Stone Cold Dead by James Ziskin (great novels of all time txt) 📕

threatened to beat her if she disobeyed him, and I had endured his wonton, lascivious gazes at my posterior. This man lusted after young women, that much I knew. I didn’t like him. He gave me the creeps in spades.

Darleen was one of those girls who attracted older men as well as boys her own age. Unwittingly, unintentionally, she radiated something that the male of the species detected and thought he could exploit, like a pickpocket who sizes up a vulnerable target. I believed her stepfather was one of those men. And if he wasn’t the killer, then there was at least one other of that breed somewhere on my list. I just wasn’t sure who.

“Ellie,” prompted Fadge, bringing me back to the present. “I asked what you thought? Who do you think killed her?”

“Sorry about that,” I said. “I have no idea.”

Fred Peruso was waiting for me in the doctors’ lounge at City Hospital when I arrived at eleven. He told me the autopsy was straightforward: death by strangulation. Darleen Hicks had been dead before she went into the water, which had preserved the body and, thus, much of the evidence.

“What evidence is that?” I asked.

“Her tissues and organs are intact,” he said. “It made determining the cause of death a lot easier. No guesswork.”

“And?” I asked. “What about the pregnancy?”

Fred paused to light a green cigar. “You were pretty sure about that,” he said. “Who told you she was pregnant anyhow?”

I didn’t want to say and deflected the question. “Why?”

“Well, you should let whoever told you know that it’s pretty hard to get pregnant when you’re a virgin.”

“A virgin?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

“Shall I draw a picture for you?” he said, puffing billows of blue smoke.

That came from left field. It changed materially the portrait of Darleen that I’d been forming in my head. The rumors and innuendo about her and men and boys. I felt no one was a reliable witness. And what of her quest for money? Perhaps she truly was planning to run off with Joey, and the abortion story was just a ruse. Or maybe she was a ruthless manipulator without scruples or concern for the boys who loved her. I hated myself for thinking ill of the dead, the victim, and a little girl at that, but I just wasn’t sure about her. This was the teenager who had been so kind to me in my moment of need. But even then, her kindness may have been a feint, perhaps no different from the scheme she’d hatched with Joey Figlio. Just a ploy to get what she wanted and nothing more.

“Was there any other physical evidence that might suggest what happened?” I asked Fred.

“Pretty simple,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Two hands around her neck, trachea crushed by intense pressure right about here,” and he indicated the location by touching his right index finger to my neck. I gulped.

“Nothing on her clothes? Nothing elsewhere on her body?”

Peruso shook his head. “Clothes? Everything had been torn away by the current. Everything except a belt around her midsection.”

I cringed. “Fred, I want to see the body.”

Peruso finally relented. He only allowed me to see her head, as her neck and thorax had been dissected during the autopsy. He promised me that I did not want to see that. In fact he promised me I didn’t want to see any of it.

I had expected a gruesome sight. I had expected to vomit and run from the room. But what I saw affected me in quite a different way. I was serene in my horror, gazing unflinchingly at the cyanotic blotches that swirled over her bloated face, parts of which had been gashed and gouged by underwater collisions and the violent currents of her watery grave. The nose was partly missing, and a piece of the cheek as well. Fred Peruso theorized that ice chunks or the dam gate had scraped the tissue away. He explained that the body floats through or on top of water face down, with the head slightly lower than the trunk of the body. In fast moving water, the bloated skin puckers, swells, and wrinkles. He called it “maceration” of the skin.

I stared at the face before me. Her hair clung together in bunches, like seaweed tangled and twisted on itself. The last thing I focused on was her lips. Swollen and hardened permanently in a grotesque death grimace, her open mouth revealed the white teeth and silver-gray braces. Peruso gently pulled the sheet back over her face, and I left the room.

“You held up better than I thought you would,” said Fred who rejoined me in the corridor outside. “Why was it so important for you to see the body?”

I drew a deep breath. Then another. “I want to remember what she looked like when I nail the monster who did this to her.”

I reached the Metzger farm at half past noon. An old Chevy sedan and a weathered pickup sat parked next to Dick Metzger’s green truck and the porch. I knocked on the storm door, and a plump woman in her fifties answered. I told her I had come to offer my condolences to the family. She opened the door, and I stepped inside.

“I’m Winnie Terwilliger,” she said in a low voice in my ear. “I live over in Palatine Bridge, but I’ve known Irene for many years. That’s Mr. Sloan and his wife over there. I’m afraid I don’t recall their first names. They brought a couple of casseroles and some punch.”

I found Irene Metzger in the armchair across the room, staring down at the floor. Mrs. Sloan was holding her hand, patting it from time to time and whispering comfort in her ear. Dick Metzger was nowhere in sight.

I knelt down before Irene, took her hand from Mrs. Sloan, and looked up into her bleary eyes. I told her how sorry I was. She stared back at me in misery,