An hour later Mars made it down to the morgue. He was feeling behind the curve, having gotten hung up in the squad room. While the autopsy was usually time well spent, from what he’d seen at the crime scene, Mars wasn’t expecting much. Where he wanted to be was out on Cornelia Drive. He’d spend no more than half an hour with Doc D. Then he’d try to get a hold of Phil Keck, chief of police in Edina, to coordinate a visit to the Fitzgerald family.
Entering the autopsy room at the Hennepin County Morgue, Mars was always conscious of his own smell: faint sweat, warm blood. The autopsy room air was perpetually cold and damp, punctuated with a chemical smell that felt like it could turn the inside of your nostrils to corduroy. The chill was intensified by the hard, shining surfaces of tile and stainless steel. Even the fabrics in the room—stiff white sheets and Doc D’s ice-green scrubs—looked cold.
Mary Pat Fitzgerald’s white blond hair spilled out from under a cover sheet and over the edge of the autopsy table. Seeing her bare foot at one end of the sheet covered autopsy table, Mars guessed she’d already been stripped and scrubbed. Doc D was shaking his hands over a stainless steel wall sink as Mars came in. To Mars he said, “Prettiest corpse I’ve seen in a long time. And clean. I’m gonna be real surprised if the
Trace Unit finds anything. Whatever it was happened to her on the bluffs didn’t dirty her up any.”
Mars walked over to the body and pulled the sheet from the girl’s face. Her beautiful bone structure was even more evident, Mars guessed, in death than in life.
Doc D called Mars over to a countertop where he’d laid out a number of objects removed from the body. “Take a look at this.” He handed Mars a tank watch with a tan leather strap. “She was wearing a Weissie wrist watch. You notice it on her arm at the scene?”
Mars nodded.
“My dad collected watches when I was kid. Sold most of them to send me to college.” Here Doc D stopped to light another cigarette. He drew deeply on the cigarette and looked at Mars as he exhaled. “A Weissie? Well, my dad could have paid for a couple of years of medical school back in the sixties if he’d cashed in what the kid was wearing on her wrist. Solid gold case, hand hammered. Hand-stitched leather band—original, in good condition.”
Mars waited for Doc D to make his point.
“The Weissie’s got a month and a date calendar built into the face, and the interesting thing about a Weissie is that it has a very tricky setting mechanism. To wind the watch, you pull out of the stem and wind, pretty much like you would for any watch that isn’t digital. But if you want to reset the calendar, you pull the stem out and—very slightly—give it a half turn counterclockwise, which stops the works—time, calendar, everything. It’s not the kind of action a person could do by accident. You’d have to think about doing it, intend to do it.
“The Fitzgerald girl’s Weissie was stopped, with the stem pulled, at eleven-oh-five on April third. This tells me that at eleven-oh-five last Thursday, she knew she was in trouble. And goddamn it, knowing she was in trouble, she had the
presence of mind to send us a message. I tell you, Mars, I got tears in my eyes when I figured out what she’d done with that watch.”
Mars said, “It’s not the kind of evidence that holds up very well in a courtroom. But for investigative purposes, it’ll help.”
“This, too,” Doc D said, holding up the girl’s khaki pants. He pointed to the knees on the pants. Dirt stains were visible. “At some point she was on her knees, but it wasn’t a fall. Her knees look fine. No bruising, which would have shown up even if she died a few minutes after falling.”
Mars said, “At the scene, the way her butt was sort of up in the air, it looked like she’d been kneeling, then fallen forward. You opened her up yet?”
“Just about to start. Got her scrubbed, and my first guess, that she took a shiv to the aorta, looks like it’s gonna hold up. She’s got a puncture wound in the right place. Nothing else that looks probable for cause of death. One thing’s a little odd. There’s a slight trauma over the skin of the pubis—and she’s missing pubic hair in that area. Hard to say what’s going on there. Say she’s about to have sex with someone, and he’s over her, pants unzipped. Gets interrupted, starts to zip up fast. Catches her pubic hair in his zipper, pulls away, taking some pubic hair with him. That’s what it looks like.”
Mars said, “But she was in the wrong position for that to be the murder scenario. I mean, he’s not gonna be interrupted, zip up, get her on her knees, then stick her with a screwdriver. He’s gonna zip up and get the hell out of there …”
Doc D nodded. “I take your point. Thing is, there’s evidence of very slight bleeding in the area where pubic hair is missing. Takes a magnifying glass to see it, and I haven’t done run any tests yet, but my guess is we’ve got pinpoint bleeding.”
“But you didn’t find any blood on her panties.”
“None. Remember, her pants were down, so if the trauma
occurred in connection with the murder, that fits. But I agree, it’s hard to figure a scenario that fits the pubic trauma with the murder. I don’t know. Just strikes me as odd. Probably doesn’t mean anything.”
Mars said, “So, if we find a suspect, we should check pant zippers.”
Doc D snapped on powdered latex gloves. “That’s what I’d do. Well, might as well get on with the main event. You staying around?”
Mars shifted. “I’d like to, but frankly, I’m thinking my best shot is getting out to Edina as fast as possible. I’m not feeling particularly good about what’s coming out of the crime scene. I’d like to be the first to deliver the news to the family, check out their reactions, start interviewing people. You available sometime early tomorrow to go over what you find?”
“You gonna be around, say, eight tomorrow morning?”
“Sounds fine. You want me to come over here?”
“Nah. I’ll come over to the squad room. Your domestic arrangements are superior to mine.”
Back in the Pontiac, Mars switched on the ignition and cranked the heater. Then he dug around in the glove box for his phone directory. The Directory of Metropolitan Area Law Enforcement Officers was a much-abused object: bent, torn, coffee stained. Chris had colored on more than one page and as many pages were missing as remained.
Mars thumbed through the Cities index and found Edina. He was in luck, the page listing the Edina Police Department was intact. Pulling up the antenna on his mobile phone, he punched out the numbers and tucked the phone between his ear and shoulder.
“Edina Police Department. This is Chief Keck’s Office. How may I help you?”
Now, there was a difference right off. Three sentences to answer a phone.
“This is Special Detective Marshall Bahr with the Minneapolis Police Department. Is Chief Keck in?”
“I’m sorry, Special Detective, but the chief is out of the office at the moment. May I have him return your call?”
Mars hesitated. “Well, I’d like to talk to him sooner rather than later. Any chance you could give him a page and have him get back to me within the next fifteen minutes or so?”
This time it was Edina that hesitated. “I’m sorry to say Chief Keck is involved with a family friend whose daughter is missing. I will certainly interrupt him if you think it necessary. I’d prefer to wait until Chief Keck returns later this afternoon. What would be best for you?”
Mars looked out the car window. There were maybe ten miles between where he was sitting and the Edina Police Department. But at that moment, he had no doubt they were on the same page.
“Is Chief Keck with the Fitzgerald family?”
“Why, yes. Forgive me. I hadn’t understood that you were returning the chief’s call.”
“I’m not. But I do need to talk to the chief about Mary Pat Fitzgerald. Why don’t you go ahead and page the chief.” Mars gave his mobile phone number, then settled in to wait for the return call.
Keck had started his police career in the Minneapolis PD as a patrolman. He’d done well, put a lot of effort into career training, and had been a good PR guy who’d moved off the streets fast and into department administration. He’d been a deputy division director when he was picked to head up the Edina PD. Mars had run into Keck at the Southdale Target maybe two years ago. You didn’t see much of your inner-city colleagues when you were chief of police in a suburb where
a typical felony was a set of golf clubs getting stolen out of the trunk of a Lexus sedan.
In less than three minutes the mobile phone rang.
“Mars. Phil Keck. I got a call from my office saying you wanted to talk to me about Mary Pat Fitzgerald. How did you guys get in on this?”
Mars made a face to himself. “We found her body, Phil.”
Keck didn’t say anything for a count of five. “Wait a minute. What body? Mary Pat ran an errand over at Southdale Thursday and didn’t come home. But we’ve got no reason to expect that she’s in any big trouble. In fact, her boyfriend’s been out of town since Thursday morning, and what we think is she hooked up with him. He’s due back tomorrow morning.
“I mean, what body?”