Unsolved Page 18

  At that moment, my phone buzzes—a call, not a text.

  Speak of the devil.

  65

  WE DON’T bother with a conference room, choosing instead to communicate by Skype.

  “Well, this is déjà vu, isn’t it?” says Dr. Janus, gesturing around the room she’s in.

  Dr. Olympia Janus—Lia—is a special agent and a forensic pathologist. When the FBI does its own autopsies, she’s usually the one with the scalpel.

  She helped me catch Graham. When I finally convinced the FBI to look into the deaths of Graham’s victims, it was Lia who peeled back the layers (no pun intended) of forensic evidence that would suggest accidental death and uncovered the truth locked deep inside the victims’ bodies—torture, mutilation, agonizing deaths. Homicides.

  I’ll never forget sitting in a conference room at the Cook County morgue in Chicago while Dr. Janus walked us through detail after painstaking detail of the most sadistic yet meticulous example of torture-homicide she’d ever seen. I almost passed out. When it was over, the other agents looked like they’d just been through a turbulent flight on a small plane.

  And though I’m in the Hoover Building in DC, I’m looking at Lia Janus in that same Cook County morgue, this time after she’s performed the autopsy on Mayday, the homeless man in Chicago who might help us catch Darwin and solve the Chicago bombing. Hence her déjà vu comment.

  “You look exactly the same, Lia,” I tell her, a routine compliment but nonetheless true. She is wearing a doctor’s white coat, unlike last time, but otherwise she is unchanged—a strong, confident woman with short dark hair and simple jewelry, her glasses on a beaded chain around her neck.

  “And how are you coming along, Emmy?” No similar compliment in return, but nobody who knew me before Graham would even pretend that I look the same. I’ve heard what people say, that I look like I’m hiding, wearing bangs to conceal my forehead, growing my hair longer to obscure my neck, covering everything below my chin in clothing. And I know it’s more than my physical appearance that’s changed.

  Officer Natalie Ciomek, the Chicago cop who put me onto Mayday in the first place, is with Lia at the morgue.

  I introduce them to Bonita Sexton, who’s sitting with me, and when we are finished with pleasantries, Lia clears her throat. “We’ll have our full briefing later,” she says as a reminder, as if I needed one. I asked Lia to give me a sneak preview before the entire team heard her report. “Call this an informal chat.”

  “Sure, great,” I say.

  “Mayday was the name you used for the decedent?”

  “Mayday, yes.”

  “All right.” She folds her hands in front of her. “I should start by telling you that I’m not prepared to give conclusions within a reasonable degree of medical certainty.”

  “Okay,” I say, as if I expected that. In a way, I did, because Darwin’s been so careful. But forensic pathology is based on the idea that the body doesn’t lie and that some things can’t be covered up. Graham, by Lia’s own admission, was as skilled as anyone she’d ever seen, and yet she uncovered the details of those murders.

  “I can’t state, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, the manner of death. The cause of death, certainly. The cause of death was asphyxiation. Those signs are evident. Bloodshot eyes, mucus in the back of the mouth, frothy fluid in the air passages, high levels of carbon dioxide in the blood, slight but acute edema of the lungs, hemorrhages and congestion in the internal organs.”

  “You’re saying he suffocated?”

  “He suffocated, no doubt. The cause of death is asphyxiation. But the manner of death? That, Emmy, I cannot conclusively say.”

  “Okay, but we aren’t in court,” I say. “What do you think?”

  She nods. “Best guess? Your Mayday died of natural causes.”

  66

  NO. THAT can’t be.

  I stare at Lia’s face through the grainy Skype transmission and see a hint of apology in her expression.

  It’s like the oxygen has been sucked out of this cubicle where Rabbit and I are sitting. I look at Rabbit as if somehow she can help.

  Just when we were getting some momentum…

  “Why, Lia?” I manage weakly. “Why natural causes?”

  “The decedent had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Lung disease.”

  “COPD,” I say.

  “Yes, COPD. Undiagnosed, I gather. Certainly untreated. We’ve been unable to track down any medical history on the man.” She looks at Officer Ciomek, seated next to her at the morgue.

  “I doubt that Mayday had seen a doctor in the past decade,” Ciomek says. “He did have a pretty bad cough. I once told him he should see somebody about it. He just said he had a cold.”

  “So…COPD.”

  “I can’t rule out that he asphyxiated due to untreated COPD. But I have to say, Emmy, that the reason I can’t rule this out is due, more than anything, to the lack of evidence of any other manner of death.”

  “Nothing that suggests murder.”

  “Nothing that suggests homicidal smothering. I’m sure you can understand that, while asphyxiation itself is easy to detect, evidence of foul play often is not. Your decedent unquestionably died of asphyxiation, but I can’t call it homicide.”

  “Can you rule out homicide?” I ask, a drowning woman reaching for a life preserver.

  “No, I certainly can’t rule it out. But I found almost no signs of antemortem injury suggesting a struggle.”

  Antemortem—before he died, she means. No signs that Mayday struggled with an attacker.

  “Nothing under his fingernails indicating he scratched at an assailant. Little in the way of external antemortem injuries. There was a contusion on his left ear and skull just above the ear, but the contusion doesn’t suggest a blow to the head as much as it does a fall. There was minor bleeding at the wound site, and mixed in with the blood were some chemicals common to asphalt as well as some grease. He was in an alley, after all. That’s a hard, dirty street surface.”

  “He fell and banged the left side of his head on the street.”

  “Yes. Which could happen for any number of reasons. If he struggled to breathe, he could have collapsed. From the fall, I can’t rule out homicide, accident, or natural causes.”

  “Okay…”

  “There was no neck compression, and thus little in the way of petechial hemorrhaging. No tiny blood vessels bursting,” she explains, probably for Rabbit’s benefit, not knowing how much she knows about forensic pathology. She knows that I have more experience with it than I care to admit. “If he strangled him, we’d likely see burst blood vessels in the neck region. We don’t have that.

  “Hand compression—smothering with one’s hand—that didn’t appear to happen here either,” she continues. “The violence done to the nose and mouth would be evident in many ways that are not present here. Lacerations to the nose, lips, gums, tongue. We don’t have that.”

  He didn’t strangle him. He didn’t close Mayday’s mouth and nose by hand. What did he do?

  “Any possibilities, Lia?”

  “One,” she says. “The decedent presented with minor petechial hemorrhages in his eyelids and pericardium, and his head and face were pale—more difficult to detect in an African-American man but nonetheless present.”

  I don’t know what a pericardium is, but I guess I don’t care. I just want the punch line.

  “And I did find very slight trace evidence of polyethylene on his tongue and in his lungs.”

  “What does all this mean, Lia? How did he die?”

  “If this was a homicidal suffocation, and that’s a big if,” says Dr. Janus, “my guess is that the offender wrapped a plastic bag over Mayday’s head.”

  67

  RABBIT AND I look at each other, trying to incorporate what Lia Janus just said into what we’ve learned about Darwin. Could a man in a wheelchair suffocate another man with a plastic bag?

  Yes. If he got him to the ground and
subdued him. That could work. But it wouldn’t be easy.

  “The decedent was a good-size man,” Lia says as if reading my mind. “At presentation, he was over six foot two and weighed two hundred and twenty-one pounds.”

  “And yet no signs of struggle,” I say. “He didn’t put up a fight.”

  “The unexplained puncture wounds,” Rabbit chimes in.

  “Yes,” Dr. Janus agrees. “That’s where the relevance of the puncture wounds on his torso become critical.”

  “He injected Mayday with something,” I say.

  “He didn’t inject chemicals,” Lia says. “The tox screen was clean. No illicit drugs, no paralyzing agents. Nothing that would have rendered the decedent powerless.”

  Just like the tox screen for Nora Connolley in New Orleans.

  “I can think of only one possibility,” says Dr. Janus.

  “What’s that?”

  “A Taser,” she says. “The two puncture wounds are the approximate relative distance apart of two Taser darts.”

  “But—we ruled that out,” I say. “That was the first thing I thought of, long ago. But every cop in every case has said this doesn’t look anything like a Taser wound.”

  Lia draws back, looks over at Officer Ciomek, then at me. “I wasn’t aware of other cases. You think this is another…another serial—”

  “Let’s—let’s just focus on this case, Lia. Why did you think of a Taser?”

  “Well.” She still seems disturbed by my revelation. I’m not ready to go public with my theory tying the Chicago bomber to Darwin and his other crimes. I can’t risk the Bureau shutting down my work.

  Shit, I just screwed up.

  “Well, I’d have to agree—this doesn’t look anything like a Taser wound. For one thing, a Taser dart has a barb on one side, so it can latch on—hook into the skin, so to speak, not terribly different than hooking a fish. And when you remove the barb, the hook, you can’t help but reinjure the skin, even when it’s done in a clinical setting. I see none of that here. These are pinhole punctures, Emmy. These are punctures made by a needle.

  “And Tasers conduct electricity. Bruising aside, we typically see burn marks on the periphery of the external wound. The punctures on our decedent’s torso are not the size of a traditional Taser dart and do not share the same characteristics of a wound caused by a traditional Taser dart.”

  I sit back in my chair and look at Rabbit, who shrugs.

  “But a Taser is the only thing that would make sense,” she continues. “If this was a homicide—if—then the offender wrapped a plastic bag over the decedent’s head or forced plastic wrap over his face while the decedent held perfectly still.”

  “Perfectly still,” I mumble.

  “Perfectly still, or at least not resisting. That’s nearly impossible to imagine unless he was subdued in some way. And if he was subdued by a chemical, I’d have found it. He must have been temporarily paralyzed by a Taser. The offender probably had to stun him more than once.”

  “So he built his own custom-made Taser,” I say.

  “Yes. A taser with darts like needles, no hooks. And something that prevents electrical burning around the wound. My guess—I don’t know, Emmy, I’d be going far out on a limb here with my speculation.”

  But that’s Darwin’s brilliance. Nobody would believe it. Nobody would go that far out on a limb, not even to speculate.

  “Please,” I beg her. “Speculate. I’ll take your best guess.”

  She nods. “My guess is that the end of the dart is a needle, but then it has some kind of stopper that holds the needle in place. And it’s made of some nonconductive material, so it prevents the electrical burn from penetrating the outer skin.”

  “So it won’t look like a Taser-dart injury.”

  Lia waves her hand. “Well, it certainly doesn’t look like a Taser-dart injury. So, yes, in this hypothetical—that would be the offender’s plan.”

  Rabbit puts her face in her hands. I know the feeling.

  “I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to design something like that,” Lia says, “so I couldn’t tell you if it’s even possible. Like I said, I’m well over my skis on this.”

  “But when you’re briefing the FBI later, your best guess is natural causes. COPD.”

  “That’s correct.” She gives me a faint smile. “Why do I have the feeling I’m disappointing you?”

  “No, not at all.” I assure her that the facts are all that matter.

  “Look, if you have information on other deaths, I’d be happy to compare results.”

  “Can we just strike that part from our unofficial record, Lia? I’m not ready to put that out there yet.”

  “Sure, of course. Well, okay.” She claps her hands. “I don’t think this was murder, Emmy—but if it was, this offender is more meticulous and careful than any I’ve ever seen.”

  “Including Graham?” I ask.

  “Graham couldn’t fool a forensic pathologist,” she says. “This guy can. Even if you catch him, you’ll never convict him.”

  68

  I STARE at the grainy image frozen on my screen, at the man in the wheelchair. A wheelchair!

  Nobody would ever suspect a man in a wheelchair of being a serial murderer.

  Even if you catch him, you’ll never convict him. Dr. Lia Janus could be right about that. But I’ll worry about a conviction later.

  The parking-lot video is stopped at the moment when the wheelchair man—Darwin—first enters the picture. He was smart, avoiding the camera until he had no choice, and even at that point he was already turned so that he was captured only briefly in profile before he turned his back and moved down toward Nora Connolley’s car. But the brief profile glimpse isn’t much.

  “Nothing,” Rabbit says, looking over my shoulder at the computer screen. “Between the baseball cap, the wraparound sunglasses, his jacket collar pulled up—”

  “And his face turned away,” I add.

  “Facial recognition won’t have anything to play with. We can’t see his face.”

  And certainly there’s no moon on his face, whatever that might mean.

  I sit back in my chair. “COPD,” I say. “Of all the luck. Mayday has a lung disease that could’ve caused his death.”

  “Is it luck?” Rabbit asks. “Or is it deliberate? Is he picking out victims that way? So the autopsies won’t be conclusive? So there will be an alternative possible cause of death?”

  The thought occurred to me too—that Darwin was choosing people with medical problems that could disguise their murders, even after an autopsy. But I just don’t see it. “Darwin couldn’t have known Mayday had COPD. It doesn’t even seem like Mayday knew it. It hadn’t been treated. He wasn’t receiving medical care. No,” I say, shaking my head, “Mayday wasn’t someone Darwin chose after lengthy research. He didn’t choose him at all. He needed Mayday’s spot across from the payday-loan store to do surveillance before the bombing. And he had to kill Mayday because Mayday had seen Darwin’s face.”

  Rabbit moans in agreement.

  “There’s gotta be something on this video,” I say, trying to recapture the momentum. “What about the wheelchair itself? Anything distinctive?”

  Rabbit hums as she leans forward.

  “We know it’s automated,” I say. “He wasn’t rolling it by hand. The little control thing—the joystick?—must be on the right side, because I can’t see it on the left. Is that unusual?”

  “A right-handed remote? Wouldn’t think so. Actually, I have no idea.”

  Me either. “We can’t tell the color from a black-and-white image. You see anything that looks like a brand-name label on there?”

  She doesn’t. I don’t either. The picture is too grainy.

  “Seems like a nice one,” she says. “It has front and rear wheels. When I had knee-replacement surgery, they put me in a simple two-wheeler that I had to roll myself, and the wheels were skinny. And the seat sure as heck wasn’t leather. This is a four-wheeler, and
those back wheels are thick enough to be bicycle tires.”

  “Okay.” I nod. “So we have a four-wheel, leather, remote-powered wheelchair. And we think he’s local, so—Virginia? Maryland? Everyone in a wheelchair who lives in Virginia or Maryland or the District of Columbia. Who has a moon on his face.”

  Rabbit is silent, unmoving.

  “Am I missing something?” I ask.

  “Hang on.” She leans closer. “What is…that? On the…left arm of the chair.”

  “His arm is on the left arm of the chair. His forearm and elbow—”

  “No, underneath. The arm of the chair. It’s leather.”

  “Yeah, that seems right.” I look closer. I see something too. Something on the leather arm…like…

  “Like a sticker,” Rabbit says. “A bumper sticker. A decal. Zoom in.”

  I do as she asks, but when the camera zooms forward, the image only gets blurrier.

  “Let’s send it to the lab,” I say.

  “Lab, schmab.”

  Rabbit and I both turn around. Eric Pullman looks like a Howdy Doody puppet, his chin perched on the top of his cubicle divider as he peers down at us.

  “Pully,” says Rabbit, “aren’t you supposed to be minding your own business and solving the Citizen David case?”

  His grin is so wide, his eyes practically disappear. “Give me the rest of the day with that image,” he says, “and I’ll tell you what it is.”

  69

  IN ONE of the Bureau’s myriad conference rooms, Dwight Ross, Elizabeth Ashland, and I sit, turned toward the screen on the wall, where Dr. Olympia Janus has just completed her summary.

  Dwight lets out a sigh of disgust. “So, Agent Janus, best guess is natural causes.”

  “Best guess,” Lia says, no longer at the morgue. She’s now at the FBI field office in Chicago, and the image is much better than it was over our Skype call earlier today, but her message is no better, and it’s even more depressing to hear it the second time.

  “But I couldn’t say to a reasonable degree—”