Unknown Means (16 page)

“Her neck didn’t break,” Jonathan said at last, pulling off his gloves. “He crushed her larynx and shut off her air. I took swabs, but even if they’re positive for semen, I can’t tell if she’s been raped.

Decomposition might be masking any tiny vaginal tears. I don’t find any defense wounds on her hands or arms.”

“Grace Markham had no signs of injury either. She was dead or unconscious at the time of the rape, and Frances’s death probably followed the same MO,” Evelyn said.

“Or they weren’t raped and the semen is from a boyfriend. Or maybe the same boyfriend.”

“It’s possible, but so far there’s been no sign of any boyfriend in either woman’s life. Assuming we find semen in Frances Duarte’s swabs, and still no boyfriend turns up, we have two cases of sex occurring in conjunction with murder. In light of that, it strains credibility to think

the sex part is consensual. I have that feeling about this guy. He’s one sick puppy.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and his DNA hasn’t completely decomposed. I don’t find any other injuries besides her neck.”

“So they didn’t have a long struggle. He just slipped the strap over her head and that was that.”

“And you think this is the same guy that got Marissa.”

“Yes, for two reasons: the marks on her neck and the threads, probably from his jacket, caught by his escape route through a mesh fence. The marks match the straps on Grace and Frances. The threads match the fibers on Marissa’s clothing, and the oil on the threads matches the grease on Grace’s arm. Obviously I can’t tell if he left a smear of grease on Frances. It’s the same guy in all three cases, I’d bet my paycheck on that.”

“I don’t think I’ll take that bet. But why didn’t he attack Marissa in her apartment, like the other two?”

The idea made Evelyn’s skin crawl. “Frances lived alone, and Grace’s husband worked a steady schedule. Marissa’s fiancé is in and out at all hours. The killer could never be sure he’d find her alone.”

Jonathan nodded as he sectioned Frances Duarte’s liver on a polypropylene cutting board, dropping pieces into a liquid-filled jar.

The autopsy assistant sealed each plastic jar and attached a printed label with the victim’s name and six-digit case number. Each biological specimen the doctor collected—hair, blood, gastric contents, as well as tissue samples in a quart container of formalin—would be labeled. “Meanwhile, why don’t you get some sleep tonight?”

“Is that a polite way of telling me I look like crap?”

“It would be impossible for you to look like crap, Evelyn—”

“You gallant child, you.”

“—but you’re getting there.”

C H A P T E R

13

I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M DOING THIS, EVELYN THOUGHT. NOT

again.

The salt-mine elevator shaft made its badly lit, rusted-out way into the depths with reluctant shudders of movement. It carried Evelyn and the OSHA inspector, a rounded older woman wearing work boots and a nylon vest with enough pockets to satisfy a fly fish-erman. She stood about four-ten including a hard hat with a photo ID clipped to it, a boon to Evelyn, who couldn’t remember names when well-rested and under present circumstances could barely recall her own. The tag read “Margery Murphy.”

“There’s no stairs here,” Evelyn noted, unable to keep her mind off the rusted elevator.

“You’ve got tougher thighs than me if you want to walk down eighteen hundred feet. Or back up.”

“But what if the elevator breaks and there’s guys in the mine?”

“Then they’re screwed.”

“Doesn’t seem safe.”

“It’s not a ride at Disney World, honey,” Margery Murphy said kindly. “It’s a mine.”

Evelyn tried to smile. “You’re used to salt mines, I take it.”

“Me? I’m practically the damn expert on salt mines, at least in the Northeast area—exciting, huh?”

“Um, yeah.”

“I meant that as a joke, honey. What’s the matter? You’ll trot right up to dismembered corpses and a little salt mine makes you nervous?”

Surely the elevator car had slowed, its single light dimmed.

“There’s the part about being sixteen hundred feet under the lake.”

The inspector’s head bobbed in a chuckle, swaying a few curls that had escaped from the hard hat. “Relax. They never cave in.

Coal mines, though—two hundred years and we still can’t make those safe.”

The car stopped. Evelyn hoped that meant that the doors would open and not that they were stuck halfway down the shaft. “Why is there such a large difference between the two?”

“The type of soil around them. The pH, minerals in it. Mostly the structure—coal deposits tend to meander, but salt deposits are very large and geometrically sound. They’ve been mining salt out of this one since the early sixties, and there’s still enough to last a hundred years from now.”

“So what happened here then?”

Margery Murphy’s boots slapped their way off the elevator and onto the carved salt floor of the first mine room. She gazed around, from the rough white floor to the pipes running along the wall.

“That’s what we’re here to find out. This is very interesting. Very interesting.”

To Evelyn, it all looked the same as it had two days before, with one exception. Today the mine was empty except for the two of them. Two women. In a series of sixty-by-sixty rooms. Buried underneath Lake Erie. Where there had recently been an explosion.

What the hell am I doing here?

“Well, let’s see the spot,” Margery said, hefting her toolbox onto her shoulder and looking like one of the Seven Dwarfs. “You lead the way.”

Evelyn walked this time; she didn’t know how the golf cart worked and didn’t want to take the time to learn. She put her flashlight to use even though the ground seemed level and the area well-lit. What if the power went out, left them encased in a large salt box far below the earth with no lights . . .

“This look like anything has been changed since you were here?”

Margery asked. “Equipment still here? Was that piping installed before?”

Evelyn glanced up at the cables and four-inch pipe mounted high on the salt wall. It turned into another room shortly, but the cables kept going toward the damaged area. “Yeah.”

“Well, they should have told me about that.” As they walked, the OSHA investigator fiddled with a small black box inside a nylon carrying case.

“Why? What is it?”

“This the loader?”

The front-end loader waited for them, retaining enough material from its victims to fill the room with the odor of seared, rotting flesh. “That’s it. They turned it upright to get the bodies out. Otherwise it doesn’t seem to have moved.”

Now Margery seemed more interested in her black box. “Hmm.”

“What’s that?”

“Air-quality monitor.”

“Looking for carbon monoxide?”

“That’s not usually a problem in salt mines.” The reading must have satisfied Margery, because she put the box away, took copious photographs of the grisly loader, and moved into the room where the explosion had happened. “Whew! Quite a fire in here. And fast.”

She took more photographs while Evelyn kept her mind off her claustrophobia by following the burn marks back to the point of origin.

She arrived at the area of most damage—a blackened, jagged crater in the salt—but couldn’t pinpoint the source more precisely than that.

“You think there was something wrong with the dynamite?”

“Don’t think so.” Margery had her air monitor out again, taking reading after reading around the explosion site. Finally she stopped and sighed. “Yeah. They should have told me about that.”

“About what?”

“The natural gas they’re storing down here.”

The lights going out no longer seemed like the worst thing that could happen. The entire chamber igniting into a fireball before Evelyn even had time to think about running to the elevator, that would be worse. “Gas?”

“Yeah. One of the extra uses of salt mines—once you’ve got all this space cleared out down here, it’s a great place to store stuff.”

Margery took out a small rock hammer and cheerfully broke off pieces of charred salt, which she placed in a manila envelope. “Toxic waste, garbage. For gas, they pump water into a deposit. And what does salt do in water?”

“Dissolve?”

“Exactly. Dissolve a good chunk of it and then suck all the solution back out, and you’re left with a bubble in the salt deposit—a nice, inexpensive, closed container. Pump in some gas, and it will stay there until the gas company needs it, usually in winter, when demand peaks and people start complaining about high prices.”

“The gas exploded?”

“No, no!” Margery stored her envelopes in one of the many pockets in her nylon vest. “If a room full of gas had gone up, we wouldn’t be standing here and the body count would be a hell of a lot higher than seven. The fish would be reclaiming this space right now.”

Evelyn wanted to sit down. “The East Ohio Gas Company leaked gas into the sewers and killed a hundred and thirty people—”

“In 1944, I know. But that was liquid natural gas, and this is just the compressed form.” Margery thought on that a moment. “At least I hope to hell it is.”

“Are you done?” Evelyn asked. “Can we go now?”

“Don’t worry. The air monitor says we’re fine. Gas has been

stored in salt mines for forty or fifty years, and it’s never exploded or even leaked, that I know of. The pipes used to pump it in and out, however, can. All it takes is a hairline break and the gas seeps out over time, moving upward through gaps in the strata. Even that won’t hurt anything, usually, unless it finds someplace to pool, like in the Hutchinson, Kansas, explosion. I’m betting it found a little pocket right around here, and still didn’t become a problem until someone poked a stick of dynamite into it.”

“And there’s no gas here now?”

Margery put on a pair of scratched reading glasses and checked the monitor readings again. “Well—”

“Can we go now?”

And to Evelyn’s everlasting horror, the OSHA inspector said,

“That might be a good idea.”

Evelyn scooped up the inspector’s toolbox and turned. It was all she could do to keep from breaking into a run.

Margery trotted to keep up with her. “Nothing to panic about, honey. There’s just enough gas present to register, so we have to leave as a precaution until I can come back with proper breathing equipment and trained personnel. Then we can trace the leak, if there is one.”

“You’ll come back,” Evelyn panted. “I won’t.”

“Now that you’ve officially turned the scene over to me, you don’t have to. Slow down, missy. There’s the elevator.”

“What if it causes a spark? What if it ignites—”

“It won’t.” Margery pressed the button, and the world did not detonate into a mass of flame. “So, where’s a good place to eat around here?”

“The mine is at fault, then? You said they’re in trouble—because they were storing natural gas?”

“Nothing wrong with storing natural gas, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. It’s usually as safe as T-bills. The wrong part was not telling anybody about it, especially us. Alexander Mining apparently bypassed all the permitting and licensing aspects of this little side

job, since I didn’t find word one about it in their paperwork. I’m guessing they needed the money.”

The elevator stopped inside its long, thin tube with a rumbling clang, and the doors opened. Still, the air did not catch fire. Evelyn stepped gingerly inside and did not speak until they were making their way upward. “Apparently it will be a while until this new mine begins to pay for itself.”

“Usually is. So they diversified their services, to get some cash coming in.” Margery watched Evelyn glance at the ceiling for the fourth time. “I think we’re almost there.”

“Sorry. I don’t like being underground.”

Margery shifted her black box to one hand and patted Evelyn on the shoulder with the other. “Don’t feel bad. No shame in admitting that some places are plain scary. Like there was this—here, I’ll take that toolbox back—this mine in a little town way outside of Great Rock Bluff, Kentucky. You could spit from one side of the city limits to the other, that kind of place? We were there on a routine inspection of an anthracite vein—” She paused to stuff the nylon case into a vest pocket.

“The mine was scary?”

The elevator stopped, and the doors opened. Margery Murphy held one with the palm of her free hand. “No, the mine was fine, nothing wrong there. The bar across the street from the entrance, though—

I still wake up in a cold sweat dreamin’ about that place. Come on, help me find that Giardino character. I have some questions for him.”

C H A P T E R

14

FRANCES DUARTE HAD ONLY ONE LIVING IMMEDIATE

relative, her sister in Tucson. To David fell the unenviable task of informing the woman that her sibling had been brutally murdered. She had been understandably distressed but could not shed any light on who might have done it. To her knowledge, Frances had neither lovers nor enemies.

David yawned, reached for his foam cup, and felt surprised to find it empty. He tossed it in the overflowing wastebasket next to his desk. The Cleveland Police Department Homicide Unit fell in the middle of how police departments were usually depicted on TV—neither as dirtily cluttered as in the gritty dramas nor as spiffy as in the lighter series. Large windows lining one wall kept the room bright and airy, allowing the men and women working there a great view of Ontario Street and the Marriott Center, with the blue expanse of Lake Erie off to the far left. Desks stretched across the linoleum floor. It was a functional room, with no concessions whatsoever to decoration or style.

Riley shifted in his chair. Their desks faced each other in the typical partnering arrangement. Both blotters were littered with the statements of Frances’s neighbors, collected early that morning. Several people had noticed the smell, but the last suspicious sound