Whatever Remains (10 page)

He’d left his Charger up at the split in the drive and he turned when he reached it, a hand braced on the roof as he glanced back down the hill at Jade and her great beast of a horse in the spot-lit arena. Dawn was still an hour off, and the darkness was thick, consuming, nightmare-quality stuff. In the warm glow of the lamp posts, Jade was regal as a queen: head lifted, shoulders squared, the lines of her body long and elegant.

              He was on his way to watch a dead girl get laid open on a steel table, so he took a moment, in the dark, to watch something alive and vital and graceful. He was still a cad, and if anything, Jade was even further out of reach than she had been five years ago.

8

             
I
f he went straight to the morgue, he’d be five minutes early for Dr. Harding’s post-mortem exam. Instead, he stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts. He bought a black coffee and a doughnut: chocolate frosted with sprinkles because the last time he’d taken Clara, that’s what she’d ordered; she’d dripped sprinkles all down the front of her shirt and giggled about it. The guy behind the counter – a frizzy-headed burnout college kid – gave him a look that said
dude, sprinkles?
And Ben shot him a glare that dared a verbal response.

             
He sat in the parking lot, sipping his coffee, scrolling through backed up email on his BlackBerry, thinking about the defiant tilt to Jade’s chin in the shadowy glow of her arena lights. Maybe she was incensed by what she considered to be his “meddling.” Maybe she really did have a thing for McMahon. Maybe they’d slept together; maybe the guy’s hands had been on her…

             
He rolled up the doughnut in its bag and tucked it between the passenger seat and center console, telling himself he’d eat it later. Then he headed for the morgue.

             
Dr. Harding worked out of the same sprawling precinct where the Homicide unit was located; he had his own wing, and just pushing through the swinging double doors curled Ben’s gut into a tight  knot. He was glad he’d forgone the doughnut. The halls were the same industrial cinderblock, the lighting the same fluorescent glare, but the AC kept the temp low – meat locker cold – and the stink of disinfectant was acrid. The OR floor of every hospital was a buzzing hive of controlled chaos, but not here; not where the patients were already dead.

             
Harding was in his apron, his shirtsleeves pushed up, dotted with blood in places, but clean for the most part; corpses didn’t bleed like the living did. His autopsy room was set up like a torture chamber: swinging lights on booms, orange biohazard bags lining industrial sized garbage cans, instruments laid out pointed and glittering and wicked. And on his stainless table, little Heidi Latham was swallowed up by a white drape, her dark hair dull and greasy where it spilled over the edge and into the drain. Ben paused in the door, arrested by the shock of how white she was, the blue of her lips and eyelids, the way her face was sinking in on itself. Her arms, outside the drape, were thin and sallow as spaghetti noodles. The comparison made him cringe.

             
“Detective Haley.” Harding had one of those surgical lamps perched on his head, cords draped back over his shoulders. “You just missed your partner.”

             
“Kaiden was here?” he asked with surprise, moving deeper into the room, up to the table. He didn’t attend every autopsy – not but two or three, really – but this case was, inevitably, starting to feel personal, and Heidi was so small…he felt the need. Trey had too, obviously.

             
“Yes.” Harding motioned to his assistant, a guy who looked too young to be out of school, and he went to a plastic bin along the back row of steel cabinets, and the yellow envelopes sticking up from the top. “He didn’t,” Harding said before Ben could ask, “vomit this time. Just a case of the dry heaves.”

             
Ben was impressed. He hadn’t even had the stomach to come watch Harding peel back the layers of Heidi’s skin and unveil her organs. “Wow.”

             
The assistant came over, dead-faced, with a double handful of labeled evidence envelopes.

             
“Hair and nail scrapings and the like,” Harding explained. “I thought you might hand them into the lab on your way.”

             
Ben nodded.

             
“She had skin under her nails, but of course, you know that won’t be of any help until you have a suspect to compare it to.”

             
“Right.” He consolidated the envelopes under one arm and nodded to Heidi. “Walk me through?”

             
“Of course.”

             
Heidi had been underweight for her age – only sixty-eight pounds – but she had a slight build anyway and, as Harding commented, girls were worried about their weight earlier and earlier; it was a disturbing notion. She had been well-groomed: hair trimmed recently, clothes clean save typical childhood stains – not the clothes she’d died in. Her nails had a coat of clear, glittery polish and were unbroken. She had fresh, dark bruises along her ribs and on her upper arms. A scratch down one forearm that could have come from a branch, or a fingernail, or anything, really. She’d broken her wrist a long time ago – the heal was old – and it had been a clean break: childhood rough housing. Her last meal had been mac & cheese, like Alicia had said, just fifteen/twenty minutes before death; the noodles had still been intact in her stomach. Lividity suggested she’d been on her back the entire time post-mortem. And, the best news of the day, there were no signs of sexual assault. Not a one.

             
Ben released a breath he hadn’t known he was holding at that revelation. “That doesn’t prove there weren’t sexual motivations for the killing,” he said, and Dr. Harding’s head snapped up in an uncharacteristic display of confusion.

             
“You want it to be sexually motivated?”

             
Ben made a face. “I don’t want it, no. But I’m not sure this tightens my suspect pool.”

             
Harding lifted a noncommittal shrug. “Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.” The message was clear:
you sound like an ass, Haley
.

             
Whatever. He wasn’t ruling McMahon out on this technicality.

             
Cause of death was, as Harding had said at the scene, the puncture along the side of her neck that had indeed sliced through her carotid.

             
“There would have been blood everywhere,” Harding said. “And while these clothes aren’t pristine –  ”

             
“Someone redressed her.”

             
“And washed her. Her hair was damp at the scene. Clearly, the blood had been washed out of her hair only minutes before.”

             
There were dozens of reasons someone would clean and redress a body – all of them working toward the main goal of not getting caught, but some of them motivated by regret or obsession.

             
“Time of death?”

             
“At least an hour before she was found. Maybe more.”

             
“But not long enough to move her that far. There’s dozens of houses along that road,” Ben said, more to himself.

             
Dr. Harding straightened and switched off his headlamp. “And there’ll be blood residue at one of them.”

             
Ben sighed; this meant lots of warrants, if there was enough evidence to attain them. “So we’re looking for someone who killed her, cleaned her and dumped her inside an hour’s window. What about murder weapon?”

             
“Something small and cylindrical with smooth edges. It could have been an ice pick, or a screwdriver, or a ball point pen if there was enough force behind it.”

             
“Weapon of opportunity; points toward crime of the moment without premeditation.”

             
Harding heaved a breath through his nostrils. “Wherever it points, I hope you find him.”

             
Ben spared Heidi another glance: dead before she’d even begun living, breakable as glass. “Yeah. Me too.”

He found Trey at his desk, thankfully wearing a fresh set of clothes and looking like he’d showered and shaved. He was staring at his computer in a zombie trance and snapped to when Ben fell into his own chair across from him.

              “So,” Trey said with a little sigh. “Woods is bringing Alicia and Grace in. He wants to talk to Grace – or, well, his partner does.”

             
“Monica Riley,” Ben supplied. “She’s good with kids.”

             
“Tell me she’s better with adults than Woods.”

             
He twitched a grin. “She is. Woods already get to you this morning?”

             
Trey pulled a disgusted face. “I had to step out of the post to answer my cell. He was going on and on about us traumatizing the family and that kinda shit. Douche.”

             
“It’s a good thing there’s no Adult Crimes division or he’d be up our asses about McMahon. How’s he looking, by the way?”

             
Trey’s eyes flicked to the computer and then came back; he rolled his lower lip between his teeth. “Not much. Couple of parking tickets. He’s a social science professor at the University. Pays his taxes.”

             
Ben’s head was already spinning. He was pretty sure one of Chris’s brothers-in-law was a prof; maybe, if he needed a character witness… “What aren’t you telling me?” he asked, and Trey seemed to shrink down into the collar of his jacket.

             
“You won’t like it.”

             
“I didn’t figure I would.”

             
“You’re gonna jump to conclusions.”

             
“Since when do I do that?”

             
Trey sighed. “He has a sealed juvie record.”

             
Every muscle in his body came to instant attention. “We’ve gotta get into that.”

             
“There’s not a judge in the county who’ll open up juvie records just because this guy gives you a gut feeling or whatever. We don’t have any evidence that points to him.”

             
“We don’t have much evidence of any kind at this point.”

             
“Still, Ben…”

             
“What kind of alibi does he have?”

             
Trey’s glance said
duh
. “Um, that would be your ex-girlfriend.”

             
“Shit.”

             
“And she’s probably mad as hell you pulled her guy in, isn’t she?”

             
“Something like that.” He propped an elbow on his desk and glanced out through the window at the sleepy Sunday traffic going down Cobb Parkway. It took a tremendous effort to force his thoughts away from Jade and her link to McMahon, but he managed. “Okay, let’s go back to the evidence. CSI went through the Latham house, right?”

             
“Turned it upside down. They didn’t find anything, obviously, that points to the killing.”

             
Sometimes, victims have been communicating with their killer, innocently or otherwise, and there was a trail: clues that pointed toward motive or means. With an eleven-year-old, odds were that she hadn’t seen this coming, and there wasn’t a trail. “Did they find a diary or a journal or anything?”

             
“No.”

             
“We need to talk to everyone in her life,” Ben said, swiveling his chair around to face his partner again. “Teachers, counselors, whoever. If this is a random killing – someone jumped her, she struggled – then we’ll be leaning on forensics. But my money’s on someone knowing something.”

             
Trey shuffled through the mounds of paperwork on his desk. “I’ve got a list….here, here it is. Alicia drew it up for me and I looked up addresses. All of Heidi’s friends and teachers.”

             
Ben nodded. “Good. Let’s stay and watch the CC losers have a go at Grace, then we’ll start on the list.”

The lead crime scene tech, Jason, had tagged and clear-bagged a small collection of Heidi’s things for her sister to look at. Alicia and Grace were in one of the one-way glass interrogation rooms, per Ben’s not-so-polite request, so he and Trey could watch and listen in via the intercom.

              “We pulled prints off everything,” Jason told them over the rim of his paper cup of department coffee. “All match your vic, her mother and sister, like we guessed, but we pulled some off her coin purse – that little blue plastic one – that aren’t consistent. We’re running them now.”

             
Ben nodded absently, eyes trained through the glass. Grace Latham was slight like her sister, pale and big-eyed, but her hair was a dark dirty blonde. And her features – where Heidi’s had been delicate – were round like her mother’s. She was in a baggy sweater and jeans, hair in a lopsided ponytail, mother’s arm draped protectively across the back of her chair. Alicia looked better, even better than the day before. Her color was brighter and her hair was in a tidy clip; she had a touch of makeup on to try and cover the rings beneath her eyes. On the opposite side of the table, Woods and his partner – tall, square-shouldered, blonde and a little bit feminine if you squinted – Monica Riley were an odd combination. Riley had played lacrosse in college – before she’d dropped out – and chewed her nails and had no time for female antics. She was a good detective; she was good with kids; Ben grudgingly approved of her presence on the case.