Old City Hall (14 page)

Gradually they moved through the years, how Dundas first met Brace and began to substitute for him on the program three years ago. Something about Dundas rankled just a bit. Maybe it’s just people in show business, Greene thought. It always felt as if they’d rehearsed to death what they were going to say.

“Did you see Brace socially?” Greene asked.

“Not very often,” Dundas said. For the first time, he seemed to hesitate before he answered. Kennicott caught Greene’s eye. “To be perfectly honest, we had different circumstances. I mean he was married, and I’m single. And, well, we’re kind of different generations.”

“To be perfectly honest” was a classic prevarication. A ruse witnesses used to buy time to formulate their answers. Dundas had lost his smooth cadence. It was subtle, but it was real.

Greene often lectured at Police College, where he taught a course called Interviewing Techniques. He stressed that in every interview there was a turning point. “Always one moment in a good interview when the story suddenly comes to life,” he’d tell his students. “Find that turning point. If you’ve done your homework and set up the interview properly, hit it with a direct question.”

Greene waited until Kennicott stopped taking his notes. He put the file down hard on the table. It made a thwacking sound. He faced Dundas head-on, wearing his biggest smile.

“Ever been to the Brace condominium?”

“A few times.”

“Kevin Brace ever been to your place?” Greene wasn’t pausing anymore. He wanted these questions to come out one on top of another.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I don’t think so.” Another prevarication. Greene didn’t change his pace, but kept it constant. Perfect technique for the turning-point question.

“How about Katherine Torn?” Greene asked, keeping his voice as calm as if he were asking Dundas the time of day. “She ever been to your house?”

Dundas stole a glance at the door.

Greene and Kennicott remained silent. Dundas seemed suddenly out of sync, the rhythm of his answers in tatters. Each moment, as the silence built, he looked more uncomfortable.

“Um . . . umm . . . do I have to answer that question?” he asked at last.

Greene could feel his heart start to race, but he kept his voice neutral. Bland. Slowly, he picked up the file folder and opened it again. This time it wasn’t an act. A thought had just occurred to him, and he wanted to read something. It took a few moments for him to find it. He nodded his head for a long moment before he turned to Dundas.

“Did she come over on Thursday mornings?”

Dundas crossed his arms. “I’d like to speak to my lawyer,” he said.

“No need,” Greene said. “You’re not under arrest at this time. Like we said at the top, you’re free to leave. The door isn’t locked.”

Greene reached inside his jacket pocket, fished out his wallet, and felt for one of his business cards. He knew Dundas wasn’t going to answer any more questions. “Here,” he said, passing the card over. “Have your lawyer call me.” He looked back down at the file. A moment later, he heard the squeaking sound of Dundas’s chair scraping against the concrete floor. After he heard the door shut, he looked up at Kennicott.

“Having fun yet?” he asked. Greene could see that Kennicott was very tired. They had been going flat out for a day and a half, and the guy was coming off the night shift.

“This is what I signed up for,” Kennicott said.

“I’ve only had four other people walk out on me in a homicide interview,” Greene said, packing up his notebook.

“What happened to them?”

Greene shrugged his shoulders. Like the way my dad would do, he thought. “They were all convicted.”

“Doesn’t look good on him, does it?” Kennicott said.

“Watch out for statistics,” Greene said. “Usually don’t prove anything.”

Kennicott nodded. He was a quick study, Greene thought. And damned determined.

“The autopsy’s next,” Kennicott said, looking at his watch.

“Meet me at the morgue at six,” Greene said. “And then I’m sending you home for some rest.”

T
he odor was the thing that Daniel Kennicott remembered about the morgue. The smell of decaying flesh. Impossible to describe, impossible to forget. And the sound. Electric saw on bone as the top of the head was removed in a circular cut, like the top off a hardboiled egg.

Kennicott had been here only once before, when he’d identified his brother’s body. The memories were seared into his brain.

Today the receptionist had asked him to sit in the waiting room, and as he tried to read a year-old copy of
Newsweek
, he struggled to keep his mind firmly on the present. Greene had told him to be here at six o’clock. He’d arrived fifteen minutes early.

“Good evening, Officer Kennicott,” a squat man with a squeaky, thin voice said as he walked into the room, a large plastic coffee mug in his hand. He was about five feet tall, with a rotund chest. His short arms barely met in front, making him look like a Humpty Dumpty cartoon character. “Warren Gardner, chief attendant.”

Kennicott remembered the man from that other visit to the morgue. He even remembered the man’s name. Funny how, at a time like that, the small details stay with you.

“I’m sure you won’t remember me,” Kennicott said as he shook hands with Gardner. The little man had a very firm grip. “I was here a number of years ago as a civilian. Before I joined the force.”

“Older brother, bullet behind the left ear,” Gardner said without missing a beat. “Summertime. Only family you had left. Lost your parents before that in a car accident. Drunk driver. How’m I doing?”

Kennicott nodded. “You were very kind. I meant to write a note to thank you.”

“Not necessary,” Gardner said, sipping his coffee. “Our clients have great needs and short attention spans. Want a coffee?”

“No thanks,” Kennicott said.

“We might as well go in. Detective Ho from Ident’s already started.” Gardner guided Kennicott across a spotless tile floor past a long wall of what looked like enormous steel filing cabinets. This was where the bodies were stored. They went into the glassed-in room where Katherine Torn lay naked on a long metal table, her body startlingly white. A body bag was folded below at her feet.

Detective Ho was busy photographing a close-up shot of the wound, near the top of Torn’s abdomen, just below the sternum. A gray ruler lay beside it for measurement. Kennicott spotted Ho’s old briefcase and knapsack stashed away in the corner.

“Hey. Good evening, Officer Kennicott,” Ho said, sounding cheerful as ever. “Ms. Torn looks even more beautiful out of the water, doesn’t she?”

Though Kennicott hated to admit it, Ho was right. Strangely, Torn’s face was even prettier than the first time he’d seen her, dead in the bathtub. Her mane of hair had been tied up above her head, and her body seemed strong. The small hole in her abdomen was startling against the vastness of her skin.

“Too bad about the water, isn’t it?” Ho said.

“Why’s that?” Kennicott asked.

“Print killer. We can pull terrific prints off skin nowadays. But the water just wipes them out.”

“Who’s our pathologist?” Kennicott asked.

Ho looked at Gardner, and the two men rolled their eyes.

“You’re in for a treat,” Gardner said as he slid on a rubber apron with the initials W.G. written in bright red on the bottom left corner.
“Dr. Roger McKilty, a.k.a. the Kiwi Boy Wonder. Once the body bag was opened, he went out for a coffee.”

“Bloody New Zealander. Good luck understanding a word he says,” Ho said. “He couldn’t be more than thirty-five years old. Has more degrees than a thermometer.”

“Sounds smart,” Kennicott said.

“Just ask him,” Ho said. “And fast. Guy works so quickly he’s giving the morgue a bad name.” Ho started to laugh at his own joke. The sound vibrated around the antiseptic room.

Gardner chuckled. “The good doctor will make eleven hundred dollars and be out of here in record time.”

“That would have been a week’s pay back at my parents’ restaurant,” Ho said. “Just think of how many egg rolls they’d have to sell to make that.”

Kennicott came closer to the body. “What would cause these?” he asked, pointing to some marks on Torn’s upper right arm.

Ho took a quick look. “Postmortem lividity,” he said. “See it all the time. Remember, she was on her back and her heart wasn’t pumping, so all the heavy red blood cells get pulled down by gravity. Causes this purplish discoloration to the top of the torso.”

Kennicott took a closer look at the skin. He walked around to the other side and bent down. There were marks there too. He was about to ask Ho a question when Detective Greene walked in, accompanied by a slender, energetic-looking man with remarkably light blond hair. He could have passed for twenty-one.

“Oh, hello,” Kennicott said, looking up from the body. “I was just checking out some marks on her upper arms.”

Greene and the man exchanged glances, as if to say, “That’s the kind of thing rookies always notice.”

“Upper-body bruises are almost always forensically insignificant,” the man said. His accent was a hard New Zealand twang. Ho was right. He was difficult to understand. But there was no mistaking his tone. It was condescending, bored.

Kennicott walked back around the body over to Greene.

“Officer Daniel Kennicott, meet Dr. McKilty,” Greene said.

“Nice to meet you, Doctor,” Kennicott said.

“Yes,” McKilty said. He gave Kennicott a weak handshake and looked over at the big clock on the wall. It was exactly 6:00. “Shall we, gentlemen?” he said, his impatience palpable.

McKilty went over to the body and quickly examined it from head to toe. He looked at her hands closely and then examined her abdomen. All without paying any attention to the stab wound in the middle of her body.

“I’d guess our girl was a bit of a drinker,” the doctor said in his nasal, twangy voice.

McKilty turned toward Detective Greene. “When you get the medical chart, check her platelet level.” He looked at Kennicott with a bored expression. “Platelets are tiny bodies in the blood. Colorless. They’ve got sticky little surfaces that help the blood to clot. Without them we’d all bleed to death. Now, take a drinker. Enlarged spleen secondary to liver disease. Causes thrombocytopenia—low platelet count. If it’s under twenty, she’d bruise like a ripe banana. So you see, those marks on her arms probably mean nothing.”

He hovered over the body, getting remarkably close. There’s no need to keep an acceptable social distance from a dead body, Kennicott thought. “Now let’s see this stab wound,” McKilty said. He motioned to Kennicott. “Look here,” he said without moving.

Kennicott leaned in beside him.

“Almost straight vertical,” McKilty said. “I’d call it eleven-thirty five-thirty.” He was referring to the numbers on the clock to describe the angle of the wound. “See the difference between the two sides?” he asked Kennicott, moving slightly out of the way. “Here, get closer.”

Kennicott lowered his head even more. “The top of the wound is rounded, the bottom is like a V.”

“Exactly. This was caused by a single-edged knife. The blade was on the bottom. The angle of the wound tells us that the knife was being held up and down, the way you hold a knife to spear something.”

Kennicott nodded. “What about the darkness on her skin around the wound?” he asked.

“Very good,” McKilty said. “We call that a hilt mark. Comes from the knife handle. Tells us it went all the way up to the hilt, with lots of force. Nasty bit of work.” He looked up. “Mr. Gardner, please.”

Gardner passed him a narrow metal ruler. “Wound measures one and three-quarters inches wide, that’s almost exactly four and a half centimeters,” McKilty said. He was now talking into a tiny microphone speaker in his lapel. He slid the ruler through the open cavity. “Estimate the depth at . . .” He put his finger at the point where the ruler touched the skin, then pulled it back out, like a mechanic checking the oil level in a car. “Seven and a half inches, just a sliver over nineteen centimeters.”

“Hey, that’s it,” Detective Ho said. “Those are almost the exact measurements of the kitchen knife we found in the apartment.” He was close to shouting with excitement, like a lottery winner who’d just won a jackpot. “She got stabbed hard.”

McKilty shook his head at Ho. “Don’t be so sure,” McKilty said. He looked at Kennicott and held both hands up in the air. “Think of an abdomen as a feather pillow, with a tough case around it. The skin. It’s a difficult surface to penetrate. But once you do”—he clapped his hands together and the sound echoed hard in the tiled room—“there’s really nothing to stop it. So the stab wound could have gone in seven and a half inches, but if the body was coming toward the knife, that could account for the penetration too. Even the hilt wound. Can’t jump to conclusions.”

Kennicott looked over at Greene, who stood a few feet back, taking the whole scene in with his usual detached, observant passivity. Kennicott had been watching Greene for years, looking for signs of what he was thinking. The man seemed to run on many different levels at the same time.

A part of Greene appeared to be totally focused on the moment. As if he was recording in his brain everything that was in front of him, always ready to testify in court about all that he heard or saw. Another
part of Greene was standing back, watching as things unfolded. Still another part seemed to be somewhere else, his mind always considering different possibilities. Like water determined to run downhill, seeking out every crevice. That was Detective Greene, Kennicott realized, remarkably present yet tantalizingly detached, all at the same time.

“I fear this will be messy,” McKilty said as he sliced Torn’s abdomen open with a sleek scalpel, confidently cutting slightly off center to the right of the entry point. As the body cavity opened, it let out a horrible gaseous smell. “See that?” McKilty said, immune to the odor, pointing the scalpel at the clear, straw-colored fluid that was seeping out, his voice excited for the first time. “Ascites. Free fluid in the belly. Drinker for sure. Some of it probably spilled out when she got stabbed. Awful stuff.”