“Damn it, Michael,” I said—yet I continued to speak very quietly. “We’ve been in worse places, after all. Let’s find the girl and do what we came to do.”
Mike nodded, trying to join in my effort to assume a more professional demeanor; and our steps did begin to fall a little faster, as we steadily concerned ourselves less with the overall condition of the trailer’s interior and fixed instead on that last room, where we would finally find the object of our inquiry:
Her presence was not immediately evident. The room was typically large, for one located at the end of such a structure: three exterior walls stood on either side of and facing the doorway, so that the chamber took up the full breadth and remaining length of the trailer. Ancient, curling pictures—some cut from the pages of magazines and depicting ideally formed young men and women, but some far more interesting digital snapshots of a girl surrounded by various groups of boys, in differing places but always happy poses—still clung bravely to the unpapered surfaces of the walls, while the floor was now covered with the kind of thick, near-colorless carpet that I had expected to find throughout the place. But this was the extent of the room’s details; and as we took the space in, Mike shot me a slightly puzzled look. I think that we had both expected to find a body crumpled in a corner, perhaps with some methamphetamine paraphernalia nearby, if local rumors were to be believed; but no such predictable spectacle awaited us. We soon realized, however, that the work lights were not trained on the room proper, but on some nearby, partially obscured remove: a closet, in fact, its frame obstructed by a folding particle board partition that had been covered with a plastic veneer patterned after a dark wood grain.
Mike saw her first; and I am not too proud to admit that this was because I hesitated to look within the closet, at the spot where the two beams of the small work lights met in a fashion more suggestive of an alcove in some hellish place of worship than a mobile-home hiding place. But when Mike groaned, quietly and mournfully, I could avert my eyes no more.
“Jesus, Trajan,” Mike said softly. “A ‘throwaway child,’ all right—she could be their damned poster child…”
Shelby Capamagio was not crumpled on the floor after all, but was upright, her two arms secured just below the elbow with duct tape to the wooden bars on either side of the closet so that her toes brushed the floor. She was clothed only in her bra and panties, the latter torn, though not violently; indeed, they seemed more cut than torn. Above all, she displayed the particular delicacy and vulnerability of an adolescent that precociousness can sometimes disguise in life, but that always becomes sadly plain again in death. Her otherwise very pretty face was marked by just a few blemishes that might or might not have been signals of meth use, but the remainder of her body was not, nor had it in fact been violated by the trailer’s other occupants. Thus her unspoiled, slightly translucent skin was free to warmly feed some of the illumination of the lights back into the room. Her blond hair, fashionably cut just below her shoulders, had been artificially colored, if the sandier roots near her scalp were any indication; and the open, downcast blue eyes, although beset by heavy bags of exhaustion, along with her mouth, which seemed on the verge of speaking, continued to convey much of the innocence that one should find in the face of any child her age, as well as of the fearful disillusionment that had evidently marked the last minutes—or perhaps days and weeks—of her life.
Indeed, so pitiable yet riveting an impression did her face and body convey that it took both Mike and me an instant to realize the very worst aspect of the image: a length of bright yellow, quarter-inch nylon cord was looped tightly around her neck. The apparently fatal ligature was tied into the infamous double constrictor, or strangler, knot, which bit into the side of her neck, its tightening length leading up to and around her right hand.
“Okay,” Mike whispered, swallowing hard and moving closer to her. “Let’s see what we’ve actually got…”
I kept alongside him, glancing around at the walls again and then back at Shelby. “Quite the brassy girl, for around here” was my immediate impression.
“Yeah?” Mike said, as he set his kit down and opened it. “What makes you say that?”
“A few things,” I answered, wishing for all the world that I could tear off my jacket and cover the dead girl; but I knew that we could best serve her, now, by being analytical rather than emotional. “The coloring and styling of her hair was no cheap job. Almost certainly not local—fairly recent, too: the roots have barely grown out. And the bra and panties—that’s not normal teenage gear, that looks like fairly high-end merchandise. Then there are these pictures on the walls: she’s always with boys, only boys, and lots of them, going back at least two or three years. Not a female friend in sight. Yet she’s plainly no tomboy. By Burgoyne County standards, that’s all pretty precocious behavior…”
Mike had begun dusting for and lifting fingerprints, and as he did, he moved ever more into his own examinatory mode, beginning to see Shelby’s body as a corpse and her death scene as a puzzle to be solved. This, again, was not insensitivity: he simply believed, as much as I did, that a solution to the apparent crime was our only way to honor the girl. “Okay,” he began. “So we start at the beginning—with what Weaver and Curtis have said: murder with the possibility of sexual assault. And, if we take what you’re saying into account, maybe she just met the wrong guy, while she was being so precocious. Pretty common. Or maybe when she got back from out West, she met up with somebody who wasn’t so glad to see her.”
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“Meaning that somebody seems to have known where she lived. Because you’re not describing a girl who would come back to this shithole, which she apparently hated—very understandably—just because it was an available place to hook up. And remember what Steve said: she stayed up in her relatives’ equipment shed, instead of coming back here, after the rest of the family disappeared.”
“That,” I mused, “could simply have been because the utilities here had been shut off…”
I turned to step ever closer to Shelby, and to gaze into that peculiar look that occupied her face and eyes. When people die, facial expressions can come over them for any number of reasons, pain, terror, and the relief that death often brings from such traumas being only a few (if common ones). But this girl, who we had been told was strangled and perhaps violated, bore no such look. Of course I knew that eyes, for their part, are notoriously poor indicators of a person’s state at death: once again, popular entertainment has told us that people violently killed die with their eyes wide open, while those who die peacefully die with a more relaxed position of the lids, even to the point of their being fully closed. But Shelby’s partially hooded blue eyes were nonetheless eloquent, it seemed to me; indeed, the more I studied her features, the more the innocence that I had at first seen there seemed to me to be augmented only by sadness and resignation. And as I peered into that not yet completely vacant blue gaze, I tried to see if I could divine something even more specific. “She can’t have been dead long,” I said quietly, losing myself still further as I went on studying Shelby’s features. “And there’s something in the face…something that does not fit…”
Just how long I stood in that position before I again heard Mike’s voice I couldn’t say; but at length his somewhat alarmed repetition of my name did break through: “Trajan…? Trajan! Come on back, dude, you’re doing it again, goddamn it.”
“Doing what?” I answered, never breaking my gaze.
“Your whole ‘Sorcerer of Death’ routine,” my partner answered. “Seriously, we don’t have time for it.”
Mike was referring to a ridiculous nickname given to me by a typically sensationalist headline in the New York Post about seven years earlier. We had, at the time, just concluded a case in which we’d gone completely against the thinking of the NYPD and its crime lab, and in the process divined the correct solution to a string of upscale robbery-murders. Having embarrassed the powers that were, we had nat
urally burnished our growing reputations among the tabloid press; little did we suspect, however, that such popularity was only increasing the determination of the mayor and the police commissioner to banish us from the city, and that those same tabloids would follow suit, once the public mood had swung.
“No,” I said, finally backing away from the closet again. “Perhaps we don’t.”
“You fucking freak…” From the corner of my eye, I saw Mike shake his head with a chuckle as he moved to grab an extremely high resolution camera from his kit, after which he began to study and photograph the closet around young Shelby, looking for any likely spots that might turn up well-hidden hairs, fibers, or any of the other especially discreet traces that most techs like Curtis Kolmback could be relied on to miss, but that my partner was quite expert at detecting; and when the camera’s flash revealed them, he quickly lifted them from their hiding places with strips of wide, clear tape. “How can you not know when you’re doing it, that’s what gets me…” He paused, using a pair of magnifying eyeglasses to gently examine a spot on Shelby’s right arm. “Hunh,” he noised. “Skin doesn’t look to me like it’s been exposed to a lot of sunshine—like southwestern sunshine, for instance—and that’s her hitching arm.”
“Her what?”
“Well, if she hitchhiked out West, or even took a bus, that’d be the arm that was most often exposed while she was riding. But—pretty pale…” He glanced up at me. “Well? Have you come out of your trance enough to actually contribute something to the conversation, here?”
“Right,” I replied, shaking myself a bit and finally looking away from Shelby. “So the obvious answer is just what Weaver said: death by strangulation, with the possibility of sexual assault. But I don’t like it, for the reasons we just stated, among others. First of all, they’re presuming that at some point she, too, had gotten into meth. Which would open a lot of possibilities for murder, I admit, but—there’s nothing about her to suggest it.”
“Meaning…?” Mike said, collecting more specimens and sealing them away in bags and tubes.
“Well, besides the fact that Steve says he can’t find any link between her and the drug—”
“A purely preliminary estimate,” Mike cut in, checking me.
“All right, but look at the physical evidence—her face, and her teeth in particular. Does she look like the usual meth head? The destructive physical effects of the drug start pretty quickly—and she’s awfully healthy looking.” I returned to study Shelby’s face. “There are a few adolescent blemishes, all carefully covered by either makeup or medication, and a certain amount of petechiae”—the tiny red hemorrhages that appear as faint dots on the face during strangulation—“but otherwise, nothing. And the skin on the rest of her body’s in even better shape.”
“Well,” Mike argued, “I have picked up one or two traces of a crystalline powder, here and there.”
“But you can’t just assume it’s crystal meth.”
Mike looked slightly irritated. “No. I can’t. All I’m saying is—”
“All you’re saying is we don’t know, but that what physical evidence we are presented with speaks against the drug-abuse aspect to her case.”
“Yeah. I guess.” Having conceded the point, Mike moved back to his kit, to open the second of its two large compartments. “What about the assault angle, then?”
I shook my head, glancing again at the lower portion of Shelby’s body, but looking away quickly, with a kind of reluctance I would never have felt around an adult in her position. “I’m not buying that right away, either,” I said. “Those panties weren’t violently ripped, for my money. The tear is almost…gentle. If it wasn’t a knife, I’d say—human teeth, carefully applied.”
“Okay.” Mike returned from his kit with a familiar, boxy piece of equipment and a tripod. “But that could have been a fetish of the murderer’s: tormenting her with a slow, careful cut or tear once she’d been restrained.”
“It could,” I said with a nod. “Or it could not. And I’m betting not, unless you see some sign of sexual activity on the tear that I don’t.”
“Nope,” Mike conceded. “And let’s face it, sex, any sex, is always a little messy.”
“Not a universal truth—the killer may have had a particular fetish about tidiness, and prepared accordingly. Yet if it was rape, as Weaver and Curtis are saying, and if I’m reading this girl right, then she would have put up some kind of a struggle. So what you say is almost certainly the case. All right: so for now, we don’t buy the sexual assault—”
“I don’t know,” Mike cut in. “I’m not sure we have enough to rule it out.”
“I said for now. Ultimately the pathologist will have to determine that, anyway. What about the m.o. of the supposed murder?”
Mike puffed himself up a bit. “That’s why I got this baby out.” He pointed to the boxy piece of equipment, which we proceeded to place on the fully extended tripod. Handing me a metallic tray that was about a foot square in size, he said, “Hold the exposure plate, will you? Right behind the profile of her neck…”
It was Mike’s habit to be ever on the lookout for new technological methods of advancing the cause of physical evidence that would not be apparent to others in the field—perhaps because he was, as he so often reminded me, himself a doctor. And we were now holding the components of one such device, which we’d used many times in the past. A gambler by habit (and perhaps, as I sometimes taunted him, by heritage), Mike had grown fascinated by just how quickly and precisely the injuries suffered by horses at racetracks could be determined; and he had discovered that veterinary medicine had for quite some time been using and perfecting mobile X-ray units. This only made sense: while it’s always been easy to bring one’s cat or dog to a veterinary clinic for such exams, large animals present a different problem—the clinic, in effect, must come to them, hence the development of the portable X-ray units. Law enforcement and the military had been known to use such gear to determine, say, the existence and entry angles of bullets in background materials—wooden walls and the like—as well as for the examination of such threats as improvised explosive devices; but when it came to dead bodies, X-rays and other forms of exams were left up to pathologists, once the body had been brought to them. And that, to Mike, was just the problem: the bodies had already been moved, and the story of just how the victim had died perhaps altered in the process. So, borrowing a page from his acquaintances at New York’s various racetracks, Mike had purchased a portable X-ray unit—and gained one of the advantages that had created our “magical” reputation.
Mike stated his reason for putting that advantage to use in the Capamagio trailer with a succinctness that belied the thought and research that had gone into determining it: “I just don’t like the angle of that neck,” he murmured. “And by the time she gets to the pathologist, I’m a little concerned that rigor won’t keep it in place, anymore. God knows Weaver’s idiots won’t be careful to, whenever they bother to get here and move her.”
“What’s bothering you about it?” I asked, moving closer again with the exposure plate and placing it on the side of Shelby’s neck opposite the imager that Mike was positioning.
“Well,” Mike began, “that strangler knot is on the side of her neck; and that means that somebody was pulling pretty hard on it, to achieve the necessary force. Now, it’s been looped around the end of her hand to make it look like it was her, but that’s bullshit, because she couldn’t have maintained the amount of force required to constrict the throat sufficiently to kill herself in the way that’s indicated—especially with her arms restrained in that position.”
“No,” I said, “but the killer could have, and then bound her in the closet afterwards.”
“Why the hell would he have done that?” Mike asked. “He must have known that even an idiot like Kolmback, hell, even Weaver, would be able to see it wasn’t suicide.”
“All right,” I tried again, “what about cerebral ischemia? She tightens
the knot to the point where it cuts off the carotids just enough to starve the brain, then dies slowly.”
“How about if we just let her neck tell us how she actually died,” Mike answered, pleased to be able to lecture me. “Because, even if it was ischemia, I still don’t think she could have done it, taped up like that; and besides, her body doesn’t indicate much trace of your idea. In those cases, there’s usually some involuntary, violent struggling—but her hands and feet, especially the nails, are clear of any sign that she clawed or kicked at anything. So are the walls and carpet. Now, the killer could have done it, but the lack of fighting-back trace goes for skin, too. And besides, the same question comes up all over again, on that: why? Why does the guy slowly deprive her brain of oxygen, when he didn’t rape her, or so we think, and then string her up like this?”
“He panicked,” I answered. “Or, if he was devious, then he would have known that adding as many contradictory elements as possible would work in his favor by confusing the cops—and anybody else they brought in. Which it did, in Kolmback’s case.”
“Yeah, but a strangler knot?” Mike said. “If he was that smart, he would have known—and, more importantly, he would have known that any investigator would have known—that she could have held on, maybe, until she passed out, but that’s it: the release of her pulling force would have locked the knot in a non-cataclysmic position. She might have been brain-damaged and died hours later, but her neck says it was all at once. It doesn’t work.”
If it appears that my partner and I had been taking turns ruling out not only the ME’s and Curtis’ ideas, but each other’s, as well, such was actually the heart of our investigative method, of which I had spoken upon entering the trailer. Modern law enforcement agencies—again, contrary to whatever impressions have been created by popular entertainment—had used forensic science to reinforce their traditional habit of most energetically pursuing whatever suspects and theories for a given crime either came most readily to hand or, more importantly, were those that they most favored. Mike and I, on the other hand, had gone farther back in history to find a philosophical framework (simplified Hegelian dialectical reasoning, with its thesis-antithesis-synthesis framework) that would allow us to question all conclusions, including and most especially our own, almost as quickly as we came upon them, and to keep questioning them until we could find no opposing theory that worked. This seemed to some a complex intellectual system, but it was in fact a relatively simple process (although we kept that fact to ourselves); and using it, we were able to proceed with our analyses at a pace that was perhaps surprising, and to reach agreements that were far more independent, and therefore more reliable, than law enforcement’s reliance on what amounted to confirmation bias.