Mile High Death Read online

  “They called you, huh?” Rizza asked. “The moment I saw the body, I thought they should.”

  He slowly unzipped the black body bag, careful not to disturb whatever trace of evidence might still have lingered on the body. Water, especially salt water, is a great forensic countermeasure, washing most bodies clean of all trace evidence in only minutes.

  Doc Rizza finished unzipping the bag and opened it. Tess approached the girl’s body, focusing on her face. She hadn’t been in the water too long; the bloating that irreversibly disfigures submerged bodies had not yet started to show.

  Tess used a gloved finger to gently remove wet strands of hair clinging to the girl’s face. Her beauty still showed, despite the bruising on her jaw and a swollen left eye. Her lips were slightly parted and pale, the lower lip a little swollen and showing some indentations and a deep split.

  “What are these?” Tess asked. “Bite marks?”

  “I’m going to say yes, although I will need to confirm it back at the lab.” Doc Rizza sighed. “See this split, here? I’ll go out on a limb and say she was hit across the face and that busted her lip, but then she was bitten hard, multiple times. Some of the bites broke her skin. See here?”

  Tess didn’t reply. She stared at the girl’s arms, apparently tied behind her back. But something else had caught her attention.

  Every bone in her naked body seemed to have been broken or crushed in multiple places. As Doc Rizza cut the cable tie that held her wrists together, her arms settled in unnatural positions. Her legs were the same, bones broken but no visible bruising. Where her wrists had been bound, deep lacerations stood in testimony of her struggle to escape, to survive.

  “Any signs of sexual assault?” she asked, lowering her voice as if the media sharks could hear her from the edge of the perimeter.

  He nodded. “It’s a strong possibility, from what I can tell without having her on my table.”

  “How long has she been dead, Doc?”

  “I’d say no more than three to five hours. The Gulf waters are warm and have delayed the onset of rigor, but I’m also not seeing major signs of wildlife activity on her body. Usually, fish and birds go to work after the skin has started to decay. But there are cutaneous changes of immersion present.” He looked at her and added a clarification. “Her extremities are pruned.”

  “Can you give me a cause of death?”

  “She shows signs of strangulation and the associated petechiae,” he said, pointing at some bruises on her neck. “She didn’t drown, I’m certain of it,” he replied. “She was floating shortly after death, meaning that it wasn’t the decomp gases that held her body to the surface; it’s too early for those. It was the air in her lungs. We were lucky to find her. A few more hours and she would’ve dropped to the bottom.”

  “Why?”

  “She was found face down, which trapped the air in her lungs and prevented it from being replaced with water. A stronger wave to flip her face up or just the passing of time would’ve allowed enough air to escape and her body to lose its buoyancy until decomp gases would’ve brought it back to the surface again.”

  “I see,” Tess replied, “but I’ll need more. What killed her, Doc?”

  He sighed heavily, straightening his back with his left hand propped against his side.

  “If I were to venture a guess, which I never like to do, is that she fell from high altitude. See all these broken bones? That happens when you hit the water at high velocity. It’s like hitting concrete, only without the skin lacerations that come with the rough surface abrasions. I’ve seen this type of trauma in high-speed water-skiers.”

  “Yet, you’re assuming she fell from up high?” Michowsky asked. He’d kept quiet for a while, a permanent frown digging ridges on his forehead.

  “Yes, I’ll venture a guess that she wasn’t water-skiing naked with her hands tied behind her back,” Doc Rizza replied.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Michowsky said, sounding a little flustered. “I’m not an idiot. I was thinking she could’ve been thrown from a high-speed boat. Some of these multiengine types can easily go seventy knots.”

  “Got your point,” Rizza replied. “I’ll clarify that after I examine the fracture lines. Dropping from above doesn’t have the same twisting effect that being thrown from a fast-moving vessel would have. Think of stone skipping. If thrown from a boat, her momentum versus the water surface would show in the manner her bones broke. I’ll let you know.”

  “So, if you were to venture a time of death, Doc?” Tess asked, knowing how much the coroner hated making imprecise statements. He’d mentioned three to five hours earlier, but she wanted to confirm.

  “I’d have to say it was sometime between eleven A.M. and two P.M. today. I’ll know more after I finish the autopsy.”

  Tess peeled off her gloves and shoved her hands deep inside her pockets. She stared at the vastness of the Gulf of Mexico, wondering through what miracle the girl’s body had been found.

  The odds of that happening were nonexistent.

  The killer had made sure of that.

  Married

  At twenty-three, Richard thought the world was his. He was the single heir of a billion-dollar industrial conglomerate. He was tall and ruggedly handsome, and he was charismatic. The sports cars he loved to drive, in total disrespect for posted speed limits, were additional girl magnets, but he proved to be hard to get, although many coeds had tried and failed. For some obscure reason, it wasn’t that easy to get into Richard Sanford’s bed, not even in his silver Porsche.

  Drawn to his good looks and his family fortune like moths to the flame, many girls attempted the impossible. Some even ignited a glint of interest in the young man’s eyes, but he always chose to walk or drive away on his own. Few had noticed the clenched fists and tensed jaws when he did so. Yes, he could have them all if he wanted, but it wasn’t smart to give in to his urges. And he had the willpower not to light the fire he knew he couldn’t control once it was kindled.

  Nonetheless, life was good for him.

  He’d just graduated cum laude from Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science, and his hard-to-please father had thrown a relatively decent party for the occasion, complete with a couple of girls who didn’t say no to anything he demanded, to compensate for the many times he’d refused the advances of his coeds. Come midnight on that day, his father had presented him with a formal job offer delivered pompously in a wax-sealed, gold-lettered envelope.

  He was to join Sanford Industries as the vice president of sales, on a direct path to someday taking over the reins of the company from his aging father.

  Yeah, the bastard was aging all right, but not nearly fast enough. He had stamina and drive and was relentless about the business, about every minute of Richard’s time. He expected Richard to give his everything to the family business, just as he had.

  And so, one day, Richard came home to find his perfectly architected world was about to change.

  The old man was seated in front of the study fireplace, sipping twenty-year-old scotch from a cut crystal glass and wearing cigar smoke like a halo around his balding head. On the opposite chair, a somewhat older, heavier, and more obnoxious version of his father sat with his legs crossed and a greedy grin on his face. The two men could’ve been brothers.

  “Richard,” his father had said, “have you met Mr. Wilkes?”

  He promptly approached the guest and shook the hand that was offered, ignoring the cigar ash the bastard sprinkled on his shoes.

  “Of Wilkes Consortium?” Richard replied with a wide smile that managed to look sincere. “No, I haven’t had the pleasure yet.”

  That’s how his slavery had started, with a stranger in his father’s study, the stench of Cohibas, and a handshake he’d never forget because it had sealed his fate. He still remembered that night, the sense of uneasiness he had experienced seeing how his father fawned over Wilkes and knowing he wasn’t privy to the whole story. What were the two tycoons up to?


  That story started unfolding shortly thereafter. In a private conversation happening behind closed doors, his father, with an unyielding stance and a firm tone of voice, had announced Richard’s engagement to Wilkes’s daughter at the same time he informed his son about his intention to merge the two companies into Sanford Wilkes Enterprises. “It makes sense,” he said, blocking his son’s objections with a hand gesture and a raised baritone. “We’re the biggest heavy equipment manufacturer; Wilkes is number one in steel. Times have been hard while you’ve been partying at Yale. Not just for us, you know. All American manufacturers struggle.”

  “But, Dad—”

  “There are no buts here. Your wedding date should be sometime before August. Now, go see your future bride. Her family is expecting us on Sunday for the official proposal of marriage. Just a small circle of friends, nothing big. About two hundred people or so.”

  “Dad—” he tried to plead, but he couldn’t get a word in.

  “Not another word, son,” the old man said, letting himself fall heavy in his burgundy leather armchair. He looked older all of a sudden, tired, drawn.

  Richard crouched in front of his chair to be on the same eye level. “What’s going on, Dad?”

  The old man sighed and lit another cigar. “We need this to happen. Our cash flow’s been taking a beating for years now. We have become dependent on steel imports at high prices. If we want to survive, if you want your legacy to be worth more than a pile of junk, we need this alliance to take place and be sealed with more than signatures on a contract.”

  He found himself at a loss for words. He wanted to swear, scream, strangle the old man with his bare hands. After all, mergers could be signed without having to marry someone. That was so last century.

  “She’s not that bad, son,” his father added, as if reading his mind. “You don’t have to love her.” He blew a cloud of bluish smoke in the air, sending it twirling above Richard’s head. “She’s totally fuckable, you know? I’d marry her myself if her old man would allow it,” the old man added with a raspy, lewd laugh that morphed into a coughing spell.

  Maybe Geneva Wilkes looked fuckable, but was she, really? Richard’s needs were special, leaving him with little choice but to seek the company of women who were willing to satisfy his intense urges without objections.

  The moment he’d seen Geneva, he knew those urges were to be denied, confined to the darkest recesses of his lusting body when he shared the bed of his wife, kept under the strictest control. The classy, snobby socialite, who hadn’t even accepted to take his name, was an ice block in bed. She probably had the same enthusiasm for their union as he had. Noticing that, he was relieved to see he could visit with her less and less often, and she voiced no complaints, apparently, preferring to sleep with her Löwchen dog Althea than with him. Even the dog was a pretentious little snob; apparently only a few remained in the world and had been the dogs of choice for Chinese emperors, at some point or another in their spoiled history. The mutt looked like a regular, fluffy canine accessory to him anyway, and Geneva could’ve gotten a dog looking just like that from the local pound.

  But that pretentious furball and his wife’s low libido had brought him the freedom to spend his nights at will, as long as he was discreet about it. And that he was. He’d learned the need for discretion the hard way.

  Their marriage evolved well in the first couple of years, if what they had could even be called a marriage. But one night, after an exquisite meal and a certain bottle of Pineau des Charentes, a sweet French wine with unexpected consequences, he made a drunken pass at his wife, and she didn’t send him away. Maybe she was just as horny as he was, after sipping two glasses of that intoxicating elixir. They held hands all the way back from the Palme d’Or restaurant in Coral Gables, and they almost tore each other’s clothes before reaching the bedroom door.

  Lust and wine swirled in his heated body, fueled by Geneva’s eager moans and undulating body, and soon he forgot all about his need to control his urges. Overtaken by dark passion, he tied her hands and smothered her screams until he found his release. He hadn’t noticed that halfway through his assault, she’d stopped fighting him, choosing to stare at him with cold eyes, waiting for it to be over, the determination in her gaze as steeled as her family’s roots.

  Lying spent and grateful by her side, Richard had removed her restraints and placed a kiss on her cold lips. “Baby, you were amazing,” he’d whispered, still oblivious to her deathly stare.

  She got up and wrapped a silk robe around her body, then rubbed her sore wrists for a long minute, staring at the naked man lying in her bed. Then she turned away and left without a word.

  The following day, she was waiting for him in the living room when he came home. Seeing her icy glare, his smile died on his lips while worry unfurled in his gut, setting off alarm bells.

  “I knew who you were before we were married,” she said, going straight to the point without any introduction. “You don’t think I was going to marry a total stranger without a full background check, did you?”

  She waited for him to reply, but he stood frozen, slack-jawed.

  “Baby, what are you talking about?” he managed to ask, but his voice was trembling pitifully.

  “You gave me some nice souvenirs last night,” she added, showing her bruised wrists. “But don’t worry, my dear,” she added, her voice dipped in poison. “These will heal. That’s why I have taken photos of every bruise you left on my body and placed them in safekeeping with my lawyer, in case some unforeseen accident would happen, and I’d be hurt in any way.”

  He swallowed hard, as he started to comprehend where this was going.

  “Now, let’s discuss the new terms of our marriage, my dear husband.”

  She paused again, expecting him to agree. All he could do was nod, his teeth too clenched to allow any spoken words to come out.

  “I’ll keep it simple. You do what I say, when I say, how I say. That includes everything, even sex. You are not to lay a single finger on me without permission, ever again.” She smiled, seemingly savoring his humiliation and prolonging it. “If you break this arrangement, the photos will come out, and with them, the entire dossier my investigator put together on your youthful indiscretions.”

  A jolt of fear traveled through his body. How much did she know?

  “Yes, that dossier includes the girls you raped at Yale. Remember those poor creatures? Did you know one of them needed hospitalization? Did you even care? How much did your daddy fork out to make them go away?”

  She stood and then picked up her fluffy mutt, quickly placing a smooch on the dog’s nose with a smile and a happy flicker of love in her gaze. Then she faced him, her eyes turned steel-cold again.

  “Welcome to your new life, hubby dear. May it be a long and painful one. If you had any self-esteem, you’d shoot yourself.”

  Minutes after she’d left and closed the door, his jaws were still clenched so badly he didn’t feel the pain from the molar he’d cracked while grinding his teeth to keep himself from killing her right where she’d stood.

  He was screwed for life. The damn bitch from hell would never let him go.

  But one day he’d be free.

  Autopsy

  The coroner’s office was a familiar place that came with the territory of being an FBI agent, the type most frequently assigned to investigate murders, especially those where Tess’s profiling background was a valuable asset. Yet every time she set foot on Doc Rizza’s domain, Tess shivered, the coldness of the room more imaginary than real, enhanced by the metallic furniture, the steel tables, and the body freezers aligned on the back wall.

  He’d been up all night, working, she’d concluded upon receiving his text message at five-thirty that morning, inviting her to review preliminary findings. Michowsky had received the same message, but he’d managed to squeeze in a coffee stop on his way in and approached with a spring in his step while carrying a tray with three tall paper cups bearing t
heir respective names scribbled in blue Sharpie.

  The smell of the freshly brewed coffee collided with the strong chemical odors in the morgue. The strongest, formaldehyde, prevailed and made Tess crinkle her nose and decline the coffee offering.

  “Maybe later,” she said, then approached the lab table where the coroner worked. “Good morning,” she greeted him with cheer in her voice, then added, catching a whiff of sweat mixed with traces of alcohol. “Or, should I say, good evening, in your case?”

  “Clinically speaking, morning refers to the time of day, not to my chosen lifestyle,” he replied, not taking his eyes off a screen, while he adjusted some samples under the digital microscope’s lens. “So, it’s good morning until noon,” he added, looking at Tess with unapologetic, bloodshot eyes surrounded by dark circles.

  “You could’ve slept last night,” Tess admonished him gently.

  “Do you know how lucky we were to find this girl so soon after she’d been killed, in the Gulf of Mexico? It’s almost twice the size of Texas!”

  Tess nodded. “Still, you could’ve—”

  “Could’ve what?” he cut her off, rubbing his nape thoroughly. “Could’ve gone home to enjoy an evening with my family?” The bitterness in his voice was heartbreaking. “At least here I can do some good.”

  “I—I didn’t mean it like that,” Tess replied. “You still need rest.”

  “And I didn’t mean to be a jerk,” he said, avoiding her gaze. “I know your heart is in the right place.” He walked toward the autopsy table with slow, heavy steps. “Let’s just focus on her instead, shall we?”

  “Do we have an ID yet?” Michowsky asked, seeing a driver’s license pulled up on one of the monitors. “Was she reported missing?”

  “Again, we were lucky. No missing persons report yet, but her fingerprints were in the system. She was a frequent traveler with TSA clearance.” He bent over the keyboard with a quiet groan, and the driver’s license filled the large screen. “Meet Myra Lambert, twenty-nine, from Palm Beach.”