In the Bleak Midwinter Read online

  The coroner, who also worked as a pathologist at the county hospital, was a compact man in his fifties, with close-cropped, grizzled hair and pale blue eyes that peered at Russ over the top of his trifocals.

  “Of course I needed to stay,” Russ said. “A Jane Doe that’s a possible murder? You’re lucky I didn’t sit in on the autopsy.”

  Dvorak looked askance. “Mmmm. As I recall, the last time you did that you—”

  “Don’t remind me. What do you know?”

  “The basics. From her teeth, she’s somewhere between sixteen and twenty-four. She was hit with a heavy, blunt object at the base of her skull, crushing in part of her medulla and causing swelling and hemorrhaging in her brain. It would have rendered her unconscious, and could have led to her death eventually.”

  “Eventually?”

  “My guess is she died of exposure. Based on her lividity, she hadn’t been dead more than four hours before you found her. But the body temperature taken by the paramedics was very low, the sort of thing you see a day or so after death. There’s no sign of frostbite, which means she was dead before any damage to the skin could occur.”

  Russ nodded. “Her killer whacked her and then dumped her. And she froze to death.”

  “In the vernacular, yes.”

  Russ remembered Clare’s voice, shaky with horror, asking what it would be like, watching the car drive away, leaving you alone in the cold and the dark. “Did she ever regain consciousness?”

  “No.”

  He wondered if Clare would think this a mercy from her God. He rubbed his eyes underneath his glasses. “Anything else?”

  “No other injuries. No distinguishing marks. The lab work from the state should be back by Monday afternoon, Tuesday at the latest. Then I can let you know if there were any alcohol or drugs involved.” The pathologist opened the folder he had carried from the mortuary and slid a paper across the desktop to Russ. “Here are her prints.” A set of X-rays. “Her dental profile.” A few Polaroids followed. “Pictures for identification purposes. I hope for her family’s sake you find out who she was quickly.” Russ turned the photos over in his hands, trying to lay the color and expression of life over the pale, fixed mask of death. “She had a baby recently, poor thing.”

  “What?” Russ jerked his attention back to the doctor. “God damn. I was right. You sure?”

  Dvorak gave him a quelling look. “Am I sure? Of course I’m sure. She’s about a week, ten days post-partum. Why?”

  “Because six days ago we found an abandoned infant we’ve been trying to place ever since. And when Jane Doe turned up, I had this feeling . . . You got her blood type?”

  The doctor looked at his sheet. “AB negative.”

  “Hot damn. The baby is AB positive. That means she could be its mother, right?”

  “Sure. It simply means the father would have to have a positive blood type.” Dr. Dvorak steepled his fingers together. “I take it this wasn’t a hospital birth?”

  “Not that we can track down, no.”

  “Well, then, if this girl gave birth to a baby with a different rhesus factor, and she didn’t receive an antigen shot afterwards, she’ll have Rh antibodies swimming in her blood. I can test for that.”

  “Do it.” Russ stood, anxious to get to the station and put her prints into the database. “Would you give me a call when you have the results?”

  The pathologist stood as well. “Of course.” They shook hands.

  Russ glanced back at the report. “Damn. We really don’t have a whole hell of a lot here, do we?”

  Dvorak shrugged. “She could have been killed by almost anything: a baseball bat, a small log, a tire iron, the leg off a barstool . . .” he opened his hands apologetically. “And the injury could have been done by almost any healthy adult. Sorry I can’t make it any easier for you.”

  “It would be nice if you could have told me it was ‘a left-handed man under five-feet-six who pumps iron, wielding a barbell,’ but I’ll work with whatever you give me.”

  “You don’t want a pathologist, you want a game of Clue. It was Miss Scarlet, in the Conservatory, with the candlestick.”

  Russ scooped up the photographs, the X-rays, and the print sheet and put them into the empty folder Dvorak proffered him. The two men walked down the short hallway to the waiting room.

  “You think there’s a connection between this girl having a baby and being murdered?” Dvorak patted his pockets absentmindedly, searching for the keys to unlock the door to the public area of the morgue. “Seems hard to imagine in this day and age.”

  “I know. What’s the big deal about an unmarried girl having a baby these days? Not like when we were young.” Russ shook his head as the pathologist ushered him through the empty waiting room to the entrance.

  “There are a lot of people willing to kill to get rid of an unwanted baby,” Dvorak said, smiling sourly. “It’s called abortion, and it’s perfectly legal.”

  Russ did not want to go down that road. “What I need to know is who would be willing to kill to get rid of an unwanted mother.” Bright sunshine spilled over the buffed wooden floorboards when he opened the door. “Warmed up. Must be over forty.”

  “Nice,” the pathologist agreed. “As long as you don’t count on it lasting.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Dvorak was right, Russ thought. As soon as the sun dropped behind the mountains, the mercury plummeted. Turning onto Church Street, he could see the time and temperature sign outside of Farmer’s and Merchant’s Savings and Loan. Twenty-one degrees, and with the air so clear it was bound to keep on dropping overnight. At least they were done with snow for awhile. Hell of a lot of snow for the beginning of December. Lousy for driving, but good for all the bed-and-breakfasts catering to skiers.

  At a red light, his gaze dropped to the folder on the seat beside him. He’d spent the rest of his Saturday afternoon showing the X-rays to all three dentists in town, with no results. He didn’t want to consider the possibility that she might have been a tourist. Somebody who had come up to Millers Kill for antiquing or leaf-peeping or skiing and decided it would be the ideal place to drop her baby. If she was an out-of-towner, he might never be able to get an I.D. on her.

  He drove past St. Alban’s, onto Elm, and pulled into Clare’s driveway. The connection to the church. That was the key, his best lead so far. Either the dead girl or the man who had impregnated her had some tie to St. Alban’s, and he needed the priest’s help to find out what it was. He killed the engine and sat for a moment, looking at the glow of lights through the windows, the intermittent puffs of smoke from the stone chimney. Admitted to himself that he wanted to check up on Clare, too. Not that she’d appreciate the idea. Russ got out of the car and crunched his way across her snow-covered lawn. The Dutch-Colonial house had a deep-hipped roof and a wide porch supported by four plain columns. He swept his boot back and forth as he climbed the stone steps up to the porch, clearing off a little of the snow. There must be another doorway out back by the ramshackle garage that she’d been using. Kind of a shame, because the double front door, with its small, stained-glass windows, was one fine piece of woodworking. He loved old houses.

  He tried the wrought-iron door handles. They turned easily. After what she had seen, she still wasn’t locking her door. He sighed, rang the bell. From inside, he could hear a muffled lumping, then a faint “Coming!”

  The left door opened wide, framing Clare in a swirl of smoke. She coughed. “Russ!” she said. “I didn’t expect you. Do you know anything about fires?” He followed her into a roomy foyer, wiping his boots on a worse-for-wear rag rug stretched out in front of the door. The air was acrid, making his eyes sting.

  “Holy cow, Clare. What’re you doing, burning wet leaves?”

  She reached for his coat. “I tried to get a fire going in the fireplace in the living room. But something went wrong.” He shrugged out of the bulky nylon parka and she hung it on an old coatrack.

  On either side of the door we
re broad archways. From the size of the brass chandelier hanging in the room to his left, Russ guessed it was meant to be a dining room, although it looked more like a warehouse at the moment, with boxes and mismatched wooden chairs taking up most of the space. He bit back a smile. Evidently even the prospect of living out of cardboard hadn’t made the Reverend any more receptive to the idea of the church ladies swarming through her things, doing up the house for her.

  Through the right arch, he could see the source of the problem. The Colonial-style brick fireplace in the center of the wall held a pile of overly large logs that were sputtering flames. Smoke curled under the mantel and filled the room. Since he didn’t hear anything, he guessed the quaint rectory had never been fitted out with anything as modern and useful as smoke alarms. “Let me see what I can do,” he said. “You open a few windows.”

  The first thing he saw once he was on his knees on the flagstone hearth was that the flue was closed. He pulled its handle forward, opening it. The air rushed up the chimney with a sucking sound, drawing the smoke with it. There was an iron woodbox to the left of the fireplace and a wrought iron carrier holding kindling. “You got a newspaper handy?” he asked. She scooped yesterday’s Post-Star off a pine coffee table. He knocked the slightly singed logs to one side and replaced them with crumpled wads of paper, then laid on several small pieces of kindling and a quarter-split log. She had one of those silly brass canisters with foot-long match sticks on the mantelpiece.

  “You’re supposed to use newspaper?” she asked, as the fire caught cleanly and began to burn. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Where did you learn to make a fire?” Russ asked.

  “Survival training,” she admitted. “You know, using pine needles, branches, a gum wrapper . . .”

  “Do yourself a favor,” he said, grinning. “Use paper instead. And start small. Don’t pile on the big logs until you’ve got a roaring fire going.”

  “I did have a roaring fire going!” she said. “For a minute or two.”

  “What, when the pinecones caught on fire?” Russ laughed.

  “The smoke’s cleared out,” she said with dignity. “I’ll close the windows.”

  Russ took in the room while Clare cranked the casement windows shut. There was an overstuffed sofa and a few fat chairs with faded chintz covers grouped in front of the fireplace, and a needlepoint rug over the floorboards. The low built-in bookcases on either side of the fireplace were piled with haphazardly arranged books, pictures, and plants, and topped by two narrow clerestory windows.

  “So what brings you here? Besides saving my bacon from getting smoked.”

  “Wanted to talk about the case.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Then why don’t I get us some coffee first? Make yourself at home.”

  “Coffee would be great. This is quite a place you have here. Do you know when it was built?”

  She disappeared through a swinging door in the back of the room, but her voice floated out to him. “Nineteen-twelve. It’s very Arts-and-Crafts, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He walked back to the foyer and pulled off his wet boots. “Linda and I have an eighteenth-century farmhouse out near Fort Henry. No closets, eleven rooms and not a level wall or floor in any of them.”

  “Must take a lot of work,” Clare shouted from the kitchen.

  “Yeah, but I like it. Pretending I’m Bob Vila is a hobby of mine.”

  She had set up a square chest on legs under the big front window and put it to work as the bar. Nice decanters. Russ uncorked one and took a sniff of Scotch. The smell was enough to make his mouth water. Sighing, he replaced the top. The little cane-seat chairs on either side didn’t look as if they could hold his weight, but he liked the plain, bare window, showing off the small panes of glass that ran along the edges. That was the one thing that drove him nuts about his wife’s custom curtain business—every window in his house was swagged and draped and ruffled with about fifty-seven yards of fabric.

  Two standing lamps flanked a folded gateleg table behind the sofa. There was an assortment of family pictures, some in fancy silver frames, others in good-quality wood. He picked up the largest photo, taken on a beach somewhere. An older couple who must be Clare’s parents sitting on a driftwood log. A younger Clare in shorts and cotton sweater, her arm around a similarly dressed blond girl of eye-catching good looks. Two blond guys flanking them, not much taller than the girls but broad-shouldered and big. Which would explain the two separate photos of men in UVA football uniforms.

  A smaller picture in an elaborate frame caught his eye. Mom and Dad dressed like one of those rich couples in a Cadillac ad, and Clare, who was decked out in a heavily embroidered robe, smiling and teary-eyed. Inside a church somewhere, from the looks of it. The two beefy brothers were accompanied by two cheerleader types, one of whom held a baby.

  “Here you go,” Clare announced, backing through the door at the rear of the room. She lowered a tray containing two plain crockery mugs and a sugar bowl onto the coffee table. The smell was incredible.

  “Damn, that is one good-smelling coffee. ’Scuse my French.”

  She sat in one of the plump chairs and picked up a mug. “Why thank you. I grind my own mix. Jamaican Blue roast, Colombian . . . I put in a little ground hazelnut and cinnamon . . .” She smiled, the smile of a really good cook attempting without success to look modest. “The secret is to use fresh-roasted beans and fresh spices, and to grind ’em yourself. Don’t bother with the stuff in the supermarket that’s been sitting around in a bag for who knows how long.”

  Russ took the other chair. “I’ll keep that in mind. Next time I have a spare half hour to make a cup of coffee.”

  She laughed. “I didn’t know how you take it, so . . .” she said, waving a hand over the sugar bowl, packets of artificial sweetener, and creamer.

  “I should probably be a macho guy and say I drink it black, but the truth is, I like it real sweet.”

  “Oh, yeah. I drink mine sweet, too, but I’m always a little embarrassed by it. I used to stash sugar in my pockets and slip it in on the sly at briefings. Hey. Do you think how people drink their coffee reveals their personality?”

  Russ stirred sugar into his mug and took a sip. He closed his eyes. “This is good. I needed this.” He opened his eyes and looked at Clare. “No. How you drink your coffee while you’re eating donuts, that reveals your personality.” She was wearing a woolly turtleneck tucked into a pair of khakis and what looked like some New York designer’s idea of army boots. She was curvier than he had thought when he had seen her in baggy sweats and thick outdoors clothes. “You run today?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Six miles. I needed it, too, after last night.”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen my share of dead bodies, and I’ve never gotten used to it. To tell you the truth, I hope I never do. Seeing someone who’s been murdered . . . that should make you lose sleep at night.”

  Clare sat up a little straighter. “She was definitely murdered? It wasn’t a suicide?”

  “Oh, no, it was murder, all right.” He told her Dr. Dvorak’s findings. When he got to the part about giving birth recently, her eyes went wide.

  “Cody’s mother,” she said. “Good Lord. I have to admit, when you said it was too much of a coincidence last night, I chalked it down to, um . . . paranoia.”

  “Thanks a lot. If I were a woman, you’d have called it intuition.” She made a face at him. He continued, “Dvorak is going to send DNA samples to Albany, along with some of Cody’s, to make sure. Of course, that will take up to four months.”

  “That poor girl. I can’t imagine . . .” Clare looked into the fire. “I wish she could have known Cody was settled with the couple she had picked out for him. Before she died. Was killed.”

  He got up and laid another two logs on the fire. “Don’t be wishing that so quick. As far as I’m concerned, Geoff Burns is my number one suspect. With Karen Burns following close behind.”

  “You must be joking! The B
urnses? You’re just saying that because you don’t like Geoff.”

  “I admit that. I don’t like Geoff Burns. He’s an arrogant, self-important, humorless pain in the butt.” He sat down on the edge of his chair, leaning across the table. “But think about it, Clare. Who else has a better motive? The father of the baby? He’s gonna kill to avoid a few bucks child support a month? Or the Burnses, who have been trying for years to get a child, and are running out of resources and time and have no friends at DSS?”

  She crossed her feet under her, tailor style. “You know nothing about this girl. What if Cody’s father was a married man, with a family, and she was going to blackmail him? Or what if her boyfriend killed her because Cody wasn’t his? Or . . . or . . .”

  “Or what if she was a hit-woman for the Mafia and they rubbed her out before she could testify to the Feds?”

  “Don’t be smart. You see what I’m saying, here. You can’t pin a murder on the Burnses without doing a lot more leg-work. Just because they’re convenient.”

  “Legwork?”

  “Well . . . that’s what they say on TV.”

  “I’m not going to cut the investigation short, no. In fact, I want you to help us with something.”

  She shifted forward in her chair. “Yeah?”

  “The one thing we do know about the girl is that she knew the Burnses were looking for a baby, and that she left Cody at the church.”

  “Or she agreed to let someone leave him at the church.”

  “Right. Somewhere, there’s a connection. She was either a member of your congregation, or she worked there, or the father of the baby did, or she had friends there.”

  “You think someone in my parish will be able to identify her?”

  “Yeah.” He leaned back into his chair. “How would you feel about arranging for people to take a look at some photos tomorrow?”

  She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and bit her lip. In the warm light, her hair was the color of honey and molasses. Russ looked into his coffee.