by A. J. Thomas
The morgue always smelled like ammonia. The scent filtered out of the closed door to the exam room and through the cluttered office, where the Elkin County coroner and the deputy medical examiner worked, and out into the utilitarian hallway beyond. Doug tried to convince himself the smell was from window cleaner, but he had visited the morgue enough times to know better.
He fidgeted in one of the blue plastic chairs lining the hallway outside the office, refusing to check his watch again. After two days, his ass still hurt, and the hard plastic chairs seemed to be angled to remind him of just how much. The pain was a subtle reminder of the things he had spent the weekend doing, and every time he let his mind wander, his body responded to the memories and he had to think about sports to keep himself from squirming. The reminder was delicious, but he had to focus on acting like a professional.
What made waiting worse today was that he was sitting less than ten feet from Brittney McAllister, the new deputy medical examiner. She stood leaning against the door to the office with her arms folded rigidly across her chest. Her once long brown hair had been cropped short, probably to avoid having the long strands get stuck in anything messy, and she wore an expression on her face that made Doug suspect she was thinking about ways to dissect him.
He probably deserved it, but he would never admit it aloud.
They had dated for two years in high school, and had been engaged before she left to go to an Ivy League school and he began classes at the local community college. For a few years of hormone-induced bad judgment, he’d allowed himself to be paraded in front of her very wealthy, very conservative, and very white family as the ultimate sign of rebellion.
At sixteen, Doug had been too damn naive to know how to handle the I’m going to date a boy from the reservation just to spite you! vibe between Brittney and her parents. College and four years in Miami had given Doug an easy confidence that had charmed Mr. McAllister the next time around. Brittney’s rage about her father’s approval told Doug just how sincere she’d been about their relationship. As soon as her father approved, she’d decided they had grown too far apart. When he called her on it, she had blown up, screaming denials, then screaming obscenities at him, and ultimately throwing things at him—all in front of her family. Afterward, her father had actually invited Doug out for a drink to apologize and that had just made her hate him more. Doug had rubbed it in by being as cool, professional, and civil as he possibly could.
It was just as well. Without the hormones of a sixteen-year-old, Doug couldn’t revive the adolescent desire that had originally convinced him he was attracted to both men and women. The few times he’d seen her after he came back had more than proven that.
Now that Brittney was the official county deputy medical examiner, it had become the department joke that no one in the coroner’s office would work with him. Between her attitude and the small-town crime rate, the only way he’d ever see another homicide investigation was by returning to Florida, or by watching a documentary about one on television.
So he was stuck dealing with things like this.
No one liked to deal with an obvious suicide. The people who killed themselves while making it look like an accident were easier. A single car hitting a tree at a hundred miles an hour was easy to chalk up to a senseless tragedy, so it wasn’t so hard to break the news to the next of kin. An obvious suicide, especially a messy one, was always met with denial and rage instead of grief.
Doug had been the one to cut him down, though, so he was automatically the one who got to deal with the rest of the mess.
“So is this guy actually supposed to show up, or was this just an excuse to waste my time?” Brittney asked.
“The sheriff said he’s driving in from out of town.” Doug tried to sound diplomatic.
“It’s already ten past five.”
Doug held up his arm and made a show of pulling up the sleeve of his suit jacket, then staring down at the bare skin. “Is it?”
“Yes, and some of us prefer not to work all night.”
“What, you got a hot date or something?” The words tumbled out before he could stop them. He fought the urge to smack himself in the forehead.
“Like you’d care.”
“I don’t care. The guy is coming all this way just to bury his brother. You could cut him a bit of slack.” Doug leaned back, making as much of a show of relaxing as he dared. If he shifted too much, his ass would twinge again.
“If he shows up, he can get a hotel room and come in alone tomorrow, during normal business hours. It’s not as if he’s going to find the funeral home tonight, anyway. Unless he doesn’t exist, and you’re just using this as an excuse to ruin my evening….”
Doug couldn’t believe she had actually said that. “Are you actually suggesting that I hiked eight miles into the woods, rappelled down a crumbling limestone wall, and orchestrated some random freak’s suicide on the off chance that the guy’s only family would live out of state, all so I could waste four hours of my day fucking with you when his next of kin doesn’t show up?”
“I think you’d gladly exploit some random freak’s suicide for a chance to be an asshole.”
“You know, Brit, the county health benefits include decent mental-health coverage. If you wanted to sort out these delusions about the world revolving around you, you could talk to a professional without spending a dime out-of-pocket.”
She smiled at him brightly, unfolded her arms, and jangled her keys. She strode through the office behind her, and then into the exam room. Less than a minute later, she reappeared outside the exam room door, slammed it shut, and locked it behind her.
Doug hopped out of his chair to try to stop her, holding his hands up pleadingly. “Come on, Brittney, you don’t have to be such a bitch about it! If it was a member of your family in that cabinet, wouldn’t you want to know? I’m sure he’ll be here!”
She flung a loose file at him, spilling notes, photographs, and typed pages everywhere, then closed and locked the office door. “Tell this mysterious brother that if the photos look familiar, he’s welcome to come in alone and begin seeing to funeral arrangements when we open in the morning.”
“Say hi to your dad for me!” Doug called out as he watched her rush out the door. He waited for the door to close before he began putting the file back together again. He shoved everything back into the manila folder, but paused on a full-color close-up of the cuts on the corpse’s arms. The blue-gray skin made a gruesome canvas for the words, and the sharp contrast of the photograph reminded Doug of a cheap zombie horror flick. Paper-clipped to the photo was a handwritten note from the county coroner, detailing how long the cuts had been left to form clots before the man died, along with a note that they were most likely self-inflicted. They estimated that the cuts and the man’s time of death were about twenty minutes apart. There were no signs of a struggle and no evidence that the man had been intoxicated at the time. There was no reason at all to classify the death as suspicious. Gruesome, yes, but not suspicious. There were dozens of sets of footprints left by the hikers who discovered the body, and by Doug and the rest of the backcountry search-and-rescue team that retrieved it, so there was no way to know if he had been alone or not. They’d found no blood splattered on the trail, no crushed underbrush, no torn scraps of clothing.
Doug had been able to hang onto the case because it was an obvious suicide. The department’s real detectives didn’t want to bother investigating why the local drunk had decided to carve up his own body and then hang himself. Doug had spent the better part of the previous week trying to nail down the man’s probation officer and get a phone number for his mysterious next of kin. The probation officer was apparently catching hell for not knowing one of his clients was dead and had refused to hand over the information so he could contact the man himself. When Doug dropped the victim’s personal property off at his home, he had had spent hours digging through the victim’s desk, filing cabinets, and random paperwork trying to find the contact info
rmation for his brother, but he’d come up empty-handed. By the end of the week, Doug had reported the problem to the sheriff and given up. Over the weekend, the sheriff had managed to get in touch with the guy somehow. Now all that was left was identification and disposition of the remains.
At least he didn’t have to go back inside that filthy house again.
Doug tucked the folder under his arm and strolled toward the double glass doors. He scanned the nearly empty parking lot for the sixth time. His truck and Brittney’s Malibu had been the only vehicles in the parking lot for most of the day. Now his truck was the only thing in the parking lot. He thought about going back to the row of chairs, but decided against it. He’d already been sitting for too long. He was beyond twitchy. He reached into his pocket and ran his thumb over the ridges of his keys again.
He stretched his shoulders and rolled his neck from one side to the other, remembering the pair of smiling blue eyes he’d left behind in Missoula. He should have given Christopher his number, should have tried harder to talk him into showing up next weekend. But that would have been a very bad idea. He was already having trouble forgetting about him. Walking away was the only thing to do, but now that it was done, he couldn’t go three seconds without thinking about whether or not he could track the other man down. If he went back to Missoula anyway, maybe Christopher would swing by the same bar again. And then what? Make a joke about how desperate he looked? Hope the other man wouldn’t think Doug was stalking him and bolt?
He was already cursing himself for not calling in sick and spending Sunday with the other man. It had been a slow, dull day. Because it had been the weekend, he’d been stuck supervising the traffic officers, dispatch center, and the jail. It had given him plenty of time to catch up on paperwork, finish reports, complete more crossword puzzles than any sane person would ever want to do, and argue about sports with the shift sergeant at the jail. And force himself not to think about the man he’d left behind in Missoula. He hadn’t thought about Christopher until his shift ended, and then he hadn’t thought about him on the drive home, or through a grueling workout. When he dragged himself into the shower, though, he had remembered the feel of the other man’s skin, remembered his scent and his taste, and he had given in and jacked himself off.
Today had been worse. He couldn’t sit in the dispatch office and argue about baseball, and he had finished every single crossword puzzle in the small paper book he had bought last week. He definitely couldn’t think about the weekend, but it was hard not to. On impulse, he bought a Snickers bar for lunch from the vending machine and chuckled as he ate it. Brittney had glared at him for that. He was about to stand up and start pacing again when he saw a dark blue Lexus turn slowly into the parking lot. “Well, it’s about fucking time….”
He reached for the door handle but stopped himself from pulling it open when his eyes caught the local license plate. Doug watched as the car came to a stop across three parking spaces and the handicap access aisle and a giant of a man stepped out from the driver’s seat. He had a bit of white hair brushed in thin strands over a rather pronounced bald spot, and a thick white beard. He was the type of man who was built to play Santa Claus at the mall each Christmas. He was dressed in a thick wool suit with leather patches sewn on the elbows and a western-style bolo necktie with a jade and silver slide pendant on it.
The sight of the bolo tie made Doug wince. Every tourist-trap gift shop on the reservation sold them, and every would-be cowboy who retired to Montana thought he had to wear one. Doug’s family had owned and lived on the same ranch for three generations now, and despite being enrolled members of the Salish-Kootenai tribe and cowboys, none of them had ever worn bolo ties.
The towns around the reservation were all conservative, and that conservative nature made them naturally distrustful of anyone from the reservation. They were naturally distrustful of anyone with different colored skin, a different religion, different sexual preferences, a different hometown, or even a tendency to eat more vegetables than meat. Doug fit every single one of those categories, and it was almost a relief that folks only expected him to be a petty criminal and an alcoholic. Oddly, the worst assholes around town tended to be the ones who proudly wore trinkets from gift shops on the reservation, so Doug knew he’d have to deal with the same bullshit as always.
A tailored suit and a professional attitude helped. Doug straightened his own gray clip-on tie and stood up straight. He even held the door as the huge man lumbered up the four concrete steps.
“Good evening, sir,” Doug said politely.
“You work here, young man?” the fat man huffed, apparently too winded from climbing the steps to return Doug’s greeting. Doug could see him sweating, even in the cool June breeze.
“No, sir,” said Doug as he reached for his badge automatically. “I’m a deputy sheriff. Detective Douglas Heavy Runner. The coroner’s office is closed for the evening. Is there something I could help you with?”
“That man….” The man caught his breath. “The one they’ve been talking about in the paper?”
“Yes, sir?”
“I understand that you haven’t released his name or picture yet,” the man explained, “but a gentleman who does some odd jobs for me sounds a lot like the description in the paper. As I was reading the paper, I began wondering whether he had any family left, any who would come for him, and I realized he was probably all alone. So I thought I’d come down and see if anyone has arranged to bury the poor soul. As he was my employee, I feel a certain duty in that regard.”
“Yes, sir, I understand. However, it’s department policy not to release the name of the deceased until we’ve had a chance to notify any family. His closest family is coming into town to take possession of the body. You said he may have worked for you?”
“I… maybe… I see so many people, you understand, but….” The man shook his head. “Would it be possible to view the body?”
“At the moment, no,” said Doug. “The deputy medical examiner and a member of the sheriff’s department must be present to view the body. I’d be happy to schedule a time for you to view the body tomorrow morning, if you’d like. Mr.…?” Doug let the question hang in the air.
“Liedes,” the man said, puffing out his already enormous chest. “Reverend John Liedes.”
“Liedes?” Doug repeated.
“Lead us not into temptation, Liedes, as I always say.” The white haired man smoothed down his lapel.
Doug knew the name. The man was the minister of one of the larger Christian churches in town. He had a reputation for being a passionate, fire-and-brimstone kind of preacher who drew in so many parishioners that his small church had expanded into a modular warehouse that took up three city blocks. He and his wife took in an average of five to six foster children at a time, and he’d dedicated a section of the back of the warehouse to the youth of his congregation, where he’d built a skateboard ramp, an arcade, and an indoor rock-climbing wall. It was a popular place.
No matter how popular the man was as a minister, though, Doug couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he was dealing with an old con—the type who would chat up a police officer with a big smile on his face just to get him close enough to cut his throat.
“Well, Mr. Liedes, how about ten tomorrow?”
“Why such a fuss, young man? The paper said the poor soul committed suicide.”
Doug kept his face rigid and stared at the man, not saying a word.
“I mean,” the man stammered, “why does a sheriff’s deputy have to be there? Seems like quite a bit of trouble, if I do say so myself.”
Doug stared at him in silence for a few more seconds. In Miami, he had learned to let people fill in the silences in conversation, since they almost always did. Sometimes, though, even he couldn’t stand the awkward pauses that doing so left in conversations.
“You do think someone killed him, don’t you!” Liedes hissed, narrowing his eyes.
Doug took a deep breath, making sure
it looked like he was choosing his words carefully. “I don’t believe I said that. It’s just against department policy until his family signs for his remains.”
“But you do… I was worried he would come to no good end, I don’t mind telling you. If it’s the man I think it is.” Liedes leaned in close, as though he was going to whisper a secret in Doug’s ear, then he clamped his mouth shut.
“The man you think it is?” Doug echoed. He had to hold his breath as he caught the smell of sweat and cigar smoke emanating from the large man.
Reverend Liedes nodded frantically. He draped a hand the size of a dinner plate over Doug’s shoulder and pulled him close. “He came to us out of a halfway house in California, years ago now. He cleaned up after services, performed some maintenance around the church.” He shut his eyes and shook his head. “He had spent time in prison, I’m sure, but I’m a stalwart believer in second chances. Seemed to me, though, he was more friendly than he should have been with some of the young men in my flock. Peter was his name. So many people passing through the church, you understand, but I try to look after them—even those who have strayed.”
“Young men?”
“Well.” Reverend Liedes looked horrified. “That’s not the type of thing I like to say out loud. Especially if I’m not certain it’s the same man. Was it Peter Hayes?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t release his name,” said Doug automatically. In the back of his head, he started mapping out possibilities. That wasn’t the type of comment he could ignore. If there was even a hint that a crime might have been committed, or that someone might need help, Doug had a duty to perform due diligence. Even if the perpetrator was already dead, he had to investigate. Since it meant another few days of not having to deal with bicycles in the stolen property locker, he was more than willing to explore every possibility.
“The coroner’s office opens at eight, and a deputy can come by at any time. If you feel like you need to talk to me about anything….” Doug passed the man a business card.