“No, he’ll show up…” I replied.
I heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. The medical examiner’s van had arrived. “I’ll see you back at the station, I’m going to talk to the M.E. I’ll stop off on the way into town and get some breakfast burritos or something. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long night.”
I looked up as the moon started to fade behind a cloud and corrected that statement. “Long day. It’s going to be a long day.”
I turned my attention back to the leader of the pack.
“Katie, do you know if Jamie’s family belongs to any church?” It always helped to have a minister, priest or rabbi with you when you informed the family, especially if it was a child that had died.
Maybe she was getting tired, or maybe I had gotten the wrong impression before, but now she answered me without the attitude. She almost sounded humble.
“Yes, ma’am, they belong to St. Mary’s. Her mother is the secretary there.”
“Thank you,” I told her as Marty guided the girls into his vehicle for the ride back to the station.
Now it came to me why everyone looked so familiar. All these girls belonged to the same school and youth group at St. Mary’s that my daughter Bethany belonged to. Now not only did I have to break the news to that poor girl’s parents, I had to tell my daughter once again that something terrible had happened to someone she knew.
She still hadn’t come to grips with the death of Joe’s wife. Connie had been like a second mother to her. Then Annie came back from Afghanistan with a devastating brain injury and my daughter, who was twelve at the time, fell into that dark hole they call depression. Glenn and I were so concerned that we enlisted the help of Marty’s girlfriend Hope, a child psychiatrist.
My daughter was now also feeling the loss of her “Uncle Joe,” who was so wrapped up in his own sorrow that he couldn’t see he was breaking my daughter’s heart.
On top of that, Bethany’s hero, her big brother Cliff, had gone off to college and she was having trouble adjusting to his absence.
I didn’t relish coming home and giving her the news. I looked at my watch. It was almost five a.m. She would still be asleep and unaware of how her day would begin. I toyed with the idea of having Glenn keep her home from school. News of the girl’s murder would spread like fleas in a kennel. I didn’t want her to hear about it at school, but I had a job to do, and I couldn’t shelter my child from the realities of life forever.
I turned to one of the officers who were just hanging around waiting for something to do.
“Rick, get the number of St. Mary’s Parish and give Father Murphy a call. Explain to him what happened and have him call me.”
I walked over to the medical examiner, deciding that when I was done here, I would call Glenn and have him make the decision of how we would inform my daughter about what had happened.
***
Robert
Lyons
served as the town’s medical examiner. He was a fifty-four-year-old confirmed bachelor with a Harvard education, a throwback to the sixties era with a hippie persona. He had returned to his childhood home after becoming disillusioned while working in the trauma department at one of Boston’s inner-city hospitals. He told me once that he couldn’t deal with the expiration of someone’s physical and spiritual being, but that he believed that the science of discovering why that person ceased to exist within our reality was his preordained future.
His vernacular was usually wasted on the majority of us cops while he performed his duties, but put a drink or two in him, or, as I sometimes suspected, a toke of some illegal substance, and he spoke just like the rest of us: “It sucks, watching someone die—especially a kid.”
It boiled down to the fact that watching gang members, mostly children, shooting the crap out of each other had taken a toll on this sensitive man. Although he often was able to repair the damage inflicted on so many of these kids and save their lives; there was a percentage of those who did not survive. Watching those kids die in such a senseless way was not his cup of tea.
Anyway, Boston’s loss was the town of Fallsburg’s gain.
I got to him just as he was lifting the gray tarp that covered Jamie Camp’s now-faceless body. He tossed it aside as you would a blanket getting out of bed. The girl now lay fully exposed. I saw several of the officers turn their faces, in either respect for the partially nude child or just in horror of what had been done to her. One or two seemed fixated on what they were seeing, drawn to it as a deer is to headlights.
When the M.E. lifted the gray tarp and exposed the body, the first thing my eyes were drawn to, was what at one time had been her face. The acrid scent of burnt flesh and hair still lingered in the air. Charred skin reminded me of a toasted marshmallow that was left in the fire a bit too long.
As Lyons knelt down and began a preliminary examination, taking her liver temperature to determine the time of death, and looking for other signs of injuries. My own eyes slowly took inventory of Jamie Camp’s other physical attributes. She was petite: I guessed her to be five feet tall, maybe ninety-five pounds, if that much. Not flat-chested, but with small firm adolescent breasts. The bottom half of her body was attired in a pair of blue jeans that sat low on her waist, showing her to have a slight hourglass figure. Her belly button was adorned with a diamond stud that acted like a tiny prism, reflecting off the car high beams, which were aimed at her body to provide adequate light. She wore socks and a popular and expensive brand of leather sneakers. This very same type of sneaker sat in the bottom of my own daughter’s bedroom closet.
I was just about to ask Lyons if he could determine the cause of death when Tommy Sullivan, known affectionately as Sully, approached us.
“Detective Whitley, we found a half-empty can of lighter fluid under some brush about thirty yards from here. We have it marked off and photographed, but I’m waiting for someone to get some material to make casts of what look like shoe prints. Do you want me to bag it and label it, or do you want to check it out first?”
“Leave it, Tommy, I’ll be right there. Thanks,” I told him.
“Sure, detective, no problem. Damn crazy people out there,” he muttered as his teddy bear physique and signature duck walk carried him back in the direction from which he came.
I started to turn back to the M.E. as Tommy waddled away. I looked back in Tommy’s direction.
“Hey,” I called after him. “What about her blouse? Bra?”
He shrugged with what a decade ago had once been broad shoulders, but now appeared rounded and tired.
“Nothing,” he answered me, shaking his head as he kept walking, never turning around.
“Do you think that’s what caused the burns to her face, Rob? Does that look like burns from lighter fluid?” I asked Robert, who was standing now. His tall, lanky body reminded me of an overcooked green bean. His skin fell in deep creases, taking on the look of worn leather. His hair was tied back and woven into what had to be at least three feet of gray braid that swayed back in forth as he moved. I found myself picturing him playing the part of an aging surfer dude in one of those “Beach Blanket Bingo” flicks with Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee or Annette Funicello.
“Can’t say with any degree of certainty, but it is categorically a distinct possibility that lighter fluid, a highly flammable, colorless liquid, could be the culprit. Sure as hell smells like it.”
I smiled at his answer. Lyon's was so meticulous in his wording until the end, when he spoke in plain old English.
“What about cause of death? Any ideas?” I asked.
I wasn’t an expert in forensics, but experience and a lack of blood on or around the girl’s body made me fairly confident that Jamie Camp did not meet her demise by the use of a gun or knife.
‘I would rather not presume anything at this point, detective.” Kneeling back down, he carefully cradled the girl’s head, gently lifting her neck back, trying to expose skin that was unaffected by the burns.
“There are no obvious ligature marks, no discoloration around her throat, but it’s hard to tell, with the residue of the burns. Normally I would look for petechiae in the eyes, but her lids are burnt shut.” His upper lip curled up in what I took to be a sign of disgust.
He gently laid her head down back on the ground. The way he did it reminded me of the care Glenn would take when Bethany was just an infant and he was laying her down in her crib. I pictured my daughter’s tiny head cupped in the palm of her father’s hand.
As he stood up, I heard a loud snap as he took off the latex gloves that protected his hands. He was a few years older than me, but you couldn’t tell it by looking at his hands. His fingers were long and thin, almost feminine. In the shadow of the moonlight and with the lights coming from the high beams, I had perfect visibility. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t find a blemish on them. It was as if the man’s hands didn’t belong with the rest of his body.
“Let’s get her on the table; I prefer not to make any assumptions,” he reiterated, adding, “I would make an educated guess, though, since rigor mortis is in full bloom, she has been deceased anywhere from one to four hours.”
The officer that I had instructed to call St Mary’s walked over to us. “detective,” he handed me his cell. “Father Murphy is on the line.”
I mouthed a word of thanks as I took the phone from him.
“Sorry to bother you this early, Father, but I thought it would help for you to accompany me to the girl’s home. Can you meet me there in about forty-five minutes?” I asked as I tried to make out the time on my wrist- watch. The face of the watch appeared blurry.
I hated to admit it, but this was becoming more and more of a problem. I knew it would be just a matter of time before I joined that group of aging baby boomers that I often saw turning the display of reading glasses in Wal-Mart.
I could hear the sleepiness in his voice when he answered me, but I could tell from the noises in the background that he was already in the process of getting dressed.
Father Murphy
was what my mother would have described as a dapper young man. I knew many of his female congregation, of which I was a part, thought that the church’s gain was every single woman’s loss. Since I was suffering from a lack of sleep and that often made me a little slaphappy, I got giddy at the thought of the good Father stepping into his tighty-whities. Annoyed with my lack of professionalism and maturity, I compelled myself to visualize him placing the clerical collar around his neck instead.
I started to give him the address, but he informed me that he didn’t need it. He reminded me that Jamie’s mother was not only a parishioner, but also an employee. Before hanging up, he echoed my own feelings: “This is the part of the job I hate the most.”
“Yeah, me too,” I told him, before I handed the phone back to the officer.
I turned back to the medical examiner.
“Okay, Rob,” I said. “I need to go inform her parents. Take care of her, will you?”
I knew he would. I knew that although he appeared to be emotionally detached because of his highly intelligent persona, it was just a defense mechanism. I had caught him tearing up and sniffling on more than one occasion, often blaming the distinct smell of death for his watery eyes