Lisa Black - Evidence of Murder

When she had searched the ground with reasonable thoroughness-reasonable defined as longer than she wanted to but not so long that she shrieked with boredom-she turned Jillian Perry onto her side. Frank helped her, but it was not difficult given Jillian’s slender frame and the assistance of gravity. Theresa quickly taped the back surface of the clothing as well. Another peek under the clothes-not difficult since the pink polo-type shirt had not been tucked into the jeans-confirmed their suspicions: Jillian Perry had not been shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned.

Frank stood up, rubbing his arms, his mustache framed by red cheeks. “Damn, it’s cold.”

“I’d still rather be here. A brilliant forensic scientist hired by the defense for their poor railroaded client is visiting our lab as we speak.”

“I take it he’s not a buddy of yours. She could have gotten here on foot from her place,” Frank thought aloud. “It’s not even three miles by car. Less if she walked along the train tracks.”

“I know.”

“She disappeared Monday afternoon. The high that day was six degrees. How long does it take someone to freeze to death?”

“A long time. Overnight would be enough. But if she came here in the afternoon, why didn’t she go farther into the woods? She’s visible from the path. Someone could have found her, even on a cold day. You said yourself there’s always some crazy hiker around.”

“She is visible from the path, and still it took five days for someone to notice her.”

“But it’s a risk.”

“Maybe she wasn’t very good at thinking things through. Maybe she was too drunk or high to think clearly.”

Theresa looked around, and decided that she had done all that could be done at the scene. She pulled out her Nextel to call for the ambulance crew-i.e., the body snatchers. “We’ll just have to wait on tox for that. No drugs or alcohol at the apartment, you said?”

“A little Michelob Lite. Of course he had time to clean up for our visit.”

“Or throw the stuff out, if he knew she wasn’t coming back.”

Frank considered this, then shook his head. “Nah. The husband’s got no record past a speeding ticket or two. If she’s got drugs in her system, then my money is on Georgie. She was lighting up for old time’s sake with her boss and OD’d. He needed to get rid of the body and dumped it here.”

“Then it’s not murder, exactly.”

“I know.”

“And there are a lot more convenient places for someone on West Twenty-fifth to dump a body, starting with the Dumpsters at the West Side Market and moving about a thousand feet to the river.”

“So what are we looking at here?” He stood next to the oak, his face turned to the silent woman at his feet. Frustration tinged his voice; they both knew that without more information, they could ask questions of each other from then until the next fall and not be able to answer a single one.

“A little girl who’s never going to know her mommy,” Theresa told him.

The autopsy suite in the sixty-year-old medical examiner’s office, scrubbed every afternoon, was the cleanest room in the building. Or at least it appeared to be-the staff took general precautions against cross-contamination but beyond that placed no particular emphasis on sterility. The patients opened up on these tables did not have to worry about infection.

The room held three stainless-steel tables, two sinks, a central floor drain; small red ceramic tiles covered the floor and half of the walls. Unless a victim’s organs were currently open, it did not smell bad, more like the humid odor of a seedy bar during the day. Autopsies were performed one after the other until the doctors ran out of candidates; sometimes this would be early in the day and sometimes late. The dieners, or autopsy assistants, would then clean the room and go home, a system that provided every incentive to work quickly and efficiently.

Any new deceased who arrived after cleanup joined the queue for the following morning’s work. Jillian Perry made it in under the wire.

“Could have been an early day.” Jesse, a skinny black man who didn’t look old enough to have a driver’s license, absently hosed the body as he grumbled. He did not seem at all enamored of the beautiful model; a hot dead girl was no match for paid time off.

Undressed, Jillian’s body continued to show no signs of violence. No needle marks, no injuries, not so much as a bruise. Lividity, of course, on the buttocks and backs of the legs, but Theresa expected that. She and the pathologist, Dr. Christine Johnson, had already collected fingernail scrapings, a rape kit, and a few hairs and fibers from the skin. Now the ebony-hued doctor held a small but brilliant flashlight up to the mouth.

“Her throat’s clear. I don’t see any of the foaming you usually get with an OD.”

Jesse offered his opinion. “She froze to death.”

Theresa peered down the throat as well. “That would take a long time. It wasn’t that cold out.”

“Just long enough to screw up my day. If she’d been here this morning, I’d be going home by now.”

Theresa had often proposed a law restricting all crimes to only daylight hours to keep from being dragged from bed, and didn’t blame him. “It sucks to be you.”

“Not as bad as it sucks to be this chick today,” Christine said, clicking off the flashlight with a brisk snap, similar to the way she discouraged potential suitors. The young, black, brilliant pathologist was too interested in studying for her board exams to be distracted by romance. “It seems we have a rash of people freezing to death in the woods all of a sudden.”

Theresa said, “Not really. We have a thirty-year-old, half-clothed, throttled prostitute, a warmly dressed fifteen-year-old boy with a single blow to the head, and now a lightly but fully dressed twenty-four-year-old mother dead of-what?”

“Good question. I’ll let you know what I find.”

Theresa relinquished control of the body and went next door to the old teaching amphitheater which, by virtue of its size, availability, and the fact that it had a table in the middle, doubled as the trace evidence department’s examination room. She covered the table with fresh brown paper and spread out the aqua sweatshirt, noting its size, color, and brand. It smelled faintly of perfume, a light and undoubtedly expensive floral scent. Would a woman intending suicide wear perfume? Sure, why not? No need to save the good stuff for a special occasion, as Theresa did. She still had perfume from high school.

Aside from a little dirt and some dead leaves, almost certainly picked up when they rolled the body, the shirt was clean. Theresa turned it inside out-more of the same, except for a smear above the right cuff, on the inside of the forearm. It could have been a minuscule amount of oil. Perhaps Jillian had had something in her hand when she pulled the shirt on? But the victim’s hands were clean, and no spots appeared on the shirt’s waistband, where she would have had to tug downward.

The pink polo shirt under the sweatshirt had become discolored from the seepage of the decomposing tissues. Theresa hung it on a wheeled rack; when it dried she could tape its surface to pick up any loose hairs or fibers. Odd that it hadn’t been tucked into the jeans underneath the sweatshirt, which would have kept her warmer, but perhaps the victim had dressed in a hurry, or it had something to do with the current fashion.

The jeans were a designer brand, size four, making Theresa think there might be something to the rumor that clothing manufacturers had downgraded all women’s clothing sizes to make customers feel better about their bodies, and, by extension, better about parting with the cash to clothe them. Jillian seemed slender, but by no means undernourished for her height. A close look at the back pockets yielded a tiny dusting of white powder, which Theresa dutifully scraped into a paper fold to be tested for the presence of cocaine. The left front pocket contained some lint. The right front pocket held a single stud earring-a small cubic zirconium, as near as Theresa could figure-and a phone number with a Cleveland exchange scribbled on a piece of paper.