“I’ve told you everything I know.”
I pause long enough to let him absorb everything that’s been said. “Norm, I haven’t put all of this together yet, but I think these two murders may be related to a cold case from back in 1979,” I tell him. “The Hochstetler case.”
“I remember it. That Amish family. But I was only a teenager at the time.”
“Did you know the Hochstetlers?”
He hesitates. “No.”
“Do you know anything about what happened the night that family was murdered?”
“Of course not.” He makes a sound of disbelief. “What the hell are you insinuating?”
“I’m not insinuating anything. I’m trying to solve two homicides, get a killer off the street, and maybe keep you safe in the process.”
“I had nothing to do with that.” His lips peel back, exposing small, artificially white teeth. “How dare you accuse me of—”
“I didn’t accuse you of anything.”
From two feet away, I can hear his molars grinding. “This is outrageous. I ask you for help, and you come into my home unannounced and start making wild accusations, all because you haven’t the slightest clue how to do your job! I’m a sitting member of the council, for God’s sake.”
“Norm, I need you to level with me. If there’s anything you’re not telling me, you need to come clean. Right now.”
He stares at me, his mouth open, his chest rising and falling. “I’ve told you everything I know.”
“I’m not going to let this go,” I tell him. “Do you understand?”
A quiver runs the length of his body. In the periphery of my vision, I see his right hand curl into a fist. And I know he’s struggling to control a temper run amok. That if he loses the battle, I’d better be prepared to defend myself. I’m not sure what it says about me, but I’m pretty sure I’d take a hit for the opportunity to arrest him.
“You fucking bitch. I’m sick and tired of your incompetence. First my daughter is killed because of you and now this. I swear to God, I’ll have your job for this.”
I try hard to let the words roll off me, especially the insinuation about my being responsible for the death of his daughter. But I don’t quite succeed. My heart is pounding; I can feel the pulse of it in my neck. Adrenaline jigs in my midsection, powerful enough to make my hands shake.
“You do what you have to do,” I tell him. “This isn’t going to go away.”
He strides to the door and opens it. “Get the fuck out of my house.”
I stand there for a moment, looking at him. “Watch yourself, Norm. I mean it.”
He snarls another expletive at me as I go through the door and step into the pouring rain.
CHAPTER 15
I’m nearly to the station when my phone erupts. I check the screen to see that I’ve received a text from the coroner: Michaels autopsy complete. Will be at my office until noon. Groaning inwardly, I make a U-turn and head back toward Pomerene Hospital.
No matter how many times I make this journey to the morgue, it never gets any easier. Dread is a dark and silent presence that steps onto the elevator and rides with me to the basement. The doors swish open to a tiled corridor. My boots echo as I pass a yellow and black biohazard sign and a plaque that reads: MORGUE AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL. At the end of the hallway, I push open dual swinging doors and traverse a second hall to the clerk’s desk, but Carmen is nowhere in sight. Early lunch, I think, and I’m reminded that I’ve yet to have coffee.
I go through a second set of swinging doors. The autopsy room is straight ahead. To my right is a small alcove, where the biohazard protection supplies are stored. I glance to my left and through the mini-blinds of his glassed-in office, I see Doc Coblentz sitting at his desk, eating a burger the size of a small tire.
I enter his office. “Sorry to interrupt,” I tell him, relieved he’s not eating in close proximity of a dead body.
“This is the only place I can enjoy red meat in peace.” He blots his mouth and rises. “My wife has me eating rabbit food. Beets and carrots.” He extends his hand and we shake.
“You work all night, Doc?”
He nods. “The dead are blissfully quiet.”
“Okay.” But I can’t help but grin. “You finished the Michaels autopsy?”
He sobers. “We just received Julia Rutledge.”
“Any idea when you might get to her?”
“As soon as I can.” Taking a final bite of the burger, he motions toward the alcove. “You know the drill.”
I go to the alcove, where his assistant has set out disposable shoe covers, a blue gown, hair cap, and latex gloves. Doc Coblentz is waiting when I emerge and, I find myself wondering how he does what he does. No matter how well prepared I think I am, I’m never ready to witness this cold and clinical side of death. While the blood and bodily fluids have been rinsed away, the incised skin hidden from view, there is no eradicating the hideousness. I can’t look at a body without thinking of the life that person lost or the loved ones he left behind.
Entering the autopsy room is like stepping into a cave where some grotesque beast stores its kills. Ensconced in gray ceramic tile, the room is maintained at a cool sixty-two degrees. But despite the state-of-the-art HVAC system, the smells of formalin and decaying flesh are ever-present reminders of why this place exists. It’s a large room, about twenty feet square. Stark fluorescent light pours down from several overhead lamps onto stainless steel counters. There are a dozen or so white plastic buckets. Gleaming instruments lie atop stainless steel trays, the uses of which I don’t want to ponder. Two deep sinks with arcing faucets are butted against the far wall, next to a scale used to weigh organs.
“What’s the cause of death?” I ask.
“Strangulation due to the compression of the carotid arteries causing global cerebral ischemia.”
I follow the doc to a gurney situated beneath a lamp that’s been pulled down close. A green sheet marred by several watery stains covers the body. I brace an instant before Doc Coblentz peels away the sheet.
I steel myself against the sight of the massive Y-incision cut into Dale Michaels’s torso. The flesh is blue gray with a sprinkling of silver hair on a chest that’s sunken and bony. A few inches above his navel, a neat red hole the size of my pinkie stands out in stark contrast against the pasty skin.
“So he was still alive when he was hanged from those rafters?” I ask.
“Correct. There was a good bit of bleeding from both gunshot wounds, which tells me the heart was still beating when he sustained them.”
“There were two gunshot wounds?”
“Sorry to do this to you, Chief, but you need to see this.” He draws the sheet down to mid-thigh, revealing more of Dale Michaels than I ever wanted to see. A shriveled penis and scrotum are nestled in silvery pubic hair. There’s a wound there, too, and I can barely force myself to look. My eyes skim over jutting hip bones and the tops of skinny thighs. But Michaels was not a thin man. The abdomen bulges and is slightly gelatinous with fat.
The urge to look away is powerful, but despite my aversion, I don’t.
“For simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to them as Wound One and Wound Two.” Using a wooden, cotton-tipped swab, he indicates the hole near the navel. “On Wound One, we’ve got an entry wound here. The slug penetrated the stomach wall between the greater curvature and the pyloric canal and lodged near the spine.”
“Did it paralyze him?”
“Probably not, but the trauma so close to the spinal cord may have temporarily immobilized him.”
“Looks like a small caliber.” But I’m finding it increasingly difficult to focus on Dale Michaels’s brutalized body. “A .22 or maybe a .25.” I look over at him. “Is the slug intact?”
“I have one slug, which I’ve bagged for you. The other was a through and through.”
I make a mental note to get with the CSU that processed the scene. If the second slug wasn’t found inside the body, maybe it’s stil
l at the scene, in a wall or in the ground.
“Going on to Wound Two.” Using the swab as a pointer, he indicates the hole near the groin. “The missile entered the anterior aspect of the left thigh, just to the left of the genitalia. It fractured the superior ramus of the pubis, tore through the neck of the bladder, and left the body through the perineum, compromising the entire genitourinary tract.”
“Jesus,” I hear myself say, but I’m keenly aware that the buzzing of the overhead lights seems inordinately loud as I stare down at a hole the color of raw meat. Despite the chill, I feel sweat break out on the back of my neck.
I swallow hard. “So there’s no slug for the second wound.”
“Correct.”
“Was he alive when he sustained it?”
“Yes.” Doc Coblentz shifts his attention to the neck. “Interestingly, the vertebrae are free of any fractures.” He indicates the throat area, where the rope dug a deep groove into the flesh.
“What does that mean?” I ask, but I already know.
“I would venture to guess he was hoisted up from the ground as opposed to being dropped down from the rafters,” he tells me. “Unconsciousness would have occurred in a relatively short period of time, probably one or two minutes. Death occurred when the oxygen and blood flow to the brain were cut off. Most of the damage you see here occurred postmortem, gravity working against the weight of his body.”
I think about that for a moment. “Would he have survived the gunshot wounds if he hadn’t been hanged?”
“Well, both were serious, penetrating wounds. But there were no major arteries involved. Hemorrhage was present, but not life threatening. If he’d received prompt medical attention, and barring any preexisting medical conditions, he would have survived.”
Some of the tension leaves me when he pulls the sheet up and covers the body.
“Any sign that he was engaged in a struggle or physical confrontation?”
“No.”
“Tox?”
“Won’t be back for two or three days.”
“What about that Amish doll, Doc? Do you know if it was put into his throat before or after his death?”
“Before. There were abrasions on the upper part of the pharynx, along with a minute amount of bleeding. It wouldn’t have been a comfortable ordeal for the victim.”
“I get the sense there was a lot of rage involved with this crime.”
“I agree.” He shrugs. “The level of brutality…”
I think about that a moment and then ask, “Do you have anything preliminary on Julia Rutledge?”
Doc Coblentz shakes his head. “I performed a cursory exam upon her arrival. As you’ve probably already deduced, she sustained several stab wounds, including a deep chest wound. I can’t give you a cause of death until I get her on the table.”
“What about the object in the wound?”
He turns to a stainless tray on the counter behind him and picks up a plastic evidence bag. “I knew you’d want to see it, so I extracted it first thing.”
It’s an Amish peg doll exactly like the one we found in Dale Michaels’s mouth. I know what’s inscribed into the base before I look: HOCHSTETLER. I pass the bag back to the doc.
“I’ll get it couriered to the lab ASAP,” he tells me.
I thank him and start toward the alcove. As I remove the biohazard gear and toss it into the receptacle, it strikes me that for the first time in the course of my career, the autopsy of a murder victim has raised more questions than it answered.
CHAPTER 16
It had been a long time since Jerrold McCullough was afraid. He’d lived a long, full, and sometimes difficult life. He’d lost a two-year-old daughter when he was twenty-six years old. He’d spent some time overseas in Bosnia when he was in the military. At the age of forty-two, he survived a serious car accident in which he’d lost a limb—and nearly his life. He lost his wife of twenty-four years to cancer several years back. Yes, Jerrold McCullough had faced his fair share of adversity. Each time that bitch fate dealt him a blow, he’d conquered it and come back from it a smarter, stronger, if lonelier, man.
But as life had proved, there were some things you didn’t come back from. Sure, you went on with the business of living. You fell in love and got married. You had children and you brought them up right. But through it all, you knew your life was one big fat lie.
The rain had been coming down for five days now, and the creek behind his house crested last night. By dawn, the brown, churning water had encroached another twenty feet into his backyard. If the rain didn’t let up soon, he figured by midnight it would overtake the deck, where in summer, he kept the barbecue and lawn chairs. It was hard to believe that roaring monster was the same creek he’d swum in with his kids when they were young. The same creek where he caught that eight-pound largemouth bass—the one no one had believed him about. The same creek where he and his wife had gone skinny-dipping after getting drunk the day their last child went off to Ohio State. That had been ten years ago now and he still smiled every time he walked by that deep swimming hole. He figured if he was going to die, he’d just as soon it be here, where he’d raised his family.
He’d found the second note last night when he came home from his Lions Club meeting. It was on plain notebook paper and had been left in his mailbox. You’re guilty. He’d known it was coming; he hadn’t been surprised. What had surprised him was the fear. He was only fifty-four years old, and frankly, he wasn’t through living yet. But what could he do? Go to the police? Tell them a dead woman was sending him notes?
He hadn’t seen her since that night in his driveway. He’d never admit to it, especially to the others, but he believed in ghosts. In fact, he knew they existed. He’d been seeing little two-year-old Tessa for years. On occasion, he still saw his wife, too, only the way she’d looked before the cancer ate her up. And so when he saw Wanetta Hochstetler, standing in the driveway, looking at him with that accusatory expression, he hadn’t questioned his eyesight, blamed it on the bad light, or even doubted his sanity. He accepted it as truth because he’d always believed that sooner or later, a man paid for his deeds.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to go down easy. He was a fighter by nature, and by God he’d just as soon live for another twenty or thirty years. He wanted to pass this house and property on to whichever of his children came home to Painters Mill, once they realized the Holy Grail wasn’t in Dallas or Sacramento or Atlanta. So far none of them had been takers, but they would. Sooner or later, everyone came home.
He poured coffee into his BEST GRANDPA IN THE WORLD mug, added a dollop of milk, and then opened the patio sliding door and stepped outside. Cold drizzle fell from a glowering sky the color of granite. Something inside him sank when he noticed the water was just ten feet from the deck now. He’d put a lot work into it. He’d sunk pressure-treated four-by-four posts into three-foot-deep post holes and filled them in with concrete he’d mixed himself. He’s used treated two-by-sixes for the decking, two-by-fours for the rail. Damn shame that the water was going to take it all, but then, that was the nature of the creek.
Pulling up the collar of his jacket against the chill, he walked to the edge of the deck. He sipped coffee and listened to the water take down another tree upstream. When he turned to go back inside, she was coming up the steps. Not little Tessa. Not his beloved Luann. But Wanetta Hochstetler. She was wearing an Amish dress and dark head covering pulled low and shadowing her eyes. Black shawl over her shoulders. Her shoes were covered with mud.
He dropped the mug. Coffee splashed on his pants. He glanced down where it lay in pieces, and the word GRANDPA stared up at him. It saddened him because in that instant, he knew he’d never see his grandchildren again.
He looked at her and shook his head, suddenly tired. “I know why you’re here,” he said.
“Do you?” She stepped onto the deck.
He took an involuntary step back when he spotted the pistol in her hand. A .22 revolver. Someth
ing resembling doubt drifted through the back of his mind. If she was a ghost, why did she need a gun? Why was there mud on her shoes?
He looked into her eyes. “I told them not to do it. I didn’t want any part of it.”
“Liar.” Keeping the weapon poised at his chest, she stepped closer. “It was you.”
“Things got out of hand,” he said. “We didn’t mean to—”
“You’re guilty,” she said. “Just like the others.”
“Please, don’t kill me.” He heard pleading in his voice and it shamed him. “I have children.”
“You’re a child killer.” She shuffled left, motioned toward the steps with the revolver. “Walk.”
Heart pounding, he obeyed. Upon reaching the base of the stairs, he hesitated, thought about running to the front of the house and calling for help. But she jabbed the weapon toward the deck closer to the creek. “There,” she said. “Go.”
He started toward the deck, wondering what she had in mind, wondering if it would be painful, if she would murder him the way she had the others.…
Upon reaching the deck, he turned to her. He noticed the length of rope in her left hand and a hot streak of panic ran through his body. “What are you going to do?”
She raised the pistol slightly. The revolver cracked. Agony zinged in his knee. His leg buckled. Crying out, he hit the ground hard. Dizzy with shock and pain, he clutched his knee, glanced down, saw blood between his fingers. “But you’re … you can’t…”
The pain took his breath. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t tell her she was a ghost and ghosts didn’t need guns.
Another shot snapped through the air. Pain exploded in his other knee. He screamed and then flopped around in the mud like a hooked fish. “Don’t,” he panted. “Dear God, please don’t.”
He tried to scream for help, but the sound that squeezed through his lips was the howl of a wounded dog. He lay on his side, wheezing, and looked up at her. “You’re not a ghost,” he croaked.
Rope in hand, she started toward him, a smile curving her mouth.