“Daniel Mersa’s father. There’s been no mention of him.” I sense the direction the roads are moving in, all headed to the same source at the center of such cruelty.
“Sperm bank,” Benton says. “His mother’s always claimed she doesn’t know who the biological father is and you have to ask how she afforded therapy, college, studying abroad. Veronica Mersa is a former beauty queen, never married, was a secretary for a New Hampshire congressman who only recently retired from politics. She wasn’t paid a lot and had no other income. She has never seemed to hurt for money.”
“I’m not uploading anything to CODIS or any other database until I know it’s safe.” I’m adamant about that. “We’ll do any comparisons in my labs and I’m going to ask for a familial search to look for first-order relatives, siblings or parent-child relationships. If Daniel’s related to someone and we’ve got that individual’s DNA, we’re going to figure it out.”
“It would explain it,” Benton says. “It would explain a lot of things. And Granby might have pulled it off if you’d let Geist have his way and decide Gabriela Lagos’s death was an accident.”
“There’s no question it wasn’t. There should never have been a question.”
“Show me how you know the killer used both hands. I need to see it for myself. I’ve got to be able to say it in no uncertain terms.”
I touch the glass tabletop where her autopsy report and photographs are side by side.
43
“Medical history: none.” I read what Dr. Geist reported about Gabriela Lagos on his autopsy protocol. He included some facts and omitted other ones.
“No history of seizures, fainting, cardiac problems, nothing, and suddenly she takes a bath and dies at age thirty-seven. Negative for drugs that were screened for, and the alcohol present in her blood was due to decomposition.” I show Benton what’s on the four-page document, going over the displayed image of it projected on the table. “White froth in her nose, mouth, and airway because it wasn’t possible to disguise the fact that she was a drowning.”
Benton gets up from his chair and walks into the PIT, where Gabriela’s bathroom and her decomposing body are all around him, their projected light and dark shapes reflected on his face as he seats himself at the small table, what Lucy calls the cockpit. The wireless keyboard and mouse allow him to reorient whatever he wants, moving the scene as if he’s moving through it, and the tub with the body, roll to the right and in closer, a little jerky at first until he gets warmed up.
I can see her long brown hair splayed over the stagnant surface of the cloudy water, and drifting nearby is a black elastic band with a shiny black bow that held her hair up and out of the way before she was drowned. A white mask smears the outer layer of skin that has slipped, her frog-like face bright red from the chin down because that’s how she was submerged after the tub was drained and refilled with hot tap water. Dr. Geist omitted that important fact, too. He failed to record the pale areas of exposed flesh above the surface of the water, the upper face, the tops of the wrists, while the rest of the body was scalded red.
“Had the water been scalding hot when she was being drowned,” I explain to Benton, “every inch of her upper body and head would have had full-thickness burns. And that’s a critical piece of information because it indicates the water got hotter after she was dead, and that alone tells me homicide.”
“I’ve never understood froth.” Benton clicks the mouse and Gabriela’s face suddenly looms larger, blown up by the gases of decomposition, her eyes bulging as if in horror. “People are underwater and the froth is still there. Why doesn’t it wash away?” He moves an arrow to the white foam between her protruding lips, pointing it out.
“It seems stubborn because it’s not really just between her lips,” I reply. “When someone is drowning and gasping violently froth builds up like dense soap suds in the lungs, the trachea. That’s where most of it is and what you’re seeing is leaking out of her mouth. It doesn’t wash away because there’s a lot of it and Dr. Geist knew he couldn’t say she didn’t drown. He knew her body wouldn’t let him get away with that lie. The best he could do was decide it was an accident.”
I walk over to where Benton is standing and as I look at her again I’m reminded why I felt the way I did at the time and drove to the funeral home in northern Virginia. While the contusions aren’t easy to discern because of the condition she’s in, they are there, dark red areas, some slightly abraded, on her right cheek and jaw, her right hip, and on both hands and elbows. Small fingertip bruises are scattered over both ankles and lower legs, with wider, more indistinct bruises behind her knees.
“It would take two hands to leave those bruises on her ankles, and two hands were used, not big hands like Martin’s hands, and that’s the other thing,” I tell Benton. “These circular bruises from fingertips pressing into the tissue of her lower legs and ankles are small.” I hold up my hands. “Not much bigger than mine. Someone held her firmly, grabbing her ankles with his hands and yanking up, hooking her lower legs in the bend of his arms, causing the bruises behind her knees.”
I show him.
“Now she’s held by her lower legs tightly against his chest and her upper body is completely underwater. The other bruises on her hip, hands, elbows, and face are from her thrashing and striking the sides of the tub. It would have been violent, with water splashing everywhere, knocking candles onto the floor and in the water, and then in minutes it was over.”
“I can see how that wouldn’t work if one arm was in a cast,” Benton says.
“Martin couldn’t have done it but I think he watched. Sitting on the closed toilet lid, his big feet on the white mat, where he’d probably sat for most of his life through every hellish episode of her forcing him to be an audience to her seductive bathing,” I explain. “You can’t blame him for wanting her dead, wanting to be free of her, but he wouldn’t have anticipated what it was like to actually witness such a thing.”
I imagine him wide-eyed, paralyzed and shocked as he watched his mother cruelly and horribly die before his eyes. Once it started he couldn’t have stopped it and he may have wanted it but he didn’t.
“It would have been appallingly awful,” I say to Benton. “I can promise you her son couldn’t have imagined how awful it would be.”
“He wouldn’t have enjoyed it,” Benton says. “Martin Lagos wasn’t a sociopath and he wasn’t a sadist. And he didn’t need to constantly overload his senses with the next huge thrill, in this case a kill thrill.”
“I wonder what size shoe Daniel Mersa wears.” And I envision the young man and the elephant in the photograph.
I feel a change in the air as the door behind us opens and light from the corridor makes the room brighter. Lucy walks in holding a sheet of paper and she looks really happy, the kind of happy she gets when she’s about to nail someone or pay them back in a way that’s lasting.
“Granby and his troops are here,” she says. “By the security desk. I said they had to wait and you’d be right out. The computer is wrapped up and ready to go. Ron has it and I’ve signed off on the paperwork, all set for you to do the honors of receipting it. There’s a lot more to go through but we’ve got everything backed up and they don’t know that. Carin and Janet are upstairs.”
“Good,” I reply.
Lucy glances at her phone and when she looks at me she smiles, then she hands the sheet of paper to Benton. “Well?” she asks him.
“I was getting to it,” he says.
“He has bad news that’s good news,” Lucy tells me cheerfully.