Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(16)

Have an open homicide. Female, 32, came in last year as single-car traffic fatal with COD orthopedic decapitation (AOD) but TA investigator said impact not enough. Scene was staged. TA injuries postmortem. Victim name: Mallory Yates. I/O Ray Gonzalez FLPD.



I could decipher most of the shorthand. COD was cause of death and TA meant traffic accident, while I/O meant investigating officer. And I thought FLPD meant Florida Police Department until I googled it and came up with Fort Lauderdale Police Department, which was located within Broward County. I copied the message and transferred it to the story file I had created on my computer.

The next message was from Dallas and it was similar to the first in that the victim was a woman of similar age—thirty-four-year-old Jamie Flynn—who had died in what appeared to be a single-car accident with AOD listed as cause of death. This was not classified as a homicide but as a suspicious death because all of Flynn’s toxicity reports came back clean, so there was no clear explanation as to why she drove off a road and down an embankment into a tree. Flynn’s death had occurred ten months earlier and the case was still open because of the suspicious circumstances.

The third message was a follow-up from Frank Garcia at the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office.


Checked with Gonzalez at FLPD. Case still open, no suspects, no leads at this time.



The fourth post on the message board was about another case, which had occurred three months before. This one came from Brian Schmidt, who was an investigator with the Santa Barbara County Coroner’s Office.


Charlotte Taggart, 22 yoa, fell from cliff at Hendry’s Beach, found DOA next morning. AOD and other injuries, accidental. BAT .09 and fall occurred 03:00 in full darkness.



I knew that BAT meant blood-alcohol toxicity and that the limit for driving in California was .08, indicating Taggart was at least slightly inebriated when she walked to the edge of a cliff in darkness and fell to her death.

The fifth message was posted most recently. It was the shortest message but it froze me.


Who is this?



It had been posted only twenty minutes earlier by Dr. Adhira Larkspar, who I knew was the chief medical examiner of Los Angeles County. It meant I was in danger of discovery. When no one volunteered to identify themselves to their boss, Larkspar might check to see if her office did indeed have a recent AOD case, and this inquiry would undoubtedly lead her to Mattson and Sakai, who would undoubtedly conclude that I had been the one to initially post on the message board.

I tried to push thoughts of another visit from the detectives aside and to focus on the information I had in front of me. Three cases of AOD in the last year and a half, with Tina Portrero making a fourth. The victims were women ranging in age from twenty-two to forty-four. So far, two of the cases had been ruled homicides, one was suspicious, and one—the most recent before Portrero—was classified as an accident.

I did not know enough about human physiology to be sure whether the fact that all four cases involved females was significant. Since men are generally larger and more muscled than women, it was possible that AOD happened more to women because their bodies were more fragile.

Or it could be that they are stalked and become the targets of predators more often than men.

I knew that I had to add more to the profiles of these four women if I were to make any informed judgment based on the information I had. I decided to work backward and start with the most recent case first. Using basic search engines I found very little on Charlotte Taggart other than a paid obituary that had run in the East Bay Times and an accompanying online memorial book where friends and family could sign their names and make comments about the deceased loved one.

The obituary said Charlotte Taggart grew up in Berkeley, California, and attended UC–Santa Barbara. She was in her senior year when she passed. She was interred at Sunset View Cemetery in Berkeley. She was survived by both parents, two younger brothers, and many close and distant relatives she had discovered in the past year.

The end of the last line drew my focus. Charlotte Taggart had discovered new relatives in the last year of her life. That said to me that she most likely discovered these people through a heritage-analysis company. My guess was she had submitted her DNA just as Christina Portrero had done.

This connection didn’t necessarily mean anything—millions of people did what these two young women had. It was not uncommon at all and at this stage it appeared to be a coincidence.

I scanned the comments in the online memorial book and found it to be full of heartfelt but routine messages of love and loss, many written directly to Charlotte as though she would be reading them from the great hereafter.

After entering what I knew about Charlotte Taggart’s life and death into the story file, I moved on to the Dallas case, where Jamie Flynn’s death was labeled suspicious because there was no explanation for her driving down an embankment into a tree.

This time I found a short story about the death in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Jamie was from a prominent family that ran a well-known boot-and-saddlery business in Fort Worth. Flynn was a graduate assistant at Southern Methodist University in Dallas while working on a doctorate in psychology. She lived on a horse ranch in Fort Worth owned by her parents and commuted because she liked to be close to her horses. It was her life’s goal to open a counseling practice that incorporated riding as therapy. The story contained an interview with Flynn’s father, who lamented that his daughter had battled depression and alcoholism before straightening her life out and returning to school. He seemed proud of the fact that she had not had a relapse and that her blood screens in the autopsy were clean.