J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

“I figured that if you looked at the autopsy report, maybe the context alone would suggest something to you. And maybe there are other similarities between the two cases, things they didn’t suppress.”

He takes up the pages again, mouthing the Spanish words to himself. Cavallo glances my way, risking a faint smile. The doctor is hooked.

Bridger helped me greatly when I first joined the homicide squad, explaining details of forensic medicine in a way that didn’t put me to sleep, and teaching me that, despite his manner, the science could be far from objective. So much depends on interpretation, and on the context investigators provide. And we rely so much on the science, myself included, that common sense sometimes takes a backseat. The answers, more often than not, aren’t waiting in the laboratory. They’re out on the street. You have to ask the right people the right questions, simple as that.

When you need an expert, though, there’s no substitute for a thorough, analytical mind like Bridger’s. If something’s there, he’ll find it.

“Did you bring a copy of the other autopsy report?” he asks. “No, of course not. Fortunately I have it handy. I had a visit from your FBI colleague yesterday, asking for a similar kind of miracle.”

“Bea was here?”

“She brought some interesting files along, several men the approximate age of the victim. Despite the identification, she seemed to think he might be one of these others.”

“She knew Brandon Ford,” I say. “Intimately. When we came here before, she said that wasn’t him.”

“You might have shared that information.”

“Were you able to find a likely candidate?” I ask, ignoring his remark.

“I did recognize one of the men. It was the one you shot. Interesting that she has a file on him and no one’s made that connection public.”

“Yes, interesting. Maybe there are some questions about the reliability of those files.”

Cavallo scoots her chair closer to the desk, distancing herself from me. “If you’re feeling left out, Alan, you’re not alone. Roland operates on a need-to-know basis, and he seems to think the people who put their careers on the line for him don’t need to know. Everything I get, I have to pull out of him. It gets old after a while.”

“I can relate,” he says.

“Considering how explosive some of this stuff is, maybe I’m doing you both a favor by not burdening you with too much. Have you considered that?” They clearly haven’t, and I know it’s a lame excuse to make. I concede as much with a smiling shrug. “But hey, the important thing is, we may have linked these two cases, assuming you can find something concrete to go on.”

Bridger goes over the John Doe autopsy report quickly, refreshing his memory, then returns to the Argentine report, squinting through his glasses and mouthing more words. Tense with anticipation, I have to force myself to breathe. He goes back and forth again, comparing lines, examining photographs, keeping his thoughts entirely to himself.

“The suspense is killing me,” I say.

He doesn’t look up. After another minute, he pulls a photo from the John Doe report and compares it to the one with Macneil’s hands blacked out. His lips part.

“Yes?” I ask.

“Come with me.”

He leads us back to the cold storage, where I’d had him take Bea the morning she looked at the body. He hands me the photos before donning a pair of gloves. After consulting the register, he opens the right refrigerator unit and cantilevers the sheeted corpse out for examination. He glances at Cavallo before pulling the sheet back, forgetting that she’s seen worse, much worse.

Glimpsing the corpse again, I get a flash of memory, a snapshot of the concrete basketball court where we first encountered him, Lorenz and me. The wounds had seemed fresher then, more shocking to behold. The stylized pose, the skinned finger extended.

“Are you okay?” Bridger asks.

“I’m fine.”

“This is what we’re looking at,” he continues, lifting the left arm. Using his pinkie, he draws a semicircle in the air above the wrist, indicating the discolored flesh where some kind of restraint was used to secure the hand during torture. “Tied to an armchair, most likely. See underneath? The marks are on the top of the wrist, but not the bottom, like it was resting on something. Now take a look at the Argentine photo. See that mark there, just below the part that’s blacked out? What does it look like?”

“The same,” Cavallo says.

“You’d want to make a real comparison, obviously, or at least work from a better photograph, but what that suggests-and this is only speculation-but it suggests Macneil may have had similar injuries to his hands.”

I look at the picture again, then the body. Once the ligature mark in the photo has been pointed out, it’s impossible not to see it, not to interpret it as a restraint. Before, it was invisible, bordering so close to the black box. Cavallo double-checks the comparison, too.

“It’s really there,” she says.

“I think so.”

Bridger puts the sheet back in place, rolls the body back into storage. Halfway in, he stops and rolls it back out. “There’s something else,” he says. “Bad news, really. But since this is your case now, Theresa, I thought you should know. Detective Lorenz, before his death, had asked about the marks on the back of the victim’s leg-”

“What marks?” I ask.

He cocks his eyebrow in surprise. “That’s right. You weren’t there. This was at the scene, after you went off on your wild-goose chase into the woods. But it’s in my full report-you have read the full report, haven’t you?”

“I don’t remember anything about marks on the leg.”

He exchanges a look with Cavallo, then extends the body tray all the way out so he can access the legs. “There are three dark streaks running parallel, here on the back of the calf. Like he swiped against something while being moved. Looked like oil to me, and I was right. It’s a 5W-30 motor oil. Nothing to help you there. If the body was transported in a car trunk, maybe a van, there are a thousand ways to get marks like that. Lorenz hoped it might be something more exotic, to help pinpoint a murder scene.”

I hunch down for a closer look at the marks. Three faint swipes across the back of the calf, maybe two inches in length.

“Is there anything else you’re holding back?” I ask.

Cavallo laughs. “Holding back is your specialty, March.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

While Bridger returns the body to the refrigerator, Cavallo and I go into the corridor. She’s biting down on her bottom lip, waiting for me to acknowledge the fact that she’s done good work. I give her shoulder a pat. “Nice job. Do you think there’s any chance of getting the full autopsy report through official channels? That’s what we need to make this stick.”

“It might be possible,” she says.

“Ask Bascombe. He’s good at that kind of thing.”

“If I did that, I’d have to tell him what I’m working on.”

Now it’s my turn to laugh: “He already knows.”

When I left Hilda and her files in Bea’s hands for safekeeping, it was an acknowledgment that her resources were greater than mine. But I did not walk away empty-handed. Hilda gave me a detailed outline of the process Brandon Ford used for making contact with Inferno to collect his raw intelligence. She’d never made the journey herself, of course. But Ford had apparently relied on her experience when it came to making operational dispositions. I trusted that her information would prove accurate.

Setting up a watch on the route on the off chance that Ford might make a trip to Matamoros was beyond my capabilities, though. So was hunting down the men in Hilda’s files. With Bea’s team of experienced drug intelligence officers, she could do more on both counts. I had to take it on faith that if anything turned up, she would keep me in the loop.