PROBLEM WAS, TIM was right.
The best-case scenario, and the traditional route in such a case, would be for Ray to plead guilty to an amended charge, in this case negligent homicide, which carried a maximum twenty-year sentence as opposed to the possibility of life in prison or even death that would accompany a deliberate homicide conviction.
Claudette had been smart enough not to slap Ray with the most serious charge. That would have required premeditation, which would have been more difficult to prove and also would have carried the possibility of the death penalty, an administrative nightmare reserved only for the cases likely to provoke the most outrage. Instead, she’d gone for a mitigated homicide charge, which still allowed for the wiggle room of accepting a plea agreement to negligent homicide.
Until St. Patrick’s Day, Julia told Marie in response to the intern’s relentless probing the day after Adonis was added to the team she’d never sought, Ray’s saving grace was that nobody gave a shit about him.
“We’d have been even better off if he hadn’t pulled that little stunt at the parade. Now everybody knows who he is. He sure didn’t count on the Rotarians stomping him the way they did. But people will forget about that part. All they’ll imagine is some big scary naked dude—nearly naked dude—cavorting among a bunch of community leaders.”
Marie picked up a pen and bit the end of it. “What about a change of venue?”
“We’ll ask. In fact, why don’t you draw up the request? I’ll review it when you’re done.”
Throwing her a bone, one that had no chance of success. Julia couldn’t remember the last change of venue in Duck Creek, even in cases that had raised the community blood pressure far more than one involving a couple of transients slugging it out by the creek. But at least it would keep Marie busy and off her back for a little while.
Fat chance.
Marie chomped down on her pen again, so hard Julia feared she’d end up with a mouthful of ink. “Another thing. Is the medical examiner’s report back yet? Because what if it shows the vic—uh, Mr. Williams—just slipped on the ice and hit his head?”
Checking with the medical examiner was on Julia’s list. She just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. “I’ve already got a call in to her office.” She rose and reached for her coat. “In fact—” She started to declare her intention to visit the medical examiner in person but realized Marie would probably just invite herself along. “I’ll check back after I make a coffee run.”
She edged out the door, ignoring Marie’s pointed look at the half-full cup from the coffee cart sitting on her desk.
When she and Claudette had shared the office, they’d had an understanding that whoever made a coffee run would always bring back a cup for the other.
She didn’t ask whether Marie wanted some.
The crime lab shared space in an office complex located conveniently near the jail. Its nondescript beige buildings also housed bail bondsmen, a title search business, a mediocre takeout restaurant catering to the office workers, and the county Motor Vehicle Division, whose long-suffering clients, Julia often thought, were only slightly less miserable than the inhabitants of the medical examiner’s cold-storage compartments.
“I’ve got the report on William Williams right here,” Dr. Amanda Pinkham said in response to Julia’s query. She tapped a few computer keys, and a printer whirred into action. “You want to see him?”
Despite her cheery, pastel-hued name, Pinkham dressed the part of someone who spent her day digging around in dead bodies, her white lab coat thrown over an all-black wardrobe.
Julia wondered if Pinkham had adopted the look that had earned her the nickname Morticia as a defense against the inevitable. She suspected the hair piled high on Pinkham’s head owed its raven sheen to a bottle and wondered how Pinkham managed to don her surgical gloves without tearing through them with her long, ebony-painted nails. She took what felt to Julia like an unseemly enjoyment in showing police and the occasional attorney the actual basis for her reports, leading them into the morgue and pointing out proof of, say, suicide versus homicide.
“He didn’t leave a note, but nobody pushed this gentleman from the top of the Orpheum Theatre,” she’d explained once as Julia looked queasily away from the broken body on the table. The Orpheum’s owner had been in a long-running and very public dispute with the owner of the neighboring property, a tech entrepreneur who’d wanted to buy the old theater and tear it down in order to put up the sort of high-end condos his high-paid employees could afford.
The two men had had such a violent street-corner quarrel the day before the theater owner took his midnight swan dive from the roof that the neighbor had been arrested in connection with his death, only to be released when Pinkham rendered her report.
“Look.” She’d shown Julia a pair of wire-frame glasses, their earpieces neatly folded, on a nearby table. “The cops found those on the roof. Murderers don’t bother to remove someone’s glasses.”
Julia apparently had passed some sort of test that day, because Pinkham didn’t make her usual offer of showing her a fresh cadaver. Julia couldn’t really fault the medical examiner for trying. Pinkham was justifiably proud of her work—her results had stood up to the most determined court challenges—and like any other professional at the top of her game, she liked to show off from time to time.
“Here.” Pinkham paper-clipped the report and handed it to Julia.
“Any chance it was accidental? Ray Belmar was really, really drunk. I can’t imagine he could even connect a punch, let alone hit someone hard enough to kill him.”
“I read the arrest report. And I had the same thought. But if you could see the injury to Mr. Williams’ head …” She left it at that, inviting Julia to say that yes, she’d very much like to see it.
Julia would not.
“What kind of injury?”
Julia tried to tune out Pinkham’s recap, but her mind caught on words and phrases like “shattered” and “deep” and “maceration of the brain.”
“My guess? Something heavy and metal. A tire iron, maybe, given that the wound was elongated rather than smaller, as it would have been if caused by a hammer.”
Julia held up her hand. “Enough. But two things: Nothing like that was found at the scene.”
“Correct.”
“Whatever it was is probably sitting at the bottom of the creek, and the hole in the ice is already frozen over.”
Pinkham didn’t bother to respond. Speculation was not part of her makeup.
“Anyway, my initial qualm remains. Ray’s a little guy. A little, very drunk guy. I can’t imagine him wielding a tire iron any more effectively than swinging a fist.”
Pinkham finally weighed in. “If he’d been coked out, or flying on meth, the superhuman-strength theory would apply. But there’s a reason they call it stumbling drunk.”
“Pretty sure he was on something.” Julia thought again of the tiny bruise on Ray’s inner arm. “The affidavit didn’t mention anything other than booze in the blood draw. Know if they checked for anything else?”
“Not my area of expertise.”
Pinkham grinned at Julia’s startled look. “Land of the living,” she said. “I don’t check that stuff until they’re cold.”
“Of course. But speaking of the dead, I saw you at Leslie Harper’s memorial service. What’s the deal with her?” Maybe she could ferret out a scrap of information from Pinkham and pass it along to Wayne Peterson, trade it for something that might help Ray.
“You want to know if it was suicide. So does everyone else. That reporter, Chance Larsen, he’s called me every day. I’ll tell you the same thing I’ve told him. I’m checking a couple of things. If there’s any update, you and the rest of the world will know at the same time, when I release my report.”
To her credit, Pinkham was known for not playing favorites in terms of doling out information, something Julia usually respected—unless she was the one seeking the information.
“She just didn’t seem the type to kill herself.” Harper frequently breezed into the courthouse to pick the public defenders’ brains before drawing up legislation. She knew everyone, down to the bailiffs and custodial staff, and her booming voice preceded her as she called greetings along her route. Unlike the courthouse regulars who tended toward dark blazers or the starched uniforms of law enforcement, Harper favored flowing dresses in neon colors accessorized with fringed scarves and jangly bracelets that crowded her arm nearly to the elbow. She called everybody “darling,” even and especially those with whom she was at odds—usually the prosecutors—and rarely showed up without tins of still-warm oatmeal cookies. She’d been one of the few people from whom Julia welcomed a hug.
“She was so full of life. Suicide just doesn’t make sense.”
“You’d be surprised.” Pinkham loved proving people wrong. “I sometimes think of these sorts of deaths as unintentional suicide. She lived alone. Never married, no kids. Sometimes, no matter what kind of public face they put on things, people who live alone get too sad. Men, they eat a gun. Women sit around at night and cry into too many glasses of wine and then take pills when they can’t sleep. Sometimes it goes south. They fall asleep in the tub and drown, or in bed and don’t wake up. Or, they slip and hit their head. In this case, there was blood on the kitchen counter.”
She arched a severely drawn eyebrow. “And she’d really been putting it away. Her alcohol level was off the charts. Well, nearly,” added Pinkham, a stickler for precision.
“She was a large woman. Stands to reason she drank the way she ate.”
Pinkham looked around and lowered her voice, as though even the corpses had ears. “Did you ever know her to partake in something stronger?”
“Like weed? She strikes me as one of those old potheads who probably still fired up. But then, you could say that about half the county.”
“No.” Pinkham’s voice went lower still. Julia had to lean in. “The hard stuff.”
Julia wasn’t quite sure what the hard stuff was, but she doubted Harper had been a druggie and said so. Harper had managed to wrangle the conservatives who dominated Peak County’s legislative delegation into supporting some of her more liberal bills. “She’d never have been so effective if she was any kind of a user. Why? Was there more in her system than booze?”
Pinkham pursed her lips and shook her head. “No. Just wondered. Something I heard, maybe.” Which might have been true or might just be a diversionary tactic on Pinkham’s part.
“I never heard anything to that effect, and God knows, in that courthouse you eventually hear everything about everyone.”
Pinkham cast a look over her shoulder, clearly longing to get back to her beloved cadavers.
Julia took the hint. “Thanks for this.” She spindled the report and saluted Pinkham with it.
Pinkham tucked a stray strand behind her ear and gave her a tight smile.
“Good luck with this case. You’re going to need it. Oh, as to the official cause of Harper’s death?”
Julia stopped. Was Pinkham really about to give her some inside information?
But no.
“Make sure you’re not busy at around four PM. I expect to send over my report then.”