“Well, we’ll discuss this later. I’ve got to go to a scene.”
She shrugged and returned my irritation. “So what else is new?”
“I’m sorry. It’s not as if I have control over people dying.” Grabbing coat and gloves, I hurried out to the garage. I started the engine, buckled up, adjusted the heat, and studied my directions before remembering the automatic door opener attached to the visor. It’s amazing how quickly an enclosed space will fill with fumes.
“Good God,” I said severely to no one but my own distracted self as I quickly opened the garage door.
Poisoning by motor vehicle exhaust is an easy way to die. Young couples necking in the backseat, engine running and heater on, drift off in each other’s arms and never wake up. Suicidal individuals turn cars into small gas chambers and leave their problems for others to solve. I had neglected to ask Marino if Jennifer Deighton lived alone.
The snow was already several inches deep, the night lit up by it. There was no traffic in my neighborhood and very little when I got on the downtown expressway. Christmas music played nonstop on the radio as my thoughts flew in a riot of bewilderment and alighted, one by one, on fear. Jennifer Deighton had been calling my number and hanging up, or someone using her telephone had. Now she was dead. The overpass curved above the east end of downtown, where railroad tracks crisscrossed the earth like sutured wounds, and concrete parking decks were higher than many of the buildings. Main Street station hulked out of the milky sky, tile roof frosted white, the clock in its tower a bleary Cyclops eye.
On Williamsburg Road I drove very slowly past a deserted shopping center, and just before the city turned into Henrico County, I found Ewing Avenue. Houses were small, with pickup trucks and old model American cars parked out front. At the 217 address, police cars were in the drive and on both sides of the street. Pulling in behind Marino’s Ford, I got out with my medical bag and walked to the end of the unpaved driveway where the single-car garage was lit up like a Christmas creche. The door was rolled up, police officers gathered inside around a beat-up beige Chevrolet. I found Marino squatting by the back door on the driver’s side, studying a section of green garden hose leading from the exhaust pipe through a partially opened window. The interior of the car was filthy with soot, the smell of fumes lingering on the cold, damp air.
“The ignition’s still switched on,” Marino said to me. “The car ran out of gas.”
The dead woman appeared to be in her fifties or early sixties. She was slumped over on her right side behind the steering wheel, the exposed flesh of her neck and hands bright pink. Dried bloody fluid stained the tan upholstery beneath her head. From where I stood, I could not see her face. Opening my medical bag, I got out a chemical thermometer to take the temperature inside the garage, and put on a pair of surgical gloves. I asked a young officer if he could open the car’s front doors.
“We were just about to dust,” he said.
“I’ll wait.”
“Johnson, how ’bout dusting the door handles so the doc here can get in the car.”
He fixed dark Latin eyes on me. “By the way, I’m Tom Lucero. What we got here is a situation that doesn’t completely add up. To begin with, it bothers me there’s blood on the front seat.”
“There are several possible explanations for that,” I said. “One is postmortem purging.”
He narrowed his eyes a little.
“When pressure in the lungs forces bloody fluid from the nose and mouth,” I explained.
“Oh. Generally, that doesn’t happen until the person’s started to decompose, right?”
“Generally.”
“Based on what we know, this lady’s been dead maybe twenty-four hours and it’s cold as a morgue fridge in here.”
“True,” I said. “But if she had her heater running, that in addition to the hot exhaust pouring in would have heated up the inside of the car, and it would have stayed quite warm until the car ran out of gas.”