After taking pictures of the surroundings, of the mound from all sides, of the footprints, the paw prints, the skid marks, the dug-out hole, Spencer shivered as he watched the paramedics dressed in white begin to dig out the body with gloved hands, careful not to throw the snow over the footprints.
First they exposed her boots, which were laced onto bare ankles, and then her bare calves, and her knees. Spencer began praying for some clothing on her, but when they got to her naked thighs, he began to suspect the worst.
Helplessly, he yanked up the sheet from under his feet, ready to cover her. God, she was naked, all this time in the snow and naked. His eyes burned.
The paramedics delicately stopped and turned to Spencer, who stared at them dumbly with the sheet in his hands. Will patted Spencer’s back. ‘It’s all right, man,’ he said. ‘You go right ahead,’ he told the paramedics.
Spencer didn’t want to see them scrape snow off her genitals. He turned away. Then, dropping the sheet, he grabbed the camera from Will. He desperately wished he were sitting after hours on a high stool in a dimly lit bar, holding a glass in his hand. He shuddered.
‘Careful,’ he said under his breath. ‘Please. Be careful.’
The paramedics uncovered her bare stomach and hands and arms and chest, gingerly brushing the snow off her frozen white breasts. Spencer lifted the camera, which shook in his hands.
The men began to expose shoulders and her neck –
‘Careful!’ screamed Spencer. ‘I asked you to be careful, goddammit!’
They turned to stare at him. Will, his head bent, placed his hand on Spencer’s back.
‘Do you want to do this?’ asked one of the men.
In other circumstances, Spencer would have. But in other circumstances, it wouldn’t have mattered to him if the men were careful with a corpse. He shook his head. ‘Just be careful is all I’m saying,’ he said, much quieter.
He could only bear to look at her body in quick glances. There were marks on it: cuts on her knees and calves, dark blue bruises on her ribs. They could have been from the car accident. On the other hand, a maniac could have mauled her. How else could you explain her being nude in the middle of the woods?
Her left arm even in death looked unnatural lying at her side, as if someone had put the cover on a jar improperly with the grooves out of alignment.
‘Careful,’ he kept muttering under his breath. He lifted the camera and shot another roll of film, walking around her, coming close to her, not letting himself see her through anything but the lens of the Nikon.
Will came up behind him. ‘Spence, can you do this?’
‘Yes, of course,’ replied Spencer. ‘Everything is okay.’
‘Then I want you to look at something.’ Spencer and Will knelt down near the body as if to pray for the dead or to examine evidence.
Spencer was praying. Quickly, mutely, he mouthed a Hail Mary before he answered Will with a statement of his own. ‘Her eyes are closed.’
‘Right,’ Will said. ‘Unusual, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Impossible, I’d say.’
‘Could she have gone to sleep and died in her sleep?’
‘Nobody goes to sleep in this weather,’ Spencer replied.
‘Nobody goes outside naked in this weather either,’ Will said. ‘Yet, there she is, with nothing on except her boots, and with her eyes closed.’
Spencer got up and turned to face Will. ‘I think she was killed. And whoever killed her closed her eyes.’
‘How likely is that?’ Will said skeptically. ‘Does a rapist close his victim’s eyes? And where are her clothes?’
Spencer, exasperated, wanted to retort and snap at Will, but he was too cold and too upset. It wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t Will’s fault Kristina was dead.
The paramedics were ordered to go back up the hill and wait until the police and the doctor had examined her. The medical examiner pronounced Kristina Kim dead at three forty-five in the afternoon on Thursday, the second of December, nineteen hundred and ninety-three.
The paramedics were impatiently calling down to the detectives. They wanted to leave, to get out of the cold. Fed up, Spencer finally yelled back, ‘Wait, please! We’ll be done in a while. Then you can take her.’
‘How is she?’ one of the students yelled down.
‘She is down for the count,’ Spencer heard somebody shout back, and tried to no avail to shake off the words when he realized it was he himself who had yelled that. What could be worse than the memory of his own flippant voice wrecking the center inside his conscience? Down for the count. Had he seen so much death that it had made him immune to pain, even his own? Even to the pain of her dog – he was sure it had been hers – that had sat at the snow mound and dug with his paws and whined and cried and hadn’t moved, needing to be pulled away from his frozen mistress.
Spencer heard the question again, ‘How is she?’ and realized the student was yelling, ‘Who is she?’ and Spencer had misheard. His eyes welled up. This time he didn’t answer.
They had about an hour of light left, and here in the trees, hidden behind the north side of a building, it was darker Spencer and Will looked through the trees, and the snow, looked at the soles of Kristina’s boots, looked at her hands and nails, looked at her eyes and through her hair. They shot five rolls of film. Three-quarters of an hour went by in utter silence.
In the growing darkness, Will finally said to Spencer, ‘So what do you think, Trace?’
Spencer concentrated on maintaining his voice as he answered. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it? There’s nothing here.’
‘No, nothing. Except the marks on her body.’
‘Yeah.’ He wanted to tell Will they were old, but he didn’t want to have to explain how he knew that. ‘But her legs –’ He paused, having difficulty continuing. ‘Her legs are closed. She was left in pristine condition. There are no gunshot or knife wounds, no marks around her neck.’
‘Maybe she was poisoned,’ suggested Will.
‘What is this, ancient Greece?’ said Spencer. ‘What else?’
‘She got drunk, fell down, and died?’
‘On her back? And naked? What else?’
They stood near the body. Spencer didn’t look at it.
Will quietly said, ‘She knew her attacker.’
After a silence Spencer asked, ‘Where are her tracks?’
Will shrugged. ‘Under the snow?’
‘Yes. She was lying under that snow as if she flew here, not walked here, not stumbled here. If she was killed, where are her attacker’s tracks?’
‘Under the snow,’ repeated Will.
‘Yes. Her attacker knew what he was doing. He was careful. He left no trace of himself.’
Will motioned to the paramedics and then said to Spencer, ‘We’ll find him, Trace. Murder is hard.’
‘It’s easy, Will.’ Spencer pointed to Kristina’s body. ‘Look how easy.’
‘No, I mean, it’s easy to trip over all the details. Planning means lying, and lying means remembering. You’ll see. We’ll find him.’
Turning away and looking at the woods, Spencer nodded.
The paramedics brought down a stretcher. Spencer helped them lift Kristina’s corpse onto the gray canvas. He took a white sheet from the ground, brushed snow off it, and covered the body. Will went up to help Ray question the students. Spencer was interested in Kristina’s dog. Who walked her dog? Spencer asked Will Baker to find out. He reminded Will that her death was a suspicious homicide, however, and it was good to ask all kinds of questions. The less time people had to make something up, the better.
The paramedics carried Kristina’s covered body up the hill, past the curious students, past the police officers, to the ambulance with the flashing lights at the end of the stone bridge. The attendants turned on the siren and sped away to Dartmouth-Hitchcock. A big crowd had gathered nearby to see what was happening.
Spencer stood apart from everyone, with his hands in his pockets. He took out his
leather gloves and put them on. While Spencer watched the ambulance go, he noticed a petite girl slip by quietly into Hinman’s side door. There was nothing at all remarkable about the girl – she was small and it was dark. What was remarkable was that she walked past the crowd, past the ambulance, and didn’t stop. In fact, she seemed to drop her gaze and quicken her step. Rubbernecking was a profound human instinct, much like blinking. Spencer didn’t know how she could stop herself; it flew in the face of his experience as a detective-sergeant and as a human being.
There was no one behind Feldberg. It was too dark. Baker and Fell were finished. Spencer warned the students at the bridge that the area within the tape was a police-protected area and anyone found inside it would be arrested and charged with disturbing felony evidence, a class-B misdemeanor, punishable by several months in prison. That seemed to impress the group.
‘Who was it?’ someone asked.
‘A girl named Kristina Kim. Do any of you know her, or of her?’
In the back a girl started to cry. Shining a flashlight in the crying girl’s direction, Spencer broke through the crowd and came near her.
‘Does this mean yes?’ he asked gently. ‘You do know her?’
The girl wiped her face. Spencer waited. He was cold. He’d been outside too long; even his parka was not helping him. It was fifteen degrees Fahrenheit out on a dark December night.
‘I know of her,’ said the girl finally. ‘God, she was the best basketball player Dartmouth ever had. She was just the best. Last year she set a Dartmouth record with seventy-four blocks. She’d regularly score twenty to thirty points in a game. I think last year she scored twenty-seven points when the Big Green won the Ivy title.’
The girl needed a moment to calm down. ‘You think someone might’ve killed her? Like maybe somebody from another college?’ she asked.
‘What? Because they wanted her out of league play or something?’ Spencer asked, not wanting to smile.
‘Yes, oh, you have no idea how serious the Ivy League takes its sports.’
‘No, I guess I don’t,’ said Spencer, patting her shoulder. ‘Please calm down. Do you know who she hung out with? She had mentioned something –’ Here Spencer stopped. What was he saying? Kristina had mentioned something about a former roommate to him at EBA, but what was he telling this girl? He glanced at Will Baker, who stared at Spencer inquisitively.
Spencer shrugged and shook his head.
The girl stopped crying.
‘Nothing, never mind. Know anybody she was friendly with?’
‘Let me think.’ She scrunched up her forehead in an attempt to remember. ‘I don’t know. I think she went out with the editor of the Dartmouth Review. ‘
Spencer felt a pang in his heart. So she went out with somebody. How silly of him to have thought she was unattached.
‘Know his name?’
‘Jim. Jim something. Shore, I think. Maybe Shaw.’
Spencer said in a loud voice, ‘Anyone here from Hinman?’
One person raised his hand.
‘Well, isn’t this interesting?’ said Spencer to Will. It was loud enough for all to hear. ‘Hinman is the closest dorm to here, in fact, there are no other dorms, only the library, which, by admission of the students, no one uses. Yet we have twenty people collected in the middle of a crime scene, all from somewhere else. I find this all very interesting, Will, wouldn’t you agree?’
Will agreed.
Six more people raised their hands.
Shaking his head, Spencer took down their names and phone numbers. What did they hope to accomplish by keeping quiet? He figured they must be budding lawyers. Wouldn’t utter a word without legal advice.
Spencer thanked the girl for cooperating, asked again the perfunctory questions about when was the last time anyone saw Kristina Kim alive, and got no satisfactory answer, which was as he expected.
Afterward, he stood quietly for a few minutes with Will.
‘Wow,’ said Will. He was a good, easygoing cop, never raised his voice. He was a perfect complement to Spencer. He kept Spencer in check.
‘Wow what?’ asked Spencer.
‘Wow nothing. Just wow.’ Will scrunched up his face. ‘Tracy, how the hell did you know who that girl was? How did you know her name was Kristina Kim?’
Spencer looked over at Fell, standing a few feet away, shifting from leg to leg in the cold, obviously wanting to be part of the conversation. Calling Fell over, Spencer said, ‘Ray and I came to see her last week about a car accident, didn’t we, Ray?’
‘Who?’
‘The girl. The dead girl. Kristina Kim.’
‘Oh? I didn’t recognize her, Sergeant Tracy.’
‘No, of course not.’ Spencer observed Ray for a few seconds.
Squaring his shoulders, Ray said loudly, ‘Waiting for further instructions, sir.’
Spencer said, ‘Go on back to the station, Ray. We’ll join you there.’
Will said softly, ‘He’s not a bad cop, Spence. He’s steady.’
‘Yeah, steady rotten.’
‘No, no. Just… inexperienced.’
‘Will, he forgets everything! Everything. He’d forget to go to his own funeral.’
Will smiled, and said wow again.
Leaning even closer to Baker, Spencer said, ‘Wow what?’
‘Really, nothing. I was just thinking that Kristina – that could be my kid someday.’
‘You’ve got two boys.’
‘You know what I mean,’ Will said. ‘She’d been dead a while, the girl. How long you think?’
‘When did enough snow fall to bury her?’
Will was silent. ‘I think the blizzard Tuesday before Thanksgiving.’
Spencer nodded mutely. He couldn’t bear to think of her in the snow for nine days. When he had left her last Tuesday in the afternoon, it had just started to snow. She’d been alive then. So sometime between 1:00 P.M. Tuesday and Wednesday morning when it stopped snowing, Kristina had died.
‘Yeah. I think that’s a pretty good bet,’ he said at last. ‘Before Thainksgiving.’
‘It was so cold that night,’ said Will. ‘She must have frozen immediately. Did you see? No decay, no lividity.’
‘Hey,’ said Spencer weakly, in an attempt at humor. ‘Maybe if we thaw her, she’ll still be alive?’
Will shook his head. Spencer asked him to go notify the dean of students that there had been a death at the college and to interview anyone else who might have seen her in the last week or so. Then he remembered basketball. ‘Will, do me a favor, too, and talk to the women’s basketball coach. See if Kristina played in last Saturday’s game.’ He was just sending Will away; Spencer knew she couldn’t have played. He had seen her shoulder.
Will was wrong about the lividity too. Spencer caught a glimpse of her back and legs as he helped lift her onto the stretcher. They were a mass of black bruises and marks, pools where the blood had settled after it stopped circulating. There was no decay because there was no rigor, and there was no rigor because she had frozen before rigor had had a chance to set in. In the hospital she would thaw and decompose at the same time.
Spencer felt very cold.
He waited to be let in at Hinman Hall’s side door, and went upstairs. At the third floor, he stopped by Kristina’s door and knocked. The door was not locked, but Spencer knew he had no right to enter without a search warrant.
Opening the door slowly, Spencer peeked into her room. The light was on. The computer was playing a screen-saver of some kind. The bed was not made. Books and clothes were scattered over the room. The clothes on the bed could very well have been the clothes she took off the night she died. A bottle of Southern Comfort lay on the floor near the bed.
Spencer badly wanted to enter the room and damn the protocol, but he knew better. What was the point of finding anything if he wouldn’t be allowed to use it? The court would first throw the evidence out, and then the chief, egged on by the Concord prosecutorial zealots and sticklers for
detail, would throw Spencer out. He’d be out on his ass, out of a job, and without a suspect.
Reluctantly Spencer let the door close.
And then he looked up and down the hall and knocked at the door directly across from Kristina’s. A fastidious-looking Asian student opened the door. Spencer began to tell him who he was and what had happened, but the student calmly cut him off.
‘Wait, wait, wait,’ he said. ‘You want to speak to him.’ He pointed down the hall. ‘Three-nineteen.’
‘Why three-nineteen?’
‘They were friends,’ said the student and made a move to shut his door. Spencer put a foot out to stop the door and took out his badge.
‘I don’t like your attitude,’ he said firmly. ‘What’s the name in three-nineteen?’
The student, looking at Spencer’s foot inside his door and then at Spencer’s badge, said, ‘Maplethorpe. Albert. May I?’
Spencer took his foot away, and the door closed.
Spencer slowly walked over to 319. On the mauve door, next to the magnetic note board, there was an art representation of Anubis, the god of death, jackal-headed and frightening, and a Bulgarian proverb that said, If you wish to drown, don’t torture yourself with shallow water.
Is there anything more I need to know about Maplethorpe, Albert} Spencer wondered, knocking on the door until it opened and a handsome, long-haired young man stood in front of him. He wore only black shorts.
Spencer showed his police badge. ‘Are you Albert Maplethorpe?’
‘I am, yes,’ Albert said, pulling his hair back and tying it up in a ponytail.
‘Were you friendly with a girl down the hall, Kristina Kim?’
The young man’s black eyes flashed something at Spencer. What was that? ‘Friendly, yes.’
‘She was found dead today.’
Even in the dim light of the hallway, the young man looked as if he’d been hit, and hard. All the blood drained away from his face.
Without turning around, Albert said, ‘Conni, come here. It’s about Kristina.’
The girl came to the door. She, too, was barely dressed, even though it was winter. ‘What’s the matter? What’s happened?’