Lost Lake Page 7

  Chapter Ten

  It was the middle of the afternoon, and I was famished. I grabbed a couple of shredded pork tacos and an ice-cold Dr Pepper from a food truck in Civic Park. The park, four shaded acres of grass and a small playground, was adjacent to the local community college, and I sat at a damp picnic table under a grove of aspen trees, watching a group of students play Frisbee in the grass.

  As I ate, I jotted down notes from my conversation with Crabbe and the search of Starbuck’s house. Her extravagant financial donations were new and unexpected developments in the case, though to be honest, I was fairly certain that in the end they would be unrelated to her murder. While it’s true that people kill for money every day, the valuable necklace left broken at the scene of the crime seemed to suggest that money was not the motive for this particular murder.

  I ate half of my lunch and then pushed the plate away. I’d lost my appetite. Starbuck’s murder, coming on the heels of her employee Sari Chesney’s disappearance, was disturbing to say the least. Two women who worked closely together, one violently killed, the other missing. Was Chesney dead, too? If so, where was her body? Had she been killed by the same person? To what end? And how—if at all—did the missing Rayburn Diary and/or the museum figure in?

  An errant Frisbee headed my way. Picking it up, I aimed it back to the kids and with a flick of my wrist sent the disc flying through the air. The kids resumed their game. The cloudy skies had parted, the morning’s early rain forgotten. It was another beautiful day in the Rockies. All around me were signs of spring, Mother Nature’s most glorious display of new life, but I barely noticed it. I had another appointment with death, this time in the form of a phone call to the morgue.

  I spoke briefly with Dr. Bonaire. Patrick Crabbe had yet to appear and formally identify Starbuck’s body, so I continued on to the police station. The talk there was about the murder, of course. More and more, Cedar Valley was regularly catching the same kinds of crimes that we used to only see in the big metro regions like Denver and Colorado Springs. A television in the corner of the central squad room was tuned to a local station, and the news ticker on the bottom of the screen scrolled highlights from Chief Chavez’s press conference earlier in the day: Prominent citizen murdered … Museum director killed … investigation proceeding …

  My partner, Finn Nowlin, was back from his trip to Palm Springs. His startling blue eyes looked even brighter than normal against his deep tan. I stopped at his desk, and he handed me a small box of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts.

  “TSA confiscated the palm tree I stuffed in my suitcase. I figured you’d like the chocolate better anyway.”

  “You know me so well.”

  We made small talk for a few minutes as I wrestled with the plastic wrap on the chocolates. Amused, Finn watched me until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He grabbed the box of candy and took a letter opener to the wrapper. Then he popped off the lid and handed the chocolates back to me.

  I groaned. “Damn. There’re only four in here. That’s like a tease.”

  “Portion control, Gem. People in California, they’re all about the portion control. So, get me up to speed on the Starbuck murder.”

  Finn was a good listener, remaining quiet while I spoke, taking notes on the yellow legal pad he favored. In addition to the Starbuck murder, I told him about the Sari Chesney and Rayburn Diary disappearances. I watched as he wrote Kent Starbuck’s name and then circled it twice.

  It was a lot of information to share. When I was done talking, I sat back and sipped from a water bottle, then finished the box of chocolates and waited while Finn reviewed his notes. He scratched at the base of his neck, and I noticed he was wearing his dark hair longer these days. It didn’t suit him, and I almost said something.

  Almost.

  Finn went first, and his words were unexpected. “I don’t think you can assume these three cases are related.”

  “Seriously?” I raised my eyebrows. “So it’s just coincidence that in one weekend, a priceless diary is stolen, a woman disappears, and her boss is viciously murdered?”

  “It could be coincidence. Here’s one explanation: Chesney ditches the boyfriend and the small town for a shot at riches somewhere else, maybe Las Vegas, Los Angeles. The diary is stolen by the guy with OCD. And Starbuck is murdered by some junkie looking for cash to score.”

  “Larry Bornstein is a germaphobe, not obsessive-compulsive.”

  “Whatever. Point is, he’s one of three employees with the combination to the museum safe and he’s the only one of the three who is not dead or missing. Out of everyone, he’s got the most opportunity and means to both steal the diary and kill Starbuck. Why aren’t we looking at him more closely?”

  “We are looking at him. We’re going to look at everyone.”

  “How does a guy who’s scared of germs end up spending his days around a bunch of old, dusty artifacts? I guarantee everything in that museum has been touched by a hundred hands. I find it very strange that he works there,” Finn said. “So how do you want to do this?”

  “Our priority is the Starbuck murder, obviously. And the stolen diary is just going to have to wait.”

  After tossing around a few more ideas, we divided up tasks. We were in the middle of finalizing next steps in the investigation when the front desk officer popped his head in.

  “Gemma, the medical examiner just called. He’s ready for you.”

  I stood. “Thanks, Tony. Finn, I’ll take the autopsy if you want to start gathering the guest list from the gala? We need to interview every person who was there. By my estimate, that’s close to two hundred people.”

  “You got it.” Finn looked grateful to skip the autopsy.

  I gathered my things, then stopped and looked at him. There was one more thing troubling me, something I hadn’t planned on mentioning. But I believed in that moment that by saying it, by bringing it into the light, I’d somehow exorcise it from my mind.

  “Have you ever heard of the Lost Girls?”

  Finn thought a moment, squinting. “Nope. Who are they?”

  “A group of young women who killed themselves in Lost Lake over a hundred years ago. It was a suicide pact. One of them was related to Owen Rayburn.” I chewed on my lower lip, hesitant to express the thing that was circling in my thoughts.

  Finn said it for me. “You think there’s something to this diary curse?”

  Hearing Finn say it out loud, I had to laugh.

  But the laugh was hollow, and my words felt untrue. “Of course not.”

  “Good. We’ve got enough on our plate without worrying about some mumbo-jumbo hex.”

  Chapter Eleven

  As I left the police station, I found and then called the number for the alarm company that serviced the museum. It was a national chain, and I was placed on hold almost immediately. I put the phone on speaker, set it on the passenger seat of my car, and started heading for the morgue. Five minutes later, while I was stopped at a red light, my call was finally picked up. After I identified myself and explained the situation, the man on the other end transferred me to a female supervisor who pulled a few records.

  “Yes, Mrs. Starbuck called us last week. According to the notes on file, she wanted override permissions because of a late-night party she was throwing on Saturday. Those permissions overrode the automatic five p.m. alarm. The alarm was set with her code at midnight last night—wait, I guess that’s this morning—midnight this morning, then disabled again at twelve twenty-two a.m. and set again at twelve twenty-three a.m. Then the alarm was again disabled at five a.m.,” the woman said. “Does that information help you?”

  “Yes, thanks so much. So, if I understand correctly, those records show someone—we’ll assume Mrs. Starbuck—leaving the museum at midnight and then coming back twenty-two minutes later, disarming the system, and then re-arming it one minute later?”

  “You got it. Those codes are assigned to Mrs. Starbuck, and then that next one, the one at five a.m., is a code a
ssigned to a cleaning crew,” the woman answered. Having gotten everything that I needed, I thanked her and hung up. I pulled into the hospital parking lot and found a spot near the rear entrance, close to the morgue. I parked, then hurried in, aware that Bonaire was waiting for me to begin the autopsy.

  As I changed in the locker room from street wear to paper scrubs, I marveled not for the first time at the sheer number of moments, actions, and decisions that make up a person’s life. Were we to trace every second of Betty Starbuck’s last day on earth, we’d only be scratching the surface of a vast chasm of time, of seconds and minutes and hours and days, that made up her existence. It was akin to pondering the size of the universe—you’re always going to come up short.

  The morgue was located in the basement of the hospital. I left the locker room and headed down the corridor to what I’d taken to calling the Death Room. Inside, Bonaire and an assistant were dressed in identical booties, masks, and hair caps. Each wore gloves and a heavy apron over their scrubs. Bonaire also had an earpiece with a microphone that went down to his mouth to record his observations as the autopsy progressed.

  The room was freezing, with a sterile quality to the air.

  Everything—from the instruments laid out to the grates in the floor—looked cold and unfeeling, yet I knew that, in this room devoted to probing the most intimate human spaces, Bonaire, like our medical examiners, cared very much about the person on the table. They treated the bodies that came in their doors with dignity and care. They were respectful and dedicated to their mission. It was thankless work, and yet somehow, medical examiners were among the most humane professionals I’d met in the field.

  Through his mask, I saw Bonaire lift his eyebrows at me. I nodded back at him: I was ready. I stood in a corner, careful not to touch anything. Aside from the rhythmic whoosh of fresh air entering the room through vents set high in the walls, it was silent.

  Bonaire and his assistant moved fluidly, comfortable in the chilly environment.

  Betty Starbuck lay on a stainless steel table in the middle of the Death Room, draped with a pale blue sheet. While he’d waited for me to arrive, Bonaire—or his assistant—had washed Starbuck’s head wound. Without the blood, it was clear the injury was superficial, but now the gruesome bruising around her neck stood out in even more shocking and stark tones.

  Bonaire worked steadily and quietly, as he’d done at the museum. He was clinical and thorough, stopping every few minutes to murmur into his microphone and then resuming his work. I was, of course, not an expert, but unlike some of the other autopsies I’d attended, this particular death seemed rather straightforward. I waited for some new piece of information to emerge, but when Bonaire finally took a lengthy break, it was to tell me what he’d predicted that morning: Betty Starbuck, in the plainest terms, had been strangled to death.

  “As I initially suspected, the larynx is damaged and the hyoid bone is fractured. Her airway was compressed and the blood flow to the neck impeded. She would have lost consciousness within a minute or two, followed shortly by death,” Bonaire said. “There is something strange, though. The bruising on her neck, here and here, suggests that her killer started choking her, only to stop and then start again.”

  “Maybe he had second thoughts about killing her? Or lost his grip and had to start again?”

  Bonaire lifted a shoulder. “Motive is beyond this room. That’s your field. I will say, though—strangling someone like this … it’s a very personal attack.”

  “Yes. Anything else?”

  Bonaire took a step back to the body and lifted Starbuck’s right hand. “She has tissue fragments and blood under her nails. You’re looking for someone with deep scratches, likely on his or her forearms, possibly on the face.”

  Bonaire gently set Starbuck’s hand down and lifted both of his, putting them together in front of him, mimicking throttling someone. “The victim’s right hand was free, and she fought her killer. He, or she, had the victim by the neck—so the surface area on which she could have clawed her killer was limited.”

  “You’ll run the tissue and blood samples through the databases? We could get a match if the killer has a record.”

  “Of course, that’s standard procedure,” Bonaire said with a nod. “You are aware results can take weeks?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. There is one other thing. You saw at the crime scene that the victim had a necklace in her right hand?”

  “Yes. I observed her wearing the same necklace earlier in the evening.”

  “I’ve submitted the jewelry to your department with the rest of the items she had on her person—her dress, undergarments,” Bonaire said. “There are fibers entwined in the chain that don’t match the dress she wore. Red and black threads.”

  “Fibers from the killer’s clothes?”

  He nodded. “Possibly. Or they may have come from a coat, a jacket that belonged to the victim. They could have come from hugging someone. Point is, they may or may not be important. I’ll leave that to your forensics team.”

  “Got it.”

  Several scenes ran through my head, visions of the way the killing may have unfolded. Bonaire said the killer started choking Starbuck, then stopped, only to start again. “Maybe the necklace got in the way of the initial choking. The killer stopped and tore the necklace from her throat as she tore at his clothes … or she tore at her throat in an effort to breathe and in the process tore the necklace away. Then he started again. The killer was not there for the necklace, so he didn’t care that she had it in her hands.”

  Bonaire slowly nodded. “It could have happened like that.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Bonaire, for seeing this through, on a Sunday. I know you could have postponed it for tomorrow.”

  Bonaire frowned. “Yes, I could have. But I would not have been able to look at myself in the mirror tonight, or enjoy dinner with my wife and twin sons. Someone stole this woman’s life from her. Every minute that we are not searching for answers is a minute more in the killer’s bank.”

  “That’s how I feel, too.”

  I left the doctor and his assistant to do their strange dance with Starbuck: they manipulating her limbs, her organs; she giving up the secrets of her life and death. As I changed back into my street clothes and tossed the scrubs into a trash receptacle, a thought began to nag at me. Something Bonaire had said, or something I’d seen, scratched at the edge of my mind, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was.

  It bothered me immensely, not being able to wrangle my own thoughts.

  Frustrated, I stomped out of the locker room and headed to the vending machine that hummed next to the front doors of the morgue. I dropped a few bucks in and was rewarded with a fiber bar and a bag of cheese-flavored chips. Wondering for a moment if they canceled each other out, then deciding I didn’t really care, I scarfed down the bar and took my time with the chips, figuring they were maybe dessert.

  It was nearly six p.m. and I should have headed home, but instead I sat in my car, watching hospital personnel and members of the public go in and out of the building.

  I sat for a long time, thinking about a series of events:

  Rayburn’s daughter and friends kill themselves at Lost Lake.

  Rayburn’s Diary is to be the showpiece of a museum.

  A museum employee disappears at Lost Lake.

  The diary disappears.

  The museum director is killed.

  How could there not be some thread linking these events? Was it the diary? Lost Lake? Or one of the women, and if so, which one: the missing or the dead?

  As if reading my mind, Sari’s boyfriend, Mac Stephens, called on my cell phone. To my surprise, considering it had been on the news, he hadn’t yet heard about Betty Starbuck’s murder.

  “Oh my god. Sari and Mrs. Starbuck worked side by side,” Mac said. His voice grew agitated. “Something must have happened to Sari, too, something terrible.”

  “We don’t know that yet. Mac, w
hat was your impression of the relationship between Sari and Betty Starbuck? Did they get along? I recall that Ally Chang referred to Starbuck as a witch.”

  Silence on the other end of the line.

  “Mac? Are you still there?”

  He cleared his throat, then: “Well … they were both professionals. But I think they disliked each other, quite a lot, actually. Sari had some great ideas for the museum, cutting edge exhibits, that sort of thing, but Mrs. Starbuck never let her implement any of them. I got the feeling maybe the old lady was jealous of Sari.”

  “Do you think things could have gotten physical between them?”

  Mac snorted into the phone. “You’re kidding, right? Like, could Sari have killed Betty? Um, no. Not a chance in hell. Sari wouldn’t hurt a fly. She’s vegetarian. Although…”

  “What is it, Mac? Anything you can tell me might be helpful, no matter how small or trivial seeming.”

  “Well, there was one incident. About six months ago. Mrs. Starbuck blew up at Sari after a board meeting. She belittled Sari. By the time I got off work and met her at a bar, Sari was three sheets to the wind. And Sari’s not a heavy drinker. I remember she told me that one day ‘that bitch’ would get what was coming to her. I didn’t pay too much attention at the time—I was more concerned with getting Sari to lay off the booze than with idle comments.”

  “Did anyone else witness this altercation?”

  “No, it was just the two of them. At least, that’s what Sari told me.”

  I heard a muffled voice from a paging system. It was obvious Mac was still at work at the hospital. He said, “Look, I’ve got to go. Please, call me if you hear anything. She’s been gone the whole weekend.”

  “Of course. Listen, Mac, before you go—did Sari ever mention a diary to you?”

  “Oh yeah. She journaled religiously. She’d refuse to come to bed until she wrote in that thing,” Mac said. “I called it her second boyfriend.”