Alone a bone secrets nov.., p.10
Alone (A Bone Secrets Novel), page 10
“Why here?” she whispered. “Why did you have to do it in public?”
He shifted in his seat, guilt flooding his face. “I couldn’t do it at one of our places. If we were alone and things got too emotional, I was afraid…”
He was afraid they’d end up in bed.
Their sex life was good. There was no getting around it. Lying in bed with Seth on a rainy afternoon was heaven. They’d spent hours talking and making love. He’d been her first and had opened a whole new world of intimacy and sharing for her. In the beginning, it’d simply been explosive and exciting, but it’d grown into a tender, loving experience.
And now it was over. No more.
If she could get him in bed, maybe…
She rejected the thought; she wasn’t a manipulator. She wasn’t that kind of woman and she wasn’t about to start. She was strong. Seth was done with Seth and Victoria. And her logical brain screamed at her to accept it.
She stood up, shoved her books into her backpack, and pushed in her chair. Slinging her pack over one shoulder, she stared Seth in the eye. “I loved you. I loved you a lot and was committed to the future we’d planned together. Good-bye, Seth.” She strode out of the coffee shop with her chin up and her heart in pieces on the floor.
Never again.
Seth noticed Lorenzo Cavallo had managed to rake his leaves in his yard before he died. Lorenzo’s home looked like every other small Portland home from the fifties. The entire street had one-story white homes with single-car garages. Only the yards were marginally different. Some with bushes, some with trees, some with nothing. A shiny classic Chevrolet stood visible in Lorenzo’s garage. Someone had opened the garage door and the vehicle gleamed against the dreariness of the wet day.
The clouds had been high and gray during Seth’s commute to the office. Enough to make him wonder if the day would actually be dry. But his hopes were dashed as black clouds rolled in. Dr. Campbell had assigned him to visit the Cavallo death, doling out assignments among his deputy examiners and himself. It’d been less than a week, and Seth felt like he belonged in the Portland office. His working interview time was almost up. If he was offered the job, he was taking it. No question. He liked Portland. It was quirky, and the ME’s office ran like a smoothly oiled machine.
A uniform held a log out to him at the front door. He signed and slipped on a pair of sanitary booties, studying the young officer out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t look green or ashen, so hopefully the scene wasn’t a bad one. Detectives Callahan and Lusco had already signed the log. It didn’t feel like ten hours had passed since he’d parted from Callahan at the bar.
Seth moved down the narrow hall of the house toward the voices in the kitchen. He smelled the familiar odor of death. The coppery scent of blood and the stench of released bowels. A wave of sadness washed through him as he stepped into the kitchen and examined the body on the floor.
Lorenzo Cavallo was covered in blood from head to toe. He wore what Seth thought of as old-man underwear. The white stretchy tank top and baggy white undershorts. Neither had been truly white in a long time; instead they were a bad yellowing cream color. Browning blood stained Lorenzo’s silver hair. Detectives Callahan and Lusco leaned against a counter in the tiny kitchen. A female uniformed cop nodded at Seth, and a crime scene tech snapped scene photos.
“Morning, doctor,” Callahan greeted him. “Welcome to the party.” His grim expression belied his words.
“Morning,” Seth answered.
“As soon as you can get us a time of death, we’d appreciate it,” Lusco added.
Portland was no different from Sacramento. The cops always wanted that fact first.
Seth stepped over to the corpse, carefully avoiding the blood, and squatted down. Now closer, he could see the tears from a knife through the old man’s shirt. And a spot at his temple that looked… sunken. Seth scanned his surroundings, looking for a baseball bat or similar weapon. Callahan noticed his gaze.
“Whatever he was stabbed and hit with, the killer took with him,” Callahan stated.
“Can you get a picture right here?” Seth asked the photographer as he pointed to a spot just below the ribs on the right side of the body. The old man’s tank was ripped wide open as if it’d been prepared for Seth to take his liver temperature. The tech snapped a shot, and Seth made a half-inch slit with his scalpel and slid a thermometer in four inches. He waited and the tech took a shot of the inserted thermometer. Looking around, he noticed Lusco watching in fascination along with the female cop, but Callahan seemed focused on making notes in his pad.
“We just talked with him yesterday,” Lusco offered.
“What for?” asked Seth.
“He came in to offer a lead on the old Forest Park case. He thought his sister might be one of the victims,” said Lusco.
Seth looked at the body. The old man had been brutalized. Did someone not like him talking to the police? “You think it was related to the killings from the other night?”
“Don’t know,” stated Lusco.
“A neighbor was walking by about seven this morning and noticed his door was wide open,” Callahan added. “She came up to the door, rang the bell, yelled his name, and finally entered the house when no one answered. She immediately backed out when she saw he was dead and called nine-one-one.”
Seth didn’t ask why the neighbor didn’t physically check to see if Lorenzo was dead. It was obvious. This was a case of overkill. Seth saw multiple blows to the head and too many stab wounds to count. Any of them could be the cause of death.
Seth took a long look at the furnishings of the little kitchen. “He lived alone?”
“His wife died six years ago,” stated the female cop.
“Yesterday in our interview, he didn’t mention that. He talked about his life as if his wife was still alive,” Lusco said. “We haven’t been able to get ahold of any family yet, and the neighbors don’t seem to know anything about his sons. I’m a bit surprised. He acted like they were all very close.”
Callahan nodded in agreement.
The home showed the touch of a woman, but of a woman who hadn’t been around in a long time. The floral prints of the sofa were faded, the picture frames showcased thick dust, and the ashtray overflowed. The house was utterly quiet. It had an aura of waiting for someone. Maybe waiting for the grandkids to pay an overdue visit. Or waiting for the female heart of the house to return.
“I still have guys questioning the neighbors,” said the female cop.
Seth took a closer look at the policewoman. Her badge was Portland Police Department and read Goode. Callahan and Lusco were with the state police. There were some police politics at work here. No doubt this had been Portland’s crime scene and investigation until someone had discovered the victim had been interviewed by the state police. Goode was keeping her hand firmly on the scene, but allowing state to have its look.
Seth knew from experience that most local departments didn’t care to have a different agency step in to lend a hand or take over a case, whether it was the FBI or a state police agency. Callahan had told him that the Forest Park teenage girls’ case had been turned over to OSP, but it’d mainly been a matter of timing. The Portland Police Department was recently overwhelmed with a gang war that had consumed their local resources. OSP didn’t have the gang expertise that Portland did. But they knew murder.
Seth’s gaze went back to the small plate of ashes on the tiny table in the corner of the kitchen. He sniffed at the body. The usual overwhelming odor of a smoker didn’t emerge from the body. “Did you find cigarettes in the home?”
“No. I looked for those,” Goode answered. “No cigarettes in the cupboards or drawers of the kitchen. Bedside table drawer is empty. That’s a dish from an old china set in the cupboard, not an ashtray. A smoker would have several ashtrays in the house.”
Callahan walked over to the ashtray on the table. Seth noticed it didn’t have butts left in the pile of ash. Who removes the butts? Goode was right; it wasn’t an ashtray. It was a thin china saucer with a bit of worn gold trim on the edges.
“What else did you notice?” Callahan asked Goode.
“He lives alone,” she said. “He eats like a bachelor. Lots of white flour and white sugar products. Red meat and frozen dinners. Tons of family pictures on the walls, but they’re old ones. Going by the hair and clothing styles, no new photo sessions in at least two decades. He reads Louis L’Amour and Tom Clancy. Sinks were dry when we arrived. No one appears to have cleaned up their bloody hands at them. Hand towels are hanging neatly in place along with bath towels. Same with the kitchen towels.”
“What’s the room temperature?” Seth asked as he pulled out the thermometer.
“Sixty-five degrees,” said Goode.
No heating vents blew directly on the body. Seth did some fast math in his head. “I’ll estimate ten to seven hours ago for your time of death. I can narrow that with the lab work. Got all his front photos?” he asked the tech, who nodded. “Help me roll him onto his side.”
The two men shoved and pulled to balance Lorenzo on his side. Seth did a quick scan of Lorenzo’s back. The tech backed up and snapped more photos of the purpling back tissue. Seth pressed a gloved thumb against the darkened skin. “Livor mortis is fixed.” No surprises there based on his time-of-death estimate. The back had no stab wounds.
Seth leaned over the body, distracted by the colored plastic in the corpse’s ear. A hearing aid? The color was awfully bright… and the shape was wrong. He reached out with the end of his ballpoint pen to carefully move some of the blood-stained hair out of the way. And froze.
His pen matched the color of the plastic in the man’s ear.
“Is that—”
“Yes, I think that was a pen.” Callahan bent beside Seth. “I was looking at that. Looks like he jammed a pen in his ear and then stomped on it to drive it in farther.”
“Holy crap.” Seth was speechless.
His ears suddenly ached.
“Someone was angry,” he muttered.
Callahan raised a brow at him. “No kidding. This killer would be a profiler’s dream. They’d be itching to dissect his brain.”
“It’s so different from the girls,” Seth commented. “That scene was peaceful, almost otherworldly. This is simply brutal. I’d have a hard time believing they were committed by the same person.”
“It might simply be someone with two distinct killing motives. Two different reasons and rationales,” said Callahan. “I’m not disregarding any theories.”
This was a hard, stark scene out of a gore-fest film. The girls in Forest Park belonged in an ethereal fantasy movie, misty and soft.
“This isn’t the result of a botched robbery,” said Callahan grimly. “Lorenzo Cavallo was murdered deliberately and with a lot of anger. Whether or not it’s tied to our girls remains to be seen. But considering he offered insight into the old crime yesterday, I have to consider that someone wasn’t happy that he’d volunteered information.” He pointed at the pen fragments in the old man’s ear. “That’s punishment.”
“Symbolic, maybe?” Lusco mused.
“Probably not,” answered Callahan. “I think it would have been in his mouth if symbolic. As if to shut him up for speaking out. Still, I want that pen when you’re done with it, doctor.”
“Not a problem,” stated Seth. He’d removed odd objects from corpses before. Lightbulbs, kitchen gadgets, and workbench tools. But the crushed pen in the ear was the first of its kind. He stood and heard his right knee pop. As usual. He pulled off his vinyl gloves and set them on the body to keep any evidence with the corpse.
He’d be seeing the man again in a more intimate setting.
Victoria was in her office, typing her notes about the second skeleton, when her email popped up. Noticing it was from Detective Lusco, she immediately opened it and found herself face-to-face with an image of a young woman from another generation. Excitement bubbled inside of her. Did they have a lead on one of the old remains?
She slowly read the email, fighting the urge to rush through it. Italian heritage, age twenty. A brother had reported his sister missing yesterday morning. Why had he waited so long? She continued to read Lusco’s notes. The brother had consented to a DNA comparison. She scrolled back to the photo and stared at the familiar crooked smile.
She smiled and sent a text to Lacey to meet in her office.
Victoria clicked on her file of lab photos from the three women, and scrolled until she found the teeth views. She studied the upper front teeth carefully in each photo, stopped at the teeth photo of the third skull, and enlarged the shot on her screen.
“Hey, whatcha got?” Lacey breezed in through the open door, a light of curiosity in her eyes. She knew Victoria wouldn’t have messaged if she didn’t have something good to see.
Victoria arranged the police photo side by side with the photo Lacey had taken of the teeth yesterday, and pushed back from her screen with a flourish. “What do you think?”
The blonde dentist leaned over, resting her hands on the desk as she studied Victoria’s screen. Victoria waited impatiently and watched Lacey’s eyes flick back and forth between the two photos. Lacey’s smile started on one side of her mouth and spread rapidly to the other. “Oh, nice! Where’d you get this old head shot?”
“Lusco and Callahan had someone bring it in yesterday, wondering if one of the women from the old scene could be his sister. He gave a DNA sample, too.”
“Excellent. Look how the central incisors overlap.” Lacey pulled a dental probe out of her lab coat pocket and held it up to the lovely woman’s photo, eyed the angle, and then moved it to the lab’s image of the teeth. “The angle and amount of overlap are identical. I’ll get a tooth to the lab so they can grind it and extract the DNA for comparison. But I think we’ve got a great start to figuring out if this is his sister.” She grinned at Victoria, who couldn’t help returning the infectious smile. “I’d hoped to identify this skull. When I was charting the teeth, I knew this overlap would be recognizable to the right person. I wish everyone had as easily identifiable teeth in photos.”
Victoria nodded. To her, most people’s teeth always looked about the same. But this woman’s were rather distinctive.
“What’s her name?” Lacey asked.
Victoria felt a small stab of guilt. She’d breezed right over the name, moving on to the photo in the email. She clicked back to Lusco’s letter. “Lucia Cavallo. She was Italian.”
“Pretty.” Lacey tilted her head as she studied the screen.
Victoria looked at Lucia’s eyes, startlingly similar to her own brown, and wondered what had happened in the girl’s life that’d brought her to a group death in the quiet woods. Had she chosen the death? Or had she been murdered?
So far, none of the skeletons showed trauma. No nicks on bones from knives nor broken hyoids from strangulation. No gunshots in the skulls. Overall, they were a clean group of women. Two skeletons had well-healed breaks and all were of a normal size, no evidence of malnutrition or disease.
These should have been women who’d gone on to raise families and live normal lives. Not end it on the forest floor.
“Let’s go check her out again.” Lacey straightened and looked to Victoria.
Victoria recognized the focus in her eyes and the tilt of the jaw. Lacey was a woman on a mission to find answers. Victoria suspected she often appeared the same way. It was the facial expression that made cops move out of her way and techs listen carefully to what she had to say. She followed Lacey to her lab.
The women didn’t talk as they strode down the halls. Lacey wasn’t prone to useless chatter, and Victoria liked that about her. The two focused on work when they were together, and had found they fostered a similar drive for finding answers. When she’d first met Lacey Campbell, she’d immediately misjudged the dentist to be a blonde bimbo. It’d been a reflexive action. The blonde hair and brown eyes had reminded her of Seth’s wife.
Lacey wasn’t like that. She was honest, direct, and sharp, with a high level of sensitivity and a bit too much fondness for cats. She didn’t seem as intimidated by Victoria as some of her coworkers. They’d discovered they shared an interest in Edwardian English history before it became a trend and a love of Greek food, and both owned television’s single season of Firefly and mourned its cancellation.
Lacey was the closest thing she had to a tight female friend. Didn’t most women have hordes of close friends and run in packs? Victoria had always been the type to have a few intimate friends, usually male. Right now that list included only her neighbor, Jeremy. He knew more about her than anyone.
Except for Seth. Even though they hadn’t been around each other in years, he looked at her as if he knew all her private thoughts. He’d always been that way. He’d always been able to read her perfectly. She thought she’d mastered a mask to hide the thoughts in her head, but it’d fallen away when Seth looked at her in the woods.
Her ex-husband, Rory, said she always wore a façade. He claimed he never knew how she was feeling or what she was thinking. She’d said she’d let him know if she was upset, but it wasn’t enough. To him, she never looked happy, and he took that as a failing on his part.
What a bunch of bull.
Her happiness didn’t rely on her husband’s actions. And just because she didn’t walk around being ecstatic, it didn’t mean she was unhappy. He didn’t seem to understand that a person can function in the space between happy and unhappy. That space offered a level of calm and balance. It held an evenness, a place of moderation that allowed her to do her job and go home to forget some of the horrors she’d experienced that day. Some people might drink to forget or seek relief; she preferred to simply exist and accept it.
