“Holy shit!”
“Uh-huh.” Jesse pointed at Maxie’s body. “What do you think, Doc?”
“I think she snapped her neck on the way down. My guess, without opening her up, is that C-five or C-six, maybe both, are broken. And although she may look intact, I bet I find a whole host of broken bones and internal damage when... you know. Mink coats may cover a multitude of sins, but she took a long, hard fall, Chief.”
So it was Chief again. He let it go. “Suicide?”
The ME looked up to the top of the Bluffs, shrugged. “Probably. I don’t know that I’ll be able to make a definitive determination unless I find evidence indicating something else killed her.”
“Evidence like what?”
“Bullet wound, stab wound, ligature marks, like that.”
“Did you find a note on her?”
“I just got here a few minutes ago,” she said. “But there doesn’t seem to be anything on her except her clothes.”
Jesse shrugged. Then he said, “I have to treat it as a homicide until you tell me different. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll let you get back to work.”
He walked over to where Stu Cromwell was standing. “Give me a few minutes to talk to my man and to the jogger and I’ll have a statement for you.”
“Okay.”
Jesse turned his back on the sea spray. The air was a bit warmer and clearer than it had been the night before, but it was still pretty cold and the icy ocean water didn’t help. He called Peter Perkins over.
“What’s the deal?”
“Suit dispatched me after he got the call,” Perkins said. “I checked the body. She was cold, unresponsive. Did the initial forensics, but it’s pretty clear this is where she landed.”
Paradise had no budget for a dedicated crime scene unit, so a few of Jesse’s cops had been certified by the state to do basic forensics. Jesse didn’t love the setup, but he’d given up trying to convince the powers that be to spend the necessary funds. It had been hard enough to get the county to fund a certified ME. When the situation called for it, as with the remains of the girls and John Doe, Jesse asked Healy’s people to do the forensics. They had the training and the resources to do it properly.
Jesse asked, “Any sign of a struggle?”
“None that I could see. The scene was pristine around the body and the only footprints near it were the jogger’s.”
Jesse turned, tilted his head at the jogger. “What’s his story?”
“Name’s Rand Smythe. Age forty-seven. Retired. Lives down the beach on Falmouth Circle with his wife.”
“Retired?”
“Made it big in the computer software business,” Perkins said. “One of the big companies bought him out. Says he runs this stretch of the beach beneath the Bluffs every day.”
“What happened?” Jesse asked, eyeing the trim, silver-haired Smythe in his cold-weather running getup and two-hundred-dollar running shoes.
Perkins pointed behind him. “Smythe says he came around the elbow there where the bluff juts out and the beach narrows at five-fifty-seven.”
“Pretty sure of his timing, isn’t he?”
“Watch.” Perkins tapped his wrist. “He’s got one of those fancy runner’s watches, shows the actual time and the time of the runner. Measures his heart rate, all stuff like that. He was checking his time when he noticed the body. He touched her neck. She was cold and there was no pulse. Then he called it in. He didn’t hear or see anyone or anything.”
Shielding his eyes with his hand, Jesse looked at the sky over the water. Then he turned back to the Bluffs and to the jogger.
“That time of the morning it would just be the gulls,” he said. “Tell Mr. Smythe he can go and that we’ll keep his name confidential, but that we might need to speak to him again.”
“Okay, Jesse.”
“And, Peter, when you’re done with Smythe, call Molly and get her down here.”
As Peter walked away from him, Jesse kept looking up at the Bluffs.
25
Captain Healy and Molly Crane showed up at the crime scene at about the same time. Jesse had just finished giving Stu Cromwell his statement.
Yes, the dead woman was Maxie Connolly, but that’s not official until the next of kin is notified and he identifies her. No, there were no obvious signs of foul play. Yes, her death would be investigated as if it were a homicide. Yes, you can quote me on that.
It wasn’t much of a statement, but Cromwell would have it first. Though Cromwell knew Jesse wasn’t giving him anything he couldn’t have figured for himself, he had a statement he could attribute to an official source. That would make all the difference when it came to peddling the finished story.
Jesse made sure Cromwell had left the area before he went over to talk to Healy and Molly.
“This is a mess,” Healy said. “You think she killed herself?”
Jesse shrugged. “Seems to be the question of the day.”
Healy and Jesse stared at Molly.
“What do you think, Molly?” Jesse asked.
She shook her head and walked to the edge of the water.
Healy was curious. “What’s with her?”
“Catholic guilt. She didn’t like Maxie very much and didn’t do a good job of hiding it.”
“What do you think, Jesse?”
“When Maxie first walked into my office, I would never have figured her for this. But by the time she left, I would have changed my opinion. She took the official notification about her girl pretty hard.”
“Guess even bad girls live in hope,” Healy said. “When you take the hope away, they crash like everybody else.”
Jesse wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he said nothing.
Healy pointed up. “You think she threw herself off the Bluffs?”
Jesse shook his head. “I don’t like it.” There, he said it out loud. “I didn’t know the woman. Spent a half hour with her, but it seems too Wuthering Heights for me, her throwing herself off the Bluffs like that. And how did she get up there? Molly picked her up at the airport and we drove her back to her hotel. A fist full of pills and half a bottle of bourbon, okay, I’m buying. But this... I don’t like it.”
“Yeah, you said that.”
“Molly,” Jesse said, “come over here a minute.”
“What is it, Jesse?”
“Did Maxie mention renting a car to you?”
Molly laughed, then caught herself. “She lost her license. She had a few DWIs down in Florida. Told me about five minutes after she got in the car, like she was proud of it.”
“Go get the husband and bring him in to the station. Don’t tell him anything, but keep him there. Tell Suit to call the cab companies in town and see if we can’t find out if one of them brought her up here. Call Connor Cavanaugh at the hotel and tell him I’ll be by later this morning to look at his security tapes from last night and early this morning. And I want any record of phone calls in and out of their room last night.”
“That it?” Molly asked.
“For now. Hold on a second,” Jesse said, grabbing her arm as she started away. “Healy, can you give us a minute?”
Healy turned and headed toward the body.
“You okay?” Jesse asked, letting go of Molly’s arm.
“Fine.”
“No you’re not.”
“I will be.”
“Better answer,” he said. “I bet you wished Maxie dead a few times when you were younger, huh?”
Molly clenched her jaw.
“I don’t know if Maxie suicided or if she was murdered, but there’s one thing I’m sure of.”
“What’s that, Jesse?”
“Your wishes had nothing to do with it. Now, go get the husband.”
26
Healy and Jesse circled around to the other side of the bluff and climbed the switchback stone steps up to the top. Healy was pretty winded when he finally made it, a full thirty seconds after Jesse. But both of their lungs burned as they sucked in gulps of frozen air. When Healy caught his breath, he turned to face the ocean.