Looking for A Sign

            “Waller, they found a body on the Midwest Bike Trail about a hundred feet west of the Fox River,” stated Police Sergeant David Dodson, our special-operations supervisor. His voice was full of tension.

“Isn’t that for the Forest Preserve Police?” I asked into my cell.

 “They’ve asked us to handle it because it looks like a homicide. I want you and Garcia on it. I’ll notify the coroner next.”

“A body? Yeah, we’re on it.” I looked at my partner, Detective Carlos Garcia, seated at his desk. He’s not bad looking. The Fu Manchu mustache looked good with his brown skin. A raised glazed donut perched in his right hand and a paper cup of Dunkin coffee before him on his desk. His white shirt and blue suit hung lean and long off his well-tapered build. I looked down at my solidly built body, thinking, how can he eat donuts and still look like that? I became aware I had to hook my belt on the last notch when I dressed that Monday morning. But I told him, “They’ve got a body for us.”

Garcia’s hand stopped halfway to his mouth. “Let’s go.”

We strode out of the station house in a hurry to do our job. I pride myself on being a no-nonsense individual. I’m thirty-five-year-old Detective Alicia Waller. My black shoes making long, mean strides.

Twenty minutes later Garcia parked on Western Drive near two squads. I called in a ten twenty-three to let dispatch know we had arrived at the scene. The morning sun was poking over the horizon coating a glow over everything.

The sides of the path mingled with a collection of weeds and wildflowers of various heights. Garcia and I pulled on white Tyvek suits over our clothing. These coverall pants and shirt are all one piece that zips up the middle to prevent us from contaminating the crime scene. We also put protective white booties over our shoes. We pulled on plastic gloves from a dispenser shaped like a Kleenex box. We quickly showed our badges to a uniform and signed our names on the Crime Scene Attendance Log the cop held on a clipboard.

I squatted near the victim in the trampled weeds.  Her face and hands were as white as the Queen Ann’s Lace growing nearby. I told myself, dead people aren’t people; they are objects. Look at the corpse as evidence. This is always easier thought then done.

She was wearing a tank top and jogging shorts. Even with gloves on my hands, I could feel the chill of her cold, cold fingers. She had perfect Jennifer Lopez thighs. Mentally I compared them with my thunder thighs. Her thin fingers ended with ragged nails. I turned her hand over and said, “Her broken fingernails might indicate she struggled with her attacker. Be sure to bag them.” I made sure to tell him what to do because I’m the lead investigator on this case.

Garcia encased the victim’s hands in paper bags. He looked closer at the victim. “Bruising around the neck.”

I turned the body a little more. Purple discoloration around the neck told me there had been some sort of trauma in that region. “The broken capillaries under her eyes looks like she was strangled,” I told Garcia. “Those cuts on her arms and legs could be evidence she fought her attacker or maybe they came when the killer dragged her off the path.”

“There’s a cell phone clipped on her waistband,” Garcia said. “The killer didn’t take it. We also have a watch on her wrist. Doesn’t look like robbery.”

“See if you can get an address off the cell.”

After pressing a few buttons, he said. “I lived about 4 blocks from here.

 I pointed at a couple cigarette butts on the ground. “These could be from our killer. Everyone knows smoking is a nervous habit, but it’s not smart. DNA in the saliva on the cigarette butts can send a killer to death row.”

He snickered. “Another way smoking can kill you.”

We set to work with paper evidence bags for collecting cigarette butts and beer bottles. Vacuum cleaners collected trace evidence from the ground. The killer might have left behind hair, or bits of skin sloughed-off when their hands touched the victim’s clothes.

One area in the trees south of the body caught my eye when I saw how flattened the weeds were. “Someone could have been standing there.” I told Garcia. We both looked closer. Then I spotted a small aluminum and plastic package. “What’s that?”

Garcia bent to pick it up, then read, “eclipse” off the side of it. He brought it to his nose. “Mmmm, still minty. Must be fresh. We’ll see if the lab can get any prints off it.” He bagged it.

A crime scene had clues of its own, remembering trauma in the soil, insects altered by body fluids, and plants trampled by feet. The scene lost its privacy just as a witness did, for no stone would be left undisturbed. “I only want one medic to enter the scene to preserve as much evidence as possible.”

Two patrol officers started to tape off the scene to keep reporters out but allowed the medical examiner’s attendant inside the “hot zone.” The ME’s attendant wrapped the body in a clean white sheet before removal to trap any hairs, fibers, or other trace materials to examine later.

As we walked back to our Explorer, I was unzipping my white Tyvek suit. My personal clothing was wet with perspiration under the coveralls for the day was warming up. I wrestled my shoulders lose. “Let’s go to her home to notify anyone she was living with.”

Evidence technicians would spend the next six hours at the site, long after the body was removed to the morgue.

Garcia and I found her husband at home. It’s always difficult notifying family. We also asked him to volunteer a sample of his saliva DNA so we could rule him out. Hesitantly he gave in.

As we left his home, I turned toward Garcia. “Since there are no cameras on this trail, I want to talk with people and get photos of everyone out here at the same time of day she was murdered. You and I will walk the trail tomorrow morning to get pictures of everyone. Maybe there are some regulars out here.”

Garcia nodded in agreement. “You’re right. She was killed at approximately six this morning. We could get lucky if someone noticed them arguing before the killer got his hands on her.”

I placed my hands on my ample hips as I said, “Let’s meet at the diner at five for breakfast, then we’ll question everyone near the site. Sound like a plan?”

“Works for me.” He nodded.

By four thirty on Tuesday morning, my dark hair was pinned into its normal bun on top of my head. I don’t wear lipstick because it would just make my mouth look even bigger on my face, I stepped inside the Komfy Koffee Kup, a greasy spoon diner on the corner of Cochise and Main to have breakfast with Garcia.

We ate quickly, paid for our food, and left the diner. We had a lot of work ahead of us.

We pulled out onto Route 59 and headed north to Western Drive towards the area where the trail started in town.

We parked our Ford Explorer at the beginning of the trail, a faint reddish glow appeared in the eastern horizon, making Garcia’s eyes as bright as little campfires. Noisy birds greeted us on the path.

“It’s too lovely a day to be on the hunt for a murderer.” He looked down the trail before us. The Midwest Bike Trail, a gravel path approximately five feet wide, wound into the country between fields and the Big Chief Golf Course where the signs of inhabitants grew sparse.

A small bouncing light approached. Soon we could tell it was a runner with a bobbing flashlight on his helmet. “That’s a dedicated runner,” I murmured.

 We stopped the thin man, got his name, and questioned him. He said he started a couple hours ago when it was dark and leaves the light on. He ran every morning but hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary yesterday. Reluctantly we moved onward. Glimpses of sunlight poked through the foliage along the running path.

Representatives of the West Chicago social hodgepodge, couples with dogs which I always pet when we stop their owners, and loners hiked or biked the path.

The sun was making shadows across the path. The hottest part of the day was ahead. We peered into underbrush on each side of the trail. We were committed to talking and taking photos of everyone on the path.

A man carrying a camera with a large lens and a camera bag slung over one shoulder came towards us. We questioned him, and he explained he sold outdoor photographs to Shutterstock. His ID confirmed who he said he was as he kept checking the sky. At first, he resisted showing us what was in his large camera case saying sunrise was the best time to take photos and he was missing it, but when I suggested he come into the police station to show us, he grudgingly presented the extra lenses and cleaning cloth.

We continued hiking the trail which ran right up to the weedy bank of the Pottawatomie River, a flat stretch of water twelve feet wide, moss-green in places and rusted brown in others. Frogs belched while two crows fought over something, they found important. Weeping willows bent along the banks.

Trees partially hid a small dirt parking area on the west side of the river. I remembered someone referring to it as parking area two. We talked with a pony-tailed twenty-year-old getting out of her car. I asked if she usually parked here to use the trail.

“I try to get out here every other day and I always leave my car in this parking lot.”

“How crowded does this lot get?”

 She said there were usually two to four cars parked in this area when she ran the path. We took down her license plate number and also the other cars parked there. We’d run the plates later.

Garcia said, “Someone could hide in all this buckthorn lining the trail.” We looked through the bushy trees for any evidence someone might have left behind. But how would we know whether the trash was from our killer or the hundreds of people who use this trail every day?

 We took photos of every walker, jogger, and biker. We questioned everyone we saw, asking, were you here yesterday morning at this time? Did you see anyone else? If so, what did they look like? Male or female? Some had been here and did see others but really couldn’t describe anyone clearly. All of them seemed to be too busy doing their own business to really notice anything out of the ordinary.

We stopped at the area where the victim had been found. Yellow caution tape still surrounded the area off the path. We were both giving the area a slow search, looking for things that didn’t fit the natural scene, when I spotted something very small and red in the weeds. “The vic had red fingernail polish, didn’t she?”

“Yes.” Garcia turned in my direction to see what I’d noticed.

First, we photographed the tiny red thing laying in the weeds; then measured the distance from it to where the body had been found. I gloved up, bent to retrieve it, and came up with what appeared to be a broken fingernail.

“How did we miss this?” Garcia wanted to know. “It’s quite far from where the body was found.”

 I dropped it into an evidence bag.  “Maybe she swung her arms to fight her attacker and that’s how it got this far from her body. What if she scratched her assailant?”

A smile played on Garcia’s face for an instant.

My hopes went up too. “If there’s enough DNA, we got him. When in doubt, review the crime scene.”

“Good thing we came back here this morning. Topflight detective work,” my partner congratulated me.

We stopped everyone. A sunburnt jogger, nose and lips smeared in sunscreen and wearing mirrored sunglasses approached. At first, he said he didn’t have time to stop because he had to be at work soon and called our questioning a ‘fishing expedition.’ He was right. After we told him it would only take a minute, he reluctantly gave in. While questioning him, he said he missed running yesterday. We photographed him like everyone else and let him continue. When he was out of sight, Garcia said, “He sure didn’t want to talk to us. You think that could mean anything?”

“Difficult to say, but we’ll run his ID when we get back.”

The day dragged on endlessly, hours and hours of taking statements, collecting bits of evidence, taking photos of their IDs, being thorough and gathering the facts, doing what cops are trained to do to look for signs.

We dropped the small red fragment at the ME’s DuPage County lab and joined the autopsy in progress.

The coroner gave us a head nod as we entered and then turned back to the vic to study the traumatic bruising on her neck with a magnifying glass and took photographs. “We’ve x-rayed her neck,” he told us as he stepped to a nearby wall.

He  studied some x-rays hanging over light boxes and said, “Her airways are hyperinflated. She died of asphyxiation by manual strangulation. Official cause of death: suffocation. The trachea and larynx were collapsed by trauma and prevented oxygen from reaching her lungs. Said trauma to her neck was most likely from someone’s hands. No ligature or lacerations to the neck or any other indications of tightening objects such as a belt or rope. You’re dealing with a homicide.”

He went back to the body on the table and turned the victim’s hands, revealing red fingernail polish. “No defensive wounds on her hands or forearms.”

 “Maybe she didn’t have time to fight,” I said.

The coroner raised the victim’s right hand and looked intently. “A couple nails are broken, right down to the quick.”

“It’s possible they broke when she fought with her attacker,” suggested Garcia.

I looked straight at him and finished his statement. “It’s possible her killer’s DNA could be on a nail. Which could be that red fragment I found.”

Somerfield smiled, “I’ll look at that piece for a DNA match.”

It wasn’t until the following week Carol Dean, a medical assistant, came waddling up to my desk, her hair pulled back in a lose ponytail.

 “That gum wrapper turned out to be Spearmint Eclipse, but I’m sorry, all we could find on it were smudges. No conclusive fingerprints.”

I was frustrated. “Well, I’m not even sure if it was from our killer or not. Have you got anything else?”

“Going over the wrapper made me want to try Spearmint Eclipse. I stopped on my way over here to buy a package.” She popped her gum. “It’s pretty good. You want a piece?”

“Sure.” I never turn down food and reached a hand to the gum package she held out to me.

“We did a rush on that fragment you found on the edge of the path. The fingernail is definitely from your victim. The best part, there’s some skin cells under the nail.”

So, she did claw at her assailant. She fought for her life and lost. “Was there enough of her attacker’s skin to get a DNA match?” I held my breath, ready for the conviction.

Dean’s voice became serious. “Yes. The X chromosome shows us that’s it’s male skin cells, and the skin DNA collected from the white blood cells under her fingernail matches up with her husband’s samples you brought in.”

I drew himself up to my full height and thrust my chin forward with determination. “We’ve got our killer.”