A Ticket to the Boneyard (Matthew Scudder #8)

I thought about Connie. Prostitution isn't necessarily a bad life, not at the level she and Elaine had practiced it, with East 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 in Massillon, 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 in Cleveland. 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?"

I shook my head. I was unwilling to look between her parted thighs, let alone touch her. I didn't want to see any more, didn't want to be in that room any longer. Havlicek evidently felt the same way, and Wohlmuth sensed it and led us back to his office.

There he said, "I, uh, checked the children for semen."

"Christ!" Havlicek said.

"I didn't find any," Wohlmuth added quickly. "I thought I ought to check, though."

"Couldn't hurt."

"You saw the stab wounds, right?"

"They'd have been hard to miss."

"Right." He hesitated. "Well, they were all inflicted from the front. Three stab wounds between the ribs and into the heart, and any one of them would have done it."

"So?"

"What did he do, sodomize her and then roll her over and kill her?"

"Maybe."

"How did you find her? Lying on her back?"

Havlicek frowned, summoning the memory. "On her back," he said. "She'd slid down off the foot of the bed. Stabbed through the nightgown, and it covered her to her knees. Maybe that semen was from much earlier."

"No way to tell."

"Or later," I suggested. They looked at me. "Try it this way. She's on her back in bed and he stabs her. Then he rolls her over onto her stomach, lifts her nightgown, and pulls her halfway off the bed so he can get at her better. He sodomizes and turns her over and pulls her nightgown down, and in the process she slides the rest of the way off the bed. Then he goes into the bathroom to wash up and rinses the knife while he's at it. That would account for the evident lack of struggle, wouldn't it. They don't offer a whole lot of resistance when they're already dead."

"No," Wohlmuth agreed. "They don't insist on a whole lot of foreplay, either. I don't have any knowledge of the man you're talking about. Is that kind of behavior consistent with what you know about him? Because I don't think it's in conflict with the physical evidence."

I thought of what he'd said to Elaine, about dead girls being as good as live ones if you got them early on. "It's consistent," I said.

"So you're talking about a monster."

"Well, Jesus God," Tom Havlicek said. "It wasn't Saint Francis of Assisi killed those kids."

"James Leo Motley," Havlicek said. "Tell me about him."

"You know about his priors and what he went away for. What else do you want to know?"

"How old is he?"

"Forty or forty-one. He was twenty-eight when I arrested him."

"You got a photo of him?"

I shook my head. "I could probably dig up a photo but it would be twelve years old." I described Motley as I remember him, his height and build, his facial features, his haircut. "But I don't know if he still looks like that. His face wouldn't have changed much, not with the kind of strong features he had. But he could have gained or lost weight in prison, and he might not still have the haircut. As far as that goes, he could have lost the hair. It's been a long time."

"Some prisons will photograph a prisoner at the time of his release."

"I don't know if that's policy at Dannemora or not. I'll have to find out."

"That's where they had him? At Dannemora?"

"That's where he finished up. He started at Attica, but after a couple of years they transferred him."

" Attica 's where they had the riot, isn't it? But that would have been before his time. The years seem to go by faster and faster, don't they?"

We were having lunch at the Italian place he'd recommended the night before. The food was good enough but the decor had a determinedly ethnic feel to it, and it came off like a stage set from one of the Godfather movies. Tom had turned down the waitress's suggestion of wine or a cocktail. "I'm not much of a drinker," he said to me, "but you go right ahead."

I'd said it was a little early for me. Now he apologized for having stranded me after we'd left Wohlmuth. "Hope you found things to keep you busy," he said. I told him I'd had a chance to read the newspapers and walk around town a little. "What I should have told you," he said, "is we've got the Pro Football Hall of Fame right off Seventy-seven in Canton. If you're any kind of a football fan, it's something you wouldn't want to miss."

That got us onto football, and that carried us through to the coffee and cheesecake. Massillon, he said, was like Kansas during the Civil War, with brother against brother when it came to the Browns and the Bengals. And they both had good teams this year, and if Kosar stayed healthy both teams ought to make the playoffs, and that was about as much excitement as the town could be expected to handle. They'd never face each other in the Super Bowl, not with both of them being in the same conference, but it was conceivable that they'd be matched up for the conference championship, and wouldn't that be something?