“Out here?”
“He spends a lot of time out here, she says, especially in the summer. Again, I get the impression he’s enough of a snot to alienate the other kids on the street, so he’d kick around in here by himself. Mom only knows two of his friends and called both last night and this afternoon, but they gave the usual know-nothing answers.”
“So he comes out here to sulk and winds up freezing to death?” Rachael often left the house to walk off a snit, but had better sense than to die of exposure. At least Theresa hoped so. Sense did not seem to be hardwired into the teenage brain.
“That, we’re not so sure of. Come on, follow me.”
The trees should have protected them from the icy wind, but somehow it didn’t feel like that. Snow had slipped into Theresa’s shoes and melted. The air smelled of cold, and trees, even without their leaves, muffled the hum of traffic on I-71. Slush and dead twigs snapped under their feet. “Sort of a path” described it pretty well, since it left room for single-file movement only. A lone officer guarded the body. He stamped his feet, and Theresa hoped he wouldn’t stamp them on anything important.
At his feet sat a dead, frozen boy.
Jacob Wheeler wore a heavy Timberland jacket but, like many stubborn teenage boys, no hat or scarf. His arms were crossed over his chest with his hands under his armpits, his knees drawn up almost to his chin, his feet in scuffed work boots. Unkempt brown hair covered his ears and part of his face, but Theresa noted thin lips and high cheekbones, plus a few assorted body piercings. His eyes were closed. The pockets of his coat had been turned out and the contents set on a blank sheet of notebook paper.
Theresa sighed, her exhaled breath briefly but clearly visible. “Too mad to go home, he stays out here to get good and miserable first so he could think of himself as a victim.”
“Take a look at his head,” Frank told her.
She stepped closer, keeping her feet on the path of already-trampled prints. The boy had his chin down, tucked into the shelter of his chest and knees, the top of his head exposed. A drop of blood had dried at the hairline of his right temple.
Theresa retreated, found a safe spot for her crime scene kit, and turned the camera on. Then she approached the body again, Don close behind her.
After she photographed the body, she sacrificed her two pairs of warm gloves for latex ones and parted the boy’s hair with her fingers. The blood had trickled from a cut to his scalp, about an inch long but not terribly deep. The area had begun to bruise. “It hardly seems enough to kill him.”
“Victims don’t usually sit meekly by and let someone slug them either,” Don said. “I’ll bet he got in a fight and then came here to think it over. Perhaps it disoriented him enough that he sat down to rest and never got up again.”
Frank added, “There are two shoe prints up the trail and more around the back of this tree that the cops swear aren’t theirs, so the scuffle could have occurred here. It’s not a convenient place to dump a body, and he’s one-forty if he’s a pound, so I can’t see someone lugging him all the way in here just to get rid of him. But the guy must have walked back toward Park Road and not the ballpark, unless he could fly. Then Mom and the cops and you and I obliterated his prints. We haven’t looked at the boy’s shoes yet. We were waiting for you.”
Theresa crouched next to Don and poked at the meager belongings removed from the boy’s pockets. Jacob had carried his wallet with two dollars and fifty-three cents in it, an iPod, and a spring-loaded knife in excellent condition. “So he met someone out here?”
“His dealer, I’ll bet,” Frank said. “No matter what Mom says, no doubt this kid had some connections. He tries to stiff the guy-no pun intended-or they disagree on terms.”
Don suggested, “A girlfriend? She took her purse to his head when he tried to get friskier than she was in the mood for?”
Theresa shook her head. “Not unless she carries a brick in her purse. What about his two friends? I assume you’ve sent a car to their homes?”
Frank nodded. “It’s kind of weird if you think about it.”
“What is? I mean, aside from a teenager freezing to death five hundred feet from his house?”
“This is the second frozen body we’ve found in as many weeks, and both sitting up against something. Usually our frozen people are in cars or apartments where the heat was turned off or something, not usually completely outside.” No one in Cleveland took the weather that casually, not even murderers.
“She was a black thirty-year-old hooker, and she was strangled. This is a white high school student with a bump on his head. Not too many similarities there. Speaking of his bump, any sign of a weapon?”
“We’re surrounded by them,” Frank said.
She looked around. The open spaces between tree trunks bulged with fallen limbs, twigs, and dirt, all melting into the same shade of white-topped brown. Snow penetrated the canopy in inconsistent patches, making it impossible to tell what might have been recently disturbed, whether a piece of wood had been flung in from the path or had been lying there since the previous fall. They would canvass, but a needle in a haystack would be a breeze by comparison. She got on the other side of the boy and motioned to Don. “Let’s turn him. I want to get a look at his shoes.”
The boy wore Nikes with a standard waffle pattern. Stepping gingerly, Theresa noted that the prints farther up the trail matched his down to a worn spot on the right toe, as if he had continued along the path for a few feet and then stopped. Had his attacker called out to him? Then he’d turned back, because he knew who it was.
The print to the right of the tree, however, consisted of plain tread lines crossing the foot, almost like Keds or some other lightweight wear. It certainly didn’t belong to the victim or any of the large men surrounding her now. “What did the mother do when she found the body?”
Frank said, “Screamed, touched his face, and checked his neck for a pulse-as if his subzero temperature didn’t tip her off-and ran back to her house to call 911.”
“That’s all?”
“I asked her three times.”
The print looked too large for the mother, anyway. “We’re going to have to cast that.”
“In snow?” Don asked. “I thought that was, like, nearly impossible.”
“Just about. But after my last experience with shoe prints I didn’t lift, I’m not taking any chances.” Casting compound generated heat as it hardened, which, obviously, had a deleterious effect on prints in snow. Some precasting sprays provided limited help. But forensic scientists didn’t get to create their scenes; they could only work with what they were given. “I’ll get the tripod and the shutter remote for the camera.”
Theresa and Don examined Jacob’s bedroom with its worn orange carpeting but found only a few Ecstasy tablets and one well-smoked marijuana roach. A few violent drawings accompanied his sporadic note taking during classes, but no letters or journals turned up and only a few phone numbers, which Frank would run down. Jacob had apparently spent his days playing video games, reading comic books, and not listening to his mother.