Supreme Justice

Chapter Nine

Inverness, a sleepy college town of roughly thirty thousand in northern Wisconsin, was founded by Scotch immigrants who migrated west from New York in the mid-1800s. The population of the town more than doubled each fall when the students at Inverness University and Robert M. La Follette School of Law started the fall semester, and it swelled again during hunting and fishing seasons. Hiking and camping were popular diversions for Inverness students, and the university orientation package contained maps highlighting the hiking trails that started at various points on the outskirts of the campus, and the location of the many lakes that could be found in the verdant forest that surrounded the town and the university.

Daphne Haggard was a redhead with green eyes and freckles but without the stereotypical fiery temper. She’d been one of five officers in Chicago ’s police department with an Ivy League degree when she arrived in the Windy City after her husband was accepted into the PhD program at the University of Chicago. She had moved to Inverness when her husband was hired to teach history at Inverness University. Her law-enforcement career had been on the ascendancy, and the decision to move had been difficult, but not as difficult as her husband’s efforts to find a good job at a good college. Brett had been miserable working as an adjunct professor with no hope of tenure, who supplemented his income by teaching courses at a community college. Daphne loved her husband, and she’d been willing to make a sacrifice to see him happy.

Daphne’s business card identified her as the chief homicide inspector of the Inverness Police Department, but she was usually working on crimes that had nothing to do with dead people, because there weren’t many murders in Inverness, and it usually didn’t take much sleuthing to solve them when they did occur. Inverness had never been the scene of a bizarre serial killing, and no one could recall finding a murder victim sealed in the locked room of an eerie mansion. Once or twice a year, someone who had too much to drink would hit his wife too hard and too often, or a bar fight would end in tragedy, and Daphne would make the arrest. There was usually a teary confession and a slew of witnesses, and the skills she’d developed in the Chicago PD were rarely needed.

Early one Saturday afternoon, however, the Inverness Police Department received a call from a terrified coed concerning a body part she’d stumbled over in the forest surrounding the campus. Daphne, an officer, and a forensic expert met Tammy Cole at the trailhead. The coed was dressed in running shorts and a sports bra. Her complexion was ashen and her arms were wrapped around her body despite the unseasonably warm weather.

Daphne showed the frightened girl her credentials. “Miss Cole, I’m Detective Haggard. This is Officer Pollard and Officer McCall. Can you tell us what happened?”

The girl swallowed. “I usually go for long runs around this time of day. I run different routes. There’s a stream about five miles in on the trail I picked for today’s run. I got thirsty. The underbrush is thick in spots and I tripped over a root. When I…”

Cole stopped and took a deep breath.

“Take your time,” Daphne said.

“I threw out my hands to break the fall,” Cole said when she was calm enough to continue. “It was soft, not like ground. There were insects, and it smelled rancid.”

“What did?”

“I’ll show you.”

“It’s human,” Douglas McCall, the forensics expert, said after a brief examination.

The thigh presented Daphne with the only interesting case she’d had since she’d moved to Inverness-a chance to do some real detective work-but she suppressed her excitement for fear that McCall would think her ghoulish.

“Man or woman?” asked Daphne, who was squatting beside him.

“Tough to tell. Lots of men and women weigh in the neighborhood of 150 pounds, and their thighs would look similar after decomposition because the hair gets lost and the skin turns green, like it has here.”

“Isn’t there any way to tell who we’ve got? What about DNA?”

“You could send the thigh to NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. It’s run by the Department of Justice, and they have a database they use to identify missing persons.”

“How does that work?”

“We’d send a tissue sample to the University of North Texas, where they do the DNA testing. Their people can extract DNA from soft tissue, like the deep muscle in the thigh, and do nuclear testing on it.”

“Make it radioactive?”

McCall laughed. “I thought you were the cop with the Ivy League degree.”

“Spare me the wit. My degree’s in English lit.”

“Hey, that rhymes. I bet you aced poetry.”

“Fuck you, Doug,” Daphne answered with a grin.

“I didn’t know you were so sensitive. Anyway, the term refers to the cell nucleus. That’s where they get the DNA from. You can do that type of testing with blood, hair. When they extract the DNA, they put the sample in their database and try to get a match. But it takes a while.”

“What’s a while?”

“If this was a high-priority case you could get them to act pretty fast, but I’m guessing, realistically, we’re talking three months at a minimum.”

“Shit.”

“Of course, the easiest way to do it is to find the rest of the body. Get me a hand, and we can print it; a pelvic bone, and I can give you the sex.”

Daphne studied the grisly evidence. Who are you? she wondered. Then she stood up and looked around. Normally she would have found the shushing sound the stream made and the deep green of the forest restful. Today the woods had become a sinister place where the rest of the unknown victim might be hidden.

Daphne dialed headquarters on her cell phone. It was lucky that they were in a quiet time of the year, because she was going to need a lot of help searching the woods for the rest of Mr. or Ms. X. They’d have to mobilize the Explorer Scouts, get some cadaver dogs from the state police. It would be a logistics nightmare.

Daphne briefed the chief and told him what she needed. It was only after she hung up that she remembered the weather forecast. A storm was coming in, the first of the year. If they didn’t find the rest of the body quickly, the parts might be buried under snow by tomorrow night.