J. Jance - Fire and Ice

Dr. Hopewell nodded again and returned to her work and her narrative. “The victim was evidently lying on her back when she was set on fire. You’ll notice that the charring is far more pronounced on the top portions of the body than it is on the bottom,” she continued. “I would assume that whoever did this probably expected that the body would burn down to mere ashes, thus erasing all trace evidence. Unfortunately for him, the fire went out prematurely.”

“Due to weather conditions?” I asked. In the Cascades in November, it’s either raining or snowing.

“The weather could be partly responsible in putting the fire out,” Dr. Hopewell conceded. “But remember, most of the people who turn to crime do so because they don’t have many other career options. They aren’t smart and didn’t pay attention in school. The guy who did this-and I’m pretty sure it was a guy-obviously had no idea that the human body is more than fifty percent water. He may have poured on all the gasoline he had, but it wasn’t nearly enough to do the job completely. Unfortunately for us, when the fire was out, there was still enough flesh on the bones to attract carrion eaters. That’s why the bones were scattered around the way they were.”

Suddenly the door to the morgue swung open. A woman who appeared to be in her mid-to-late-thirties strode into the room. She was five-six or-seven and solidly built. She looked tough enough that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she could take me in a fair fight.

“How come you started already?” she demanded of the M.E. “Connie was supposed to call and let me know when you got back. I wanted to be here for this. I was supposed to be here.” Noticing me, the woman stopped short in mid-tirade and stared at me. “Who the hell is this guy?” she added pointedly. “What’s he doing here?”

“His name is J. P. Beaumont,” Dr. Hopewell said. “He’s an investigator with the AG’s office, and this is Detective Lucinda Caldwell, Kittitas County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Homicide,” Detective Caldwell added unnecessarily, since I’d already figured out that much on my own.

It struck me that if Detective Caldwell thought the lady in the outside office was going to lift a hand to help her or anyone else, she was a lot more naive than your run-of-the-mill homicide cop ought to be.

“Glad to meet you,” I said. I wasn’t particularly glad to meet her, but I’m old enough to know that a certain amount of insincerity is necessary to get along in this world. “People call me Beau,” I said. “Or else J.P.”

“I don’t give a damn what people call you,” she said. “I’m going to call you gone. This is my case. What are you doing here?”

Ross Connors had sent in Special Homicide because of the possible connection between this victim and the five other cases we were already working. But the truth was, the body had been found in Kittitas County, and their homicide folks should have been primary. Until Detective Caldwell’s abrupt arrival, the local constabulary had been notable in their absence.

My initial instinct was to take offense at Detective Caldwell’s proprietary approach. I started to object but then thought better of it. I happened to remember how I used to feel back in the old days at Seattle PD when some arrogant piece of brass would deign to come down from on high and venture onto the fifth floor to tell me and the other lowly homicide cops how to do our jobs. Or the time when some twit of an FBI agent ended up being parachuted into the middle of one of my cases and took it upon himself to rub my nose in the concept that he was smart and I was stupid. Given all that, it made sense that Detective Caldwell might be territorial about her case. What I had to do was find a way to work with her.

“My boss, Attorney General Ross Connors, believes this case might be related to several other ones we’ve been working.”

“I don’t care who you are or where you’re from,” Detective Caldwell declared. “You’ve got no business horning in on my-”

“Play nice, you two,” Dr. Hopewell ordered. “I happen to be doing an autopsy here. How about if you cool it, Lucy? You can sort out all the jurisdictional wrangling later on. In the meantime, you need to know that our victim is female. Probably late twenties, early thirties. She’s had at least one child, and she died on or around November eighth.”

That caught my attention, and Detective Caldwell’s, too. “You can tell that from looking at this pile of bones?” Lucy Caldwell asked.

“I can tell that from looking at her watch,” Dr. Hopewell said, holding up the charred remains of a watch. “It was still on her wrist, and that’s the day it stopped running.”

Detective Caldwell nudged Bob Craft, the M.E.’s assistant, out of the way and bullied herself directly between me and the M.E. Even so, I managed to step around the detective’s stolid body long enough to take a closer look at the damaged watch.

Getting older is an interesting process. My eyesight isn’t what it used to be. I’m annoyed at times when, if I don’t want to resort to reading glasses, I have to hold menus as far away as my arms will reach. That’s the only way to make them readable. In this case, however, that peculiarity served me in good stead. It allowed me to see that although the crystal covering was broken and the strap had been burned away, the numbers across the bottom, the ones showing the date, were still clearly visible.

My first impression was that this was a reasonably expensive watch that might very well be traceable. The same thing could also be true of the ring, which had already been taken into evidence. Before I could say anything to that effect, however, Lucinda Caldwell produced an evidence bag of her own.

“I’ll take that,” she said. “Put it in here.”

And Dr. Hopewell did. By then the body was pretty much put back together except for some bits that had probably been carried off by marauding carnivores. Those pieces would most likely never be found.

Dr. Hopewell stepped back from the examining table, snapped off her gloves, and nodded to her assistant. “You can switch off the camera, Mr. Craft,” she said. As he hurried to do her bidding, she turned to Detective Caldwell and added, “I’ll have my diener make copies of the tape.”

“Diener” happens to be a highfalutin name for plain old ordinary morgue assistant. It annoyed me that the M.E. found it necessary to play that kind of cop-talk one-upmanship. I prefer using ordinary English to law enforcement jargon.

“Please give Ms. Whitman your e-mail information,” Hopewell said. “That way we can send you each a copy of my final report.”

Looking up, I noticed for the first time that an overhead camera had silently recorded all the proceedings. That was a new one to me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to live in a world where autopsies were routinely recorded in HD color and then sent out over the Internet. How long would it be before some ghoulish entrepreneur set up an Autopsies-R-Us Web site and started letting viewers log on at will? It would probably mean an end to the macabre black humor comments cops and M.E.s have long used as a coping mechanism to see their way through the routine, mind-numbing horror of human dissections.

“You’ll get her dental information entered into the Missing Person database?” I asked.

Dr. Hopewell nodded. “Once we have the X rays, Mr. Craft will see to that as well.”

With Detective Caldwell leading the way, we started down the hallway toward the lobby. It depressed me to think that the receptionist in the outer office would be in charge of distribution. It occurred to me that Detective Caldwell and I would both probably end up waiting for that e-mail for a very long time, probably about as long as…well, as long as Detective Caldwell had waited for Connie Whitman’s call to let her know the M.E. had returned to her office. I had an idea that Ms. Whitman’s receptionist’s passive-aggressive behavior wouldn’t be limited to her gatekeeping responsibilities. I also doubted she would favor one law enforcement entity over any other.