Never Tell

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_ec43f112-296f-5867-889f-1b2817e7a72b)

The top floor of the townhouse served as a separate residence, complete with its own dining room, living room, kitchen, and long hallway leading to the back of the building. The decor was white-on-white-on-white. Gleaming white high-gloss floors. White sheepskin rugs. White Lucite furniture. White throw pillows on the white furniture. Swank digs for servants’ quarters.

“Julia’s room is back here.”

From the rear of the apartment, Ellie heard footsteps. Voices. The clicks and squawks of radios.

“And you are?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Detectives. My name is Katherine Whitmire. Julia’s mother.”

“And no one has told you that you can’t be here?”

“This is my home, Detective. My daughter. I said I wouldn’t leave until homicide detectives arrived. I heard what they were saying about Julia, but I’m telling you: My daughter was murdered.”

The callout had come to them as a suspected suicide. When they had pressed for an explanation as to why the case required two homicide detectives, none was forthcoming. Ellie had a feeling she was looking at the numero-uno reason.

“We’re here now, Mrs. Whitmire. And I know you’re hurting. But you can’t be in this house right now, especially if you’re right about someone doing harm to your daughter.” Ellie caught sight of a uniformed officer on the spiral staircase and waved him up. “This gentleman’s going to take you outside. You can wait in one of the cars if you’d like, or he can take you to the precinct if you’d be more comfortable there. We just need to take a quick look around, and then we’ll need to talk with you in more detail.”

She could tell the woman wanted to argue but then seemed to think better of it and nodded. “I’ll let you go back and see for yourselves. I can’t look at her again. I can’t. I just—can’t.” She led the way down the stairs, the uniform following her awkwardly.

The noises Ellie had heard were coming from behind a closed door at the end of the hallway. She opened it.

“Why is this door closed with a civilian running around the crime scene?”

“Because it’s not a crime scene, and that crazy bitch slammed the door before she ordered us not to touch her daughter’s body.”

The two Emergency Medical Technicians were young, one with a crew cut, the other with too much gel worked through his spiked hair. They stood passively by the bedroom windows, placing themselves as far as possible from the white marble floor of the en suite interior bathroom they both eyed unconsciously. It was the spiky-haired one who was doing the talking. From his colleague’s shrug, Ellie could tell that he was also the one who’d gotten into some kind of confrontation with Katherine Whitmire.

“So some rich lady in a designer jacket gets a little irate about her daughter being dead, and the two of you decide to just stand in here, scratching each other’s balls? What the fuck is going on here?”

“You got the same callout we got. Sixteen-year-old girl, slit wrists in the bathtub. We came up. Probably only beat your two guys by a minute or so. And it was obvious what we were looking at.” He lowered his voice. “It’s a clear suicide, all right? The blade’s in the tub on the right side of her body. A couple hesitation marks on the left wrist, then a clean cut through the radial artery. The girl even left a note, right there on the bed.”

Ellie saw a lined sheet of yellow notepaper propped neatly against the throw pillows on the low platform bed.

“So tell me again why you’re calling this girl’s grieving mother a crazy bitch?”

“Because I guess she heard us talking and wigged out on us. I was about to go downstairs for the gurney. We were all in the bathroom, making that initial assessment, you know—the hesitation cuts, the clear slice, the note—and the next thing I know, she’s screaming at me to take my hands off her daughter’s body. Yelling at us not to touch anything at all if we weren’t going to investigate what happened. You’ve seen this place. These people obviously have some grease. So, yeah, we decided to stand in here and—what’d you say? scratch our balls?—until someone higher on the pay grade showed up. When we heard that doorbell, your guys went running out to cover their asses, but here we are, still scratching. I’ll stand here and scratch all day until the ME makes the call. I’m not taking on some rich, crazy bitch. How about you, Andy? You need any help over there, or are you all squared away?”

Another shrug from the quiet one.

Rogan was already making his way to the bathroom. It was spacious enough for the two of them, plus the two Emergency Medical Technicians and a few linebackers, but she was the only one who followed. She heard Spike call out behind her. “If you need me to explain how I know the girl’s bulimic, let me know. We aren’t as magically astute as you cops, but eating disorders go with depression. Suicide notes go with suicides. There’s nothing for us to do here.”

She hitched a thumb over her shoulder. “Go save lives, guys. We’ll wait for the ME.”

Rogan looked back at her from the bathroom, hands on hips. “Real sensitive for a guy who spends his days helping people.”

“Some people would say that about you, Rogan.”

“You didn’t want to take him up on that bulimia thing? To me, she looks as skinny as every other white girl these days.”

When people imagine a woman soaking in a tub, they picture those cheesy commercials with a bath full of frothy bubbles, the woman’s hair tucked into a loose bun as she runs a loofah across her pampered skin, pausing to take a sip of wine in the candlelight.

There was nothing pampered about Julia Whitmire’s death scene. There was wine, but it was an empty bottle toppled on the floor next to the toilet. She was nude, but there were no bubbles or loofahs or candles. Just clear pink water, a few smears of dark red on the edge of the white ceramic tub, blood that had streamed from her left wrist. The straight razor had fallen into the tub on the right side of her body.

Ellie leaned forward and saw two superficial lacerations next to the source of the leaking blood. Slitting a wrist takes fortitude. Some people try for years before they can bring themselves to go through with it. This girl only took two practice strokes.

Rogan was seeing the same scene, drawing the same conclusions. “Looks like she held the razor in her right hand and pulled her left wrist across it. Right arm falls into the water with the razor. Left arm doesn’t quite make it back to the side.” Julia’s left hand was draped across her pubic area, as if trying to protect her privacy in death.

Ellie didn’t need an Emergency Medical Technician to explain the signs of this girl’s eating disorder. “Her skin’s loose. That’s one of the things the Emergency Medical Technician was probably seeing.”

“She’s dead. Skin gets loose.”

She peered between the girl’s parted lips. “No, it’s more than that. See how her face is bloated even though she’s gaunt around the eyes? And her teeth are gray. This girl was definitely making herself sick.” She walked out of the bathroom and over to the bed, bending down to read the hand-scrawled note, filled with scratch marks and second attempts, propped against the pillows.

She took in every scribbled word, but a few lines summed it up.

I know I should love my life, but sometimes I hate it … I’m constantly being told how lucky I am, but the truth is, my so-called privileged life hurts … It hurts to believe that I can never amount to the person I’m supposed to be. It hurts to feel so alone every second of the day, even when I’m surrounded by other people.

Poor little rich girl.

The final sentence said it all:

And that is why I have decided to kill myself.

She left Rogan to read on his own as she did a quick walk-through of the upper-floor residence. Medicine cabinet filled with high-end hair and skin supplies, but no prescription drugs other than a birth-control packet made out to Julia Whitmire. Hairclips and magazines in the nightstand. Top dresser drawer filled with expensive La Perla lingerie, more suitable for a soft-core porn shoot than a high school girl’s bedroom. No food in the refrigerator except two bags of baby carrots and a bottle of nonfat ranch dressing. Cabinets filled with liquor. Wine rack stocked with bottles.

Rogan trailed into the kitchen behind her. “So what do you think?” he asked.

“Looks like making herself throw up wasn’t quite enough self-inflicted damage for her anymore.”

“What were you saying about sensitivity?”

“Hate to say those tools were on to something, but this looks pretty clear-cut to me.”

“The note even had tearstains on it,” he said.

“And yet I noticed you didn’t touch the letter. Neither did I.”

“Don’t need to. Got that LASIK shit. These eyes shine like diamonds and focus like laser beams.”

She rolled her own, un-LASIKed, eyes. “You know what I’m getting at. Those idiots had a point about people who’ve got—what did he call it—grease? I don’t know who that woman outside is, but she’s clearly rich enough to have a setup like this, and she’s apparently powerful enough to set her own terms about where she’ll stand and what type of detective will be sent to her home.”

They were interrupted by a towering bald man in medical scrubs. Rogan squinted at Ellie, a sign that he recognized the new arrival’s cue ball but had forgotten his name.

“Ginger,” she called out with a smile. Cue ball had called her “Blondie” during a tense moment when they’d first met. Instead of making an obvious bald comment in response, she’d called him Ginger. Since then, he always returned her calls in record time.

“It’s Blondie and her stoic partner.”