I flashed Mark a can-we-please look. We didn’t have any other plans for today, but Mark might not want to spend his afternoon driving to my office to look at more case files. Unlike me, he still had to deal with death every day. Today was supposed to be about new life. We should probably spend it looking at cribs or something.
“Has he already been charged?” Mark asked.
Anderson made an affirmative noise. “He’s out on bail, and I have the discovery package at the office. He interviewed a few lawyers before settling on our firm.”
That spoke to a certain thoroughness and also a level of concern. If he hadn’t been worried that the police had something significant against him, he would have hired whoever was cheapest. That definitely wasn’t us. Our firm was quickly becoming one of the highest-priced firms in Michigan, and Anderson still couldn’t keep up with the volume of work. One of the things we needed to do before the baby was born was hire a junior lawyer.
“Scale of one to ten,” Mark whispered.
“Thirty-seven,” I mouthed back.
He shook his head, but he finished off his ice cream cone. “We’re on our way.”
* * *
Anderson had the case material waiting for us in my office when we arrived. When I came here, I usually spent my time in Anderson’s office, going over files with him, so I hadn’t bothered doing much with my office. The upside of that was my desk was clear, giving us plenty of space to spread out.
Mark and I took chairs on opposite sides of the desk. He plucked the medical examiner’s report out of the box right away. He flipped silently through the pages rather than putting it back, which told me it wasn’t a case he’d worked. If he had, he’d have had to bow out of helping me due to a conflict of interest.
Which begged a question. Why hadn’t Mark been the ME called to the scene? “Is this from another county?”
Mark shook his head. “The house where they found the victim’s body is in a town about twenty minutes from Fair Haven, but well inside the county lines.” He touched a finger to the police reports I’d laid out in front of me. “Look at the date.”
I glanced down. December 19. That explained it. Mark and I were gone on our honeymoon.
That was a fairly large gap, though, between time of death and an arrest. Not that arrests always happened quickly. Sometimes months or years could pass between when a crime took place and when the police were ready to make an arrest. That said, the longer the time lapse, the harder it was to close a case. In most of the cases taken on by my parents’ firm, an arrest was made within the first couple of months. In this case, we were already over five months from the original incident.
“Anderson made it sound like the police were convinced the client did it, but they moved slowly if that was the case.”
“It was originally ruled a suicide by hanging.” Mark slid the papers toward me. “Are you okay with looking at pictures?”
Not really, but he wasn’t asking if I was emotionally or mentally okay. He wanted to know if I’d lose the ice cream we’d recently eaten if I looked at pictures of the corpse. A valid concern considering how much time I’d spent bent over the toilet the last few months. Crime scene photos had been a struggle for my stomach before I was pregnant.
Things had been better recently, and I wouldn’t know until I tried. This was part of my job. And at least with a hanging there wouldn’t be any blood.
I edged the photos toward me.
Mark pointed to a close up of the victim’s neck. A woman. A dark bruise drew a V in her pale skin.
The back of my throat felt too warm. I needed to focus on it being a puzzle. The ME originally ruled it a suicide and now it was a murder. Thinking about the puzzle was how I’d get through the pictures.
“If she’d been strangled,” Mark said, “the bruise would be straight across her neck in a line because her murderer would have been tightening it from behind. A bruise like this one shows the rope was pulling upward on her neck.”
I swiveled my gaze away, back onto the police report. I’d seen enough. “Could someone have killed her by hanging her so it looked like a suicide?”
“There weren’t any defensive wounds or signs of a struggle elsewhere on her body.” Mark turned a few pages. “No drugs in her system, either. I would have ruled it a suicide, too, except that there weren’t any rope fibers on her hands.”
She’d have had to be a magician to tie a rope without actually touching it.
Mark closed the file. “The ME who filled in while I was away is new. This was his first solo job.”
The unfortunate truth of many professions was that people sometimes had to make mistakes while learning. At least this one had been caught in time. Though my client wouldn’t think it was fortunate since he said he was falsely accused.
Before I took the case, I needed to be sure he was innocent, and to do that, I needed to first understand why they thought he was guilty.
The start of answering that was how they’d concluded the victim’s death wasn’t a suicide.
I might be okay with calling our baby an it until we gave him or her a name. I wasn’t okay with continuing to call the victim a victim. Doing so depersonalized them and desensitized me to the fact that a life had been lost. I never wanted to get hard to death the way my parents had.
I flipped a few pages in the police reports. There it was. Jordan Williams. She was 42 and unmarried.
So how did they decide that Jordan hadn’t killed herself?
I gave the rest of the crime scene photos to Mark. I’d need to look them through eventually myself, but my stomach was still touchy after the autopsy pictures.
“It looks like she was hung from the railing in her entryway.” Mark held up the photo. I caught the movement in my peripheral vision, but decided not to look up. “She had one of those entryways that’s open to the second story.”
The image formed in my mind’s eye. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth. “Did she jump from the second level?”
“No. There’s a chair knocked over by where she’s hanging.”
A chair indicated suicide, too. Or at least that someone wanted it to look like one.
I skimmed the written report of 911 receiving a call from Jordan’s brother and the testimony he’d given.
The evidence reports and photos were next. The first picture was a close up of a railing, presumably the one the rope had been tied to. “The scuff mark from the rope wasn’t from top to bottom. It was from bottom to top, as if someone hauled her up once she was already tied to it rather than that her weight dragged the rope down as she fell.”
That would have been the first tip-off for the police that something wasn’t right.
They’d also measured the height of the chair and the height of the victim’s body. Based on her height, where she was hanging, and the height of the chair, she’d have had to stand on her tiptoes on the chair. Most suicide victims climbed up on the chair first, then tied the rope around their necks. Very few people would have had the balance to do that while standing on their toes. I certainly wouldn’t have.
The knot in the rope was also a complex one, probably chosen for its sturdiness. It’d have been hard to tie while wobbling on your tiptoes.
And yet it looked like a suicide from all other angles. “You said it was ruled a suicide at first. What was the official cause of death?”
“Suffocation. That’s consistent with a hanging.”
The V mark on her neck proved she hadn’t been strangled and then hung, but she’d suffocated. “No fibers in her nose or any sign that she was suffocated by a different method and then hung?”
Mark shook his head.
He’d already said she didn’t have any residual chemicals in her system. That crossed off someone drugging her first and then hanging her.
“I guess they could have forced her to climb up onto the chair by holding a gun on her.” I couldn’t seem to make my voice sound convinced.
Mark’s expressive eyebrows rose again. “Would you do it?”
He already knew I wouldn’t. There’d been a couple of times where I’d been in a situation where I had to choose, and I’d chosen to go down fighting to make sure that whoever investigated my murder knew it was a murder. Some people might be too afraid and would simply comply with someone with a gun. That said, if they were clearly going to hang you, I had to think most people would prefer to be shot. At least death would be quicker and presumably less painful.
Besides, if someone had a gun on her, that meant two people had to have been involved—one to hold the gun and one to tie the rope around her neck since she didn’t have rope fibers on her hands.
What that left us with was a suicide that couldn’t have been a suicide and yet didn’t seem like it could have been a murder, either.