Until the Final Verdict (2 page)

“Y
OU PLAYED REALLY WELL,
E
M
.
I'm so proud of you.”

“Oh, Mom, you always say that after my violin recitals, no matter what. It's your duty.” Emma's expression conveyed the continual state of exasperation she and her friends felt with parents.

Kathryn smiled. “True, but I always mean it. What are you going to eat?” Emma had chosen the restaurant for dinner as a reward for her flawless solo. As expected, she picked the current teenagers' hangout, a fast-food place called Carpo's. Actually, Kathryn liked Carpo's food, and she felt invigorated by the atmosphere, which pulsed with a wholesome energy emanating from the hordes of young people.

“Double bacon cheeseburger, large fries, a slice of chocolate cake, and a Diet Coke.”

“I was thinking along the lines of a grilled chicken breast and a side of pasta. What's the point to a diet drink if you're going to eat all that stuff?”

“I don't want to get fat.”

“You're slender and beautiful. I just want you to stay that way.” Kathryn walked to the counter, ordered and paid for their food, and carried the full tray to the table, where Emma was talking on her mom's cell phone. Kathryn motioned to hang up.

As soon as she punched the End button, Emma told Kathryn, “Ashley and I are getting our belly buttons pierced.”

“No way, we've already been through this.” Kathryn's look told her daughter there would be no negotiating. “Understood, missy?”

“It's my body,” Emma protested weakly.

“I know, but . . .”

“Then, can I get my left ear pierced?”

“It's already pierced.”

“ 'Nother one.” Emma tugged at the small gold ring that hung from her left earlobe. “All the girls are doing it.”

Kathryn looked around and noted that most girls had one ear pierced in at least two places, and some had several. “I'll think about it.”

When they finished eating, Kathryn went to the rest room and Emma pulled the StarTac cell phone out of her mother's handbag.

“Ash—it worked,” she said conspiratorially. “She's gonna let me get my ear pierced again.”

She giggled, listened for a minute, then told her friend, “Are you kidding, I'd
never
get my belly button
pierced, that'd hurt!” She was still talking when her mother returned.

“Please get off the phone and finish eating, Em.”

“What's the hurry, Mother?”

“I'd like to get home by five o'clock.”

“What for?”

“Dave said he might call.”

E
MMA RAN TO THE SPARE BEDROOM
of their condo as soon as she and Kathryn got home, checked the answering machine, and yelled, “Mom, there are three messages for you, do you want me to write them down?”

Kathryn had filled a teakettle and put it on the stove, then ground some fresh decaf beans and dumped them into a Melitta filter. She set the filter cone on a cup, then walked to the back bedroom and kissed Emma on the cheek.

“No thanks, sweetie, I'll listen to them in a few minutes. Get busy on your homework.”

After her coffee was brewed, she slipped off all her clothes, removed her makeup, washed her face with cool water, put on black Nike sweats, sat at her small
desk, and punched the Listen button on the answering machine.

“Hi, Babe, uh, it's Dave. I hope you had a great afternoon. I called to let you know Doctor Death—sorry, Nelson's going to autopsy Tucker this evening.”

Kathryn frowned at the use of Nelson's unofficial law enforcement nickname and listened to the second message. “Kate, Dave. Bad news. Berroa escaped. Fill you in tonight.”

Eduardo Berroa had been a County Health Clinic doctor who raped several of his Hispanic patients. Kathryn dropped rape charges in exchange for his testimony against County Health Officer Dr. Robert Simmons, who murdered ex-District Attorney Harold Benton and tried, but failed, to murder her as well, before fleeing.

After Berroa testified before the Grand Jury, Kathryn arrested him for a botched abortion that killed one of his patients. She convicted him of involuntary manslaughter and he was sentenced to the maximum, four years in state prison at Soledad.

Berroa's testimony led to a murder indictment of Simmons, but with her first reelection looming, Kathryn's ex-Chief Deputy and political foe Neal McCaskill, criticized her for cutting a deal with a sexual predator, accused her of exercising poor judgment, and cited her prior romantic relationship with Simmons as proof.

Eventually, Mackay tracked Simmons to Tamarindo, Costa Rica, where she had him arrested, only to learn later that he had escaped and disappeared
again. Mackay couldn't prove it, but she believed he bought his freedom from sympathetic Costa Rican officials, who at Simmons' extradition hearing openly opposed Mackay's intent to seek the death penalty if Simmons was convicted of Harold Benton's murder.

She punched a phone number into her handset and sipped her coffee.

“Granz.”

“What time is Doc Nelson going to autopsy Judge Tucker?”

“How soon can you can get there?”

“I need to make sure Ruth's home.”

“And that she'll watch Emma while her mom's out gallivanting again.”

“Besides you and Doc Nelson, I don't have all that many friends. Watching Doc autopsy one of them is hardly ‘gallivanting.' ”

“Gallows humor. I'm sorry.”

“It's all right, I know how much you hate these things. Who could blame you after—”

“After the Gingerbread Man smashed in my skull, slashed my throat, and left me to die in that alley? And I damn near did?” He paused. “That night changed my view of death forever, Kate. It almost takes more courage than I can muster to watch an autopsy.”

“I know, Dave. Maybe I should go to the morgue by myself. You can read the protocol.”

“No, it's my job and I need to be there.” He paused. “Good thing Ruth lives in your condo complex, saves you a fortune in gas running Em back and forth.”

“Don't want to talk about it anymore, right?”

“ 'Bout what?”

“I—”

“See you in thirty minutes,” he said, and hung up.

“Love you,” she whispered.

“D
OC
N
ELSON
'
S WAITING FOR YOU
in the Hellhole.” The security guard recognized the District Attorney and slipped into law enforcement slang for the morgue in the basement of County General Hospital. Edward McCaffrey was a retired Santa Rita cop.

He held the door open for Mackay and added, “Sheriff's already there.”

“Thanks, Ed,” Mackay answered.

Like most hospitals, County General's entrance conveyed a serene cheerfulness with pastel colors, soft abstract artwork, comfortable furniture, and lots of glass and skylights.

Mackay crossed the lobby, punched the elevator Down button, and tapped her toes impatiently. When the door swished open, she drew in a deep breath
and scrunched up her nose. The morgue's environment stood in stark contrast to the lobby, with its rancid odor of antiseptic and death that ventilators couldn't get rid of, deodorizers couldn't cover up, and she never got used to. Worse was the eerie quiet—as if all living sounds, especially hers, were unwelcome interlopers.

At the far end of the spotless tile hallway was a set of heavy double doors through which hearses loaded and the coroner's wagon unloaded. Putrefying bodies or those with infectious diseases went directly to the isolation suite, where a sealed atmosphere prevented the escape of offensive or infectious gases until high-power exhaust fans sucked them up and blew them into an incinerator.

Other bodies stopped first in the adjacent coldstorage vault. There they were preserved until a morgue attendant known as a “diener” cleaned, weighed, measured, and photographed them in the staging room, then placed them on gurneys and rolled them into one of the autopsy suites.

The largest suite contained three slanted stainless steel tables with high rolled edges to contain blood and other fluids. Each was equipped with faucets, sluices, scales, lockers, a set of autopsy tools, and a soundproof booth where the pathologist dictated notes.

The last suite, called the VIP Room, was used to study special cases and had only one table. Bodies that came to this room often belonged to victims of heinous crimes, and Mackay always approached it reverently.

Granz and forensic pathologist Morgan Nelson were leaning against the wall. Nelson wore bloodsplattered green surgical scrubs and plastic covers over his green rubber-soled shoes. A fringe of short gingery hair stuck out around his green skull cap. Years before, he designed and oversaw the morgue's construction, then wrote the operating rules. Like its creator, the morgue operated around the clock with consummate professionalism and efficiency.

Mackay spotted the dark, heavy stubble on Nelson's face and the bloodshot eyes behind his wirerimmed bifocals and knew he hadn't slept recently.

“You look awful,” she greeted him.

“You're a real sweet talker, Katie,” he retorted. The nickname was his special privilege as her closest friend. “Worked last night and today, but I knew you'd want this done ASAP.”

“TOD?”

“Only way to be exact about time of death is to be there when it happens, but the court building's cold, which slowed down the processes we use to establish time of death—algor, livor and rigor mortis. Body temperature at the scene was sixty degrees, same as ambient. Body temp drops two to four degrees an hour in cold air, so it happened before one-thirty this morning.”

“Can you narrow it down a bit?”

“Fully developed livor mortis was present,” he told them, referring to the fact that gravity pulls blood to the lowest part of a dead body, where it pools into reddish blotches. “But lividity occurs
quickly; besides, there wasn't much blood left, she lived until her heart pumped most of it out.”

“Jesus,” Granz muttered.

“Body was in total rigor, so she died at least twelve hours before the body was found. Rigor hadn't started to resolve, so I'd say it was closer to eighteen hours, considering room temperature.”

“Best guess?”

“Between four o'clock yesterday afternoon and midnight.”

“Would vitreous potassium testing firm it up any?”

“Maybe.”

“Refresh my memory,” Granz said.

“I extract about an ounce and a half of vitreous fluid from the eyeball, and the lab runs a potassium test. Could narrow it down a little, but not much.”

“You'll do a rape kit?” Mackay asked, referring to an examination that established whether the victim was sexually assaulted.

“Yeah, of course we need to know if she was raped before death.”

“Or after.”

“True. The vaginal swabs will tell us if there's seminal fluid present in the vaginal tract, but I can tell you now that there were no external indications of forced vaginal intercourse—no contusions or torn tissue.”

“So she wasn't raped?”

“I'd say not, but we'll know more after closer examination of the genitalia.”

Nelson pulled two paper scrub suits and four shoe covers from a drawer, which Granz and Mackay
slipped into, then they followed him into the autopsy suite where a body lay on the surgical table under a sheet. They had both observed hundreds of autopsies over the years, but neither had ever seen a friend's body stretched out on the table. When Nelson pulled the sheet away from Jemima Tucker's ashen gray corpse, they both gasped audibly.

“I've done more than eight thousand autopsies, and I had the same reaction,” Nelson confessed. He slipped on a headset, switched on a recorder, and started dictating the external examination.

“The body is that of a mature, well-developed black female in her midforties, five feet two inches, weight approximately one hundred twenty pounds.”

He rolled the body from side to side to examine the back of the torso, then lifted each arm and leg to check underlying tissues. He looked into the ears, nose, mouth, and eyes, then visually inspected the other body openings.

“No visible scars or tattoos, no abnormalities. Outer genitalia normal—no obvious trauma.”

He rolled the body onto its right side and slid a brick-shaped, black plastic body-block under the back, forcing the chest to protrude and the arms and neck to fall back. Then he pulled a black-handled Buck knife from a leather case, sharpened it on a sheet of extrafine sandpaper, and drew the razor-sharp blade down an eight-by-ten sheet of paper.

The paper sliced cleanly into two pieces, which he tossed in a trash basket. “Better than a scalpel.” He looked first at Mackay, then Granz. “Ready?”

He cut deep
V
-shaped incisions starting at the
shoulders, curving beneath each breast and meeting at the xiphoid process, or bottom, of the sternum. Another deep cut connected the point of the
V
to the pubic bone, diverting slightly around the navel. The final cut ran from hipbone to hipbone, intersecting the leg of the
Y
. He laid back the abdominal skin and peeled skin, muscle, and soft tissue off the chest wall, exposing strap muscles on the front of the neck and the rib cage, then pulled the chest flap up over the face.

“The final insult, losing her identity,” Mackay said softly. “Damn, I hate that part.”

“Me, too,” Nelson acknowledged.

They all pulled masks over their mouths and noses before Nelson ran two quick cuts up the outer sides of the rib cage with a Stryker saw. He lifted out the breastplate comprising the sternum and ribs and laid it on the table, then cut the pericardial sac and pulmonary artery, stuck his finger into the artery and, detecting no thromboembolism, removed the heart. He tied strings to the carotid and subclavian arteries and snipped out the larynx and esophagus. Finally, he cut the pelvic ligaments, bladder and rectal tubes and lifted out the organ block. He inspected it briefly.

“Nothing unusual.” He glanced at Granz, who averted his eyes. “I'll weigh and examine the internal organs, but preliminary cause of death is massive hemorrhage from the neck wound. I'll let you know if anything else turns up.”

He gave a small flip of the head to Mackay. “Why don't you two get out of here.”

Granz sighed. “Gladly.”