Broken Saint, The (10 page)

Ryan wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t say anything.

“Are we clear on that, Ryan?”

He didn’t reply, but he started up the cruiser and
we headed back to headquarters. The way Ryan was so bent out of shape about it,
I was starting to wonder what
he
lied about.

Chapter 14

“She had a 1.4 BAC in her system, which is a lot but not
toxic,” Robin said. “We sucked a liter of fluid out of her stomach, a mixture
of beer and river water.”

Harold had left me a message that he’d finished the
initial report on the forensics and the autopsy results for Maricel Salizar.
Ryan and I arranged to meet with Harold and Robin in his lab. She was standing
near a bunch of microscopes and PCs on the long table that ran the length of
the wall.

It was about forty-eight hours after we’d brought
Maricel’s body in, and we were a little bit behind where I wanted to be with
the investigation. By forty-eight hours I want to like someone. I don’t mind if
he’s gone off the grid. He usually turns up. And I don’t mind if we’re missing
that one piece of evidence that links him to the crime. With the quality of the
forensics we can do now, most of the time it’s just a matter of running more
and more tests.

But the problem with the Salizar case was we had
too many possibles. There was Al Gerson, the lying Mormon provost, who we’d
just learned was living in Manila about nine months before Maricel was born—not
that I’m counting months or anything. Gerson had copped to a small lie—fudging
Maricel’s application forms—but he insisted that was all there was. He was just
helping the girl meet Central Montana’s State University’s rigorous admission
standards for exchange students. In fact, I think the form has two tough questions:
1) You a foreigner? 2) You got tuition money? Answer yes to both, you’re in.
Answer yes to just the second one? Close enough. You’re in.

There was his crazy son, Mark, who copped to
screwing and killing Maricel, who incidentally was also God’s wife. Our
prosecutor, Larry Klein, loves confessions as much as anyone, but I figured he
might have a couple of questions he’d like to run by Mark before he filed this
case.

“You can tell it’s river water in her stomach?” I
said to Robin.

“Yeah,” she said, “it has some unique bacteria and
other crud floating in it that you don’t see in beer.”

Then there was Hector Cruz, the boyfriend. Smart
money is always on lovers and family. In this case, Hector didn’t look like the
murdering-boyfriend type. But he didn’t have an alibi. Instead, he had a felony
conviction and a Latin Vice Lords tattoo on his chest. Doesn’t make him a
murderer, though, right?

“So that mean she drowned in the river?”

“I’ll let Harold address that,” Robin said.

And finally there was Amber, the good-girl pre-law
student who was either a truly gifted actress or didn’t kill the bitch—Amber’s
word, not mine. Her calling Maricel a bitch made me want to cross her off,
except for her colossal stupidity in having anything to do with that six-foot stool
sample of a boyfriend, Jared. As a mom, I wouldn’t mind it being Amber. It
would make it easier to tell teenagers around the world what can happen if you
hang out with the wrong crowd. But as a cop, I just didn’t think it was Amber. Didn’t
matter what Maricel did, Amber wasn’t going to throw away her future by
teaching the exchange student a lesson.

But Jared? I’d love to lock up his skinny white
ass for twenty-to-life. Keeping his genes out of the pool would be one of the
few ways I could think globally, act locally.

“Any other forensics?” I said. I wanted to get
through everything Robin had.

“No, nothing that wouldn’t be expected given that
she was dunked and recovered on the river bank.”

“No prints, hair, fibers?”

“We’ve got a few strands of hair, from two
different males, and some thick polyester threads, curly, maybe from a mat in
the trunk of a car. Which would be consistent with her being killed somewhere
else and dumped at the river. You get me some hair and some threads from some
trunks, I can tell you more.”

“How long would the DNA on the hair take?”

“Thirty-six hours. Want me to do it?”

“Yeah, do it,” I said. “Okay, Harold, what did you
get?”

The ME was sitting on a battered, armless desk
chair that creaked in protest when he moved. “Robin’s already told you about
the BAC and the river water in her stomach. Since the river water is mixed up
with beer, we’re not able to state definitively the role of the immersion in
her death.”

“What about water in her lungs? Wouldn’t that tell
you whether she drowned?”

“Not necessarily,” Harold said. “We found a little
water in her lungs, but that doesn’t tell us how she died. If her lungs were
full of water, that would indicate she was alive when she went into the river.
But if there’s no water, or just a little, that could indicate she was already
dead, or just that she had a dry drowning.”

“What’s that?”

“Means that when she hit the water, whether she
was conscious or unconscious, the larynx spasmed, closing up the airway. If it
stayed closed long enough, she could have gone into cardiac arrest. So she
might have been alive.”

“What about the stab wounds?” I said. “They tell
us anything?”

He looked down at his clipboard. “Three stab
wounds to the abdomen, from what looks like a knife with a blade width of
almost two centimeters. One sharp side, one dull side.”

“Like a steak knife?”

“Sure,” Harold said. “For a big piece of steak.”

“What kind of damage did the stab wounds do?”

“I think they killed her. Perforated her stomach
and the small intestine, which released a boatload of bacteria, which would’ve
made her really sick. But the significant damage was when the knife sliced a
big vein in her liver.”

“She might have bled out internally.”

“I think she did bleed out internally. The liver
is like a sponge filled with blood. You lacerate that and don’t stop the flow,
you’re dead in less than a half hour.”

“Could the cold temperature out at the river have
slowed things down a little?”

“No, it wasn’t cold enough to ice her brain.”

“So, your best guess for cause of death?”

“I’d say her brain died within a half hour of the
laceration of her hepatic vein. She might have been alive out on the river, and
the hypothermia and getting dunked didn’t help. But find whoever stabbed her
and charge him with murder.”

“What kind of guy should we be looking for?”

“From the angles of the wounds, a right-handed
guy. Taller than five feet, heavier than a hundred pounds.”

“So it wasn’t a left-handed midget? Could you be a
little more vague?”

He smiled sadly and shrugged his shoulders.
“Sorry.”

“Anything else you see?”

Harold and I have this game he seems to like. He
tells me all the boring medical stuff that happened to the vic, then waits for
me to ask him whether there’s anything else we ought to know. Then he drops a
big one. I don’t generally like games, but I like Harold enough to play along.

“There is something else that you might be
interested in. She’d had a rough abortion a few weeks ago.”

“What’s a rough abortion?”

“In an induced abortion, as opposed to a
miscarriage, you have to stretch the cervix open to get the instruments in
there. It’s easy to tear the cervix muscles. A good ten to twenty percent of
women need stitches. In a hospital setting or a good clinic, they stitch it up right
there. An iffy outpatient clinic, they don’t do it.”

“And she needed stitches?”

“Yeah, but she didn’t get them.” He leaned back in
his chair, which creaked. “The tears were half healed up, with some scarring.”

“She would’ve had bleeding?”

“Probably, and it definitely hurt like hell for a
while. But the real damage would have shown up in the future—that is, if she
had one. She’d have run the risk of what’s called an ‘incompetent cervix.’”

“English?”

“The next time she got pregnant, if she wanted to
come to term, the cervix might have been too weak to stay closed long enough for
the fetus to hang on and develop properly. She’d run an increased risk of
miscarriage or premature delivery.”

“How big a risk?”

“Three to five times that of a woman who never had
an abortion.”

“Anything else?”

“No, that’s all I’ve got.”

I shook my head. “I thought she only had a shitty
last day.”

“No.” Harold looked wrung out. “I think her whole
last month was shitty.”

I thanked Harold and Robin as Ryan and I left the
lab.

“Well,” Ryan said as walked up the stairs toward
the detectives’ bullpen, “looks like we’ve got another possible motive.”

“Yeah, but a new motive doesn’t help us with our
list of suspects. Assuming they all have working dicks.”

Chapter 15

“Want to pick up Hector Cruz again?” I said.

“I think we have to.” Ryan sat down at his desk. “Odds
are it was his baby, which opens up a bunch of scenarios. She didn’t want to
get the abortion, but he pressures her into it and now she’s decided he made
her kill her baby.”

“Or she wanted the abortion and he didn’t. So he’s
decided she killed his baby,” I said.

“Or it wasn’t Hector’s baby,” Ryan said. “Hector
finds out, they get in a big fight.”

“It could be one of the fabulous Gerson boys. Dad
would have an obvious motive for shutting her up. And the son’s so crazy he
doesn’t need a motive. He just goes off his meds for a couple days.”

“We could tell Hector we know about the abortion,”
Ryan said. “See how he reacts. And while we’re at it, we could ask him if we
could look around his trailer and the trunk of his car.”

I smiled. “I guess we could. And then he could say,
yes, she told me she was knocked up, so I told her to get an abortion, which
she did, but it hurt a lot and she started complaining, which got on my nerves,
so I knifed her three times.”

“Well, you put it like that,” Ryan said, “we should
have this case wrapped up by lunchtime.”

I was tapping a pencil on the edge of my desk.
“From what Harold told us about the tearing of the cervix and how it wasn’t
stitched up, most likely the abortion was done by a coat-hanger guy, right?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan said. “Probably, but not
necessarily.”

“How you mean?”

“I don’t know anything about abortions, but I’ve
had five operations on my knees—football—and every time I’d done my homework on
the Web, but then the doc explained how, yeah, in most cases, this problem
would indicate that particular surgery but my situation was a little different
because such and such, so he thinks we should come at it some different way.”

“So what are you saying about Maricel?”

“Just that we shouldn’t assume it was a butcher.
It could’ve been a real doc, and there might’ve been a legitimate reason he did
it the way he did.”

“Which means Maricel could’ve had a legal case
against the doc if he screwed something up.”

“Could’ve,” Ryan said. “I’m saying we shouldn’t
rule out the possibility that money is involved somehow.”

“Probably a good general principle. But if it was
a coat-hanger guy who screwed it up, she could’ve come back at him—not to sue
him but to expose him. He could’ve found out, they get into it, he kills her.”

Ryan sighed. “Aren’t we supposed to be narrowing
things down at this point?”

“That’d be nice.” I thought for a second. “Shit.
The only things we can do are try to figure out who did the abortion and see
how Hector reacts when we tell him we know about it. You got a better idea?”

He paused. “We could check with Planned
Parenthood, the university health center. See if they remember her. They can
tell us where they point girls who want an abortion.”

“And if they remember her, maybe they can tell us
if she came in with a guy,” I said.

“A lot of maybe’s here.”

I nodded. “Let’s start with the university. Can
you get an address on the health center?”

It took Ryan thirty seconds. He wrote it down on a
slip of paper and we headed out.

Traffic had thinned. We got stuck behind a girl in
a two-door shitcan who was driving real slow and weaving a little. “Is she
drunk?” I said.

Ryan leaned forward. “I think I see her looking
down. Can you pull up next to her?” I did it. “She’s texting. Want to stop
her?” he said.

“No, write down her tag and call it in. Let one of
the uniforms get her. I want to get started on the abortion thing.”

“Okay,” Ryan said. He picked up the radio and
called in her tag and location.

We parked at the entrance to the health center, which
was inside the new three-story Nursing Building that was finished last year.
Some pharma had endowed it, and it looked good, more like one of those
satellite hospitals than a college health center.

We walked in, across a decent carpet, through a
good-sized student lounge with upholstered chairs with little desks built into
them. Off to the side were a half-dozen study rooms with big flat-screen
monitors on the walls.

Up at Reception, I showed the student my shield
and asked to speak with the director. The girl got on the phone. Ryan and I sat
on a couple of chairs in the lounge. A minute later, a forty-year old woman
wearing a white lab coat, with a stethoscope around her neck, came out. The
receptionist pointed to us. We stood and I introduced us to Dr. Evelyn Cordoza.
The doctor led us back to her office and gestured for us to sit.

“We’re investigating that murder of the student,
Maricel Salizar, and we think there might be an abortion angle to it,” I said
to her.

She lowered her head, looking out over her half
glasses. “You’re aware we don’t do any abortions here?” Dr. Cordoza said.

“Yes, we assumed that,” I said, “but we’d like to
see whether you have a record of whether she came in to talk about it.”

Ryan said, “And we’d like to learn whether you
refer students to a particular abortion provider.”

Dr. Cordoza said, “What time period are we talking
about?”

“Three to four weeks ago.”

She tapped some keys on her laptop. “That’s
S-A-L-I-Z-A-R?” She looked up at me. I nodded. “I don’t have a Salizar coming
here, going back to January 1.”

“Any chance she could have talked with one of your
people without her name going into your system?”

“No.” Dr. Cordoza shook her head. “Every student
has to present herself at Reception and show a university ID.”

“Can’t bluff their way in by saying they want to
talk about a cold?” That was how I got birth control when I was a student.

Her expression told me she didn’t like answering
the same question twice. “Every student goes through Reception.”

“All right, Dr. Cordoza, let me ask you about
where you point students who want an abortion.”

“Planned Parenthood. They’ve got the resources.”

“You don’t name any docs?”

She shook her head.

We stood up. “Thank you, Dr. Cordoza.”

Back in the cruiser, we headed over to Planned
Parenthood. Their doc on duty was Kenneth Lawler, who invited us into his
office. I explained what we were looking for and slid the picture from
Maricel’s ID across his desk.

“Yes, I think I do remember her,” he said.

“Can you look up whether it was her came in?”

“I could, but that wouldn’t do you much good,
since we give everyone the option of not signing in.”

“Do you remember if she came in with another
person? A guy?”

He shook his head. “She could have, but this place
can get pretty busy, and I don’t usually see them till they get back here.”

“So you don’t remember anything you said to her?”

“Sorry, no.”

“If she asked you where to get an abortion, what
would you have told her?”

“We’ve got some materials pro and con—pamphlets,
books, DVDs—that we offer them, but if they say they want an abortion, we
direct them to Montana Reproductive Services, here in town.”

“Why do you recommend them?”

“They’re good,” he said. “And they’re the only
ones within a hundred miles.”

“Are there any illegal providers?”

“There are illegal and unsafe, and some that are both.
I don’t know them by name, but I know they exist. The ER routinely sees
perforated uteruses and intestines. And they see infections and toxic shock
from chemical abortions. There are deaths in town every year.”

“And you warn the girls about these providers?”

He looked at me directly. “Every. Damn. Time.”

We drove over to visit with Montana Reproductive
Services. Dr. Lester Allenby was finishing a procedure, so we burned through
some Rawlings
taxpayer money by sitting in his
waiting room.

“If we strike out with this guy,” Ryan said, “you
want to pick up Hector Cruz?”

“No other option,” I said.

“You can go in now,” the secretary said a moment
later.

Dr. Allenby invited us to sit, but I said, “We’ll
just need a minute of your time.”

“How can I help?”

I explained the case we were working on. “Can you
tell us if you treated Maricel Salizar?”

He looked it up on his computer.

“No record of her.”

Ryan said, “Let me ask a question, Doctor, if you
don’t mind. What is the approximate cost of an abortion?”

“About three fifty to six hundred, depending on
the length of the pregnancy and a couple of other factors.”

“And do you know if the student health insurance
policy at CMSU covers it?”

“All but twenty percent,” Dr. Allenby said.

“Okay, Doctor,” I said, “thanks very much.”

Back in the cruiser, Ryan said, “I don’t get it.
Maricel goes to an unsafe abortion provider rather than shell out sixty or
eighty bucks? It must have cost her at least that much for the procedure she
bought.”

“Only thing I can think of,” I said, “is she was
afraid if she did it on the books it would somehow get back to Dr. Gerson—or
Mark Gerson—”

“Or Hector,” Ryan said. “But that doesn’t make any
sense. She’s twenty-one. There’s no parental consent. How would anybody find
out?”

“Makes sense to me. She gets the abortion from a
legitimate place,” I said, “they keep records. If there are records, someone
with a twenty-dollar bill can see them. Or a person with some influence. A
provost at the university? A guy who can move her halfway around the world? In
a place like Rawlings, he’s got influence.”

“If that’s why she went with an unlicensed guy,”
Ryan said, “she must’ve been awfully afraid of what someone would do if he
found out.”

“You mean, like, kill her or something?”