Russ dropped into the chair opposite the medical examiner’s desk with a graceless thud. “I hope to God you’ve got good news for me.”
“Well, good afternoon to you, too, sunshine.” Dan Scheeler turned away from the Keurig machine hissing and foaming atop the credenza. “Can I offer you anything? Coffee? Xanax?”
“A solution to the unsub killing. Or a quick and merciful death. They both feel about equal at this point.” Russ took off his glasses and rubbed his face.
Scheeler waited.
“Okay, coffee and a couple aspirin, if you got ’em.” Scheeler held up one of the tiny containers and Russ squinted to read FRENCH HAZELNUT. “Sure. Fine. Anything’s better than the stuff they used to have in the vending machine.”
Scheeler slid a cup beneath the spout and punched a few buttons. “When the county asked me to take over from Dr. Dvorak, I had three stipulations. High-speed Internet, some office furniture that didn’t look like it was featured in a 1950s Sears catalog, and to take that vending machine out to the dump and shoot it.”
Russ glanced around at the steel-case bookshelves and the ponderous metal desk with paint chipped away at its edges. Only Scheeler’s desk chair, with its smooth mesh and ergonomic curves, looked like it came from this century.
“Yeah, I bought the chair myself,” Scheeler said. “Sometimes, you have to pick your battles.”
“Amen to that.”
Scheeler handed Russ his coffee before seating himself. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of pills, which he tossed to Russ.
“You had that right handy.”
Scheeler grinned, his teeth white against his close-trimmed black beard. “Trust me, you’re not the only one who has headaches.” He flopped open a file. “Speaking of which…”
Russ sighed. “Let me guess. You didn’t find anything.”
“I always find something.” The medical examiner slid a few sheets across the desktop. “The unknown woman was between the ages of twenty-one and thirty. She had no fillings, which you’d expect from a young person who’d been treated with dental sealant. I e-mailed the X-rays and file to your office.”
“Dental records never help.”
“Maybe not, but at least we know she had access to decent insurance and went to the dentist’s regularly. She broke her right arm above the wrist. Sometime after she stopped growing so, say, sixteen at the earliest. Not recently, it was well healed. Her stomach was empty. She hadn’t eaten in at least six hours before her death, which I estimate was between three and six hours before she was found. She had a small amount of alcohol in her bloodstream. Maybe two drinks’ worth.”
Russ lifted his head from the paper Scheeler had given him, which presented exactly the same facts as he was hearing now. “Okay. She was a normal, healthy girl who drank responsibly and didn’t eat between meals. Can you give me anything helpful? Can you tell me how she died?”
Scheeler leaned back in his fancy ergonomic chair. “No.”
“Oh, hell.”
“I can tell you how she didn’t die.” The medical examiner started ticking off reasons on his fingers. “She didn’t die of alcohol poisoning. She didn’t have a heart attack or stroke. She wasn’t shot, knifed, or killed by blunt force trauma. I examined her entire epidermis under a magnifying glass and found no puncture wounds which might indicate she’d been injected with something. I can only conclude the culprit will be some sort of agent that will only show up in the tox screen.”
“By ‘agent,’ do you mean poison?”
Scheeler juggled his open hands as if tossing an invisible ball between them. “‘Poison’ isn’t a word I like to use lightly. There are a lot of perfectly natural chemicals around that can kill us if taken in excess. You can die from drinking too much water, for instance.”
“How soon—”
“I prepped the slides and sent them off to the state lab this morning. I stressed time was of the essence so … maybe three weeks?”
Russ uncapped the bottle and shook out three aspirin, which he chased down with a mouthful of coffee. “You remember, I told you there had been another case like this in ’72? What if I got you the medical records for that victim?”
“I’d take a look at them. Honestly, though, we have so many diagnostic tools they didn’t have then. I doubt there’s anything they did that we can’t do better.” He swept the loose papers back into the file and handed it to Russ. “Are you thinking it might be the same perpetrator?”
“I’d be a fool not to consider it.” Russ shrugged. “I don’t know. There was a third incident very much like this one back in ’52. The county coroner couldn’t find any signs of foul play so it was labeled natural death, unknown causes. It was never officially investigated as a homicide, just a Jane Doe. If we’re looking for the same perp between ’72 and now, don’t we have to consider the same perp for all three deaths?” He cut himself off. “Sorry. It’s been running round and round in my head like a hamster on a wheel.” He drained his coffee cup and rose.
Scheeler got up to walk him to the door. “A particularly vigorous seventy-something? Maybe. Psychological models of serial killers suggest they don’t change. They’ll only stop when they die or are incarcerated.”
“Huh…”
“What?”
“Oh, I’ve heard that, too. Went to a symposium on repeat killers down in Kingston last year. It just never really struck me before—how can they not change? I mean, I can barely recognize the kid I was at twenty.”
Scheeler shrugged. “Pathological, unresolved psychology. You probably weren’t killing cats and setting fires when you were twenty.”
“No, but I was closer to that than to a civilized human being. Stupid, careless—I was strung out with PTSD, although nobody recognized it back then. And I was angry. So angry, all the time.” He pushed his chair back and stood. “Believe me, if you’d known me back then, it wouldn’t be a stretch to think I could have committed murder.”