“What else did you notice?” Callahan asked Goode.
“He lives alone,” she said. “He eats like a bachelor. Lots of white flour and white sugar products. Red meat and frozen dinners. Tons of family pictures on the walls, but they’re old ones. Going by the hair and clothing styles, no new photo sessions in at least two decades. He reads Louis L’Amour and Tom Clancy. Sinks were dry when we arrived. No one appears to have cleaned up their bloody hands at them. Hand towels are hanging neatly in place along with bath towels. Same with the kitchen towels.”
“What’s the room temperature?” Seth asked as he pulled out the thermometer.
“Sixty-five degrees,” said Goode.
No heating vents blew directly on the body. Seth did some fast math in his head. “I’ll estimate ten to seven hours ago for your time of death. I can narrow that with the lab work. Got all his front photos?” he asked the tech, who nodded. “Help me roll him onto his side.”
The two men shoved and pulled to balance Lorenzo on his side. Seth did a quick scan of Lorenzo’s back. The tech backed up and snapped more photos of the purpling back tissue. Seth pressed a gloved thumb against the darkened skin. “Livor mortis is fixed.” No surprises there based on his time-of-death estimate. The back had no stab wounds.
Seth leaned over the body, distracted by the colored plastic in the corpse’s ear. A hearing aid? The color was awfully bright… and the shape was wrong. He reached out with the end of his ballpoint pen to carefully move some of the blood-stained hair out of the way. And froze.
His pen matched the color of the plastic in the man’s ear.
“Is that—”
“Yes, I think that was a pen.” Callahan bent beside Seth. “I was looking at that. Looks like he jammed a pen in his ear and then stomped on it to drive it in farther.”
“Holy crap.” Seth was speechless.
His ears suddenly ached.
“Someone was angry,” he muttered.
Callahan raised a brow at him. “No kidding. This killer would be a profiler’s dream. They’d be itching to dissect his brain.”
“It’s so different from the girls,” Seth commented. “That scene was peaceful, almost otherworldly. This is simply brutal. I’d have a hard time believing they were committed by the same person.”
“It might simply be someone with two distinct killing motives. Two different reasons and rationales,” said Callahan. “I’m not disregarding any theories.”
This was a hard, stark scene out of a gore-fest film. The girls in Forest Park belonged in an ethereal fantasy movie, misty and soft.
“This isn’t the result of a botched robbery,” said Callahan grimly. “Lorenzo Cavallo was murdered deliberately and with a lot of anger. Whether or not it’s tied to our girls remains to be seen. But considering he offered insight into the old crime yesterday, I have to consider that someone wasn’t happy that he’d volunteered information.” He pointed at the pen fragments in the old man’s ear. “That’s punishment.”
“Symbolic, maybe?” Lusco mused.
“Probably not,” answered Callahan. “I think it would have been in his mouth if symbolic. As if to shut him up for speaking out. Still, I want that pen when you’re done with it, doctor.”
“Not a problem,” stated Seth. He’d removed odd objects from corpses before. Lightbulbs, kitchen gadgets, and workbench tools. But the crushed pen in the ear was the first of its kind. He stood and heard his right knee pop. As usual. He pulled off his vinyl gloves and set them on the body to keep any evidence with the corpse.
He’d be seeing the man again in a more intimate setting.
Victoria was in her office, typing her notes about the second skeleton, when her email popped up. Noticing it was from Detective Lusco, she immediately opened it and found herself face-to-face with an image of a young woman from another generation. Excitement bubbled inside of her. Did they have a lead on one of the old remains?
She slowly read the email, fighting the urge to rush through it. Italian heritage, age twenty. A brother had reported his sister missing yesterday morning. Why had he waited so long? She continued to read Lusco’s notes. The brother had consented to a DNA comparison. She scrolled back to the photo and stared at the familiar crooked smile.
She smiled and sent a text to Lacey to meet in her office.
Victoria clicked on her file of lab photos from the three women, and scrolled until she found the teeth views. She studied the upper front teeth carefully in each photo, stopped at the teeth photo of the third skull, and enlarged the shot on her screen.
“Hey, whatcha got?” Lacey breezed in through the open door, a light of curiosity in her eyes. She knew Victoria wouldn’t have messaged if she didn’t have something good to see.
Victoria arranged the police photo side by side with the photo Lacey had taken of the teeth yesterday, and pushed back from her screen with a flourish. “What do you think?”
The blonde dentist leaned over, resting her hands on the desk as she studied Victoria’s screen. Victoria waited impatiently and watched Lacey’s eyes flick back and forth between the two photos. Lacey’s smile started on one side of her mouth and spread rapidly to the other. “Oh, nice! Where’d you get this old head shot?”
“Lusco and Callahan had someone bring it in yesterday, wondering if one of the women from the old scene could be his sister. He gave a DNA sample, too.”
“Excellent. Look how the central incisors overlap.” Lacey pulled a dental probe out of her lab coat pocket and held it up to the lovely woman’s photo, eyed the angle, and then moved it to the lab’s image of the teeth. “The angle and amount of overlap are identical. I’ll get a tooth to the lab so they can grind it and extract the DNA for comparison. But I think we’ve got a great start to figuring out if this is his sister.” She grinned at Victoria, who couldn’t help returning the infectious smile. “I’d hoped to identify this skull. When I was charting the teeth, I knew this overlap would be recognizable to the right person. I wish everyone had as easily identifiable teeth in photos.”
Victoria nodded. To her, most people’s teeth always looked about the same. But this woman’s were rather distinctive.
“What’s her name?” Lacey asked.
Victoria felt a small stab of guilt. She’d breezed right over the name, moving on to the photo in the email. She clicked back to Lusco’s letter. “Lucia Cavallo. She was Italian.”
“Pretty.” Lacey tilted her head as she studied the screen.
Victoria looked at Lucia’s eyes, startlingly similar to her own brown, and wondered what had happened in the girl’s life that’d brought her to a group death in the quiet woods. Had she chosen the death? Or had she been murdered?
So far, none of the skeletons showed trauma. No nicks on bones from knives nor broken hyoids from strangulation. No gunshots in the skulls. Overall, they were a clean group of women. Two skeletons had well-healed breaks and all were of a normal size, no evidence of malnutrition or disease.
These should have been women who’d gone on to raise families and live normal lives. Not end it on the forest floor.
“Let’s go check her out again.” Lacey straightened and looked to Victoria.
Victoria recognized the focus in her eyes and the tilt of the jaw. Lacey was a woman on a mission to find answers. Victoria suspected she often appeared the same way. It was the facial expression that made cops move out of her way and techs listen carefully to what she had to say. She followed Lacey to her lab.
The women didn’t talk as they strode down the halls. Lacey wasn’t prone to useless chatter, and Victoria liked that about her. The two focused on work when they were together, and had found they fostered a similar drive for finding answers. When she’d first met Lacey Campbell, she’d immediately misjudged the dentist to be a blonde bimbo. It’d been a reflexive action. The blonde hair and brown eyes had reminded her of Seth’s wife.
Lacey wasn’t like that. She was honest, direct, and sharp, with a high level of sensitivity and a bit too much fondness for cats. She didn’t seem as intimidated by Victoria as some of her coworkers. They’d discovered they shared an interest in Edwardian English history before it became a trend and a love of Greek food, and both owned television’s single season of Firefly and mourned its cancellation.
Lacey was the closest thing she had to a tight female friend. Didn’t most women have hordes of close friends and run in packs? Victoria had always been the type to have a few intimate friends, usually male. Right now that list included only her neighbor, Jeremy. He knew more about her than anyone.
Except for Seth. Even though they hadn’t been around each other in years, he looked at her as if he knew all her private thoughts. He’d always been that way. He’d always been able to read her perfectly. She thought she’d mastered a mask to hide the thoughts in her head, but it’d fallen away when Seth looked at her in the woods.
Her ex-husband, Rory, said she always wore a fa?ade. He claimed he never knew how she was feeling or what she was thinking. She’d said she’d let him know if she was upset, but it wasn’t enough. To him, she never looked happy, and he took that as a failing on his part.
What a bunch of bull.
Her happiness didn’t rely on her husband’s actions. And just because she didn’t walk around being ecstatic, it didn’t mean she was unhappy. He didn’t seem to understand that a person can function in the space between happy and unhappy. That space offered a level of calm and balance. It held an evenness, a place of moderation that allowed her to do her job and go home to forget some of the horrors she’d experienced that day. Some people might drink to forget or seek relief; she preferred to simply exist and accept it.
Rory wanted to party. When they’d first met, he was a breath of fresh air. A stimulant to the life of books and studying and old bones. Rory was fun and outgoing and made her feel important. She fell under the popular college professor of English’s spell and married him ten months after they’d met.
Then reality struck. Their oil and water didn’t blend. She’d thought she could bring him down to earth, and he’d thought she would lighten up. Deep down, they’d both hoped for a bit of change in themselves and believed the other person could make it happen. Their five-year marriage ended two years ago.
She’d learned a lesson. An obvious facts-of-life lesson. You can’t change a person.
You can only change yourself.
“So, how’ve you been getting along with Seth?”
Victoria fought to not break her stride. “What?”
“Dr. Rutledge. How is it to be working in the same building with him after all these years?” Lacey tried to give an innocent making-conversation look but failed miserably.
“It’s fine.”
“Fine? That’s all you’re going to tell me? You haven’t seen him in eons, and all you can say is it’s fine?” Lacey shot her a sideways look. “Sparks blaze when you two are in the same room. It’s distracting when I’m trying to chart teeth.”
“Sparks?”
“Denying it?”
Victoria felt ambushed. Her mind went into protection mode, and she kept her mouth shut.
Sparks?
Lacey pushed open the door to the lab and headed straight to the shelf with number three’s remains. The first skeleton was laid out on a table. Lacey set box number three on a table and removed the lid. “I don’t know your history with Dr. Rutledge, but there are a lot of rumors circulating. Why don’t you talk about it so people will stop speculating?”
“It’s none of their business.”
“That’s true. Is it an ugly past?”
“It’s also none of your business,” Victoria said pertly.
Lacey grinned. “You need to talk to someone. Your eyes go all puppy-dog when he walks in the room. I swear you’re about to melt when you look at him.”
“They do not.” Victoria stared at her in shock. Puppy-dog? Her?
“How’d you meet?”
“We met in college.”
“And?”
“We dated in college. We broke up.”
Lacey had a disappointed look. “Why did you break up?”
Victoria fumbled for the right words. “It’s a long story.” She ran a hand over her hair.
The dentist sighed. “I get that. And it’s safe to share with me. I won’t abuse it.”
Victoria studied Lacey’s face. She was serious. Everything she knew about Lacey Campbell told her she could trust her with innermost secrets. Victoria simply didn’t know how to get the words out. She didn’t know how to confide in another woman. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last woman she’d admitted a secret to. Her mother? Her roommate in college?
“He dumped me,” she blurted out. “He dumped me for another woman he’d gotten pregnant. She was an old girlfriend who he’d believed had a baby with another guy. Turns out he was the father, and she didn’t tell him until Eden was seven months old.”
Lacey’s mouth opened slightly. “How shitty for you.”
“Tell me about it.”
“You were dating when he got the news he was a father?”
“Yes. We’d been talking of living together. I really believed there was a future there.”
“You were in love with him,” she stated.
Victoria held her gaze. “Deeply.”
Sympathy flashed in Lacey’s eyes, and Victoria cringed. She hated pity from someone she respected.
“You haven’t seen him since then?”
Victoria pressed her lips together and moved her gaze to the box with the 3 on it.
“Oh. You have! What happened?”
“I’m sorry, Lacey, but—”
“It’s okay. You can hold off on that part. For now.”
Victoria looked at her. “Thank you.”
“I’ll expect details later.” Lacey smiled warmly at her. “I’m impressed you shared as much as you did. I know it wasn’t easy for you. And that was a really crappy thing to have happen to you at that age. To be a college student and believe the world is showing you a nice neat, happy path, and the most important person in your life drops a boulder in your way.”
“Exactly.”
“I suspect you bounced back nicely. You’re kind of like me. I brush off my knees, cry silently inside, and push on, hoping no one saw me trip. Then I promise not to let anyone hurt me that way again. But another man comes along and you open yourself up to be mauled again.”
Victoria winced, thinking of her ex-husband.
“You risk getting hurt, but it just takes the right person to make it worth it.” A dreamy look entered Lacey’s eyes. “The first time I saw Jack, I knew he was special. There’s that sense of everything clicking into place, you know? You feel the world shift slightly as it adjusts to lay out your new path with the right man.”
Victoria froze. It’d been that way with Seth. Each time. When she’d first seen him at school, when they crossed paths at that conference, and again the other night. So why was the universe being so difficult?
“It’s okay to admit you’ve had your heart broken. Most people have, a time or two. It acknowledges that you are human. Some of us like to think we’re superhuman, but we’re not. We bleed. Whether it’s from a vein or the pain in our heart that no one can see.” Lacey gently lifted the skull from the box and smiled at the empty face. “Ohh. I think this is definitely our girl. Let me see the picture.”
Victoria turned to the lab computer, thankful for something to do to get out of Lacey’s spotlight. Lacey had a point. Why did she pretend she wasn’t human? Victoria pulled up the image from her email.
Lacey held the skull next to the image. Even Victoria could see the odd front teeth matched. Her gaze went to the eyes and brow ridges of the woman in the photo and then back to the skull. Yes, she could see Lucia in the skull. The DNA tests would make the final call.
Lacey set the skull back in the box. “So pretty,” she said softly. “You haven’t done a full work-up on this one yet?” she asked Victoria.
She shook her head. “Just some prelim photos and a quick look. I knew when I saw the photo of those teeth that I’d seen them before.”
Lacey studied the contents of the box. “There’s so much I don’t know. I can’t see what to look for in a bone. It reminds me of the first time I looked at dental X-rays. All I saw was a weird image in black and white. Now I can judge at a glance what’s going on in an X-ray.”
“Well, that’s why bones are my job, not yours. Go back to school if you want to learn more.”
“I’d rather keep watching you.”
“Armchair anthropology?”
Lacey lifted out the pelvic girdle and turned it over in her hands, studying the elegant structure. “Why not? You’ll show me the important parts, right? Skip all the boring book-learning stuff,” she said with a wink.
“And you can show me how to drill decay out of a tooth. I don’t need to learn all the technical parts, right?”
“Touché.” Lacey smiled.
Victoria smiled in satisfaction. “I’ll let the detectives know we have a preliminary match.”
Two more to go.