by Dudley Lynch
The Old Testament was filled with such acts of deception. I was certain Malachi could tell you about a dozen of them in Hebrew, Greek, and probably Assyrian as well as English.
This whole episode felt like another instance of someone in Flagler stirring the dust because they were afraid of losing control of events. Or explanations. Or maybe just losing control period.
I could see Professor Rawls having such concerns. And being capable of pulling such strings. I’d not be discussing tweets about anthrax or polio with him.
But I would ask our Greek-born county medical examiner. Soon. It was only a two-block walk to her offices. First, though, I needed to dictate an official tweet from the Abbot County sheriff’s office and get Helen and Tommy to send it out with the hashtag #DOAFlagler.
It would deny any and all claims of anthrax bacteria or polio viruses running loose in our county.
Chapter 21
How we’d gotten the irrepressible Dr. Konstantina Smyth for our medical examiner was a Cinderella story. Not that she’d come to Abbot County looking for her glass slipper. It was more her husband that she was trying to keep in her sights.
Mr. Smyth was British and a teacher of medieval history with what I’d concluded were modest skills. They’d met in Athens as undergraduates. In the two decades she’d spent getting MD and PhD degrees and credentialed in forensic anthropology, he’d traipsed after his ambitious wife without complaint.
When he was offered a job at Flagler’s smallest college, she’d said it was his time. She didn’t mind talking about it in her quaint second-hand English. “He has been the one deserving.” It didn’t seem to have bothered her that a world-class forensic anthropologist was heading off to podunk.
“Doc Konnie” was hard not to notice. She was a large woman with chipmunk cheeks, mischievous dark eyes, overpainted lips, and a chin that resembled half a donut. She’d consumed hefty servings of moussaka, pastitsio, and souvlakia in her forty-plus years.
“Yassou!”
I returned the big smile. “Yassou, yourself!”
“Always, I like this job.”
“I knew you’d find this case intriguing.”
“The bodies, there are so many.”
My outfit was similar to hers because she’d provided it when I’d arrived at her office — a lab coat. And, given my recent medical history, she’d also provided a barf bag. It was jammed in my coat pocket.
“The job you are ready for, I see.”
“And I see you’ve already been on the job.”
“I will take a look. You will take a look?”
“I’d be disappointed if I couldn’t.”
Other times I’d been there, Doc Konnie called her autopsy room her industrial kitchen. She’d told me that was because it was larger than most such facilities. But I’d never been in it when more than two cadavers were out on display. If there were any others, they’d been wheeled into cold storage.
Not this time. The remains of all ten of our victims were resting on gurneys.
Most of what there was to see were the bones. For the most part, they were lined up on Doc Konnie’s tables in the order Mother Nature had intended. Back bone connected to the shoulder bone, shoulder bone connected to the neck bone, neck bone connected to the head bone. As I looked on, the song played itself over and over in my head.
Sometimes the bones were connected, sometimes they weren’t.
Doc Konnie had left a path through the shiny metal tables so she could walk to the center of the room, view all the gurneys, and decide which one she wanted to examine next.
“The elements, I have checked them. Preliminary, of course. A few are — how you say it — kaput. Missing. Smaller ones, in the most part. The buzzards, they must have eaten them.”
“The bones, you mean.”
“No, the elements.” That’s what it sounded like she’d said, but I knew she was mixing apples and oranges again. English and Greek. I’d learned in divinity school at Yale that the Greek word for yes looked like “neh” in our alphabet. And sounded like “no” to English-speaking ears.
She’d told me, yes, some of the smaller bones were missing.
“Everything, I have put in anatomical position. We will now take a look. You will take a look?”
“I’ll take a look.”
She summoned me to peer at the nearest skeleton’s pelvis. “The sexual dimorphism — so pronounced. Every one.” She gestured dramatically toward the nearest gurneys. “No pelvises here for having babies.”
“So, they’re all men?”
“Neh, all men, those.”
This time, I provided the dramatics, sweeping an arm over the assembled tables. “Younger men, middle-aged, older?”
“We will take a look. You will take a look?”
Again, we approached a tidy arrangement of what was left of a human being. She pointed to the pelvis again — to a precise point halfway between the two hip bones. It looked like Mother Nature had filled a space between the halves of the pelvis with a hefty strip of grout that had turned to bone. “Pubis symphysis” — she spelled the words for me — “this is. It is changed, with age. This one, it is not so young, it is not so old. Others older, others not so much.”
I knew when she wrote up her report, she might be more precise, but I got the point. Age-wise, we had a wider range of victims than I was expecting.
“Big question. How’d these people die?”
“All morning, I have been looking.” She held both arms out. “Every gurney. Every specimen. From tip of phalanges to last zag in coronal suture on each one.”
“From top to bottom, I get it.”
“Neh, neh! Sharp force trauma, projective trauma, I do not see on these.” For the first time, I’d become aware that she’d pushed one of the gurneys apart from the others. She’d been talking about the nine cadavers that were grouped together. “Blunt force trauma, I do not see on these.” She gestured toward the nine tables again. “Strangulation, maybe, but there are no signs. Electrocution, heat related, explosion — that is difficult. Maybe I could see, but I do not. OH-kee, OH-kee!”
Or so it sounded. But I knew she’d lapsed into Greek again. She’d said “όχι, όχι!” No, no!
I’d learned not to rush Flagler’s Greek-born ME when she was leading you through the thicket of possibilities. We were getting there.
She summoned me to follow her to the gurney parked away from the others. No introduction was necessary. This was the victim that my chief deputy thought had been run over.
The skeleton looked the part. And a lot more than the leg bones, pelvis, and spine had been damaged.
“The human body, it has two hundred and six bones. At least by time it is grown out. This one I think is grown out — more than thirty years. Another male. Hit so hard. See, everywhere, there are fractures. For itself, the skull has eight fractures. We will take a look. You will take a look?”
She had something to show me, so I followed her lead. She bent over the midsection of the skeletonized remains, so I bent over the midsection. And looked where she was pointing.
“This one, I have an idea how the death arrived. You can see that, neh?”
“I can see it.”
“The photographs, we have already taken.”
“I appreciate your leaving it in so I could see where it was.”
“I will pull it out so you can closer look.”
“That would be good.”
She left to get one of her stainless-steel kidney dishes and a pair of tweezers. On her return, she leaned in and grasped a translucent piece of plastic the color of tangerines. It came from one of the hip bones and wasn’t sizable — smaller than a pencil eraser. It slid around in the tray when she thrust it toward me but made very little noise.
“To the lab, we will send this. But this one, I will predict a gu
ess on cause of death.” Both her eyebrows and her eyes were dancing. “Blunt force trauma.”
I agreed.
I was almost certain we were looking at a tiny piece of injection-molded plastic from a broken vehicle light. Tangerine-hued lights were most often from the front headlight assembly. If so, it would indicate that our tenth victim had been run down by a forward-moving vehicle. One probably accelerating.
I handed the tray back to her. “For the lab.”
She swept an arm in the direction of the other gurneys. “I will hope the lab tells us information on these gentlemens too. From the few blood samples we have got. And the garbage bag, maybe. Everything to the lab. We only find the cause of death that way, I think.”
“Unless your sharp eyes see something else here.”
“We will be looking. I find something, you will come take a look?” She arched one brow and studied me.
“Anytime you call me.”
Chapter 22
Walking back to the office from the ME’s, I realized I didn’t mention anthrax to Doc Konnie. She’d kept me too entertained to remember it. But then, I was convinced my suspicions about it being disinformation were correct. What had Helen called it? A red herring.
Even if the claims in the tweets were real, an abandoned house thirty miles from town would have been the best place for an anthrax outbreak. Especially since everyone who had entered the house after we’d found the bodies had been wearing protective clothing and a respirator.
My mind kept seeing plastic. A jagged tangerine-colored flake of it.
If we only had a witness.
Then I remembered we might have one. The big kid at the cattle guard, the one who’d kept plying me with rehydrating fluids. He’d said he’d seen something. I’d felt he wanted to tell me more, but for some reason, he’d held back. Knowing it would keep, I hadn’t pressed him. Now I would.
I slipped my walkie-talkie off my duty belt, held it close enough to my mouth to trigger the automatic VOX switch, and asked Detective Salazar if he was listening.
“You just missed me. Left the office about five minutes ago.”
“Question about the teenagers at the cattle guard. You learn anything from them?”
“Only where to get the best burger in town. Eden Junction Bar and Grill. Order the Both Barrels Double Meat Cheeseburger. And be sure to ask for caramelized onions.”
“No wonder you made detective so fast.”
“Anything I can help you with?”
“The name of the driver.”
“Jude the Dude.”
“S’cuse me?”
“Said that’s what he’s called on the Flagler High School football team. He’ll start at right tackle this fall. Sucker tips the scales at three hundred fifteen pounds.”
“A lot of Both Barrels cheeseburgers.”
“Nice guy. Very polite. Seemed above the average in the IQ department.”
“I thought so too. He has a real name?”
“He does. Hold on a minute. Got to get out my notebook to get it right the way he said it. Here it is. Judson Thomas Mayes the One, Two, Three.”
“Really? He actually said it that way?”
“He did. I don’t think he likes ‘the Third’ much. Probably the only kid in school with a Roman numeral after his name.”
“Comes with being a doctor’s son, I suspect.”
“He did say that. You going to talk with him?”
“If he’s not out bagging rabbits with his buddies.”
Judson Mayes III wasn’t out rabbit hunting. He answered the phone at his house. When he volunteered to come to the courthouse for a chat, I asked if he could bring his mother or father. This time, I knew he needed to be accompanied by an adult.
I sensed some nervousness in his reply. “My mom doesn’t come with me to appointments much anymore.”
I wanted him to be at ease. “Would it be a problem for you if she did?”
His pause lasted only an instant. “Only if she started correcting my grammar.”
Once again, I found myself liking the guy.
Jude the Dude and his mother arrived within an hour, and I seated them where I thought we’d all be most comfortable — in one of our interrogation rooms.
I thanked her for coming. “May I call you Ms. Mayes?”
Her eyes flashed. “No, you may not.”
“So how should I address you?”
“With some respect, I would hope. I’m also a physician. A psychiatrist, to be precise. Referring to me as Dr. Simpson-Mayes would be appropriate.”
Dr. Simpson-Mayes was gristle in the stew pot from the start. “This is an interrogation room.” She was still standing, ramrod straight, her pricey leather purse dangling from one hand. She looked dressed for a business meeting. Maybe she’d come here from one. Beige patent work pumps. White pants. Navy blue jacket. Light tan ribbed blouse. A string of pearls.
“Yes, ma’am, it is. But this isn’t an interrogation.”
“So why aren’t we meeting in your office?”
“I’ll be totally honest with you —”
“That would be nice.”
She walked to the other side of the table. Parked her purse in one of the empty chairs. Pulled one out for herself. And sat down without invitation. She appeared not to care if I finished my sentence, so I didn’t. I’d been about to explain that my small office would not easily accommodate her strapping son.
That giant of a young man did what I had been about to invite him to do. He pulled out a stout metal bench we kept shoved up against the wall for overflow visitors and lowered his immense heft onto it.
His mom didn’t let up. “All this because my son and his friends took a few potshots at some buzzards.”
“Judson and I have already talked about the buzzards. We’re good on that.”
“So he’s done something else?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“It’s because of what he saw at the Huntgardner house?”
“In and around the Huntgardner house, yes.”
“Well, he tells me and his dad that he saw very little.”
“Sometimes, it’s those little things that help us in law enforcement the most.”
Halfway through this tit-for-tat conversation, her son had lowered his head into his massive hands and started shaking his head. Without warning, he straightened up and slammed those sauce-pan-sized hands flat onto the table top. If we’d had a Richter scale in the office, I’d have expected it to register at least a 4.0. “Mom, I saw something.”
The two adults in the room let this simple admission reverberate off the walls. His mother because she was speechless, and me because I wanted to see where he intended to take this. If he started waffling or fabricating events, I’d correct him. Or at least that was the plan.
But as the silence in the room grew, it became obvious to all three of us that he was going to need help. And that was going to make this sound more like an interrogation than I’d intended. I’d have to see how his mother reacted. I didn’t want her asking for a lawyer for her boy. To my knowledge, he’d done nothing beyond violating a fish and game regulation about shooting at turkey vultures. I didn’t think he’d need a lawyer.
But I sensed more than ever that I needed to know what he knew.
I ventured a question. “You saw something after you left the Sweetwater cutoff?”
“Well, a long way past that. We’d just made the turn to go down to the professor’s house from the back road that runs to the ridge when we almost got run over.”
“Run over by what?”
“Somebody hauling construction stuff.”
“Like a big semi? Heavy equipment hauler, that kind of thing?”
“No, not that. A pickup, pulling a trailer. With a piece of machinery on it.”
&n
bsp; “Machinery for doing what?”
“We talked about that. Had a scoop on the front end — on an arm. Like they dig ditches with. A claw.”
“Any markings on the truck?”
“You mean signs?”
“Yes, signs, logos, addresses, phone numbers?”
“Not that we saw. Plain white pickup. One of those big four-door jobs, though. With dual rear wheels.”
“And they were driving recklessly?”
“Careening all over the road. I thought the digging machine was going to bounce off the trailer as they went by. Could’ve been bad news if it had. Might have landed right in our laps.”
I chanced a glance at Judson’s mother. One look at her face was enough to know she’d known none of this. And, now that she did, she was alarmed by it.
“So you don’t know who was driving the truck?”
“Really don’t.”
“And that’s all you saw?”
“Really is.”
I don’t know if his mother had detected the extra half-tick that occurred before he replied. But to my trained ear, it might as well have been an air raid siren going off. Plus, he’d said he really didn’t know who they were.
“Really” was a word that stirred the interest of any alert interrogator. That’s because it was forever showing up around claims of what had been said or imagined to be true — and weren’t. Like when someone said, “Okay, what really happened is this.” Didn’t always mean someone was lying. But many times, it meant something was being left unsaid.
I’d have let it go this time if it hadn’t kept reappearing in Judson’s and my exchanges like a Whac-A-Mole.
Dr. Simpson-Mayes glanced at the door. The expression on her face suggested that she thought they’d be leaving soon.
But Judson had that other tell. His intriguing eyes. And those eyes were betraying him again.
So I did what I had a habit of doing when I didn’t think people were leveling with me. I leaned back in my chair.
Maybe it was an old cowboy move — or cowboy movie move. I’d thought about bringing a piece of straw with me to questioning sessions so when I leaned back in my chair, I could start picking my teeth with it. I might do that some day.