The Truth Seeker (18 page)

“I’ve got the basics here: the crime scene photographs, autopsy reports, and the X-ray slides.”

“Then eat a muffin, and get to work.”

She crossed over to the desk and opened the sack. “Do I have to share?”

He glanced over from the folder he had picked up and smiled at that subtle plea in her voice. “If that’s dinner, then no, have all four.”

“If I wasn’t about to inhale this muffin I’d tell you thanks again.”

“You’re welcome. And you’re easy to please.”

She sat down holding the first muffin and spun her chair around toward the light board. “You have good taste in food, unlike Kate, who tends to get the banana nut ones.”

“Good taste?”

“I’m not afraid to admit it when you’re occasionally right.”

“In that case, how about dinner some night and I’ll show you what really good food is?”

“I like hot stuff.”

“Deal. I’m hungry. And I’m broke.”

The admission made him laugh. “What did you buy now?”

“It’s still on layaway at the gallery. I found a Krauthmerr portrait.

Her eyes danced as she laughed. “Trade secret.”

“I found it to be a very unique no.”

“I’d hate to be thought of as less than original.” She turned on the

“You would. I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“Thai is good.”

“Plan to pick the restaurant too?”

She smiled. “Just broadening your palate a bit.”

“You’ll have to get more creative than that. I’ve eaten at the best ethnic neighborhood restaurants from New York to L.A.”

“A challenge?”

“I can probably spring for two meals if you want to compare choices.”

It’s fabulous. I needed a break Monday, so I took a late lunch and went browsing. The hike in my homeowner insurance payments is going to kill me but it’s worth it.”

She was so pleased with herself; he enjoyed enormously sharing that pleasure. “And I wonder why it is so hard to find something good when I’m at the galleries. You’ve been there first.”

“Guilty.”

He loved the fact they shared a passion for art. “Just to satisfy my curiosity, the last time I invited you to dinner—where in the world did you get that petrified squid you sent me in reply?”

hotshot bulb to warm up. “If you can keep a secret, I’ll show you my real treasures. They’re in my office filing cabinet.”

“You collect odd specimens.”

“The more unusual the better. Would you hand me that red folder by your left elbow? It should be Heather Ashburn’s dental records.”

Quinn flipped it open, confirmed that it was, and handed the folder over.

She turned her attention back to work. Quinn watched her for a few minutes, then turned his attention to the first case and reached for the initial police report.

When he finished reading the details of the fourth case, dawn was less than an hour away. Lisa was taking measurements from a set of X-rays, jotting numbers on a pad of paper. “See anything there?”

She absently nodded as she moved the caliper. “Martha Treemont.

There’s a fracture in her radius as if her arm was first rotated behind her back and then struck a hard surface: The bone shattered up into the elbow joint. She put up a fight; that seems to be common to these cases.”

Quinn saw her rub her eyes, and that frown was back. She had a tension headache and the way she was sitting her back was hurting too.

He closed his file. “We need to visit the most recent scene. After you get some sleep.”

She looked over at him and set aside what she was doing. “Marla Sherrall?”

“Yes. The way she was buried—it’s Rita Beck all over again. Face down, hands behind her back, no apparent cause of death.”

“Yes, it is,” she admitted. “And you’re right, it would be good to see the scene.”

He leaned forward, rested his forearms on his knees, and studied her, something in her voice alerting him. “Lisa, what’s wrong?” His voice gentled. “Did you work this case too? I didn’t see your name on the reports, but I know you would have helped.”

“No, I was out of the country when she was found. I did some of the lab work, helped during the analysis when the case got cold, but that’s not it.” She looked away from him as she got to her feet, but he could see the tension in her posture. “I once lived down the block from where she was found.”

Twelve

Marla Sherrall’s body had been found here, within sight of the hummingbirds. Lisa looked around the grove of white birch and weeping willow trees, the place peaceful but forever marked by the blight of what had occurred. The public park and small pond adjoined the zoo, the land an expansion area should they need to extend the exhibit space.

“I doubt she was killed here,” she said quietly, pushing aside the low-hanging limbs of the weeping willow tree to get closer to where the grave had been discovered. It was an awkward place, isolated, but remote only in that the focus was on the adjoining exhibits in the zoo to the right side of the path, and not on this stand of trees to the left.

“Agreed. But he made an effort to bring her back here.”

“Location is important to him. Maybe central.” She studied the damage at the base of the willow tree. Decay had rotted the tree trunk, causing sap to run out. It was too near the zoo to use pesticides to kill the beetle infestation. Park personnel had been digging out the tree when their shovel had hit Marla’s left arm, breaking the radius bone.

“It reads that way, given the chance he was taking to bury her here.”

She nodded even as she tried to think like the man. Why here?

There was a reason. Marla had been buried near water, sometimes a significant signature. She’d been buried in her own neighborhood. Was the proximity to the zoo significant?

Knolls Park was hidden in the north section of Chicago within an easy commute to downtown. The streets were narrow; the oak trees tall, old, and overhanging the streets; most homes brick two-storied, tall, and narrow with steep roofs. The upper-middle-class community was made unique by the small zoo. It was the community’s pride and joy and thrived as the local alternative to the much larger downtown zoo.

This was a community that still had local businesses in its downtown —an icecream shop, an upscale clothing store, a bridal shop, a gift card shop, and two local restaurants along the main street. The French bakery where Marla had worked was between the library and the bank, a fourteen-minute walk away. They had timed it to figure out if someone could have stalked her from work, caught her alone on the path, and killed her here. But the location suggested it had been a much more deliberate act, planned long before it occurred.

Lisa stood up, studying the path. The grove of trees was only about twenty feet from the back of the zoo’s aviary building. Behind the fine mesh of the nearest enclosure hung a row of odd-shaped, red-based water tubes filled with sugar water, nectar to the hummingbirds that were attracted by the color. Lisa knew the zoo, knew those birds, had watched them for hours as a child. They could dart and maneuver and hover with wings moving too fast to see.

She had enjoyed the zoo. It was one of the few good memories in a cluster so sharp and painful the explosive emotions were hard to contain even after all these years. Follow the dirt footpath and the next block over was St. James Street. She forced the thought away, even as she felt the tension grip her. She’d had enough of this place. “I’ve seen everything I need to.”

“The bakery is still in business; let’s see if it’s the same owner. I want to know more about Marla’s boyfriend.”

“No.” She said it too sharply and felt his attention change from the job to her in a fraction of a second. She moderated her voice. “I don’t want to talk to him, not until we review his original statements when she disappeared and when she was found again. I want to be ready to spot any inconsistencies.” And she’d be very sure to have a last-minute conflict so she wouldn’t be available to go along with Quinn for the interview.

He studied her, then finally nodded. “All right. We’ll wait.”

Lisa turned back the way they had come, relieved to get out of here.

Quinn rested one booted foot on the bench in front of the Knolls Park Bank as he ate a turkey croissant sandwich. Lisa, seated at the other end of the bench, was so tightly wound up she started every time the outside book drop for the library was used. Whatever was wrong, the longer they stayed in this neighborhood, the worse it became.

He’d insisted that they stop at the bakery so he could at least look around inside. Lisa hadn’t wanted a late lunch but hadn’t been able to refuse since he knew the last things she’d eaten were the blueberry muffins over ten hours ago. She was nibbling her sandwich like it was plaster paste while he’d rate his as one of the best sandwiches he’d had in a long time.

He wished she would tell him what was wrong.

He considered deliberately stalling them longer to use the situation to probe for the reason. In another situation he would have done it, even though she was a friend. Kate had been that way; he’d had to crowd her to get her to open up. Jennifer had simply called and cried, and he’d had to wait out the tears before she could tell him what had happened.

With Lisa—the silence was different. She would never allow herself to break, it was a different weight she carried, and knowing that, he

wasn’t sure how to proceed. He had learned a long time ago that secrets, even those made to protect someone, always over the years came back to the fact they were lies to maintain and wore a person down. She had her secret buried deep, but this place was resurrecting it.

He hated the fact she was hurting and he wasn’t sure how to help.

Quinn wadded the waxed paper wrapper into a small ball and lowered his foot back to the ground, straightening. “Ready to go?”

She didn’t answer for a moment, then only glanced over at him.

“Yes.”

He didn’t like the quiet of her voice. For the first time there was an edge of defeat to it. The fact she didn’t protest when he dropped his arm around her shoulders and steered her back toward the car bothered him even more. “Let’s go see a movie.”

She glanced over, caught by surprise, and smiled. “Sure.”

She could keep her secret; he’d just have to find out the answer another way.

Under the large lighted magnifying glass, the tweezers designed to pick up a single hair looked big and clumsy. Lisa held her breath to steady her hand as she separated another thread within the edge of the duct tape taken from Rita’s wrists.

Two of the fours cases she had discovered had duct tape binding their hands. So had Rita’s. It was improbable that the tape came from a common roll because the crimes had happened too many years apart, but if the tape matched to a common manufacturer—that would be useful knowledge. Certain brands were more common for consumer sales while others sold only through industrial channels.

Lisa carefully used the tweezers to count the threads. Forty-two threads in this tape weave. She groaned. She had hoped for fifty-four.

She leaned back from the magnifying glass and closed her eyes to let them relax before she looked again at the tape.

Was it complete side to side, or had a strip of the tape been torn away? She focused again on the sides of the tape. It had been twisted around the wrist bones, and it took time to flatten it out far enough back to check the side edges. This strip of duct tape was intact. It did not match the tape from the other two cases.

Heather Ashburn and Vera Wane were linked. The duct tape in those cases had been fifty-four thread, seven millimeter, which typed it as the consumer brand of Triker Duct Tape. But Rita was forty-two thread, eight millimeter, and that made it a different brand she would have to track down.

If they couldn’t find a pattern in the victims, then it became even more important to find a solid, consistent MO to the method of the crime. A difference in brand of tape was a problem.

She leaned back, rubbing the back of her neck. She did not need this.

What about Marla Sherrall? There wasn’t duct tape available to help establish a common MO, but given where and how she had been found, how the excavation had been done—there had been no tape discovered but that didn’t mean she hadn’t been bound.

The cold storage warehouse was just that: cold. Lisa wished she had thought to grab a sweater from her office before signing through security to come over to this side of the state crime lab complex.

She walked down the tile hallway of the lower level, stopped at the third door, and unlocked it. While it had an official name nowhere near as descriptive, the room was called by those who entered here for what it was: the bone vault. The florescent lights overhead snapped on, bathing everything in sharp, bright light, intensifying the impact of the room. The skulls looked back at her, neatly lined up on foam circles along the shelf of the back wall—three men, two women, and two children.

It really felt like entering an open-air graveyard, one of the few places in the building where Lisa felt the silent stillness and foreverness of death. The morgue was not nearly so overpowering in its effect.

She reached for the evidence log clipboard hanging on the wall inside the doorway; glanced at the clock; wrote down the date, time, case number, the lab ID number next door where she would be working; then signed the log.

There was a long metal table in the middle of the room. She rolled it over to the storage case and started scanning for Marla Sherall’s case number. Similar to an architect’s storage case for blueprints, the long, flat skeleton drawers were eight inches deep, five feet long, and two feet wide. Finding the right drawer, she adjusted the metal table height and slid out the drawer onto the table.

Lisa covered the box with a lid, not for the protection of the remains but for the comfort of anyone she might pass in the hallways.

She rolled the table from the room, locked the vault, and took the skeleton to the X-ray room.

“How long an exposure do you need?” Janice asked, holding the door for her to the lead-lined room.

“Let’s start with ten minutes.” Lisa didn’t have to worry about the radiation exposure a hospital doctor would with a living patient. Ten minutes would give her any clues the bones hid deep inside.