Freezing Read online

  ‘Sky?’ She looked at the man Eric was pulling to his feet. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were in an accident in my van? Huh?’

  The man she was addressing was spitting dirt out of his mouth, his face red with anger and exertion. His hair was pale next to the red of his forehead and the veins of his neck were twitching above the collar of his NASCAR logo T-shirt. ‘Shut up! For once, woman, shut your trap.’ He spat once more, directing the spittle to the wall of the house but some of it flew toward the woman.

  She ran to him, got on tiptoe, and slapped him hard across the face. He reared back into Eric, who instinctively shoved him forward.

  ‘Bitch!’ The man tried to kick out with his legs but she was too quick for him and was running inside the house, shouting that he would find his things on the front lawn.

  ‘Enough!’ Scott’s voice was authoritative and the man stopped struggling in Eric’s hold but he still looked angry. ‘What’s your name?’ Scott demanded.

  The man focused on Scott. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot and when he spoke, the ripe smell of alcohol wafted into the air. ‘Sky Horton.’

  ‘You got any aliases, Mr Horton?’

  The man shook his head.

  ‘What about time inside? We’re going to check on that, so you may as well speak up instead of looking like you’re trying to hide something.’

  This set the man off but now his tone was aggrieved. ‘Listen, I know I should have reported it but I don’t have the money to pay the damages and it isn’t even my van. It’s not like I hurt anyone for Chrissakes!’

  Eric spoke. ‘Should have reported what?’

  ‘The accident.’ The man tried to twist to see Eric’s face. ‘That’s why you’re here, right? Did the City call you?’

  ‘Tell us what happened.’

  ‘I backed into the traffic light, OK?’ He looked at Scott. ‘It was a tight turn and I was in a hurry. I didn’t even realize the thing was there until I hit it and the light came down with a God-awful crash. I almost swore it moved while I was turning!’ He tried to twist again.

  The agents locked eyes, then Scott spoke. ‘Mr Horton, we’re going to need you to accompany us to our office for questioning.’

  ‘I’m owning up to it, man! I’ll pay the City! Can we work something out?’

  ‘Right now,’ replied Eric, ‘you’re looking at a charge of assaulting an identified Federal Agent and that’s just for starters. We’ll cover the rest of this at our office once we’ve examined the van. Move forward.’

  SEVEN

  Tony Lee had brought out the torso and Jayne was finding it more frustrating than the leg. Whoever had made the cuts had aimed just below the ribcage but just above the pelvis, avoiding cutting through bone even on the spine, where the cuts had been squeezed in between vertebrae. The flesh didn’t yield any clues; no scars, no tattoos, no perimortem bruising. When Tony turned it over, there were some moles and beauty marks on the back, along with some hair towards the base, but not enough secondary sex characteristics to even start a sex determination. Tony photographed everything before turning on the fluoroscope.

  On X-ray, the epiphyses of the vertebrae were clearly fused.

  ‘OK, fusion puts this one easily over seventeen and more likely over twenty-five,’ said Steelie. ‘So we’re still at an MNI of one.’

  ‘MNI,’ Tony repeated. ‘Minimum number of individuals?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jayne answered. ‘So far, you can’t say you have more than one person here but I suspect that the leg’s a youngster, while the torso’s over twenty-five. But let’s move on to the next bag before we make grand pronouncements.’

  Jayne caught Steelie’s look and knew what it meant: there wasn’t enough information yet for them to reliably compare these body parts with any 32/1 profiles.

  Tony was switching over the gurneys and unzipping the third body bag. It was the left arm and hand. Here, the cut was above the humeral head, allowing a careful disarticulation of the shoulder joint.

  ‘If the person who cut this nicked anything, it would have been the scapula. The humerus itself looks unscathed,’ commented Steelie.

  Jayne asked, ‘You notice how much cleaner these cuts are than the other parts we’ve seen so far?’

  ‘Want a photo of that?’ asked Tony.

  ‘You read my mind.’ Jayne stepped back to give him room at the gurney’s edge.

  Next was the fluoroscopy. The humeral head looked small on the screen, female. But Steelie and Jayne wanted a better estimate and asked Tony for a shot of it so they could measure it with calipers.

  In pulling the fluoroscope down the length of the arm, they had to stop twice to take shots of old, healed fractures. One mid-shaft on the humerus, the other close to the wrist on the ulna.

  ‘Defense wounds?’ asked Tony, as he typed in a label for the second shot.

  ‘Looks like it,’ replied Jayne.

  ‘The ulna’s got a classic parry fracture.’ Steelie demonstrated the defensive pose by holding one arm out diagonally in front of her chest, and then her face, trying to imitate the position the ulna would have been in when hit. ‘Nasty.’

  ‘Badly healed, too,’ said Jayne.

  Tony looked at the hand with its chipped burgundy nail polish. ‘Are you thinking this is a different person to the leg and torso?’

  ‘Well, all the epiphyses of the arm bones are fully united, so we’re looking at someone older than their mid-twenties,’ began Steelie. ‘Plus, those sunspots on the forearm suggest an older person. We might be able to narrow it down by looking at the structure of the bone on the X-ray prints you give us.’

  ‘Which isn’t something we do all that often,’ added Jayne. ‘Usually, we deal with X-rays taken at a known age and don’t need to examine internal structures.’

  ‘But since we don’t have much to go on with this material, we’ll try everything we can,’ Steelie rounded out.

  ‘OK. Want to move on to the other arm?’ He looked at her expectantly, one hand on the gurney.

  ‘Sure.’

  As Tony switched the gurneys for the last time, Jayne felt deflated. They weren’t getting very far. All the parts appeared to be female, all had pale skin, all were post-pubescent and therefore it was more difficult to discriminate between them, especially within the parameters of their non-invasive examination. Body parts that might give a clear indication of age, like the pelvis or the teeth, were not in this batch. Jayne felt her hopes for an identification of any of the victims fading. She suddenly felt weighed down by her lead vest. She shifted it and stretched her back uncomfortably.

  Tony was moving as though he wasn’t wearing a lead vest, exposing the right arm in the body bag with efficient movements. The arm lay slightly sideways in the bag so he moved it parallel to the edges of the gurney. His gloved hand momentarily supported the fingers with their polished nails and Jayne had a sudden, violent image of a dead woman being led in a waltz. She looked at the ceiling to banish the image from her mind, causing her mask to pull on the skin under her cheeks. This brought her back to reality. She was mildly tired from this kind of concentration and the standing, and the cold was getting to her. Gruesome images fed on her fatigue, she knew that already. Just one more body part, she told herself.

  She looked down when she thought Tony had photographed the arm from every angle. It was a right arm and appeared, superficially, to be the match for the left arm they had just examined. Tony drew the fluoroscope down along the severed limb, pausing briefly to take a shot of the small humeral head. Then the fluoroscope’s lens resumed its journey, Tony carefully keeping it in line with the arm, and Jayne’s mind began to drift on to where they’d get the reference material to improve the age estimate for both humerii.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  Steelie’s exclamation made Tony freeze and Jayne jump. She looked at Steelie, who was staring at the fluoroscope screen. Jayne immediately followed her lead. And there it was, the thing the killer couldn’t have known about – unless
he had an X-ray machine.

  The surgical plate was screwed into the humerus at about midshaft. It would have been applied by a surgeon, could have an identifying number, and might just lead an investigator to that surgeon’s patient records. Surgical plate as homing pigeon, Jayne thought, and then immediately realized they wouldn’t find this woman’s identity in the Agency’s files. They didn’t have a single client who had reported a missing woman with a plate in an arm, nor had they received any X-rays that showed plates on examination. But it was the first real lead on the identity of this woman and thus the first real lead on her killer.

  Tony was looking at the screen. ‘I guess this is a good thing?’

  Steelie’s voice sounded excited. ‘You just got yourself a lead, Tony.’

  Eric walked into his office and sat down heavily at his desk. Scott looked at him, eyebrows raised.

  Eric shook his head.

  ‘Everything checked out?’ Scott asked.

  ‘Yeah. The City confirms that well after our van got hit on the freeway yesterday morning, someone put a traffic light out of commission at Winnetka and Hatteras. They had traces of white paint on the light post and had just started searching for the vehicle that did the damage. The Critters have examined the Redding woman’s van. No suspect biological traces, no work on the van besides the body work on the back doors.’ He looked at Scott. ‘What did you get from Redding on interview?’

  ‘She alibied him, under caution, for the time the van we’re looking for was hit on the freeway. And given how mad she is at him, I think it’s a safe bet she wouldn’t cover for him if he wasn’t actually there.’

  ‘So we’re back to square one.’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  Eric looked interested.

  ‘Let’s expand your body shop theory. We started with the ones that have handled hot cars but if it’s our perp from Georgia, he doesn’t know which shop to go to out here in California, does he? He picks whatever is convenient from the freeway and figures that, with enough incentive, he can keep the shop quiet.’ Scott pulled a printout closer to him. ‘I’ve got twelve more body shops we can check in that radius you set up around the accident site. There’s hope for your gold star yet.’

  Eric had stood up to scan the list over Scott’s shoulder when someone knocked on their open door. Weiss was waiting for their attention.

  ‘Heard you guys were in the building. Thought you should get this from Thirty-two One direct.’

  At his summons, Jayne and Steelie appeared, the latter carrying a toolbox. Eric gestured for her to take his empty chair while everyone greeted each other.

  ‘You found something?’ Scott asked.

  Jayne announced, ‘There’s a surgical plate in one of the arms.’

  Neither agent reacted at first. Then Eric put the question. ‘What does that mean for the case? Do you know who she is?’

  Steelie smiled. ‘We don’t know but you’re probably gonna know. Tony’s working on it now, up in your lab.’

  Jayne explained, ‘If the plate is batch-stamped or coded in any way, and you add that it’s screwed into the right humerus of a woman between the ages of twenty-five and forty, say, then you guys are about as close as you’re going to get to a shortlist of people who had this procedure done off of that batch of plates.’

  ‘You’ll notice there are a couple of ifs in that statement, though,’ cautioned Steelie.

  ‘And there’s another way we can search, right?’ Eric commented. ‘Using the National Crime Information Center database, we could generate a shortlist of all missing women in that age range with a plate in the right arm.’

  ‘That, too,’ agreed Jayne.

  ‘If she’s been reported missing,’ countered Steelie. ‘And if the person who reported her knew about her surgery or put the cops on to the medical records, and if the records then actually got uploaded into NCIC. And we know that doesn’t always fly.’

  Scott looked thoughtful. ‘Was there a scar? Like, from when she had surgery to put the plate in?’

  Steelie smacked her forehead lightly and turned to stare at Jayne. ‘Of course! We got so carried away by the plate, we forgot about the scar. Of course there’s a scar.’

  ‘So,’ Eric concluded. ‘We can do a simple search on “scar, upper right arm” and forget about the person who put in the misper report knowing what kind of surgery or accident led to the scar?’

  Jayne commented to Steelie, ‘And you always had a low opinion of these law enforcement types.’

  Scott rocked back in his chair and grinned at Eric before saying to Jayne, ‘He just wants the gold star I promised him.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Is that what they taught you at Quantico? Carrot and stick?’

  He paused, locking eyes with her, then said, ‘Well, you’ve been there—’

  Steelie cut in. ‘No, we were only there for a week giving our two cents on NCIC Two Thousand. At the time, your main object of study appeared to be a beer bottle.’

  Scott dragged his eyes away from Jayne to respond to Steelie. ‘Then you wouldn’t know that the Bureau stalwarts who teach us think the only place for a carrot is in a side salad – shredded.’

  ‘And even then, it’s suspicious,’ Eric added.

  Scott grinned at him. ‘Plenty of stick around, though.’ He stood up. ‘And we should escort you out before our boss comes in here wielding his.’

  EIGHT

  Jayne went into the Agency’s laboratory to put away the biometric equipment they’d used to measure the X-ray images Tony Lee had printed at Critter Central. Steelie was booting up the lab computer. After it whirred to life and executed a few beeps, she said, ‘Check it out. Our first message via the All Coroners Bulletin. From a coroner in Anchorage about Thomas Cullen.’

  Jayne pulled up a stool and read the couple of paragraphs, whose font was all capitals. Then she translated, ‘The coroner’s saying that they have a John Doe with a projectile in the sphenoid but they have his cause of death down as GSW with that bullet as the projectile that caused death? So . . . they don’t think it’s Cullen but they’re notifying us as a courtesy?’

  Steelie nodded. ‘Looks like they ascribed the bullet to a more recent gunshot, not an old bullet that was sitting in his head for years.’

  Jayne pushed back from the desk and frowned. ‘But how could they confuse the two?’

  Steelie shrugged. ‘Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it’s not Thomas Cullen but rather some guy who actually died from shooting himself the same way.’

  Jayne looked back at the coroner’s message. ‘It’s a decent match on the identifiers though . . . Caucasoid male, forty years plus or minus five, five-foot-nine plus or minus two, dark brown head hair, eyes brown, picked up in nineteen ninety-eight . . .’

  ‘So he’s a forty-year-old white guy with brown hair and eyes, no known scars, marks or tattoos. No wonder they’ve never had any hits in NCIC; there’s almost nothing there to discriminate between him and thousands of other missing men. Doesn’t mean it’s Cullen, that’s all I’m saying. They could be right and it’s a different guy.’

  ‘Send them another message.’

  ‘I’m going to. I will encourage them, in polite language, to compare any X-rays they’ve got with the one we digitized. They haven’t done that yet.’

  Jayne got up. ‘OK, I’m going to write up the report on the BP’s for Scott and Eric. Let me know if you hear anything.’

  By the time Steelie came to Jayne’s office, she was tidying the papers on her desk at the end of the day.

  ‘Did you get an acknowledgment from Tony on our report?’

  ‘Yes and he said he’d make sure Scott and Eric saw it when they got back.’

  ‘Which was when?’

  ‘God knows.’

  Steelie perched on the edge of the desk. ‘So where are you meeting Gene tonight?’

  ‘They put him up at the Omni—’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’

  ‘His company, I guess. So I’m
picking him up—’

  ‘He doesn’t have a rental?’

  ‘No . . .’ She waited for Steelie to interrupt again but she didn’t. ‘And we’re going to eat in Little Tokyo.’

  ‘Which restaurant?’

  Jayne stopped pulling the papers together. ‘I don’t know. We agreed to walk around, see what takes our fancy. If you’re so curious, why don’t you come too?’

  Steelie gave a little shudder. ‘I hear your cry for help and yet I am not moved.’ She went out the door, then stuck her head back around it. ‘But call me when you get home afterwards.’

  Jayne nodded. She finished at her desk, closed up the building, and left. At home, she changed clothes and put on mascara and lip gloss, realizing that the last time she’d seen Gene, they’d been at Kigali Airport in Rwanda almost a decade earlier. She’d still had a pair of well-used leather gloves sticking out of the back pocket of her cargo pants even though she and Steelie were leaving the mission in a matter of hours. He’d been wearing dusty boots, on his way to UN HQ, staying in the mission for another six months as he’d joined the team late, on loan from the FBI Lab. She belatedly wondered if she’d recognize him now and was glad he’d suggested the rear entrance of the hotel, which was quieter and he’d be easier to spot. Glancing at her watch, she picked up her bag and went out to her truck, making a mental note to stop by the Home Depot eventually to purchase new plants for her porch. She would have to do more than just sweep up the mess of broken pottery left by bumbling critters the night before.

  The traffic on Sunset was still heavy but the evening’s milder temperatures were layering in and Jayne drove with the windows down, listening to an Oscar Peterson compilation but not minding hearing music from nearby cars as they idled next to each other along the boulevard. Keeping to surface streets, she turned right on Grand, passed the new cathedral, and made her way to Olive, starting the descent toward the heart of Downtown.

  She pulled into the Omni Hotel’s curved driveway, its facade looming skyward, dwarfing the people gathered at the curb. A young valet made eye contact with her, raising his hand interrogatively but she shook her head as she drove past him slowly, scanning faces. When she had made the full circuit of the driveway, she pulled to the curb in front of a taxi and twisted in her seat to look for Gene out the back window. Just then, her passenger door swung open and a man dressed entirely in beige leapt in beside her as she pulled her bag to safety.