Significantly advanced?’ Roth interjected. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s difficult to say,’ Hemmings replied. ‘Cancer is a strange thing. The phenomenon of cells randomly reproducing themselves, rogue cells we call them, and when there’s enough of them going at it fast enough you have a tumor. The body’s equipped to fight some of them, and some tumors grow and they’re never anything but benign. With Catherine Sheridan it was malignant, very much so, and I don’t think she would have lived much longer.’

‘Was she taking any medication or undergoing any treatment? ’

‘There was no evidence of anything in her system. No painkillers, nothing. And like I said, I couldn’t find a record of her registration with anyone. There are some alternative clinics, quite a few of them in fact, but the legal ones still have to carry licenses, still have to record patients’ details and report who comes to them for treatment.’

‘But there are places where people can get medical care that don’t record patients’ details?’ Roth asked.

‘Sure there are,’ Hemmings replied. ‘Backstreet abortionists, veterinarians that do minor operations, illegal cosmetic surgeons—’

‘But people who treat cancer?’

Hemmings shrugged. ‘Who the hell knows. I’ve heard about homeopaths using Vitamin K to treat cancer, but generally they fall foul of the FDA and run to Mexico.’

‘Why?’

‘Why Mexico, or why do they get kicked in the head by the FDA?’

‘Why do they get kicked?’

‘Because Vitamin K is supposed to work a helluva lot better than most things . . . because it’s cheap, because you don’t really need any kind of extensive medical experience to administer it perhaps? I’m only guessing, but my experience with the FDA is that they get a real bug up their ass if someone is doing something that looks like it’s going to make people better.’

Miller smiled wryly. Marilyn Hemmings carried too much cynicism for a woman of her age.

‘So is there any way of proving that the first three were killed by someone other than the one who killed Catherine Sheridan?’ Roth asked.

‘Anything I tell you could be argued in court,’ Hemmings said. ‘Way the D.A.’s office runs these days, you’ve got to pretty much bring the guy in with his signed confession and some video footage of him doing the thing before you even get a warrant to search his garbage.’

‘That’s a very wide streak of cynicism you have there,’ Miller said, once again surprised by Hemmings’ tone.

‘Cynical? Realistic more like. I see what these assholes do to people every single day, Detective. You do too, I’m sure, but I see it up close and personal. How many murders have you been present at this year?’

‘Hell, I don’t know . . . ten, twenty perhaps.’

‘You cover the zone of one precinct, right?’

‘Right.’

‘And there are other detectives who cover homicides?’

‘Yes, there’s anywhere between six and ten of us.’

‘Well, right now, with the coroner away, you’ve got me and Tom Alexander, a couple of others on a different shift. We cover eleven police precincts, fifteen if you count the overflow we share with Annapolis and Arlington. I have a facility that can cope with four hundred bodies at a time, and then a freezer that can take another one hundred and fifty if needs be. We cycle over six hundred a month, sixty-eight percent of those are murders, manslaughters, hit and runs, drownings and suicides. Of those a good two hundred and seventy-five are unlawful killings, and some of the things . . . well, hell, I don’t need to tell you what people are capable of doing to each other, do I, detective?’

‘I get your drift,’ Miller said. ‘You said there were three things . . . CSA at the scene said there was a possibility she had sex with someone on the day she died.’

‘That was the third thing, yes.’

‘Can you tell us anything about the person she had sex with?’ Miller asked.

‘I can’t tell you anything, except they had protected sex. He wore a condom. There’s a spermicidal agent called Nonoxynol-9, very common, you find it on dozens of brands. Can’t give you anything there.’

‘No other pubic hairs around the vagina?’

‘No, and nothing beneath her nails, and nothing in her hair, and nothing about the marks on her neck that help me tell you anything about him. Right-handed I think, that’s all I can get. Pressure marks on her left are a little deeper. Thumbs centered her neck. He knew exactly where to press, but that could have been good luck. He stood behind her, and then he came around and stood in front of her, and he was standing in front of her when she died. That’s as much as I can tell you.’

‘We’ll sort out this thing with the identification,’ Miller said, something in his tone that sounded like he was trying to reassure himself.

‘I’ll tell you something, Robert . . . there is something seriously awry when you cannot ID someone correctly on any system.’

‘Give me the name you got on her social security number,’ Roth said.

Hemmings took a slip of paper from the desk and handed it over.

‘Isabella Cordillera,’ Roth said. ‘That’s all you got?’

‘That’s all there was. You track her number back and that’s the name the system gives you.’