Diagnosis Murder 5 - The Past Tense (4 page)

"I'm not talking about the condition of the corpse," she said.

"You're talking about the message she sends," Mark said softly.

Steve looked at his father. "You mean with the mermaid costume?"

"There's more than that," Mark said, keeping his eyes on Amanda. "Isn't there?"

She nodded. "This is one I'm not going to forget very easily."

Amanda picked up a folder and reviewed her report, reading the salient facts aloud. "The victim is an unidentified Caucasian female, approximately seventeen to twenty years old. She's a brunette. Her hair was colored red shortly before or after she was killed."

"Which was when?" Steve asked.

"Last night, most likely between nine p.m. and midnight. The time she spent in the cold water makes it difficult for me to pinpoint a more precise time of death. But I can tell you she was dead before she went in the water."

"Was there any sign of sexual assault?" Steve asked.

"Not that I can tell," Amanda said. "But again, the immersion in the water, getting tossed around by the surf, could have removed any traces of semen."

"Any drugs or alcohol in her system?" Mark asked.

Amanda seemed to hesitate for an instant before she replied. "I found succinic acid in her blood and in her brain tissue."

Mark stared at her, beginning to understand why this case was going to haunt her, and perhaps him as well, for some time to come.

"Any residual traces of anesthesia?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"Hold on. Not everyone in this room went to medical school," Steve said. "I have no idea what any of this means, and I can tell from looking at your faces that it means a lot. Let's start with succinic acid—what is it?"

"It's a metabolized by-product of succinylcholine, a neuromuscular paralytic. It's usually administered through IV or injection to induce paralysis as part of general anesthesia and intubation," Mark said. "It's also used to control someone having continuous, violent seizures that are preventing the patient from breathing. The drug works almost immediately to relax the muscles and make it easier for the anesthesiologist to intubate the patient and place him on a ventilator."

"What happens if you're given this drug without anesthesia?" Steve asked.

"She would have been wide awake," Amanda said, "but completely paralyzed, unable to move or speak."

"Or breathe," Mark added. "If she wasn't immediately intubated and hooked up to a ventilator, she would have died of asphyxiation within a few minutes."

"You mean she didn't die from getting her throat slit?" Steve said.

"Yes and no," Amanda replied, her voice uneven. "The killer slashed open her trachea and her esophagus. It was a fatal wound. The angle of the incision indicates she was attacked from the front. She was facing her killer."

"I didn't see any defensive wounds," Steve said.

"That's because she doesn't have any," Amanda replied.

Steve looked at Amanda. "You're saying that while she was unable to breathe or move, this bastard looked her in the eye and cut her throat?"

She nodded.

"If she was going to die of asphyxiation anyway," Steve said, "why did he slit her throat, too?"

"To add to her agony," Mark said, his face tight. "And her terror."

They were silent for a long moment, all of them staring down at the unidentified woman in front of them and imagining the horror she must have experienced in the moments before her death.

"There's more," Amanda said, almost whispering. Mark glanced up at her, shocked. What more could the killer possibly have done to this poor woman?

"When I opened her up, I found this in her stomach," Amanda said. "It was coated with bacon fat to make it easier to swallow."

She held up a sealed evidence bag that contained a tiny black object, rectangular with one clipped corner, that was about the size and thickness of a priority mail postage stamp.

It was a memory card, the kind used in a digital camera.

CHAPTER FOUR

Steve took the memory card back to the police lab to get it cleaned up and, if possible, extract any data that might be encoded on it.

Mark remained in the morgue, examining the corpse himself, going over every detail of Amanda's autopsy and reviewing all of the various test results. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but something was nagging at him, something beyond the horror of what the killer had done to his victim.

Why did he dress her in a mermaid costume?

Why did he paralyze her and slit her throat?

Why did he dump her body in the ocean?

Whatever was on the memory card could hold some of the answers, but Mark couldn't shake the feeling that the questions added up to something else on their own. Even more troubling, in some strange way it felt familiar, as if somewhere deep inside he already knew the answers.

He'd never seen a dead woman dressed as a mermaid before, or anything like it. Was the murder symbolic of something else he'd heard about or encountered?

It was frustrating and infuriating.

While he conducted his examination, Amanda hardly acknowledged he was there, concentrating her attention on other autopsies. He didn't take it personally. He couldn't blame her for wanting to distance herself from the horror this dead woman represented.

Mark also knew Amanda wasn't offended by his reexamining the body and double-checking her conclusions. They'd been working together for too long, and respected each other too much, for any such resentment.

He found only one thing Amanda had missed—the puncture wound where the victim was given the lethal injection of succinylcholine. It was in her back, near her shoulder, suggesting that this was one attack the killer made from behind, taking the woman by surprise.

Jesse came in around four o'clock, at the end of his shift, eager to know the latest developments in the case. Mark was glad to fill him in because it gave him a chance to go over all the details for himself once more and get a fresh perspective at the same time.

"Whoever did this is one major sicko," Jesse said. "I don't know how he ever got a medical degree."

"What makes you think he has one?" Amanda asked.

"He had to get succinylcholine somewhere," Jesse said. "Which means he's either a doctor, a nurse, a paramedic, or a pharmacist."

"Or knows someone who is," Mark said. "Or he works in a hospital or pharmacy or in a nonmedical capacity that gives him access to drugs and the opportunity to steal them."

"What makes you think the killer is a he?" Amanda asked. "It could be a woman. She might have used succinylcholine because she didn't have the strength to subdue her victim any other way."

Amanda's phone rang and she answered it. She spoke for only a moment, then hung up.

"That was Steve," Amanda said. "They were able to pull a file off the memory card. It's a picture."

Amanda and Jesse got in their cars and followed Mark back to his beach house. There was no way either of them was going to miss whatever discoveries Steve had to share with his father. Mark didn't discourage them from coming. He had a feeling that soon he was going to need all the help he could get to solve this mystery.

While reexamining the body, Mark had come to a grim conclusion he didn't want to share, at least not yet. Who ever killed this woman took too much perverse delight in it to be satisfied with just one kill.

There would be more.

When Mark arrived at the beach house with Amanda and Jesse in tow, Steve didn't seem surprised. In fact, he seemed to be expecting them. He had a laptop on the kitchen table and four chairs already arranged at one end so they could all have a clear view of the screen.

"I've copied the file onto a CD," Steve said. "It's a photograph in JPEG format."

"What's it a picture of?" Jesse asked.

"That's the bizarre thing." Steve clicked a few keys, and the front page from an old issue of the Los Angeles Times appeared on-screen. The date on the mast head was Friday, February 9, 1962. The major headline was L.A. DECLARED DISASTER AREA AFTER SIX-DAY DOWN POUR. TWENTY-ONE DEAD. Mark started to read the article.

Governor Brown has declared Los Angeles County a disaster area in the wake of six days of unrelenting rain, which has dropped three inches of water on the Southland and claimed 21 lives.

Mudslides accounted for three deaths alone on Thursday in the San Fernando Valley, where two children and one woman were swept away when the rain-swelled Los Angeles River overflowed its banks.

The children, Robert Reese, age 9, and his sister Ginny Reese, age 12, were rescued by Los Angeles firefighters, but the woman drowned. The victim's identity is being withheld pending notification of next of kin.

A downed power line in Reseda is blamed for the death of a motorist, who was electrocuted stepping out of his car on Balboa Avenue. Arnold T Tyler, 27, leaves behind a wife and two children, all of whom were inside the vehicle and witnessed his death.

Rising waters at two man-made lakes threatened to spill over dams and inundate the town of Palmdale, and electricity in downtown Pasadena was knocked out for six hours when water submerged underground power lines.

Many sections of the county, particularly new subdivisions, were flooded, forcing evacuations of residents from their homes in Woodland Hills, Encino, and Northridge.

A tree crushed a home in Westwood, while mud-slides in the Holly Hills swept three homes off their canyon perches.

Two schools in Culver City were closed when a six-inch high-pressure natural gas line was snapped in a sinkhole on Washington Boulevard.

Numerous city and county streets were closed to traffic due to the downpour.

Mark stopped reading midway through the article and took a seat at the table, while the others remained standing, huddled around the laptop. Suddenly, he could feel each day of the last forty years, as if they were bricks stacked on his shoulders.

He knew why the dead woman's hair was dyed red.

"What does that newspaper have to do with anything?" Jesse asked.

"Obviously it means something," Amanda said, "or the killer wouldn't have put it on a memory card and made his victim swallow it."

Mark knew why the dead woman was dressed as a mermaid.

"That newspaper was published forty years ago today," Steve said. "And it was raining then, too."

"Maybe that's not the story the killer wants us to see," Amanda said. "Maybe it's one of these other articles on the front page."

Mark knew why the killer slit the woman's throat.

"We're checking out each article," Steve said. "Starting with all the people whose names are mentioned in the stories."

"You think the victim or the killer is related to one of them?" Amanda asked.

"At this point I don't know what to think," Steve said, turning to his dad. "Do you?"

Mark looked up at his son and surprised him by nodding. "It's no coincidence that this body washed up in front of my house this morning. I was supposed to find her. She was killed for me."

Steve saw his father's ashen face and shaking hands and got very worried. His father had never looked so tired. So old. So afraid.

"Jesse?" Steve said, but the young doctor was already moving to Mark's side.

"Mark, are you all right?" Jesse asked, putting his hand to Mark's forehead. "Do you feel any dizziness or pain?"

"I'm fine," Mark said.

"You don't look it," Jesse said.

"Neither would you if you were responsible for the horrible things that were done to that poor, innocent woman," Mark said.

Jesse turned to Amanda. "Could you please get him a glass of water and a cold towel?"

She nodded and hurried to the kitchen.

"You didn't kill her, Dad," Steve said.

"Not directly," Mark replied. "But this newspaper clipping proves it all has to do with me—and a series of events that began on this day in 1962."

Steve pulled out a chair from the table and sat down next to his father. "What happened, Dad?"

Amanda set the glass of water in front of Mark. He took a long sip, then faced his son.

"Forty-three years ago today, my life changed," Mark said. "I didn't know it at the time, but I was about to solve my first murder."

CHAPTER FIVE

1962

On the rare occasions when it rains in Southern California, it feels like the end of the world, certainly for a doctor struggling to keep up with all the people injured in the floods, mudslides, drownings, electrocutions, and countless car accidents.

I was a young GP on a rotation that had me doing time all over Community General. In February 1962, I was in the middle of a three-month stint in the emergency room. I was on call every other night, which on paper meant I was on for thirty-six hours and off for twelve. I was supposed to show up at the hospital at six thirty a.m. and leave the next day at seven p.m., then return twelve hours later and start all over again.

But that's not the way it really worked. I could never get out of the hospital before midnight. There were too many patients and too much paperwork, especially during a major rainstorm. So I actually worked at least forty hours at a stretch with about seven hours off.

In those seven short hours of freedom, I had to squeeze in one good meal, a shower, and some sleep, which you can manage if you're a single guy. It's not so easy when you're a newlywed with a wife, who naturally appreciates a little attention, and a newborn son, who wakes up every two hours, crying to be fed or have his diaper changed.