The Alibi Man

Chapter 13

The autopsy suite in the Palm Beach County Medical Examiner’s building was never a place Landry enjoyed visiting. It was a necessary part of his job. Mandatory, to his way of thinking, though he could have passed this part off on Weiss.

Weiss was like the weird kid in science lab who wanted to dissect everybody’s frog-just because. But from the moment he was given the lead on a case, Landry became the victim’s advocate. It was his job to get justice for that person. And in order to do that, he needed to know, to see with his own eyes, everything he possibly could about the victim-how she had lived, and how she had died.

He stood on the side of the table opposite the ME, in mask, cap, gown, gloves, and booties. All one could see of anyone in the room were their eyes.

The ME was Mercedes Gitan, acting chief medical examiner, to be precise. The defection of her predecessor to a cushy teaching job at the University of Miami had opened the spot for Gitan. If the powers that ran the county had any sense, they would give her the position permanently.

“See here?” she asked, pointing into the gaping wound where the gator had taken a large chunk of tissue out of Irina Markova’s lower torso. “It’s a section of the head of the femur. The gator snapped it like a chicken bone. The power in an alligator’s jaws is unbelievable: between fifteen hundred and two thousand pounds of pressure. Equal to the pressure of the weight of a small pickup truck.”

“I’d rather be under the truck,” Landry said.

“Amen to that. I did the autopsies on two of those recent alligator-attack victims. That’s not a good way to go. I can’t even imagine the terror those people felt. I suppose the good news here is that our victim was already well past feeling anything when she was attacked-by the second animal, that is,” Gitan added grimly.

She heaved a sigh and shook her head as she looked down at Irina Markova’s face, the ravaged eyes and lips. “These are the tough ones. I can slice-and-dice drug dealers and gangbangers all day long. They know what they’re in for, doing what they do. This one is a pure victim. She didn’t go out looking to cross paths with a killer.”

“I knew her a little bit,” Landry said. “Enough to say hello. She was an acquaintance of a friend.”

“I’m sorry. You don’t have to stay for this, James. I can call you later.”

“No. This is part of it. She’s my vie. You know how I am.”

“Superstitious?”

He shrugged, still staring at the body. “I need to see what happened to them with my own two eyes. I feel like… like I owe it to them to be here, at least for this part, you know? Crazy, huh?”

“Not so. Shows that you’re still human. I always figure that the time I start just counting the bodies, not thinking of them as human beings, is the time I need to consider another career. I mean, I don’t get emotionally involved. We can’t do that and stay sane. But I do them the courtesy of knowing their names.”

“Thanks for coming in for this one, Merci,” Landry said.

He had called her personally to make the request. He’d known her for six or seven years, had watched her work her way up the adder. She was very good and very thorough. This wasn’t going to be an easy case. Gitan would garner every bit of information, no matter how insignificant it might seem. She wouldn’t miss a thing.

“Oh, who needs to have a life?” she said. “Besides, the mayor of Wellington, the mayor of West Palm, the mayor of Palm Beach, he sheriff, the state’s attorney, and half a dozen other big shots called me after you did.”

Landry gave a humorless laugh. “Nobody cares when some Poxahatchee redneck gets his brains blown out. A beautiful young woman strangled and dumped-that’s bad for tourism. Can’t have killer running around during season.”

Gitan glanced at her watch and huffed a sigh. “Where the hell is Cecil? WHERE THE HELL IS CECIL!!”

“Just waiting for you to scream, boss.”

Gitan’s assistant, a seven-foot-tall black transvestite, came into the suite. Even on the stool, Gitan had to crane her neck to look up at him.

The process began with the external examination of the body, Gitan spoke quietly into her microphone, identifying the victim, stating her age, height, weight, sex, color of hair. She couldn’t state the color of her eyes, because there was nothing left of them.

Landry stared at the girl’s hand, at her fingernails, still flawlessly painted a vibrant red despite her time in the water. A couple of them were broken. Hopefully she had sunk them into her killer, hopefully Gitan would discover something to suggest that-skin cells, a microscopic bit of blood, enough of something for a DNA profile.

The body had been in the water for some time, but unless the fish had taken up giving manicures, maybe there was a chance that something lodged well under the nails could still be there.

The analysis of that kind of evidence took time. Serology, toxicology, DNA profiles. Real life isn’t like television. Even with a rush put on the potential evidence, it would take days, even weeks to get results back. And even if they got a DNA profile on the perp, it would be helpful immediately only if the guy had offended before and was in the national data bank.

Gitan examined every inch of the girl’s body. Every mark, every cut, every bruise was measured and photographed. Landry was hoping for bite marks. No defense attorney could argue away bite marks. They were as good as fingerprints.

“What do you think here? Bite marks?” he asked, pointing to several dark semicircular marks around the areola on the left breast. He had put his reading glasses on and bent down close to squint at them.

“Could be,” Gitan said. “The shape is right, but I’m not seeing clear individual tooth marks. Maybe he bit her through something like sheets or a light blanket, to obscure the marks. Maybe he’s smart.”

“Maybe he’s done this before,” Landry said.

That was a very bad thought. They wouldn’t be talking about some random horny bastard who didn’t want to take no for an answer. The crime wouldn’t be about a situation that had gotten out of hand. It would be about something done methodically, which required organized thought and enough cool in the heat of the moment to take precautions against self-incrimination.

Gitan moved on to the ligature marks around the girl’s throat.

“What do you think?” Landry asked. “A rope? A wire?”

“First,” Gitan said, “we have thumbprints on either side of the larynx. See here? So we know her killer choked her manually at some point in the attack. But then we have the ligature marks as well. Not a wire. There’s too much abrasion. It had to be something with texture. If it was a rope, it was quite thin. I’m not seeing any natural rope fibers, but she’s been in the water. Fiber evidence is a lot to hope for. Or the rope could have been synthetic. Nylon cord, maybe.”

Looking through a lighted magnifying glass, she studied and studied the deep grooves cut into the girl’s neck. The skin had broken in places.

“Huh,” she said, as she took a tweezer and very carefully clucked a piece of something out of the wound.

“What is it?”

“Dried coagulated blood. Look.”

Landry looked at the scab through the magnifying glass. Stuck in it were several fibers so small they were all but invisible to the naked eye. Short, superfine, dark. Almost like short hairs.

“The lab rats will have an answer when they can get it under a microscope,” Gitan said.

“I’m surprised you found anything,” Landry said.

“Sometimes we get lucky. Her killer didn’t dump her right away, the wounds had time to dry and harden.”

When Gitan was satisfied she had examined every inch of the front of the body, Landry helped Cecil turn the girl over. Gitan moved Irina Markova’s hair out of her way to examine the marks on the back of her neck. There weren’t any.

“Okay,” Gitan said. “Either there was something behind her and between her and the killer, or maybe the killer was on top of her, holding her down with the ligature.”

“In my experience, the kind of guy who does this kind of thing wants to watch the victim’s face as he chokes her,” Landry said. “The fear gets them off. Watching the lights go out in the eyes is a big power trip.”

“Looks to me like he strangled her to the point of unconsciousness, then let her regain consciousness, only to ‘kill’ her all over again.”

“Sick fuck,” Landry muttered.

“He let her lie somewhere for quite a while before he dumped her in that canal,” Gitan pointed out.

With no heartbeat to move it through the circulatory system, the girl’s blood had pooled down her back and the backs of her legs and arms in a huge purple stain. The body had remained on its back long enough that the blood had clotted and set, which took hours. No matter what had been done with the body after that, the lividity wouldn’t move or change.

“Maybe he had to wait to dump her,” Landry said. “Or maybe he’s one of those freaks that likes to play with them after they’re dead.”

Landry stayed until Gitan was ready to make the incision across the top of the girl’s head. The scalp would be pulled back and the interior examined for evidence of trauma; the cranium would be checked for fractures. He didn’t need to hang around for that. He didn’t need to wait for Gitan to make the primary Y incision across the chest and down the torso. He didn’t need to watch as Irina Markova’s sternum was split in two and her chest was cracked open like a clamshell. He didn’t need to watch as her organs were lifted out of her body and weighed.

He had seen it all before. Everyone had a liver. Everyone had intestines. Everyone had a brain. None of that was of interest to him. The organs were examined and weighed, and notes were written down, because that was procedure. But no internal disease or defect had killed Irina Markova.

Someone else’s disease had killed Irina-whatever malignancy it was that took up residence in the minds of murderers.

With that thought foremost, he went across the parking lots to the sheriff’s offices and Robbery/Homicide.

“The interpreter is here,” Weiss said.

They went into the interview room Weiss had exited. The older man standing at the end of the table wore no readable expression. His long face might have been carved from stone. Dressed in black, he was tall and narrow and wore a clipped-close white mustache and goatee that had been sculpted to a point just below his chin.

His left eye was piercing blue, the right milky white, ruined but left bare for all the world to see. No patch, no glasses to hide behind. The old priest put it out there like he was proud of it, like it was an ugly badge of honor. A scar split the eyebrow above it.

Weiss introduced him. “Father Chernoff, this is Detective Landry, who is also working on this investigation.”

Landry let the remark slide. He didn’t need to whip his cock out and put it on the table in front of a holy man just to put Weiss in is place.

He held out his hand to the priest, who had quite a grip on him for a guy who had to be in his seventies. His fingers were gnarled and twisted like the branches of an ancient windblown tree.

“Father Chernoff. Thank you for coming in on such short notice. Unfortunately, that’s the only kind of notice we get at the start of a murder investigation.”

The old priest looked down his nose at him as they took their seats. Landry flashed back on Catholic school, where he had spent much time on his knees, saying Hail Marys for one sinful infraction of school rules or another while Father Arnaud glared at him.

“This is a Russian girl who died.” His accent was heavy, but his English was crisp.

“Yes, sir. Irina Markova. She worked on a horse farm outside Wellington. Do you know of any Markovas in the area? If she has family here, we’d like to contact them.”

The priest ignored the question.

“This one,” he said, tilting his head in the direction of Weiss, played for me the tape from the answering machine.“

“Yes. Are you able to translate for us?”

Again, the priest ignored the question, as if Landry’s agenda held absolutely no interest for him. “This girl, she was a criminal?”

“Not to my knowledge. Why? What does the man on the tape say?

“His name is Alexi, yes? This one told me.” Again he tipped his head at Weiss without bothering to even look at him.

“We believe so, yes. Why did you ask if the girl was a criminal?”

“Play the tape again, please.”

Weiss touched the button on the machine, and the Russian voice spewed forth in staccato bursts.

“He says, ”Why the hell have you not called me? Are you too fucking good for me now with your fancy, soft American men? Don’t forget who you are, Irina. Don’t forget who owns you. I have a job for you to do. It will pay well, greedy girl.“”

“Do you recognize the voice?” Landry asked.

“There are many Russian men called Alexi,” the priest said.

“Do you have any idea which one this guy might be?”

The priest looked around the room as if suspicious one or more of these men named Alexi might be hiding in a corner, listening in.

“Are you familiar with Russian organized crime, Detective Landry?”

“I know about it.”

“Then I don’t need to tell you these are very ruthless and violent men. They are a disgrace to our community. Not all Russians are criminals.”

“But you asked me if I thought Irina Markova might be.”

“There is a man, a very dangerous man. His name is Alexi Kulak. He is a vicious wolf. This perhaps is his voice.”

“Do you know him?” Weiss asked. “Do you know where we can find him?”

“I know of him. He is the kind of man who believes he ‘owns’ people and can do with them what he will.”

The bitterness in the old man’s voice seemed personal.

“Did he do that to your eye?” Landry asked.

The priest sniffed. “No. KGB did this to me when I was a young man. They burned my eye because I would not be a witness for them. I watched a man steal two loaves of bread to feed his family. It was just after the war. People were starving.

“In my Russia we feared only KGB. There were no criminals. Now there are many criminals and no KGB. It is not a better place.”

“Do you know someone who may be able to help us find Alexi Kulak?” Landry asked.

“I know someone,” the priest said. “But he will not speak with you.”

“If he’s afraid, we can speak over the phone,” Weiss said. “All we’re trying to do at this point is locate this Alexi person.”

The old priest got up from his chair. He stood ramrod straight, formidable figure in his black cassock and priest’s collar.

“He will not speak with you,” he said again, “because Alexi Kulak cut out his tongue.”