Diagnosis Murder 5 - The Past Tense (13 page)

"Anything interesting?"

"Nothing I don't see far too often," he said with a weary sigh. "Someone beat up a young woman and slit her throat. But it's going to get a lot of attention."

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Because it's that missing babysitter," he said. "Tess Vigland."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Dr. Barbette invited me to come along with him to the crime scene. I couldn't understand why, until he explained that Harry Trumble, the homicide detective working the Sally Pruitt case, was also assigned to the Vigland murder.

I followed the morgue wagon out to a vacant lot in Chatsworth, part of a large swath of land that had been cleared and graded for development.

It had stopped raining, but the relentless downpour of the last week had turned the unpaved streets into muddy riverbeds. A dozen dirt-splattered police cars were parked around a corner lot, which was illuminated by several huge lights powered by a loud portable generator on a trailer.

Dr. Barbette stopped his van beside the officer posted to keep people away from the scene. They exchanged a few words and the morgue wagon moved on, the officer waving me through behind it. I parked beside the morgue wagon and got out of the car, my feet immediately sinking into the thick muck. When I lifted my foot to take a step, my shoe almost came off with it.

Taking pity on me, Dr. Barbette offered me a pair of galoshes from the back Of his van. I put the galoshes on and accompanied him through the crowd of officers, police photographers, and crime lab technicians towards the body, which was covered with a white sheet.

Harry Trumble was crouched beside a crime lab technician who was carefully pouring plaster into a set of tire tracks left in the mud. The technician was a heavyset man in a too-tight crime lab jumpsuit. I moved up quietly behind them.

"I couldn't get a set of tracks better than this if I put the plaster right on the tire itself," the technician said. "They're beauties."

"Yeah, they're a real work of art, Earl," Harry grumbled. "What can you tell me about them?"

"There are thousands of different tire tread designs, and each tire wears differently," Earl said. "They are almost like fingerprints for cars, though you can change a tire and you can't change your fingertip. That doesn't—"

"People don't ask you about your work much, do they, Earl?" Harry asked.

"I could talk about tires for hours."

"That's what I'm afraid of," Harry said. "How about you just tell me about this specific tire."

"It's a rayon custom super cushion tubeless tire, probably a B. F. Goodrich Silver Town, if I'm not mistaken," Earl said. "Judging by the deep, firm impressions left by the ribs and transverse grooves, I'd say they are relatively new. Only a few hundred miles on them, tops."

"What kind of car did they come from?"

"A large passenger sedan with a front and rear track of about sixty-two inches and a wheelbase of about a hundred twenty-nine inches. I'd guess we're looking at a Cadillac or a Chrysler or a Lincoln or—"

"I get the picture," Harry interrupted, rising to his feet. That was when he saw me. The look of shock on his face was almost comical and I couldn't help smiling.

"Hello, Harry," I said.

Every muscle in his face became rigid. It was a wonder he was still able to blink.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he asked.

Before I could answer, he yelled at the officers around him, "I ordered this scene locked up tight. Who let this civilian through?"

"I did," Dr. Barbette said, peering under the sheet at the corpse. "He's found out some interesting things about Sally Pruitt's murder that I thought you'd want to hear."

Harry took a step towards me, getting in my face. I held my ground, mainly because my feet were sunk too deep into the muck for me to take a step back.

"I told you not to get involved," Harry said.

"I couldn't help it," I said.

"Seems to me I've heard that excuse before," Harry said.

He had. And the last time I said it, he decked me. I didn't think that was going to happen again, at least not at that moment.

Dr. Barbette stepped between us, forcing us apart. "I take it you two have some history together."

"We're old friends," I said.

"We used to be," Harry said. "Say whatever you came to say, Mark, and make it fast. I've got a homicide investigation to run here."

I quickly explained that Sally Pruitt and Muriel Thayer were both involved with the nursing school, Sally as an applicant to the program and Muriel as a student. They were both earning money babysitting. They were both killed during the storm. And they both had copies of the same key.

When I was done, Harry shook his head. "You came all the way out here to tell me that?"

"I thought it was significant," I said.

"That's why you're a doctor and I'm a homicide detective," Harry said. He turned to Dr. Barbette. "Was Muriel Thayer murdered?"

"No," Dr. Barbette said.

Harry looked back at me. "Kind of kills your point, doesn't it?"

"Dr. Barbette can also tell you her cause of death isn't certain," I said. "That leaves the door open to other explanations."

"Like what?" Harry asked.

I glanced at Dr. Barbette. He looked back at me blankly.

"I don't know," I said. "But look at the connections. They were both babysitters." I gestured towards Tess Vigland's corpse. "And so was she."

"Do you know how many teenage girls in this city do some babysitting?" Harry said. "I'd guess just about all of them."

"How many of them are aspiring nurses? You should see if Tess Vigland either applied to nursing school at Community General or was already in the program."

"I
should
?" Harry said. "You're telling me how to do my job now?"

"I'm afraid there's a killer using the storm as a cover for murdering young women," I said. "Nursing students who do babysitting work."

Harry shook his head. "How many years have you been investigating homicides, Mark?"

"You don't need to be a detective to see the connections," I said.

"This morning, the waitress who served me breakfast at the Pantry sneezed," Harry said. "I saw two other people in the restaurant sneeze, too. Another one coughed. You want to know what I think? The cook is sick and is breathing germs all over the food. He's infecting us all. The health department should shut the place down before the plague spreads any further."

I saw what he was getting at. Just because all those people in the restaurant were sneezing, that didn't mean they'd caught a cold from the same person at the same place. It also didn't mean they all had colds. There were too many other factors at work to make that conclusion. Calling it a plague was a ridiculous leap, way out of proportion to the evidence he'd seen.

That was the point, of course.

He wanted me to say there was no connection between the people who were sneezing and the chef. That making the jump from a sneeze to a plague was outrageous. That if he was a doctor, he'd understand that.

It was a shrewd argument on his part. Especially since he was right. And I could tell from the smug look on his face that he knew it.

From his point of view, I was guilty of taking several unrelated bits of information about several different women, combining them with some superficial and irrelevant commonalities, and assuming that a mad killer was at work.

"This is different," I said.

That lame reply was the strongest defense I could muster without revealing how I knew for a fact that I was right.

I could feel it.

It was hardly a convincing argument. I'm not entirely sure I was convinced, but I was in too deep at that point. My pride was at stake. Maybe if it had been any other cop except Harry. Anyone except the man whose friendship I'd betrayed.

But it wasn't.

"Even if I thought that you were right, which I don't, this murder doesn't fit," Harry said, pointing at the corpse lying in the mud. "This isn't an accident. Tess Vigland was abducted by someone she knew, who beat her head in, slit her throat, and dumped her body in a vacant lot. There's a second killer."

"Check her keys, see if one of them matches these," I said, offering him the bags that contained the keys.

He snatched them from me and tossed them to the nearest uniformed officer.

"Stick to medicine, Mark," Harry said. "And if I find you interfering in this case again, I'll have you arrested."

Harry stomped away, splattering mud on his pants legs.

I remained where I was. I knew I'd keep investigating and I suspected that Harry knew it, too.

"You better get yourself a good criminal lawyer," Dr. Barbette said. "Or at least a dependable bail bondsman."

"Why?" I asked.

"So you're ready when Trumble catches you snooping around."

When I finally got home, it was nearly eleven p.m. Even so, it was earlier than usual for me. Katherine was sitting on the couch, feeding Steve his bottle, his chubby little legs kicking happily.

"Take off your galoshes," she said. "You're tracking mud all over the carpet."

I looked at my dirt-caked feet and realized I now had another excuse to drop by the morgue. I took off the galoshes, my shoes, and my wet socks and left them outside the front door to dry.

I padded barefoot back into the apartment. Katherine handed me Steve and a diaper to put over my shoulder.

"Burp him for me while I heat up your dinner," she said.

I held him, patted his back, and gently bounced. He nuzzled my neck and hiccupped.

"How was your day?" I asked.

She turned on the oven and took a tuna casserole out of the refrigerator. "Not nearly as interesting as yours," she said. "But there was one nice surprise."

Katherine picked up a letter from the kitchen table. It had the Chrysler logo on the envelope.

"Your Imperial Crown Southampton is waiting for you," she said. "They can deliver it to our door or you can pick it up. I think you should go get it or have them pick you up at the hospital. If they see where we live, they may change their mind about loaning it to us for a few days."

"I didn't know you liked cars so much," I said.

"I just think it'll be fun," she said. "We can make a night on the town out of it. A long night."

She winked. Katherine almost never winked. I would have winked back, but Steve reached out and gave my nose a hard squeeze, so instead I winced.

"Tell me all about your investigation," she said. So I did, filling her in on everything I'd learned since discovering Sally Pruitt was murdered, right up through my encounter that night with Harry Trumble. The explanation carried me through dinner. When I was finished, Katherine put Steve to bed and came back to the table.

"There's one thing I don't get," she said, sitting on my lap. "How did you make the connection between Sally Pruitt and Muriel Thayer?"

I'd purposely danced around that part, but apparently not very well. I looked down at my plate, concentrating on the difficult task of rolling a pea.

"I asked Joanna, the Spicers' babysitter, if she knew Sally Pruitt," I said. "And then she mentioned how Muriel Thayer had also died."

This was my opportunity to tell Katherine about the kiss, to unburden myself of the guilt. But when I looked up at her face, I just couldn't do it.

Katherine slid an arm around my shoulder, a thoughtful expression on her face as she mulled over what I'd told her. I hoped she wasn't trying to decide if I was deceiving her or not.

"What about those other two women?" she asked.

"What other two women?"

"The two women you found in the newspaper who also died in accidents during the storm."

"I forgot all about them," I said. "Dr. Barbette got that call about Tess Vigland and before I knew it, we were racing out to the crime scene. In the rush of events, the names simply slipped my mind."

"Is the list in your pocket?" she asked. "You better take it out now and put it in your wallet for safekeeping or it might accidentally get run through the wash."

"Good idea," I said. I pulled the list out of my pocket and glanced at the two names again. One was Ingrid Willis nineteen, who slipped and fell down a flight of stairs outside her apartment, breaking her neck. The other was Clara Cohen, eighteen, who'd been buried alive in a mudslide in her backyard when a retaining wall on the hillside gave way.

"So Harry doesn't know about them," she said.

"I don't think so," I said. "I certainly didn't tell him."

"Then it's up to you, Mark."

"What's up to me?"

"To find out if Ingrid Willis and Clara Cohen were nursing students," she said. "And if they were working as babysitters, too."

"You want me to keep investigating, even after what Harry said to me?"

"Forget about Harry," she said. "He's not going to arrest you. Because if he does, he'll have to deal with me."

"I think he'd like that," I said.

"I doubt it. He blames you for stealing me from him, which doesn't say much about my own free will. He does it because it's a whole lot easier than accepting that he lost me all on his own."

"What does that have to do with whether or not he'll follow through on his threat?"

"Because if he tries to hurt you in any way, I'll remind him of all the reasons I left him for you and why you're a better man than he is," she said. "And that's the last thing he wants to hear."

"But that still doesn't explain why you want me to keep investigating."

"You mean besides the fact that you're going to do it anyway?"

I nodded.

"Because Harry is too stubborn to listen to you, and if you're right and nobody does anything, more women are going to die."

I could feel Katherine's hand shaking ever so slightly on my shoulder. I put my arms around her and held her close to me. She was shaking all over. She was terrified.

"There's no reason to be afraid," I said.

"What's going to happen when he finds out what you're doing?"

"You just told me what's going to happen," I said. "If anybody should be afraid, it's Harry."