'Well, hell,' he said. 'I didn't know I was supposed to look for it.'
'There's a possibility the case is more complicated than it looked at first,' I said. 'Do you have the body on hand?'
'Sure do.'
'Could you check?'
'I don't see why not. She's not going anywhere.'
He was halfway to the door when I remembered my conversation with Elaine. 'Check for anal as well as vaginal entry,' I suggested. He stopped in mid-stride, but he didn't turn around so I don't know what showed on his face.
'Will do,' he said.
Tom Havlicek and I sat around waiting for him. Wohlmuth had some family snapshots in a lucite cube on his desk. That inspired Tom to tell me that Harvey Wohlmuth had himself a real sweetheart of a wife. I admired her photograph, and he asked me if I was a family man.
'I used to be,' I said. 'The marriage didn't last.'
'Oh, I'm sorry.'
'It was a long time ago. She's remarried, and my boys are pretty much grown. One's in school and the other's in the service.'
'You have much contact with them?'
'Not as much as I'd like.'
That was a stopper, and the silence hung for a moment before he picked up the ball and talked about his own children, a girl and a boy, both of them in high school. We moved from family to police work, and then we were just a pair of old cops telling stories. We were still at it when Wohlmuth returned, an owlish expression on his face, to tell us that he'd found semen traces in Mrs. Sturdevant's anus.
'Well, you called that,' Havlicek said.
Wohlmuth said he hadn't expected to find anything. 'There was no evidence of struggle,' he said.
'Nothing. No skin particles under her nails, no bruises on her hands or forearms.'
Havlicek wanted to know if he could type the sperm and prove that it was or wasn't Sturdevant's.
'It might be possible,' Wohlmuth said. 'I'm not sure, with all the time that's gone by. We can't do it here, I can tell you that much. What I want to do is send slides and specimens and tissue samples to Booth Memorial inCleveland . They can do a workup beyond what we're capable of here.'
'I'll be interested in the results.'
'So will I,' Wohlmuth said. I asked if there'd been anything else remarkable about the body. He said she appeared to be in good health, which has always struck me as a curious thing to say about a dead person. I asked if he'd spotted any contusions, especially around the rib cage or the thighs.
Havlicek said, 'I don't get it, Matt. What would bruises there indicate?'
'Motley had a lot of strength in his hands,' I said. 'He liked to use his fingers on a spot on the rib cage.'
Wohlmuth said he hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary in that respect, but that bruises weren't always that pronounced if the victim died shortly after the injury was inflicted. The injured area didn't discolor a day later in the same way.
'But you could have a look for yourself,' he offered. 'You want to come see?'
I didn't really, but I dutifully followed him down a hall and through a door into a room as cold as a meat locker, and with a not entirely dissimilar odor to it. He led me to a table where a body lay beneath a sheet of translucent plastic and drew the sheet aside.
It was Connie, all right. I don't know that I'd have recognized her alive, let alone dead, but knowing who she was I was able to see the girl I'd met a few times a dozen years ago. I felt a sickness deep in my gut, not nausea so much as a deep acidic sorrow.
I wanted to look for contusions, but it was hard for me to violate her nakedness with my eyes, and impossible to lay hands on her.
Wohlmuth had no such compunctions, and a good thing, given the line of work he was in. Without ceremony he shunted a breast aside and palpated the sides of the rib cage, and his fingers found something.
'Right here,' he said. 'See?'
I couldn't see anything. He took my hand and guided my fingers to a spot. She was cold to the touch, of
course, and there was a flaccidity to her flesh. I could see what he'd found; there was a spot where the flesh was softer, less resilient. There wasn't much in the way of discoloration, however.
'And you said the inside of the thigh? Let's have a look. Hmmm.
Here's something. I don't know if it would be a particularly sensitive pressure point for pain. Not an area I've got much expertise in. But there's been some trauma here. You want to see?'
I shook my head. I was unwilling to look between her parted thighs, let alone touch her. I didn't want to see any more, didn't want to be in that room any longer. Havlicek evidently felt the same way, and Wohlmuth sensed it and led us back to his office.
There he said, 'I, uh, checked the children for semen.'
'Christ!' Havlicek said.
