Evidence of Murder (6 page)

Frank stopped at a curve in the walk, where the land jutted out slightly, and turned his back to the water. “There she is.”

Theresa saw the shirt first, a flash of brilliant aqua not found in the northeastern woods, just visible through a mesh of pine boughs and saplings. Only after staring a while could she distinguish the head, the face nearly as white as the snow, and the dark pants. “Who found her?”

“Jogger. Who else? Joggers and hikers find more bodies than anyone…it would put me right off that activity, if I were them. Lucky for me I never exercise. This trail had iced over, kept most people off it all week except for a few crazy people like you who run in subfreezing temps.”

“But they wouldn’t have their heads turned toward the woods. They’d be concentrating on the icy path, or looking at the lake.” Theresa turned again to the water; too bright or not, she had trouble keeping her eyes off it for any length of time. The brisk, slightly fishy air meant that her family was on vacation in the years before her father died, that they were up at Catawba Island for a whole week, and she and Frank and a passel of other cousins had nothing to do but swim, suntan, and roller-skate.

If summer ever came, perhaps she’d get out her scuba gear and dive on the wreck of the
Dundee
, sunk off the coast. Maybe. “Do we have a path we’re taking to the body?”

“I don’t know where the jogger stepped. Or the jogger’s jogging partner.”

Theresa breathed out, a
pfff
of irritation.

“Sparky here picked the right side of this growth to walk around, and I stuck with him. That’s all I can tell you.”

“I didn’t see any footprints,” the young CPD officer told her. The tip of his nose had turned red, catching up to the hue in his ears. Half of her wanted to tell him to wear a scarf, and the other half wondered, absently, if he was single. “I just went in, established death, checked for ID, came out, and called it in.”

“EMS?”

“I didn’t call them. An EKG wouldn’t have helped.”

“Good for you.” The fewer people in the crime scene, the better. She set her cases on the paved walking trail, selecting only her camera and a plastic ruler. “Did you find any ID on her?”

“No.”

She asked her cousin, “Then what makes you think that’s her?”

Frank looked grimmer than he had a moment before; the excitement of the find, of having his suspicions confirmed, had worn off. “You’ll see.”

She began to approach what was left of Jillian Perry.

Thin branches, stiffened by the cold, brushed against her legs and snapped under her feet, covering the ground thickly enough to prevent footprints. At least three men had traveled this area, but the growth had not meshed that thoroughly and only an occasional branch hung awry. Four feet from the body she stopped, since her ankles snagged on a wild blackberry bush. She shook off its embrace and aimed her camera.

The dead woman sat at the base of an oak tree, its trunk supporting her back, her skull nestled into a slight hollow created by the undulating bark. The aqua color belonged to a sweatshirt with BAHAMAS embroidered in white across the chest; a pink collar poked out from underneath it. Her legs, in dark blue jeans, stretched straight out, and the toes of the white tennis shoes pointed neatly upward. Her hands were empty and lay loose at her sides. No gloves, no coat, no hat. Either she had already been dead before arriving in the woods, or didn’t much care that she soon would be.

Why didn’t you care? Theresa wondered. Did you even think about your daughter?

In summer, by now, her flesh would be purplish, bloated, beginning to slip and smell very bad, but the winter cold had slowed decomposition to a crawl. The body began to break down from the inside out, causing a darkening under the bluish-white skin, but the outer shell remained intact. The kinds of animals who wouldn’t mind gnawing on dead flesh were all hibernating or staying deeper in the woods, away from the icy winds, near easier sources of food such as garbage cans. Jillian Perry didn’t exactly resemble Sleeping Beauty, but she could have looked a lot worse.

And it was Jillian. If the color and the length of the hair didn’t convince Theresa, the necklace spelling out JILLIAN in gold wire would have. It rested on the sweatshirt’s neckband; the short chain had been pulled free of the pink collar and the sweatshirt. Jillian had been left there like a piece of luggage, the tag turned outward for easy identification.

A faint smell made its way to Theresa’s nostrils as she grew closer, the unmistakable sign that organic cells had succumbed to entropy.

Why did she assume that someone had left Jillian there? The aqua sweatshirt and jeans had no blemish, no sign that she had been shot or stabbed. No blood stained the blond hair. Theresa pulled at the collar. The neck, with its telltale necklace, had not been throttled or even bruised. There was no reason to think that Jillian hadn’t walked out into the woods under her own power, to purposely end her life. Freezing to death was supposedly painless and, perhaps important to a model, not disfiguring. Shooting or stabbing would tear the flesh, hanging would distort it to grotesque shapes. Even overdoses produced messy vomiting. But this left the victim looking, aside from the skin color, serene.

Jillian had probably killed herself. Case closed. At least the body had been recovered, so her family wouldn’t have to spend the rest of their lives wondering. All Theresa had to do now was finish her photos, call the body snatchers to collect the remains, get a cup of hot coffee, and call it a day.

Except she didn’t believe it. Not because Jillian, a beautiful, married mother of a baby girl, had everything to live for. That hadn’t stopped others before and wouldn’t again. They were only a three-mile walk from Jillian’s apartment and the girl was in good shape. She could easily have done that—but not without a coat or hat, not without getting frostbite, and her ears and nose showed no sign of it. Theresa’s cheeks were already tingling.

It also seemed odd that Jillian would leave her necklace in view but not carry any ID—if she wanted to be identified, why not keep her driver’s license in her pocket? And freezing might not immediately disfigure her, but if her body remained undiscovered, a thaw or two would reduce it to soup. But mostly, Theresa didn’t believe it because she had felt the effects of overexposure at too many northern Ohio bus stops, football games, and sled rides. The last few minutes of freezing to death might be painless, but the hour or so leading up to it would be sheer agony. Jillian would have really wanted to die, which didn’t quite jibe with the image of some flighty, selfish, pretty girl.

Either there was much more to Jillian than Theresa knew, or someone else had helped the woman to die, to abandon both her own life and that of her infant daughter’s.

After the first battery of photographs, Theresa donned gloves and turned Jillian Perry’s right wrist outward. The nails were unbroken, perfectly manicured, without blood or even dirt underneath them. The left hand matched the right, an impressive diamond solitaire winking from the fourth finger. Theresa sheathed each in a brown paper bag, pulling it tight around the wrist with red evidence tape. Her toes had gone numb.

Twigs snapped behind her as Frank approached along their set route. “What do you think? The setup has some similarities to the other hooker, but I didn’t see a mark on this one. You find anything?”

“No. Of course she could have a syringe sticking out of her arm, for all I know, but we’ll have to wait until she’s undressed. I doubt it, though. I’ve seen a lot of overdoses, and she hasn’t got the look.” She pulled up the bottom of the sweatshirt, just enough for a peek at the pink pullover beneath it. Sections had begun to darken as decomposition fluid seeped from the body, but she saw no defects from bullets or knives. At least in the front.

“So you think pretty Jillian decided to end it all?” Frank asked. He sounded disappointed, either in Jillian’s abandonment of her family or the loss of a reason to arrest George Panapoulos.

“I think I’m going to treat her as a homicide until I decide she’s not.”

Frank digested this as Theresa taped the front surfaces of Jillian’s sweatshirt and jeans. The cold lessened the adhesive qualities of the tape and, in light of the fact that the body had been exposed to the elements for days, made it enormously unlikely that any useful trace evidence would be found, but the process was quick, cheap, and nondestructive. Without a table or work area handy, she didn’t bother pasting the pieces of tape to sheets of clear acetate paper, merely folded the pieces back on themselves and dropped each into a hastily labeled manila envelope.

“She hasn’t got a mark on her,” Frank repeated. “Unlike Sarah Taylor. But one was a prostitute and one’s an escort.”

“Sarah was malnourished and poor. Jillian had found her way to a different world.” She combed her fingers through the detritus around the body, lumbering around in short hops, like a short sumo wrestler; ungraceful in the extreme, but she could not kneel or she’d have wet pants as well as cold feet. She had even clipped a few branches from the blackberry bush—if it had caught on her clothes, it might have snatched at someone else’s. She found only a crushed Coke can that appeared to have been there since the last millennium, a gray plastic ring about an inch in diameter, and a broken piece of red rubber, the same width as a heavy-duty rubber band. She bagged and tagged these items, doubting that they would relate to Jillian’s death. They were not on a remote mountaintop; over two and a half million people called Cleveland home, and the Edgewater beach and park were popular, even in the winter months. She could probably find debris from human beings in every square inch of the wooded area if she looked long enough.

When she had searched the ground with reasonable thoroughness—reasonable defined as longer than she wanted to but not so long that she shrieked with boredom—she turned Jillian Perry onto her side. Frank helped her, but it was not difficult given Jillian’s slender frame and the assistance of gravity. Theresa quickly taped the back surface of the clothing as well. Another peek under the clothes—not difficult since the pink polo-type shirt had not been tucked into the jeans—confirmed their suspicions: Jillian Perry had not been shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned.

Frank stood up, rubbing his arms, his mustache framed by red cheeks. “Damn, it’s cold.”

“I’d still rather be here. A brilliant forensic scientist hired by the defense for their poor railroaded client is visiting our lab as we speak.”

“I take it he’s not a buddy of yours. She could have gotten here on foot from her place,” Frank thought aloud. “It’s not even three miles by car. Less if she walked along the train tracks.”

“I know.”

“She disappeared Monday afternoon. The high that day was six degrees. How long does it take someone to freeze to death?”

“A long time. Overnight would be enough. But if she came here in the afternoon, why didn’t she go farther into the woods? She’s visible from the path. Someone could have found her, even on a cold day. You said yourself there’s always some crazy hiker around.”

“She
is
visible from the path, and still it took five days for someone to notice her.”

“But it’s a risk.”

“Maybe she wasn’t very good at thinking things through. Maybe she was too drunk or high to think clearly.”

Theresa looked around, and decided that she had done all that could be done at the scene. She pulled out her Nextel to call for the ambulance crew—i.e., the body snatchers. “We’ll just have to wait on tox for that. No drugs or alcohol at the apartment, you said?”

“A little Michelob Lite. Of course he had time to clean up for our visit.”

“Or throw the stuff out, if he knew she wasn’t coming back.”

Frank considered this, then shook his head. “Nah. The husband’s got no record past a speeding ticket or two. If she’s got drugs in her system, then my money is on Georgie. She was lighting up for old time’s sake with her boss and OD’d. He needed to get rid of the body and dumped it here.”

“Then it’s not murder, exactly.”

“I know.”

“And there are a lot more convenient places for someone on West Twenty-fifth to dump a body, starting with the Dumpsters at the West Side Market and moving about a thousand feet to the river.”

“So what are we looking at here?” He stood next to the oak, his face turned to the silent woman at his feet. Frustration tinged his voice; they both knew that without more information, they could ask questions of each other from then until the next fall and not be able to answer a single one.

“A little girl who’s never going to know her mommy,” Theresa told him.

The autopsy suite in the sixty-year-old medical examiner’s office, scrubbed every afternoon, was the cleanest room in the building. Or at least it appeared to be—the staff took general precautions against cross-contamination but beyond that placed no particular emphasis on sterility. The patients opened up on these tables did not have to worry about infection.

The room held three stainless-steel tables, two sinks, a central floor drain; small red ceramic tiles covered the floor and half of the walls. Unless a victim’s organs were currently open, it did not smell bad, more like the humid odor of a seedy bar during the day. Autopsies were performed one after the other until the doctors ran out of candidates; sometimes this would be early in the day and sometimes late. The dieners, or autopsy assistants, would then clean the room and go home, a system that provided every incentive to work quickly and efficiently.

Any new deceased who arrived after cleanup joined the queue for the following morning’s work. Jillian Perry made it in under the wire.

“Could have been an early day.” Jesse, a skinny black man who didn’t look old enough to have a driver’s license, absently hosed the body as he grumbled. He did not seem at all enamored of the beautiful model; a hot dead girl was no match for paid time off.

Undressed, Jillian’s body continued to show no signs of violence. No needle marks, no injuries, not so much as a bruise. Lividity, of course, on the buttocks and backs of the legs, but Theresa expected that. She and the pathologist, Dr. Christine Johnson, had already collected fingernail scrapings, a rape kit, and a few hairs and fibers from the skin. Now the ebony-hued doctor held a small but brilliant flashlight up to the mouth.