Rite of Wrongs (6 page)

T
EN

Wednesday, 9:00 a.m.

Miriam arrived at the county’s forensic-services department only minutes before Ballard. Fiona Wick, one of the two forensic pathologists in the office that served four adjoining counties, was ready and waiting. She’d already switched out her lab coat for protective clothing and had Gina Gardner’s body on the slab.

On a supply shelf just inside the door sat Fiona’s Louboutin black-patent platforms that Miriam wished she had a reason to wear. She was only three years younger than Fiona, but the other woman was so chic, Miriam always felt like an awkward tween when around her—not because of anything Fiona said or did but because at thirty-eight years old, Miriam wasn’t sure she’d ever have her own ducks in anything resembling a row.

She might be degreed, and able to follow bread crumbs better than Cumberbatch’s Holmes, but her personal life was a wreck. She was the first to admit it. No reason not to; it was the absolute truth. And she really had no business judging her siblings because of it.

It was also why she worked as many hours out of the day as she could. She needed to keep busy, to stay on the move. To think. To act. Slowing down allowed the bits and pieces of herself she kept on the perimeter of her life to creep into the day-to-day.

Truths like how she’d ended up thirty-eight with a bad tequila habit and emotionally alone—though that one was easy. The genesis was in her choice to work her way through grad school not as a waitress or barista but answering calls for a suicide-prevention hotline.

A bad day there had made it easy to justify the drink. A lot of bad days there had made it easy to get out from behind a desk and become a police officer. She was proud of the fact that in the heat of the moment and face-to-face, she’d saved more lives beyond the suicidal.

The morgue and autopsy suite was in the basement of Union Park’s only hospital—a corner of the basement at that. A far corner, even, which meant a long,
long
walk from the elevator down the brightly lit and overly sanitized hallway’s squeaky-clean tile floor.

Clean was good, but it was still a morgue, with dead bodies cracked open, internal organs removed, and secrets and dignity thrown to the wind. Not to mention the blood.

So much blood.

Once inside, having made eye contact with Fiona and shared a cursory nod, Miriam took up her usual position as far away from the stainless-steel table as she could get.

She did her best not to shiver as she leaned against the cold counter near the exit. She didn’t need to see what was going on. She was good with listening to Fiona explain her findings. A technician from the crime lab listened as well, photographing the body and Fiona as she worked.

But Ballard . . .

He bellied up to the bar, his hands in his pockets, his goggles and protective clothing in place. Miriam wasn’t sure if he enjoyed watching Fiona or the autopsy more. Metal tools clinked as she finished with one and reached for the next. Miriam didn’t look too closely. She didn’t want to know what they were.

“I gotta think this one’s pretty straightforward.”

That was Ballard. Always hoping for the easy answer.

Miriam thought in this case, he might be getting exactly that.

From behind her hood, Fiona arched both brows at him and paused, a big-bladed knife-looking thing in her hand. “Nothing about homicide is straightforward, Detective. It complicates more lives than most crimes.”

“Well, yeah,” he said with a shrug, a little kid reprimanded. “I get that. I just meant, the victim’s death—”

“Please don’t use that word.” Fiona’s calm cut him off as surely as if she’d used whatever it was she was holding. “Mrs. Gardner lost her life at the hands of a killer. The least we can do is show our respect by using her name.”

Ballard and Miriam, too, were accustomed to avoiding such personalization. Doing so gave them the distance they needed to see the whole picture, and not lose their shit over the things one human being could do to another.

Fiona’s role wasn’t the same as theirs, even while she provided one of the most important investigative services in any homicide. In fact, Fiona was more empathetic than any ME Miriam had ever worked with. Her determination to do right by the person whose body lay under her hands had her finding the minutest of details.

Miriam had her fingers crossed that would happen today. She didn’t yet have much to work with. She wasn’t going to discount a clue, no matter how seemingly small or random.

Using her jacket lapel to block the smells, she tuned out the sound of Fiona’s saw and thought about the case. Would learning anything at all about the murder weapon help?

There hadn’t appeared to be signs of a struggle. If there was anything beneath the victim’s nails, Fiona would find it, but Miriam wasn’t holding her breath. So far, her biggest lead was the bloody Scripture.

She pulled her notebook from her pocket and found the page where she’d written down the entire verse:
Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee. Exodus 20:12.

Why had the killer only painted the first six words? Had he run out of time, because she knew he hadn’t run out of paint. Maybe his brush wasn’t made for blood and had fallen apart. She scratched out a note to ask Karen Sosa about loose hairs, whether natural or synthetic.

Were those the only words of the verse that mattered? Were they the only ones he needed in order to make his point? And what
was
his point? That Gina had not respected her birth parents? Or had disrespected the foster parents who’d taken her in?

Gina, at five, would’ve gone into foster care in the early sixties. Hmm. That was going to make things tough. Adult Protective Services hadn’t been established until the seventies, and once set up, had covered both elder
and
child care.

Before that, the foster-care-and-adoption system had been handled by the individual foster-care-and-adoption agencies. There would’ve been no real state oversight, though the records would most likely have been filed by the court clerk.

Meaning Miriam had a whole lot of paper cuts to look forward to.

E
LEVEN

Thursday, 2:00 p.m.

After leaving the pediatric office on Tuesday, Ballard had gone to Henry Cross Elementary to talk to the staff there. He’d also interviewed the school’s crosswalk and car-line volunteers, hoping to find someone who’d noticed undue attention being paid to Gina or one of the Gardner kids. He’d come back with squat.

Miriam had gone to Whole Foods, where Gina had shopped on Monday, and watched on security feeds from the manager’s office as she’d entered and exited the store. The interior cameras had picked her up in the produce section, but she’d rushed in and rushed out; she’d talked to no one, and she hadn’t been followed.

Wednesday morning, Miriam had hit Copper Acres Park, talking to others who used the trails at the same time Gina had daily. Several remembered seeing her and Bongo, though they weren’t sure on which day since they saw her there often, but no one had talked to her or noticed anything out of the ordinary.

Then again, Miriam herself had needed to stand on the paved path in front of most of the runners and flash her badge to be seen. Earbuds and headsets that could’ve come from a music studio kept her from being heard. She couldn’t imagine that someone trying to be invisible would’ve had any trouble staying out of sight.

Ballard had used most of his Wednesday to go over the neighborhood-canvass reports. The guard at the community’s main entrance had a complete list of nonresident vehicles he’d allowed through the gate. Along with UPS, FedEx, the USPS, Dish Network, and three authorized landscaping crews, all visitors had been preapproved, their names called to the gatehouse by the resident expecting them, the proper security code given.

The camera on the garage across the street from the Gardners’ home hadn’t caught anything but a dog walker letting two of her dogs use the homeowner’s front lawn for taking a shit. Apparently the problem was ongoing, and why the camera was angled the way it was.

Very few of the immediate neighbors were home during the day. The two women who were, hadn’t seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. One had been working in her backyard flower beds, the other prepping the family’s evening meal of meat loaf. Both had been devastated later when they’d looked out and seen the crime-scene-and-death-investigator vans and patrol vehicles, plus the miles of yellow tape across the Gardners’ front yard.

Thursday morning again sent Miriam and Ballard in different directions. With both of their partners out of the office, the two had more on their plates than Gina Gardner’s case and were juggling a lot of leads on those, too. Miriam wasn’t sure why they were called leads; hers hadn’t led anywhere so far but to dead ends.

On her way back to the station, she’d stopped by the pediatric office on a whim, and had been able to talk to Allyson, but Sameen was still out. The mood in the clinic was somber, though all business, as Drs. Cuellar and Nguyen juggled Jeff Gardner’s patients with their own.

Helen wasn’t sure when he’d be back. He hadn’t made a decision, or if he had, he hadn’t yet let them know. The practice was bringing in a temporary physician next week. And, yes, Dr. Gardner had seen his usual quota of patients on Monday before his gruesome discovery at lunch.

After leaving the clinic, Miriam headed for Copper Acres, wondering how the killer had gotten into the subdivision, then into the Gardners’ home without setting off an alarm. She’d driven up and down the streets looking for an in. She’d found nothing. Eight-foot brick walls sat behind four-foot sculpted hedges, both encircling the residential parcel.

The family lived in the center of the community. Their fence didn’t back up to a stretch of woods, or ranch land, or even another section in development. The lot behind theirs was nearly a mirror image of their own, with a jungle gym, a pool, and a dog.

And even if the suspect
had
accessed the neighborhood through one of the backyards that bordered the security wall, he would’ve had to traipse through the streets with the sixteen-by-twenty polyethylene tarp rolled up and slung over his shoulder. Unless he’d brought it in previously, using an approved vehicle, and stashed it somewhere for easy retrieval.

That said a whole lot about premeditation.

And destroyed any possibility that Gina Gardner had been a random victim.

Finally back in the squad room Thursday afternoon, Miriam transferred the photos she’d taken at the Gardner scene from her phone to a folder on her desktop. Then she pulled up her e-mail and dragged into the same folder reports she’d received from Karen Sosa and Fiona Wick.

Both women had put a rush on their findings, though Karen’s included a note saying she was waiting on additional results. Miriam owed them big-time and clicked Fiona’s report first.

Gina Gardner’s case had officially been ruled a homicide, her death occurring on Monday between 9:00 a.m. and noon. That, Miriam knew because of the time stamp on the market’s security feed showing Gina walking out the door, and Dr. Gardner’s recorded 911 call.

The tox screen revealed nothing in her system to raise a flag.

There’d been only coffee and yogurt in her stomach.

Lividity showed she’d died on her left side from the wound to her throat. It was the only one inflicted and had been delivered with a straight-edge blade from behind. Her attacker had been taller and right-handed. She hadn’t been moved after being lowered to the tarp, until her husband had rolled her to her back. She hadn’t struggled during the attack. There were no abrasions from being bound, and no evidence of sexual assault. The only foreign epithelials beneath her nails belonged to Bongo.

None of Karen’s findings were surprising, either. The prints on the victim’s clothing, the floor, and the wall all belonged to Dr. Gardner. His footsteps were the only ones to have tracked blood across the carpet and marble floor. The killer had left bloody smears where he’d stood while painting, and he’d taken whatever he’d used to cover his shoes with him.

No weapon had been found. The bodily fluids swabbed from the tarp all belonged to the victim. Her saliva. Her tears. Her urine. If the suspect had jerked off to celebrate his kill, he hadn’t given them a deposit.

He hadn’t given them anything. No hairs. No fibers.

He was controlled. He was thorough. He was confident.

Considering the window of time he’d had to work, he couldn’t have been anything else.

Which meant he was going to be a big pain in Miriam’s ass.

She moved next to the photos Karen had taken at the scene, saving her own for last. The reason Karen was Miriam’s favorite tech was her thoroughness. As with Fiona, it was rare for Karen to miss a piece of evidence, and more than once she’d tagged something that seemed completely innocuous but turned out to save the day.

Miriam was studying a shot of the writing on the wall, wondering whether a handwriting analysis could make anything out of it, when her desk phone rang. It was Karen.

Her heart thumped hard. “You’ve got something new for me already?”

“Good afternoon to you, too, Detective Rome.”

Karen. Always so cheery. And strangely more capable than even Nikki of making Miriam realize there was more to life than work. “Please, Karen, call me Rome. Or even Miriam. As long as you never call me
ma’am
.”

“Oh, I hear you,” Karen responded with a snorting sort of sound. “Of course, I teach my son to use the word to be respectful, then see women younger than me cringe when he does.”

“It’s a thin line from respect to insult.”

This time Karen laughed. “It most definitely is.”

And now that the appropriate chitchat was done . . . “I hope you’re calling with good news?”

“Interesting news, at least.”

There was that word again.
Interesting.
“Oh?”

“It’s about the tarp. I swabbed some dried blood I found in the seam of the finished edge. Blood that most definitely did not come from the victim.”

Miriam’s pulse kicked hard.

“Unfortunately—”

Crap.

“It doesn’t belong to your killer, either.”

“How do you know?”

“For one thing, it’s been there awhile. It’s not from the crime scene. And then there’s the part where it’s canine.”

What the hell? “Canine?”

“Yep. It came from a dog. Woof-woof.”