P. Parrish - Thicker Than Water

Mobley walked to a credenza and opened a large cardboard box. On the side was written: #4532, Homicide, LCSO, Florida, April, 1966, Jagger, K.

He pulled out some plastic bags and a stack of photos, spreading them on his desk. Louis moved to it. The plastic bags held some bloody clothing, some torn clothing that looked like red cotton, and a pair of girl’s panties, turned inside-out. They appeared to have droplets of brown blood and several large yellowish stains, along with some discoloring Louis assumed was from the lab testing.

“Is this semen?” Louis asked.

“Yeah, that’s how they pinned the panties to Cade. He’s a secretor.”

Louis knew that meant his blood group could be typed from any body fluid. “So’s eighty percent of the population,” Louis said. “What’s Cade’s blood type?”

“O positive.”

“Most common type. Did they break it down into subgroups? Proteins?”

Mobley shook his head. “It was 1966, the dark ages for serology. I doubt they went beyond seeing that big O come up.”

“Could they now?”

Mobley was getting irritated. “Hell, I don’t know. That shit’s awful old. Samples break down.”

“Did Cade offer an alibi?” Louis asked.

“Yeah, some guy named Atterberry. But they were never able to find him.”

“What about the weapon? You have it?”

Mobley reached into the cardboard box and pulled out another large plastic bag. He extracted a tool and laid it on the desk between them. It looked like a pickaxe, about a foot and a half in length with a wooden shaft.

Louis picked it up, his eyes drawn to the forged steel double head. “Jesus, what is this?” he asked.

“Gardeners use it to loosen hard dirt. Cade’s-and only Cade’s-fingerprints are all over the handle.” Mobley gave a twisted smile. “It’s called a Clot-Buster. Catchy name, huh?”

Louis turned it over in his hands. It was heavy, one end of the steel blunt-edged and coated with rust. The other metal end had three thick prongs, covered with a brown grit that Louis was sure was dried blood. It was hard to think of the evil-looking thing being used for something as innocent as gardening.

“She was stabbed with this end?” he asked, nodding at the three prongs.

“Yup. I was reading the autopsy report when you came in,” Mobley said. “The wounds all showed that three-prong profile.”

“How did they know this was Cade’s?” Louis asked.

Mobley pointed to a blurred mark on the handle. “It’s hard to see, but there’s a phone number there, done with a laundry marker. It was Cade’s business phone.”

“Anybody could have put it there.”

“Cade’s wife admitted she marked his tools with their phone number because she was tired of him losing them. Cade claims this one went missing a couple days earlier.”

Louis set the Clot-Buster on the desk.

“What else you got?” he asked.

Mobley picked up a stack of photos and handed them to Louis. They were crime scene photos, each labeled with an evidence number from the trial. Louis went quickly through the first ones, which showed the dumpsite and wide-angles of the body.

He flipped to the next series of photos, all shots of Kitty Jagger’s body. Blood smeared across her bare, bruised thighs. A close-up of her hands. And a shot of her torso with its gaping wounds in a slender chest.

He paused at the next photo. He was staring into Kitty’s face. He was trying to see some resemblance to the smiling girl of the newspaper photo. But this face wasn’t even human-looking anymore. The body had lain in the dump for two days and he knew from experience what that could mean.

It was blood-streaked, the eyes open, the corneas milky with death. Rigor had frozen her lips into a horrible grin, revealing her small teeth. The left part of her cheek had been pecked away, probably by the gulls that he had seen circling over the dump.

He set the photos down, running his hand over his eyes. Mobley had walked back to his desk and was sitting when Louis turned to face him.

“Why are you wasting your time with this?” Mobley said. “From what I hear, Outlaw hasn’t got anything that’s going to help Cade beat this Duvall thing. I’d think you’d be working on that.”

Louis was still looking down at the photograph of Kitty Jagger’s ravaged face.

“It was twenty years ago. Let it go, Kincaid,” Mobley said quietly.

The door opened and the secretary poked her head in. “Sheriff, Vern Sandusky is on hold.”

Mobley picked up the receiver, finger poised over a button as he looked at Louis. Louis was still staring at the photo of Kitty.

“Kincaid.”

Louis looked up.

“Forget her. She’s dead and her killer has been convicted. There’s nothing you can do for her now.”

Mobley jabbed at the phone and swung his chair around away from Louis.

Louis gathered up his files and left. When he walked out, the Amazon was looking at him.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“Hard to convince your boss of anything, isn’t it?”

She smiled. “Not if you know how.”

Louis’s beeper went off, and he tried to shift the files so he could turn it off, but she beat him to it, reaching across her desk to his hip.

“Need to use the phone?” she asked, leaning on the desk.

Louis shook his head, seeing Susan’s number. “Nah. It can wait.”

“Let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.”

The look in the Amazon’s eyes wasn’t hard to translate. Okay, he’d use it. “What about a transcript from Jack Cade’s 1967 trial?” he asked.

“You don’t want much, do you?”

He tried a smile. “It would be a big help to me.”

She cocked her head, tapping her pen against her cheek. “Okay, give me your number,” she said. “I’ll call you if I can get it.”

Louis rattled off the pager number. The Amazon waved the paper between two long pink fingernails. “Got it.”

He was going to ask for her name, but he had the feeling it would open doors he didn’t want opened right now.

“Thanks, I owe you one,” he said.

“I’ll collect later,” she said.

It shouldn’t have bothered him. It was just a normal wound chart-the simple line drawing of a generic female body that pathologists used to record injuries to the deceased. Louis stared at the sketch. The body portion of the drawing was oddly neutered with no nipples or pubic area. The pathologist had dutifully drawn in the twelve stab marks on the torso.

But something about it was bothering him.

Then he saw it. The drawing’s face. Unlike the body, it was detailed, with eyes, hair- shit, and a smile.

Jesus. He had heard about these old wound charts, but he had never seen one before. They had been phased out years ago when someone finally realized how grotesque they were.

He tossed the diagram aside, hoisted himself off the bed and went to the kitchen. He returned with a Dr Pepper and it was several minutes and half a can later before he returned to Kitty Jagger’s autopsy report.

The pages of the twenty-year-old report were yellowed, some even mildewed from lying in the damp bowels of the municipal filing system. A musty odor rose up to him as he carefully turned the pages.

Katherine Lynn Jagger. DOB: 2-29-51. Height: 5 ft. 5. Weight: 122 lbs.

Cause of death: cerebral hemorrhage.

Manner of death: blunt trauma to the skull.

Mode of death: homicide.

Issy jumped up on the bed. The cat stared at him for a moment, then laid down on one of the open folders.

He was looking for something that might provide a clue about where she had been killed before being dumped. But so far there was nothing.