Code 61

SEVEN

Saturday, October 7, 2000

11:18

By the time Special Agent Hester Gorse arrived at the Mansion, Borman and I had done the preliminary interviews of Toby and Melissa. We'd got the standard personal ID stuff, and statements from both of them that they lived in the house, and that they were asleep when Edie's body had been discovered. And, no, she hadn't seemed more depressed or despondent than usual. Toby, it turned out, worked at the local branch of Maitland State Bank, and Melissa worked at the Freiberg Public Library.

I was a bit surprised that Toby could work at the bank, with the stud in the bridge of his nose, and said so.

“I just take it out,” he said. “Like pierced ears.”

Hanna Prien, still upset, had also talked to us. Generally, she had the same kind of information for us as

Toby and Melissa, except that she'd been the one who found Edie when she went into her room to get her up for work. They both worked in Freiberg: Hanna at the local convenience store, and Edie had been employed at Wilson's Antique Mall.

Hanna said that she had stuck her head in the bathroom door after calling out a couple of times, stared for a few seconds, trying to put together what she was seeing, and then just freaked. Understandable.

There were two other residents of the house, one Kevin Stemmer, and a girl named Holly Finn. Holly, according to Hanna, had the misfortune of having the nickname of “Huck.” That rang a bell, and I pictured her in my mind immediately. I'd never arrested her, but she'd been in the area when I'd popped some others. With that nickname, she was hard to misplace. With Kevin I drew a blank, but was pretty sure I'd remember him when I saw him.

According to Hanna, Kevin and Huck had left for work before she'd discovered the body. They were both dealers on the General Beauregard; and worked a 06:00-to-14:00 shift. Toby had notified both of them by phone before I arrived. They wouldn't be home until their shift ended.

“Yeah, I called them right away.” Toby was one of those people who seem to have to interrupt. “I talked to Huck, though, not Kevin, really. I thought one was enough, and she'd tell Kevin.”

Great.

“Toby said they were real upset, though,” Hanna said, almost as if she were trying to excuse their not coming right back.

“Oh, yeah. Huck was, anyway,” Toby explained. “I didn't talk to Kevin.”

I'd asked if the owner was here, and got kind of a surprised look from all three. Jessica Hunley, according to them, lived in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. She was exceedingly wealthy, ran a dance school in Chicago, and only visited the house three or four times a year.

I'm no expert, but I had a bit of a rough time with “exceedingly wealthy” and “runs a dance school” being in the same sentence. That needed to be checked further.

We'd released the EMTs, prompting Toby to ask why they weren't taking the deceased with them. He got a straight answer. Melissa then asked just how long we were going to keep the body in the tub before removing her. I told her that it would depend on when the scene had been thoroughly processed, but that it shouldn't be too very long.

It being Saturday, and an urgent call-out to boot, Iowa DCI Special Agent Hester Gorse was more informally dressed than usual, in blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a gray turtleneck, with a blue microweave rain jacket, worn to conceal the gun on her right hip. I saw her head through the window as she started up the steps, and was in time to greet her at the door.

“Hi, Hester. Thought you'd be here sooner.”

“Hard to find this place. I must have missed the drive the first time.” She smiled, in sort of a weary way. None of us get enough weekends off. She'd probably been counting on this one. “So, Carl,” she said as we paused in the atrium, “just what do we have here, anyway?”

I told her, in about two minutes. Told her that it could be a homicide. Told her that it looked like a suicide.

“So, are you leaning either way?”

I shrugged. “It doesn't look right. The clothes, or lack thereof. The wound, although that could be self-inflicted, God knows.” I'd told her what Doc Z. had said about the arterial spurts and the bruises. And the Coumadin.

“But we don't know, yet, if there was any major arterial damage caused by the wound?”

“Right.”

She smiled again. “So, do I just sign for the free pathologist and lab team, or am I going to have to work today?”

“I feel so transparent,” I said, grinning back at her. “No, I'm afraid you're going to have to work on this one.” I told her about the body in Wisconsin.

We went into the parlor, and I introduced her around. We left Borman in charge downstairs, and I took Hester up to meet Edie.

Afterward, we compared notes, Hester seated at Edie's vanity, and me leaning against the bathroom door, where I could keep an eye on the door to the hallway.

“You got an extra pen in that camera bag of yours?”

“Sure.” I handed her the bag. “Right-hand front pocket, there.”

“I want the lab team here,” said Hester, peering into my camera bag. “I don't know just exactly what we have here, but we can't wait for them to come up to process the scene until after the autopsy.” The lab team had to come from Des Moines, some four to four and a half hours away.

“I'm for it,” I said, as brightly as possible. This third visit to the tub had been difficult. “What do you think? Can we move the body out now? I'd like to get her out as soon as practical.”

“No problem. I don't think the victim has any more to tell us until the autopsy.”

“Good.”

She found the pen, and browsed absently through the bag. “You've got just about everything in here, Houseman. Exam gloves, bags, labels, fflm, batteries, pens, scissors, tweezers… ” She unzipped the side pocket, and looked up. “Girl Scout cookies? Are these Girl Scout cookies?”

“Caught me. Want one?”

Hester ate the chocolate mint cookie in two swift bites, and then looked for a place to put her notepad on the vanity.

“Look at the neat stuff.”

“Pardon?”

“Her makeup,” she said. “Lipstick colors. Interesting. Like these: Tar, Bordeaux, Garnet, Pulsing Blood… ”

“Oh.”

“With foundation names like Porcelain. And glitter for the eyelids. Little stick-on holograms. Neat stuff.”

“You betcha, Hester.”

“No, really. This isn't your mother's kind of makeup, chances are. And not the shades and colors that are usually worn around here.” She gave me a smug look. “Sort of a gentle rebel, this Edie. Look more closely. She took very good care of all this stuff. It's orderly. Neat. Her appearance was important.”

“I caught the neat part right away,” I said. “Always makes me feel out of place. Speaking of makeup, you notice her nails? The multicolored thing. Does that mean something?”

“Probably not. Whimsy, I'd think.”

“Whimsy. Like with the frilly clothes?”

“You mean the brocades, the lace, the velvet and satins hanging over there?” She gestured toward the walk-in closet.

“Yeah.”

Hester smiled. “I'd think she enjoyed being a girl.”

“Oh.”

She ate one more cookie, then pulled her walkie talkie out of her pocket and went on to the mobile repeater channel. That was so neat. She was talking to her car radio via a secure channel, which, in turn, transmitted to State Radio repeater towers down to Cedar Falls State Radio, also via secure link, and enabled her to order up the lab team without the media getting wind of it.

Being from the wrong side of the government procurement tracks, I went into the hall, and down the first half flight, where I could see Borman standing in the doorway to the parlor. I caught his attention, and told him to use the residence phone to call our office and get the hearse coming.

I got back to Edie's room, and couldn't see Hester. I looked around the door frame into the bathroom, and saw her checking the contents of the bathroom cabinet.

“Got something?”

She turned. “No, and that's just the problem,” she said slowly. “No open shampoo, no open soap, no razor, just blades.”

Oh. “Yeah. Doesn't sit right, does it?”

“Like you said, Carl. Where's the stuff you'd use in a tub or shower?”

We'd talked about that during her first pass through the bathroom area. Although it was barely possible that someone would run out of everything currently in use at the same time, it was unlikely as hell. The problem was, there wasn't a really good explanation as to why it was gone.

“I don't get it,” said Hester. “Why isn't it here?”

She came toward the door, and I backed out of the doorway to let her pass. “It isn't like somebody would enter her bath and cut her throat in order to gain possession of a used bar of soap and half a bottle of shampoo… ”

“Souvenir?” I just tossed that in.

“Right.” She shook her head. “First things first. I want to know where that knife came from.”

“The kitchen?”

“I'd bet. We couldn't be so lucky as to have it come from anywhere else.”

“Right now,” I said, “if this case were on a balance scale, I'd have just about a quarter of the weight in the suicide dish.”

She sighed, pulling off her latex exam gloves. “Maybe a bit less. We really need that autopsy.”

We moved back into the bedroom.

“So,” said Hester, “what can you tell me about the group who lives here?”

I explained that they were local, or very close. Marched to a bit of a different drummer than some, but were known to us as pretty decent people. Those I knew were bright. They caused no trouble, which in cop parlance meant a lot.

“Some, like the one they call Huck, just strike me as people who would really like things to be different. But who know they can't make it happen.” I considered. “Like, at a party, when some nice person knows that if they join in the conversation, there's going to be an argument. So they sit on the couch, and are pleasant, and pass the dip, and kind of let the flow go around them.”

“Like the hippies used to be?”

“This is going to date me,” I said, “but they remind me more of beatniks.”

“Angry? Intellectually rebellious? Cynical? Depressed?”

“You got it. All the above. Caused by life in general.”

Hester smiled. “You sure this isn't a bunch of retired cops?”

When the hearse arrived, it came complete with two attendants. One of them was about seventy, and the other was a small man in his thirties. This meant that Borman, Hester, and I had to glove up again, and help lift Edie's body from the tub. Messy, if you didn't watch your step. We got the chromed portable stretcher up the stairs, noticing how the bend in the stairway at the first landing was going to make this a tough movement on the way down. Once in the bathroom, we tried to position it near the tub and yet not have it be in our way. Not possible. We were going to have to hold Edie up at about chest height while we slid the stretcher under her. Ugh.

Both attendants were gaping at the body, but neither of them said anything.

Rigor mortis raised its ugly head at that point. Borman had squeezed between the tub and the far wall, and he and I had linked hands under her knees and behind her back near her buttocks. Hester had her feet, and the younger attendant tried to slide his hands under her armpits. No go; a bit too stiff now. So he had to hold her left elbow and her head.

“On three… ” said Hester. “One, two, three.”

We started the lift, and it became obvious that Edie was pretty well stiffened in her sitting position. She also seemed to sort of stick to the bottom of the tub. The cold flesh had flattened at the pressure points, and as she came up, I could see that her right breast and chest bore a large dent from her arm and part of the tub. Some blood, strangely, appeared to have pooled under her buttocks, and that was the cause of the sticking when we started to lift. That should not have been there. Not if the fatal wound had been inflicted when she was in the tub. I caught Hester's eye. She gave an almost imperceptible nod. Evidence like that was not to be discussed in front of noninvestigative personnel, civilian or otherwise.

As we placed Edie on the stretcher, we saw that the knife was stuck to her right thigh by the congealed blood. Congealed, but not yet clotted. We took photos, made another note, and then Hester carefully pulled it free. I got a paper bag out of my camera case, and we placed the knife in that.

“Your camera bag reminds me of my purse,” she said.

I snapped three shots of the interior of the tub. The blood under where her buttocks had been was very apparent. It even showed a slight wrinkle pattern from the flattened flesh.

Edie couldn't have weighed more than 125 pounds alive, and having lost all that blood volume, she was down to about a hundred or less. The blanched and flattened areas of her buttocks were very obvious, the result of her weight pressing her into the tub. Her mouth, which had been hanging open as she sat there, now looked as if she were about to cough. Interestingly, her eyes no longer had that “alive” appearance that had startled me before. Must have been the light, that first time. Whatever it was, it was a relief.

Now I was able to get a really good look at the wound in her neck. “Deep” hardly did it justice. But it was a cut, all right. Even, smooth edges.

I took several more photos before she was finally covered.

While Borman and the two attendants maneuvered the gurney to get Edie out of the room, Hester and I had one of those fast chats that, if you hadn't known we were talking about the blood in the wrong place, you'd never have guessed.

“You caught that, too?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Conclusive?”

“Possibly. Very possibly. But maybe not.”

“Really?” It looked pretty conclusive to me.

“Reflex lunge or hip thrust.”

“Ah.” Well, sure, she could have spasmodically arched her back, for example, and then sat back down in the blood she was leaving. Except… “No fountain, though.” I said that because there surely should have been secondary evidence that there had been a forceful gush or spurt, or something to deluge the tub area sufficiently for blood to flow under her when she might have moved. Something that very likely would have squirted past the perimeter of the tub, and onto the floor and maybe even the walls. Especially since the knife had been pulled free.

“True.” She grimaced. “Not enough data.”

“Think it could have slipped free? I'd say pulled out. You agree?” I was referring to the knife.

“Agree. I think it would tend to stay in.”

She finished her sentence as we emerged into the hall to help get Edie down the stairs.

We'd zipped up the white body bag, covered the lump that had been Edie with two blue blankets, and strapped her tightly to the stretcher with all three belts. We had to lift her and the stretcher to about shoulder level to clear the banister at the first landing, but from then on it was a piece of cake. We went by the parlor, and the three residents saw her. They followed us out to the hearse, and watched while we pushed the stretcher into the back.

“Remember,” cautioned Hester, “there will be an autopsy done there. Under no circumstance is she to be embalmed until we say so. There will be a forensic pathologist up shortly.” There had been an instance several years ago when a funeral home had embalmed a murder victim before the pathologist got there. Ever after that, the officer always made very certain that the funeral home understood the situation.

“Yes, ma'am,” said the elder of the attendants. He was lucky. Hester hates that term, and if it had been the younger who'd said it, he would likely have had to ride down the hill in the back with Edie.

As the hearse drove off and we turned back in toward the house, I felt this familiar urge. I really wanted a cigarette, and this was the stage in an investigation where I'd normally have one. I looked up toward the porch. The three looked pretty dejected.

Toby spoke up. I was beginning to think he was compelled. He was smoking again. “Why do you need an autopsy? Isn't it pretty obvious what killed her?”

Hester took that one, while I tried to smoke his cigarette vicariously. “There's a big difference between 'pretty obvious' and certain,” she said.

“Why are you coming back into the house? Aren't you done?” There was no malice in Toby or his questions. Just the same sort of question you always heard from the one kid in class who always had his hand in the air. Questions designed to focus attention on the asker, not the subject.

“Ask us again in five or ten hours,” I said. “In the meantime, we can't leave the scene unprotected, and the best way to protect it is to have one or more of us here.”

“Oh. But, why-”

Hester cut him off. “Done with your written statement yet?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then, would you be kind enough to show me just where everybody's bedroom is?”

Toby, being the compulsively cooperative sort, immediately launched into his task. “And the kitchen,” she continued, as they headed up the stairs.

In the meantime, I sat down with Melissa and Hanna to have what turned out to be an interesting but pretty fruitless chat about Edie that lasted nearly an hour. Regrettably, they both smoked, as well.

Melissa and Hanna seemed quite a bit more self-possessed than they had appeared even an hour before. A good sign, and I thought it was due to seeing Edie leave, and the relief that seems to come to the household when the body is finally removed from the premises.

We walked into the parlor. Hanna offered coffee, which I accepted. As I sat on the couch, I felt a jab in my hip. The copy of the Freiberg Tribune and Dispatch that I'd put in my back pocket. I pulled it out and laid it on the coffee table in front of me. Melissa reached out for it.

“Do you mind? Is it today's?”

“Yep, it is. Feel free.”

She sort of browsed through it as we sat and talked. Interesting.

Neither of them could offer much insight into Edie's character, at least not much that I didn't already know from Lamar. She did have a daughter, about three years old, who lived with Edie's mother. Edie didn't like her mother at all, and according to both Melissa and Hanna, with good reason.

Edie had lived, or had been living, at the Mansion longer than any of the rest of them, and she was the one that the owner would talk with if anything needed to be taken care of. According to Melissa, it wasn't anything particularly special, but Edie was a pretty reliable person, and could be counted on to attend to things.

Edie didn't appear to have been noticeably depressed the last few weeks, and hadn't shown any remarkable signs of mood changes. Both acknowledged they had no idea why Edie would take her own life, although they both thought she had plenty of reason to be depressed. Hanna shared the fact that she, herself, had attempted suicide once before, with what turned out to be something less than a fatal overdose of her sister's phenobarbital.

So, my questions about Edie's emotional state had elicited suicide-oriented thinking among others in the household, with the assumption I was on a suicide track. They seemed very sincere in their efforts to help, and almost apologetic that they hadn't observed any of what they termed “suicide triggers.” I did think it a little unusual that both of them were that familiar with the subject of suicide. I said as much.

“We've read about it,” said Melissa, “because some of our friends have been really depressed sometimes. We worry about them.”

“But Edie didn't fit in that category?” I asked.

“No. I mean, there's depressed, and then there's depressed,” said Melissa. “Things not going right, that can depress you, but it's something you get over. Lover leaving, grandparent dying, that sort of thing. You know. But, the kind of thing where you just have to end it, that's much deeper, and much more prolonged. Oppressive, always there.”

“Okay.”

“I'm afraid I'm not saying this very well,” she said, and looked toward Hanna.

“It feeds on itself,” she said, helping Melissa. “It controls you. The suicide kind.”

“But Edie didn't show any sign of that?”

She hadn't, and according to them, Edie really seemed to have her life under control. They were both sorry they hadn't been more help.

What they'd actually done was to inadvertently add another bit of weight to the side of the scales that was labeled “murder.”

“So, then,” I said, “let's just say for the sake of it that it wasn't a suicide. Do either of you know of anybody who might be, say, an enemy; that would want to kill Edie?”

Absolutely not. They were both in complete and emphatic agreement on that point.

I persevered. “Anybody threaten her? Been bothering her? Harassing her?”

“Just her lame excuse for a mother,” said Melissa. “That's been happening for years, I guess. Not new. Why? Do you really think she didn't commit suicide?”

I shrugged. “We have to treat every unattended death as a homicide, until we're sure it isn't.”

“Sure,” said Melissa.

“Okay,” I said, “now, I don't want you to take this in the wrong way at all. But I'd like to know if either of you could tell me if Edie was doing any dope, or alcohol, or anything even prescription, that could affect her moods.”

“Is that really your business?” asked Melissa. “Not to be taken in the wrong way, of course.”

“Fair question,” I said. “The answer is, probably wasn't my business yesterday. Now that she's dead, and my problem for now, yep, it is.”

“Aren't you going to do a blood test? I mean, won't you know from that?”

“Sure. But it won't be back for a few days, and when it arrives, it only gives the chemical information, not the substance. You know… it might say acetaminophen, but not a brand name. So if she took Tylenol for a headache, say, it would be a help to know that. That sort of thing.” I was also fishing for a known substance, although I didn't say that. A blood scan for everything cost a fortune, and took forever. You had to give them parameters.

“Oh,” said Hanna. “Oh, sure. Well, I know she'd drink a beer now and then, maybe some wine. No dope…?” and she looked at Melissa.

It was hard not to grin.

“She smoked clove cigarettes,” said Melissa quickly.

“That's it.”

“Okay,” I said, making a note. “You do know what those are?” Melissa wasn't being insulting, she was just a sincere twenty-something talking to a fifty-something. Usually, the only people my age she'd be likely to know were her parents, aunts, and uncles.

I smiled. “Either of your parents cops?”

“What?”

“I strongly suspect that your folks and I have vastly different, oh… What? Life experiences?”

“My father's a minister and my mother is a music teacher.” She paused as it dawned on her. “Oh.” A small smile started forming on her lips.

“Right. I think we definitely move in different circles.” The small smile grew larger, into a full-fledged one. “I'd say so.”

“And the real point's this: If she did occasional dope here, that's something we have to know. If there's a fair concentration in her fluids, and she did it here, that's one thing. If there's the same concentration and she didn't do it here, that's another thing altogether.”

Both the young women looked away from me as soon as I said that. I attributed it to the fact that there was probably at least some dope in the house, even as we spoke.

The phone in the hallway rang, and Hanna answered it. It was for me. As I left the room, I could hear both young women talking to each other in low tones. My best guess was that they were discussing narcotics.

I answered the phone. “Houseman.”

“Hey, no kidding?” Sally, at the office.

“Yeah. What's up?”

“There was a man here, came to talk with Lamar. Lamar said for you to talk with him instead, because he was going to have some family things to attend to.”

“Sure, okay.” Great. Not that I didn't understand, but I really didn't need the distractions, either. Ah, well. I could never say that Lamar didn't delegate.

“Man's name is”-she paused just an instant, so that I knew she was reading from her notes-“William Chester, from Milwaukee.”

My first thought was a pathologist that Harry had contacted regarding the death of Randy Baumhagen, late boyfriend of Alicia Meyer. “What does he do? Or want?”

“Beats me. He looks pretty straight arrow, though. About forty, but that's not all bad. Nice eyes. Slender. Still has all his hair… ”

“That's not quite what I wanted.”

She laughed. “I don't know. Not an attorney, that's for sure. I asked Lamar that, 'cause I knew you'd just shit-pardon the expression-if we sent somebody like an attorney up there.”

“You sent him here?”

“Well, to Freiberg. He'll get hold of Byng or somebody, and connect up with you later on. Not at the Mansion, though.”

“Okay.” That was a relief. “Anything else?”

“Nope. Lamar just said to let you know. He's over at his sister's, I think.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, and guess what?”

I was too tired to play. “Tell me.”

“I'm assigned to duty as a reserve tonight, up there! Isn't that just so cool?”

I grinned to myself. “It's cool. Just remember to bring cookies.”

At that point, Hester and Toby came back. Hester was holding a legal pad, making the final touches to a diagram of the second floor. She handed it to me. According to her diagram, Edie's room was the first one at the top of the stairs, on the right. The northeast corner. The next room on her side of the hall was Toby's; the room after that was Hanna's. Across the hall from Edie was Melissa in the southeast corner, then Holly, known as Huck, and then Kevin.

“They're all about the same,” she said. “Basically thirty-six-foot by eighteen-foot rooms, with a dividing wall for the individual bathrooms at about ten feet from the end.”

Like I said, it was a big house. Over a hundred feet long, and about forty-five feet wide.

Hester handed me the pink copy of the “Seized Property” form, listing the knife from the tub. “It's from a set in the kitchen,” she said. “No doubt at all.”

As they sat down, Melissa handed the copy of the Freiberg Tribune and Dispatch to Toby. “Seen this?”

Toby looked a bit surprised, said he hadn't, and opened it up. He looked up at Melissa, rather startled.

“That's freaky,” he said, mostly to her.

I was curious. “What?”

“The bit about Dracula,” he said. “Just floating outside the second-floor window, I mean. Wow.”

“I'm sure he had help,” I said.

Melissa joined in. “In what way?”

“Oh,” I said conversationally, “I'd think a rope, for example.” I forced a chuckle. “He wasn't flying.”

“Did you, you know, find a rope?” Her large eyes were very steady on mine.

“No, but we found ringbolts.” I shrugged. “It's just a matter of the mechanics of the thing.”

“I'm sure you'll find an explanation,” said Melissa.

Hanna suddenly apologized for being a bad hostess, and asked if anyone else wanted coffee. We all did. We spent the next half hour discussing suicide, death, and how friends should deal with it. To me, it seemed that Hanna was by far the most affected by Edie's death. While she was telling Hester just how she'd found the body, I started to think about the possibilities we had. Somehow, it seemed to me that it just damned well shouldn't be this hard to determine the cause and method of death. What had we missed?

Hester interjected a new item. “Did you know the whole third floor is sealed off?”

“No.”

“Yes. It's the owner's private apartment, and nobody can go there unless she's here. According to Toby, here.” She shrugged. “The doors to that floor are both locked, anyway. Keyed. New.”

“That's right,” said Melissa. “We just never go up there unless Jessica's here.”

Hester looked up toward the ceiling. “Must be a pretty damned big apartment.”

The whole third floor would be about four thousand square feet. I could only agree.

There's a rule of thumb in homicide investigations, whereby you either solve the murder in the first forty-eight hours, or the investigation will drag on for months before an arrest is made, if ever.

It was beginning to look like we'd be lucky to know whether or not this was even a suicide in forty-eight hours.

Then some people arrived who would irrevocably tip the scales.