Dead Ringer

Book 11: Mattie Winston Mystery

by Annelise Ryan

Genres: Female Sleuths; Cozy Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

A new murder victim with an old M.O. puts Mattie Winston on the trail of a killer who gives a grim new meaning to flower power . . .

Spring is beginning to brighten Sorenson, Wisconsin, for Mattie and Steve Hurley and their family. While their son Matthew may be in his terrible twos and Steve's daughter Emily a moody teenager, the kids bring light to their lives when their work is dark by its nature—Steve is a homicide detective and Mattie is a medicolegal death investigator, a.k.a. medical examiner. They deal in corpses.

The latest corpse, a Jane Doe, was clearly an addict, but drugs didn't kill her, at least not directly. She's been stabbed multiple times in a pattern that is disturbingly familiar to Mattie. When she discovers flower petals from yellow carnations stuffed into the stab wounds, she recognizes a very specific M.O.—belonging to a convicted serial killer who's currently serving a life sentence.

The details of the flower petals were never made public in the last case, so it can't be a copycat crime. It looks like the wrong man is in prison, and the murderer is still at large. Now it's up to Mattie and Steve to get the case reopened—and catch the real carnation killer . . .

Release date: February 25, 2020

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

The dead woman in front of me is a stranger. I’ve never seen her before and I don’t know her name or where she’s from, but I can tell she hasn’t had an easy life. Yet by the time I’m done with my job for the day, I will know her with a level of intimacy few can understand.

My name is Mattie Winston, and helping my boss, Izzy, a forensic pathologist, figure out how people die is what we do. It requires knowing someone both inside and out in every sense of the word. In the current case, this began with a call in the wee hours of the morning that got my husband, Steve Hurley, a homicide detective, and me out of bed. This was because a county sheriff cruising along a country road not far outside of Sorenson, the Wisconsin town where I live and work, came across what he thought was a dead deer alongside the road. This is not an infrequent site in Wisconsin, where the deer population might well outnumber the people.

This body, however, wasn’t a deer. It was human, a woman, lying on her side with her arms flung out as if in a plea for help. But nothing could help her anymore. It became apparent as we examined the body that she had been dead for some time. She was pale and cold—colder than the unusually warm April temperatures we’ve had the past few days could explain—and her back was dark from blood that had settled there when her heart stopped. This discoloration, along with the lack of blood in the ground around the body, told us that she had been dumped there on the side of the road after being killed elsewhere. She had been killed lying on her back and left that way for some time before being tossed away here, like a piece of trash.

I loaded her body into a bag with the help of a local funeral home and followed their hearse to our office in Sorenson, arriving there just as the sun was starting to light up the sky. Now Izzy and I are in the process of trying to figure out what happened to her.

She has been x-rayed from head to toe while still in her body bag. When she first arrived in our office, I opened the bag enough to get to her eyes, so I could remove vitreous samples—the liquid within the eyeball. This can often tell a story about how and when a person died. Now she is on our autopsy table and we have removed her clothing: a pair of worn and torn blue jeans, cotton underpants with stretched-out elastic, a thin blue T-shirt stained with blood, and a faded brown puffy coat, torn in two spots where it is bleeding stuffing. We have also removed a pair of plain cotton socks and dirty athletic shoes that have seen better days. All her clothing is filthy and worn. Not surprisingly, she is not wearing any jewelry.

The woman’s skin is a pale gray color along the front of her body, though I can see the edges of the darker coloring that marks her back and buttocks. Her body is a bag of bones, the skin loose and sagging in places, indicating a large weight loss. The ends of her blond hair are ragged, as if she cut it herself. Her nails are cracked and jagged; yet there are chipped remnants of a mauve-colored polish on them. Seeing how ravaged her body is now, I find it hard to imagine she ever cared for it enough to polish her nails, but she did. This lingering vestige of pride and vanity she clung to in the weeks before she died saddens me. I wonder what her life was like before it all started to fall apart.

One of the most obvious indications that she has led a less than stellar life is the fact that she only has three teeth in her mouth—one of them broken, all of them brown, her gums inflamed and spotted with pockets of infection. It’s a classic example of meth mouth, and the methamphetamine abuse has also left red, scabby sores on her face. There are pockets of festering infection tracking down both of her arms and along one foot, evidence of an IV drug habit. It’s an all-too-common story of drug use and abuse: heroin, sometimes laced with other narcotics to mellow out, and methamphetamine to amp back up again. Both are highly addictive and horribly destructive.

How she died appears obvious, though it’s not what one might expect at first glance. It wasn’t the drugs, an infection, or malnutrition that killed her. There are five stab wounds in her torso, each one deep with bruising around the wounds to indicate that the hilt of the knife came into brutal contact with the skin. Two of the wounds are located just above her breasts, the left one—likely the cause of death—over the heart. There are two more wounds in her abdomen at the same height as her navel, about six inches apart. The final wound is centered in the lower abdomen, just above the symphysis pubis.

All the wounds appear deep enough to have reached and injured underlying organs, but none of them, other than the one by the heart, were likely to be fatal, at least not immediately. Based on the bloodstains and a cursory examination of the surrounding tissue, all the wounds appear to have been inflicted while she was still alive, and her blood was still pumping. She was stabbed through her clothing and there are two denim fibers from her jeans embedded in the right-sided chest wound, suggesting that the single wound in the pelvic area was inflicted first.

Notably lacking are any of the defense wounds typically seen in a stabbing like this: slashes and cuts on the forearms, hands, and fingers as the victim tries desperately to ward off the knife blows.

“Someone really didn’t like this woman,” I say to Izzy, who is across the autopsy table from me. He is standing on a stool, which enables him to reach everything he needs to, because he is barely over five feet tall.

I, on the other hand, need no such accommodation as I have a full foot of height over him. I hit five-foot-twelve (it sounds shorter that way) at the age of twelve, earning monikers like Giraffe, Beanstalk, Amazon, and my personal favorite, Timber, which some of my schoolmates would holler at me whenever they passed me in the hall. This is because I have very large feet that made me clumsy back in the day. Okay, they still tend to make me clumsy at times, but you try walking around on snowshoes all day and see how well you do.

The size thing also led to the nickname Sasquatch, a version of which my husband has adopted for his own, calling me Squatch as a form of endearment. I should probably be offended. However, the way the name typically rolls off his tongue with a ton of love, and a hint of lust behind it, makes it easy to tolerate.

Izzy and I are the yin and yang of coworkers: He’s short and I’m tall; he’s swarthy and I’m fair-skinned; he’s dark-haired and I’m a pale blonde. Despite the physical differences, we are a lot alike in the way we think and function, right down to our shared predilection for men. It has made us the best of friends and great colleagues.

“How old do you think she is?” I ask.

“Hard to say,” Izzy says, straightening up from his close exam of the wounds. He arches his back and lets out a little sigh.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he says dismissively. “Just a bit of a backache. One of the many joys of getting older.” He studies the woman’s face for a moment. “I’d guess our victim is late twenties or early thirties,” he says after a bit. “Can’t be very precise with the level of damage to her body. Hopefully, your husband can come up with an ID for her soon.”

No doubt Hurley was currently working hard on that very thing, even though the body was dumped in a location outside of his typical jurisdiction. There is a lot of overlap on this sort of thing, and since the body dump site was close to town, and my office does all the criminal autopsies for the county, Hurley took over the investigative part. The county cop looked more than happy to give it up, since they’ve been short-staffed of late and an investigation into a Jane Doe such as this one was likely to be long, tedious, and frustrating.

Izzy once again bends over the body to examine the knife wounds more closely. He is looking at the one over the heart when I see his brow furrow. “Can you open this wound a little for me?” he says, handing me a small speculum.

I carefully insert the end of the speculum into the wound and push the handles together ever so slightly, separating the edges. “What the heck is that?” I say, peering into the wound at what appears to be some type of yellow debris.

Izzy picks up a small, narrow forceps and reaches into the wound. When he pulls the instrument out, there are two small yellow bits of something grasped in its end. Izzy holds the forceps aloft and we examine the debris in the light. I think at first that it looks like tissue, but something about it isn’t right. Izzy sets the debris on a towel-covered Mayo stand beside him; he uses the forceps to unravel and flatten the small chunks and then straighten the edges. The result is two vaguely fan-shaped bits of delicate-looking material.

“I think they’re flower petals of some type,” he says, staring at the bits. He then picks them up and drops them into a glass container before once again going into the wound. This time he comes out with three pieces, and he drops them into the container as they are. Setting the forceps aside, he peers at the debris through the glass.

With the mention of flower petals, something in my brain shifts, like an elbow nudge in the ribs. My first impulse is to ignore it, but then it nudges again and a memory, hazy but distinct in parts, surfaces. I sort through the pieces of it, and as I’m doing so, I become aware of Izzy staring at me.

“What is it?” he asks. “You’re onto something, aren’t you?”

“Maybe,” I say. “Could those be petals from a carnation, by any chance?”

Izzy eyeballs the debris again and his eyebrows rise. “They certainly could be.” He shifts his gaze to me and narrows his eyes in curiosity. “Why?”

I look down at the woman’s torso, at the arrangement of the wounds, and the memory gels a bit more in my mind. “These wounds, they form a sort of triangle, or chevron shape.”

Izzy glances at the wounds, then back at me. “They do,” he says cautiously.

“I recognize this MO.”

Izzy frowns. “I don’t. Was it a case you did with Otto?” he asks, referring to Otto Morton, a forensic pathologist from Madison who job-shares with Izzy.

I shake my head. “No, it wasn’t one of our cases. It was one I heard about. It was at that forensic conference in Milwaukee I went to last fall. I was in the bar one night, chatting with a guy from Eau Claire, and he was telling me about a case he worked on with that serial killer from up there. I can’t remember the killer’s name, but it was in the papers last year. You remember, don’t you? I believe he killed four women.”

“Ulrich?”

“That’s it!” I say, trying to snap my fingers, an impossibility with gloves on.

Izzy frowns and shakes his head. “I think the stabbing pattern was similar to our victim, but I don’t remember anything about any flower petals.”

“That’s because that fact never came out. The guy I talked to said he was part of a new program in Eau Claire where they’re trying to set up a forensic pathologist for the area by training someone with local interest. It’s through the U of Dub.”

“I heard about that,” Izzy says. “Most of the outlying areas don’t have forensic pathologists, so they send all of the bodies that need autopsies to Madison or Milwaukee. Those places are getting overwhelmed, and because of the success we’ve had here, they decided instead to implement a rural training program a few years ago. They send forensic pathologists to these outlying areas to provide training to interested physicians, sort of a residency program. Sounds like your guy might be in one of those programs.”

“That sounds about right,” I say with a frown, “though, truth be told, my memory of my chat with this fellow is hazy at best, as I might have had a little more to drink than I should have.” I shrug and give Izzy a guilty smile. “I was feeling carefree and a smidge wild, given that I had two days and one night with no mothering or other responsibilities.”

Izzy gives me a mildly chastising look.

“Anyway,” I go on, “something I remember this guy telling me was that the flower petals were never brought to light because the prosecution couldn’t connect them to their suspect. They couldn’t figure out where he might have obtained them, and the murders took place during a time of the year when the flowers wouldn’t be available in the wild. Given that they couldn’t tie them in, and afraid the defense might try to use this lack of a connection to create reasonable doubt, they buried the evidence. I think he said it was made available to the defense team, but he didn’t know if they’d found it or understood the significance of it. Apparently, the prosecution felt like the case was strong enough without the flower petal evidence, and it would seem they were right, given that Ulrich was convicted.”

“And the flower petals in this Ulrich case were stuffed inside a wound?” Izzy asks.

“They were,” I say with a nod. “I remember him saying that the stab wounds were in a triangular pattern that was wide at the chest and narrowed down to one wound in the pelvis, and the petals were in the one over the heart.” I gesture toward the body in front of us. “There was something about these wounds that was nagging at my brain, but I didn’t make the connection until you found the flower petals.”

Izzy holds up the container with the petals in it and studies them again in the light. “Did your fellow happen to mention what type of flower petals they were?”

“He did. He said they were yellow carnation petals.”

Izzy sets the container to one side. “Do we have a copycat killer?”

“Only if the information about the flower petals got out somehow.” I stare at the face of our victim as something occurs to me. “We also have to consider the possibility that Ulrich didn’t do the other murders, don’t we?” I give Izzy a worried, partly panicked look, a sinking feeling in my stomach. “Oh, hell, did the wrong guy get convicted again?”

Our legal system is good, but it’s far from perfect, and the harsh reality of that is all up in my face right now. That’s because I started my day yesterday by apologizing to a man who was wrongly convicted, someone I helped put behind bars because, for a long time, I was thoroughly convinced he was guilty.

I can admit it when I make a mistake, but I don’t like having to. It’s not a pride thing; it’s that some mistakes are bigger than others. During my career as a nurse, working first in the ER and then in a surgical suite, a mistake had the potential to cost someone their life and cost me my job, my license, and my livelihood. That’s a lot of things at stake and the responsibility of it has made me a careful, thoughtful person.

At least now the possibility of making a mistake that could directly kill someone is no longer a risk for me, since my clients are already dead. But while the stakes aren’t quite as high, it’s not risk-free. A mistake could mean a killer goes free, or a cause of death goes undetermined. Letting a killer avoid justice might cost someone their life in the long run if that killer decides to practice his or her trade again.

While I know that in the course of carrying out my current job, I no longer run the risk of killing anyone if I make a mistake, I’ve discovered that I can destroy a life. An erroneous assumption I made robbed a man of his freedom. My guilt is mitigated a bit by the knowledge that the error wasn’t mine alone, and that the stage was set through the conspiratorial efforts of some very bad people. But mitigated isn’t assuaged, and the knowledge of my role in the whole mess still stings.

The victim, a man named Tomas Wyzinski, was convicted largely on the testimony given by Bob Richmond, one of our local police detectives, and me. Neither of us lied about the facts, which were straightforward and admittedly damning, considering that we found the head of a murder victim in Wyzinski’s refrigerator. My assumption that Tomas was guilty colored the observations and conclusions I made on the day of that first encounter, as well as my observations, assumptions, and testimony later.

But he wasn’t guilty.

Eventually the wrong was righted, and just yesterday morning, I sat across from Mr. Wyzinski at a table in our office library—which also serves as office space for me and the person with whom I job-share—atoning for my mistake. I was relieved and glad that Wyzinski was no longer in prison and delighted that he had been rejoined with his brother, Lech, who is mentally challenged. The two of them were accompanied by two U.S. Marshals, who were ready to take them to a secret location, where they would embark on a new life in the Witness Protection Program.

“I’m so very sorry, Tomas,” I told him with all the sincerity I could muster. I was tempted to try to explain my erroneous assumptions, to paint a picture of the damning scene I encountered that day when I first met him, but I refrained at the last second for several reasons. He’d heard it already the day I testified in court, it made no difference in the end, and I recognized the impulse for what it was: an attempt to explain away my blame. I didn’t want to explain it away; I needed to own it.

“I jumped to conclusions and closed my mind to the possibilities,” I told him. “And you paid the price for my ignorance. I’m sorrier than you will ever know and will regret it for the rest of my life.”

Lech, whom I’d visited several times while his brother was in prison, smiled at me. Tomas did not. “You helped us,” Lech said with a big, beaming smile. “And that’s a good thing.”

I smiled back at him, but it was hard to feel happy about any of this.

“Your part in this was very minor,” Tomas said finally. “In some ways, you were as much a victim of the puppet masters as I was. I don’t hold any grudges, and I don’t blame you for what happened. What’s more, I appreciate what you did for both me and my brother. Particularly what you did for Lech. You made sure he was safe.”

“It was the least I could do,” I said with a wan smile. “I knew he was your weak link and suspected it was threats of harm to him that were keeping you in line.”

“And you were right,” Tomas said. He closed his eyes for a moment and took on a pained expression. “I was so afraid of what they would do to . . .” His eyes opened, and he looked at his brother with sweet affection. “Of what they would do,” he concluded, presumably not wanting to spook his brother.

“The marshals were really nice,” Lech said with an emphatic nod. “They gave me a new house to stay in. They got me really good food, too. I got to eat ice-cream cake!”

Tomas smiled at his brother, and it transformed his face. These two obviously bore a deep mutual affection for one another, and I knew that the role I played in nearly destroying that relationship would haunt me for the rest of my life. I hoped it would also serve as a reminder to me in the future, a precautionary note for any time I found myself tempted to jump to conclusions or close my mind to possible scenarios.

“Thank you for your understanding, Tomas,” I said, getting up from my chair. “I’m not sure I deserve it, but I’m truly happy to have it.” I glanced at my watch and sighed. “I need to get to work and you guys need to get going. You won’t be able to contact me, and I’ll likely never see you again, but know that I’ll be thinking about the two of you often, hoping that you’re enjoying your new lives.”

“Thank you,” Tomas said, giving me one last smile.

“Thank you, Mattie,” Lech echoed. He rose out of his chair, came around the table, and wrapped his arms around me, hugging me for all he was worth.

I hugged him back, my eyes closed to contain burgeoning tears. When Lech released me, I swiped at my eyes and saw that Tomas was also on his feet. He walked to and then past me without another look my way. No hug, no good-bye, no comment of any sort, but then I hadn’t expected one. Lech followed him out of the room, one marshal leading the way, the other falling into step behind the two men.

I’d stayed in the room to give myself a moment or two to get my emotions under control and to give the marshals and their charges time to leave. Then I went into the locker room, changed into scrubs, and headed for the morgue fridge to retrieve the body I’d put there during the night.

I’m normally somewhat immune to cold temperatures, in part because you adapt to it if you live in Wisconsin for any length of time, and in part because I come with plenty of my own insulation. But yesterday morning, when I walked into the morgue fridge on the heels of my meeting with the Wyzinskis, I was wracked by a violent shiver that made me hug myself. I made quick work of getting the body out of the fridge, the air in there feeling colder than the look my ex–mother-in-law, Stella, had given me when I’d ran into her—quite literally—at the grocery store the night before.

My marriage to Stella’s son, David Winston, a local surgeon, ended because he cheated on me. Despite that, I’ve somehow become the enemy in Stella’s eyes. She is here in town now because David has remarried and his new wife, Patty, just had a baby. It’s Stella’s first grandchild, as David is her only child and he and I never had any children.

I have them now, however: a seventeen-year-old stepdaughter named Emily—a surprise arrival in Hurley’s life a few years ago, given that he never knew he had a child before then—and Hurley’s and my two-and-a-half-year-old son, Matthew.

I’d had Matthew with me when I ran into Stella at the grocery store, and Matthew, in what seems to be his modus operandi of late, was having a meltdown in the cereal aisle, screaming and thrashing about in the cart because I wouldn’t buy a box of Frosted Flakes. He was sobbing that he wanted “Tony Tiger” with all the angst of a kid who’s just been beaten and threatened with death. I was refusing to buy them because I’d done so once before, and Matthew hated the stuff. But there was no way to explain that to the other shoppers, who were watching us with hooded, judgmental eyes, and expressions that clearly communicated their displeasure.

Desperate to get Matthew to stop, I had bent down close to his ear, telling him in a stern but low voice that if he didn’t knock it off, I was going to run Tony Tiger out of town and he’d never see him again, not even here at the grocery store. It wasn’t my proudest parental moment, but I find that logic and kindness tend to disappear from the equation when dealing with a temperamental toddler amid societal condescension and judgment.

As I was muttering my Tony-cidal threat to my sobbing son, I steered the cart around an end cap and into the next aisle, eager to leave the row of cereals behind. I wasn’t watching where I was going and ran the cart into someone else’s. An expletive escaped my lips before I could stop it, uttered right near my son’s ear. At least this, combined with the shock of the collision, got Matthew to stop crying. It took me a second to place the woman behind the cart I’d hit, as I’d only seen Stella twice before: once when David took me to Chicago to meet her and announce our engagement, and again at our wedding.

Stella is a large and imperious woman who literally looks down her nose at people. A wealthy widow—her husband died of cancer when David was in medical school—she is a class-conscious snob. I never felt accepted or good enough when I was around her, a feeling reinforced by the fact that during seven years of marriage, she never came to visit us or invited us down to Chicago to visit her.

“I’m sorry,” I’d uttered automatically postcollision, focused on disentangling my cart from the other one.

The only response I got was a dismissive “Hmph.”

It was then that I looked up at my victim. “Stella! What are you doing here?” I asked, feeling momentarily disoriented. Then I remembered. “Oh, wait, you came up to meet your new granddaughter, didn’t you? Congratulations.”

Again there was no response, just a glacial stare delivered from a head that was tilted back ever so slightly to give that look-down-my-nose-at-you posture. After a moment, she gave a derisive glance toward my son, who was gaping at her with a startled yet fascinated expression.

I whipped my cart around, aiming for the next aisle over. With one last glance over my shoulder, I said, “Tell David and Patty hi for me.” Then I hightailed it out of there and hid in the baked-goods aisle for half an hour before venturing on.

As I tally up my encounter with Stella, yesterday’s meeting with the Wyzinskis, and the current realization that the body we are working on is providing evidence of yet another possible wrong conviction, my emotions feel tighter than the SPANX I wore to my sister’s Christmas party.

“Let’s try to get ahead of this case,” Izzy says, nodding toward the woman’s body between us and refocusing my thoughts. “Call Arnie and have him come down here to collect some of this trace. And then call your husband and get him up to speed on this right away.”

I nod and step back from the table, stripping off my gloves. I wash my hands, flexing my fingers a few times to test my dexterity. For some reason, my fingers have been swollen for the past couple of weeks, making my rings so tight that I had to take them off. I suspect it’s due to the ten pounds I put on over the holidays and have yet to take off. It’s now April and those extra pounds are taunting me, reminding me that shorts and bathing-suit season is right around the corner.

First I use the phone on the desk by the far wall to call Arnie down from his second-floor lab, and then to call Hurley. I get Hurley’s voice mail and leave a message telling him we need him to come to the autopsy suite ASAP. By the time I’m done, Arnie has arrived.

“What’s up?” he says, eyeing the body on the table through his thick-lensed glasses.

After cutting off his ponytail as payment for a lost bet, Arnie is trying to grow his thinning hair long again, and it’s not a good look for him. The long, thin strands hanging down around his head are prone to static and it makes him look like the love chi. . .