No Stone Unturned (4 page)

Reaching into the hole, I ran a hand along the length of the wall, exploring the grainy mud and clammy leaves with my fingers. I dug a little deeper, raking the ground with my nails, until I unearthed a small, metallic object: a bottle cap. Strange place for garbage, I thought, wiping the bent cap with my thumbs, then on a lens cloth. It was maroon and white: “the friendly Pepper-Upper,” Dr Pepper, 10, 2, and 4. It looked new.

I shot ten frames of the gravesite by day, then moved on to the service road. Only Deputies Halvey and Pulaski had examined the scene, so, unlike the gravesite, there had been no stampede of cops and there were few footprints left behind. The ancient ruts carved in the dirt had swallowed any recent tire tracks that might have been laid; it was possible someone had come up the road recently but unlikely that any evidence remained.

By daylight, the road took on a different mien. The mounds, curves, and depressions had shrugged off the night and now stood out prominently, painted in various shades of gray and brown. I retraced my steps of the night before, hunched over like a contemplative monk, examining the ground for anything out of the ordinary: footprints, tire tracks, a stray bottle of Dr Pepper minus its cap . . .

After stooping several times to examine small artifacts in the mud, I began to distinguish the old from the new. A spent shotgun shell—possibly one of Fast Jack’s—was clearly a recent arrival, though not germane to my search. In the ditch beside the road, I found a nest of rusting Schaefer cans, relics of some furtive caucus of teenagers. There was a broken milk bottle from Stadler’s Dairy; a battered hot water tank, buckled by what appeared to be a sharp kick to the groin; soggy, yellowed newspapers; and a muddy garbage can, crushed flat, a few yards into the woods. Fodder for future archeologists.

I marched up and down the service road twice, searching for enlightenment. Plopping myself onto the same log Pat Halvey had held down the night before, I surveyed the high trees, craning my neck to see the water tower fifty yards behind me. A cold breeze had been blowing since before dawn, whistling through the bare trees and drying the muddy road. A tawny color was spreading over the crests of the ruts in the road, except for one curious spot about ten feet in front of me. From my seat on the log, it looked like a blackish blotch, as if it was still wet. But on closer inspection, I saw the mark was actually three circles about an inch in diameter each, forming an isosceles triangle. A touch of my finger confirmed my first impression; it was motor oil. I shot a few frames of the oil then trudged back through the woods to my car. It wasn’t yet eight: plenty of time before my meeting with Fred Peruso at City Hospital to make some prints of the film I’d shot the previous night.

I was renting the upstairs flat of a homey duplex on Lincoln Avenue, across the street from Fiorello’s Home of the Hot Fudge. It was a friendly, middle-class neighborhood, quiet and respectable, at least until Friday night when the youngsters descended upon Fiorello’s and Lincoln Avenue to hang out and cause trouble. Confrontations between residents and the teens boiled over every few years or so. The locals would enlist the police to arrest loiterers, and the youths practiced a guerilla war of retaliatory mischief and late-night noise. Kids’ stuff. Lincoln Avenue always found its way back to serenity, usually when a troublesome group of teenagers outgrew its taste for malteds at Fiorello’s and moved up to beer in any of New Holland’s legion of taverns. Things had been relatively quiet on Lincoln Avenue since I’d arrived nearly three years earlier.

For want of space, I had set up my enlarger, smelly chemical baths, and clothesline in my bathroom, the only room besides the kitchen with running water. I was no expert developer, but sometimes I needed a quicker turnaround than the photo lab at the paper could provide. I ran three rolls of film through the processor and made two sets of prints of the murder scene, hanging them to dry in my darkened bathroom.

Over coffee and a slice of dry toast, I dropped the sheriff’s prints and negatives into an envelope. Then I selected a five-by-eight shot of Jordan Shaw’s lifeless face and slipped it into my purse—the sheriff didn’t need to know—and I headed for City Hospital.

Fred Peruso was in the doctors’ lounge, dressed in his usual blue scrubs, writing a report amid thick cigar smoke. He looked up from his paper and announced without preamble that there were no lesions in the vaginal wall, no sign of struggle or forced penetration.

“Good morning to you, too,” I said. “So no rape? At least her honor was intact.”

Peruso frowned. “Not quite. She may not have been raped, but there was semen in her vagina.”

I took a seat next to Peruso, tossing the envelope of Olney’s prints onto the table in front of him.

“No rape and no prophylactic?” (I congratulated myself for having resisted the temptation to say “rubber.”) “She wasn’t worried about birth control?”

Peruso shook his head. “Do you know what this is?” He placed a small, metallic coil on the table for my inspection.

I picked it up, turning it over again and again. “No idea,” I said, tapping it on the tabletop.

Peruso peered over his reading glasses at the small coil in my hand. “It’s an intrauterine device. IUD. It’s one of the most effective contraceptives available.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of those,” I said. “Not very common, are they?”

“These copper ones are new. There’s been some testing here and there, in Europe and in the Third World.”

“How does it work?”

“It’s implanted in the uterus and prevents a fertilized egg from attaching itself. Effective, worry-free birth control. No chemical manipulation like with those new pills.”

“So, a girl doesn’t get one of these on a lark. Jordan Shaw must have been getting regular action.”

Peruso glared at me. A curtain of blue smoke hung in the air, surrounding his head and closely cropped white hair like an aura or a corona. “You didn’t know Jordan, Ellie, so I can’t expect you to feel too sorry for her. But she was a heck of a girl. I don’t know what she was doing in Boston, but I don’t like to judge people for what they do behind closed doors. I’d assume a girl like you would agree.”

He was right. I was certainly in no position to cast stones. I apologized, conscious for the first time of my cavalier attitude toward the life and death of a twenty-one-year-old girl.

“Let’s see if I can be more clinical,” I said, placing the coil on the tabletop with delicate fingers. “The IUD prevents pregnancy without the use of other methods of contraception?”

Peruso nodded, picked up the coil, and dropped it into a pocket-sized envelope.

“Is it your professional judgment, then, that the presence of an IUD would indicate regular sexual relations?” I felt like a district attorney questioning an expert witness.

“Yes, but I intend to deny I ever found an IUD. And I know I can count on your discretion.” His eyes stared me down, dead serious.

“Of course,” I said after a moment. Then, wanting to rid myself of his eyes, I asked about the exact cause of death.

“Broken neck. Severe damage to the spinal cord between the second and third cervical vertebrae.” He produced an x-ray from another, larger envelope, held it up to the light, and showed me the anatomy of Jordan Shaw’s death. “Quick and painless. Some gorilla snapped her neck like cracking his knuckles. I’ve fixed the time of death between ten p.m. Friday and nine a.m. Saturday.”

“I’d guess before one a.m.,” I said.

“Why’s that?”

“The rain. It started about one thirty, I think. That would explain the absence of tracks in the woods.”

“I hadn’t thought about tracks,” said Peruso, picking up the envelope with my photographs inside. He chewed on his cigar, flipping through the entire set.

“How does one break a neck like that?” I asked. “From behind?”

“Most likely. Doesn’t look like there was much of a struggle.”

“What about the gash in her pelvis?”

Peruso shrugged his shoulders, eyes fixed on one of the photographs. “Certainly not fatal, but it would’ve hurt like all get-out . . . had she been alive at the time.”

“So you think she was already dead?” I asked.

“I know she was,” he said, tapping the ash from the end of his cigar into a paper coffee cup. “Not enough blood to indicate a pumping heart.”

“What kind of a monster snaps a girl’s neck and slices out a piece of skin for sport?”

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” said Peruso, laying the photograph face down on the table.

“Some kind of deviant?”

“Maybe. Or a clumsy killer.”

I picked up the pile of photos and shuffled through the tight shots of the victim’s pelvis, focusing on the gruesome details of the wound.

“Why, indeed?”

I tried without success to imagine a plausible explanation.

“You said sport, Ellie. You think whoever did this did it for some kind of sadistic thrill?”

“I can’t see any other reason,” I mumbled, peering into the muddied space where two inches of Jordan Shaw’s smooth, white skin had once been. “What kind of weapon do you think did this?”

“Just a knife, I guess. A large one. Maybe a hunting knife. There doesn’t appear to be any serration in the blade.”

We sat quietly for a moment, digesting the photograph together, then I asked if Jordan had had any marks there.

“A scar? Birthmark? Old hernia operation? Appendix?”

“The appendix is on the other side,” he grumbled. “And I examined her about three months ago before she went back to school. There was nothing there then and nothing there this morning in the autopsy. No hernia, no C-section, if that’s what you’re driving at. I examined her uterus very carefully; there was no scarring anywhere.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed that my theory had been sunk. “But her killer took the time to carve out a piece of her flesh; I’d like to know what was there before. Maybe it was some imperfection he wanted to remove, as if he was obsessed by her beauty.”

Peruso grunted, still chewing on his cigar, but offered nothing.

The lounge door swung open, and Frank Olney stepped inside.

“What are you doing here?” he asked me, none too friendly. I didn’t answer. “Those mine?” he asked, motioning to the photographs.

I nudged the set of prints across the table. He examined them closely, groaning with each eight-by-ten. Finally, he put them down and took a seat.

“I just spent the longest hour of my life over to Judge Shaw’s,” he said, removing his cap to rub his balding scalp. “Broke his heart. It was torture, I tell you. You ever have to stand there and tell a man his child is dead?”

Peruso sneered. “A few times; yes.”

“Oh, sorry, Doc. Of course.” He shook his head. “His only child. He took it hard. Real hard.”

“Is he all right?” asked Peruso.

“He’s just crushed, like I kicked him in the stomach telling him. We had to call Doc Terrell from next door to tranquilize Mrs. Shaw. She went ape.”

“Does he have any idea who might have done this?”

“No. No clue anything was wrong. Said Jordan was like always when she got home from Boston Wednesday night. Had a nice Thanksgiving dinner Thursday, then the judge and the Mrs. were out of town Friday. Got back Saturday afternoon and just assumed Jordan took the car and went out that day.”

“Where’s the car now?” I asked, butting in.

“He doesn’t know. I figure it was stolen by the shit who did this to her. State police are looking for it now.”

“What’s the make and model?”

Frank looked at me funny at first, then figured I needed it for my story. “Dark-gray, four-door Continental Mark Five. Brand new. Same car as Elvis Presley got. The judge just bought it two weeks ago.”

Probably not leaking oil, I thought.

“Have you checked to see if it’s been towed?” I asked, sure the question would rile him.

It did. But he kept the lid on his stew, ignoring me and turning to Doc Peruso instead for the results of the autopsy. Frank Olney was under the gun; he had to catch a killer and catch him fast. I had the feeling that even if he solved the case quickly, he would never be the same again, as if it were somehow his fault that such a tragedy had taken place on his watch.

“Do you have any statements for the press, Frank?” I asked, once he and Doc Peruso had finished. He didn’t.

I left City Hospital, intent on finding Judge Shaw’s Lincoln. My car had been towed out of a snowbank the previous winter, and I had claimed it at Phil’s Garage on the West End. Phil Leone was the proud holder of the lucrative towing contract with the City of New Holland and Montgomery County. If the judge’s Lincoln had been towed, it would be on Phil’s back lot.