“Have you seen any graffiti or markings like it before?”
He’s quiet for a few seconds. “Can’t say that I have. Maybe. Is it important?”
“Just covering bases. Would you think of a symbol like that as a cult thing?”
“Oh, I don’t know. But it’s odd finding something like that near a dead body.”
I agree.
“Thanks, Captain.”
“You bet. And, Ronnie, you did a good job out there today.”
“Thanks, Captain,” she says. Her cheeks are pink. I hand her phone back.
“You did good today,” I add.
It doesn’t thrill her as much.
I’m thinking about the light sticks. There would be no chance of fingerprints or anything else and I doubt if Captain Marvel protected them as evidence. He would have told me.
Ten
Ronnie is sitting in the visitor’s chair by my desk. Even though she isn’t a detective, she witnessed everything that I had seen today. “Find an unoccupied desk. You need to type up your report before you go home.”
“But you have a secretary. Can’t I just send the audio file of Boyd’s statement to Nan?”
I almost laugh. Nan? I’d like to see that. Actually I wouldn’t. I don’t want Nan in on the little details. Some things are not meant to be leaked. Nan is like a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
“You should type it yourself,” I say. “And don’t talk about any of this with anyone. That means you give your finished report to either me or the sheriff. No one else unless you get permission.”
Nan chimes in from around the corner. “I’ll be happy to type the statement, Ronnie.”
She has sonar-like hearing.
Nan has never offered to type anything for me. Half the time she doesn’t even tell me when I’ve had a call. Of course, I’ve never asked her to type anything because she’s the queen of gossip. “We’ve got it, Nan. Thanks.”
“Anything else?” Ronnie asks.
I’m thinking of her skill in researching on the Internet. “Start out with the date and time we got the case, when we arrived, who we talked to, and what you did at the scene. You can get our dispatch and arrival time from our dispatcher.”
I give her the number.
“But I really didn’t do much besides take Boyd’s statement,” she says.
“That’s not true. You were a big help.”
Now write a big report. I hope to keep her busy and out of my hair.
“Okay.” She gets up and looks around for a computer. “I’ll have to call Roy and find out when he and Deputy Floyd arrived.”
Roy? “You don’t need that in your report. The captain will do his own report.” She just stands there. I don’t have time to hold her hand. “When you’re finished, let me read it before we give it to the sheriff. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I pick up the desk phone and start to dial Jerry Larsen’s number. Ronnie is trying to get my attention.
“What?”
“What time do I get off today?”
We get off when I say we get off.
“Whenever your shift is over, you can leave. If it’s important, you can leave whenever.”
Deputy Marsh is not going to make it as a detective. She may not make it as a deputy. But that is her problem. I didn’t want to take her on this morning and my gut feelings on her were right on target. Her shift ended an hour ago, but I would have thought she’d show a little interest in this. She sulks off and I get on the phone and call Larsen.
No answer.
I finish my report and collect what Ronnie has typed up. It’s actually pretty concise; I have to give her that. We have to wait for Crime Scene’s report. They will be working on it for a while. Crime Scene will run the victim’s fingerprints through our database and IAFIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System—the national fingerprint and criminal history system kept by the FBI. I have a thought just then. Maybe she isn’t in IAFIS or the local and state database. If she commits a crime that is minor enough, some jurisdictions don’t enter fingerprints. In Jefferson County, if we arrest someone for a minor vandalism, for instance, we don’t require the suspect’s prints be put in any database. We keep them in our records, but that’s as far as it goes.
I check a few things on the missing persons database and get nowhere. I tell Ronnie she can go home, and she bolts. I check in with Sheriff Gray. He’s playing solitaire on his computer.
“I want to catch you up.”
“Do you have a suspect?”
“No.”
“Have you identified the victim?”
“No.”
“Have you done everything you can for the night?”
“Yes.”
“Go home and leave me to my solitary pursuits.”
I smile politely at his pun and head for home thinking I should have asked Ronnie to get a drink with me. On the other hand I was hoping that I’d seen the last of her. If Sheriff Gray sees us getting close, he will keep us paired.
Not going to happen.
Eleven
I sit, engine running, in front of my place in Port Townsend, lost in thought. The thing about being a detective is that you never stop detecting. You don’t write a traffic citation or make an arrest and then go home knowing tomorrow will be different. What’s on my mind is the preliminary coroner’s report. He faxed it over, but I need to clarify what he found. Her hand was broken. There were scrape marks on the wrist and bruising on the heel of her right hand. The trapezium and metacarpal bones were dislocated. The metacarpals are the bones in the palm of the hand, which the fingers are connected to, and the trapezium is the bone that connects the thumb’s metacarpal to the wrist. He said my hunch about handcuffs was the most likely cause. She had pulled or tried to pull her hand out of one of the cuffs. The bruising down the side of the hand, from wrist to little finger, indicated she was successful. As if that weren’t enough, the metacarpals of both hands were broken, and half-moon-shaped bruising suggested someone stomped on them. He also saw scuff marks on the backs of both elbows. He didn’t touch them but indicated it in his preliminary for the pathologist to confirm. To him it looked like she’d crawled on elbows and knees across a rough surface. He didn’t see fiber but didn’t rule it out.
I figure this is punishment for trying to get out of the handcuffs. He stomped both hands to be sure she wouldn’t be able to do it again. She crawled on her elbows because her hands were broken. A pathologist can determine how long ago the bones were broken. That may give me an idea how long she was held captive and possibly when she was murdered. Jerry Larsen isn’t a forensic pathologist. He doesn’t cut the bodies up to see what made them stop ticking. But he has spent more than half of his sixty years of age doing the job, and with that he’s developed some damn fine instincts. Still, I need to talk to Dr. Andrade.
Crime Scene wouldn’t have collected a rape kit. That will be Andrade’s job in the morning. The rape kit is important for DNA, but the turnaround time for DNA testing and comparison is weeks. The sheriff can request the rape kit be expedited, but it will only tell me if the victim had sex and not with whom. DNA may do that. I know what the crime lab will say. They are always backed up and busy.