The Company She Kept (5 page)

Joe had thought as much. The way Susan was dressed suggested an indoor death, not to mention that the trace evidence at the scene had been consistent with a drag-and-drop scenario, versus something demanding more action on the killer's part—or any signs of resistance from the victim.

Of course, there were other possibilities, as his next question implied: “Does that rule out her being rendered unconscious and then killed by hanging?”

Beverly was keeping her eyes on her subject, moving her gloved hands about as Todd's efforts revealed more and more of the body to the bright overhead lights. “I wouldn't say that it rules out her having been rendered unconscious, as you so delicately put it.” Here she cut him a quick look and an implied smile, which he couldn't appreciate through her mask. “But I can say that her cause of death wasn't this.” She tapped the rope with a fingertip.

“So, she was assaulted elsewhere, given her clothing,” he reiterated, “cut into and hanged after death, and presumably put on display, all to make a point.”

Beverly resisted agreeing unequivocally, as suited her scientific approach. “Could be.” She picked up Susan's arm and bent it slightly, adding, “And judging from what I'm seeing right now, your heater idea worked, if barely. She's still very cold, but I'm willing to give it a shot.”

She then paused, Susan's hand still in the air. “Judging from the rest of her fingernails, I'd call this a clue.”

He bent forward to scrutinize what she'd found. The fingernail of the body's right index was raggedly broken at the quick, leaving behind a smear of dried blood. “Damn. Painful.”

“We'll be sure to scrape under the rest of them,” she said, at which point Mike immediately set to work. “You never can tell when you might get lucky.” She indicated several bruises across the ribs, previously hidden by clothing. “These, too, are telling, I would think.”

Joe glanced at her. “Can you tell when they were administered?”

She touched his forearm with a gloved hand. “Exactly what caught my eye. They definitely predate death. They've been given time to get established. Not much time, mind you, but some.”

“Maybe a struggle beforehand?” he suggested.

“They'd be consistent with that.” She indicated more bruises around the body's upper arms. “Just as these would be with someone seizing her tightly, either holding or pushing her.” She looked up at Todd. “Could you turn her over for a quick look?”

With an ease befitting his weight lifter's physique, the diener complied, revealing a horizontal bruise across Susan's lower back.

“Thank you, Todd.”

Smiling in response to Beverly's trademark courtesy, Todd returned the body to its original supine position.

“Therefore possibly grabbed and pushed against something hard and horizontal,” Joe said.

“Possibly,” was her cautious reply.

They continued trading observations and information for a couple of hours, as Beverly examined what else Susan had to offer. Several times during the autopsy, she stepped away from the table to run warm water over her partially numbed fingertips.

There were essentially three distinct stages to a full-fledged postmortem examination, barring the final toxicology report: what the clothed body had to tell, what the naked version followed with, and finally, what the internal organs might reveal. To an old-fashioned person like Joe, only the middle stage stimulated a sense of inhibition, stemming back, no doubt, to a traditional upbringing involving modesty and discretion. For him to watch a woman he'd known for so long being slowly disrobed and then meticulously probed, scraped, and fingerprinted—every inch of her recorded by Todd's camera—made him feel like a voyeur, and brought home as nothing else had so far that Susan's vitality, like it or not, was never again going to be on display.

The third and last stage was by contrast a comfort zone for him. The autopsy seemed purely scientific, exposing a history that even the host body often hadn't known, such as a slightly damaged heart muscle. With Beverly as his guide, Joe learned about Susan's past as a smoker, her having once had an abortion, her sporting a sensual tattoo that only her most intimate companions had appreciated. He discovered that she might have benefitted from more exercise, less alcohol, and that she'd had a small but persistent argument with hemorrhoids. Most important, and late in the procedure, he also learned—once her face had been elastically peeled down and tucked under her chin, the top of her skull removed, and her brain exposed—that she'd suffered a stunning blow to the back of her head sometime prior to death and that she'd finally been done in as a result of a subsequent blow to her left temple, which had fractured the bone and caused, in Beverly's language, a “catastrophic” hemorrhage.

“You seen enough of this kind of wound to take a guess about what caused it?” Joe asked, fascinated by the amount of damage left behind.

He should have known better, of course. He and Beverly had been meeting over dead bodies for more years than either of them could recall. Never in that time had she ever speculated about any mechanism that wasn't blatantly obvious. She reported end results, supplying clarity and insight based purely on the evidence.

Nevertheless, she caught his eye upon hearing the question and suggested, “I doubt she was hit by a bird flying at high speed, if that helps.”

He bowed slightly. “Point taken, Doctor.”

Later that night, however, as they lay together in her home south of Burlington, alongside the dark immensity of Lake Champlain, she did allow herself more latitude.

“Seriously?” Joe asked. “A bird?”

“It just popped into my head. Maybe because you found her dangling halfway down a cliff. I can give you this much: It was something cylindrical at point of contact, perhaps an inch in diameter, and delivered at high velocity. Of course, that could cover anything from a chair leg to the butt of a pool cue to even the heel of a woman's shoe. Do you have any idea at all of what happened?”

He snaked his arm around her bare shoulder as she tucked in closer, loving how comfortable they were together. “Not yet,” he said. “But we've barely begun.”

*   *   *

Senior Trooper Tommy Redman radioed dispatch that he'd be out of the car on portable, before killing his engine and opening the door to the cold night air, at once reluctant to leave the cruiser's warmth and happy to be seeing his old friend Jack Muskett, ex-cop, current constable, always a good source of area gossip, and—last but most important right now to Redman—the unlikely brewer of the best cup of coffee in the county.

Muskett lived off a dirt road, in a trailer grown roots, with a retrofitted peaked roof, dilapidated attached porch, and cinder blocks skirting its base—hopefully but inadequately designed to keep the cold wind from sneaking in under the thin floor. It was as representative a residence for the rural northeast as were the surrounding maples and the sweet sap that dripped from them once a year.

Redman found Muskett burrowed into his beaten La-Z-Boy, one hand around a mug, the other clutching the remote, staring at a program featuring alligators, swamp boats, and men who looked like him.

“Hey,” the trooper said, passing through the living room on his way to the kitchen.

“Hey, yourself,” was the response.

Redman pulled a stained clean mug off the drying rack by the sink and poured himself some coffee from a percolator that had no reason to be functioning, before returning to the other room and carefully settling into an adjoining armchair, simultaneously balancing his mug and shifting his duty belt to allow him to sit comfortably. Between the Taser, radio, an extendable baton, his ammo pouches, two cuff cases, his gun, his OC spray can, cell phone, flashlight, and pager—this took some doing.

Muskett caught the body language. “Cuffs, a stick, and a gun,” he said. “It's all we had. Don't know how you move around with all that crap.”

“Why do you think I'm putting my feet up?”

Muskett raised an eyebrow. “For Christ sake. You just got out of a car. Cops don't walk anymore.”

Tommy had heard it before. He actually agreed with much of it. Times had changed, and not always for the better. The onboard computers, the GPS units that told the shift sergeant where you were at all times, the audio-video equipment … It all was starting to make
RoboCop
look like a documentary instead of a sci-fi movie. Plus, most cops were a conservative bunch, and bitching about the sorry state of the world was an ongoing source of perverse comfort.

Tommy announced his reason for dropping by, as he did every week, keeping his eyes mindlessly glued to the two men on TV, who were poking into the water with oars, hoping for some angry reptilian reaction. “So what's new?”

It was their eight-year-old ritual, where Jack filled Tommy in on all the local skulduggery. In addition to currently being constable, Jack owned a one-truck towing company, drove a school bus every morning and afternoon, served on the three-man selectboard, and was a member of the fire department. He also inaugurated every day at the local filling station/coffee shop, opening the place up at five-thirty by being first in line. Amid all of these occupations, habits, and professions, Jack Muskett became privy to more information than might be jammed into a weekly soap opera. More times than he could recall, Tommy Redman's ongoing string of criminal investigations had been helped from just regularly tuning in, and sometimes asking a well-chosen question. Redman had four or five such dependable sources—men and women, both—scattered across the county.

They were about twenty minutes into their news update, as Jack referred to it, when he casually mentioned, “I had a complaint not twenty-four hours ago about activity in the middle of the night at Dana's junkyard. Pissed me off something royal, getting up outta bed for absolutely nuthin.”

“You didn't find anything at all?”

“That is what nuthin means, Tommy. I drove up and down the rows, flashing my light around. No bodies, no party animals, no horny teenagers. Like I said, nuthin.”

Dana's was the largest auto junkyard in a thirty-mile radius, recently defunct and increasingly a target of environmentalists and transplanted city dwellers who found the place unsightly. For pragmatists of Tommy's acquaintance, it remained a source of recycled auto parts, helping to keep a remarkable fleet of barely legal backwoods beaters on the road.

They wrapped things up shortly thereafter, Tommy knowing that his dispatcher would soon be wanting an update. But as he eased out of Jack's rutted and slippery dooryard, trying not to slide into any of the abandoned hulks lining the way, he set his course on Dana's, two miles away, responding to both instinct and curiosity. Jack, as Tommy well knew, might have been the best of gossip blotters, but he wasn't the most energetic of investigators. He hadn't seen anything suspicious at the junkyard—which also might have meant that he simply hadn't run it over in his car.

The place wasn't locked. It wasn't even fenced in, which was another complaint from the growing chorus against it. In the old tradition, places like this junkyard had simply evolved over time, born of falling crop prices, available farm acreage, and the instinct among hardscrabble people to make ends meet practically. What began as simply a way station for wrecked cars heading elsewhere had grown into a vast and loosely organized semipermanent resting place for hundreds of disintegrating vehicles, all of them roughly stacked in rows, with broad snowpacked paths between them. New additions to the rotting collection were both rare and probably against the law, given the legislature's ever-streaming current of regulations, so the towering piles on each side of Redman's cruiser hadn't changed much in recent years. But it was precisely the place's neglected reputation that had triggered Tommy's instinct to take a look. A party place or a lovers' lane it might have become, but its isolation and vastness were also magnets for things darker—and thus worth checking out.

The problem was that literal darkness was also what Tommy had to deal with. He had alley lights on the strobe unit atop his car roof, and a searchlight that he could manipulate as he crawled forward, but peering amid the inky gaps and jagged angles of one teetering stack of metal after another taxed one's concentration, and about fifteen minutes into this spontaneous and fruitless impulse, he began to rethink the wisdom of his action.

Until he saw the oddity.

That was often the case, after all. It wasn't so much with clarity that so many discoveries were made, but rather the small mental nudge that made one think that—just maybe—this one anomaly deserved further scrutiny.

As it did here. Just before his brain completely dulled to the slow, monotonous procession of piled, rusty, black and brown heaps, Tommy caught sight of the barest accent of something colorful. Not the fading paint job decorating a dented fender or door, but a small, distinct spot of bright green, reflecting in his searchlight like a beacon's flash.

He stopped the cruiser and backed up, looking for confirmation, and then emerged into the night with his flashlight in hand.

Lurking in a niche between two stacks that had slumped over onto each other like drunks on a subway car, was a Prius with a green license plate. It had been pulled into the gap as far as possible, and then not quite covered by a weatherworn tarp. The plate was just visible through a hole in the fabric, and only from one angle.

Under normal circumstances, a finding like this was followed by a request to dispatch to check the state's DMV data bank for the owner of record.

That wasn't necessary here. Tommy Redman simply returned to his front seat and consulted a scrap of paper that he'd taped to his dash earlier, listing the registration of Susan Raffner's missing car.

It was a match.

 

CHAPTER FIVE