Bad Blood (34 page)

“Is it a collar, Mikey?” the older one asked, patting Chapman on the shoulder. “You get him for assaulting you, or did you start up with him?”

“No arrest, Jesse. Just let him cool down. I can’t blame him for taking a shot at me.”

Mike crouched next to Bobby Hassett. “Nice try. I might have done the same thing in your circumstance. Now, we’re going ahead with what we gotta do whether you like it or not. Me personally, Bobby? I’d recommend you get in your car and get out of here. You wanna see how we handle this? Then you’re doing it from the back of Jesse’s RMP, hands behind your back with your mouth shut. I’ll let you know every detail of anything we find out. I promise you she’ll be in good hands.”

Mike paused to get an answer. “What’s your call?”

Hassett raised his head off the ground. The radio motor patrol car obviously didn’t interest him. “I’ll go. Lemme up and I’ll go.”

Mike nodded at the two cops, who released their prisoner and stepped back while he got to his feet.

We all watched as Bobby Hassett walked to the foot of Bex’s grave, lowered himself onto one knee, made the sign of the cross, and bowed his head. Tears fell over the reddened rims of his lids, and with his thick fingers he wiped them off his cheeks. I closed my eyes and thought of the sister he had lost so long ago.

After a minute or so, he stood up, glared at me with whatever energy he had left, and headed across to his car. The patrol car was blocking his way, so he backed up into the intersection and gassed the Toyota as he drove away from us.

Again, Mike waved the workmen on to begin opening the Hassett grave. He talked to the cops and convinced them to stay at the site to make sure no other unexpected visitors interfered with our grim task.

Then he told me to follow him and we walked back to his car. “There’s nothing to see, Coop. Might as well wait over here. Let them do what they gotta do.”

Just as we leaned against the car, another Crown Vic approached. The two men got out and smiled at me, then introduced themselves to Mike.

“Heads or tails?” I heard one of them say. “Heads we get to keep her, tails she goes downtown with you.”

“You’re too late, guys,” Mike said. “We just got permission from the family.”

“What? Who’re you kidding?” The detectives looked at each other before the one in charge spoke. “Jefferson said they ain’t cooperating. He wants the body, Chapman.”

“Bobby Hassett just left us, isn’t that right, Ms. Cooper? All you had to do yesterday was talk nice to him, guys. Guess you couldn’t even get that right. We reached an understanding with him, didn’t we? Like gentlemen.”

“We did, actually. I suggest you find him before you embarrass yourselves,” I said, returning their smiles and thinking of Battaglia’s directive to me. “Mike seemed to have gotten to him this morning. Maybe his technique was a little different than whatever you and your prosecutors told him.”

It had taken less than a quarter of an hour for one of the men to strike his shovel against the lid of Rebecca Hassett’s coffin. I heard the metal edge crack against the wood and turned to look.

The detectives went over to the guys from the morgue to see what story could be coaxed from them, but since the duo were from Manhattan — not the Bronx satellite office of the medical examiner — they weren’t planning to return to First Avenue without the body either.

Another half hour and the diggers were waist-deep in the hole they had made, wedging the wooden box up as they secured it with straps in order to raise it onto the ground. It appeared to be made of simple pine, intact but showing obvious signs of rot on each of the corners.

Mike had gone back over to the grave. He crouched beside the coffin — probably offering a prayer, much as Bobby Hassett had done minutes earlier — then brushed some of the dirt off the worn lid before directing the men to load it into the van for the ride to the morgue.

The driver stood next to the rear door. “Don’t you want them to open it here? Take a peek? Make sure it’s who you’re looking for? That’s how we usually do it.”

“Nothing’s been going according to plan with this. I want her out of here before anybody else shows up, okay? Let’s just get her downtown,” Mike said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

We drove slowly up to the corner of the next plot and followed the van as it made a U-turn to retrace its route to Woodlawn’s entrance. As we passed the Hassett grave again, the men were filling the hole with the dirt that had been displaced.

Mike paused at the intersection, and my eyes were drawn by the movement of something dark off to my right. The ornate headstone that marked the border of the Primrose section of the cemetery had a large relief carving on its face — a weeping mother mourning the effigy of her curly-haired child, a sculpted robe covering her arched back.

The wind gusted again. It caught and lifted a piece of the black-sleeved coat of the person hiding behind the tomb — the same motion that must have gotten my attention originally.

“Mike, look over here. I think it’s the guy you were chasing. He’s come back.”

He made the turn and threw the car into park, opening the door as though to give chase.

“Don’t do it,” I said. “Your leg — it’s not worth it. You’ll make it worse.”

He waved me off and started to lope across the road.

A head appeared around the side of the old granite marker.

“It’s not a guy at all,” Mike said, stopping in place as I caught up to him. “It’s Trish Quillian.”

The figure in black ducked under a tree branch and ran headlong into the maze of shrubs and grave sites beyond the roadway. We’d lost her.

“Crazy as a loon that girl is,” Mike said. “I bet she’s been waiting with Bex — waiting at her friend’s grave for something to happen. I sure as hell would like to know why.”

I smelled the musty odor as I entered the autopsy room at the morgue. I had been to crime scenes where bodies had been discovered in closets or locked rooms after several days, and the stench was unbearable. This was just stale and unpleasant.

Jerry Genco was standing beside the photographer, who was bending over the coffin with his camera, talking to Mike.

“Stop wriggling your nose, Alex. There’s nothing much to smell,” Jerry said.

As with most forensic pathologists, years on the job had burned out his olfactory nerves.

“You ready for this?” Mike asked.

I didn’t like anything about being present during an autopsy — not the sights nor the sounds nor my inevitable musings about how the deceased would, when alive, have felt about this kind of investigation. I had enormous respect for the work of the doctors who performed the critical task and never ceased to be amazed at how they interpreted the stories that dead bodies revealed to them. I was comfortable knowing Mike would remain in the room for the entire procedure, but it was actually better if I did not make myself a witness to the reexamination.

“I’m not staying,” I said, holding up my hand like a stop sign.

At times it was critical to understand the process that would occur. I had never participated in an exhumation, and I knew that Battaglia would have questions that I would have to answer. Perhaps one day, if we were lucky enough to name Bex’s killer, a jury would need to know exactly what had transpired, too. So I would stay close by in the event there were developments that would direct the course of our work.

The photographer took a few more shots and walked out of the room. Genco made space for me beside him.

“Aspergillus fungus. That’s all it is, Alex,” Genco said, offering me a Tic Tac. “The body is pretty well preserved — a combination of the embalming process and luck. What you see is a bit of mold on the surface of the skin. I’d expect it to be there. That’s what the odor is.”

I looked down at the lifeless remains of Rebecca Hassett. Her skin looked rubbery and discolored against the white satin lining of the coffin, which had been stained by fluids that had seeped into it over the years. The black hair, so lustrous and thick in photographs, was clumped around both sides of her face, which itself had taken on a greenish hue. The once vibrant eyes were closed, probably sewn in place in the funeral home that had prepared her young body for the wake.

I was both horrified and transfixed. I wanted to look away but was drawn to stare at the petite body while images of a life that should have been flashed through my mind.

Her clothing had fared no better. The black cotton sweater and the pleated skirt that draped the thin figure had holes.

Around her neck was a silver crucifix on a chain, and cradled beside the teenager — a reminder of how childlike she still was at the time of her death, despite her defiant independence — was a worn stuffed animal, a brown-and-white bulldog that a family member, I presumed, had placed beside her.

“What happens next?” I asked, reluctantly turning my back to Rebecca.

“We’ll lift her out onto the table. Undress her, clean her up. I’ll examine the body first, of course. Then the vital organs.”

“Were they inventoried?”

“That’s the first sign that this case wasn’t taken too seriously,” Genco said. “I’ve checked everywhere for a record that the doc kept the neck organs. No luck.”

“They’d be useful because the cause of death was asphyxial?” I asked.

“Yes. A careful physician would have put the hyoid bone, the windpipes, the major pieces of the neck, in a formalin jar. They’re just not anywhere here in our archives.”

Had there been a timely arrest and a trial, the defense attorney would have been allowed to have his own expert reexamine the body parts at issue.

“And the other organs?”

Genco guided me to the door while he called for his photographer to return and his assistants to move the body. “Just wait out here while we set up. There’ll be a bag — a green plastic trash bag, probably — inside the girl’s body cavity. That should have all her other organs inside it.”

The brain and liver and uterus — everything else that had been removed for analysis during the autopsy at the time of Bex’s death — would have been stored within her since then.

Mike and I paced the basement corridor for fifteen minutes until Jerry Genco was ready to proceed. Mike would take his position at the foot of the table while Genco got to work, speaking into the recorder that dangled overhead. I waited in an office down the hall, using the time to catch up with Laura and return calls.

When Genco finished his reexamination of the body, he sent an assistant for me and I rejoined him and Mike as the aides removed the gurney with the girl from the room.

“Pretty straightforward,” Genco said. “I’d agree, from what I can see now on the front of the neck and what’s left of the strap muscles beneath, that this was a manual strangulation. There’s certainly no ligature involved.”

“Nothing like a ribbon around her neck?” Mike asked. He was still troubled by the “confession” extracted from the kid named Reuben.

“No. There isn’t any injury to the back of her neck. None at all,” Genco said. “The pathologist overlooked some other minor trauma, though.”

“How significant?” I asked.

“You tell me what isn’t significant at an autopsy.”

“Inconsistencies?”

“No. More like sloppiness. Laziness, I’d say.” Genco sketched a diagram for us. “Some minor bruising on her back — her shoulder blades. The rear of her thighs, too. I’d expect to see those things, since it figures she was lying down when she was killed. Even if she didn’t have the ability to resist, she was being pressed against the surface of the ground, and there were bound to be some rocks, stones, or twigs around.”

“The doc knew what he had,” Mike said. “Guess he thought there was no need to work overtime.”

“That’s what it looks like. I’ll go the whole nine yards,” Genco said, pointing to the trash bag. “Check the organs, too, in case he missed anything.”

It was early afternoon and Mike’s stomach was growling. “You want a sandwich, Jerry? I need some fresh air.”

“Ham and cheese.”

“Coop?”

“I’ll walk with you.”

As we started to the door, Mattie Prinzer, the newly appointed chief of forensic biology, walked in. “I heard you two were down here.”

“Hey, good to see you. I was going to stop by later on.”

“I’ll save you the trip. Thought there was something you ought to know.”

“You don’t have that ‘good news’ look all over your chops, Mattie. You making life difficult for me?”

“I know you’re a guy who likes a challenge, Mike. Is this the child? The girl from Pelham Bay Park?”

“C’mon, Mattie. You get anything off the zipper? You get a profile?”

“I hope inside that thick skull you’ve kept an open mind, Mike. You have a suspect, don’t you?”

Mike feigned indifference and tossed back the hair on his forehead. “Any one of a number of guys, Mattie. I’m in no rush.”

“You might need to think outside the box, if you’re looking for a guy.” Mattie was holding a printout of the DNA results in her hand. She placed it on the countertop near the door. “One of my techs ran this overnight, just as soon as Mercer Wallace brought it in.”

“What’s the problem?” Mike asked, bending over to study the bands that made up the unique genetic profile of a human being.

I could see where Mattie was going the minute I looked at the page.

The sex of the individual whose blood had been examined was encoded in the DNA results. A male donor’s profile was always marked by two peaks that appeared on the line — one representing the X chromosome and the other representing the Y.

“There’s only one peak,” I said to Mattie.

“Let me see,” Mike said, trying to find the telltale image on the page that looked like a hieroglyphic jumble.

“That’s it, Alex,” Mattie said. “No sign of a Y chromosome anywhere in that little speck of blood, my friend. No question whoever cut herself on that zipper is a woman.”

“How long have you known this?” Mike asked, his fist resting on the lab results.

“I just found out this morning. The tech didn’t want to tell me at first.”

“Why not?” Mike said, shaking his head. “We’re losing precious time.”