Scent of Evil Page 3

  Gould smiled at me. “You look half-asleep.”

  I laughed and got to my feet. “It’s the air-conditioning—first cool air I’ve felt in days. I’d move a bed down here if it weren’t for the company. You all set with Hillstrom?” I’d given him the phone after bargaining with her, so they could work out the details.

  He was standing by the table now, his fingertips resting lightly on its edge, like a piano player preparing for a difficult solo. In the normal world, he shared a successful family practice with two other doctors. But I had only seen him in his medical-examiner capacity, and it made me feel odd to think of him working on live patients.

  He nodded distractedly to my question. “Yeah. She’s busy right now on another case, but she’ll be ready in three hours or so.”

  The trip up to Burlington took three hours. “So how long’re you going to spend on this?” I was disappointed. Time flies when you’re struggling to get clothes off a body, or turning it over to check for previously unseen wounds, especially when it’s as stiff as a board. It didn’t leave us much time to actually examine anything.

  His eyes were sweeping back and forth across the body. “Thirty minutes at most. She can only fit it in today if we get it to her fast. It doesn’t matter; it looks pretty straightforward. I basically just want to draw some blood, lift his prints, and check for anything obvious.”

  Gould had appeared at the Canal Street scene shortly after Tyler had finished his exhumation. He’d looked at the pupils, checked the temperature in and outside of the body, felt the jawline and extremities for rigor, and examined the man’s neck. It had taken all of seven minutes, and only because he’d moved slowly. I was growing anxious to find out what little he knew, but I was reluctant to rush him. Past experience had taught me he liked to keep his findings to himself until he was absolutely satisfied they were accurate.

  So, suppressing my impatience, I stuck to quietly assisting him as he awkwardly stripped his uncooperative patient.

  Dead bodies don’t bother me much, at least not emotionally. The horrifying realization that a once-vibrant human being can be reduced to a corpse in an instant had been beaten into me repeatedly during the Korean War. As a teenage warrior, I had seen friends and strangers shot, maimed, burned, blown up, and frozen to death until the shock and my tears had evaporated. Now, instead of the horror, I can’t help but see a corpse as a Chinese puzzle box.

  Preliminary forensic examinations, like the one I was attending now, tend to open a few of the more obvious hidden compartments, answering the broader questions about the time and method of death. But the classic exams, the ones done by the true artists of the profession, can reveal far more, even, sometimes, the feelings, the motivations, and the calculations that once drove an individual through life. Hillstrom I considered such an artist.

  The man Alfred Gould and I were undressing was not bad-looking. Of medium height and build, he was probably in his late twenties, with a strong upper torso and only the faint beginnings of a soft waistline. His hair had been carefully barbered, his fingernails were neat and evenly clipped, and, as I’d suspected at the gravesite, he was clean under his earth-soiled clothes, as a man might be who showered every day. The silver ring on his right hand was matched by a thin silver chain around his neck.

  Twenty-five minutes after we’d begun, Gould muttered a small “huh.” The body was on its side, and Gould was peering closely at something near the dorsal side of the right shoulder, out of my line of sight. While Gould had conducted his examination, I’d been noting details I thought might come in handy later, like the pale outline of a watch across the body’s left wrist—a watch now missing—and the labels from his clothing, from L.L. Bean and Land’s End, both upwardly mobile catalog stores. I’d also noted the bloodless dime-sized puncture Ernie Wallers’s soil-boring tool had left on the corpse’s right forearm.

  I raised my eyebrows at Gould from across the body. “What?”

  He smiled. “I appreciate your self-restraint, Joe. One of these days, I’m going to walk out of the room without saying a word, just to see if you’ll wait a few days for the written report.”

  “I’d shoot you in the foot first. What did you find?”

  He straightened and motioned to me to come around the table and look. What I found was a small reddish patch of skin on the shoulder, a perfect circle about a half-inch in diameter.

  “Bee sting?”

  “I’d say an injection site; it’s called a ‘wheal.’”

  I looked up at him. “So he OD’d on something?”

  He shook his head. “My guess is that he died of acute cerebral ischemia.” He smiled at my expression. “Which means the blood flow to his brain was shut off suddenly.”

  “Strangled.” I had noticed two bruises on either side of the body’s windpipe, but none of the standard transverse markings common to hanging, garroting, or throttling. Also, his face was pale and normal-looking, rather than bloated and flushed, as I’d come to expect in day-old strangulations.

  “Not in the sense you mean. He didn’t die of asphyxiation. The way I read it, his assailant placed a thumb on either side of his larynx and applied sudden pressure, completely blocking off both carotid arteries. He might also have hit the carotid sinuses and triggered what you’d call a heart attack. Either way, it was a pretty painful way to go, and slow, too. The face looks normal because the carotid veins weren’t cut off at the same time, so no blood built up in the head to make his features discolor.”

  Gould had placed his hands gently on my throat to demonstrate. I removed them, feeling slightly squeamish. “So the murderer was facing him.”

  “Presumably.”

  “Wouldn’t this guy have put up a fight?”

  “He may have tried. That may be where the injection fits in. Its location makes it all but impossible that the victim injected himself.” Gould lifted one of the lifeless arms and turned it stiffly so I could see the inside of the wrist. “Also, there’s a slight red band here, and a corroborating one on the outside of the other wrist, both of which suggest they were bound together at one point, probably just prior to death.”

  I bent over and studied the mark on the other arm. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I noticed a neat rectangular pattern of hair had been removed from the back of the wrist, just where the watch had once been. “Tape?”

  “I think so. I’ve made a note to Hillstrom to have the skin at those points analyzed for residual adhesive.”

  I straightened and looked thoughtfully at the body for a minute. Tyler had yet to carefully examine the dirt he’d gathered at the grave site, but I already knew he’d found nothing as obvious as a piece of torn tape.

  “There’s something else,” Gould added. “Normally, if a body were laid flat on its back after death and covered with dirt, the lividity—the postmortem pooling of the blood—would be equally distributed along all the low points—the shoulder blades, the buttocks, the calves, the heels, and the undersides of both arms.”

  “And here they aren’t.”

  Gould rolled the body all the way over. “It’s not crystal clear, but I see most of the pooling having occurred in the buttocks, thighs, and feet, and not at all along the upper torso—”

  “As if he’d been sitting in a chair,” I finished for him.

  He returned his uncomplaining patient to its previous position. “Yup. Of course, it’s all conjectural, including the injection, which could indeed be an insect bite.”

  My fingers strayed to the blue pants we’d removed. “I better have the State Police Crime Lab check these for adhesive, too.”

  Gould looked puzzled for a moment and then nodded, understanding. We both shared the mental image of how this man had died, sitting in a chair, his hands taped behind his back, his legs taped to the chair legs. The man opposite him—his killer—must have carefully positioned his thumbs over the fat carotids, feeling the life blood pumping underneath just seconds before he pressed down with all his might, shutting o
ff the flow, starving the brain, backing the blood up to the nearby heart, jamming it to a halt, forcing the blood back further to flood the lungs. I wondered what had killed him first—the brain, the heart, or had he drowned in his own blood?

  “You said the death was slow as well as painful. How long would this have taken?”

  “If I’m right on the cause of death, his assailant had to have kept his thumbs in position for almost five minutes to do the job right.”

  “Would a shot of something play in with that? He must’ve been flopping around like a landed fish, even tied down.”

  “You mean a sedative? That’s what I was thinking, actually. The killer gives this guy an injection to calm him down, maybe even knock him cold, and then goes to work without a struggle. The fact that the wrists show only adhesive and no abrasions or bruising indicate he didn’t put up a fight.” Gould made a sour face and shook his head. “But then, why bother cutting off the blood supply? Why not just overdose him and be done with it?”

  I looked at the body again, those questions and more running around my brain. He looked fine for a corpse—a little in need of the bottled tints lining the far wall, of course. I wished I could peel back his eyelid and see reflected there the last image of his life. “How long do you think he was in the chair after he died?”

  Gould stuck his lower lip out slightly. “Hard to say. Lividity generally becomes permanently fixed after eight to twelve hours, but that’s not set in stone—variations can be huge. Best I could say is that he sat for several hours after he died and before he was moved to a supine position.”

  So he was killed somewhere else, before being dumped behind the Canal Street retaining wall. “Can you tell if he was gagged?”

  Gould shook his head. “I looked. I don’t think so, but anything’s possible.” He glanced at his watch.

  “I know—you got to go.”

  “Well—he has to. I’m just going back to my office. But I don’t want to keep Hillstrom waiting.”

  I headed toward the door to arrange for a patrolman to accompany the body to Burlington. “I know, Al. Thanks for your help.”

  · · ·

  I paused at Tony Brandt’s open door, allowing some of the pipe smoke to filter out before I wandered blindly in, hoping I’d find his guest chair before falling over his desk in the smog. He glanced up from his computer keyboard and squinted at me as I settled down.

  “Why the hell don’t you open a window?” I asked him.

  “Wouldn’t make any difference.” He pulled the omnipresent pipe from his mouth to make sure it was still burning brightly.

  “Maybe not with the heat, but it might help with this stuff.” I waved my hand through the tendrils of smoke.

  There was the sudden shriek of a circular handsaw ripping through plywood. Brandt motioned to the door, and I reluctantly rose and shut it against the noise, my day-long headache struggling for new heights. The police department’s previous rabbit warren of offices was being totally remodeled. Walls were coming down, work spaces redefined, lighting replaced, and central air-conditioning being put in. Unfortunately, some logistical genius had arranged to have the window air-conditioners removed before the central system had been completed, leaving us all to swelter at the peak of the summer’s heat amid the pounding of hammers, the screaming of power tools, and the continuous swirl of sawdust.

  I paused to open a window before sitting back down. Brandt made no comment. He’d been chief for the past nine years, on our force for ten years before that. Aside from Deputy Police Chief Billy Manierre and myself, he’d spent more years as a cop than any of us.

  Not that he looked the role. I’d seen a television documentary recently about the Manhattan Project. It had shown all those tweedy professor types—skinny, aquiline, and bespectacled, with thinning hair—scurrying around the New Mexican desert in search of the perfect bang, and I could have sworn I saw Tony Brandt six different times. But where rocket scientists of lore are reputed to be sloppily dressed, absent-minded, and insensitive of other people’s feelings, Brandt was neat, organized, tough as nails, and fully aware of the emotional buttons we all carry within us.

  He fixed me now with a long look, his head slightly back, the blue rectangle of his computer screen reflecting off his wire-rim glasses. “So—we found a man in a grave.”

  I spoke distinctly, to cover the noise. “Yes. We don’t know who yet. There was no wallet or ID. He’s young, looks pretty well off, and Gould says he was killed by having his blood supply cut off to the brain.” I put my thumbs against my throat to illustrate. Brandt’s frown deepened.

  “Either that or he was overdosed with something. We found a probable needle mark. Gould also thinks he was killed elsewhere, in a chair, and left there for a few hours before being moved to where we found him.”

  “And no one saw the planting.”

  “Not that we know of yet. Klesczewski’s reviewing the canvass reports. There’re a few people we missed that we’re following up on, and there’s the off chance a bum was living under the Elm Street bridge who might have seen something. I’m having people check the flophouse to see if we can get a line on him. Also, at around 3:00 a.m., one of our patrol cars was seen parked at the embankment. George Capullo says that would have been John Woll, but I haven’t been able to locate him yet.”

  There was a slight pause. Brandt’s pale gray eyes were looking out the window. A few months ago, he had requested funding from the selectmen to purchase beepers for all off-duty officers, not just the detectives and the upper ranks, as was now the case. He’d argued that both the private ambulance service in town and the Municipal Fire Department were so equipped, as were most of the surrounding area fire and rescue squads, but he’d been turned down. We would therefore have to either wait for Woll to show up for his midnight shift, or hope he just happened to wander in early.

  “There’s no obvious motive at this point,” I continued. “While the wallet and a watch seem to be missing, there was a fancy silver ring and a neck chain that would have been worth something to a thief. Plus, it sounds a little complicated for a simple robbery.”

  “So what is it?” Brandt rarely gave opinions himself. He sat as Sage on the Hill at times like these, welcoming all to divulge what they knew. Some of the younger officers found this an irritating trait and accused him of trying to look wiser than he was. I, on the other hand, took it at face value. I’d spent several months in his chair recently, as temporary chief, and I knew what his role was like—not being able to investigate anything personally, being chained to the desk, and yet being accountable in the public’s eye for everything that came out of the department.

  I let a minute float by before answering. “My gut tells me we’re going to have problems with this one. There might be all sorts of reasons for wanting to bury a man you just killed, but I don’t know why anyone would pick that spot.”

  Brandt’s right eyebrow rose. “Seems perfect to me.”

  “‘Seems perfect.’ That’s the trouble with it. This is one of the most rural states in the whole country. Even Brattleboro has as much countryside as concrete. If I’d discreetly murdered someone in my basement, and had waited several hours to put him in my car at night so I could dump him, I sure as hell wouldn’t head for Canal Street. I’d go out of town, find some forgotten ravine where I could work in peace, and bury my man for keeps.”

  “Maybe you don’t have a car.”

  I pondered that one. “Which makes me local to the scene, having to carry the body from my basement to Canal Street on my shoulder.”

  Without a word being spoken, we both rejected that one.

  “So why was it put there?” he finally asked.

  “So someone would find it.”

  3

  THE CARPENTER HAD FINISHED FOR THE DAY by the time I left Brandt’s office. I noticed the offending saw, lying tilted and silent on a sawhorse, its nerve-jangling screech as neutered as the unplugged electric cord curled up on the floor beneath it.
I went down a short, interior hallway to the men’s room to treat my headache with some cool water on the face.

  It wasn’t just the police department that was being revamped, but the entire Municipal Building. A half-year earlier, the ribbon had been cut on the new District Court Building across the street, and all the judges, clerks, secretaries, and sheriff’s men who had once shared our quarters had taken their paraphernalia and abandoned us like a departing storm. In the sudden void, we survivors—the police department, the town manager, the planning director, the finance director, the town attorney, the listers, the town clerk, and all the others—had crept warily out of the nooks and crannies into which we’d been stuffed for decades and had begun to explore a vast new domain.

  Unfortunately—in the short run—with freedom had come remodeling, and department by department the building was being torn apart. I knew it was for the eventual good, but at the moment I couldn’t imagine a grimmer place to work, a point that was driven home by the notice on the sink in the men’s room: “Disconnected for renovation—please go upstairs.”

  I sighed, mopped my forehead with my warm, soggy handkerchief, and crossed the main corridor to the unmarked door of the detectives’ bureau, located opposite the department’s administrative and patrol offices. At least now, though still looking like a battlefield and feeling like a banana republic, the building was quiet.

  I found Ron Klesczewski with Harriet Fritter, the detective-unit clerk and, for me, a gift from a bureaucratically sensitive god. They were standing over Ron’s desk, shuffling through the results of the canvass. Here, all construction had been completed. An erstwhile maze of cubbyhole offices had yielded to two large rooms, the first of which was circled by four smaller ones—a lockup evidence room, an interrogation room with a small viewing closet, a lab, and an office for me. This first large room—the squad room—also held a cluster of four desks in its middle, cloistered from one another by head-high sound-absorbent panels. The second large room beyond served as a meeting/training area, with a VCR, a TV, some equipment lockers, and a conference table. All of it was pretty basic, but compared to what we’d had—once the air-conditioning was in place—it would be heaven on earth.