Bury the Lead

16



DR. JANET CARLSON must be the best-looking coroner in the United States. It’s ironic, because she had to have been voted “Least Likely to Hang Out with Dead People” in high school. She’s about five foot four, a hundred and ten pounds in rubber surgical gloves, and at thirty-five years old still looks like every guy’s dream date for the senior prom.

But put a scalpel in her hand, and you don’t want to mess with her.

I once helped Janet’s sister out of a sticky legal situation with her ex-husband, so she owed me a favor. I’ve called in that favor about fifty times since, but she doesn’t seem to mind, so I’m doing it again today.

Janet’s full medical reports on the murders aren’t in yet, or at least they haven’t been turned over to the defense, so I go down to her office to find out what I can. As soon as I arrive she buzzes me in; she almost seems anxious for the company. Maybe because the other ten people hanging out with her are in refrigerated drawers.

“I shouldn’t be talking to you,” she says. “Tucker would tie me to a tree and flog me.”

I close my eyes. “What a great visual . . .”

She laughs. “So what do you want?”

“Information that will clear my client.”

She touches her apron pockets. “Sorry, I left that in my other apron.”

We finish bantering, and she takes me through what her reports will say. “It’s pretty straightforward, Andy. All four women died from manual strangulation, probably with a cloth. Cause of death in each case is asphyxiation.”

“Were they sexually molested?” I ask.

“No.”

I’m surprised to hear this. “Isn’t that unusual, considering they were naked?”

“In my experience, very. And there was no semen found on or near the body, so it’s likely he didn’t masturbate, although two of the bodies were moved. But it’s refreshing, don’t you think, Andy? A prudish sex fiend.”

“If they died from the strangulation, when did he cut off their hands?”

“Postmortem. Very neatly done . . . he took his time. Same thing with the clothes.”

“They found the clothes?”

“Only Linda Padilla’s,” she says. “But I doubt that they were ripped off in any of the cases . . . there would have been some abrasions. I believe he cut them off after the victims were dead, most likely with the same knife he used to cut off the hands.”

“Without passion?” I ask, since she’s making the murders sound almost clinical.

“I would say so. If there was, it’s certainly well hidden.”

I thank Janet and head back to my office. What she had to say is surprising and vaguely disconcerting. I had been having trouble seeing Daniel as a psychopath and was counting on the jury feeling the same way. Janet’s portrayal of the crimes is such that it may not be the work of a psychopath, at all, but rather someone making it look that way. That would make the killer smart, cold, and diabolical, a role Daniel is far more suited to.

On the more positive other hand, if the killer is more calculating than psycho, he would be quite capable of pulling off the frame we are claiming has been perpetrated on Daniel.

Vince is at the office when I arrive, and he starts in on his daily ritual of questioning me about progress in the case. I’ve basically been telling him what I know, for two reasons. First, I cleared it with Daniel, and second, I don’t know anything.

“What do you know about Daniel’s sex life?” I ask.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s a pretty straightforward question, Vince. Is there anything unusual that you know of?”

He’s upset by the question. “Of course not. Come on, Andy, he’s my son.”

“Having your genes is not exactly proof of normalcy.”

“The killer had weird sex stuff going on?” he asks.

“He murdered women, stripped them naked, and cut off their hands,” I say. “There’s a hint of the loony in that, don’t you think?”

Vince believes his role in this is to convince me of Daniel’s innocence. While he’s babbling away about that, I glance at the call list Edna left on my desk. First on the list is Randy Clemens. He called only once, which is not a surprise, since inmates in state prison are allowed to make only one phone call a day. Next to Randy’s name is Edna’s note: “He needs to see you right away.”

I defended Randy Clemens on a charge of armed robbery four and a half years ago. The state had a strong case, but not an airtight one. I came to like him and believe in his innocence. The fact that he’s calling from prison should give you some idea of how successful I was in his defense. After he was sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years, his wife divorced him and took their daughter to California.

It is a source of ongoing pain and guilt that Randy is behind bars, and those feelings are exacerbated every few months, when he calls me with ideas he has thought of for appeal. They never have any merit or prospects for success, and it always falls to me to break that news to him. What he can’t accept, what I have trouble accepting myself, is that his legal game was played out and he lost. No do-overs allowed.

I ask Edna to call the prison and arrange for me to visit Randy on Saturday. I don’t want to go, I never want to go, but I can’t stand the idea of him sitting in his cell, feeling that I’ve abandoned him.

Kevin and Laurie come back for a meeting I’ve called to go over what we’ve learned. I don’t really expect anything to come from these initial efforts; I believe that if there is a motive anywhere to be found, it will be in the Padilla killing. But it’s more likely that there was no motive to any of this other than lunacy, despite the curious tactics the perpetrator used.

Kevin says that he visited with Arnold Simonson, husband of Betty, the grandmother who became the second victim.

“They lived off their Social Security and his disability insurance; he hurt his back while working as a foreman in a carton factory,” Kevin reports. “They were high school sweethearts, married forty-two years, hoping to move to Florida next year. Two grown kids, four grandchildren . . .” Kevin is obviously upset as he recounts this.

“So no apparent motive?” I ask.

“Zero. And I showed him the photos of the other women, but he had never seen them before.”

I nod. My guess is that the only thing we’re gonna find these people have in common is that they were killed by the same person.

“He showed me their family album,” Kevin says. “How anybody could have hurt that woman . . .”

I discuss with Kevin and Laurie what I learned at the coroner’s office, and Kevin makes the very logical suggestion that I should talk to someone with professional insight as to the killer’s state of mind. I make arrangements to do that, then I leave for a meeting with my client.

Laurie heads off to talk with the husband of Nancy Dempsey, the first victim. With that out of the way, we’ll be free to turn our collective focus to Linda Padilla. We need to find proof that the killer is logical, that the crimes had a motive, because only then can we make a credible case that he framed Daniel.