Chapter 7
Detective Bart Romanski, head of the Crime Scene Unit at CBI, puffed his way up to the top of the trail, doubling over and gasping in the thin air as the cabin finally came into view.
He had given up all semblance of pretending to be in shape about two miles back.
He was skinny as a rail and always had been.
Nothing to do except be proud of it. Plus, this was a tough hike.
It was a good thing the body and evidence would be choppered out.
Romanski’s crime scene detectives followed behind him.
The first CSA—-a forensic specialist in trace chemistry, fibers, and miscellaneous evidence—-was a new hire, a ball--capped redhead named Aisling Byrne, still too green and nervous to laugh at his jokes.
She was accompanied by the crime scene photographer, Tyrone Harris, and a third CSA, a DNA specialist named Michael Reno.
As Romanski stopped to catch his breath, Harris bumped against Aisling behind him. “Whoops,” he said, grinning.
Aisling giggled.
Waiting a beat, he joined them at the perimeter and dropped his pack with relief.
“People, time to dress for the party.” He pulled crime scene packages out of his pack and handed them out to the CSAs.
They didn’t need full monkey suits—-apparently, the scene wasn’t a bloodbath.
Disappointing. Romanski loved a bit of gore.
Romanski scowled as he saw Cash step out of the cabin with the sheriff and duck under the yellow tape to join them. He liked the gal, but she was always barging into his damn crime scenes. Her face, tinged with freckles, was sunburned, auburn hair pulled back in a bun.
Colcord ambled after her with his usual swagger, blue eyes hidden in the shade of a cowboy hat.
“Cash,” Romanski said, “may I ask what you were doing in my crime scene?”
“Don’t worry—-all we did was eat some sandwiches as we walked around, dropping crumbs and touching everything.” Cash grinned and gave Romanski her hand. “Damn, you’re all sweaty.”
“And you’re red,” Romanski said. “Didn’t have a hat?”
“No, I didn’t have a goddamned hat.” Cash frowned. Her eyes flickered to Colcord and back to Romanski. “Is it bad?”
“Like a ripe tomato.”
Colcord coughed, hiding a smile behind his fist.
As they spoke, Dr. Chris Huizinga, CBI’s chief medical examiner, glided up the hill with his technician Saanvi Gupta. Romanski noted that Huizinga, not a blond hair out of place on his aggravatingly handsome head, had barely broken a sweat.
Huizinga laid his pack on the ground, adjusting black--rimmed glasses perched on an elegant nose. He turned to Cash and plucked a squeeze bottle of Coppertone out of his breast pocket. “Agent Cash, you’re rather red. You want some sun cream?”
Colcord chuckled loudly.
“If it’ll shut everyone up, then fine.” Cash snatched the squeeze bottle and began to smear her face.
“Not to interrupt whatever this is about,” Huizinga said, “but can we get to the briefing?”
Cash got to summarizing the victim, background, murder scene, and basic facts. When she finished, Harris, following protocol, disappeared into the cabin to photograph while the rest waited. Around twenty minutes later, he reappeared, looking a little jumpy.
“All right, follow me,” he said.
Romanski and Huizinga ducked under the tape, followed by the two CSAs.
Harris led them on the path he had delineated through the crime scene, Romanski picking his way among weird constructions and miscellaneous junk.
He paused to admire a fish sculpture, with scales of colored glass held together with soldered foil.
It was incredible what people threw away these days.
The sculptures he had seen on his way here had been remarkably original works of art.
Without electricity, Grooms must have used an acetylene and oxy setup.
He wondered if the man had lugged all this stuff out here.
A lot of the sculptures had been made from old mining equipment that he must have found abandoned in the area.
Romanski stepped around Aisling, who had knelt and was collecting trace evidence with tweezers. Reno followed him into the kitchen, DNA swab kit in hand.
There Willy Grooms lay on the slab of a kitchen table, body bathed in the dappled sunlight reflecting off the water, looking disturbingly peaceful and almost alive.
Romanski took a whiff of air. There was a peculiar smell that he couldn’t quite place.
He and his team remained in the doorway while Huizinga went over to the body. He circled it like a predator, crouching low and sniffing like a dog.
“Jesus, why don’t you buy the guy a drink first?” Romanski said.
Huizinga ignored him. They had been working together ever since Eagle County had replaced the coroner system with trained medical examiners from CBI.
The new ME system was a huge improvement over an elected, and usually ignorant, coroner.
Huizinga was both an MD and forensic pathologist, a fact he loved mentioning in a faux self--deprecating manner.
He definitely knew what he was doing, but he could be a pompous ass and had no tact, was terrible at expressing sympathy to the families of victims. He also had a strange sense of humor.
Romanski watched as the ME checked for a pulse and respiration.
“Definitely dead,” he said as if it wasn’t obvious.
Or maybe he was attempting a joke. “The deceased looks to be in exceedingly fresh condition. I won’t be able to tell the exact time of death until a thorough autopsy.
” He lifted one of Willy’s arms and dropped it with a sickening thud back on the table.
He examined the wrists and ankles, pausing to examine the bloody right foot.
He then poked one of Willy’s cheeks, nose as close as possible to the dead body without actually touching it. “He’s unusually pink, plump, and firm.”
“You sure he’s dead? You wouldn’t want to pull another Angelo Hays,” Romanski said.
Huizinga raised an eyebrow in silent query.
“You know, Angelo Hays? Buried alive in the 1930s?”
“Well, he certainly won’t be alive after the autopsy I’ll be performing.”
Typical Huizinga humor, Romanski thought.
Resuming his inspection, Huizinga nudged his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose with one gloved finger. “I note,” he said, “that the victim was shaved postmortem. There are razor nicks that did not bleed. They must have cleaned up the hair and taken it with them. How odd.”
Reno now appeared, surgical mask covering up his big handlebar mustache, swabbing samples around the body.
“It looks like the eyes might be missing,” Romanski said. “Can you, ah, lift the coins to check?”
Huizinga lifted a silver dollar with his gloved fingers. “Yes, this one is indeed gone.” He gently lowered the coin back in place.
“And the foot?” Romanski asked. “You see that?”
“Indeed I do,” said Huizinga. “We shall certainly be looking at that with a CAT scan back in the lab.”
Romanski rubbed his hands together. This crime scene was getting interesting.
The curiously bloodless wounds—-aside from the foot—-the missing eyes, the posed and dressed corpse, and the postmortem shaving.
It had the markings of a serial killer, and a demented one at that.
He couldn’t wait to get this stuff back to the lab and start putting the puzzle together.
“Think this could have been the Neanders?” Cash asked from the doorway, arms crossed.
“Very unlikely,” said Huizinga. “The modus operandi is too different. I hesitate to draw conclusions until I perform an autopsy. But …” Instead of finishing the thought, he grasped the hem of the lace garment Willy was dressed in, drawing it up to expose the old man’s naked body.
Romanski winced. “I did not need the full monty.”
Huizinga ignored Romanski and leaned in and sniffed at two strange holes, one above, and the other to the right of Willy’s belly button.
“Any idea of cause of death?” Cash asked.
Huizinga didn’t answer right away. He took out a magnifying loupe and examined two odd lacerations at the base of the corpse’s neck and the two marks near the belly button.
Then he straightened up and tucked away the loupe and looked around, an odd expression on his face.
“This corpse has been embalmed,” he said.
Romanski stared. Of course—-that’s why the smell had been familiar: It was formalin.
“You can see,” Huizinga went on, “these two incisions in the neck. One is to the carotid artery, where the embalming fluid was pumped in, and the other to the jugular vein, where the drain tube carried the blood out.”
Romanski peered more closely, fascinated.
“Now I would direct your attention to the hemorrhaging and ecchymosis evident around those incisions, as well as the petechiae here, around the umbilicus, where a trocar was used to pump out the cavity fluid and replace it with preservative.”
Huizinga now had everyone’s undivided attention.
“This indicates the victim was alive when this commenced. If he were conscious—-and I believe he was, due to abrasions on the wrists that suggest restraint—-it must have been terrifying. And painful.” He paused. “What I believe we are dealing with here is murder … by embalmment.”