Annelise Ryan - Dead Ringer

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Table of Contents

Books by Annelise Ryan (who also writes as Allyson K. Abbott):

A Mattie Winston Mystery:

Working Stiff
Scared Stiff
Frozen Stiff
Lucky Stiff
Board Stiff
Stiff Penalty
Stiff Competition
Dead in the Water
Dead Calm
Dead of Winter
Dead Ringer

Helping Hands Mysteries (a new series featuring Hildy Schneider!)

Needled to Death
Night Shift (coming in August 2020)

Books by Allyson K. Abbott (who also writes as Annelise Ryan):

A Macks Bar Mystery:

Murder on the Rocks
Murder with a Twist
In the Drink
Shots in the Dark
A Toast to Murder
Last Call

CHAPTER 1

T he dead woman in front of me is a stranger. Ive never seen her before and I dont know her name or where shes from, but I can tell she hasnt had an easy life. Yet by the time Im 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, wasnt 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 coldcolder than the unusually warm April temperatures weve had the past few days could explainand 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 samplesthe 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 womans 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 mouthone of them broken, all of them brown, her gums inflamed and spotted with pockets of infection. Its 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. Its 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 its not what one might expect at first glance. It wasnt 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 onelikely the cause of deathover 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 didnt 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: Hes short and Im tall; hes swarthy and Im fair-skinned; hes dark-haired and Im 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.

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