No Good Deed (25 page)

‘He was nervous. He's like that a lot.'

Sam patted her shoulder. ‘He'll settle in.'

‘I can't drink this, Sam. You want it?'

‘I was raised up not to let anything go to waste.' He took the cup, went through the motions, but his mind was elsewhere. Like hers.

‘I haven't felt like this since my first autopsy.'

Sam put his hands on her shoulders, massaged the muscles. She touched the top of his hands. Strong fingers, masculine, vibrant with tensile strength.

She was getting that feeling again, like she couldn't breathe.

Eversley nodded at them as he passed in the hallway. He stopped by the metal cart which sat outside the steel swing doors that led into the lab where the autopsy would be performed.

‘Sam, why do they say performed?'

He stopped rubbing her shoulders. ‘What?'

‘When they talk about autopsies. Why do they say performed? Why not … executed?'

‘Because the victim is already dead.'

Stella Bellair passed them next, heading down the hall with her entourage of indentured servants otherwise known as medical students.

Stella inclined her head. Then the hallway was quiet, save for the soft echo of rubber-shod feet and the swing of the steel door as everyone went into the autopsy room.

Sonora looked at Sam. Time.

Chapter Forty-Three

Sonora could hear the faint rise and fall of Sam's breath, realized they were breathing together in rhythm.

She sat next to Sam in Interview One. Their knees touched.

The door was open. They could hear Crick's hand slide up and down the wall as he fumbled for the switch. The light was harsh and sudden, but neither Sam nor Sonora flinched.

If Crick was surprised to see them sitting side by side in the dark, he did not comment, merely looked at his watch, muttered ‘Two out of three' and left.

Sonora watched her co-workers walk past the open doorway, down the hall to the bull-pen. She felt out of sync, as if they inhabited another universe. They walked back to their desks, did their paperwork, worked their shift. Drank coffee or Coke or Highbridge Springs Mountain Water. Mango Snapple. They answered the phone, listened to their messages and filled out the endless cycle of forms that violent crime always engendered.

And she knew that some days, sometimes, all of them felt just like she did just then. She experienced a quick touch of nostalgic sympathy for all of them, as if they were long-lost relatives she would never see again.

Crick came back through the door with his own personal coffee pot, chipped enamel, harvest yellow, in which he made his own very bad coffee.

He had brought Sonora her mug, the half-moon of lipstick like a brand on the side. She felt embarrassed. The guys kept their mugs cleaner than she did. Crick set a cup in front of Sam. Laid out spoons and the jar of dust-encrusted Cremora that had been sitting on his file cabinet since Sonora had come to work for him in Homicide seven and a half years earlier.

Sonora gave the jar everything she had to get it open. Inside, the white powder looked gummy and gray, as if someone had left it out in the rain. She dug out a chunk with a plastic spoon, put it in her cup. The coffee went from oily black to oily brown. Just needed to find a victim to feed it to.

‘Want some?' She held the cup out to Sam. Who looked in the cup, then at Crick.

‘How long has that creamer been sitting around?'

Crick looked at the ceiling. Frowned, making his eyebrows bunch thickly. ‘Have to be 1962.'

Sonora wondered why it would
have
to be 1962. Knew it would be useless to ask; Crick would never explain. She believed he made statements like that one just to make people crazy.

Sam screwed the lid back on the jar. It made a grinding noise, like someone gritting their teeth. ‘None for me, y'all, but thanks just the same.'

‘Real cops drink it black.' This from Mickey, who stood in the doorway, a brown accordion file under one arm, a legal pad dangling from his fingers and a bottle of Jolt cola in his right hand.

The bottle was one-third full. Mickey paused in the doorway to take a healthy swig, belched in polite understatement into the top of his fist, as if he were speaking into a microphone.

‘Come in, Mickey.' Crick did not bother to turn around.

Mickey raised the bottle over his head, so he could scratch behind his ear with his little finger.

‘He recognizes your voice,' Sonora said.

‘More like your belch.' This from Sam.

‘You can't say I'm not entertaining.' Mickey joined them at the table, set his accordion folder down. Straddled a chair and pulled himself all the way to the edge of the table.

Crick scooted his chair closer in, the signal to begin. ‘Let's start with the autopsy. What you got?'

Sonora rubbed her finger on the edge of the table. She had only just realized that women who had really beautiful nails were likely wearing acrylics. It did not annoy her. It made her want to go out and get a pair of her own.

Joelle Chauncey had tiny little nails, bitten down to the quick, bluish white where once they had been pink-tinged and healthy.

Sonora cleared her throat. ‘No foreign matter under the nails that would indicate she put up a struggle or fought an attacker. No defense wounds on the fingers or hands or arms.'

‘Cause of death?' Crick asked. He was making notes.

‘Suffocation. Foreign matter in the nasal cavities including fibers, which will be sent to Mickey for a match with the blanket she was wrapped in, indicating that she was buried alive.' Sonora paused, looked up at Crick, who held up a finger.

‘The blow to the head was not the cause of death?'

Sam rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Dr Bellair said the head trauma would have eventually been fatal, but that Joelle was alive when she was buried in the manure pile.'

‘Not conscious?' Crick asked.

‘No. And no sign she woke up and struggled – her hands were clean.' Sam looked at Mickey.

‘Yeah, crossed over her chest. Like this.' Mickey crossed his arms, a palm on each shoulder in classic undertaker pose.

‘Placement,' Crick said, opening a file and laying out black-and-whites from the secondary crime scene.

Sonora looked up and nodded. ‘Very much so.'

Mickey opened the accordion folder, began adding pictures to Crick's pile.

‘Stella thinks the killer washed Joelle's face.'

Crick met Sonora's eyes. ‘That so?' He pulled a photo across the desk. Sonora leaned forward, recognized Joelle Chauncey wrapped in hunter green.

‘She found traces of the kind of residue you'd find on commercial wet wipes,' she told him.

‘What about the blanket?'

‘Horse cooler,' Sam said. ‘A lot of hairs on it, some horse, some human.'

Crick pulled up another picture. Put it down. ‘Time of death?'

Sonora pulled the hair off the back of her neck, which was filmed with sweat. It had been hot in the autopsy room. Stella kept it overheated, as if her patients could feel the cold as they lay flaccid and unprotected on the wet steel table, their bodily fluids running like a river down the troughs along the side.

Sonora frowned. ‘Time of death is complicated.'

‘When is it not?' Mickey, drinking from his cola bottle.

‘Stomach contents were chicken nuggets, French fries and pineapple chunks, all about three and a half to four hours digested. Canned ravioli was eaten just before death, almost no digestion. We checked with the school cafeteria, and the chicken nuggets, et cetera, pan out. Rigor was further along than you'd expect, looking at the stomach contents. If you go by rigor and body temperature, she died around ten a.m.

‘If you go by the stomach contents, say three-thirty to five p.m., which is more in line with everything we've gotten from witnesses. Stella thinks that Joelle was knocked unconscious, and the trauma stopped the digestive process. And that the heat of the manure pile accelerated the rigor. Her estimate for time of death is between three-thirty and seven-thirty p.m.'

Crick looked at Mickey. Waiting.

‘We're not ready to close the casebook here' – Mickey opened his arms – ‘but preliminaries tell me the pickup truck at the secondary crime scene is a match for the one that went through the fence at the primary scene. So, in my opinion, what we got is the vehicle used in the commission of the crime.'

Crick folded his arms and nodded. He looked at Sam and Sonora. ‘What's your take on the people who own the truck? Alridge, isn't that the name?'

‘Kidgwick,' Sonora said.

Sam scratched his cheek. ‘My take is that they're about the unluckiest couple who ever walked the face of the earth, or that property they got is bad luck. Really bad.'

‘You superstitious?' Crick asked.

‘Wasn't. Am now.'

‘You know the place,' Sonora said. ‘Where the Randolph boy was murdered.'

Crick was nodding. It was always annoying to tell him things, Sonora thought, since he already knew everything. A sort of teenager for life.

‘They had a daughter who was involved, didn't they?' Crick said.

‘She died,' Sam said. ‘Car wreck, single car, suspected vehicular suicide.'

‘How'd they hold up?'

‘They play New Age music,' Sonora explained.

For some reason, this description satisfied Crick. ‘And while they were listening to those harps, bells and whistles, did they happen to notice that their truck was missing? Did they manage to see a guy burying a little girl in the manure pile behind their house?'

‘The barn kind of hides it from view,' Sonora said.

Crick rolled his eyes.

‘They work,' Sam explained. ‘They probably weren't home.'

Crick shrugged. ‘Get their schedule down. I'm guessing our killer did his bad deeds while the Kidgwicks were doing their nine-to-fives. Which means he's pretty comfortable, pretty familiar with the area. And that the killing was planned.'

Sonora frowned. ‘That doesn't fit the Bisky Farms theory.'

‘Blair, be radical. Get the facts before the theory.'

She sighed. Crick found a way to use that line in every single investigation. He was like a parent, mouthing the same irritating strictures, over and over and over.

Crick leaned into the table, supporting his weight on both elbows, Mickey the object of his intensity. ‘Was Joelle Chauncey transported in that truck?'

Mickey leaned back in his chair. He had an expression on his face that Sonora called ‘that back-pedaling look', so she expected bad news.

‘So far, I've got nothing.'

‘No hair, no fiber, no—'

‘Nothing. Dirt in the carpet, driver's side, but not too much of that. I figured that blanket she was wrapped in might leave some fibers on the front seat. But hey …' He held up a hand. ‘It's early days yet. I'm still looking. My opinion? She didn't get transported in the truck.'

‘Killer could have put her in the trailer with the horse,' Sam said.

Sonora pictured it. A horse one side of the divider, a green-blanketed bundle on the other.

‘Makes sense, in case he gets pulled over.' This from Mickey. ‘Guy gets pulled over, it's a lot better to have her in the back of the van than laid out in the back seat. You want a wish list, get me that trailer. I promise not to ask for anything else.'

‘Come to Santa,' Sam said.

‘Nothing from the uniforms?' Sonora asked, looking at Sam.

Crick shook his head. ‘We've concentrated on an area with a thirty-mile radius. Nobody's found nothing. So far. Horse and trailer could be anywhere.'

‘He could have sent them over a cliff,' Mickey said.

Sonora threw up her hands. ‘If you found a dead horse and trailer, wouldn't you tell somebody?'

Mickey shrugged. ‘Unless I wanted the trailer?'

‘Somebody would talk,' Sam said. ‘If they found it. Sonora's got the best lead on the horse and the trailer.'

Crick folded his arms. ‘I'm glad something productive came out of yesterday afternoon.'

Sonora opened her mouth, closed it. Crick's tone of voice implied dissatisfaction. The case was three days old, unsolved. A profile case at that. Had Crick found out that she'd bought a horse? Did he know she'd gone home to make meat loaf? Was he dissatisfied with her results, or did he think she wasn't working it hard? She felt guilty about all of it – buying the horse, cooking the meat loaf, tracking the newt, wasting so much time at the auction.

Speaking of which. Sonora traced a finger on the table. ‘We went to an auction. There's one every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon at the Aquitane stockyards over past Lebanon.'

‘That's where they filmed that movie. Milk Money,' Crick said.

‘Tuesdays and Thursdays are their days for horses, tack, whatever. Low-end kind of stuff. Heavily worked by dealers who pick the horses up cheap and sell them to slaughter.' Sonora could see the kid in jeans riding the gray quarter-horse down the dirt chute, patting the horse, telling him he'd be okay. ‘A man showed up at the auction last Tuesday afternoon when Joelle disappeared. Times work out, and he was seen by two or three different people, at least. Had a horse and a trailer he was trying to sell, package deal.'

‘Sold it to slaughter,' Crick said, drumming a finger on the table-top.

‘No, that's the weird part. From what I can tell he had two offers from dealers – I think they were more interested in the trailer than the horse. But he wouldn't sell to them.'

‘Can't be our boy. He'd be desperate to sell.'

‘There's criminal precedent for stupidity,' Sonora said.

Sam put a hand on the back of her chair. ‘Whoever it was, he sold the horse and trailer to a woman who runs a riding program pretty close to there, in Loomis. We were thinking maybe our man wants to keep track of the horse. Keep it under wraps, then return and buy it back later on, when things cool down. If the horse was worth going to all this trouble for, it'd be hard to send it off to the killers.'