Allison Brennan: Speak No Evil

“Faint?” Will said. “I can’t see anything.”

Carina focused on the areas Chen indicated. She’d never have noticed anything unusual until he pointed out the very slight discoloration. “What can cause that?” she asked.

“Any number of things. And it happened around the time of death. Bruising stops after the heart stops beating. Something heavy was placed on her, perhaps to facilitate her death or to keep her body from convulsing.”

A horrific thought came to Carina. “Could the killer have laid on top of her?”

“Yes,” Chen said, a rare sigh coming from deep in his chest. “It’s cases like this that make me think about early retirement,” he said quietly, looking at Angie’s face.

“What’s the second odd thing?”

He pointed the laser at her navel. “She recently had a navel ring ripped out. It had begun to heal, so I’d guess it was removed twenty-four to forty-eight hours before her death.”

He turned his attention from the tear in the navel to the two detectives on the other side of the table. “Ready?”

No , Carina thought, but nodded along with Will. They silently observed Chen’s meticulous internal examination, his assistant following orders expeditiously.

By the end of the autopsy, they had learned and confirmed several important facts:

Angela Vance had been raped multiple times. There was extensive tearing and deep tissue damage in both orifices, indicating that a sharp, foreign object had penetrated. There was no biological evidence. The killer could have used a condom. If he didn’t, that evidence had probably been destroyed or contaminated when he cleaned the body.

Chen collected possible trace evidence, tissue samples, and additional blood samples to send to the lab. He confirmed that she hadn’t eaten in at least twelve hours because her stomach was void of food.

Jim Gage joined them halfway through the autopsy and confirmed that Angie had suffocated in the bag. While the tox screen was clean, the additional tissue and blood samples would be sent to the county lab, which could test for a broader array of drugs. Jim also collected hair samples to test for cocaine to determine whether Steve Thomas’s accusation that Masterson was feeding her the drug had merit. If she took cocaine more than a week earlier, it wouldn’t show up in her blood, but it would show up in her hair follicles.

Not that drug use would prove Masterson was responsible for her death, but they never knew what information was important or incidental until they closed the case.

Time of death was fixed at approximately one a.m. Monday, with an hour window on either side.

“Fucking bastard,” Will mumbled as they left the morgue, the bright afternoon sunlight assaulting them when they stepped outside the cool building.

“You can say that again.” Jim Gage joined them on the walk back to the police station, though his laboratory was around the corner in the opposite direction.

“By the way,” Carina asked Jim, “did you find a navel ring in the evidence collected at the beach? It might look like a regular earring.”

“We found no jewelry whatsoever.”

“I wonder if the killer kept it,” Carina speculated.

“Or it was pulled out in a struggle,” Jim suggested. “Dr. Chen is sending over the evidence priority and I’ll rush it as best I can. It would help if you get a suspect in custody; my unit has sixteen cases up for trial in the next two months that I need to prioritize.”

“We have a suspect,” Carina said.

“Come by later, I’ll try to give you a better time line.”

“Sure.”

She thought Jim’s comment was odd, since she was always coming by the lab for reports on her cases, but she realized how strange when Jim added, “If you come by after five, maybe we can go out for drinks later.”

“Um, okay.”

They were outside the main police doors when Jim turned and walked back down the block to the forensics lab. Come by after five? For drinks? Did that mean what she thought it meant? She shook her head. No, they were over the relationship thing. They’d broken up nearly two years ago. And he’d never asked her out for drinks or anything social in all that time.

“He wants you back,” Will said.

Carina laughed, dismissing Will’s comment. How did her partner always seem to know what she was thinking?

“No word on Thomas?”

“The patrol says he hasn’t come back. I have a BOLO on his car. We’ll have another shot at him.” A “be on the lookout” was standard procedure when they wanted to talk to a person but not bring them down to the station or into custody.

“Let’s find Doug Masterson.”

Minor drug offenses and a six-month stint at Descanso for possession of cocaine with intent to sell filled Masterson’s rap sheet. He’d been clean-at least, he hadn’t been caught-for the last two years.

They had his photo, description, and age-thirty-four.

After checking out his apartment, his place of work, and known hangouts, they came up empty. No one admitted to seeing him since Sunday afternoon, but his neighbor, a retiree, said he had taken “his girl” up to the mountains for skiing on Sunday and he didn’t expect him back for a couple days.

Carina had showed a picture of Angie to the neighbor. “Is this Masterson’s girl?”

“One of them. Not the one he took skiing, though. Don’t know her name, she’s a new one. He goes through those pretty little things like candy.” He grinned, revealing crooked teeth. The smell of cheap alcohol wafted toward the officers. “Yep, Doug has the lookers all over him.”

In the car, Carina frowned, made notes. “He could have dumped Angie’s body late Sunday night and then left town. But if the neighbor’s right, Masterson couldn’t have killed Angie.”

“Did you smell the booze? I doubt he knows what day of the week it is, let alone what time Masterson left yesterday. If it was yesterday.” Will picked up the radio and put a BOLO on Masterson.

Carina’s money was on Thomas. Means, opportunity, motive. The means was a little difficult right now-where would he have kept her?-but he had no alibi for the time she disappeared, and she had dumped him for another loser. More damning was the fact that he’d lied to them.

“Let’s talk to Abby Ivers again,” she said. She filled Will in on her theory that Abby was hiding something. “We need to be let in on her little secret, or maybe the phrase obstruction of justice will mean something to her.”

They found Abby at the apartment she shared with Jodi. The girls had another friend, Kayla Nichols, with them. The three of them had obviously been crying.

Carina wasn’t going to leave the room without knowing what Abby had hinted at earlier. But after fifteen minutes of the run-around with all three girls-Abby, Jodi, and wannabe lawyer Kayla-first denying, then saying it wasn’t important, then saying Angie would roll over in her grave if she knew they’d told, Carina lost her temper.

She looked each of them in the eye in turn, then focused her steely-eyed gaze on the weakest link, Abby.

“Okay, girls, let me explain something to you. Angie was raped. Then she was suffocated in a garbage bag. Murdered . She’s dead, and if you don’t spill this secret right now, I’m taking you all to jail. You can spend the night in a cold cell and maybe then you’ll try to help, not hinder, our investigation.”

Kayla jumped up. “We have rights, too!”

“Sit down, Kayla,” Carina said. “I can and will arrest you for obstruction of justice. You will be taken into court tomorrow and the judge will make you tell or you’ll be in contempt of court.”

Abby interjected, “No one can know.”