The Absence of Mercy (7 page)

Ben unlocked the door to his small office, and the two men entered. Ben walked behind his desk and sat down in a swivel chair on plastic rollers that tilted slightly to the left. Garston stood next to the only other chair in the room, his head nearly brushing against the low tile ceiling. His massive frame eclipsed the token ray of light emanating from the hallway just outside, and Ben switched on the desk lamp.

“Have a seat, Sam,” he said, indicating the vacant chair. The chief descended upon the hapless piece of furniture, which groaned in modest protest. The look of guarded anticipation that darted across Sam's face suggested to Ben that more than a few chairs had failed him unexpectedly during his tenure on this earth. Ben was grateful when this one did not. He liked Sam, who was sharp as a tack and conducted his job with surprising kindness and decency.

“Looks like this one's gonna hold,” Sam observed, optimistically glancing down at the chair beneath him.

Ben smiled. “If it don't, we'll take it out back and shoot it.”

“Won't be the first time,” the chief commented. He interlocked his fingers and cracked the knuckles loudly, the noise reverberating off the walls of the small office. It was a bad habit he'd abandoned twenty years ago at the request of his wife, but it occasionally resurfaced during times of stress. He looked up guiltily. “Sorry about that.”

“No problem.”

Sam took a deep breath and let it out. “So, what've you got?”

Ben opened the left drawer of his desk and pulled out a dark green file. It contained multiple photographs and his typed dictation from the night before. “Young kid, as you know,” he began. “I'd say about fourteen.”

“We think we have an ID on the victim,” Garston said. “Kevin Tanner—a fifteen-year-old high school student from a neighborhood adjacent to the spot where the victim was found. Apparently, he didn't come home last night. Wasn't reported missing until this morning, about two and a half hours ago. Kid's mother and younger brother are out of town visiting relatives, and the father works nights at a shipping company in Steubenville. Father came home this morning to an empty house and became concerned. Contacted us at six thirty
A.M.
”

“This Tanner kid might have just gone over to a friend's house overnight, or left early this morning before his old man got home from work.”

“Not likely,” Sam replied. “Father says his son wouldn't spend the night at a friend's house without checking with him first. He also says he got home a little before six this morning, so it would've been pretty early for the boy to be up and out of the house. Also, the family has a dog. The animal urinated on the carpet overnight. Father says he's never done that before. Probably hadn't been let out since Mr. Tanner left for work at five
P.M.
yesterday afternoon.”

“Long shift,” Ben commented.

“He works twelve-hour shifts a couple of days a week. The father's description of the boy matches that of the victim. He's down at the station right now filing a report. They'll keep him for some brief questioning, but we'd like to get him over here to ID the body after that.”

“That'll be ugly,” Ben said. “The body's in pretty bad shape. Someone did a number on this poor kid.”

“Uh-huh.” Sam cracked the knuckle of his right index finger.
Pop!
It sounded like a firecracker within the tight confines of the office, and Ben jumped slightly in his seat. “Why don't you tell me about it?”

The pathologist looked down at the report in front of him. “Well, there were multiple stab wounds from an unknown instrument,” he began. “I don't think it was a knife. The entrance wounds measure about 0.75 by 0.9 centimeters, and all appear to be made using the same weapon.”

“Screwdriver?”

“Maybe. There's a wound entering the neck and extending to the skull base. That would mean the instrument was at least six to eight inches long. There were eight stab wounds to the head itself. Two of them pierced the skull.” He was sliding pictures across the desk as he spoke.

“Interesting.”

“Yeah, that takes some force—or at least determination.”

“Or rage,” Sam commented, studying the pictures.

“The attack
was
extraordinarily violent,” Ben continued. “The victim was bitten by the assailant several times. In fact, he wasn't simply bitten—he was ravaged. There are several large avulsion injuries to the soft tissues of the face, neck, and chest where the skin has been partially torn away.”

“Consistent with bite wounds?”

“It appears so.”

“Could the bite wounds have come from an animal, perhaps one that came across the body after the boy had been murdered?”

“Unlikely.” Ben shook his head. “Most animals have much sharper canines than humans, and a different dental structure. These serrations along the wound edge”—he pointed to a picture lying in front of them on the desk—”are consistent with a human dentition pattern.”

Sam studied the picture for a moment. “I see what you mean,” he said, and when he looked up at Ben his face was slightly ashen. “It just seems so . . . savage. I don't understand it.”

“I haven't gotten to the best part yet,” Ben replied.

“You mean the fact that the victim's genitals were discovered in the woods fifty yards from the site of the body?”

“Yeah. That won't be easy for the father to hear about.”

“Then I suggest,” Sam said, eyeing Ben from across the table, “that you don't tell him.”

“I wasn't planning on it,” Ben said. He swiveled around in his chair so that he could look out through the open office door while Sam shuffled through the photographs sprawled like fallen soldiers across the desk. It was Saturday, but the Coroner's Office was beginning to come to life. Tanya Palson, who tended to most of the clerical responsibilities of the office, had arrived and could be heard at the front desk answering the phone.

“There's one other thing you might find of interest,” he commented as Chief Garston continued to study the photographs in front of him.

“What's that?” Sam asked, eyebrows raised slightly.

“I think the perpetrator was left-handed.”

“Yes, I was just noticing that,” Sam observed. “The puncture wounds to the body are clustered along the right chest and flank. Assuming the assailant was facing the victim, he must've been holding the weapon in his left hand.”

“Exactly,” Ben concurred. “Also, the two head wounds puncturing the cranium follow a trajectory through the brain that angles slightly to the victim's left. They enter through the coronal and sagittal sutures.”

“The what?”

“The skull is actually made up of several different bones which merge together during early childhood along what are called suture lines. They're weak points in the skull.”

“Fault lines,” Sam suggested.

“Yes,” Ben agreed, “in a manner of speaking.”

“So he got lucky, then?”

“Perhaps. But there were eight wounds to the skull, and
all
of them were clustered around the suture lines. I think,” Ben said thoughtfully, “that maybe he knew what he was doing.”

“What are you saying?”

“My overwhelming impression”—Ben looked somberly across the table at the Jefferson County Sheriff—“is that he's done this before.”

Pop! Pop-pop!
Sam's knuckles sounded off beneath the table.

“Yeah.” Ben nodded.

In the front room, the phone was ringing. “Coroner's Office,” Tanya answered. “How can I help you?”

Ben gathered the photos and returned them to the olive file marked simply “John Doe.” “Do you want to see the body?” he offered.

“Not really,” Sam replied. “But they tell me it's part of my job.”

“I thought you had detectives to take care of this stuff.”

“Oh, he'll be by soon enough,” Sam answered. “Carl Schroeder. Good man. Fifteen years on the force. He's questioning the boy's father right now. It's his case.”

“Okay. Then, if you don't mind me asking, what are
you
doing here?”

Sam stood up slowly. He was such a pleasant man that you forgot how physically intimidating his size could be until he was standing directly in front of you. “I'm the chief,” he said. “I have an overriding responsibility to protect the citizens of this county that goes well beyond any single investigation. What happened yesterday . . .” He seemed to mull it over in his mind, searching for the right sentiment. “What happened yesterday
offends me,
Ben—and I aim to take a special interest.”

At that moment, Ben was very glad to be on the right side of the law. “I see.” He nodded seriously, then gestured toward the open door and the autopsy room just beyond. “Well, . . . this way, Chief.”

The two men filed out of the tiny office and made their way toward a lonely shape lying patiently on a steel table in the next room.

Eleven
A.M.
, Coroner's Office. Ben sat in his small office and waited. Chief Garston had received a call from Detective Schroeder that he was on his way to the CO with the boy's father. That had been ten minutes ago. It was not a long drive.

Sam had gone out to stand on the front steps of the building. Reporters had been gathering since 9:30
A.M.
, and they were expecting a statement from the chief regarding the results of the autopsy and the early progress of the investigation. Sam hoped his appearance would draw their attention while Detective Schroeder ushered Mr. Tanner into the CO through the back door. It wasn't a flawless plan, but it was the best one they had.

Ben could hear Tanya fielding calls at the front desk. The phone had not stopped ringing since Ben's arrival, and he simply wished it would stop. Then again, he considered, the silence might be worse. He sat at his desk and tried to focus on something—
anything
—except for the covered figure in the next room.

Sam Garston, he considered, was an interesting man. His formidable physical characteristics and dogged devotion to his job suggested a no-nonsense approach to life. It was undoubtedly one of the reasons for his continued success throughout the course of his career. But there was also a different side to him, one that Ben had come to witness on at least one occasion previously.

Two years ago Ben had had the unfortunate responsibility of performing an autopsy on a four-month-old infant from Pleasant Hill. The child had come from a nice, hardworking middle-class family from a suburban neighborhood just north of Steubenville. The father wrote for the sports section of the local newspaper, and the mother took care of their daughter during the day while simultaneously managing to run a small online resale business from their home. One Friday evening they'd hired a babysitter so they could catch a movie at the local cineplex and dinner at a popular Italian restaurant afterward. When they'd come home that evening, the babysitter was watching television in the family room and the child was asleep in the upstairs bedroom. They'd popped in to check on her, paid the sitter, and the father had driven the teenager home. When he returned, he'd found his wife waiting patiently for him in their bed, naked under the covers. They had made love, and had fallen to sleep amid a discussion about their plans for the upcoming weekend. All of this had been documented in their statement to investigators the following day. When they went into the little girl's room the following morning, the child was dead.

On the surface, it sounded like a case of SIDS—sudden infant death syndrome, a term used to describe an unexplained infant death (what used to be called a “crib death”) during the first year of life. The autopsy, however, had identified retinal hemorrhages—small areas of bleeding in the back of the eyes. The postmortem had also discovered multiple subdural hematomas, a type of brain injury commonly seen with shaken baby syndrome. Ben had contacted the investigating detective with these preliminary findings, and both the parents and the babysitter had been brought to the police station for further questioning. Most of the focus had been on the teenager, who adamantly denied shaking the infant the night before. The child, she reported, had been sleeping when she arrived. An hour later, she'd gotten her up for a feed and to change her diaper. The infant slept through most of it, showing little interest in the bottle. The detectives interrogated the girl for several hours at the station. They had reasoned and bargained with her. They'd lied to her about factitious evidence proving the case against her, eventually scaring her into tears. Throughout everything, however, she had stuck to her story.

Sam had stopped by Ben's house that night with the investigating detectives. The girl's story was convincingly consistent, they informed him. She was either innocent or an exceptionally good liar—which left one or both of the parents as the only remaining suspects. The detectives wanted to know how hard they should press the parents, and whether the evidence from the autopsy suggested one more than the other as a likely culprit. The mother and father were already traumatized, Sam noted, and they didn't want to go after them unnecessarily. It was a fragile situation.

Of the two detectives accompanying Sam that evening, one of them—a small, wiry man named Harvey Nickelback—had not exactly been in agreement with the cautious approach Sam had asked them to take.

“I don't see why we have to pussyfoot around this,” he'd objected vociferously, tracing the outline of his thin mustache between his right thumb and index finger. “This kid had retinal hemorrhages and a head full of blood. That's pretty convincing evidence for child abuse, as far as I'm concerned.”

“That's why the case is under investigation,” Sam had replied. “If this death was due to shaken baby syndrome, then whoever did it will go to prison.”