Faithless Page 25

  Jeffrey forced himself to take the warm, somewhat moist key, then started up the stairs. The railing was wobbly, torn from the wall in several places, an oily sheen to the unpainted wood.

  The smell got worse the closer he got to the top, and even without directions he could’ve found the room with his nose.

  The door was locked from the outside with a padlock and hasp. He put on some latex gloves, wishing like hell he’d donned them before taking the key from the landlady. The lock was rusty, and he tried to hold it by the edges so he wouldn’t smudge any fingerprints. He forced the key, hoping it wouldn’t break in the lock. Several seconds of praying and sweating in the dank heat of the house yielded a satisfying click as the padlock opened. Touching only the edges of the metal, he opened the hasp, then turned the handle of the door.

  The room was pretty much what you would expect after seeing the front hall of the house. The same filthy green carpet was on the floor. A cheap roller shade was in the window, the edges pinned down with blue masking tape to keep the sunlight from streaming in. There wasn’t a bed, but a sleeper couch was halfway open as if someone had been interrupted during the process of unfolding the mattress. All the drawers of the one dresser in the room were open, their contents spilling out onto the rug. A brush and comb along with a glass bowl that contained about a thousand pennies were in the corner, the bowl shattered in two, the pennies flooding out. Two table lamps without shades were on the floor, intact. There wasn’t a closet in the room, but someone had nailed a length of clothesline along the wall to hang shirts on. The shirts, still on hangers, littered the floor. One end of the clothesline was still nailed to the wall. Chip Donner held the other end in his lifeless hand.

  Behind Jeffrey, Lena dropped her crime scene toolbox on the floor with a thud. “Guess it was the maid’s day off.”

  Jeffrey had heard Lena’s tread on the stairs, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the body. Chip’s face looked like a raw piece of meat. His lower lip had been nearly ripped off and was resting on his left cheek as if someone had just brushed it aside. Several broken teeth dotted his chin, the pieces piercing the flesh. What was left of his lower jaw hung at a slant. One eye socket was completely concave, the other empty, the eyeball hanging down the side of his cheek by what looked like a couple of bloody threads. Donner’s shirt was off, his white skin almost glowing in the light from the hall. His upper body had about thirty thin red slashes crisscrossed all around it in a pattern that Jeffrey didn’t recognize. From this distance, it looked like somebody had taken a red Magic Marker and drawn perfectly straight lines all over Donner’s torso.

  “Brass knuckles,” Lena guessed, pointing to the chest and belly. “There was a trainer at the police academy who had the same thing right here on his neck. Perp popped out from behind a trash can and laid into him before he could pull his piece.”

  “I can’t even tell if he still has a neck.”

  Lena asked, “What the hell is sticking out of his side?”

  Jeffrey squatted down for a better view, still standing just shy of the doorway. He squinted, trying to figure out what he was seeing. “I think those are his ribs.”

  “Christ,” Lena said. “Who the hell did he piss off?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sara shifted her weight, feeling dead on her feet. She had started the autopsy of Charles Donner over three hours ago and still hadn’t found anything conclusive.

  She tapped the Dictaphone back on, saying, “Extraperitoneal rupture of the bladder caused by downward blunt force trauma. No pelvic fracture is visible.” She told Jeffrey, “His bladder was empty, that’s the only reason it didn’t rupture. He may have gone to the bathroom before going to his room.”

  Jeffrey wrote something down in his notebook. Like Sara and Carlos, he was wearing a mask and safety goggles. When Sara had first entered the house on Cromwell, she had nearly gagged at the smell. Donner had obviously died very recently, but there was a scientific explanation for the odor. His intestines and stomach had been ruptured, bile and feces filling his abdominal cavity and leaking out through the punctures on his side. The heat of his cramped bedroom had gone to work on the viscera, fermenting it in his torso like a festering sore. His abdomen was so swollen with bacteria that by the time Sara had gotten him back to the morgue and opened him up, matter had sloshed over the sides of the autopsy table, splattering onto the floor.

  “Transverse fracture to the sternum, bilateral rib fractures, ruptured pulmonary parenchyma, superficial capsular lacerations to the kidneys and spleen.” She stopped, feeling like she was going through a grocery list. “The left lobe of the liver has been amputated and crushed between the anterior abdominal wall and the vertebral column.”

  Jeffrey asked, “You think this took two people?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There aren’t any defensive wounds on his arms or hands, but that could just mean that he was taken by surprise.”

  “How could one person do this to somebody?”

  She knew he wasn’t asking a philosophical question. “The abdominal wall is slack and compressible. Normally, when something hits it, it readily transmits the force to the abdominal viscera. It’s like slapping your palm against a puddle of water. Depending on the force, hollow organs like the stomach and intestines can burst, the spleen is lacerated, the liver is damaged.”

  “Houdini died like that,” Jeffrey told her, and despite the circumstances, Sara smiled at his love of mundane history. “He had an open challenge to anyone in the world to hit him in the stomach as hard as they could. Some kid caught him off guard and ended up killing him.”

  “Right,” Sara agreed. “If you tighten your abdominal muscles, you can disperse the impact. If not, you can get yourself killed. I doubt Donner had time to think about it.”

  “Can you make a guess about what killed him yet?”

  Sara looked at the body, what was left of the head and neck. “If you told me this kid had been in a car crash, I would absolutely believe you. I’ve never seen this much blunt force trauma in my life.” She pointed to the flaps of skin that had been rubbed off the body from sheer impact. “These avulsive injuries, the lacerations, the abdominal injuries . . .” She shook her head at the mess. “He was punched so hard in the chest that the back of his heart was bruised by his spinal column.”

  “You sure this happened last night?”

  “At least in the last twelve hours.”

  “He died in the room?”

  “Definitely.” Donner’s body had festered in his intestinal juices as they dripped down from the open wound in his side. Stomach acids had eaten black holes in the shag. When Sara and Carlos had tried to move the body, they had found the corpse was stuck to the green carpet. They had been forced to slice off his jeans and cut out the section of the rug they had been glued to in order to remove him from the scene.

  Jeffrey asked, “So, what killed him?”

  “Take a number,” she said. “A dislocation at the atlanto-occipital junction could have transected the spinal cord. He could’ve had a subdural hematoma caused by rotational acceleration.” She counted off the possibilities on her hand: “Cardiac arrhythmia, transected aorta, traumatic asphyxia, pulmonary hemorrhage.” She gave up counting. “Or it could have been just plain old shock. Too much pain, too much trauma, and the body just shuts down.”

  “You think Lena was right about the brass knuckles?”

  “It makes sense,” she allowed. “I’ve never seen anything like these marks. They’re the right width, and it would explain how someone could do this with their fists. External damage would be minimal, just whatever the force of the metal against the skin would do, but internally”—she indicated the mess of viscera she had found inside the body— “this is exactly what I would expect to find.”

  “What a nasty way to die.”

  She asked, “Did you find anything in the apartment?”

  “No fingerprints but Donner’s and the landlady’s,” he said, flipping bac
k through his notes and reading, “Couple of bags— probably heroin— and some needles hidden in the stuffing on the underside of the couch. Around a hundred bucks in cash tucked into the base of a lamp. A couple of porn mags in the closet.”

  “Sounds about right,” she said, wondering when she had stopped being surprised at the amount of pornography men consumed. It was getting so that if a man didn’t have some sort of pornography at his disposal, she was instantly suspicious.

  Jeffrey said, “He had a gun, a nine-mil.”

  “He was on parole?” Sara asked, knowing the gun violation would have sent Donner back to jail before he could open his mouth to explain.

  Jeffrey didn’t seem bothered by it. “I’d have a gun if I lived in that neighborhood, too.”

  “No sign of Rebecca Bennett?”

  “No, no sign of any girl, for that matter. Like I said, there were only the two sets of fingerprints in the room.”

  “That could be suspicious in and of itself.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Did you find the wallet?” After they’d cut the pants off, Sara had noticed that Donner’s pockets were empty.

  “We found some loose change and a receipt from the grocery store for some cereal behind the dresser,” Jeffrey told her. “No wallet, though.”

  “He probably emptied his pockets when he got home, went to the bathroom and then his room, where he was blindsided.”

  “By who, though?” Jeffrey asked, more of himself than Sara. “It could be some dealer he screwed over. A friend who knew he had the Baggies, but not where he kept them. A thief from the neighborhood looking for some cash.”

  “I would assume a bartender kept cash around.”

  “He wasn’t beaten for information,” Jeffrey said.

  Sara agreed. No one had stopped in the middle of attacking Chip Donner to ask him where he kept his valuables.

  Jeffrey seemed frustrated. “It could be somebody connected to Abigail Bennett. It could be somebody who never met her. We don’t even know if the two of them are connected.”

  “It didn’t look as if there were signs of a struggle,” Sara said. “The place looked ransacked.”

  “It didn’t look that ransacked,” Jeffrey disagreed. “Whoever was looking for something wasn’t doing a very good job.”

  “A junkie can’t exactly maintain focus.” She contradicted herself by saying, “Of course, anyone that strung out wouldn’t be coordinated enough for this kind of attack.”

  “Not even with PCP?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Sara admitted. PCP was a volatile drug and had been known to give users unusual strength as well as vivid hallucinations. When she had worked in Atlanta’s Grady Hospital, she’d admitted a patient to the ER one night who had broken the weld on the metal bedrail he was handcuffed to and threatened one of the staff with it.

  She allowed, “It’s possible.”

  He said, “Maybe whoever killed him messed up the room so it’d look like a robbery.”

  “Then it would have to be a person who came there specifically to kill him.”

  “I don’t understand why he doesn’t have any defensive wounds,” Jeffrey said. “He just lay down and took the beating?”

  “He has a high transverse fracture of the maxilla, a LeFort III. I’ve only seen that in textbooks.”

  “You’ve got to speak English for me.”

  “The flesh of his face was nearly beaten off his skull,” she said. “If I had to guess what happened, I would say someone took him completely by surprise, punched him in the face and knocked him out.”

  “One punch?”

  “He’s a small guy,” she pointed out. “The first hit could’ve been the one that snapped his spinal cord in two. His head jerks around, that’s it.”

  “He was holding on to the laundry line,” he reminded her. “It was wrapped around his hand.”

  “He could’ve reflexively grabbed it as he fell,” she countered. “But there’s no way at this point to tell which injury is ante- and what’s postmortem. I think what we’ll find is that whoever did this knew how to put a beating on somebody, and they did it quickly and methodically, then got out of there.”

  “Maybe he knew his attacker.”

  “It’s possible.” She asked, “What about his next-door neighbor?”

  “Around ninety years old and deaf as a board,” Jeffrey said. “Tell you the truth, from the way the room smelled, I don’t even think the old man leaves it to go to the bathroom.”

  Sara thought that could be true about all the occupants of the house. After being in Donner’s room for just half an hour, she felt filthy. “Was anybody else in the house last night?”

  “Landlady was downstairs, but she keeps the TV up loud. Two other guys were living there— both alibied out.”

  “You sure?”

  “They were arrested for drunk and disorderly an hour before it happened. They slept it off courtesy of your tax dollars in the Grant County Jail.”

  “I’m glad I can give something back to the community.” Sara snapped off her gloves.

  As usual, Carlos had been standing quietly by, and she asked, “Can you go ahead and stitch him up?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, going to the cabinet to get the proper materials.

  Sara took off her safety glasses and head covering, relishing the feel of fresh air. She slipped off her gown and dropped it in the laundry bag as she headed back to her office.

  Jeffrey did the same as he followed her, saying, “I guess it’s too late to go to church with Tessa tonight.”

  She glanced at her watch as she sat down. “Not really. I’ve got time to run home and take a shower.”

  “I don’t want you to go,” he said, leaning against her desk. “I don’t like how any of these people are looking.”

  “Do you have a connection between the church and Donner?”

  “Does tenuous count?”

  “Is there anyone in particular you think might have done this?”

  “Cole Connolly’s been in prison. He’d know how to put a beating on somebody.”

  “I thought you said he was an old man.”

  “He’s in better shape than I am,” Jeffrey said. “He didn’t lie about his jail time, though. His records are pretty old, but they show twenty-two years of hard time in the Atlanta pen. The car boost from when he was seventeen probably happened in the fifties. It wasn’t even on the computer, but he mentioned it anyway.”

  “Why would he kill Chip, though? Or Abby, for that matter? And what’s his connection to the cyanide? Where would he get it?”

  “If I could answer those questions, we probably wouldn’t be here,” he admitted. “What do you need to see for yourself?”

  She remembered her phrase from earlier on the phone and felt like kicking herself for saying anything at all. “It’s just something stupid.”

  “Stupid how?”

  Sara stood up and closed the door, even though Carlos was probably the most discreet person she had ever met.

  She sat back down, her hands clasped in front of her on the desk. “It’s just something stupid that popped into my head.”

  “You never have stupid things pop into your head.”

  She thought to correct him, the most recent example being her risky behavior the other night, but instead said, “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  He stared at the back wall, making a clicking noise with his tongue, and she could tell he was upset.

  “Jeff.” She took his hand in both of hers, holding it to her chest. “I promise I’ll tell you, okay? After tonight, I’ll tell you why I need to do this, and we’ll both laugh about it.”

  “Are you still mad at me about sleeping on the couch?”

  She shook her head, wondering why he wouldn’t let that go. She had been hurt to find him on the couch, not mad. Obviously she wasn’t as good an actress as she liked to think. “Why would I be mad at you about that?”

  “I just don�
��t understand why you’re so hell-bent on getting involved with these people. Considering the way Abigail Bennett was killed and the fact that another girl connected with this case is missing, I’d think you’d be doing your damned best to keep Tessa away from them.”

  “I can’t explain it right now,” she told him. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you or him”— she gestured toward the exam room— “or this case, or some religious conversion on my part. I promise you that. I swear.”

  “I don’t like being left out of your life like this.”

  “I know you don’t,” she told him. “And I know it’s not fair. I just need you to trust me, okay? Just give me a little room.” She wanted to add that she needed the same room she had given him last night, but didn’t want to bring up the subject again. “Just trust me.”

  He stared at her hands around his. “You’re making me really nervous, Sara. These could be very dangerous people.”

  “Are you going to forbid me to do it?” She tried teasing: “I don’t see a ring on my finger, Mr. Tolliver.”

  “Actually,” he said, sliding open her desk drawer. She always took off her jewelry and left it in her office before performing a procedure. His Auburn class ring was sitting beside the pair of diamond earrings he had given her for Christmas last year.

  He picked up the ring, and she held out her hand so that he could slide it onto her finger. She thought he would ask her not to go again, but instead he told her, “Be careful.”

  Sara parked her car in front of her parents’ house, surprised to see her cousin Hare leaning against his convertible Jaguar, decked out like a model in GQ.

  He tossed out a “Hey, Carrot” before she had time to close her car door.

  Sara looked at her watch. She was five minutes late picking up Tessa. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve got a date with Bella,” he told her, taking off his sunglasses as he walked over to meet her. “Why’s the front door locked?”

  She shrugged. “Where are Mama and Daddy?”

  He patted his pockets, pretending to look for them. Sara loved her cousin, she really did, but his inability to take anything seriously made her want to strangle him sometimes.