Erin dropped by Carla’s late on Wednesday afternoon after a morning of lectures. She’d had a difficult post-seminar meeting with a student who’d used an essay writing service the previous semester and was in danger of being thrown off his course. He gave her a sob story about the stresses of academic life, which was all well and good, but how would he cope once he entered the medical profession? In the end Erin had promised to write a letter to the academic standards lead, but she personally thought her student was on his way out. Fancying a bit of light relief before going on to the facility, she texted her son Ethan that she’d be late home from work and headed to Carla’s to see how she was settling in, conscious that her mentee had left a plaintive message for her on her mobile, asking for an update on the woman found at Silent Brook.
On the road outside her address, Carla was tinkering under the bonnet of an automobile. She lifted her head to grab a rag as Erin approached and gave her a wave.
‘Got myself a car, as you can see.’
‘Neat.’ It was a small Yaris. Ethan wouldn’t have been able to get his long legs into the passenger seat, but she could see it suited Carla. ‘Nothing wrong with it, I hope.’
‘Just checking the oil. They said it was topped up, but I wanted to make sure myself.’ Carla slammed down the lid. ‘Everything OK?’
‘Just checking up on you. I sent an email about your office. Have they got back to you with a date when they’ll clear it out?’
‘It’s happening Friday, but what I really want is an update on the woman we saw together last week,’ Carla said. ‘Let’s go inside.’
Erin followed Carla up the wooden steps and into a room to the right. ‘This is nice.’ The kitchen smelled of fresh apples and flour, although Erin couldn’t picture Carla baking a pie. She watched as Carla filled a kettle and put it on the stove.
‘Coffee all right?’
‘Sure.’
‘You know, I’ve kind of got used to having Lauren’s things around me. I’m not sure what the office will feel like when her stuff is gone. The only thing I’ve done is put the photos of her on the bookshelves face downwards. I had a horrible feeling it was going to take weeks for the office to be cleared and it felt strange having a woman I never met staring at me.’
‘Makes sense. I’m sorry about the delay. Everything moves at a glacial pace in Jericho,’ said Erin.
‘Surely not in your work?’
‘Don’t you believe it. I know medical examiners in the big cities who autopsy four corpses a day. It’s two max for me and that’s rare.’
‘So, what about the burned woman?’
‘I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to tell you given you’re not officially part of the investigative team.’
The kettle whistled and Carla filled a jug with hot water. ‘You don’t seem the type to worry too much about the rules.’
Don’t I? thought Erin. Well, Carla had her wrong there. She had a good job, a teaching position and a son to bring up. She was also watching her back after failing to spot the syringe mark in Jessica Sherwood’s dead body, so if Carla thought she was going to break the Hippocratic Oath based on a shared liking for each other, she was in for a shock. What she could tell Carla was the cause of death which would be on the official death certificate, a public document.
‘She died from a combination of incapacitation by barbiturates and poisoning by carbon monoxide.’
‘She was poisoned then set alight,’ said Carla, making a face.
‘Exactly. I found soot in her lungs, indicating she was alive while she burned. Her bloods and stomach suggest she’d consumed around twenty sleeping pills along with alcohol. If there had been no fire, I’d have said suicide, no problem. But even if she set herself alight, she didn’t then put those objects around the body. So, it’s a suspicious death.’
‘What do the detectives say?’
‘They’ve put the victim down as an itinerant from out of town, maybe a sex worker who’s upset a client. No local women have been reported missing.’
Carla frowned. ‘Sex worker who upset a client? That’s a little harsh, isn’t it? How about a victim of a sexual predator who preys on prostitutes?’
Erin folded her arms. ‘That’s what I said. Okay, okay I get your point. I wasn’t implying any fault on the sex worker’s part.’
‘Sorry, but language matters. Prejudice against prostitutes is endemic, isn’t it? You say no one’s disappeared and they focus on the sex workers. Is that sensible? Surely the women themselves would be able to tell you if one of their colleagues is missing.’
Erin shrugged. ‘It’s a place to start at least.’
Carla glanced at her, unimpressed. ‘All right, if you say so. What about suspects?’
‘Silent Brook is close to the main highway, so we get a lot of drivers passing through. The only potential eyewitness we have is of a girl climbing up into a truck around midnight. It might fit. The trucker picks up a girl, has sex with her in his cab, something goes wrong, he panics and sets the girl alight.’
‘Where do the pills come in?’
‘Before sex, after sex. Who knows? The detectives don’t care. The working hypothesis is that neither victim nor killer is local, which slows everything down.’
‘Jesus. Don’t they even want to identify the victim?’
‘I’ve taken impressions of the jaw and teeth, so we may be able to make a match if we have a possible victim. I’ve also taken samples from her bones, so fingers crossed they can extract DNA from that.’
‘But no likely victim means there’s no one to compare DNA to.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I just don’t believe it. I saw detectives Baros and Perez in a bar the afternoon after we found the body. They showed no interest in the death at all.’
Erin took in Carla’s anguished expression. ‘Look. Forget all those cop shows you see on TV. Murder cases take time. Years even and not every one gets solved. Detective Baros is a dick. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
‘But Viv Kantz isn’t. She runs that place like clockwork, I promise. The burnt woman is in the system and is being investigated. It’ll be done properly, but don’t hold your breath for any instant results.’
‘Fine.’ Carla dumped the coffee in front of her.
‘Did you get anywhere with those things scattered around the body?’
‘I can’t see any pattern whatsoever. I suppose there’s always the possibility another person distributed those items after the woman died. Someone other than the killer.’
‘There are plenty of wackos around Silent Brook, that’s for sure.’
Carla sat down opposite Erin at the pine table and took a sip of her coffee. ‘I might try to speak to Viv Kantz direct. Just explain that I couldn’t find anything. It’ll at least give me some closure to that day.’
‘Why not? I wouldn’t bother the detectives if you have nothing to report. They’re savage when it comes to any perceived incompetencies. Take a woman, Jessica Sherwood, who died in her own home. It was the cops who had decided it was a burglary gone wrong, but it’s me who gets the flack when blood work, which we always have to wait for, suggested that the killing was planned.’
Carla looked up. ‘Was it a recent death?’
‘It took place in late summer, and I have to say it got to me. Jessica was a woman in her sixties who reminded me of a relative. All right, I can see it looked like a break-in gone wrong, but it seems she was finished off with some potassium chloride, which doesn’t fit the modus operandi of your average burglar.’
‘Police are more interested in her case?’
‘A long-time resident of Jericho asleep in a house one evening who ends up killed? You bet they’re more interested in her. Passing killers preying on the sex workers is one thing; a perpetrator breaking and entering to murder elderly residents is something else.’
‘Was it a lone attack?’
‘Appears to be, which is how we want to keep it. It was a place near here actually, Penn Street. No need for you to worry, of course, but best to be aware. Your landlady will know all about it, for sure. She’s not mentioned anything?’
‘She’s said nothing to me at all, but this situation is only temporary. I need to start looking for a place to live as soon as I can.’
‘I’ll keep my eyes peeled. Not always easy to find somewhere in Jericho. I’ll let you know if I hear of anywhere.’
Back in the medical facility, Erin could still feel Carla’s disappointment in her, the detectives, the town. Carla was an idealist. The wonder at discoveries in her work – the emphasis on how people felt – blinded her to the inconsistencies of human nature. Detectives Baros and Perez were doing what people the world over had always done. They were prioritising their limited resources and concentrating on what would most likely cause shock waves through the society within which they operated. This meant focusing on Jessica Sherwood’s murder and not the woman lying still stinking in the mortuary.
Erin took a sip from a sports energy drink bought to revive her flagging energies. That and the coffee Carla had made her should keep her buzzing for the next hour while she ploughed through some admin. She called her son, Ethan, and told him to order a pizza and leave a couple of slices for herself. She worked methodically for the next ninety minutes until she looked up and saw it was gone six. Time to go home for a cold beer and even colder pizza. The conversation with Carla continued to niggle at her. It had been the discussion about Jessica Sherwood – the killing that she couldn’t forget.
The autopsy snaps, which she’d examined time and time again, simply reinforced her opinion that the needle mark would have been found on the underside of the woman’s body where the blood had pooled after death. Erin hadn’t been able to see it and this omission wasn’t a reportable offence as far as she could see. She wondered if the killer knew more about human pathology than they suspected and had known a simple needle mark would prove impossible to find on the livor mortis marbled skin of the corpse. She would have to put up with Detective Baros’s scorn for the foreseeable future, but so what? It was she who’d ordered the bloods to be taken, which had identified the presence of potassium cyanide. One up for the ME office. Sorry, Baros, but we did our job.