This time I read a page or two, and then I hit this passage: Whatever happens at all happens as it should; thou wilt find this true, if thou shouldst watch narrowly.
I closed the book and put it on the table next to me. I tried to imagine the events at the Sturdevant home a week ago. I wasn't sure what order he did them in, but for the sake of argument I decided he'd taken Sturdevant out first because he'd have presented the greatest danger.
Still, the report of the shotgun would have awakened everybody else. So maybe he'd have gone to the kids' rooms first, working his way down the hallway, moving from one room to the next, stabbing the two boys and the girl in turn.
Then Connie? No, he'd have saved her for last. He'd wash up in the bathroom off the master bedroom.
Let's say he immobilized her, got her husband into the living room at gun- or knife-point, killed him with the shotgun, then went back and did Connie. And raped her while he was at it? Well, I'd found out tomorrow, if you could still detect the presence of semen a week after the fact.
Then a phone call, and then a quick trip through the house to get rid of fingerprints. And, finally, a quick and silent exit through a window, and he was on his way. Five people dead, three of them small children.
A whole family gone because twelve years ago a woman had sworn out a statement against a man who'd forced himself on her.
I thought about Connie. Prostitution isn't necessarily a bad life, not at the level she and Elaine had practiced it, withEast Side apartments and an executive clientele. But she had taken her shot at a much better life, and she'd been living it in the house in Walnut Hills.
Then it ended. And Jesus, the way that it ended…
Whatever happens at all happens as it should. Maybe it would be nice to reach the point where I found that true, but I wasn't there yet.
Perhaps I just wasn't watching narrowly enough.
I got my wake-up call in the morning and checked out after breakfast. At eight sharp I gave my name to the desk officer. He had been told to expect me, and sent me back to Havlicek's office.
He was wearing a gray suit this morning, and another striped tie, this one red and navy. He came out from behind his desk to shake hands and asked me if I'd had coffee. I said I had.
"Then we might as well go see Doc Wohlmuth," he said.
I suppose there are older buildings inMassillon , but in my short time there everything I saw looked to have been built within the past ten years. The hospital was new, its walls bright with fresh pastel shades, its floors antiseptically clean. The pathology department was in the basement. We rode down in a silent elevator and walked the length of a hallway. Havlicek knew the route and I tagged along.
I don't know why, but I expected Doc Wohlmuth to be a cantankerous old bastard a few years past retirement age. He turned out to be around thirty-five, with a mop of streaky blond hair and a receding chin and an open boyish face off a Norman Rockwell cover. He shook hands when Havlicek introduced me, then stood there gamely through a round of the badinage cops and pathologists visit upon one another.
When Havlicek asked him if he'd found traces of semen or any other evidence of recent sexual activity upon the corpse of Cornelia Sturdevant, he didn't mind showing that the question came as a surprise.
"Well, hell," he said. "I didn't know I was supposed to look for it."
"There's a possibility the case is more complicated than it looked at first," I said. "Do you have the body on hand?"
"Sure do."
"Could you check?"
"I don't see why not. She's not going anywhere."
He was halfway to the door when I remembered my conversation with Elaine. "Check for anal as well as vaginal entry," I suggested. He stopped in mid-stride, but he didn't turn around so I don't know what showed on his face.
"Will do," he said.
Tom Havlicek and I sat around waiting for him. Wohlmuth had some family snapshots in a lucite cube on his desk. That inspired Tom to tell me that Harvey Wohlmuth had himself a real sweetheart of a wife. I admired her photograph, and he asked me if I was a family man.
"I used to be," I said. "The marriage didn't last."
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"It was a long time ago. She's remarried, and my boys are pretty much grown. One's in school and the other's in the service."
"You have much contact with them?"
"Not as much as I'd like."
That was a stopper, and the silence hung for a moment before he picked up the ball and talked about his own children, a girl and a boy, both of them in high school. We moved from family to police work, and then we were just a pair of old cops telling stories. We were still at it when Wohlmuth returned, an owlish expression on his face, to tell us that he'd found semen traces in Mrs. Sturdevant's anus.
"Well, you called that," Havlicek said.
Wohlmuth said he hadn't expected to find anything. "There was no evidence of struggle," he said.
"Nothing. No skin particles under her nails, no bruises on her hands or forearms."
Havlicek wanted to know if he could type the sperm and prove that it was or wasn't Sturdevant's.
"It might be possible," Wohlmuth said. "I'm not sure, with all the time that's gone by. We can't do it here, I can tell you that much. What I want to do is send slides and specimens and tissue samples to Booth Memorial inCleveland . They can do a workup beyond what we're capable of here."
"I'll be interested in the results."
"So will I," Wohlmuth said. I asked if there'd been anything else remarkable about the body. He said she appeared to be in good health, which has always struck me as a curious thing to say about a dead person. I asked if he'd spotted any contusions, especially around the rib cage or the thighs.
Havlicek said, "I don't get it, Matt. What would bruises there indicate?"
"Motley had a lot of strength in his hands," I said. "He liked to use his fingers on a spot on the rib cage."
Wohlmuth said he hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary in that respect, but that bruises weren't always that pronounced if the victim died shortly after the injury was inflicted. The injured area didn't discolor a day later in the same way.
"But you could have a look for yourself," he offered. "You want to come see?"
I didn't really, but I dutifully followed him down a hall and through a door into a room as cold as a meat locker, and with a not entirely dissimilar odor to it. He led me to a table where a body lay beneath a sheet of translucent plastic and drew the sheet aside.
It was Connie, all right. I don't know that I'd have recognized her alive, let alone dead, but knowing who she was I was able to see the girl I'd met a few times a dozen years ago. I felt a sickness deep in my gut, not nausea so much as a deep acidic sorrow.
I wanted to look for contusions, but it was hard for me to violate her nakedness with my eyes, and impossible to lay hands on her.
Wohlmuth had no such compunctions, and a good thing, given the line of work he was in. Without ceremony he shunted a breast aside and palpated the sides of the rib cage, and his fingers found something.
"Right here," he said. "See?"
I couldn't see anything. He took my hand and guided my fingers to a spot. She was cold to the touch, of
course, and there was a flaccidity to her flesh. I could see what he'd found; there was a spot where the flesh was softer, less resilient. There wasn't much in the way of discoloration, however.
"And you said the inside of the thigh? Let's have a look. Hmmm.
Here's something. I don't know if it would be a particularly sensitive pressure point for pain. Not an area I've got much expertise in. But there's been some trauma here. You want to see?"