Defensive Wounds (9 page)

“Sorry.”

“And then the guy killed someone else. Maybe he killed this lawyer, too. Or maybe the husband of his last victim.”

“His last victim didn't have a husband. Her own family barely noticed she was dead. And the alleged perpetrator has been sighted in Texas.”

“The prosecutor?”

“If he'd been that upset about the trial, he'd have requested a new one. He's already in private practice. The only person still upset about that case is me.”

“Do you have an alibi?” Rachael teased.

“Yes. You. We were home watching
NCIS
reruns all night.”

“Yeah, but I'm your daughter. You can't believe anything I'd say.” The girl twirled her hair for a few moments. “I still can't believe she stole your evidence and you let her get away with it.”

Theresa said, “No, some unknown entity ‘misplaced' it. And there was nothing I could do.”

“What about justice?”

“Sometimes justice loses.”

Another silence.
This is parenting,
Theresa thought. You feel guilty when you lie to your kids and sometimes guiltier when you tell them the truth. You want them to believe in the right things but to be prepared for the reality that others don't.

Rachael said, “So now you get to be her jury. And you've reached your verdict.”

The words hit Theresa like an unexpected wave, one that knocks you off your board not because it's that violent but because you didn't see it coming. She had judged Marie Corrigan's life and character and found both wanting. She would search for her killer, but only because he seemed even more depraved than his victim, not because she felt that Marie Corrigan deserved the justice she'd worked so hard to ravage. And Theresa would say nothing, only maintain her mask of righteous objectivity.

But didn't every human do that? Each person judges the next every minute of every day—people's faces, their clothes, the way they pronounce a word or discipline their children.

But then again, why shouldn't they? Minds were trained from infancy to gather information and draw conclusions from it; ignoring that information would be foolish and a bit insulting. Why shouldn't a human being observe other people's character and actions and decide from that how to deal with them, what to think of them? What was so wrong with that?

Another parenting question: Stick to the party line and insist that every life is sacred? Or tell the truth, that some are more sacred than others and some, as a measure of their character, not at all?

They were silent for another two miles. Then Theresa used a lesson she'd learned from her mother and said, “Let's talk about something more pleasant. Tell me about William. He seems nice.”

With a smile and a carefully casual voice, Rachael explained that he lived in Solon, played the drums, and was so kind to everyone. “He's always willing to help Shawna unpack the toiletries, and that's not even his job. He keeps Ray company on the loading dock—another charity case of his—while he has a smoke. Ray, not William.” William also had a cat and attended Bowling Green, planning to study, believe it or not, law.

“No!” Theresa cried in mock horror. “Not another friggin' lawyer!”

“Criminal law, no less. At least he'll have a steady income, getting all those scumbags back out on the street.”

“Heavy sigh,” Theresa said, and gave one for emphasis. Then, more seriously, “I should have him talk to Sonia. She could fill him in on things the law-school recruiters wouldn't, maybe talk him into the civil side.”

“Relax,” Rachael said, gathering her belongings as they pulled in to the driveway. “Maybe he'll be a prosecutor.”

Theresa was about to say that that might not be an improvement for his home life, but Rachael had already run off to let the dog out. Besides, Theresa had already introduced the two kids to Sonia, and the lawyer—oddly—hadn't had much to say.

So what about this William? Nice enough, but with … what? An edge? An intensity? Maybe just a depth out of proportion for such a young man?

To stick with the legal theme, when it came to William, the jury was still out.

Theresa went inside to make dinner and feed the dog.

T
HURSDAY

Her boss began to sing the next morning, never a good start to any day.

“ ‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead,' ” Leo DiCiccio rang out in what might pass for a baritone under certain conditions—the trace-evidence lab of the medical examiner's office not being one of them.

“That's harsh, dude,” Theresa said.

“Yeah, I can see you're all broken up about it, too. So she finally smacked the wrong ass, did she?”

Theresa spread Marie Corrigan's clothing out on the table before her, getting a better look. The red satin blouse, turned inside out, had a collar and three-quarter-length sleeves, one missing button, and four amorphous bloodstains on the back and the right shoulder. She pressed adhesive tape to the surface, picking it up and putting it down until she had done so to the entire surface. Then she turned the blouse right side out and repeated the procedure, careful to label the tapings as being from the inside or outside, front or back. “Who knows? It's a hotel. There's a ton of people there for this convention—”

“All aggressive alpha males.”

Neil Kelly, waiting around for the autopsy to begin, spoke up. “That's what my partner thinks. Power junkies.”

Theresa patted a piece of tape onto a sheet of clear acetate, frowning at her supervisor. “What, are we profilers now? Sure, guys from out of town, looking for some adventures where their wives can't catch them. But there are guests who aren't at the convention. There's the Tower City Mall—so who's to say someone didn't take a stroll through the Ritz, then go to the basement and catch a rapid to the airport and be out of town long before anyone even found Marie's body? Then there's the substantial staff, who, incidentally, should be the only ones capable of getting into the Presidential Suite in the first place.”

“ ‘Should be' being the operative phrase,” Neil said. “The hotel insists that all of their key cards are accounted for and their staff members are vetted before hire. We were there until ten o'clock last night interviewing every last one of them, and so far nobody stands out. A cook with two DUIs is the shadiest character we've found so far.”

“There's got to be a way to trace those key cards, see who swiped that one last.”

“We've got the computer-crimes people working on it now. But I'm not holding my breath. They're trained to look for child porn in hard drives, and the Ritz is not jumping up to hand over all their codes. What are you thinking, about that shirt?”

Theresa had been folding and scrunching the blouse in various conformations. “I was trying to see if maybe someone wadded it up with one bloody hand, or even two. I wondered yesterday but don't think that someone dried his hands on it, at least not after washing them. The blood is undiluted. But if I had to make a guess, I'd say the killer hit her first and then removed this, so blood from a wound got on it as he pulled it off.”

“So he beat her to death and then undressed her?” Neil suggested. “What? You're hesitating.”

“Her skull had some deep lacerations. I can't prove it, but I would think there would be more blood on this if she'd had all those injuries when it was removed. I'm guessing she had only the first one or two. Otherwise the whole back of this thing would be solid bloodstain. And he didn't unbutton it first, either.”

“Don't sound very sexy, does it? Hitting her on the head before she's even got her clothes off.”

“Unless that's why he hit her on the head. Because she
wouldn't
take her clothes off.”

“Bingo,” Neil said thoughtfully. “So we're not looking for someone she wanted to have sex with. We're looking for someone she
didn't
.”

Leo snorted. “If she didn't want to have sex with him, why was she there? She said she would and then changed her mind. Nothing more likely to enrage a red-blooded male.”

The phone rang, and then the department secretary told them that the pathologist wanted to begin the autopsy. Neil Kelly pushed himself off the counter he'd been leaning against and asked Theresa if she would be attending.

“I'll be right there. Just want to package these tapings first.”

The detective left with the slightest air of reluctance.

“I think he wants you to hold his hand,” Leo said.

Theresa placed the sheet of acetate under the stereomicroscope. “I'm not catching him if he faints. I've got a nerve under my shoulder blade that still hurts from the last time I got in the way of a weak-kneed detective.”

“He likes you.”

“Not you, too.”

Leo chuckled and shuffled away, now humming “If I Only Had a Brain.”

Under her breath Theresa muttered, “If only.”

Between the rows of overhead lights and the tiled walls and floors, washed down at the end of every day, the autopsy room was the brightest, cleanest room in the building. And, as the dieners could go home when the day's cutting had been completed, whether that was sooner or later, the most efficient. The assistants had no reason to lollygag and every reason not to. Plastic jars were labeled, flesh cut open, tables hosed down with the highest possible proficiency.

At the center of this pool of dispassionate science, Marie Corrigan lay on a steel table with gutters at its sides to drain away her blood, her vitality, her beauty, and her malice. And she had had plenty of all three. Even in the courtroom, constrained on all sides by laws and traditions and unwritten rules of conduct, Marie Corrigan had lit up the air like a fallen high-tension wire, throwing out sparks with unpredictable abandon. And you never knew when that wire might twist in your direction.

Only four weeks earlier, Marie had demanded to know why England and Germany and Australia and “every other civilized country on the planet” required a set number of points of minutiae—the spots in a fingerprint pattern where the ridges end and divide—and the United States did not. No one had seen her client shoot the store owner into a coma, the gun had never been found, and a mother couldn't recognize her only child from what passed as the surveillance video. Only an impression of the suspect's index finger on the store owner's glasses, which he had pulled off before delivering a 9-millimeter bullet to the man's chest, tied her client to the scene. Marie had to destroy that print.

Theresa had explained that other countries required points as a convenience, that was all. Reducing quality-control measures to a number made everyday life much simpler, but those numbers did not have any scientific significance. Ten points were not necessarily better than eight, or twelve better than both. “It's like being pregnant,” Theresa had said. “You're not more pregnant at six months than you are at three. You might be more noticeable, but you're not more pregnant. You either are or you aren't.” Marie Corrigan had glared at her from in front of the jury box, pacing up and back, distracting the jury from the testimony with her raven-black hair and her exquisite suit, wrapped around her impressive body as if it longed for her touch.

“Examiners in the United States use eight as a standard, though, even though they won't admit it. Don't they?”

“Traditionally it was a rule of thumb. But the number still doesn't confer any special significance on the match.”

“And Great Britain uses thirty-six?” Marie went on, giving a look of surprised alarm to the jury and repeating the number for emphasis.

“Never,” Theresa said. “They used to use sixteen, and they stopped that in 2001. Now they have no set number required for an identification, just like the United States.”

An obscure factoid that the jury surely didn't care about. They seemed much more interested in the defense lawyer's style than in the equally obscure objection she'd invented. The men wanted to possess her, and the women wanted to be her. Most anyway. One portly middle-aged housewife in an ill-fitting cotton blazer peered at Marie through eyes narrowed to slits.

Marie, however, cared very much about this obscure factoid, both because it worked against her case and because she hadn't known it. In revenge she kept Theresa on the stand another fifteen minutes with a list of renowned experts who had written in protest of a single-fingerprint conviction. Unfortunately, none of her experts were fingerprint analysts and all were defense attorneys. As Theresa stepped down from the stand, Marie Corrigan stood back and gave her a long, ultimately pitying look, from Theresa's few graying strands down to her Payless shoe-store pumps.

Marie Corrigan had been a bitch, pure and simple. And she'd been bloody good at it—and therein lay the tiny hint of admiration Theresa could never help but feel for a woman with power. She might despise that woman but would always be too honest not to admit that to walk into a room and command the attention of everyone there, to risk their ire, to risk their challenge, to refuse to be the good girl, that took a certain type of courage. And Theresa always admired courage.