Defensive Wounds (10 page)

All the same, when she now gazed at the pale, still form on the steel gurney, she felt absolutely nothing. Certainly nothing like regret, or even pity.

“So girlfriend didn't have a good day yesterday, eh?” The pathologist interrupted her thoughts. Christine Johnson, tall and black and brilliant and blunt enough to take on Sonia Battle in a cage fight—now,
that
would be an interesting encounter, Theresa thought, and vowed to get the two together for lunch one day—raised one eyebrow at Theresa as if she might be at least partially responsible.

“She was dead when I got there,” Theresa protested. “Besides, I think it may have been the night before last. What do you think?”

Detective Kelly watched the body, his face stony, only the deep swallowing motion of his Adam's apple betraying his discomfort. Some people never got used to it. Theresa knew guys who had been Homicide detectives for twenty years and still turned green at the sight of a body. But they dealt, as Neil was dealing. At least he hadn't turned completely pale—yet. She'd meant what she said about not catching him.

Christine prodded the lividity, checked the intake sheet for the core temperature at reception, and poked around one eyeball. “I'd say you're probably right. Where's the ligature?”

Theresa held up the paper bag containing the cut pair of nylons. “SuperSheer, size B, so I'd say they were hers. Unless she likes to go the fashionable bare-legs approach.”

“I doubt it, not with these veins. How does someone who looks like her have varicose problems?”

“Standing in front of a jury all day in three-inch heels,” Theresa guessed. She took another look at Marie Corrigan. Like the detective, she'd trained herself to view another person's nakedness quickly and thoroughly, to think of it as just skin, epidermis, a double layer of lipid molecules, and a canvas on which the killer might have left his mark. The woman's breasts still perked upright, the surest sign that they were fake, but Marie had somehow resisted the tattoo craze. No other injuries or bruises had come to light, no defensive wounds on the small hands. Theresa saw nothing new, and the diener began to wash away anything that might have remained.

She asked Christine, “Did you ever have a case with her?”

“Did I. Once she wanted me to agree that the damage to an eighteen-month-old's genitals could have been a birth defect. Another time she sneered at my med-school credentials and told the jury I'd graduated fourth-last in my class.”

Theresa worded her response carefully. “Somehow I suspect that's not true.”

The doctor nearly pinned her to the other steel table with one scalpel-sharp glance. “You
suspect
?”

Theresa thought fast. “How did she make such a mistake?”

“Two Christine Johnsons. Somehow she didn't notice the one on the list noted ‘valedictorian.' The point is, she went and looked that up, because she had no other way to attack my testimony.”

“Yeah.” Neil Kelly spoke up. “That'd be her.”

“So what's your story?” Theresa asked him.

“What? How did I get to be a cop or how did I draw the short straw to land this case? If the former, I'm a cop because my dad, my uncle, and my older brother were all cops, and I guess I lack the imagination to break away from the pack. If the latter, because my partner had the bad sense to pick up his phone when it rang.”

Theresa laughed. “No, your Marie story. Anything more recent than her police-brutality complaint?”

The spark left his eyes faster than a cigarette tossed into the lake fizzled out. “No.”

Things we won't admit, even to ourselves.
Theresa let it go and instead watched Christine hover over the back of Marie Corrigan's ravaged skull, cleaning the wounds, having a photograph taken, then a photograph with a scale. Then she sketched, shaved the hair away, cleaned again, had it photographed again. The straight black locks that Marie Corrigan liked to swirl around her shoulders as she mesmerized those in the jury box were tossed into a large red-lined box to be burned in a biohazard incinerator.

Christine pressed the shaved areas with two firm fingers. This produced a creaking sound almost like crumpled cellophane. “We have at least four blows here that split the skin and cracked the bone underneath, and I think one or two that only bruised.”

Christine's assistant took a stainless-steel scalpel, installed a fresh blade, and, without ceremony, cut Marie Corrigan open from her shoulders to her belly button. A smell of blood and offal filled the air; it was like being in a room full of raw meat—not horrible, but certainly not pleasant.

A second circuit of activity commenced in the other half of the room as a second team unloaded a car-accident victim with one mangled leg onto the next table.

Neil Kelly paled.

Theresa tried to distract him with a preliminary report of what she'd found on Marie Corrigan's clothing. “Some fibers, gray wool, black spandex, pink synthetic, tan stuff that probably matches the rug, and the ubiquitous white cotton. The hair caught in the knot of the nylons is brown and has something on it.”

“ ‘Something'?”

“A light coating of some sort of hair product, like gel. There's also some globules sticking to the black spandex. I'm guessing wax. Then there's two cat hairs, one gray, one tan. Did she have a cat? Did you go to her apartment?”

“We were there most of the night.” He sucked in only as many cautious, shallow breaths as necessary.

Christine pulled out the saline bags that had so enhanced the victim's figure and set them aside so a note could be made of the serial numbers.

“She didn't have so much as a goldfish. A lot of clothes, nothing in the fridge except vodka and diet pop, and a collection of DVDs.”

“What kind of DVDs?”

“Chick flicks, believe it or not. I mean … uh,” he stammered as both women glanced at him. “I mean, things like
Sleepless in Seattle
and
Nights in Rodanthe
.”

Theresa said, “Don't tell me our girl Marie was a closet romantic.”

“Apparently so. They seem to be the only things in her closet. We didn't find any bondage porn, no dominatrix outfits in the closet, no bullwhips next to her thong underwear. Not even a little black book.”

“E-mail contacts?”

“Tons of people, but no way to distinguish acquaintances from family from very special friends. No salacious e-mails, no threats. Work, meetings, and fashion consultations with her sister in Wichita. If she had secrets, she didn't put them in writing.”

“Cell-phone directory?”

“No phone. We found her purse, which was in her car, which was in the Tower City garage. Locked, apparently unmolested, and badly overdue for an oil change. The care she put into her appearance did not extend to her vehicle. No home phone.”

Theresa pondered this as she watched Christine remove the liver and slice it into sections, using what looked like a bread knife.

“Lungs were good,” the doctor reported. “Liver might have given her problems in another twenty years.”

“Vodka,” Neil said solemnly.

And little else in her apartment. “So maybe her boyfriend came up with the bondage idea. She didn't cooperate, he gets mad, hits her, then figures he might as well finish the job.”

“You know what else we didn't find?” Neil went on. “Work. Files, briefs, affidavits. What kind of lawyer doesn't have thirty pounds of paper with them everywhere they go?”

“She kept work and home separated?” Theresa suggested. “Lord knows I do. Not only because of Rachael, but because I'm not allowed to take anything out of the building. It's all confidential.”

“According to everyone up to and including her landlady, she only cared about two things: trying cases and screwing guys. And she doesn't bring any work home with her? No, one of her colleagues got to her place before we did and cleaned it out. Her desk had only some scraps of paper, a lot of dust, and two speakers that should have been plugged into a laptop. They took it back to the illustrious firm of Goldman & Jackson, Esquires, and when Powell and I showed up there this morning, they wouldn't admit it and wouldn't let us in to her office. Attorney-client privilege.”

“You must have expected that.”

“We did. But what do you do when someone's offed? You round up the usual suspects, who they slept with, who owed them money, who should have gotten their promotion. That law firm was her life. How are we supposed to find those suspects when they've put her life in a file drawer and locked it?”

Theresa sighed with him.

“Powell is still there. They said they'd let him in after they removed all the open case files. I'm betting he'll find two paper clips and a pad of blank Post-it notes.”

Christine moved back to the body. “Nice teeth. Somebody used bleaching agents until she could signal the Ninth Fleet.” Then she left the diener to work on the larynx while she took the stomach and opened it up on the polyethylene cutting board. Empty, which did not come as a surprise.

“She should have gone to Michael Symon's place,” Theresa said. “She'd probably still be alive, or at least have had a great last meal. What? Christine, you're
hmm-
ing.”

“Lesions in her esophagus. She must have had some stomach troubles—acid reflux or an ulcer. Defending a bunch of scumbags for a living would give
me
an ulcer.”

Theresa remembered what Sonia had said. “Could it be bulimia?”

“Possibly. She's a little underweight.”

“That would fit with the white teeth. Don't their teeth usually turn yellow from all the vomiting? She would have to bleach them.”

“Possibly. Or she wanted to look like a toothpaste model in front of the jury. Who knows?” The pathologist removed the uterus, which always looked so much smaller than Theresa expected it to, a smooth, dense-looking little sac.

Neil Kelly frowned at it as if he were not quite sure what it was but sure as hell wasn't going to ask, and said, “Corrigan's assistant told us of a few threats she's received over the years. She got some juvenile off for killing a girl in his class, and the girl's mother left her nasty messages for months. She defended the guy who shot the pizza-delivery guy and got a pile of hate mail on that one, mostly from the victim's grandmother, even though the guy pled and got life without parole anyway. Then the black lobby filed an ethics complaint with the board when she got that redneck a reduced sentence after he beat that college football player into a coma. And supposedly the New Nazis put a price on her head for getting a homeboy off with time served after he held up their treasurer and helped himself to a year's dues. Go ahead and snicker. I did.

“But these are all a year or two old,” he went on. “That's why the assistant could discuss them—those cases are resolved. I said I need to know who's threatening her
today
. She said she couldn't help me. Privileged. I think she used the word ‘privileged' fifteen times in three minutes.”

“It's true,” Theresa pointed out.

“It's also gonna keep us from wrapping this up.”

“Uterus is normal,” Christine announced to no one in particular.

“Can you tell if she was raped?” the detective asked.

“No—meaning no, I can't tell. There's no sign of injury.”

“Was she pregnant?”

“No.”

“She ever have a child?” he persisted.

“I'd say no.”

Theresa turned to Neil Kelly. “Why do you ask?”

“I always ask.”

When he said nothing more, she did. “Speaking of romance—”

“What's romantic about babies?” Christine interrupted. “Puking up formula, screaming all night. Romance? Hah.”

Theresa said, “That's a bit … um, vociferous. Is there something you want to talk about?”

“I'm just saying. Nothing romantic about babies.”

“Making them?” Neil suggested.

Theresa said, “I heard she was dating Dennis Britton.”

Neil nodded. “Yeah, we heard that, too. Unfortunately, he's about the only one at that whole convention with something like an alibi. He, the convention organizers, and the keynote speaker—the upper tier of the group—”

Theresa nodded. She'd been to conventions and knew how it went. Throw together a large group of people who'd never met and they would instantly sort themselves out into a decreasing gradient of prestige.

“They adjourned to the bar after the last session, then adjourned to Morton's steak house. Don't ask me who picked up the bill. I'm sure that's privileged, too. From there they adjourned to the House of Blues, but the music was too loud, and eventually they had to face the fact that none of them are thirty and hip anymore, so they adjourned once again, this time over to the Crazy Horse, where for a fee the girls would pretend they
were
thirty and hip. Three other guys dropped Britton off at his house in Gates Mills, where I'm betting the missus will vouch for the rest of the night.”