Dead in the Water Page 3

  Beckwith turns and looks at the defendant. “Obviously, the treatment worked,” he says. “Did you see an improvement in Mr. Wyzinski’s condition while you were there?”

  “I did. Insulin shock can be reversed very easily and quickly if you treat it in time. Within two or three minutes of receiving that glucagon injection, Mr. Wyzinski was alert, his pulse was stronger and steadier, and he was no longer sweating or clammy.”

  “Is it safe to say that if not for you and Detective Richmond arriving at Mr. Wyzinski’s house when you did and taking the actions you did, Mr. Wyzinski would have died?”

  “Almost certainly,” I say quickly because I see Mackey is about to object. She does, but not before my answer is heard.

  “Objection! Relevance?”

  “Withdrawn,” Beckwith says, and then he follows it with “No further questions, Your Honor.”

  To me, Mackey’s objection is painfully ironic. It’s as if she is objecting to the fact that I saved her client’s life, something I’m inclined to object to myself. After seeing what he did to Marla Weber, and looking into his cold, emotionless eyes, I’m not sure saving his life was the right thing to do.

  I am dismissed and leave the courtroom feeling like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I exit the courthouse into a beautifully sunny, cloudless June morning, and while I know I need to head to my office, the thought of being cooped up inside anywhere seems stifling. As soon as I get into my car—a midnight-blue, slightly used hearse with so many body reinforcements the POTUS could safely ride in it—I take out my cell phone, turn the ringer back on, and check for missed calls, chagrined to see three from my office. Two years ago, when I was pregnant with my son, Matthew, there was a crazy man trying to kill me. He almost succeeded, and after the first attempt, Detective Steve Hurley, the love of my life, the father of my child, and, for lack of a better term, my current cohabitation partner, had my car done up like the Popemobile. It now has steel-reinforced side panels, bulletproof glass, and run-flat tires. While the irony of bulletproofing a car intended for transporting dead people isn’t lost on me, I have to admit I feel very safe inside my hearse. It has a few other perks, too.

  I start the engine, which purrs like a kitten, and as I shift into reverse and start backing out of my parking place, I tell my phone to call the office. Cass, our receptionist/file clerk/secretary, answers on the first ring; and thanks to caller ID, she forgoes any greeting niceties.

  “Mattie, are you done testifying?” she says right off.

  “I am. What’s up?”

  “Izzy called in—he’s sick with some sort of stomach bug. I made some calls and found someone to cover for him, but he can’t get here for another hour or so. And we just got a call for a body here in town. I would have tried Hal, but he’s in Chicago for the day.”

  “I’ll take the call,” I tell her. “Text me the address.”

  “Already did.”

  I smile at her efficiency, and after disconnecting the call, I give one last, wistful look at the brilliantly blue June sky. My beautiful summer morning is about to get ugly.

  CHAPTER 3

  For the young woman on the floor at my feet, I think it’s safe to say death came with stealth and surprise, and while it may have been well ordered initially, it’s definitely messy now. She has been dead for several days, lying on her kitchen floor, waiting for someone to find her. There is an oft-repeated saying in the Book of Common Prayer about death and committing one’s body to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This makes the whole process sound orderly and tidy . . . almost sterile. And in today’s supposedly civilized society, the only aspects of death most people are typically exposed to are just that. But death can be—and often is—very messy.

  I’m wearing a Tyvek bodysuit with a plastic face shield, booties, and a mask. The mask is not to hide the smell—those nasty odiferous molecules have a way of seeping into every crack and crevice—but because we don’t yet know what killed the woman. On the chance it might be some airborne disease or other type of infectious agent, I don’t want to breathe the death-infested air. The rest of my protective gear serves two purposes. One is to protect me from the detritus of death and decomposition; the other is to protect our scene from contamination.

  I’ve grown used to the sights and smells that accompany my job, but today’s miasma is particularly bad timing. I know from past experience that while my gear may keep most of the nasty stuff off me, the cloying, sickly-sweet smell of death and decay will cling and linger despite my best efforts.

  For the past ten minutes or so, I’ve been snapping pictures of the scene, sidestepping the body as I try to get a shot of it from every possible angle. There are two uniformed cops standing in the room with me: Brenda Joiner and Patrick Devonshire. Brenda seems immune to the smells and sights, but Patrick is having a harder time of it. He keeps putting his hand over his mask—whether to keep outside stuff out, or his inside stuff in, I’m not sure—and the color of his skin is a mix of pasty whiteness with a touch of green around his gills.

  “Patrick, you can leave if you want,” I tell him, snapping a close-up picture of the jewelry on the woman’s right hand: a simple gold-colored bracelet and three rings, none of which look expensive. Her fingertips are nearly gone, I notice, most likely a combination of decay and insect activity, but out of sync with the condition of the rest of her body.

  Patrick eyes the corpse with trepidation and for a second I think he’s going to take me up on my offer to leave. However, his machismo kicks in and he shakes his head, which is then followed by a barely suppressed gag.

  “If you puke on my crime scene, I’m going to be pissed.” This statement comes from Hurley, the primary homicide detective here in Sorenson. At the moment, he is sifting through a stack of envelopes on the counter. “This mail is all addressed to a Carolyn Abernathy,” he says.

  “That’s who the neighbors said lives here,” Patrick offers.

  “Does she live here alone?”

  “No, she has a roommate, but she’s out of town. A couple of the neighbors mentioned a recent boyfriend who spent the night a time or two, but they’re pretty sure he wasn’t living here.”

  This triggers one of my pet peeves. “Speaking of living together,” I say to no one in particular, though I’m hoping a different topic might distract Patrick, who is looking greener every minute, “why hasn’t anyone come up with a good term for heterosexuals who live together?”

  “What do you mean?” Brenda says.

  “Well, how do you describe a relationship with someone you live with? Take Hurley and me. We’ve been living together for nearly a year now, but whenever I try to explain our relationship to someone who doesn’t know us, I can’t come up with a term that doesn’t sound confusing, contrived, or immature. He’s not my husband . . .”

  “Not yet,” Hurley tosses out with a wink.

  “. . . and it sounds silly to use terms like ‘girlfriend’ and ‘boyfriend’ when you’re past a certain age, not to mention the parents of a child together. Gays have kind of stolen the whole ‘partner’ and ‘life partner’ thing, so that doesn’t work.”

  “I disagree,” Patrick says, and I’m happy to see his color is moving a little more toward the red end of the spectrum.

  “Trust me, they have,” I tell him. “When I went to a forensic conference a few months ago, I told the woman sitting next to me that I shared a house with my life partner. A short time later, she hit on me, and when I explained to her that I was straight, she was ticked off that I’d led her on. Apparently, the term ‘life partner’ implies things I didn’t realize.”

  “Apparently, it implies impermanence to her,” Brenda scoffs. “Hitting on you when you’ve just told her you’re in a committed relationship makes her a skank.”

  “Maybe you give off a strong lesbian vibe,” Patrick says, his eyes narrowing in thought. I can’t tell from his expression—what little of it I can see above his mask—if this id
ea intrigues or disappoints him. Since this new line of thinking has brought some color back into his face, I continue with the thread.

  “So if you eliminate the terms ‘partner’ or ‘life partner,’ all you’re left with are stupid, cumbersome things, like ‘significant other,’ or ‘cohabitation partner,’ or ‘housemate,’ all of which still leave both the nature of the relationship and the gender ambiguous.”

  “It’s something you won’t have to worry about much longer,” Hurley says. “As soon as we’re married, you can resort to the tried-and-true husband-and-wife descriptors.”

  “There you go,” Brenda says. “You can refer to Hurley as your fiancé.”

  “Technically, yes,” I say, glancing at the naked third finger on my left hand. “But what if we weren’t planning on getting married?” Hurley frowns at this. “What if we were just living together?” I go on, ignoring him. The subject of an official engagement, complete with ring, had come up between me and Hurley a number of times over the past year or two, but I kept insisting on not having a ring. I knew from past experience with the engagement ring my ex-husband, David, had given me that those faceted stones are a nightmare when you’re donning and doffing latex gloves all day long. The ring tears the glove nearly every time, so I was forced to take the ring off whenever I worked. Unfortunately, I wasn’t very ritualistic about where and when I removed it and the end result was a lost diamond ring. I no longer work in the hospital, but I still have to don and doff gloves on a regular basis and in a greater variety of places, and I don’t want to risk losing another engagement ring. Besides, I’m not real big on jewelry. Other than earrings for my pierced ears and the occasional necklace I might put on if I’m getting dressed up, I don’t wear any. “Lots of people live together these days without any plans to marry,” I go on. “So what term can they use?”

  “There’s always the old-fashioned, but ever so reliable, terms like ‘old man’ and ‘old lady,’ or the ‘old ball and chain,’ ” Patrick quips.

  “Right,” I say, giving him a withering look. “I’m just saying that in this enlightened age where the types and structures of relationships are morphing almost daily, it seems odd that no one has come up with a good, catchy term to describe cohabitating people.”

  “Let’s think of one,” Brenda says. “What about ‘cohab’? Like a shortening of ‘cohabitation.’ ”

  I shrug. “It’s not bad, but it still leaves gender and the nature of the relationship in question. That can lead to confusion, like I experienced with the woman at the conference.”

  “Can’t you just refer to Hurley as your roommate?” asks Jonas Kriedeman. Jonas is an evidence tech for the police department, and the two of us are working the room together. I and my camera are following behind him as he places plastic numbered tents next to anything of evidentiary value and logs each tent number and its corresponding item or area in a notebook.

  “Not really,” I tell Jonas. “It doesn’t imply the bonded nature of our relationship, nor does it indicate gender.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” Patrick says. “What about ‘he-mate’ and ‘she-mate’?”

  Silence falls over the room as we all contemplate his suggestion. “I like it,” I say after a moment, snapping a picture of the double-sided kitchen sink. Inside the right half of the sink is a full dish rack. On the left side is a half-scrubbed pan with the burnt residue of something inside it, and a pair of yellow dishwashing gloves. I’ve gotten ahead of Jonas at this point, so I nod toward the gloves and pan and wait for Jonas to set down some tents before I aim and shoot.

  “She-mate,” Hurley says slowly, like it’s something he’s taste-testing. “It’s not bad.”

  “It could work,” Brenda agrees.

  “Nice job, Patrick,” I say. “Now all we have to do is convince the rest of society to start using it.”

  “I’ll take out an ad in the paper first thing tomorrow,” Patrick jokes. His gaze has gone back to the woman on the floor and I see his Adam’s apple bounce up and down as he swallows hard several times.

  “I have some Vicks in my bag there, Patrick, if you want to dab a little under your nose. I always carry it for those of you who have weak constitutions.”

  “I’ll be fine,” he says, though his appearance belies his words. He drags his eyes from the corpse and looks at me. “Doesn’t it ever get to you?”

  “It did a few times when I was pregnant, but otherwise I seem to manage. Besides, I’ve spent the last few weeks dealing with potty-training attempts on a kid who poops toxic waste. This is nothing.”

  Hurley scoffs. “Boy, you aren’t kidding! What the hell are you feeding our kid when I’m not watching? Even Hoover won’t go near Matthew’s dirty diapers, and that dog rolls in rotting garbage and decaying animal guts every chance he gets.”

  I wince, though no one can see it behind my mask, thinking the mention of decaying anything isn’t wise. My suspicion is confirmed when I look over at Patrick and see the Grinch color returning. Hurley sees it, too. He steps in front of Patrick, blocking his view of the victim, and says, “Okay, give me the bullets on our victim, everything you’ve found out so far.”

  Patrick swallows several more times as he takes out his notebook and flips the pages. “Carolyn Abernathy, age twenty-eight,” he starts, his voice only a little shaky. “She lives here with a female roommate, works in the business office at the health clinic next to the hospital, and attends school at the Madison Area Technical College at the east Madison campus. She has a sister, Christine Abernathy, who lives in Ohio. The sister tried several times over the weekend to reach Carolyn and left several messages. She never got a call back, so she called the clinic this morning and they told her Carolyn called in sick on Friday and didn’t show up for her scheduled shift this morning. So the sister called and asked us to do a welfare check.”

  “Was the house locked when you arrived?” Hurley asks.

  “It was. Brenda and I scouted around the place and found a bedroom window open partway. We could smell . . . well . . . that,” he says, glancing toward the body and then quickly looking away. “So we figured we better get inside. We pushed out the screen, and then I gave Brenda a boost in.”

  “No signs of any forced entry?”

  Both Brenda and Patrick shake their heads. “No sign of anything being out of place in the house, either,” Brenda adds. “The TV was on when I came in and I turned it off, but everything else is exactly how we found it.”

  A trickle of sweat runs down my back, creating an itch I won’t be able to scratch. The inside of the house is quite warm. While the temperatures today are only going to hit the high seventies, over the weekend we had a mini heat wave with temps in the low nineties. “Does this place not have air-conditioning, or was it not turned on?” I ask.

  Brenda shrugs and walks into the living room, presumably in search of a thermostat.

  “Did the clinic say if Carolyn told them what was wrong with her when she called in on Friday?” I ask Patrick.

  He nods. “She said she had a migraine headache and vomiting.” The mention of the word “vomiting” seems to divert his attention back to the body, and after a quick glance, he swallows hard and squeezes his eyes shut.

  I log the headache complaint in my brain, thinking it might give us a clue about what caused her death. It’s too soon to tell if there is any type of lethal trauma to the body, such as stab wounds or bullet holes, but I doubt we’ll find any. There is some liquid on the floor that has come from her body, but none of it is blood.

  “The house has central air, but it wasn’t turned on,” Brenda announces, returning to the kitchen. “I flipped it on long enough to hear something kick on in the basement, so I’m guessing it works, but I turned it back off again so it wouldn’t affect anything with our scene.”

  I nod and do some mental calculations. “Based on the level of decomposition, I’m going to say our victim has been dead on the floor since sometime Friday morning or late afternoon. We might be
able to be more precise as to time, once the insect activity is analyzed. Although . . .” I look around at the floor near the body. There are dozens of dead flies and maggots surrounding the body, particularly near the hands.

  “What?” Hurley asks.

  “It’s odd that all these insects are dead. It makes me think they ingested something that killed them. I think there’s a possibility our victim was poisoned. It would explain the lack of trauma.”

  Hurley nods and scribbles something down in his notebook.

  “Of course we won’t know for sure until we do the autopsy,” I add. “Some sort of disease or contagion is also a possibility.”

  This comment makes everyone, except Jonas and me, take a step back away from the body. I notice Patrick is looking bug-eyed and green again.

  “What was she going to school for?” I ask. It’s probably not relevant to anything, but I want to keep Patrick talking and distracted as much as possible.

  “She was in nursing school,” Patrick says. “Just finished her first year, according to her sister.”

  This fact makes the likelihood of disease a little more likely and I make a mental note of the fact.

  Charlotte “Charlie” Finnegan enters the kitchen, returning from her filming duties in the rest of the house. As our official videographer, she arrived on the scene when Hurley and I did, and videotaped the kitchen before going through the rest of the house. The combination of her videography and my photos will provide a detailed depiction of the scene that anyone can consult later if needed.

  “All done,” Charlie announces. “The only thing I saw that looked askew was a bedroom window that was open with the screen knocked out.”

  “That was us,” Patrick says. His eyes haven’t left Charlie since she walked in; as a result, his color is once again much improved. As distractions go, Charlie is a major one. She’s a stunningly beautiful redhead in her late twenties. Ever since her initial arrival at the police department, she’s been turning heads, Hurley’s included. I’d love to hate her, but she’s also smart, friendly, and funny—just the kind of woman I’d like to have as a friend. It’s created quite the conundrum for me.