Michael Connelly - The Scarecrow

Ironically, the stories had been written by a reporter I knew. Rick Heikes had worked for the Los Angeles Times until he took one of the early buyouts. He banked the check from the Times and promptly took the job with the Review-Journal and had been there ever since. He had made it over the wall and by all accounts was the better for it. The Times was the loser because it had let another fine reporter go to another newspaper.

I quickly scanned the stories until I found the one I remembered. It was a report on the trial testimony given by the Clark County coroner.

Coroner: Ex-Wife Held, Tortured for Hours

By Rick Heikes,

Review-Journal Staff Writer

Autopsy results showed that Sharon Oglevy was strangled more than 12 hours after her abduction, the Clark County coroner testified Wednesday in the murder trial of the victim’s ex-husband.

Gary Shaw testified for the prosecution and revealed new details of the abduction, rape and murder. He said the time of death was determined during autopsy to be approximately 12 to 18 hours after a witness saw Oglevy forced into a van in a parking garage behind the Cleopatra Casino and Resort, where she worked as a dancer in the exotic Femmes Fatales show.

“For at least twelve hours she was with her abductor and many horrible things were done to her before she was finally killed,” Shaw testified under questioning from the prosecutor.

A day later her body was found in the trunk of her ex-husband’s car by police officers who had gone to his home in Summerland to ask if he knew his ex-wife’s whereabouts. He allowed the police to search the premises and the body was found in the car parked in the home’s garage. The couple’s marriage had dissolved eight months earlier in an acrimonious divorce. Sharon Oglevy had sought a restraining order prohibiting her ex-husband, a blackjack dealer, from coming within 100 feet of her. In her petition she said her husband had threatened to kill her and bury her in the desert.

Brian Oglevy was charged with first degree murder, kidnapping and rape with a foreign object. Investigators said they believed he had placed the victim’s body in the trunk of his car with the intention of burying it later in the desert. He has denied killing his ex-wife and said he was set up as a fall guy for her murder. He has been held without bail since his arrest.

Shaw provided jurors with several lurid and ghastly details of the murder. He said Sharon Oglevy was raped and sodomized repeatedly with an unknown foreign object that left significant internal injuries. He said histamine levels in the body were unusually high, indicating that the injuries that caused her body to manufacture the chemical had occurred well before her death by asphyxiation.

Shaw testified that Oglevy had been asphyxiated with a plastic bag that had been pulled over her head and tied closed around her neck. He said several cord markings or furrows on the victim’s neck and a high level of hemorrhaging around her eyes indicated she had been asphyxiated slowly and may have been allowed to lose and regain consciousness several times.

While Shaw’s testimony illuminated much of the prosecution’s theory of how the murder took place, there are still blanks to fill in. Las Vegas Metro Police have never been able to determine where Brian Oglevy allegedly held and then murdered his ex-wife. Crime scene technicians spent three days examining his home after his arrest and determined that it was unlikely that the murder occurred there. The defendant has also not been linked by evidence to a van, which witnesses said Sharon Oglevy was abducted in.

Brian Oglevy’s attorney, William Schifino, objected several times during the coroner’s testimony, asking the judge to stop Shaw from editorializing and putting his personal view of the details into his testimony. Schifino was successful at times, but for the most part the judge allowed Shaw to speak his mind.

The trial continues today. Schifino is expected to mount his defense sometime next week. Brian Oglevy has denied killing his wife since the crime occurred but has not publicly offered a theory on who killed her and set him up to take the fall.

I studied the Review-Journal ’s trial stories that came before and after the one I had just read, and none gripped me like the report on the autopsy. The missing hours and the plastic bag and slow asphyxiation were descriptions that matched the murder of Denise Babbit. And, of course, the car trunk was the strongest match of all.

I pushed back from the desk but stayed in my seat, thinking. Could there be a connection here or was I engaged in a reporter’s fantasy, seeing innocent people accused of crimes they did not commit? Had Angela, in her industrious but naive manner, stumbled onto something that was under the radar of all of law enforcement?

I didn’t know-yet. But there was one way to find out. I had to go to Las Vegas.

I stood up and headed toward the raft. I had to inform Prendo and get a travel authorization. But when I got there his seat was empty.

“Anybody seen Prendo?” I asked the other aces on the raft.

“He took early dinner,” said one. “He should be back in an hour.”

I checked my watch. It was after four and I needed to get moving, first home to pack a bag, and then to the airport. If I couldn’t get a flight on short notice, I’d drive to Vegas. I glanced over at Angela Cook’s cubicle and saw it was empty, too. I walked over to the switchboard and looked up at Lorene. She pulled one earphone back.

“Did Angela Cook check out?”

“She said she was going out for a bite to eat with her editor but that she’d be back after. You want her cell number?”

“No, thanks, I’ve got it.”

I headed back to my desk with suspicion and anger growing inside in equal parts. My ace and my replacement had gone off together to break bread and I was not informed or invited. To me it only meant one thing. They were planning their next assault on my story.

That was okay, I decided. I was a giant step ahead of them and planned to stay that way. While they were off scheming I would be off chasing the real story. And I would get there first.

Carver had been busy all day routing and opening the final gateways that would allow for a test run of data transmission from Mercer and Gissal in St. Louis. It had consumed him and he had not made his appointed rounds until late in the day. He checked his traps and a charge shot through his chest when he saw he had caught something in one of his cages. The screen avatar displayed it as a fat gray rat running on a wheel inside the cage labeled TRUNK MURDER.

Using his mouse, Carver opened the cage and took out the rat. Its eyes were ruby red and its sharp teeth gleamed with ice-blue saliva. The animal wore a collar with a silver identity tag on it. He clicked on the tag and brought up the rat’s information. The date and time of the visit had occurred the night before, just after he had last checked his traps. A ten-digit Internet protocol address had been captured. The visit to his www.trunkmurder.com site had lasted only twelve seconds. But it was enough. It meant someone out there had plugged the words trunk murder into a search engine. Now he would try to find out who and why.

Two minutes later Carver’s breath caught in his throat as he followed the IP-a basic computer address-back to an Internet service provider. There was good and bad news. The good news: it wasn’t a huge provider like Yahoo, which had traffic gateways all over the world and was time-consuming as hell to trace. The bad news: it was a small private provider with the domain name of LATimes.com.

The Los Angeles Times, he thought, as something inside clutched his chest. A reporter from Los Angeles had gone to his trunk murder website. Carver leaned back in his chair and thought about how he should approach this. He had the IP address but no name to go with it. He couldn’t even be sure it was a reporter who had made the visit. A lot of non-reporters work at newspapers.