“Why are you wasting your time with this?” Mobley said. “From what I hear, Outlaw hasn’t got anything that’s going to help Cade beat this Duvall thing. I’d think you’d be working on that.”
Louis was still looking down at the photograph of Kitty Jagger’s ravaged face.
“It was twenty years ago. Let it go, Kincaid,” Mobley said quietly.
The door opened and the secretary poked her head in. “Sheriff, Vern Sandusky is on hold.”
Mobley picked up the receiver, finger poised over a button as he looked at Louis. Louis was still staring at the photo of Kitty.
“Kincaid.”
Louis looked up.
“Forget her. She’s dead and her killer has been convicted. There’s nothing you can do for her now.”
Mobley jabbed at the phone and swung his chair around away from Louis.
Louis gathered up his files and left. When he walked out, the Amazon was looking at him.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“Hard to convince your boss of anything, isn’t it?”
She smiled. “Not if you know how.”
Louis’s beeper went off, and he tried to shift the files so he could turn it off, but she beat him to it, reaching across her desk to his hip.
“Need to use the phone?” she asked, leaning on the desk.
Louis shook his head, seeing Susan’s number. “Nah. It can wait.”
“Let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.”
The look in the Amazon’s eyes wasn’t hard to translate. Okay, he’d use it. “What about a transcript from Jack Cade’s 1967 trial?” he asked.
“You don’t want much, do you?”
He tried a smile. “It would be a big help to me.”
She cocked her head, tapping her pen against her cheek. “Okay, give me your number,” she said. “I’ll call you if I can get it.”
Louis rattled off the pager number. The Amazon waved the paper between two long pink fingernails. “Got it.”
He was going to ask for her name, but he had the feeling it would open doors he didn’t want opened right now.
“Thanks, I owe you one,” he said.
“I’ll collect later,” she said.
Chapter Thirteen
It shouldn’t have bothered him. It was just a normal wound chart-the simple line drawing of a generic female body that pathologists used to record injuries to the deceased. Louis stared at the sketch. The body portion of the drawing was oddly neutered with no nipples or pubic area. The pathologist had dutifully drawn in the twelve stab marks on the torso.
But something about it was bothering him.
Then he saw it. The drawing’s face. Unlike the body, it was detailed, with eyes, hair-shit, and a smile.
Jesus. He had heard about these old wound charts, but he had never seen one before. They had been phased out years ago when someone finally realized how grotesque they were.
He tossed the diagram aside, hoisted himself off the bed and went to the kitchen. He returned with a Dr Pepper and it was several minutes and half a can later before he returned to Kitty Jagger’s autopsy report.
The pages of the twenty-year-old report were yellowed, some even mildewed from lying in the damp bowels of the municipal filing system. A musty odor rose up to him as he carefully turned the pages.
Katherine Lynn Jagger. DOB: 2-29-51. Height: 5 ft. 5. Weight: 122 lbs.
Cause of death: cerebral hemorrhage.
Manner of death: blunt trauma to the skull.
Mode of death: homicide.
Issy jumped up on the bed. The cat stared at him for a moment, then laid down on one of the open folders.
He was looking for something that might provide a clue about where she had been killed before being dumped. But so far there was nothing.
Contents of stomach: partially digested beef, potatoes, bread, unidentified sugar liquid, alcohol.
Louis shifted his weight and the bed creaked. He was trying to see her now, trying to imagine where she had been, what she looked like, what she had done the night she died. She had worked that night at Hamburger Heaven. She had probably eaten a hamburger, fries and a Coke sometime during her shift.
Tissue analysis: nothing unusual.
Lung analysis: nicotine, potassium monopersulfate.
Okay, she was a smoker. And she had at least one drink about an hour before she was killed.
Mobley had said she was a “greaser,” the wilder crowd, the kids who smoked, drank, dropped out, got pregnant.
Louis flipped the page back to the internal organ analysis. She hadn’t been pregnant.
But she definitely had been raped. Semen had been found in her vagina and on her thighs. Coupled with the extensive bruising on her inner thighs, everything pointed to rape, not consentual sex.
He started to set the report aside but paused, something registering that had not struck him before. He flipped back to the lung analysis. Potassium monopersulfate. What the hell was that?
He pulled his notebook closer and made a note to call Vince Carissimi, the medical examiner, in the morning.
The low rumble of thunder pulled Louis’s attention to the window. A cool breeze, smelling of rain, wafted in through the jalousies. He glanced up at the wet stain in the ceiling above his bed. It had rained almost every night in the last week and he knew he was living on borrowed time before the whole damn roof gave way.
He set the autopsy report aside and scanned the bed, looking for the police report. Issy was sleeping on it. He tried to ease it out from under her.
“Off, cat,” he said.
With a quick move, he jerked it out. The cat didn’t even look up at him.
He opened the folder. He was looking for the lead investigator on the case and finally zeroed in on a Detective Robert Ahnert. His signature appeared on all the reports. Ahnert’s own accounts, including his initial call to the dumpsite, were written in a concise, unemotional style. Even his report of going to the Jagger home to deliver the news that Kitty’s body had been found was handled in the same detached manner.
Louis started to gather it all up but then paused. Something in his memory was nagging him. He went to his dresser and got the file that held the newspaper clips about Kitty’s murder. He found the interview with her father, Willard Jagger.
Damn. There it was. Willard Jagger said he had reported his daughter missing on April 9th. Two days before her body was discovered in the dump.
So where was the missing person’s report? He knew that cops usually let twenty-four or even forty-eight hours go by before they acted on a missing person’s report. But this wasn’t a big city where teenagers normally went missing. This was a small town where the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old girl would probably send up a red flag. Why hadn’t Ahnert acted when Willard Jagger reported his daughter missing?
Bernhardt and Candace Duvall would have to wait, no matter what Susan thought. He needed to talk to Ahnert. If the guy was still alive.
Louis leafed through the rest of the material, but there was nothing unusual. It was all there, complete, professional-and as impersonal as the wound chart.
Kitty Jagger. . reduced to the ultimate generic.
It had started to rain. He could hear it beating on the roof. A moment later, he felt a splatter on his head and his eyes darted up.
“Shit,” he muttered.
The stain was starting to drip. Louis jumped up and dragged the bed a foot to the left. He went to the kitchen and returned with a pot, setting it under the drip. Issy had retreated to a mound of dirty clothes on the floor.
Louis stared at the mess of papers and folders on his bed. The blowup copy of the black and white yearbook picture of Kitty Jagger was lying on top.
He hadn’t noticed it the first time, but he realized now that she looked vaguely like a girl who used to babysit him. Amy. . that was her name. She lived three doors down from the Lawrence house and she used to bring a little blue case of 45s with her. He remembered she came over one night with a burn mark on her forehead from ironing her hair. All the white girls had wanted stick-straight hair in those days, like the Beatles’ girlfriends.