Delivering Death: A Novel (Riley Spartz) (8 page)

“Do any of these cars or people look familiar?” he asked.

“No. But I’m going to guess this was our sender.” I pointed to the mysterious puffy coat. “He or she seems overdressed for
the weather. The other two people aren’t wearing heavy coats or hats.”

“That may be,” the detective said. “Do you recognize any of these names?”

He read off a list that I assumed were the owners of the vehicles. None meant anything to me, but they might not have even been driving.

Delmonico put the post office photos back in a file. Since our conversation wasn’t yielding much about the perpetrator, I wanted to focus on our murder victim. I glanced at Leon Akume’s mug shot while tapping my fingers against the table.

“Was he identified through fingerprints?” I asked.

No one volunteered anything.

“If he has a mug shot on file,” I continued, “he should have fingerprints on file, too. Unless his fingers were cut off?”

Delmonico shook his head. “No, that didn’t happen.”

I started to think out loud. “So why did our killer yank the man’s teeth, if not to thwart identification?” If the law men knew, they weren’t saying, so I went for a gruesome question. “Were they removed before or after the victim died?”

That detail wouldn’t be public record, but cops often leaked juicy aspects of a crime to the media for goodwill. I figured my brief ownership of the evidence gave me standing to inquire.

The chief cut in, not giving his detective even a chance to reply. “I think we’ll hold tight to that piece of information just now.”

I understood. The answer to my question fell under the category of Things Only the Killer Would Know. The fact that the victim’s teeth had been pulled also fit that criteria, or at least had until I opened my mail.

Cops liked to keep those skeletons quiet to weed out false confessions. And this was a fresh murder, not a cold case. They weren’t at the stage of the investigation where they’d take any evidence, real or not, just to close the file.

“Any chance you would discuss any of this on camera? I can have a photographer here in ten minutes.”

They declined with a terse no.

“Well, thanks for all your help,” I said. “And since mug shots are public, I’m sure you won’t mind me keeping this.”

I palmed the picture of Leon Paul Akume and slid it into my jacket pocket.

I
stopped by the coffee shop outside the Hennepin County medical examiner’s office and bought a pricy coffee drink to take inside. Not for me—for Della Sax. Our paths had crossed numerous times in the name of news. I covered crime, she uncovered it.

But I knew her weakness.

“I’ve got a caramel cappuccino for Della,” I told the man sitting at the front desk.

That was our code. If the chief medical examiner were available, I’d know soon enough. If not, the cappuccino would be mine. Within a minute, Della was reaching for her caffeine kickback and inviting me to follow her down the corridor.

She wore trademark pink scrubs and dangling crystal earrings on the job, her way of bringing elegance to a steel autopsy table. I could smell a whiff of formaldehyde in the air that neither perfume nor coffee could disguise.

Della closed the door when we reached her office, raised her cup in the air, then sipped her cappuccino with satisfaction. The office wall nearest her desk was covered with small pictures of faces with names and dates scrawled across the bottom of each. The earliest went back nearly five years. She called the montage her “murder wall”—victim photos of all the open homicides under her watch. Once a case was solved, the photo was moved into a desk file marked
VICTORY
.

“How many left?” I asked.

“Sixty-three.” She savored another taste of caramel mixed with coffee and cream. “I’m no longer optimistic about justice. I used to count on good trumping evil and one day having an empty wall where I could hang pictures of my cats and kids instead of ghosts.”

“That’s not just on your back, Della. Chasing killers is a team sport. Cops want closure, too. But being smart isn’t always enough. Sometimes you need dumb luck. Sometimes you even need the media.”

“I know. I know.”

We focused our attention on the wall of faces. Most of the photos depicted victims while they were alive, clueless to their unsettled destiny. Some came from the case files, given to the police by families for identification of their loved ones. Others were cut from newspaper articles or obituaries. A few of the photos—John and Jane Does—were taken after death and hard to view without recoiling from their pale skin and vacant eyes. Two had no faces, only sparse notes on Post-its to hold their place in her makeshift homicide row. The majority were mug shots.

Play tough; die rough.

“If a face doesn’t come off my murder wall in the first couple weeks postmortem,” she said, “I usually end up staring at it for a long time.”

The same photo of Leon Akume in my pocket was the last in line. I leaned over to point him out. “I was just down at the cop shop about this guy.”

“A messy murder indeed. I had feeling that’s why you came looking for me, Riley. Your package is now in an evidence bag. Actually, two bags. One for the teeth, the other for the envelope.”

“Like any concerned citizen, I turned what I had over to the authorities promptly and have been cooperating in their investigation.”

She looked dubious.

“Of course,” I continued, “now I feel invested in the outcome.” I pulled out my copy of Leon’s mug and held it next to hers. “Just like you do.” I hoped he lost his life before losing his teeth. The alternative was too grisly to dwell on. “Has anyone claimed his body?” I figured that might give me a lead on friends or relatives, especially if a funeral was scheduled.

“Not yet,” she said. “Maybe someone will see it on the news now. Did you have any relationship with the victim?”

That was the first question anyone wanted to know. I shook my head. “Didn’t know his name. Never saw his face. Until today.”

“If you have no connection to the victim, then we have to wonder whether you have a link with his killer,” Della said. “This homicide is unusual on several levels.”

“What was the cause of death?”

I knew better than to press for inside minutiae, but how the victim died was a fact of public record, so she didn’t hesitate. “Homicidal aspiration.”

That sounded ludicrous. “I don’t understand. His ambition was to kill? Or be killed?”

“No,” she said. “I mean ‘aspiration’ in the medical sense. Basically, he choked on his own blood.”

A couple seconds passed before what she meant sunk in. I blanked out the rest of what she was saying because I was envisioning the horror of Leon Akume’s dying moments. Retching sounds. Panicked eyes. Perhaps convulsions as his throat sought air and his world turned hellish.

“Riley?” She brought me back to the present.

“Did he suffer?” It was a useless question. Clearly he had.

“I’ll discuss his death for context, but not talk specifics about the crime scene. You’ll have to get that from the guys over in homicide.”

I nodded, not sure how much more I wanted to know, still wishing the teeth had been lost in the mail.

“The body had no marks indicating he’d been restrained,” Della said. “But he probably didn’t struggle much. Drugs in the victim’s blood suggest he was unconscious, yet alive, while his teeth were being yanked.”

“You mean like novocaine?”

“More like meth, booze, pot. An addict’s buffet.”

“He didn’t have meth mouth, did he?” That’s when users’ teeth rot and fall out. “From what I saw of his teeth, they looked okay.”

“No. His teeth were fine,” she said. “But each extraction—at least the first several—bled plenty—until he choked. At death the heart stops and blood flow ceases. So any remaining teeth wouldn’t bleed.”

“Any special training required to pull so many teeth?”

“Not really. The killer wouldn’t have to be a licensed dentist, if that’s what you’re wondering. Just determined to get the job done. Judging by the damage to the gums, I’d guess it was an amateur.”

I cringed again, reliving a unpleasant sensation when a couple of my teeth were removed for orthodontia work years earlier. My tongue remembered warm blood trickling from the gaps in my upper jaw. Suddenly, I wanted to gag.

I forced myself to concentrate on the murder at hand. “You’d have to have a tough stomach to slay someone like that when there are so many easier and faster ways.”

“Yes, but just because the crime seems crazy to us, it doesn’t mean the motive wouldn’t make perfect sense from the killer’s perspective,” she said. “And there is always the possibility the suspect didn’t intend for the victim to die.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe the perpetrator was just playing dentist.”

B
ack at Channel 3, I photocopied several enlarged versions of the mug shot and ran my fingers along Leon Paul Akume’s jawline. My own mouth ached out of sympathy. I ran my tongue across my top row of teeth, flinching again at the thought of St. Apollonia’s demise.

That I was able to walk out of the cop shop with Akume’s mug and name meant the police, despite playing hardball, were resigned to media coverage on the case. Were they rewarding me for turning in the teeth? Or were they somehow using me as a messenger? That didn’t really matter, because I was also using them. We had different ambitions—finding a killer versus finding a story—but our goals sometimes intersected.

Right then, the cops knew more about our victim than I did. But that could change when the station broadcast his picture.

I wrote
“Leon Paul Akume”
across the bottom of one of the pictures and headed over to Lee Xiong, the newsroom’s computer ace. Channel 3 had purchased numerous government computer databases over the years and Xiong had linked their information so he could retrieve the skinny on almost anyone in the state: whether they owned a car, or a home, or a business; whether they hunted, or fished, or voted. But especially whether they had ever been charged or convicted of a crime.

The latter held the most interest for me. If a dude had a mug
shot he usually had a rap sheet, making it easy to read a biography of a life of crime.

“When you have a minute,” I asked Xiong, “I’m interested in this guy. FYI—he’s dead . . . as of last week.”

“Do you have a date of birth?” For Xiong, knowing when someone was born was much more important than knowing when he died. DOBs confirmed identities and made his searches easier.

“No. But I’m hoping you can background him anyway. I’m most interested in Akume’s criminal history.” That seemed a likely avenue to find our murder motive.

I knew Xiong couldn’t concentrate with me watching over his shoulder, so I headed to the assignment desk with the news that we had an ID on the city’s latest homicide victim.

Ozzie had a hard time remembering the crime. “Is this a murder we even care about?”

He motioned for Bryce to join the discussion because we all knew that not all murders get equal treatment from the media or the cops. Certainly, there’s a question of manpower and time. But there’s also an intangible quality that simply makes some deaths more interesting than others, like those involving rich and famous victims or unusual murder weapons, such as a wood-chipper. My boss was indifferent to the mug shot because that suggested the Leon Akume was a lowlife, until I told him to imagine a toothless grin.

“You mean . . .”

“Yes, Bryce. We have a match.”

He looked a little queasy now that he knew the teeth belonged to a dead man, but nevertheless, he quickly approved the story as the lead for that night’s late news.

Besides the photo, I also had video close-ups Malik had reluctantly shot of the teeth. But when I checked for the unedited tape from the homicide coverage, I was too late. The raw crime scene video was gone, except for what had actually
aired. I had hoped to find a visual lead. All that remained was thirty-seven seconds of cop cars, flashing lights, gawking bystanders, and a Dumpster next to a body shrouded with a sheet.

One of the changes Bryce made as news director was to order all video erased one week after the airdate. The strategy was meant to avoid having to comply with any subpoenas that might put the station in the middle of contentious litigants demanding copies of interviews. Without video, there’d be nothing to fight about in court. But for that tactic to work, the station had to be consistent. I felt the policy put us in legal jeopardy by destroying evidence of our solid work. But I was overruled.

I looked for the air check of the newscast and cued it up to my live shot. It was routine, overall.

((RILEY, LIVE))
BEHIND ME, A MAN’S BODY WAS APPARENTLY DISCOVERED NEAR THAT DUMPSTER. POLICE ARE CALLING THE DEATH A HOMICIDE.

Had the killer been watching me at that moment on television as I gestured toward the alley? Or perhaps, even eyeing me from the sidelines among the crowd? Was that why the teeth ended up in my mail slot?

I assumed that the murder happened elsewhere. After all, pulling teeth is much more time-consuming than pulling a trigger. The alley was simply the body dump. I found it strange that the body hadn’t been hidden in the Dumpster. That would have made it harder to discover. The display, along with mailing the
teeth to the media, suggested secrecy was not a high priority for the murderer.

When I went back to the newsroom, through the glass walls of Bryce’s office, I saw my boss spraying disinfectant on his desk where Leon Akume’s teeth had once danced.

H
olding Leon’s teeth in my hands, I hadn’t thought I might also hold his fate. That idea crossed my mind as I started to write his story.

((ANCHOR, SOUND ON TAPE))
A PACKAGE SENT TO OUR OWN RILEY SPARTZ HERE AT THE CHANNEL 3 NEWSROOM NOW HAS THE ATTENTION OF POLICE. WHAT WAS INSIDE MAY JUST MAKE YOUR JAW DROP. SHE JOINS US NOW FROM NORTH MINNEAPOLIS WITH MORE ON THIS EXCLUSIVE STORY.

As I typed the narrow script, the computer timed my copy out to about a second a line to make reading the teleprompter easier. Because the newscast was broadcast live, a technician operated the machine from the control booth so reporters and anchors could stare straight ahead at the camera. Viewers don’t trust television journalists with shifty eyes.