Polar Quest

16

‘Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?’ Irene Yale asked as the call came in.

‘He stabbed me,’ a woman’s voice replied hoarsely.

‘Who stabbed you, ma’am?’ Yale asked.

The address where the call had originated appeared on Yale’s screen.

‘My ex-husband, Oz, stabbed me. I’m bleeding, bleeding all over,’ the woman sobbed. ‘God, it hurts.’

Yale highlighted the address on her screen and ordered police and paramedic units to be dispatched to the house on the city’s north side.

‘Is your ex-husband still there with you?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t think so,’ the woman said, her words broken by erratic gasps.

‘I want you to stay on the line until the police arrive. Do you understand me?’

No reply.

‘Ma’am? Ma’am, are you still there?’ Yale asked urgently.

‘What’s the story, Vera?’ Detective J. R. Fink asked Officer Vera Andrews as he stepped out of his unmarked car.

‘The house belongs to a woman named Faye Olson. Shortly after midnight, nine-one-one received a call from a woman reporting that she’d been stabbed. I arrived on the scene and searched the house.’ Andrews’s voice cracked slightly. ‘I found two bodies inside — a man in the kitchen and a woman in the bedroom. The man had his throat slit. The woman was nude and had been stabbed repeatedly — the phone was on the floor by her bedside. The paramedics arrived a couple of minutes after I did, but there was nothing for them to do. I secured the house and called you guys.’

‘Good work, Vera,’ Fink said. ‘I’m going inside. Let me know when the evidence techs show up.’

‘Will do.’

As Fink walked toward Olson’s house, he pulled on a pair of latex gloves and steeled himself for the crime scene. He stepped through the doorway and knelt near a bloody shoe print on the living room carpet by the kitchen archway.

‘The killer is a big guy,’ Fink said to himself.

Fink estimated the killer’s shoe size to be at least a thirteen. He saw several other partial prints on the carpet, bloody remnants of the killer’s movements through the house.

Moving into the kitchen, he saw the first body just as the killer left it. A white male in his early to mid-forties lay in a prone position on the floor, his head tilted back like a Pez dispenser. Sprays of blood marked the walls, describing the arc of the attack that left the man dead. The glass remains of two beer bottles lay on the floor around and probably beneath the victim, their pale yellow contents pooled with blood. The two broken bottlenecks still had their caps — they were never even opened.

Fink moved slowly around the kitchen, trying to absorb as much of the fresh crime scene as he could. He knew that his best chance for catching the killer would come in the early hours of his investigation.

Inside the bedroom, the nude body of a petite white female — approximately the same age as the other victim — lay supine on the bed. Several deep stab wounds marred her chest and abdomen and, like the man in the kitchen, her throat was sliced down to the bone.

A blouse and skirt were draped neatly over the back of a chair, probably placed their by the victim before she was attacked. Long shallow slits on her chest and thighs indicated that her undergarments had been cut from her body and thrown with haste onto the floor.

On the dresser, Fink found a purse. He carefully opened it and began looking through its contents. In the main compartment, he found a thick leather wallet containing cash and several credit cards.

Robbery doesn’t appear to be the motive, Fink noted.

Mixed in with the credit cards, he found a Michigan driver’s license issued to a Faye Olson of Ann Arbor. Fink studied the smiling face in the license photo, then looked again at the face of the victim — a match.

Surveying the rest of the house, Fink found a man’s blazer in the hall closet. He carefully probed the jacket and found what he was looking for. Fink extracted a thin bill-fold from an interior pocket and opened it. It still contained a significant amount of cash, credit cards, and a Michigan drivers license issued to Lloyd Sutton.

In the living room, Fink found several framed photographs on the walls and sitting atop end tables. A few of the pictures showed the two victims together with a large, African-American male.

‘All right, people,’ Fink announced to the assembled evidence technicians. ‘I want this house run through a sieve. If there is anything in there that we can use to identify whoever did this, I want it found.’

The techs gathered their equipment and followed Fink into the house.

‘Get a full series of both victims in situ. Do the woman first,’ Fink commanded the photographer.

The photographer moved into the bedroom and began firing away with his camera. He took pictures of Olson from several different angles, amassing as complete a description of the crime scene as possible. He finished the roll with several close-up shots of the wounds on Olson’s body.

In the living room, Fink oversaw the technicians at work. He felt the excitement of the hunt amid the whirl of activity around him.

‘I’m done with the bodies,’ the photographer announced as he left the kitchen.

‘Great,’ Fink replied. He then leaned out the front door. ‘Beverly, we’re ready for you in here.’

A woman with a curly mass of strawberry blond hair flowing out from a knit cap led a pair of young men with gurneys into the bungalow. Atop each gurney was a black rubber body bag.

‘What a mess,’ Washtenaw County Medical Examiner Beverly Porter declared as she surveyed the crime scene. ‘Do we have an ID on the victims?’

‘Yeah,’ Fink replied. ‘The woman is Faye Olson, the male is Lloyd Sutton.’

Porter filled out the toe tags for the bodies and handed them to her assistants. ‘I’ll get to work on these today. The rape kit will be on its way to the State Police crime lab later this afternoon.’

‘Thanks, Beverly,’ Fink replied. ‘I appreciate it.’