thursday, may 6—lincoln prairie
The autopsy on the female found in the river didn’t begin until 10 a.m. Two women were leaving the building as Marti and Vik arrived. One was a teenaged brunette with blond highlights; the other was older, a brunette with gray streaks in her hair. They were clinging to each other and sobbing.
Marti tried not to think about the collision scene, or the two cars all but welded together by the heat. She tried not to wonder which victim had just been identified. Three bodies had been badly burned and the other two, both thrown from the vehicles, were mangled with a few body parts no longer attached.
“All it takes is one driver over zero-point-zero-eight percent,” Vik commented. “That, a couple of cars, a stop sign someone ignores. Damned shame.”
There had been no witnesses, at least none that survived. Once the identities were confirmed, and the reports on the physical components of the accident completed, Marti and Vik would have to reconstruct as much of what preceeded the accident as they could. Assessing responsibility would be the task of a coroner’s jury.
The autopsy room still smelled like roasted meat. That combined with the usual odors of disinfectant and body fluids made Marti reach for the Vicks VapoRub. She shared it with Vik. Compared to the car crash victims, the woman found in the river looked almost like she was sleeping. Marti wanted to take off the hairnet, unclasp the barrette, and brush the tangles from her dark, wet hair.
Dr. Mehta, the new coroner, was from India, two inches shorter than Marti’s five-ten, with curly black hair and dark eyes. Unlike Dr. Cyprian, the medical examiner they worked with before, who was always calm and inscrutable, Dr. Mehta telegraphed many emotions. Today he looked tired, and sad. Identifying the car crash victims and confirming their identities with the next of kin must have been difficult. Now he spent a long time examining the head wound and checking the X-rays that had already been taken. “Blunt trauma to the head,” he said finally. “Three wounds.”
“It looks like one big hit,” Vik said.
Dr. Mehta disagreed. “No, cylindrical weapon; stick, pipe maybe. Two blows here.” He pointed to the back of the head. “If you look at the outer right edge, and then the outer left edge, you can see the differences. The indentation on the right is deeper. The left side was not struck with as much force.”
“Which do you think came first?” Marti asked.
“The left, especially if she knew it was coming, or even if she was conscious and able to run or move away from her attacker. It was sufficient to knock her unconscious. The blow to the right would have been easier to deliver with that amount of force if the body were inert.”
“And the third blow?” Vik asked.
“It’s not that close to these two,” Dr. Mehta said. “There was bleeding, but the skull is intact.”
“You think it happened while she was in the water?”
“It wasn’t caused by the same thing as the other two.”
“Were the two blows sufficient to kill her?” Marti asked.
“We’ll see. They did cause major trauma.” A few minutes later he said, “There’s no premorbidity bruising except for this circular bruise on her upper right arm and the bruise and abrasion on her forehead.”
“Someone grabbed her,” Vik said.
“Perhaps. There are no other signs of a struggle.”
Half an hour later, Dr. Mehta looked up from the autopsy table. “She was alive when she went into the water. Rigor was not advanced enough when we brought her in for her to have been conscious when she went in. There was no struggle to breathe or attempt to swim. The lack of significant abrasions on the parts of the body that were exposed could indicate that she went in at or near the center of the river where the water was deep.”
“But she did go into the water after she was hit,” Marti said.
Dr. Mehta shrugged. “It seems unlikely that she was hit after she went into the water unless someone went in with her.”
“And she was hit with something like a stick or a pipe.”
“Something smooth.”
“Not a tree branch.”
“That’s possible.”
As they walked back to the office, Marti said, “They’ll rule it a homicide. We can’t call it premeditated, not yet anyway. It could have been the result of an argument.”
“Maybe she broke up with her boyfriend.”
“That doesn’t explain anything. A lot of women manage to do that without ending up dead.”
“This one could have had a bad temper, or panicked.”
“Let’s just stick with what we know,” Marti said.
“Which is not a hell of a lot,” Vik complained.
Lupe Torres and Brian Holmberg were waiting for them when they returned to their office.
“We thought you might like some hot pizza,” Lupe said. “But since you took so long . . .” She shrugged.
“Cold is better than nothing,” Vik said, helping himself.
Marti had forgotten all about lunch. She wasn’t hungry.
Lupe and Holmberg were in uniform. Marti could remember Lupe as a young officer. Now, after almost seven years on the force, there were small changes. Lupe smiled as often, but the smile didn’t always reach her eyes. The badge and the gun had become part of the job, not just symbols of authority. Most important, Lupe handled the job with the ease and confidence of someone with twice as much as experience working the streets.
“Time on your hands?” Marti asked.
“Try body found in river,” Lupe suggested.
Holmberg added, “Need a couple of assistants, gofers, or research experts?”
“We could use all three,” Marti told him, “but not for the drowning case, at least not yet.”
Holmberg smiled. “But you do have something for us to do other than street patrol and being Officer Friendly.”
“Weird case,” Holmberg said after Marti and Vik brought them current on the case involving the skeletal remains. “I’d like to know who he is, what happened, why.”
Holmberg had a degree in criminology, but had been on the force for less than a year. He was tall and lean with all of the charm that went with good looks, but he wanted to be a good cop. He already had a solid reputation among the senior officers.
“Right now we’re having a problem getting a forensic anthropologist out here to look at him,” Marti explained. “We’ve gone through every missing person’s record in four counties— including Cook—without coming up with anything.”
“They didn’t have the databases that we have now,” Holmberg said.
“There might not be any data if our guy died in the thirties or forties,” Vik added. “Times were different them.”
“If anyone would know about that, it’s you,” Marti agreed. Vik was approaching fifty, but he seemed older. His craggy face, beak nose skewed by a high school break, wiry salt-and-pepper eyebrows that almost met across the bridge of his nose, and his height all contributed to what Marti called his vulture look.
“With the Depression and then the war,” Vik went on, “it wasn’t that unusual for someone to just up and leave. No job, no place to live, broke, alcoholic, whatever.”
“Kind of like now,” Marti reminded him.
“Kind of,” Vik admitted. The sour expression on his face was the only indication that he was disappointed that after all these years, those things hadn’t changed.
“Does this mean we get to see the place where the skeleton was found?” Holmberg asked.
Lupe added, “There hasn’t been anything about it in the newspaper lately, and even when there was, they never included any pictures.”
“Some guy named Wayne Munn is putting together a slide presentation on it,” Holmberg said.
Marti looked down at the empty file folder on her desk. It was labeled “Drowning Victim.” “I suppose we can take you on a private tour.” Once they saw the place they would be hooked, just as she was. If it wasn’t for that little meeting with the lieutenant, she would put in whatever overtime it took to get both cases solved. As things stood, not working this case was the only way, figuratively speaking, of giving Nicholson the finger.
The house where the skeleton had been found was two blocks from the precinct. It wasn’t raining when they went outside, so they decided to walk.
“Town’s changing,” Vik said when they reached Geneva Street. He frowned as he looked at the new marquee on the Geneva Theater.
“It looks just like the old one,” Marti said.
“Only if you see pictures taken in black and white,” Vik disagreed. “I do not remember red, white, and blue lights.”
“They are not red, white, and blue.”
“Red, blue, orange, yellow, purple, what’s the difference?”
“Vik, if you would just go inside . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, better seating, portable bars, lots of bathrooms upstairs and down and . . .”
“Chandeliers,” Marti said. “The most beautiful chandeliers I’ve ever seen.”
“And not one bad seat,” Holmberg added. “The perfect sound system; and so far, great programs. You should have seen Riverdance.”
“Whoopie,” Vik said, and dismissed it all with a wave of his arm. “It’s not like the old days.”
“No, it isn’t,” Marti agreed. “They don’t sell popcorn anymore.” She knew it was more than that for Vik. Although going inside the renovated theater could not erase his memories, the changes were irrevocable, and to Vik, any changes that involved his past siphoned off not who he was, but how he had become who he was.
The building was less than a block from the theater. The owner of the place had halted renovations when the skeleton was found. He was there to let them in. The place was for sale again, but so far there were no takers.
Marti stood outside looking up at the fagade for a few minutes. Someone had bricked in all of the windows that had once been part of the second floor. Even close up, the work was seamless. She couldn’t tell the original brick from that used to seal off the upstairs.
“Can you see any difference in the materials?” she asked.
“Uh-uh,” Vik said.
“Does that mean the same person or company that changed the building also built it? Or that the same company made the brick maybe?”
“I have no idea. Stephen did construction work. I’ll ask him about it.”
Vik was not much of a handyman, but his son had worked for a contractor while he was in college.
“The same family owned the place for ninety-three years,” Vik explained to Lupe and Holmberg.
“Did you know any of the original owners?” Marti asked, suppressing a grin.
“Best I can tell you is that sometime during the late nineteen- thirties or early nineteen-forties the house was inherited by two sisters, Rosie and Rachel. One of the girls got engaged during the war . . .”
“World War Two?” Marti asked.
“Right. The guy she was engaged to jilted her. The other girl married a Navy pilot, got pregnant before he got shot down. I think both sisters left before the baby was born. Moved someplace east, Massachusetts, Connecticut, maybe Maine. Rented out the building. I can’t say why they didn’t just sell the place. Rented it out. Damned shame about their great-grandson.”
Lupe wanted to know what happened to him.
“He’s the one who sold this place. Nobody would have found the bones if he kept it in the family.”
They went inside. “We need a history on who rented this place,” Marti told Holmberg. “The sisters changed real estate agents seven times.”
The current owner had decided to renovate and discovered that what he thought was a one-story property with a high ceiling was not that at all. The renovations had stopped when the bones were discovered and nothing had been done since.
“There were two floors,” Vik explained. Now that the walls were stripped they could see where the stairs had been. A gaping hole and a sturdy ladder provided access to the upper level. As they climbed up, Vik said, “Everything is just like it was when they sealed it off.”
There was an apartment on the second floor with three rooms and a bath, as well as a dentist’s office and a beauty shop.
Holmberg walked ahead of them. “You have got to see this,” he said. “Old Sparky in triplicate.” He pointed at three metal hoods topped with circular gas burners that provided the heat.
“Are they hair dryers?” Lupe asked.
They dangled from the ceiling like light fixtures, but were high enough for someone to sit beneath them without coming into contact with a metal hood or gas flame.
“I wonder if anyone ever got their hair singed,” Marti wondered aloud. “It’s a wonder the whole place didn’t burn down.”
“Females,” Vik said. “The only damned fools stupid enough to sit under something like that just to look pretty.”
Marti thought of her father getting a shave at the barbershop years ago. The barber did sharpen the razor on a leather strop, but for once Vik was right, there was nothing comparable to these dryers.
Vik hesitated for a moment, waiting for a comeback; when there was none, he pointed to the woodwork. “Nice moldings. The owner says he’s going to make a table out of one of the doors.”
Inside the apartment, Marti felt as if she was standing on the stage of a turn-of-the-century play. All of the wood was hand- carved. All of the light fixtures on the ceilings and walls were surrounded by plaster with elaborate curlicue designs. “Too bad the wallpaper can’t be salvaged.” It was water-stained and brown with age, but there was nothing she could buy today that would equal the delicate floral designs. She could visualize this living room wallpaper—a pale green with wildflower bouquets—in her dining room.
Vik opened a closet door. “This is where the skeleton was found.”
Holmberg squatted and touched a dark stain. “And they found a bullet. Just one?”
“Umm humm,” Vik said. “And a complete skeleton. Some of the bones had separated, and mice gnawed at some of them, but they were all there.”
“All this time and an anthropologist hasn’t looked at it yet?” Lupe asked.
“Dr. Mehta confirmed that it was an adult male,” Marti told her. A preliminary exam by Dr. Mehta indicated that the victim was male, based on the suborbital crest—the ridge of bone above the eye sockets—and the size of the nuchal crest at the back of the skull. Dr. Mehta also concluded that the victim was an adult, because of the development of the rib ends, but was unable to give an approximate age. Other than that, the bones had not yielded any of their secrets. “A forensic pathologist at Northwestern, Meline Pickus, worked with us on a few cases, but she’s retired now and lives in California. I’ve talked with the doctor who replaced her, Nina Rose Peterson, several times, but she’s working two hot cases in Chicago that involve children and can’t give this any priority.”
“Last time we talked with her,” Vik added, “she thought she might be able to come up the end of this week, but we haven’t heard anything since.”
“Is that all we’ve got?” Holmberg asked. “One bullet and damaged bones?”
“Bug residue,” Vik told him.
“And very little dust,” Marti added. She found that interesting, but had no clue as to what could be inferred from it. “No clothing fibers. No buttons, no belt buckle.”
“He could have been one of the dentist’s patients,” Vik suggested. “Do you suppose that, say, by nineteen-thirty or nineteen- forty dentists had progressed beyond ’give ’em a shot of whiskey and pull the tooth with pliers’?”
“We don’t know when he died,” Marti reminded him.
Ignoring that, Vik went on. “Could be that our guy went to the dentist—who maybe was experimenting with something like ... I don’t know . . . laudanum . . . and whatever it was, gave our victim an overdose, and got rid of the body.”
“That doesn’t explain the bullet, Jessenovik.”
“Maybe that was how the dentist tried to cover up the crime.”
Holmberg winked at Marti. “That is one hell of a hypothesis.”
Vik didn’t notice the wink. He shook his head. “Hypothetical is about as close as we’re likely to come to solving this one.”
When they went outside it was raining. None of them had brought an umbrella, but Marti didn’t mind getting wet. After being in that building, rain seemed like the next best thing to a quick shower.
“Check out all the traffic,” Vik said.
Marti looked both ways. “There isn’t any.”
“Right. And that’s with the Anstandt Expressway shut down because they’re shooting car chases again for another movie.”
Vik was always complaining about how unnecessary the four- lane, two-mile expressway was.
“Tells you something about how much we need the Anstandt, doesn’t it?” he went on. “And now this.” He waved toward the Geneva Theater. “Downtown revitalization. Hah! Political jargon for another Anstandt. One theater gussied up and another one burned down. . . . And crowd control once or twice a month— two uniforms on horses. Politicians. You’ve got to watch them all the time. They took care of this part of town a hundred years ago when they industrialized the lakefront. Even the idiots in Chicago and Milwaukee were smart enough to leave the land by the lake alone.”