Diagnosis Murder 5 - The Past Tense (2 page)

So he grimaced against the stench and crouched beside the mound of seaweed, scattering a thousand flies and infuriating the gulls, which continued to hover low over him, squawking their fury at his intrusion.

Using a stick of driftwood, he brushed away dozens of hungry sand crabs and carefully parted the strands of sea weed to get a better look. First he saw the long, graceful fin, tapering to a fantail at its point. Then, as he cleared more kelp, he saw a mane of fiery red hair.

For a moment, he simply stared in disbelief.

It was a mermaid.

Her face was ghostly pale, almost translucent. Her eyes were wide and green, her lips slightly parted, her slender throat slit from ear to ear.

* * *

It started to rain again just as the crime scene techs finished erecting the tent over the clump of seaweed where the woman's body had been found.

While she was being kept dry, scores of officers and forensic investigators were getting drenched as they moved slowly up and down the beach, looking for clues in a race with the rain and tide, both of which threatened to wash away any remaining evidence.

Dr. Amanda Bentley, the medical examiner, squatted beside the body, waving away the swarm of flies and sand crabs that stubbornly refused to give up their claim to the corpse.

"She isn't a mermaid. She's wearing a costume," Amanda said. "And those big openings on either side of her throat aren't gills."

"I figured that much out for myself," Mark said, studying the body.

The only reason that he was still allowed to be at the crime scene was that Dr. Amanda Bentley worked for him, too. She was staff pathologist at Community General Hospital, where her lab doubled as the adjunct county morgue. Amanda not only juggled two jobs but also was a single parent, raising a six-year-old son. And she did it all with seemingly boundless energy and enthusiasm. Mark couldn't figure out how she pulled it off.

"It's not going to be easy determining time of death," Amanda said, "but judging by the lividity, the shriveling of the skin, and the lack of bloating, I'd say she's been in the water no more than eight to ten hours. I'll know more after I get her on the table."

"This may come as a shock to you," a familiar voice said, "but I'm actually the homicide detective in charge of the investigation."

They turned to see Steve Sloan entering the tent, water dripping from his umbrella, his hair surprisingly dry. His badge was clipped to his belt.

"I know it's just a small technicality," Steve said, "but shouldn't you be saving your report for me?"

Amanda shrugged, tipping her head towards Mark. "He was here first."

"That's only because the body washed up in his front yard," Steve said.

"Isn't it your front yard, too?" she asked. "Come to think of it, weren't you wearing those same clothes yesterday when I saw you at the beheading?"

"
Beheading
?" Mark asked.

"Never mind," Steve said.

"This couple, married for thirty years, is sitting down to dinner," Amanda said. "The husband turns to his wife and says that the casserole she made for dinner is too salty. So his wife does the natural thing. She smacks her husband with a cast-iron frying pan, cuts off his head with an electric carving knife, and tosses it out the window."

"What happened to the casserole?" Mark asked.

"She's not one to waste food. She kept it and offered to serve it to us while we worked the crime scene." Amanda glanced at Steve. "I didn't think it was salty, did you?"

Steve shook his head.

Mark stared at his son in disbelief. "You ate the casserole?"

"It wasn't the casserole that killed the guy," Steve said.

"In a way it was," Amanda said.

"Could we please move on?" Steve said.

"You're right," Mark said. "Let's stick to the point. Steve spent the night with his girlfriend."

Steve groaned.

"What girlfriend?" Amanda said. "He's never mentioned a girlfriend. Who is she?"

"Her name is Lissy," Mark said. "She used to work nights as a technical support operator until her job got outsourced to India. Now she's studying for her real estate license. He made her a coffee table. Not from scratch, of course. One of those snap-together things from Ikea."

"They don't just snap together," Steve said. "There's fifty parts you've got to assemble with hundreds of special screws and interlocking bolt thingies using only this tiny little tool they give you that's impossible to get a good grip on."

Mark and Amanda stared at him, making him feel self-conscious. He cleared his throat.

"Do you think we could discuss something else now?" Steve motioned to the body. "Like, for instance, this dead mermaid

"She's not a mermaid," Mark said. "It's a costume."

'Thank you, Dad," Steve replied. "It's nice to know I won't have to go to Atlantis to interview suspects. What can you tell me, Amanda?"

"I'm not a forensics expert, but I'm certain this wasn't where she was killed."

"Because there are no signs that she bled out here?" Steve asked. "The blood could have been washed away by the surf."

"It's not the lack of blood," Amanda said. "It's the body. She's covered with postmortem scrapes and some deep, ragged gashes. She didn't get them from being splashed by the tide on a soft, sandy beach. This body was slammed against a rocky shoreline a few times before washing up here. I'd bet she was in the ocean most of the night."

Mark sighed. "Which means that for the moment the victim herself is the only evidence we have to work with to solve her murder."

"We?" Steve asked.

"She did wash up in my front yard," Mark said.

"That doesn't mean you've got the right to start investigating her murder."

"Of course it does," Mark said.

"I have the strangest feeling I've experienced this conversation before," Amanda said.

"Send that mermaid costume down to the crime lab as soon as you can, okay?" Steve said.

"Sure," Amanda replied. "If you like, I can also finish your end of the argument for you. I think I know all the lines by heart. I can even tell you who wins."

"I know who wins," Steve said, leading his father out of the tent, putting his arm over his shoulder and sheltering him from the rain under his umbrella. They headed for the beach house.

"You've got some kind of luck, Dad."

"What do you mean?"

"A couple months ago you walked in on a murder at the house next door. Now a corpse washes up on the beach, practically on your porch."

"Our porch," Mark corrected.

"If I was one of your neighbors," Steve said, "I'd move."

CHAPTER TWO

Russell "Cork" Corcoran liked to tell the rookie life guards under his command that he was the inspiration for David Hasselhoff's character on
Baywatch
. He told Steve Sloan the same thing as they drove in his life guard patrol truck to the southern edge of Point Dume state beach. Steve would have had an easier time believing Cork's story if David Hasselhoff was thirty pounds overweight and tried to hide a bald spot under six wispy strands of hair combed over from the other side of his head.

The rain had stopped, but it was just an intermission while the scenery changed in the meteorological show. Dark, heavy clouds were lumbering up to their marks onstage.

"Normally the currents run north to south," Cork explained as they bounced along the deserted beach in the bright yellow pickup, surfboards and rescue floats strapped to the bed. "But if there's a southern swell, like with the storm we've had the last couple of days, the current runs the opposite way."

After leaving his father's house, Steve had contacted the county lifeguards, hoping someone over there could use tide tables and currents to help him pinpoint where the dead woman might have been dumped into the sea by her killer. Cork had volunteered for the job.

"So you're guessing the body was dumped south of where it was found on Broad Beach," Steve said.

"There's no guesswork involved. I've been doing this job twenty years," Cork said. "I can feel how the currents are moving just by looking at the water."

"So if we know the direction the currents were moving, then it's just a matter of calculating the speed and working backward from her approximate time of death."

"The lateral current runs about a quarter knot per hour," Cork said. "That's about the equivalent of one mile per hour. But then you got to figure in the wind speed, which is going to have a much bigger impact on how far, how fast, and in what direction the body floated."

"How fast was the wind blowing?"

"Fifteen, twenty miles per hour," Cork said. "But you've also got to factor in the tide and lots of other variables. For instance, when there's a southern swell, the current moves a little faster. Plus the wind speed isn't constant; it tends to change based on the time of day. The wind also changes direction depending on what corner of Santa Monica Bay you're talking about."

"This is starting to sound like one of those tricky math questions we used to get in grade school," Steve said. "I flunked math."

"Me too," Cork said.

"Great," Steve said. "You happen to have a calculator in this truck?"

"I don't rely on numbers anyway," Cork said. "I prefer instinct."

Cork stopped the truck at the southernmost edge of sand, where the beach gave way to large, jagged boulders that spilled out into the sea, creating a natural breakwater. They got out of the vehicle and trudged a few feet to the shoreline, close enough to feel the ocean spray as the waves crashed against the rocks.

"Where we're standing, the wind runs west to east," Cork said. "My instincts tell me the girl had to be dumped here."

"If the wind blows east," Steve said, "wouldn't that drive the body right back to the beach?"

"You'd think so," Cork said. "But the bay curves in the same direction, so the wind actually runs parallel to the coastline, which, given the factors at play twelve hours ago, would have carried the body north."

Steve wasn't sure he understood Cork's thinking, but his instincts told him this was the right place.

It was a great spot to dispose of a body. There was a public parking lot that ran most of the length of the beach, which would have been pitch-black and empty last night, particularly in the midst of a storm. The location provided easy access and good cover, with the added benefit that the wind, the rain, and the tide would probably wash away any evidence the killer inadvertently left behind.

Steve glanced at the waves, churning and frothing against the boulders. It wasn't just his instincts, or tide tables, or lateral currents that made this spot feel right to him. The location fit with Amanda's theory that the victim's postmortem abrasions came from being dumped along a rocky shoreline.

Still, it was only his gut feeling. He didn't have any proof that this was actually the place where the woman's body had been tossed into the sea.

He looked back at the parking lot. It was about a hundred yards from the lot to the rocks. Either she had walked out to the rocks and then was killed or she was dragged or carried across the sand. If she was dragged, there was a slim chance that some evidence might have been left behind that hadn't been washed away, particularly higher up the beach away from the surf.

That was when Steve noticed the man moving methodically along the beach, waving a metal detector over the sand in front of him, stopping every so often to dig with his sifter for whatever treasure was registering on his earphones.

Steve looked at Cork, then gestured towards the beach comber. "You know that guy?"

"No, but guys like him always come out after daybreak, particularly after a hot weekend or a major storm," Cork said. "They're looking for things like diamond rings lost by sunbathers or gold doubloons washed up from sunken Spanish galleons."

"Does that happen often?"

"About as often as you find dead mermaids," Cork said. Steve thanked Cork for his help, asked him to stick around for the evidence collection team, and then marched over to the man with the metal detector.

The beachcomber had a deep tan, a scraggly beard, and long, matted hair that looked like a bird's nest. He wore four filthy shirts on top of one another and an oversized peacoat that hung from his wiry shoulders like a cape. His dirt-encrusted Top-Siders were held together with silver duct tape. His socks were mismatched, one black and one brown. He was totally focused on his task, his eyes locked on the dial of his detector, the sounds of the out side world dampened by his headphones. He didn't notice Steve until he swept his detector over the detective's feet.

The beachcomber looked up, startled, as if rudely awakened from a deep sleep.

Steve flashed his badge and motioned for the man to remove his headphones.

"Lieutenant Steve Sloan, LAPD. Have you been out here long?"

"Every morning," the man said in a voice that sounded like it was filtered through broken glass.

"I meant today."

"Since dawn," the man said. "Why?"

"I'm going to need to confiscate whatever you've found."

"It's mine," the man said, straightening up and puffing out his chest. "The Supreme Court ruled in Benjamin v. Spruce that property is deemed lost when it is unintentionally separated from the dominion of its owners. When items are accidentally dropped in any public place or thoroughfare, or anyplace where the inference can be made that such item was left there unknowingly, it is considered lost in a legal sense."

"You're a lawyer?" Steve asked incredulously.

"I spent fourteen years in the Disney legal affairs department before I was disbarred," the man said. He spit on the sand, then continued, "Furthermore title to such items belongs to the finder against all the world except the true owner."

"So in other words," Steve said, "finders keepers, losers weepers."

"In a crude sense, yes," the man said.

"What does the Supreme Court say about taking evidence from the scene of a murder?"

The man frowned, reached into his jacket, and pulled out a crumpled and damp paper bag.