Theresa didn’t wait to watch him leave, but merely pulled her coat closed long enough to get through the back door and into the loading dock area. The smell of the building greeted her along with its warmth, but she had long grown used to the mix: the tinny smell of blood, the sharp odor of formalin, and the month-old garbage tang of decomposing flesh. A white-coated deskman blocked her way as he helped two funeral-home transport men to zip the M.E.’s white plastic body bag into a plush burgundy one so that the dead could be dressed for the trip with a little more dignity. The deskman moved to let her pass with a quiet “good afternoon.” It occurred to her that it had been eight months and her coworkers still treated her gently. This was an unfair burden on them; M.E. staff members, who spent all day around the dead, were never solemn except in the presence of family members and news reporters, and not even the latter most of the time. Her mother was right. She had to get her life back to normal. Or at least learn to fake it more convincingly.
One of these days.
She took the elevator instead of the stairs and hung her coat up just before the trace department supervisor found her. Leo had two inches of height on her but thirty less pounds, as if his nervous system had taken over and sucked the juices from all other body tissue. He waved a sheaf of papers. “We have a problem.”
This didn’t impress her coming from a man whose personal-threat assessment level remained permanently stuck on red. “I’m a little busy, Leo. I have to photo and tape the clothing from yesterday’s homicide-that woman they found in Rockefeller Park.”
“She came in yesterday morning and you’re just now getting to her clothing?”
“It was drying.”
“Yeah, right. Richard Springer wrote the judge and said you refused to comply with the court order for defense testing.”
Theresa headed for the coffeemaker, and not even Leo dared to get in her way when on that path. Of course, since Leo insisted on keeping the machine in his office, this move didn’t get rid of him either, and he followed. Springer, a defense-hired expert, had visited the lab weeks before to perform his own examination of fiber evidence.
“He said you were uncooperative.” Leo rattled the sheets for emphasis.
“Because I let him make his own slides? How else would he know they were from the real evidence unless he prepared them himself? It’s not my problem if he doesn’t like to get his fingers in the mounting media.”
“He says you created a, let me quote this here, ‘unfairly prejudicial work environment.’ What the hell does he mean by that?”
“Probably that I told him his client is guilty as hell.” She stirred in creamer with a wooden stick; they used to use the sticks for blood enzyme work, now supplanted by DNA. She continued to order the sticks. They made great coffee stirrers.
The secretary strolled in, caught a glimpse of Leo’s face, dropped some typed reports on his desk, and sidled right out again, not even risking an empathetic glance in Theresa’s direction.
“Terrific. Nothing like demonstrating an inability to be objective.” Leo crossed his arms and stared her down. “Is that what he’s referring to when he says you were blatantly hostile?”
“Well-” She sipped her coffee as if trying to remember, when of course she remembered perfectly. The human mind seemed perverse in that way; it recalled moments of misery with photographic precision, but pictures of happy times got fuzzy around the edges. Or maybe it was just her.
“Well, what?” Leo demanded.
“I may have wondered aloud how he shaved in the morning, what with the difficulty he must have looking at himself in the mirror.”
Leo’s mouth twitched, almost in a grin, but he stifled it. “And you thought he’d just let that slide? You think the judge will wink at a charge of interfering in a criminal defense?”
“He got to do the analysis he wanted to do. No court in the world says I have to be friendly.”
“Not friendly is a world away from outwardly hostile.”
She twirled the loose knob on Leo’s barrister’s bookcase. The books and papers inside pressed against the glass as if pleading for escape. “This was after he started asking where I went to school, how long I’d been in forensics, why I hadn’t poured a cast of the shoe print found under the window, crap like that.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Why didn’t you pour a cast of the shoe print?”
“Because it was two o’clock in the morning, because the budget wouldn’t allow us to order more dental stone, because it wasn’t a homicide so we had a live witness.”
“And maybe you just didn’t care.”
She stirred her coffee.
“Not caring is a dangerous condition in this line of work.”
“I care.” Now. In the middle of the night, when you hadn’t slept well for months, when dying sounded like the only reward for living, caring had proved much more difficult. But she couldn’t confess that to herself, much less to Leo. “He was fishing for weaknesses so he could report back to his client and collect his fee.”
“That’s his job.”
“No, his job is to report facts and form an expert opinion. It’s the lawyer’s job to impeach me, and it’s not even his job, it’s his job to present his client’s case in the best possible light, not to use the most underhanded tactics he can think of to shred an impartial fact finder just so he can get a rapist out on the street again. Do any of these guys ever wonder how they’d feel if one of their former clients moved in next door? Would they still let their kids play in the backyard?”
“Theresa-”
“So he was hostile first,” she finished.
“Is that what you’re going to tell the judge? He started it? Sure, the school-yard defense never fails to impress the court.”
“His client raped a teenager at knife point. And I should guard the feelings of some hired whore trying to get him off?”
“That’s what jury trials are for. What you’re for is to maintain the reputation of this lab.”
“No, I’m here for the teenager, and to make sure the guy who did that to her goes away and never comes back.”
Then you should have cast the damn shoe print, shouldn’t you?
Leo’s elongated, sallow face exhibited several tics at once. One jumped at the outer edge of his left eyelid. A second prompted the muscles to bunch around the vein in his right temple. A third caused his mouth to open and say, “All the bad guys will come back if the work of this lab is not completely above reproach.”
Leo spoke the truth, even if the trace evidence department provided his only raison d’être, until he could not distinguish between the prestige and reputation of the lab and himself, and vice versa, though she would not say so, because if she did, she would surely be fired. Leo could weather any disaster except a blow to his ego. She wondered if it would be worth it but knew it wouldn’t, not with Rachael’s college tuition looming on the horizon. Her exhaled breath sent the surface of her coffee into ripples and she thought of student loans and the young female victim: “I know. Sorry.”
“Sorry? He’s coming back here on Friday with the friggin’ defense team and the judge and you’re sorry?”
“He’s dragging a judge here? Who the hell is this guy?”
“I expect we’ll find out.” A good supervisor would have let her stew for a while, think it over, but while Leo had his talents, supervising had never been one of them. So the man who spent at least one day each week red-faced and screaming added, “You didn’t used to have control issues.”
Again, he spoke the truth. Strict self-control had gotten her over the speed bumps of life, from her father dying a few days after her fourteenth birthday, to her husband racking up more girlfriends after their wedding than before, to raising a teenager. But it couldn’t get her past watching, via security cameras, her fiancé bleed to death on the marble floor of a bank building.
Don’t think. Just keep going.
“Maybe it’s age,” she told Leo. “I’m getting cranky as I push forty.”
His tone softened. “Maybe you’ve got that posttraumatic stress stuff from someone putting a gun to your head during that bank robbery. Just be ready to be nice to this guy when he comes back here on Friday. No comments on anything but the weather, got it?”
Nothing could be quite as deconstructing as unexpected empathy. “Sure.”
“And go take care of that homicide clothing.”
She took her coffee with her, down three flights of steps to the amphitheater, and retrieved the dead woman’s clothing from the locked trap room. Her name had been Sarah Taylor-the killer had emptied her wallet of money but not ID. A movie-star name but not a movie-star life. The thirty-year-old had supplemented her welfare checks with sporadic work as a prostitute. The killer had left her body propped up against the statue of Goethe and Schiller in the German section. The Cleveland Cultural Gardens in Rockefeller Park, begun in 1916, had areas dedicated to twenty-four different nationalities. Despite the park’s beauty, hers had not been the first body to appear there. Theresa wondered what the two poet-philosophers would have had to say about that.
Sarah Taylor had been strangled with her bra, and had shredded her own neck with acrylic nails as she fought for air. Theresa needed to tape the clothing for hairs, fibers, and other trace evidence the killer might have deposited during the brutal attack. The snow-soaked articles had needed to dry first-she hadn’t entirely fabricated that-but they had hung around long enough, and besides, it gave her something to do until her brain forgot all about defense experts, irritated bosses, and Jillian Perry.
Until her body turned up at Edgewater Park, two days later.