“I’m glad you’re back, Nina, really happy. Let us know what we can do to help. Anything.” The weather-beaten lines of his face shaped a wholehearted smile. “Klaus needs the help.”
Through the window, she saw Klaus sit down in the place where he had eaten lunch for forty years. The waitress and the manager stood by, ready to attend him. He caught her looking his way and grinned so widely she could see his gums, as pink as a baby’s.
The meeting had disturbed her. It felt as if the other lawyers were indulging Klaus with this case. They hadn’t even tried to quiz him about strategy and defenses, questions she would have expected. Why were they all so worried?
Walking into the restaurant she received another unearned smile from Sean Eubanks. He was much too glad to meet her, she thought, sitting down beside him. He acted as if her presence relieved him of a burden. Only Alan, chewing sullenly on a carrot, was a relief from otherwise unalloyed delight.
What had she gotten herself into?
“You’re a champ for dropping everything to see me,” Nina said to Ginger when Nina finally got back at three. “Sorry I’m late. Lunch ran long.”
“I enjoyed the ride,” Ginger said. She gave Nina a warm hug, which Nina, surprised, returned. “Sandy and I have been catching up.” Encased in soft black leather from head to boot, she smelled of spicy perfume. Her black hair, tipped with white, spiked out like a sunburst, and she seemed to have a couple of new piercings in her ears. She was forty-five and looked a lot younger. She ran her own business now, after a long stint with the state lab in Sacramento, and was one of the top pathologists on blood evidence questions in California, much in demand by both defense and prosecution as an expert witness.
“Thanks for coming all the way down from Sacramento. I know how busy you always are, and I think you know I appreciate it. How are you?” she asked as Ginger took her seat. “It’s been a while.”
“Good work, bad affair, new girlfriend, bought a glam condo near Oldtown Sac since we last worked together,” she said. “You?”
“Left Tahoe, came here with Paul, so old new love,” Nina said, attempting the same game and giving up. “Let’s just say, after the court case in San Francisco in which my own State Bar tried to take me out and failed, I have been rethinking my life. I’m living too near my father, mostly at odds with him whenever we get together, getting together with Paul, and getting on Bob’s case. He’s mighty intense these days.”
Ginger spotted Nina’s ring. She took Nina’s hand into her own. “Wow. Fabulous! Art Deco, I do believe.” She lifted Nina’s hand up and down, as if weighing it. “Heavy commitment, this dazzler.” Letting go, she looked into Nina’s eyes, questioningly. “You’re going to marry van Wagoner and stay here? You won’t be going back to Tahoe?”
“I’m trying out the ring for size. Any words of wisdom?”
“He’s a pig,” Ginger said, “but you know that, and we love him in spite of his flaws.”
Nina smiled.
“You’re not imagining you’ll reform him, are you?”
“Not really. No.”
“He’s a macho control freak.”
“That’s a little harsh. Anyway, so am I.”
Ginger thought about that. “True. So I don’t know where that leaves you.”
“Making progress?”
“Right. Well, we’re not going to resolve your life or mine, but maybe we can make some headway on this case.”
They got down to it.
“What I’m seeing,” Ginger said a half hour later, after examining some of the documents the D.A.’s office had provided them, “is that the victim apparently was killed in the kitchen of her apartment in Monterey on Friday night, April eleventh. That’s what-nearly five months ago? It’s a strangulation. Hands-on, no evidence of a cord or anything like that. There were small signs of a possible struggle-some broken glass. Some of the glass had blood on it.”
“Right,” Nina said. “And as you can see, it appears from this report that all of the blood samples found at the crime scene have been identified as Stefan Wyatt’s.”
“Not good. The blood seems to have been reasonably fresh. The amounts were small for a decent analysis, so that’s an area we might challenge.”
“Does the state lab work look like it will stand up?”
Ginger shook her head. “Too soon to draw conclusions for you, Nina. Did you request samples for independent analysis?”
“You can pick them up this afternoon in Salinas.”
“Well, you never know. Maybe they don’t know what they’re doing. Although Dr. Susan Misumi’s supervising, and she’s no slouch.”
“You know Monterey’s assistant medical examiner?”
“Known her for years. We attend the same conferences, and we’re both Asian females in a world of white, whiskery faces. We have some things in common.”
Nina nodded. “Here’s another tricky aspect of this case,” she said. “I told you Stefan Wyatt took bones from the same grave where the victim, Christina Zhukovsky, was found? The bones of her father, a man named Constantin Zhukovsky?”
“Yeah, what’s that about?”
“Wyatt says he was hired to dig them up. While he was digging, he found the second body, of the victim, in the grave.”
“Sounds like a setup.”
“I think so, too. The guy who Wyatt claims hired him is a professor at CSUMB named Alex Zhukovsky. And get this, Ginger-he’s Constantin Zhukovsky’s son and Christina’s brother. He denies he hired Wyatt or had any knowledge about any of it.”
“Could he have tipped off the police to do a traffic stop on Wyatt?”
“Good question, but there’s no evidence the police were tipped. They stopped Stefan for a silly but legitimate traffic infraction. Anyway, I want you to examine the bones of Constantin Zhukovsky as well as the blood found in Christina Zhukovsky’s apartment. Meanwhile, Paul will be interviewing Alex Zhukovsky.”
Ginger, surprised, said, “Hasn’t anyone talked to Zhukovsky before? If Wyatt is innocent, Zhukovsky must be the killer.”
“He’s been interviewed before, but barely.”
“Where are the bones now?”
“They’re still in a morgue locker at Natividad Hospital in Salinas, but Alex Zhukovsky recently demanded their return for cremation. The police are inclined to turn them over to him. The bones don’t directly relate to the charges, except as proof that Stefan robbed the grave. And, privately, between you and me, he did. They have plenty of proof, but they didn’t even charge him for that crime.”
“Why do we want the bones, if the prosecution isn’t even bothering to test them?”
“Because Alex Zhukovsky wanted them.” Nina propped one of her small, chain-bedecked, pointy-toed shoes on her desk, and wound a finger through her hair. She felt the groove between her eyebrows digging inward, toward unsettling thoughts.
“What kind of tests are we after, with regard to the bones?” Ginger asked.
Nina bit her lip. “I’m counting on you to help me with that question.”
“At least a genetic profile, then, if possible,” Ginger said, making a note. “I’ll look for poison, anomalies, strange diseases, anything that pops up. That okay?”
“If Zhukovsky wanted those bones for a reason, and you can find it by examining them, I know you’ll find it.”
“So we’ll grab a couple of bones for me before he burns them. A femur. The pelvis. Big bones, okay? Those are both impressive enough to be fair bets for DNA even after all this time.”
Nina made notes. “You’ll get them. But we have to work fast.”
Sandy knocked and brought in coffee for both of them. “I thought you deserved better than that ancient coffeepot in the back room, so I went to the coffee place on Ocean,” she said.
“You are the best,” Ginger told her as she went out again to answer a ringing phone.
Nina leaned back, forcing herself to relax. Her body felt constricted in several places by an invisible but robust nylon rope. She couldn’t quite believe how much work lay ahead.
After a minute, Ginger picked up a file and went on, “Okay, I know what to do on the blood and the bones. Now, let’s talk about the murder itself. I’ve just skimmed the autopsy report, but it’s a clear strangulation death. Have you looked at a domestic violence angle?”
“Christina wasn’t married, and Klaus’s investigator hasn’t identified a significant other, but we’ll be looking into that. Any thoughts?”
“Strangulation is statistically suggestive of a male killing a female. I mean, someone who goes for the throat is usually passionately angry and you have to be strong to maintain the sustained force necessary to kill.”
Nina nodded. “It’s a kind of horrible intimacy.” Ginger raised her eyebrows, and Nina went on, “In answer to your next question, Stefan Wyatt swears he never knew Christina Zhukovsky. Never saw her, never met her, never heard of her.”
“Is he violent?”
Nina said slowly, “He does have a couple of violent priors. I plan to talk to him about them. As far as I know now, he was young, drunk, stupid. Things got out of hand. He really isn’t a violent type.”
“Oh, really.”
“No women, no strangling.”
“Still.”
“I know. It’s possible the priors will come in during the first phase of trial when the jury is considering guilt or innocence. Klaus and I will fight that, of course.”
Ginger said, “I was hoping I’d meet Mr. Pohlmann today. He’s in charge of the case, isn’t he? The four months of investigating and pretrial work so far?”
“He’s in charge of the case.”
Ginger didn’t follow up on that, but her perplexed expression told Nina she was as concerned as Nina about the sparseness of the investigative files. “Okay, back to the body.” She gave the autopsy report back to Nina and pointed to one paragraph. “Christina was small. It’s possible that a woman strangled her. Too bad there’s no sign of drugs. Almost anyone can strangle someone who is already unconscious. Not too much strength needed, you see?”
Nina sighed. “There’s so much we don’t know.”
“I don’t see anything about skin cell samples from the neck. Were they taken?”
“Actually, I think I have another sheet on that.” Nina gave it to her. “Klaus did make sure samples were saved, but they didn’t find any skin cells from Stefan.”
Ginger moved on to the police report with its series of crimescene photos, looking at the black-and-white photos of Christina’s body for a long time. “The jury will react to these. Her face didn’t hold up well. The plastic bags make the crime seem really depraved.”
They both thought about that. Nina looked through the photos for the third or fourth time. Christina Zhukovsky’s body had been photographed in various stages as it was removed from the bags. There were close-ups of her neck and face from the morgue. They hadn’t closed her eyes first.
