At the Scene of the Crime (16 page)

Samuel murmured something.

“I’m sorry. None of us heard what you just said, Mister Kosten. Would you care to repeat it?”

He looked up at us, face still pale, eyes wide open. “I said, I think I want a lawyer. That’s what I want. A lawyer.”

I turned to Diane. “Detective Woods, I believe you have something to say to that.”

“Yes, I do,” she said crisply. “Mister Kosten, waiting in my office is an assistant attorney general from the New Hampshire attorney general’s office. She is prepared to make a deal. The deal is that when she comes in here, you give a full and complete confession to the murder of Cassie Malone, and the dismemberment and disposal of her body. In exchange for that deal, the death penalty will not be considered during your sentencing. You have thirty seconds to accept this deal. After the thirty seconds are up, the window closes, and you may get an attorney, for however much you can afford, or one that the state will provide for you, and take your chance in front of a jury, where the death penalty most assuredly will be considered in your sentencing. And if you think you can sway a jury with some nonsense story about self-defense or an accident, think of what will happen when the prosecutor goes into details of how you disposed of your girlfriend’s body. Mister Kosten, the clock is now ticking.”

He didn’t use all of his thirty seconds.

In a voice just above a whisper, he said, “I’ll take the deal.”

 

Later Diane took me to dinner in what she said was the best restaurant in Tyler, and which I didn’t think would make the top twenty list in my previous hometown, and after a second glass of wine, she said, “I can’t thank you enough.”

“Then don’t,” I said. “I’m just glad that Mister Kosten will now be a guest of your state prison system for the rest of his life.”

“Oh, that he will, though I’m sure that his defense attorney will scream like a stuck pig when he sees the videotape and reads the transcript of how
the interview was conducted.”

I took a sip from my own wineglass. “The courts have said, again and again, that it’s permissible for police to lie while interrogating a suspect. You and I and that thoughtful state police detective may have approached the line, but we never crossed it.”

She sighed and looked at the wine bottle. A nice Bordeaux, it tasted fine after the day I had just gone through. She said, “We’re lucky that poor Cassie never explained the ins and outs of radiation to Samuel. If she had, he would have known that entire demonstration with the Geiger counter was just so much bullshit. That nothing she was ever exposed to would turn up in an examination like that, and that her exposure would just measure one thing. One thing only. Amount of exposure. Nothing like a DNA analysis. If Cassie ever told him anything, he would have walked out of there laughing.”

I said, “Perhaps Cassie did tell him about it. And he promptly forgot. He seems to be that type of person.”

“True. We were very, very lucky.”

“How’s that?”

“What you said earlier. He came that close to committing the perfect crime, without leaving any evidence behind. You said that there’s always trace evidence left behind at a crime scene. Always. Well, not this time.”

“But there was,” I gently reminded her.

“The blood traces? Not usable and you know it. Nope, Samuel got out of there the night he killed her, clean as a whistle.”

I said, “I wasn’t thinking of the blood traces. No, he left something there, before he left. Something that is going to put him away for life.”

“And what’s that?”

I picked up the wine bottle, poured us each a fresh glass. “He left a trace of a trace. His guilt. Something that will never go away.”

She laughed. “Okay. I stand corrected.”

I put the bottle down, picked up my glass for a toast.

“To justice,” I said, clinking my glass to hers.

She smiled, returned the gesture. “To guilt.”

CLAIRE CORBETT LOOKED UP AS DANNY WHEELED IN
the first corpse of the day. “What’ve we got?” she asked.

Haltingly, he read the report. “Female, age forty-four, found dead in the basement of Tus . . . cany Bay Nursing Home—”

“Tuscany Bay?”

Danny’s head bobbed up. “Did I say it wrong?”

“No, no, you did fine. But didn’t we just have another body from there?”

Danny’s brow furrowed. Dutiful, if a bit slow, he’d been her assistant for the past twelve years. She often wondered if he could make more money flipping burgers at McDonald’s than flipping bodies at the morgue. At least at McDonald’s there might be a chance for promotion.

“The day before yesterday,” Claire prompted.

Recollection dawned on Danny’s face. “Oh, yeah. The old guy. He was from that place, too. But he, like, lived there. This lady was one of the nurses.”

“Weird,” Claire said, her voice showing the strain as they shifted the heavy-set female onto the autopsy table. “Maybe we should have taken a closer look at Mr. whatever-his-name-was, huh?”

Danny might not have been particularly perceptive, but he was always eager to please. Especially in trivial matters. Before Claire could get him to reposition the body, Danny had hurried to the files and dug out documents from two days before. “His name was Mr. Pah . . . try . . . zo.”

Claire looked over his shoulder. “Petrizzo.” She pointed. “No need for an
autopsy. Eighty-seven years old, being treated for congestive heart failure, emphysema, and early stage Alzheimer’s.”

Danny looked confused. “Why did they bring him here? Don’t the nursing homes just use hearses to go to the funeral place?”

Claire waited until Danny had settled the corpse’s head onto the small wooden stand that kept it steady. “They brought Mr. Petrizzo here because he died on public property. He hadn’t taken his wallet, so no ID. They brought him here until we figured out who he was.”

“I still don’t get why we didn’t do an autopsy.”

“He was reported missing fast enough that we were able to make a positive ID and get his medical history,” Claire said. “No evidence of foul play. Looks like he just died. And from what I heard, he picked a beautiful place in the park, with a view of the gulf.”

“That’s nice,” Danny said, smiling.

“So what about our girl here?”

Danny consulted the notes again.

“Com . . . complained of pain to the abdomen and head. Her super . . . supervisor said she vomited and said she was going to rest for a while. She declined medical assistance and said she thought she had the flu.”

“The flu?”

Danny looked up. “Not the flu?”

Claire sighed. Whenever anyone got sick, they called it the flu. The symptoms this woman complained of were less influenza and more gastro enteritis. But neither should have killed her. “I doubt it,” she said. “Was she under doctor’s care for anything?”

“High co . . . co . . . ”

“Cholesterol?”

Danny nodded.

“Hypertension too?”

Another nod.

“We may be looking at a heart attack or stroke. Let’s see what our victim can tell us from the inside.” She lowered her plastic eye protection and
picked up a scalpel.

Danny lowered his eye protection as well and situated himself near the corpse’s head. Claire clicked on the tape recorder and spoke into it, providing some of the body’s specifics. She added, “Lividity on right side, consistent with reports of victim being found in a reclining position.”

Claire pressed hard with the scalpel, carving a large Y into the waxy chest. She then stretched it open. Layers of fat made the task more arduous, but as she sawed away ribs, she noticed an enormous volume of blood, much more than she’d expected. With the body tilted on a stainless steel bed, much like a large cookie sheet, fluids ran downhill into the waste sink. Still, there was so much, Claire ran the hose into the body cavity to help clear it out.

Speaking into the microphone again, she noted the profusion of blood and speculated about the root cause. “Massive intraperitoneal hemorrhage. No evidence of trauma. Possible liver cirrhosis.” She shook her head even as she said the words. Although the liver was oversized, the volume of blood was still too much to be explained away that easily. As she spoke she searched for evidence of liver cancer, a ruptured spleen, any type of aneurysm, or pancreatitis. “Nothing present to explain a hemorrhage this extensive.”

Scalpel in hand, Danny cut a long curve from behind the corpse’s left ear, around the back of the head, to behind the right ear. He worked the skin up over the crown of the skull until he turned the scalp inside out over the face.

Claire continued to remove organs from the cavity, weighing them and slicing specimens for further tests. “I’m ordering a tox screening on all these,” she said.

Danny was preparing to start on the skull with the bone saw. Squinting at the doctor, he straightened up. “How come?”

“A hunch,” she said. “Look at this.” She held up the heart.

Danny came around to see. Even though he might not understand, Claire liked to instruct as she worked. She counted on Danny having been
around autopsies enough to catch on. He did. “Huh. I thought you said this was s’posed to be a heart attack.”

“Not likely,” she said. “At first I thought maybe. What with the nausea and pain she complained about. But those symptoms are non specific; they could be almost anything.” Claire kept talking, both for the benefit of the recorder and to sort out her thoughts. “The sudden onset of trouble, the hemorrhaging, and the fact that she’s dead with no explanation make me think twice about this one.”

Danny grabbed one of the specimens. “I’ll get these out to the tox lab today.”

“And we’ll get answers back two weeks from now.”

He stopped at the disappointment in her tone. “Isn’t that the normal time?”

“Yeah, but if this lady ate something that did this—” she pointed into the body cavity, which was still deeply puddled with blood “—I’d like to know before somebody else gets hungry.”

 

Two weeks later, very early in the morning, Mark Corbett’s fingers crept beneath Claire’s sleepshirt with such stealth she almost believed she was still dreaming. When his hand ran along the curve of her hip, she felt herself come awake. She pushed her face deeper into the pillow and tried to ignore the trail of goosebumps left by Mark’s skimming fingers. “I’m sleeping,” she said unconvincingly.

“Uh-huh.” He cupped her breast, snugging closer. She let him.

“What time is it?” she asked.

He whispered into her hair. “Time for me to ravish your body.”

“I was dreaming we were in Paris.”

“So pretend we’re making love at the top of the Eiffel Tower.”

Claire peeled open one eye. “It’s four in the morning.”

“Mm-hmm,” Mark said. He brushed the hair off Claire’s neck and pressed his lips into the tiny nook that always made her melt.

“Oh,” she said, and closed her eyes.

As he murmured next to her ear, Claire heard something else. Her eyes popped open. “Hang on,” she said.

Mark kept nuzzling.

“Mark.” She reached back and pushed at his hip. “Listen. Is that you?”

He boosted himself, tilting his head toward the bedroom door.

Digital notes of Beethoven’s “Für Elise” drifted up the stairs. “Shit!” Mark said. He bounded off the bed.

Claire watched him go. Buck naked. “You must’ve been pretty sure of yourself, mister,” she said as he ran out the door. Turning, she leaned over his side of the bed and clicked on the lamp. Yep, there were his sleep clothes, dropped into a hasty pile.

When Mark returned he was still on the phone. Nodding. Scratching his bare chest. “Got it. See you there,” he said before hanging up.

“Some day I ought to turn you down,” Claire said, smiling. “Just so you can feel what the rest of the husbands in America go through.”

Mark grabbed clean underwear from the drawer. “I gotta go,” he said, heading for the bathroom.

“Now?”

“Dead guy found in the parking lot of Tuscany Bay Nursing Home.”

“Tuscany Bay?” Claire sat up. “That’s odd.”

Mark pivoted, came around to the other side of the bed and rescued his discarded clothing.

“What happened?” Claire asked. “Homicide?”

“I assume so. Don’t know yet.”

 

Sarasota, Florida, is beautiful almost any time of the day, but Mark enjoyed the cool freedom granted by the pale morning light best of all. By the time he got to Tuscany Bay’s parking lot, the sun still hadn’t broken over the horizon and the world was bathed in cool shades of gray.

“Gonna be warm today,” one of the evidence technicians said. “Good thing they found this guy before the sun came up.” He waved a hand in front of his face. “Coulda been a lot worse.”

The body lay face up on the ground next to a dark blue Dodge Neon. Spotlights had been set up in a perimeter around the area, and a few onlookers had gathered to watch. One of the uniforms, Bailey, stood nearby. “What do we have?” Mark asked him.

“Male, age fifty-six. Worked here as a nurses’ aide.” Bailey cocked his head toward the expansive elderly care facility just south of the lot. “Name is Damon Tarabulus. Complained of not feeling well, so he left early.” Bailey consulted his notes. “Was supposed to get off at eleven. Left at nine instead. Nobody noticed his car here till about an hour ago, when one of the maintenance guys saw him slumped over the wheel.”

“Evidence of foul play?”

“Wallet and keys are still here. No sign of struggle.” Bailey shook his head. “Parameds pulled him out but he was cold. Preliminary guess, he came out here and closed his eyes for a minute before starting the car. Too bad. He never opened them up again.”

Mark stepped over to the body and made a slow circuit. Dark hair, Caucasian, six feet tall, maybe more. Damon Tarabulus wore a blue patterned smock, solid blue cotton pants, white gym shoes, and a final grimace that spoke of great pain. Not a specimen of perfect health, this Tarabulus carried about sixty extra pounds and had the wrinkled skin of a smoker.