Fractured Justice Read online

  His investigator drove well over the speed limit, probably pushing sixty down the empty city streets. Jamison had learned right away that cops didn’t pay much attention to speed limits except when it suited them. When he first started riding with O’Hara, Jamison would feel his feet involuntarily reaching for a nonexistent brake pedal. Now he hardly looked up.

  O’Hara turned onto the service road that bordered an irrigation canal. The early morning sky was just beginning to lighten, showing slight streaks of rose in the distance, the moon a silver disk against a still dark sky. O’Hara drove toward the bright-as-daylight outdoor beams used to illuminate nighttime crime scenes. The sound of the generator sitting in the back of the sheriff’s department crime scene truck resonated in the morning quiet.

  The water ran slow and dark through the canal, just a shallow stream in the winter months, becoming a swiftly flowing current in the spring and summer. A heavy fog hung low over the area, rising up from the dirt roadway along the side of the canal. Yellow tape cordoned the perimeter. The light brown earth glowed white under the glare of the big crime scene lights, a spill of illumination along the darkened roadway. In the center of the light was a body spotlighted in death like a single actor on a darkened stage.

  Jamison and O’Hara stood a short distance outside the yellow plastic tape that kept people away while drawing the attention of everyone within sight. Even from fifty feet, Jamison could tell the victim was a young woman and immediately knew that whoever did this to her would leave a scar on even the most jaded homicide investigator’s memory, a distinctive calling card of obscenity.

  Everything about this girl’s body seemed to Jamison to raise the specter of a sex murder, a half-naked woman stripped of her dignity and modesty, her terror still frozen on her face. The young woman’s bared breasts were exposed to the lights focused on her by strangers, the dark patch of hair between her legs in sharp contrast with the whiteness of her thighs. Jamison’s reaction to what he saw had not changed over time. Since the first time he had been to a murder scene he was struck by the lack of dignity in violent death. The personal privacy of victims set aside, and all their secret parts a matter of clinical evaluation, becoming evidence to be examined.

  The two men walked up to the edge of the yellow crime scene tape draped around the perimeter, carefully looking over the area, watching the on-scene investigators search for anything that struck them as unusual. An experienced investigator would almost immediately seize on something that didn’t look right and begin to look for whatever else may not fit.

  Jamison had learned long ago that while time was of the essence in a murder investigation, the body was the one thing that would wait. For the deceased, time was no longer an issue. Homicide investigators would stand and look at a murder scene, taking it all in like the tableau of a monumental painting splashed with the reds and browns of violence. In time, the individuality of most murders began to blur, lost in the numbing repetitiveness of violent acts, looking so much the same that investigators no longer really saw the faces of the victims. But not this time; not this one.

  Something stood out immediately to Jamison. The body lay near the edge of the canal but he knew it hadn’t been simply thrown down like discarded trash. It almost took his breath away to see her lying there, her bright red top vivid against the bluish-white color of the skin. Her breasts were exposed but the top was pulled to the sides, as if she herself pulled the shirt apart, draping it suggestively. Her unclothed legs spread neatly apart instead of at the grotesque angles that bodies fold themselves into when they are simply thrown down. She had been carefully laid down by her killer. It had been his only gentle act. That her murderer had taken the time to do so was the first thing that struck Jamison.

  He could tell from O’Hara’s expression that he was thinking the same thing. They had both been to many crime scenes. So many that it wasn’t blood or trauma that transfixed them now as they walked toward what was someone’s child, sister, friend. The killer had ripped the victim open from the chest to the pubic area, allowing her insides to spill out, the pinkish strands of intestine protruding above her belly, no longer restrained.

  The cold ground bore very little stain; there was not enough blood soaked into it for what had been done to defile her. No sign of a struggle. What blood there was had simply spilled from the gaping open wound as the body rocked with the violence of the deep slashing motion. It hadn’t been pumped out by a still beating heart. And the small puddle was only beginning to tinge dark brown from the edges. The blood hadn’t been there long enough to turn the brownish-black color that would have indicated the body had been there for hours.

  They reached the same conclusion simultaneously. This girl was probably dead when her killer had carefully placed her where she was found. Then he opened her up in one ripping motion, taking away her last vestige of dignity in a deliberate act of desecration. No violent struggle took place where they stood. The eviscerating slice was clean.

  Other than the runner who had seen her lying there in the shallow light of early morning darkness, nobody else had approached her. In some respects the fact that she was obviously dead was a relief, not because of the gaping slash wound, but because if emergency technicians had been called to the scene, they would be focused on saving a victim, not on preserving evidence.

  Jamison and O’Hara waited until photographers and other crime scene technicians carefully examined and photographed the area for footprints and tire tracks. For some vague, uneasy reason, Jamison didn’t think they would find footprints worth anything. This scene was too well constructed by whoever created it. This murderer wasn’t likely to have left evidence behind. He was too meticulous. If there was anything to be found, chances were it was going to be because he wanted it to be found.

  O’Hara took his eyes off the body and turned toward Jamison. His rumbling voice was low and discreet. “She wasn’t killed here. She would have struggled if she could. And”—O’Hara’s eyes met Jamison’s—“she just wasn’t dumped either, Boss. The whole thing doesn’t look right.”

  Moving as close as he could without stepping into the immediate crime scene or in the circle of glaring lights, Jamison said, “This guy wants us to see.”

  Without taking his eyes off the body, O’Hara responded, “Wants us to see what?”

  “He wants us to see what he can do.” O’Hara’s right eyebrow lifted up slightly while he rubbed his upper lip, unconsciously smoothing his mustache, seeming to think about what Jamison’s comment would mean if it was true.

  O’Hara felt a pulse of anger at being taunted by a predator. He caught the attention of Art Puccinelli, the senior sheriff’s homicide detective sent to the crime scene. He had known “Pooch” since he was a rookie cop and O’Hara a senior homicide investigator. Now that Pooch was in homicide and O’Hara had moved to the DA’s major crimes unit, their paths continued to cross often.

  “Pooch, are the forensic boys finished?”

  The detective turned and gave a slightly crooked smile of greeting. “I think they’re done. This ground’s like concrete. We’re not going to find any footprints.” O’Hara nodded his understanding. Tenaya County was in the middle of an alluvial valley and was spotted with patches of clay-like dirt that had pressed and baked itself into adobe hardness. People walking over it left no more of a track than anyone would leave stepping on a sidewalk.

  Pooch waited until the technician gave him a nod, the signal that he was done and confirmation that there were no tracks.

  O’Hara took out a notepad, waved his hand toward Puccinelli, and moved just inside the yellow crime scene tape perimeter. He had one more question before they all became involved in the minutia of the next few hours. “Pooch, do we have any idea who she is?”

  “No ID yet by the family but I’m sure.” Pooch didn’t turn his head before answering. “The first officer responding called in a general description. She fits the description and photograph of a young woman whose mother reported her miss
ing a little over a day ago, but right now that’s just a maybe until we have a positive from the family.”

  O’Hara was quietly persistent. “Her name?”

  “Terry—” Puccinelli flipped through his notes. “Symes. Twenty-four years old. We don’t have much. Just that her mother reported her missing from her apartment. The incident report said there were no signs of a struggle. No signs of forced entry. So we don’t know if whoever did this came into her apartment or grabbed her someplace else or,” he added with a frown, pushing his notebook into his jacket pocket, “why she would be at this location.” Puccinelli shrugged. It was going to be a long morning.

  O’Hara scribbled the name in his notebook. He knew the routine. First they would ID the victim and then try to find out who she was last seen with or who might have had a motive to hurt her. Cases like this were extremely difficult even under the best of circumstances if the killer was a stranger.

  Now all they had was a dead girl and somewhere out there were griefstricken parents to whom they could only make hollow assurances.

  With a growing fear that this crime was related to the other murders they had been investigating, O’Hara doubted that they would find much useful evidence with this one either. He carefully followed a route to the body through small flags stuck in the ground that indicated some kind of impression in the rock-hard dirt.

  Jamison watched from outside the perimeter tape, waiting until O’Hara called him in. He rubbed his face, feeling the growing stubble. His eyes burned from lack of sleep and stress as a thought reverberated in his head. A third murder and we haven’t got a damn thing. The same thought had been keeping him up each night for the last month as he tried to wrap his brain around the other two murders. With the Maria Ventana homicide and the Mary Ann Johnson murder there were stark similarities that nobody outside of the investigative circle knew. In the drug screen of blood from Ventana and Johnson the lab had found toxic levels of heroin and barbiturates that the pathologists said were the cause of death, almost instantaneously stopping their hearts. Each woman had been missing for approximately twenty-four hours and had been dead for approximately five or six hours before they were found. The mutilating wounds were simply gratuitous desecrations of the bodies after the women were already dead.

  But Ventana and Johnson weren’t junkies—at least there was nothing to indicate they were. Jamison had learned a long time ago that junkies might share needles but they didn’t share their drugs and they wouldn’t waste them to kill somebody else. This guy moved in a circle where junk was accessible; that was something but so far it only meant that this guy swam in the same muck with a lot of other bottom-feeders.

  As he waited to learn if the other similarities were present with this third young woman, Jamison looked over at O’Hara while thinking, “Why do these damn things always happen in the middle of the night?”

  Snapping on a pair of latex gloves, O’Hara stepped in from the side and knelt near the slowly darkening puddle staining the dirt. She was lying flat on her back, unclothed except for the red blouse. Pooch had already called to have a liver temperature taken to ascertain an approximate time of death.

  He searched for any small thing in the area around the body that might give them a lead. The sightless blue eyes of the young woman stared up at him, drained of life like the dead leaves of autumn, a sight that always unnerved him. O’Hara resisted the urge to close her eyes. As much as possible the body would be left in the condition it was found for the final examination by the pathologist at the autopsy.

  O’Hara carefully moved her arm. No full rigor yet. It was fortunate that they had found her fairly quickly. After thirty-six hours other things start to happen as the body begins its inexorable return to nature; things morticians can’t easily repair. Nothing like that had shown up yet.

  He gently moved her head. The resistance was noticeable. Usually rigor mortis first began with the eyelids, neck, and jaw within two to six hours of death. O’Hara moved his hand down to the reddish-purple coloration around her buttocks and pushed gently against the skin. A whitish color appeared where the pressure had forced back the pooled blood in the tissue. Slowly the blanched area caused by the pressure began to resume the color of the surrounding tissue. He knew that after four or five hours the lividity from pooling blood would have set and the skin wouldn’t have blanched when he pressed. He concluded chances were she had been dead somewhere between three and four hours, certainly no more than six.

  He studied every inch of the girl’s body, memorizing each feature and contour. His own daughter was only slightly younger. He had allowed her, like her mother, to slip out of his life. Another regret that her face was only a memory for him, lost to the passage of his own neglectful years after the divorce and his ex-wife’s bitterness. But he couldn’t help thinking of her when he looked down at the young woman stretched out in the dirt. O’Hara talked to the still body in a low voice, “Sweetheart, I’ll do my best for you. Whoever did this to you, I’ll get him.”

  It was a promise he had made too many times before to too many victims, but he had almost always been able to keep it. And for those whom he hadn’t, the cold cases and unanswered questions rebuked him in his quiet moments, never seeming to fade away. The job and the memories aged him, just as they aged everyone who did what he did.

  She had a small slicing wound near her throat from the flick of a knife. O’Hara was certain that the wound was the result of the killer’s attempt to control a struggling victim, to terrify her into submission. The eviscerating wound as well as his own instinct told him the murderer used a knife from the beginning as a threat to force compliance. A similar cut had been on Johnson’s body. Ventana had almost been decapitated so the pathologist hadn’t been able to determine if she initially had the same slicing wound on her neck.

  Experience had taught O’Hara that it was far easier to kill a person with a gun than it was with a knife. A knife was a close-in weapon and, except in the hands of an expert, it was always an impetuous choice. Most people have an incredible fear of being cut and just the appearance of a knife could paralyze people who weren’t accustomed to violence. In this case he was certain that the man who used the knife to abduct her had a sadistic streak and enjoyed the scent of fear.

  There were faint red marks around the wrists. Looking down at her ankles, O’Hara saw identical marks. Bindings would bruise the skin if they were tight or the person pulled against them.

  The strands of her hair were damp and limp, framing her face like the long fringe of a scarf. Her hair was too moist to be wet simply from the morning fog. It had the look of being washed and left to dry in the air. O’Hara ran his gloved hand lightly over her shoulders and legs. They were dry. No morning dew on the body. Based on the location he found nothing to explain the wet hair except the conclusion that he didn’t want to reach.

  He looked over at Puccinelli. “Ligature marks. She was tied in some way.” O’Hara leaned in close to the body, the unmistakable smell of slowly thickening blood and exposed organs penetrated the air—and something else. His head snapped back, another familiar odor piercing his senses.

  Jamison waited with growing impatience until O’Hara waved him over. He carefully walked to the body and squatted down. It no longer unnerved the young DA to see people staring up with eyes that had lost the shimmer of life and become dry, opaque lenses into nothingness. O’Hara pointed at the hair. “This guy washed her off before he left her here.”

  It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. Same as the others.

  Jamison’s face squeezed into a grimace. “He wanted to make sure that nothing was on her for us to find.” O’Hara eyed him with a furrowed brow. Jamison had grown used to O’Hara’s expression of disdain when somebody restated the obvious implications of his conclusion. Murder normally happened in a rush of emotion or anger or after deliberation with cold intent. But the killer frequently looked down at the victim to see if they were really dead, or to think for a moment about wha
t they had done, and maybe, in rare cases, to admire their work. Killers often unintentionally marked their presence at crime scenes with individual hair strands that fell without notice, small threads of fabric, sometimes saliva or semen or a piece of skin—the flotsam of their bodies. Trained detectives would pick at the minutia for the detritus that would tie the scene to the killer.

  “It’s more than that,” O’Hara said as he leaned closer to the body. “You smell it?”

  Jamison put his face closer to the body and recoiled as the thick odor struck him full in the face. The acrid smell was unmistakable. Jamison quickly realized what O’Hara had already surmised. The killer knew what they would be looking for and he had gone to great lengths to ensure they would not find it.

  O’Hara carefully stepped back and muttered with undisguised disgust, “Bleach. She’s been doused with bleach. Just like the others. We aren’t going to find anything.”

  His eyes questioning, O’Hara turned his head slightly toward Puccinelli, who answered his question before he said anything. “Yeah, I smelled it too. The body’s clean, I know. But there were loose hairs on her breast. Not hers. I could tell that just from a visual exam. We haven’t combed the pubic area yet. Maybe there’s something, but this guy didn’t leave much that I can see, except the hairs.” Puccinelli hesitated. “Same as the others.”