CHAPTER THREE

 

 

BY THE TIME Deacon and Kurzweil arrived at the scene, the body had already been taken to the morgue, and Captain Witcombe had accompanied it.

Now, a woman wearing a too-large winter coat over a grey suit briefly glanced at Deacon, then pointed at the wall with her left woollen mitten and said, “Wall’s two-point-four metres high at this point. Means two people to heft her body over it. At least two, maybe more.”

Deacon could hear Judge Kurzweil talking to the police officers on the other side of the wall, and it sounded like they were grunting single-syllable answers at her. She wasn’t going to like that.

The woman took a step back from the wall. “I’m Detective Morrow, by the way. St. Christopher’s one and only plainclothes officer. So naturally the whole town knows who I am.” She returned her attention to the wall. “Now, you’re thinking that one real strong guy could do it, sure, but we’ve got to apply the rule of smaller and fewer jumps, right?”

“And what’s that?”

“They don’t teach you that in Judge School? Any unknown situation, the theory with the least amount of wild assumptions is most likely to be the right one. Like, in this case we could assume that the body was dropped from a copter, but then it would have suffered a lot of damage. So to get past that, we assume a large body of snow to cushion the fall. But that snow’s not there now, and wouldn’t have melted yet, so maybe we conjure up a bunch of guys with shovels to clear it away. But that can only happen if those guys are already on the ground waiting for the body to land. See? Now we’re getting into wilder and wilder speculations. So if—”

Deacon held up a hand. “I got it. Thanks.” He looked left and right along the narrow, snow-packed road that ran past the rear of Henderson Rotzler’s home. It was heavily lined with Canadian Hemlock trees in both directions: their densely-packed foliage effectively blocked the view of any satellites directly overhead.

“Any CCTV coverage in this area?” Deacon asked.

The detective shook her head. “Nothing useful. Could be that some of the neighbours or farms have their own private cameras. Captain’s got some of her people doing a door-to-door right now. This ain’t our first rodeo, you know.”

The voices from the other side of the wall were rising in volume. Detective Morrow shouted, “Hey, keep it down over there!”

A man’s voice came back, “Sorry, Detective.”

The Judge looked down and stamped the heel of his boot into the ground. “Solid... no recent tracks. What was last night’s snowfall?”

“I’m told it was very light. You’d get more flakes in an empty cereal box.” She hesitated for a second. “The body had been stripped naked, they tell you that? Post-mortem, too: there was no blood-splatter below the neckline. A lot of smears, yes, but no splatter. No fingerprints in the smear, no tell-tale bloody footprints in the area, no tyre tracks. Whoever did this had some idea of what they were doing. So how’d you get to be a Judge?”

“I was asked.” Deacon walked in parallel to the wall until he was about four metres away from the point at which the body had been dumped, then hoisted himself up. The breeze-block wall had been constructed perhaps five years ago, judging by the mild erosion and the patterns of lichen and moss. Its unevenness and low-quality pointing, and the occasional chipped corner, suggested that it had been built by an amateur, possibly Rotzler himself.

On the far side of the wall, eight uniformed officers and Judge Kurzweil were looking up at him.

“What do you hope to see from up there?” one of the officers asked.

Kurzweil answered for Deacon: “Any traces of skin or blood on the wall that might correlate with post-mortem scratches on the body. Something like that could indicate whether the body was pushed over or thrown. That in turn might give us some idea of the size and strength of the perp.”

Deacon examined the ground on the other side of the wall. The oversized yard was littered with decades of junk: discarded kitchen appliances, a pile of rusting four-metre-long girders, a dozen wooden sheds in various stages of disintegration, and several collections of rotting lumber half-buried under damp, sun-faded mattresses.

Even this high up, Deacon didn’t have a clear line of sight to the house. If it hadn’t been for Henderson Rotzler’s dogs, the body could have remained hidden for weeks, maybe months.

Deacon said, “Kurzweil, we’re done here. Meet me back on the main road, four minutes.” He dropped down off the wall, landing lightly on his toes.

“Morrow, we’re heading to the coroner. Preserve the scene as long as possible.”

“I will, as a professional courtesy, but I don’t work for you, Judge.”

“You do if I say you do.”

 

 

MERCY SOUTH HOSPITAL’S mortuary room was marginally warmer than the weather had been outside. As he watched the town’s coroner cut into Charlotte-Jane Leandros’s body, Deacon pulled off his helmet, tucked it under one arm and stuffed his gloves into it.

Standing next to him, Unity Kurzweil shifted a little. She and Leandros hadn’t known each other well—Kurzweil had been the last Judge to join the squad—but there’d been no rivalry between them. Deacon knew Kurzweil’s discomfort at watching her former colleague being cut open was more to do with the past than the present. Back when she’d been a cop, Kurzweil had investigated a killer who’d specialised in pre-mortem autopsies. He would administer a paralysing agent that prevented his victims from moving or screaming, but allowed them to still feel everything that happened to them. That case—and the subsequent trial, in which the murderer came close to being acquitted on a technicality—was what persuaded Kurzweil to join the Justice Department.

She’s going to have to toughen up, Deacon told himself. Chances are we’re all going to end up like that: horizontal and naked, with someone slicing us open as if the cause of death could be anything other than the very obvious bullet holes.

The coroner, a stocky woman called Loretta Abramson whose entire face Deacon had yet to see, spoke constantly as she worked, her voice slightly muffled by the surgeon’s mask. “Deceased is female, mid-twenties. One-seventy centimetres, sixty kilograms. Low body-fat, in apparent good health. Spectrograph’s showing some old scars on both forearms... both thighs, both calves... hell, she’s covered in scars.” Abramson looked up at Deacon. “What, she spend the past couple years falling down the up escalator?”

“The training’s intense,” Deacon said. “You’ll find similar scars on all of us.”

“Right. Contusions over the sternum suggests two non-penetrating gunshot wounds. Enough to slow the victim down, but not powerful enough to pierce her armour. Then two more shots to the face, left cheek and centre forehead. Either would be fatal. Obviously, she was not wearing her helmet at the time. Absence of cartridge discharge residue on the exposed flesh suggests that the shooter was at least two metres away.”

“Weapon?” Deacon asked.

Abramson said, “Possibly a semi-automatic but no way as yet to be sure. Head-shots were through-and-through, so we’re not seeing any fragments, but my guess is we’re looking at a thirty-eight calibre minimum.” She glanced up at Deacon. “For the record, can you positively identify the victim, Judge?”

The victim’s DNA test had already proven her to be Charlotte-Jane Leandros. This part of the process seemed so unnecessary, so archaic. Down the corridor, in the family support room, Leandros’s mother, brothers, and sisters-in-law were waiting. None of them had wanted to see the youngest member of their family with such disfiguring wounds. Even Captain Witcombe had been reluctant to do it.

Beside him, Judge Kurzweil said, “It’s her.”

Abramson asked, “You’re certain? Even with so much damage to her face, you’re certain that this is your colleague?”

Kurzweil nodded. “Her hands. Everyone’s hands are different... This is Judge Leandros.”

“That good enough?” Deacon asked.

The coroner took a step back from the table, then pulled off her face-mask and cap, allowing the Judges to see her face for the first time. “I don’t know...” She shrugged. “The law makes it very clear that that a visual confirmation of identity is required in the event of an unlawful death.” She turned and reached for the phone. “I think we should bring in the family. Or maybe Captain Witcombe will—”

Deacon sidestepped into her path and put his hand on the phone’s handset. “That won’t be necessary, Doctor Abramson. From now on, DNA confirmation is sufficient to establish identity.”

She gave him a weak smile. “You can’t just rewrite the laws, Judge.”

“Yes, we can,” Deacon said. He looked back towards CJ’s body. “Give her the works. Full analysis. Check for traces of Lycopodium obscurum and Flavoparmelia caperata.”

“That’s... prince’s pine moss and common greenshield lichen?”

“Correct. They were growing on the wall at the scene where she was found, and something recently disturbed them. If there are no traces on the body, then chances are they’re on the perpetrator. You’ve got a particle harvester?”

Abramson almost laughed. “A harvester, on our budget? No. There’s probably not much point. Her body’s been scrubbed clean. A rush job, by the looks of things, but the chances of finding anything useful are pretty slim.”

“I’ll get you a harvester anyway.”

“Judge, there’s just me and two assistants here, and we’re already overloaded. I’ll need to check with the board of pathology to confirm—”

“Consider my word to be all the confirmation you need, Doctor.”

“No, I need written approval from my superiors to authorise that level of overtime and release the necessary resources! You know how many laws I’d be breaking otherwise?”

“Sure I do. None.” Deacon tapped the badge on his chest. “I’m a Judge. I make the law. I say you have the authority, then you have it. You tell your superiors that they can talk to me directly if they’ve got a problem. But you might remind them that questioning a Judge’s decision would be skirting dangerously close to sedition.”

The coroner glared at him for a second, lips tight and eyes narrow. “There’s no going back, is there? This is how things are now. I commit a crime, you can sentence me on the spot. There’s no jury, there’s no process of appeals... But the reality is that no one is infallible. If a Judge makes a mistake, an innocent person gets punished and the real guilty party is off the hook forever. How is that fair, Judge Deacon?”

Deacon looked around the room, turning in a slow circle. “You’ve got... ten body-drawers here, Doctor. How many of them are currently occupied?”

“Eight.”

“Right. I guarantee that within a year, the number of bodies per day you have to examine will be considerably less than half of what it is now.”

Doctor Abramson nodded slowly. “That’s an attractive idea, Judge. But before that happens, that number is going to spike, isn’t it? I watch the news, I read the web. Judges move into a city and all Hell breaks loose. I heard that in some places they actually run out of body-bags.”

“I won’t lie to you, Doc,” Deacon said. “You’re going to be busy over the next couple of months. If you find anything that might point to the killer, you talk to me directly. Not to Captain Witcombe or any of Leandros’s family or friends. To me.” He nodded to Kurzweil. “Let’s go.”

“So what now?” the doctor asked. “What’s your next step?”

Judge Kurzweil was already striding through the open doorway as she called back, “Now we hit the streets and find the killer.”

Abramson fell into step beside Deacon as he headed towards the door. “But... there’s more to it than that! There’s paperwork, and departments that need to be informed, and you need to establish a chain of command and define the parameters of the investigation!”

“You’ve never actually seen Judges in action, have you, Abramson? It’s a mistake to think of us as cops with different uniforms.” He pulled on his gloves.

She stopped at the doorway. “But you were a cop before you retrained as a Judge, weren’t you?”

“Sixteen years Military Police Corps. Hand-picked by Eustace Fargo to help train recruits into the Judge programme. I also have a first-class degree in interpretation of the law and a doctorate in criminal psychology. Trust me, I’m qualified.”

“What about the rest of your squad?”

Deacon glanced back through the doorway at the cold, dead body of Judge Leandros. “They each have their own sets of skills. We will make a difference here in St. Christopher. You’re a doctor, you’ve seen the inside of an ER. You understand that sometimes to save a patient’s life you need to be ruthless and keep cutting, no matter how much that patient might be begging you to stop.”

“And in that analogy, the patient is the town?”

“No. It’s the whole damn country.”