The Circle of Blood (8 page)

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Authors: Alane Ferguson

BOOK: The Circle of Blood
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“Crowley, check her backpack to see if you can find any ID. I’ll pat down her pockets and search her coat.”
It was then that the thought, so obvious, slammed against her. How could she have been so stupid? Her mother’s
wallet
would be inside that backpack, or maybe tucked inside a pocket of the blue coat. There it would be, a clear direct piece of evidence linking the two. Like a drum, the thought beat through Cameryn: If they got to Hannah first, she would tell the story about Cameryn and the chase and they would all realize that she, Cameryn Mahoney, Assistant Coroner, had lied about knowing Mariah. That might be enough to make her lose her job. It was now or never.
“Justin!” she cried.
“What the—?” Justin looked inside the backpack. He peered closer, pulling the flap as far as it would go, angling it beneath the lights.
“You got something?” Jacobs asked. “’Cause her pockets came up clean. No ID. You got anything that can tell us who this girl is?”
“Wait, Justin—” Cameryn broke in. “I—”
“Hold on.” Justin held up his hand. “I couldn’t find a wallet, but I found something else. Sheriff Jacobs, could you come here?” His forehead wrinkled as he stared inside the backpack, as if he couldn’t comprehend.
Jacobs clomped over to where Justin stood. The mouth of the backpack gaped open, and Cameryn saw a flash of metal inside. “What is it, Deputy?”
“Look at this.” From the depths of the backpack Justin withdrew a pair of scissors. The blades were long, silver, and old-fashioned, with a pattern etched on the handle in a delicate engraving.
“So? Scissors don’t mean much.”
“Yeah, but check this out.” And then, with latex-gloved fingers, Justin removed a three-foot-long braid of strawberry-blonde hair. It hung, swinging like a rope. “Cutting off a girl’s hair can be an act of vengeance,” he told the sheriff.
Jacobs inclined his head. “How’s that?”
It was so quiet in the alleyway that Cameryn was afraid they might hear the pounding of her heart.
“Haircutting can be a sign of retribution,” explained Justin, his voice eager now. “When a crime is girl-on-girl, the perpetrator sometimes cuts off the victim’s hair.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, you just made a giant leap there, Deputy. As far as I can tell, there is no
retribution
and there is no
perpetrator
. This girl put a bullet in her own head.” Jacobs squinted at Justin while Justin, still holding the braid, stared back.
Finally, Justin said, “Maybe you’re right. But there’s a psychological aspect to the cutting.”
“And you know this . . . how?” the sheriff asked.
“From the police academy. And, like Cameryn, I’ve read books on the criminal mind.”
The sheriff rubbed the back of his neck and let a small stream of air escape between his teeth. “We’re just a small town, Deputy. What I’ve learned is when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”
Cameryn stood frozen. She watched as Justin held out the braid, which now hung limp from his hand. “You’re right, Sheriff—this might be a garden-variety suicide. But sometimes the hoofbeats do belong to the zebra.”
“What are you saying, Deputy?”
“I’m saying we might be looking at a murder.”
Chapter Six
“YOU WANT TO tell me what you’re thinking? I keep trying to bring up interesting subjects, but you haven’t said three words. I might as well be talking to Baby Doe. That’s what I’m calling our vic—Baby Doe instead of Jane Doe, since she’s so young,” her father said as he downshifted their station wagon. They had already descended the Million Dollar Highway and were now driving past Hermosa, a small town located on the outskirts of Durango. From the road, the town glittered with bright lights, like jewels against velvet. Cameryn watched it twinkle and wondered about the living that went on inside those houses. In those homes, people were serving dinner and helping their kids with homework, fighting and making up, oblivious to the cargo the Mahoneys carried. Death glided past life, unnoticed in the darkness.
“It’s . . . nothing,” she sighed. “Just a long day.”
“You can say that again. It’s like a bloody war zone.”
“I know,” she said, distracted. “I’m sorry, I’m just . . . thinking.” With her head pressed against the glass, she turned Justin’s words over in her mind for the hundredth time.
Murder, murder, murder
. If that were true, then she, by not telling what she knew, was withholding evidence of a crime. Suicide was one thing—there was no point dragging Hannah into a mess if she didn’t have to. But
murder
? At this point she’d already gone too far. A plunging, hopeless feeling settled inside as she watched the full moon touch the top of the mountain, balancing on a jagged peak like a golden ball.
“Well, let me take a stab at this since you’re not talking. Are you worried that Dr. Moore’s going to give you grief for being the lead coroner on this one?”
In spite of herself, Cameryn smiled. The “guessing game” was one of her father’s strategies to get her to talk when she didn’t want to.
“No.”
“Are you worried that you haven’t finished your application for that forensic guru?”
“No. She’s supposed to e-mail me today.”
“Okay,” he went on, jutting out a thoughtful lower lip, “are you worried about what Justin said—that this is a murder and not a suicide?”
It was enough to wake her from her trance. Pulling away from the glass, she turned to look at him. “What did you say?”
“Bingo!” he said happily. “If you’re concerned whether you covered procedure well enough if the case goes to trial, don’t be. First of all, you did a fine job—everything by the book. Are you worried about a trial?”
She nodded, thankful for the excuse.
“But this is
not
a murder. Deputy Crowley was overreaching. ”
“Except . . . Justin said that girls cut hair as an act of vengeance.”
He smiled to himself. “Well, yes, it’s true that sometimes when it’s a girl-on-girl crime, the perpetrator will cut hair. It happens.” For a quick moment he scoped her face before training his eyes back to the road. “But it’s
also
true that girls cut off their hair in an act of despondency. Obviously, you have to be pretty darn despondent to kill yourself. And who are these mysterious girls that killed Baby Doe? We don’t exactly have street gangs in Silverton. No, there was a gun in her hand and a bullet in her head. Far more people die at their own hand than are murdered.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Her blood began to flow again as she settled back into her seat. It was true—she’d allowed her mind to dwell on the worst thing it could possibly be, and here was her father, a professional, telling her the case was a suicide. Behind her in the bay of their station wagon lay the gurney. Strapped to it, in the blue body bag that rocked whenever they hit a bump in the road, lay Mariah, her body swaying ever so slightly. Cameryn found the motion, the sounds, unnerving—almost as though Mariah might be alive inside the body bag. But that was just her mind playing tricks—from cutting open bodies, she knew one thing: dead meant dead.
In her mind she could see Mariah’s face and her wide-set eyes that had stared into the falling snowflakes. Her father, once he’d arrived, had been the one to close those eyes. That was the scene her mind replayed—Patrick’s hand gently pressing against Mariah’s lids while Justin held the red-gold braid.
“I wish we had an identification on our Baby Doe. Jacobs told me they’ve done a search on missing persons and there’s no hit.”
“Why call her Baby Doe when she isn’t a baby?” Cameryn asked. “She’s what—fourteen, fifteen maybe?”
“I told you already, the decedent is Baby Doe because she was just a kid. In my book, that girl’s not old enough to be a ‘Jane.’”
Although Cameryn understood her father’s reasoning, she couldn’t help but bristle at the name ‘baby’ being applied to Mariah. Mariah had been a thief. She’d carried a gun. And yet Cameryn couldn’t say a word because officially, she’d never seen Mariah before in her life.
“You know, it’s strange that Baby Doe had no ID in her backpack or anywhere else on her,” Patrick went on. “Don’t you think?”
“Yeah. But maybe she didn’t want her family to know— that she was going to kill herself, I mean. Maybe she didn’t want to be found.”
“Maybe,” Patrick agreed.
The lack of identification, Cameryn realized, had been her one incredible stroke of good fortune. Mariah had ditched Hannah’s wallet before they’d searched her remains, which meant that Mariah must have tossed the wallet somewhere—in a trash can, maybe. The backpack had been strangely empty, too, another point Justin had commented on. Cameryn hadn’t cared about anything except that luck, for now, was on her side.
Her father turned on to Park Drive, which ended at Mercy Medical Center and the small parking lot of the medical examiner’s building.
“And . . . here we are,” Patrick announced. “It’s late.” He pulled around behind the hospital to a small red-brick building dwarfed by the towering center. The poor stepchild of the hospital, the Colorado State Medical Examiner Building looked unassuming and plain, almost windowless, in the shape of a rectangular box. “I can’t believe this is my second trip down here in one day,” Patrick said, backing the station wagon close to a metal door. “You know, Cammie, sometimes I hate this job. How about the pep talk—tell me why we’re even doing this.”
“We do it for the dead, remember? They tell us their stories and we figure out what happened to them and why. Our job is important. We give families the answers they need.”
He glanced at her. “If you say so.”
“I do.”
He tapped the horn twice, and a heavy metal door rolled upward. Ben, the diener, waved them inside the garage. A black man with arms as thick as her father’s thighs, Ben was in charge of the morgue’s most gruesome jobs. As he assisted Dr. Moore throughout the autopsies, it was Ben’s job to x-ray and prepare the decedent, which might include plucking maggots from someone’s mouth or breaking the rigor in bodies already stiffened up. At the very end of the procedure, Ben would crudely stitch the "Y” incision, then carefully wash the body before covering it with a white shroud. Despite the grisly nature of his work, Ben usually had a smile on his face. Tonight, though, was different. He looked uncharacteristically serious.
“We’ve already got a lot of interest on this case,” Ben said by way of greeting. “Police from all over have been calling, trying to see if this here’s their lost girl—I got one all the way from Maine. Makes you wonder how many strawberry-blonde teenagers have gone missing. Hello, Cammie,” he said.
“Hi,” she replied, giving him a tiny wave.
“I got to tell you Moore’s a bit on the crotchety side, it being past hours and all. But he doesn’t want to wait until Monday to do her, either, since people are yelling at him from every which way. Which means he decided to go ahead and undertake a nighttime chop. Makes for a very long day. His mood reflects that. So, are you all ready?”
He directed the question to Cameryn. Nodding, she went to the back of their station wagon and pulled up the hatch. “Let’s get her out,” she replied.
“All right then, on the count of three,” Ben commanded, and soon Mariah’s body got pulled onto the ME’s own gurney. Even through the blue vinyl, Cameryn could tell that Mariah’s body had turned even harder, like a loaf of bread left out to dry.
Cameryn said, “She’s in full rigor. I think it got accelerated because she’s so small.”
“All right, girl genius, I can feel it, too. But can you tell me what that means?” Ben asked, a twinkle in his dark eyes. “Word has it, you’re about to get some sort of scholarship. So tell me what you know.” He began to push the gurney up the ramp, his shoulder straining against the thin green cotton of his scrubs. The blood vessels in his arms stood out from beneath his skin as he pushed the gurney to the door. “Are you going to tell me? ”
“Why?” she said, trotting to keep up. “You already know this stuff.”
“I know
I
do. But I want to see if
you
do.” Knocking the door open with his hip, Ben eased Mariah through while Cameryn and her father trailed behind. Then, like a laying on of hands, the three of them found a spot on the gurney to push. They wheeled Mariah down a long corridor past a ficus tree dropping leaves in a corner.
“You gonna tell me?” Ben asked.
“Come on,” her father urged, “show him what you know.”
“Rigor mortis is caused by the hydrolysis of adenosine triphosphate in the muscle tissue. Basically, ATP keeps tissue soft. With death the body doesn’t generate any more ATP, so the muscles become all rigid.”
“You’re good, girl! ’Cause that’s exactly right. So now I’ll ask you a second question.” Ben turned the gurney an abrupt right-face so it could roll down another dimly lit hallway. “When does rigor start, Cammie?”
“Um, that depends.”
“‘Um’ is not much of an answer,” Ben said, smiling. The rubber soles of his shoes squeaked against tile as he stopped the gurney next to a drinking fountain. “Hold up, I’m dying of thirst.” As the gurney came to a halt, Mariah’s corpse bobbled, and Cameryn reflexively held out her hand to steady it.

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