Speak No Evil (4 page)

FIVE

W
ILL AND
C
ARINA
were fifteen minutes late for Angie Vance’s autopsy, and Chen had gone ahead and prepped the body.

“What did we miss?” Carina pulled on a smock and latex gloves, though she had no intention of touching the body.

“The next of kin left thirty minutes ago, so you haven’t missed much. I just started.”

“That was fast,” Carina said to Will. “She must have come down right after we left her.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Will asked her.

Carina hated facing death, but she would want to know with every certainty. She’d need to see the truth with her own eyes.

Chen motioned for them to approach the table. “Something interesting I noticed as soon as I started the visual examination. Someone washed her body before she died.” Chen stood at Angie’s feet, a laser pen in hand.

“Why?”

“That’s your job, not mine. There was soap residue under her arms and in her hair. I sent samples to the lab. But the body was cleaned, no doubt in my mind. From the moisture in her skin I’d say she was wrapped in the bags shortly after the bath.”

“Why would he clean the body?” Carina asked, almost to herself. “To get rid of evidence?”

“Very likely,” Will said, though Carina’s question had been more rhetorical.

“Creepy,” she said. “And planned. He held her captive, raped her, kept her under his control for forty-eight hours, then he releases her to wash her before killing? Why not kill her,
then
wash her body? It would be easier. She wouldn’t be able to fight back.”

“She may have been too weak to fight,” Will offered, “or drugged.”

Chen said, “We’ve sent blood samples to the lab and will collect tissue and stomach contents during the exam.” He pointed the laser pen at her ankles and then her wrists. “She was restrained with rope, you can see the rope burns on her limbs. I was able to find a couple fibers embedded in her skin that hadn’t been washed away. Probably nylon or a cotton fiber, not hemp.”

Carina had been avoiding Angie’s face, but now that Chen had turned his attention to her mouth, she had to look.

The bandanna had been removed, though threads of it still clung to her lips, which were grotesque, purple and red pulp. Her neck was bruised as well, though it didn’t look like hand or finger marks, which would be one sign of possible strangulation. Her open eyes showed burst blood vessels. Not all suffocation deaths showed reticular hemorrhaging, which was why many nursing home or infant murders were deemed natural causes attributed to old age or sudden infant death syndrome. But Angie’s death was not peaceful. She had fought for every breath, the evidence of her failure still in her eyes.

“The glue was an industrial-strength superglue of some sort. I’ve never seen this before in my career. Because the skin is a porous surface, glue would be absorbed in the skin and wouldn’t hold its strength for an extended period of time. Because the skin is constantly losing cells, eventually the glue would flake off. But the addition of the bandanna gave the glue something to adhere to.”

He directed their attention to the victim’s overall appearance. “She hadn’t been fed or given fluid in at least forty-eight hours. She has obvious signs of dehydration.” The signs weren’t obvious to Carina, but she took Chen’s word for it. “I’m certain when we get inside I can confirm that. But there’re two things that are odd.”

Odd?
This could get weirder?

Chen directed the laser to her stomach. “Bruising takes several minutes to hours to form depending on the trauma. Bruising is a constantly changing process, the color and size and depth of the injury growing, then shrinking and fading. Her stomach and upper chest appear to have the beginning signs of bruising. Very faint.”

“Faint?” Will said. “I can’t see anything.”

Carina focused on the areas Chen indicated. She’d never have noticed anything unusual until he pointed out the very slight discoloration. “What can cause that?” she asked.

“Any number of things. And it happened around the time of death. Bruising stops after the heart stops beating. Something heavy was placed on her, perhaps to facilitate her death or to keep her body from convulsing.”

A horrific thought came to Carina. “Could the killer have laid on top of her?”

“Yes,” Chen said, a rare sigh coming from deep in his chest. “It’s cases like this that make me think about early retirement,” he said quietly, looking at Angie’s face.

“What’s the second odd thing?”

He pointed the laser at her navel. “She recently had a navel ring ripped out. It had begun to heal, so I’d guess it was removed twenty-four to forty-eight hours before her death.”

He turned his attention from the tear in the navel to the two detectives on the other side of the table. “Ready?”

No,
Carina thought, but nodded along with Will. They silently observed Chen’s meticulous internal examination, his assistant following orders expeditiously.

By the end of the autopsy, they had learned and confirmed several important facts:

Angela Vance had been raped multiple times. There was extensive tearing and deep tissue damage in both orifices, indicating that a sharp, foreign object had penetrated. There was no biological evidence. The killer could have used a condom. If he didn’t, that evidence had probably been destroyed or contaminated when he cleaned the body.

Chen collected possible trace evidence, tissue samples, and additional blood samples to send to the lab. He confirmed that she hadn’t eaten in at least twelve hours because her stomach was void of food.

Jim Gage joined them halfway through the autopsy and confirmed that Angie had suffocated in the bag. While the tox screen was clean, the additional tissue and blood samples would be sent to the county lab, which could test for a broader array of drugs. Jim also collected hair samples to test for cocaine to determine whether Steve Thomas’s accusation that Masterson was feeding her the drug had merit. If she took cocaine more than a week earlier, it wouldn’t show up in her blood, but it would show up in her hair follicles.

Not that drug use would prove Masterson was responsible for her death, but they never knew what information was important or incidental until they closed the case.

Time of death was fixed at approximately one a.m. Monday, with an hour window on either side.

“Fucking bastard,” Will mumbled as they left the morgue, the bright afternoon sunlight assaulting them when they stepped outside the cool building.

“You can say that again.” Jim Gage joined them on the walk back to the police station, though his laboratory was around the corner in the opposite direction.

“By the way,” Carina asked Jim, “did you find a navel ring in the evidence collected at the beach? It might look like a regular earring.”

“We found no jewelry whatsoever.”

“I wonder if the killer kept it,” Carina speculated.

“Or it was pulled out in a struggle,” Jim suggested. “Dr. Chen is sending over the evidence priority and I’ll rush it as best I can. It would help if you get a suspect in custody; my unit has sixteen cases up for trial in the next two months that I need to prioritize.”

“We have a suspect,” Carina said.

“Come by later, I’ll try to give you a better time line.”

“Sure.”

She thought Jim’s comment was odd, since she was always coming by the lab for reports on her cases, but she realized how strange when Jim added, “If you come by after five, maybe we can go out for drinks later.”

“Um, okay.”

They were outside the main police doors when Jim turned and walked back down the block to the forensics lab. Come by after five? For drinks? Did that mean what she thought it meant? She shook her head. No, they were over the relationship thing. They’d broken up nearly two years ago. And he’d never asked her out for drinks or anything social in all that time.

“He wants you back,” Will said.

Carina laughed, dismissing Will’s comment. How did her partner always seem to know what she was thinking?

“No word on Thomas?”

“The patrol says he hasn’t come back. I have a BOLO on his car. We’ll have another shot at him.” A “be on the lookout” was standard procedure when they wanted to talk to a person but not bring them down to the station or into custody.

“Let’s find Doug Masterson.”

Minor drug offenses and a six-month stint at Descanso for possession of cocaine with intent to sell filled Masterson’s rap sheet. He’d been clean—at least, he hadn’t been caught—for the last two years.

They had his photo, description, and age—thirty-four.

After checking out his apartment, his place of work, and known hangouts, they came up empty. No one admitted to seeing him since Sunday afternoon, but his neighbor, a retiree, said he had taken “his girl” up to the mountains for skiing on Sunday and he didn’t expect him back for a couple days.

Carina had showed a picture of Angie to the neighbor. “Is this Masterson’s girl?”

“One of them. Not the one he took skiing, though. Don’t know her name, she’s a new one. He goes through those pretty little things like candy.” He grinned, revealing crooked teeth. The smell of cheap alcohol wafted toward the officers. “Yep, Doug has the lookers all over him.”

In the car, Carina frowned, made notes. “He could have dumped Angie’s body late Sunday night and then left town. But if the neighbor’s right, Masterson couldn’t have killed Angie.”

“Did you smell the booze? I doubt he knows what day of the week it is, let alone what time Masterson left yesterday.
If
it was yesterday.” Will picked up the radio and put a BOLO on Masterson.

Carina’s money was on Thomas. Means, opportunity, motive. The means was a little difficult right now—where would he have kept her?—but he had no alibi for the time she disappeared, and she had dumped him for another loser. More damning was the fact that he’d lied to them.

“Let’s talk to Abby Ivers again,” she said. She filled Will in on her theory that Abby was hiding something. “We need to be let in on her little secret, or maybe the phrase
obstruction of justice
will mean something to her.”

They found Abby at the apartment she shared with Jodi. The girls had another friend, Kayla Nichols, with them. The three of them had obviously been crying.

Carina wasn’t going to leave the room without knowing what Abby had hinted at earlier. But after fifteen minutes of the run-around with all three girls—Abby, Jodi, and wannabe lawyer Kayla—first denying, then saying it wasn’t important, then saying Angie would roll over in her grave if she knew they’d told, Carina lost her temper.

She looked each of them in the eye in turn, then focused her steely-eyed gaze on the weakest link, Abby.

“Okay, girls, let me explain something to you. Angie was raped. Then she was suffocated in a garbage bag.
Murdered.
She’s dead, and if you don’t spill this secret right now, I’m taking you all to jail. You can spend the night in a cold cell and maybe then you’ll try to help, not hinder, our investigation.”

Kayla jumped up. “We have rights, too!”

“Sit down, Kayla,” Carina said. “I can and will arrest you for obstruction of justice. You will be taken into court tomorrow and the judge will make you tell or you’ll be in contempt of court.”

Abby interjected, “No one can know.”

“If it goes to court, it will damn well be public information,” Carina said. “You tell me now, and I promise I will do everything in my power to keep the information private.” Carina hoped she could. If it was material to the prosecution, all bets were off. She didn’t like to deceive the girls, but finding Angie’s killer was more important.

Abby and Jodi looked at each other. Abby burst into tears. Carina rubbed her forehead. She was getting a headache.

Jodi spoke. “Angie, um, she sort of had a double life kind of thing.”

Double life kind of thing?
Carina and Will exchanged glances.

“Angie dated a lot of guys,” Jodi continued. “Some not really publicly. But she journaled about it.”

“Journaled? Did she keep the journal at her house? In her purse?” Two officers had been to Angie’s house to search her personal effects, but her purse was missing.

Jodi bit her lip. “No, an online journal. You know, MyJournal dotcom. But,” she continued quickly, “she was anonymous.
No one
knew about it. I mean, no one would even think that she did the things she wrote about. She’s really sweet.”

“You mean she made them up?”

Jodi shook her head profusely. “Oh no, it’s all true. Well, most of it. I mean, I doubt she ever lied, but I guess she could have sort of exaggerated.”

“Anonymous. How did
you
know?”

Abby glanced down sheepishly. “One day she borrowed my computer and after she left I looked at the Web page history because I needed something. There it was. I read the entries and knew it was Angie because she talked about us, but not our real names. Only our first initials. I asked her about it, and she told us everything, swore us to secrecy. It’s, um, sort of a sex diary. Her profile was ‘A for Anonymous.’ ”

“Anonymous online,” Will said, his voice flat. “Where everyone in the world can read it.”

“But no one knew it was her!” Abby exclaimed.

“You’re positive she told no one else? What about one of her ex-boyfriends?”

“Oh no, especially not them,” Jodi said. “They would have been pissed off. She detailed some of their, um, sexual failings.” The three girls giggled, then abruptly stopped as the magnitude of the situation hit them.

Carina lost it. Even after being a cop for eleven years, she’d never be so cavalier about murder.

“Give me the Web page. And I’m putting you all on notice, right now. If my partner or I have any other questions, you will answer them. Got it?”

They sobered completely during Carina’s lecture, and Jodi and Abby in particular looked guilty over their behavior. As Abby scribbled something on notebook paper, Jodi said, “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful. I loved Angie, like a sister. I guess . . . I can’t believe she’s
gone.
”

Carina forgave the girls their behavior. They were eighteen and facing the brutal death of a friend. It was going to hit them hard over the next day or two, and grief would set in.