by Amy Stuart
“I need Jack Westman’s autopsy report.”
Dr. Flanagan laughs heartily, then waves at Clare and Somers to sit in the chairs across from him. “Something tells me you don’t have a warrant for that. Or you’d have gone directly to the detective assigned to the case.”
“I don’t have a warrant,” Somers says. She taps the top of his desk. “Listen, I appreciate that you have a job to do. And I know that coroners and cops aren’t always in simpatico. But the system works better when we get along, doesn’t it?”
“I’d say it does,” he says.
“Let’s just assume I did my research. Clare, you’ve heard of the term ‘dirty cop’?”
“Sure,” Clare says.
“Well, a dirty cop’s lesser known cousin is the dirty coroner. You know, the one who fudges results here and there. Adds or leaves out a key detail in their report. Maybe forgets to write down a piece of evidence the prosecution needs to seal the case. A grimy nugget about a bad death that a rich family wants buried with their beloved. Coroners who act as judge and jury. Ever heard of such a thing?”
The smile on Flanagan’s face turns hostile.
“I’d like to think that you coroners have your hunches about which cops are dirty,” Somers continues. “And cops? We have the same hunches about you. About which coroners are bribe prone, and which ones are more committed to… what? To the purity of justice? There’s one thing we likely agree on: our work is complicated and we don’t need other people breathing down our backs. Am I right?”
Despite her fatigue, her aching chest, a swell of admiration fills Clare. It is a form of genius, Clare thinks, the way Somers disarms him. Now she can extract exactly what she needs.
“Which report did you say you needed?” Flanagan asks.
“Jack Westman,” Somers says, referring to her notes. “I believe his birth name is John.”
The coroner’s capacity to keep his composure is admirable, his ability to distill his anger to only a small shudder of his jaw muscles. He stands and disappears through a door to the left of his desk.
“You’re good at that,” Clare says.
“There’s a golden rule,” Somers says. “Always arrive to an interaction like this prepared. Don’t let them take the wheel. Always retain control.”
“You’ve got dirt on him?”
“His reputation precedes him,” Somers says. “Nothing particularly terrible. He’s not setting serial killers free or anything. Lune Bay isn’t exactly a murder hot spot. But let’s just say that some sudden deaths have been brushed off as natural causes. Some of the richer people around here tend to die with more dignity than they ought.” Somers laughs. “It’s not funny. But hey, he retires next year. He doesn’t know what I know. It’s an easy upper hand.”
What effortless confidence, Clare thinks, studying Somers sidelong. It might be a function of how long she’s been doing this job, or it might just be her, built-in. Either way, Clare wishes she could find that kind of ease in anything she does. After a few minutes Dr. Flanagan returns, a file in one hand and a handful of foil-wrapped candies in the other. He sits and sets the file down, dropping a candy in front of each of them. Somers unwraps hers and pops it in her mouth.
“This better not be laced with arsenic,” she says.
Dr. Flanagan opens the file. “If I were going to kill you, I’d use something untraceable, Detective Somers. Give me some credit.”
Somers’s laugh is genuine, booming. A pressure valve has been released between them. Flanagan has accepted his defeat. He pores over the open file as he unwraps his own candy.
“I’m just scanning the summary report,” he says.
“Did you conduct the autopsy?”
“I did,” he says. “Five years ago.”
“You probably conduct a lot of them,” Clare adds. She is grateful that Somers doesn’t flinch at the obvious question.
“Indeed I do,” Flanagan says. He looks up at Clare, staring a second too long, smiling at her. “Right. Says here: gunshot wound to the head. Three shots, one fatal.”
He spins the top page to show it to Clare and Somers. The words come at Clare in a blur.
Gunshot wound, left templar lobe. Fatal.
Patient dead on arrival. Early stages rigor mortis.
“Sometimes there are details about a case you don’t forget,” Flanagan says, the candy knocking against his teeth. “This case was certainly one of those.”
Somers uncrosses and recrosses her legs. Clare knows her well enough now to see this as a sign of her frustration. The coroner’s wistfulness is getting on her nerves.
“Can you be more specific?” Clare asks.
“The first step is to examine the obvious trauma. Here, the deceased was struck with multiple bullets. Three. We accepted that the bullet to his temple was the fatal one, but he may well have died from the piercing of another organ. When death is so sudden it’s not necessarily possible to—”
“What’s this?” Somers interrupts, pointing to a word on the page. Metastases.
Clare leans forward to follow the path of Somers’s finger. Evidence of advanced metastases. Lungs, liver. Multiple. Source unknown.
“Well,” the coroner says. “He had cancer.”
“Yeah,” Somers says. “I think we understand that much.”
The years Clare spent in close range to her mother’s cancer had taught her the basic vocabulary of the disease: tumors and their spread, metastases like weeds popping up unwelcome throughout her body.
“Advanced,” Clare says. “Multiple. Lots of cancer, basically. He was dying?”
“We’re all dying,” Dr. Flanagan says. “Just at different rates.”
Somers pushes out a hard breath, all efforts to conceal her impatience fallen away.
“Listen,” she says. “Your calendar might be clear today, but Clare and I have places to be. I really do appreciate your lessons on the meaning of life, but—”
If Dr. Flanagan is wounded, his smile doesn’t show it. He leans back in his chair.
“My guess is the liver was the site of origin, but his cancer was so advanced that it wasn’t easy to pinpoint. And since he was already dead from another cause… well, there isn’t much value in digging through his innards to find out where the cancer started.”
“Did he know he was dying?” Clare asks.
“The symptoms at this stage would have been intense,” Flanagan says.
“Like he had months left?” Somers asks.
“Not months. Weeks. There was some early-stage jaundice too. Fluid in his abdomen. Not terribly overt, but enough. Hard to believe he wouldn’t have noticed.”
“Or his wife wouldn’t have known,” Somers says.
“But,” Flanagan continues, “the coroner’s office was never presented with corroborating records from his medical team. Nothing to indicate there’d been a previous diagnosis. That doesn’t mean he didn’t know, but it sure is odd, now that I think about it.”
“Now that you think you about it.” Somers shakes her head.
Clare remembers her mother in the final months of her own illness, the way the disease invaded every nook of her body until even the most mundane tasks required a surge of pain medication. It feels impossible that someone at the same stage of disease would not have known they were dying.
“I’ve seen stranger things,” Dr. Flanagan says. “Women in the final trimester of pregnancy with no record of it in their files. People with advanced cancers, or hearts calcified with decay before the fatal infarction. You think it would have been impossible not to recognize that something was terribly wrong. At the very least, he must have known. And his family could have suspected something. But we don’t know what he knew. And his family very well could have been in the dark.”
“Or they knew and kept it hidden,” Somers adds.
“Yes,” Dr. Flanagan says. “That’s possible too.”
“Anything else? Anything in the blood?”
Dr. Flanagan flips ove
r the page and scans the findings. “Some opioid, a sedative, but not at palliative levels. His blood alcohol was slightly elevated, which makes sense, given he was drinking wine at dinner before he died. Nothing beyond that.”
“Fine. Good. Listen,” Somers says again. “I’m going to take a picture of this report with my phone. I know that’s against the rules, but you know well that some rules are made to be broken, right? So I’ll take the picture, then you file this report away again, and I promise you that this picture will never see the light of day. This conversation never happened.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Flanagan says.
Somers aligns her phone with the page and takes the photograph. She and Clare stand and shake the doctor’s hand.
“We’re grateful for your time and expertise, Dr. Flanagan,” Somers says, a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
His expression is almost sad when they turn to leave. Clare must jog the hallway to keep up with Somers as she walks past the reception area and through the door to the outside world. Somers stops at the bottom of the steps and fishes through her bag for her sunglasses.
“I know I’ve already said this,” Clare says. “But you’re really good at that.”
“You played your part too,” Somers says. “You know. The quiet, cute, good cop. The little questions you innocently threw in here and there.”
“I’m not sure ‘cute’ is a real thing in detective-speak. And I’m pretty sure it’s meaningless. Unhelpful.”
“Ha,” Somers says. “You’d be surprised. When you come across a lot of men like Flanagan, you know—men with egos incrementally larger than their brains?—cute helps a lot. At one point he was looking at you like he would have handed over his scalpel and the key to the morgue if you batted your lashes and asked him for them.”
They reach Somers’s car. In the passenger seat Clare feels hot with anger. Her entire life Clare resented those around her for whom things seemed to come easily, Grace first and foremost, and Somers now, exacerbated by the implication that Clare’s best weapon is her looks. No, Clare thinks now. Settle down. She buckles her seat belt.
“Do you think Jack Westman knew he was dying?” Clare asks.
“He must have.”
“Do you think it matters if he did?”
“Everything matters,” Somers says. “Every little secret matters.”
Somers turns the key in the ignition. They pull out of the spot and drive up the hill. When they pass a park, Clare can see the ocean overtop of it.
“I think we should go see Germain,” Somers says. “It’s time I met him.”
“Sounds good,” Clare says, even if her tone does not match the conciliatory nature of her words.
The police detachment is open and airy. Clare barely remembers its layout from yesterday morning, all the upper floors open to the atrium, where Clare and Somers wait. Just like the coroner’s office, this space seems too well appointed to be a government building. Looking up, Clare spots Germain standing at the third-floor elevator. They make eye contact before Somers sees him too. Even from a hundred feet away Clare can read his look, the sly smile. He descends in the glass elevator facing outward, his hands in his pockets, his eyes never leaving Clare. So confident, she thinks. So self-assured. Somers is looking at her phone and only spots him when he arrives at the desk and stretches out his hand to greet her.
“Detective Somers,” he says. “It’s a thrill to meet you. Thank you so much for your work on this case.”
“What case?” Somers says. “We’ve got a few of them on the go, don’t we?”
“Sure, maybe,” Germain says. “I see it as one. One big present tied together with a bow.”
“I don’t,” Somers says.
The front desk clerk follows their volleys intently, chin propped on her hands.
“We don’t have much time,” Clare says in an effort to insert herself. “Can we take a few minutes in your office?”
“Sure,” he says. “I’ve got a soda maker.”
“He’s very domestic,” the clerk chimes in.
The clerk recedes into her chair under Somers’s withering look. They follow Germain to the elevator and wait for its arrival in an awkward silence. On their way up, they stand shoulder to shoulder, Clare between them.
“Not a terribly busy place,” Somers says.
“Well, it’s Friday. Start of the weekend.”
“That’s when chaos reigns in most detachments.”
Somers is toying with him, working to gain the upper hand. Clare can feel Germain stiffen next to her. The elevator doors open and they follow him along the third-floor hall and through the cubicles to his spacious office. Both Clare and Somers take the chairs across from his desk and watch as he prepares them two sodas from a machine that sits on the bar fridge. Somers looks to Clare and rolls her eyes, tapping on the notebook in her hand as if to say, I don’t have time for this shit. Germain hands them the drinks and sits.
“The video was… an interesting twist,” he says. “Quite the break in the case. You said you received it in an email?”
“She did,” Somers answers for Clare. “I’ve had my guys working on the encryption. Seeing what they can dig up about the sender. But the file was bounced around a lot before it arrived in her in-box. It’ll be next to impossible to triangulate.”
Germain holds quiet, watching them. “It looks like Charlotte Westman was filming,” he says. “I’ve sent an officer out to pick her up for questioning. But I doubt she was our sender.”
“I doubt it too,” Clare says.
“You have ideas about who sent it, then?”
“No,” Clare says, a lie.
“What did you find on this Grayson guy?” Somers asks Germain.
Germain opens the file on his desk. “It’s not a common name. I can see about eighty records in total. There’s a decently long record for a Grayson Morris who grew up in Newport, which is three hundred miles north of here. He’d be about forty by now. I’ve got his school records. Two arrests, one for assault, one for drug charges, both a decade old. Nothing since. No record of him anywhere since. And he didn’t serve time for either of the—”
“Malcolm grew up in Newport,” Clare interrupts.
“Did he?” Somers says. “Well, well, well.”
“His parents were from Lune Bay,” Clare says. “But they moved when he was young so his father could start his business. He lived in Newport until his family died. He finished at boarding school, then went to college to study forensic psychology. Only came back after he met Zoe.”
Both Somers and Germain nod in approval.
“Is Newport a big place?” Somers asks.
“No,” Germain says. “Ten thousand, give or take.”
“So odds are, two guys roughly the same age would know each other. You have a mug shot?”
Germain unclips a photo from the file and extends it across the desk. Somers reaches for it before Clare can, an act that Germain seems to notice because he looks to Clare for her reaction. Somers is in control. Of course she is.
“Hard to tell if this is the same guy,” Somers says. “Shooter had the hoodie on. Glasses, which he probably knew would screw with facial recognition.”
“Plus, these mug shots are ten years old,” Germain says. “Still, his mug shot is in the system. Presumably the facial matching scan would have caught something if the resemblance was in any way clear.”
“His mug shot would be in the local system,” Somers corrects. “Not the federal database. Not for misdemeanors. A scan wouldn’t find it.”
“Right,” Germain says, folding his arms across his desk. “We’ll have to run our own manual search, then.”
The tension between them is thick. Germain clicks his pen and writes something in the file. He looks small behind the desk, too young for this job. Still, what does Somers have to gain by pushing him offside?
“I’m going to float a theory,” Somers says. “How long have you been a detective?”
&nb
sp; “Eleven months,” Germain says.
Somers smiles. “Still counting in months. I like that. And your time on this case?”
“Six,” Germain says. “Six… months.”
“Right. So this case was dead cold when it landed on your lap. You got both the Jack Westman murder file and the Zoe Westman disappearance, right? And Malcolm Hayes going vamoose. That’s on your plate too?”
She waits for Germain to nod.
“You’ve got this architectural masterpiece of a detachment here, don’t you?” Somers continues. “Half-empty, but lots of beautiful nooks and crannies. Just now, Clare and I were down the street digging up Jack Westman’s autopsy, which was easy enough to do, because your coroner is dirty as a pig in shit. Lune Bay has seen about five murders in a decade, most of them open-and-shut cases, domestics or robberies gone wrong, but the most high-profile murder of all isn’t solved. Jack Westman. This business magnate who was in deep with all kinds of city councilmen, politicians, builders, landowners, businesspeople. Hell, I’m sure he was friendly with the local priest.”
“Not all unsolved murders can be blamed on dirty cops,” Germain says. “If that’s what you’re insinuating.”
“I hope not,” Somers says. “I know I’ve got a few of unsolved ones on my desk. But a live-action video of a murder turning up five years later, not to mention an autopsy with some decently revealing tidbits that were never brought to bear. Am I wrong to say that it all feels a little swept under?”
“I can’t speak to the efforts of my predecessors,” Germain says. “What I know is since she arrived”—he gestures to Clare—“things have taken a turn for the better. Lots of action. An arrest, even. I mean you, Clare. You were the arrest, weren’t you?”
At this Clare sits erect. She needs this to stop, this back and forth that excludes her, casts her aside, speaks of her as if she isn’t here. Speaks of her as if she is to blame. She slaps a hand on Germain’s desk, quieting them both.
“Listen,” Clare says, her voice strong, steady. “We all want the same thing. You both have unsolved cases on your hands. That arrest of mine will go away, just like you said it would, because you and I are working together, Germain. Because you need me. I know Austin Lantz loves a hot local story. Imagine the headline: Rookie private investigator swoops into town and solves the Westman murder in about a week. Ends up with a video of the shooting in her in-box.”