Fire and Ice

“Wait here,”she instructed. “I’ll be right back.”

I find that women in positions of authority have a tendency to be at one extreme or the other. Either they’re comfortable with themselves and easy to get along with—like Mel, for instance—or they can be a royal pain in the butt. I had no idea where Dr. Hopewell would stand on the particular dividing line. To be on the safe side, I did exactly as I’d been told and sat where she’d left me.

While I waited, I examined her small but exceptionally neat office in some detail. Eventually my eyes were drawn to a framed photo on the wall—a graduation photo with a smiling cap-and-gown-clad Laura Hopewell standing between a very non-Asian middle-aged couple, a man and a woman. I was still studying the photo when Dr. Hopewell returned.

“Those are my parents,”she said. “They adopted me from China when I was three.”

“They look like nice people,”I said.

She nodded. “They are.”

“And you must make them very proud.”

She shrugged and sighed. “Maybe not so much,”she said. “My mother would rather I was curing cancer or delivering babies instead of solving murders.”

That made me laugh. “Some things never change,”I said. “When I told my mother I was going to be a cop, she felt the same way.”

That broke the ice. “Come on,”Dr. Hopewell said. “Let’s go get this done.”

Which we did.

Standing in on autopsies is tough, but it’s part of my job. Bereaved family members go to funerals. They remember the dearly departed in eulogies and they start the process of saying good-bye. For homicide cops, autopsies are a way of saying hello. What the M.E. uncovers in an autopsy is usually a starting point. By learning everything we can about the victims at the moment of death, we begin trying to find out what happened to them and why. And with unidentified victims, it’s even more basic than that. Before we can find out who killed them, we have to know who they are. And in this case, once we established the victim’s identity, we needed to ascertain if her death was related to the others we were investigating.

“All right, Mr. Craft,”she called to her assistant. “Let’s get started.”

The assistant rolled out a gurney. Rather than a sheet-draped body, the gurney held a sheet-draped box. Inside was what looked like a haphazard collection of bones. This would be an autopsy with some assembly required. One by one, Dr. Hopewell began removing bones from the box, examining the charred and chewed remains as she brought them out, and then laying them out in a rough approximation of a human form.

As I watched this painstaking process I was reminded of something I hadn’t thought about in years. As a high school sophomore, I had used my own hard-earned cash to buy myself a motorcycle at a garage sale. I had dragged it home in pieces, with the frame and tires in one section and with all the smaller parts stashed in an old wooden laundry basket. I had used all the mechanical skill my high school auto-shop teacher had been able to instill in me into trying to put the pieces back together.

My father died in a motorcycle accident months before I was born. Taking that part of my history into consideration, you could say that my mother wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of my having a motorcycle of my own. She didn’t come right out and actually forbid me to do it, but she watched the piece-by-piece reconstruction process with an undisguised lack of enthusiasm.

I’m a lot older now than I was then, and I also have a far greater understanding of what women will and won’t do in order to get their way. Standing in the Kittitas County morgue and watching the bones being laid out on the examining table, I wondered if it was possible that my mother had sabotaged the whole process. Once I finally got the bike back together, I never did make it work. Had my mother somehow managed to remove the one critical part that made it so I couldn’t get the engine to turn over? However it happened, I never managed a single ride.

Something similar seemed to be going on here. Dr. Hopewell could put the pieces back in some semblance of the right order, but no one was going to be able to breathe life back into that body. Whoever was dead was going to stay that way.

“Our victim is a female,”Dr. Hopewell intoned early in the process. “Late twenties to early thirties.”

“Wait a minute,”I objected. “I thought we already knew that. Isn’t that why I’m here?”

Dr. Hopewell gave me what my son-in-law calls “the stink eye”over the top of her surgical mask. “I believe the CSI people made their initial assessment regarding the victim’s gender based on other evidence found at the scene,”she said. “There was an engagement ring, a woman’s boot, and some odd fragments of clothing. But just because someone dresses like a woman doesn’t make her a woman. The bones do.”

I homed in on the engagement ring. That was strikingly different from our other victims, where no identifiable jewelry or clothing had been found.

“No robbery then?”I asked.

Dr. Hopewell shrugged, reached into the box, and removed the skull. As soon as she did so, I saw the other huge difference Ross Connors had already mentioned. This skull still had teeth. The teeth of all the other victims had been removed, if not prior to death, then at least prior to the time the corpse had been set on fire.

Dr. Hopewell examined the skull for a long time before she spoke again. “Lots of signs of blunt trauma here,”she said. “It looks like any number of them could have been fatal.”

“What about strangulation?”I asked. “Any sign of that?”

Dr. Hopewell shook her head. “None,”she said.

That was a point this victim had in common with the others. They hadn’t been strangled, either.

“Look at this,”Dr. Hopewell said. She used a hemostat to pluck a long strand of blackened material out of the box and held it up to the light.

“Rope, maybe?”I asked.

She nodded. “Restraints. Bag, please, Mr. Craft.”

Her assistant stepped forward with an open evidence bag and she dropped the strand of burned rope into it.

“What about hair?”I asked.

“Some,”she said.

“Enough for DNA testing?”

Dr. Hope well’s eyes met mine. “We don’t do DNA testing,”she said. “And we don’t order it, either. Too expensive. My office can’t afford it.”

“Mine can,”I said with some confidence. It was reassuring to know that I worked for a guy who would spare no expense when it came to doing the job. “Forward what you have to the Washington State Patrol Crime lab. Tell them it’s a Ross Connors case.”

Dr. Hopewell nodded again and returned to her work and her narrative. “The victim was evidently lying on her back when she was set on fire. You’ll notice that the charring is far more pronounced on the top portions of the body than it is on the bottom,”she continued. “I would assume that whoever did this probably expected that the body would burn down to mere ashes, thus erasing all trace evidence. Unfortunately for him, the fire went out prematurely.”

“Due to weather conditions?”I asked. In the Cascades in November, it’s either raining or snowing.

“The weather could be partly responsible in putting the fire out,”Dr. Hopewell conceded. “But remember, most of the people who turn to crime do so because they don’t have many other career options. They aren’t smart and didn’t pay attention in school. The guy who did this—and I’m pretty sure it was a guy—obviously had no idea that the human body is more than fifty percent water. He may have poured on all the gasoline he had, but it wasn’t nearly enough to do the job completely. Unfortunately for us, when the fire was out, there was still enough flesh on the bones to attract carrion eaters. That’s why the bones were scattered around the way they were.”

Suddenly the door to the morgue swung open. A woman who appeared to be in her mid-to-late-thirties strode into the room. She was five-six or -seven and solidly built. She looked tough enough that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she could take me in a fair fight.

“How come you started already?”she demanded of the M.E. “Connie was supposed to call and let me know when you got back. I wanted to be here for this. I was supposed to be here.”Noticing me, the woman stopped short in mid-tirade and stared at me. “Who the hell is this guy?”she added pointedly. “What’s he doing here?”

“His name is J. P. Beaumont,”Dr. Hopewell said. “He’s an investigator with the AG’s office, and this is Detective Lucinda Caldwell, Kittitas County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Homicide,”Detective Caldwell added unnecessarily, since I’d already figured out that much on my own.

It struck me that if Detective Caldwell thought the lady in the outside office was going to lift a hand to help her or anyone else, she was a lot more naive than your run-of-the-mill homicide cop ought to be.

“Glad to meet you,”I said. I wasn’t particularly glad to meet her, but I’m old enough to know that a certain amount of insincerity is necessary to get along in this world. “People call me Beau,”I said. “Or else J.P.”

“I don’t give a damn what people call you,”she said. “I’m going to call you gone. This is my case. What are you doing here?”

Ross Connors had sent in Special Homicide because of the possible connection between this victim and the five other cases we were already working. But the truth was, the body had been found in Kittitas County, and their homicide folks should have been primary. Until Detective Caldwell’s abrupt arrival, the local constabulary had been notable in their absence.

My initial instinct was to take offense at Detective Caldwell’s proprietary approach. I started to object but then thought better of it. I happened to remember how I used to feel back in the old days at Seattle PD when some arrogant piece of brass would deign to come down from on high and venture onto the fifth floor to tell me and the other lowly homicide cops how to do our jobs. Or the time when some twit of an FBI agent ended up being parachuted into the middle of one of my cases and took it upon himself to rub my nose in the concept that he was smart and I was stupid. Given all that, it made sense that Detective Caldwell might be territorial about her case. What I had to do was find a way to work with her.

“My boss, Attorney General Ross Connors, believes this case might be related to several other ones we’ve been working.”

“I don’t care who you are or where you’re from,”Detective Caldwell declared. “You’ve got no business horning in on my—”

“Play nice, you two,”Dr. Hopewell ordered. “I happen to be doing an autopsy here. How about if you cool it, Lucy? You can sort out all the jurisdictional wrangling later on. In the meantime, you need to know that our victim is female. Probably late twenties, early thirties. She’s had at least one child, and she died on or around November eighth.”

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