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“You have to think outside the box, Dave.” She adjusted her oval glasses, punched up several menus on her computer screen, and pointed.
“This was a research project in 1985 at the University of Arizona Medical School. A history of forensic pathology in Arizona in the 1950s, gleaned from autopsy records. And lo and behold, the autopsy of Rebecca Marie Stokes.”
“You are amazing.”
“It’s all in the fingers.” She opened a file, and we read silently together.
“‘A fetus, approximately eight weeks old, found in the womb,’” she read.
“Jesus Christ.” I sat back.
“She was pregnant, Dave. That changes everything.”
“Motive.”
“Exactly. Killed by somebody she knew, like Harrison Wolfe said.”
“So the lover was married and got his girlfriend, Rebecca, pregnant,” I said.
“She refuses to have a back-alley abortion. He refuses to leave his wife,” Lindsey said. “They argue. They fight. He kills her.”
“If that’s the real scenario,” I said.
“You know it is, Dave,” Lindsey put her hands on my knees, smiling widely. “She was a single middle-class woman living in 1959, and she was pregnant,” Lindsey went on. “We know from Opal Harvey that she had a lover and he was a mystery man.”
“So then,” I said, “the question becomes, who was he?”
I scrolled through the autopsy report, Lindsey leaning on my shoulder. It went into some detail about the crushing of the cricoid in her neck. The forensic serology report showed she’d had semen in her vagina.
“What about your friend Brent McConnico? Would he know who her lover was?” Lindsey asked.
“I doubt it,” I said. “He was just a kid at the time. I guess it’s worth asking, although I’m sure it won’t make his day.” I looked back at Lindsey. She was somewhere else.
“Do you think there’s good and evil?” she said at last.
“I do,” I said. “It’s not very fashionable, I guess. The Holocaust and the gulag taught us there is radical evil.”
“But is there good?”
“Of course,” I said. “The soldiers who defeated the Nazis and liberated the death camps were good. A historian named Robert Conquest documented the millions of deaths in the Soviet Union, when most Western experts wanted to look the other way. I call that good.” I stroked her wrist. “We’re the good guys, aren’t we?”
Lindsey looked at me with something like fondness. “I used to think, people don’t even think these thoughts I do.…But you do.”
I almost leaned over and kissed her. I said, “You are my hero, Lindsey. This really changes everything. Even if it blows my theory of a serial killer all to hell.”
“There was a serial killer, Dave. He probably just wasn’t involved in the Stokes murder.”
“Right,” I said. I felt awkward and silly. “You want to do something this week? Maybe see a movie?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
***
Back at home, I placed a call to Brent McConnico, left a message with his secretary, and settled into the big leather chair with a large Bloody Mary and my notes and files from the library. Phaedra was still in the center of my mind, but Lindsey’s find on the Stokes case had fired me up. I was still going to earn my thousand dollars from Peralta, and even do some honest scholarship to boot.
Going through the notes I’d made on Governor McConnico, I was struck by how the murder of his niece could be seen as a turning point in his career. He was only about fifty when she disappeared, and he was seen as a rising star in the Democratic party. Newspapers of the time talked about him seeking the Senate in 1958. Instead, McConnico retired and went into corporate law with his longtime adviser, Sam Larkin. It seemed an odd turn, even if, as Brent McConnico had said, they never felt safe after Rebecca was killed. Indeed, newspapers and historical accounts didn’t make the connection between Stokes and McConnico at all. Something else I didn’t realize: Governor McConnico had died by his own hand in 1968.
I also looked through the Phoenix PD history, hoping for some insight into the department that had investigated Rebecca’s murder. Names and dates and innovations-the first motorcycle unit, first helicopter patrol-but little on major cases. Just a sleepy desert town in the 1950s. And nothing on a detective from Los Angeles named Harrison Wolfe. I guess we’d used up our ration of luck for one day.
