Doctored Death

by P. D. Workman

  “It’s nice to see you too,” she said through her teeth. And she waited. She had already asked what he wanted. Sooner or later, he was going to have to come out with it.

  “I wondered if you had decided to go to the masquerade ball.”

  “The masquerade ball? No. I don’t know why you and Mother are so intent on me going. I know it is for kidney research, but I’m not interested in going out to these events. I contribute in other ways. Balls have never been my thing.”

  “You could have a great time there. You could bring Zachary. You could wear matching costumes. Some couples’ thing. Dance, enjoy some good food, just be seen there. So people know that the Kirsch family is still there, representing.”

  “Considering that you and Mother are going to be there, I hardly see why I would need to.”

  “I’d like you to be there. I’d like to show you off. We don’t see each other often enough, honey. You need to get out of that morgue more often. See life instead of death.”

  “I do get out. I do plenty of things other than just attend autopsies all day. You really have no idea what my job is like. Or what my life with Zachary is like. Don’t judge.”

  Kenzie’s face warmed a little as she protested. Because she knew that the truth was, she did spend too much time at the morgue. And she didn’t get out very often. With Zachary at home, she didn’t even do very much with her girl friends. She couldn’t remember the last girls’ night out. Maybe sometime when he was out on surveillance, she should give them a call. She didn’t want to completely abandon her outside life. She didn’t want to get so wrapped up in her work at the ME’s office and with Zachary that she didn’t have her own life anymore.

  She wasn’t obsessed with death. Even working with dead bodies, she was really focused on life. What had happened before the person had died. How it could be avoided in the future. By investigating death, they really examined life.

  “I’m not judging. I’m saying I would like to see more of you. Is that bad?”

  “No, of course not.”

  They both just looked at each other for a few minutes, studying each other’s faces, looking for the familiar tells.

  “I was talking to the governor just the other day,” Walter said casually, as if there were a natural segue to this topic.

  Kenzie’s stomach clenched. The governor? Walter had his high-powered friends. Everyone who was anyone knew who Walter Kirsch was. And Kenzie had a feeling that her father’s conversation with the governor had not been a casual mention of his daughter over drinks.

  “You just happened to be talking to the governor?” Kenzie demanded. “And my name just happened to come up?”

  “My family is important to me. Of course you came up.”

  “And what were you discussing?”

  Kenzie knew precisely where it was going, and she wasn’t going to give him the chance to approach the subject softly. She wanted it up-front. No couching everything in politically correct language. No hints or opacity. Walter frowned. He liked to play the part of the gentleman, who would never say anything to offend anyone, and always knew exactly how to approach every topic.

  “Honey...”

  “The governor wants Dr. Wiltshire to issue a death certificate on Willie Cartwright,” Kenzie said. “Are you telling me that’s why you’re here? To interfere with the proper investigation of the Medical Examiner?”

  “Of course not. I just wondered how it was going. The governor has his concerns about the way it is being handled.”

  “Why? Doesn’t Willis Cartwright’s family want to know the truth?”

  “The family already knows the truth. Willie Cartwright was an old man. Old men die. Eventually, things just wear out.”

  “Well, nothing wore out. He had a virus. And we’re trying to find out more information about this virus and where he got it and how it developed and led to his death. That takes time. You may think from watching TV that every lab test can be done on the equipment in the autopsy room and that there is never any doubt about any of the results, but that’s fantasy. That’s not the way things actually work. Tests take weeks, even months to come back. Sure, the families would like everything to be resolved in a day or two, but that’s not the way it goes in real life.”

  “Even if you’re waiting for tests back, haven’t you already done everything you need to? At least release the body to them.”

  “If we’re not sure that we have all the samples collected and tests ordered that we need, we are entitled to hold the body for longer. It doesn’t do us much good if we release the body and then decide later that we need a sample from another part of the brain, or need another liver sample from a different lobe, or find out that we didn’t get something else that we needed. By then, it’s too late.”

  “We’re just not sure why you’re acting like this is such a problematic case. He’s an old man who died in a nursing home. It isn’t like it was someone in the prime of their life who just dropped dead over his bowl of Cheerios. It isn’t like you have some plague that has to be quashed. It’s an old man who died in the night.”

  It was a mistake for him to refer to a plague. Because that’s just what Kenzie and Dr. Wiltshire were worried about. If the HHV-4 variant was fatal, they needed to find out how often and trace it back to its source and everyone else who might have caught it. Screen them all for who was positive for the virus and get them quarantined. Watch them for developing symptoms. Keep track of their vital signs so that they would be immediately warned if someone started to deteriorate rapidly.

  “You don’t know what’s going on,” she told her father icily. “And neither does the governor. And he doesn’t have the authority to tell the Medical Examiner’s Office what to do in an investigation.”

  “No one is telling anyone what to do,” Walter said reasonably. “We just don’t understand what is going on here. Have you discovered something? If so, you need to report it. Let him know what’s going on.”

  “No, we don’t. We have our own reporting lines. As we figure things out, we will report it to the proper authorities.” She met her father’s eyes. “Not the governor.”

  Walter shrugged, but she knew from his face that she’d hit her mark. He might act as if her words didn’t have any effect on him and he was only casually interested in the matter, but she had seen him in enough negotiations to know the tiny tells. She had spent the years since Amanda had died learning his face and everything she could read from his expression.

  Zachary shifted. He had remained quiet during the discussion. It was, after all, something that concerned only Kenzie and her father. But he spoke now, his eyes also fastened on Walter’s face, reading him. “You wouldn’t let anything happen to Kenzie, would you?”

  Walter looked startled at this. He laughed and shook his head, but his face was not amused. “No, I would never let anything happen to her. What are you talking about?”

  “The governor has a lot of power. Not just politically. There have been rumors that he has been involved with some... unsavory people. If you thought he was going to take any action against Kenzie, you would tell us, wouldn’t you?”

  Kenzie looked at Zachary in amazement.

  Walter reached over and took Kenzie’s hand in his. “Of course. Kenzie is my only living child. I wouldn’t let anyone put her in danger.” He turned his eyes to hers. “You believe that, don’t you honey?”

  “Yes,” Kenzie agreed faintly.

  “Now would not be a good time for rumors of some new virus or disease,” Walter said slowly and softly. “Full-scale panic would reverse many of the gains that have been made. There is an election coming up, and the last thing we need is for people to be worried that the government cannot protect them.”

  “What have you heard?” Kenzie demanded. How could he know about the HHV-4? Kenzie and Dr. Wiltshire had kept it carefully under wraps, just as Dr. Savage had requested. There were more people in the lab who were in the know than in the Medical Examiner’s Office, so the leak
must have come from there. But who would be talking to the governor about it? Especially before the tests on Mr. Cartwright’s tissues had even been completed.

  The governor had been pushing back against their investigation even before they knew about the HHV-4 variant.

  53

  Walter looked at Kenzie, considering her question. “What have I heard? I hear a lot of things. I talk to a lot of people and I have a pretty good picture of what things are being discussed at the Capitol.”

  “Why are you talking about an outbreak? An outbreak of what?” Kenzie did her best to bluff, speaking in a tone that implied she didn’t have a clue about any outbreak and how it might be related to Willis Cartwright.

  “It’s a benign virus,” Walter said. “You’ll get everyone all stirred up over something that isn’t even a danger. People carry around these viruses their whole life without being impacted by them. They don’t even have symptoms. Maybe sometimes they get stressed out and one of them gets activated, you get a cold sore on your lip or run a mild fever. You get a sore throat. Is that worth getting everybody in a panic about?”

  He didn’t say he was talking about herpesviruses, but his words testified that he was. Herpesviruses were notorious for hiding out, inactivated, for years. Until stress set in and then the sufferer started to have symptoms. Usually mild, but occasionally... there could be fatal complications. Not usually the brain pathology that they had seen, but liver failure or other serious complications.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kenzie said with a shake of her head.

  “You can’t lie to me, Kenzie.” He let go of her hand and rubbed his temples. “I know you are loyal to your job and have to respect the confidentiality of the office and of the families of the deceased. And even if you didn’t,” his eyes were sad, “you wouldn’t tell me about it. You think we’re on opposite sides, but we’re not. I just want what’s best for you. And for the state.”

  “The governor, you mean. You want him to be re-elected.”

  “No. It’s never been about the individuals. You know me and what I do. It’s the people I care about. All the people who depend on me to help protect their rights and keep the government and large corporations accountable. That’s what I care about. Not the money. Not the governor. All of the people who could be affected.”

  “You think this is nothing. Just the sniffles.”

  He nodded. “More or less.”

  “You don’t think it is the cause of death for Willie Cartwright or anyone else.”

  “No. I don’t. If it was that bad, you would be hearing about it before bodies started hitting the morgue. Yes, Mr. Cartwright may have had it when he died, but that doesn’t mean he died as a result of it. After all of this, what goes down on his death certificate will likely be natural causes. And if it did have something to do with his death... then it’s because he was an old man with a compromised immune system.”

  Kenzie sighed. So far, she didn’t have anything to suggest that he was wrong. They hadn’t had time to figure out the way the virus worked and whether it contributed to Cartwright’s death or not. And if it had, then, as Walter said, he was an old man and that was not unexpected. Seniors died from influenza too. Thousands every year.

  “You’ve said your piece,” she said finally. “I’m not in authority at the Medical Examiner’s Office anyway. Even if I wanted to push Cartwright’s certificate through, it isn’t my job.”

  “You do have some influence, though,” Walter suggested, his eyes glittering. With Walter Kirsch, it was always about influence.

  “No. I’m just an assistant. I’m there to answer phones and to learn.”

  54

  After Kenzie saw Walter to the door, she returned to the living room to talk to Zachary. He watched the man get into his car and drive away before he turned back to Kenzie.

  “So, that was your dad,” he said lightly.

  “Yeah. I’ll bet you were really impressed.”

  He shrugged. “Better than mine. Trust me, you wouldn’t like him either.”

  “I don’t dislike my dad,” Kenzie hurried to clarify. “But I don’t trust him. His moral compass... well, you can probably tell, it isn’t the same as mine.”

  Zachary nodded understandingly. He lifted each seat cushion on the couch and swept his hand underneath through all the cracks and crevices. Kenzie watched him put them back down and then shake out each of the throw blankets and decorative pillows. He arranged them again neatly.

  This was new behavior. Paranoia? OCD? Probably something that should be reported to Zachary’s medical team.

  Zachary looked at her sideways. “Bugs.”

  “What?” Kenzie shook her head. He was concerned about bugs crawling around under the seat cushions?

  He finished tidying the couch and went on to check the underside of the side table, then walked out to the front door, scanning the walls and running his fingers around the doorframe molding and picture frames.

  “They want to keep an eye on you. You’re his window into the Medical Examiner’s Office. He knew he wasn’t going to make any difference by coming here to talk to you. Would he ever be able to talk you into altering records at the office? Would you be able to talk Dr. Wiltshire into changing his mind on a cause of death determination, even if you wanted him to?”

  “Well, no. It would be pretty rare. You got him to reopen a couple of cases. But that’s pretty rare.”

  “Exactly. So he came here because they want to keep an eye on you. Or an ear.”

  Zachary returned to the living room and opened the soft-sided briefcase that housed his mobile office. He pushed things around until he found what he was looking for, then turned on a device he held in the palm of his hand and extended the antenna on it. Kenzie watched as he began to sweep it back and forth in slow arcs around where Walter had been sitting. As he turned to talk to Kenzie, the device gave a squawk. He started to pass it over her like a security wand at an airport. It squawked a couple more times. Zachary nodded to Kenzie’s purse.

  “In there, I think. Can I look?”

  Kenzie handed it to him. She had come straight into the house and into the visit with her father upon returning home from work. Her purse had been sitting beside the couch while they had been talking. Certainly within reach of the man, but she hadn’t seen him touch it.

  Zachary removed the contents of Kenzie’s bag a few items at a time, passing the bug-finder over them and then reaching back in. When the purse was empty, he felt around the pockets and lining, and eventually came up with a small, round, black device with a pin at one end to make sure it would stay where it was placed and not be jostled around too much by Kenzie putting things into or taking them out of her bag.

  Kenzie was stunned. She knew that her father had crossed the line more than once in the past. He always claimed to be on the side of the angels and things had always turned out okay in the end. But bugging his own daughter’s handbag?

  “He knows that you take it into work,” Zachary said. “He didn’t just want to hear the conversations between you and me. That wouldn’t be very enlightening. He wanted to hear what was going on at the office.”

  He ran the antenna around Kenzie once more and it didn’t squawk. He walked to the front door and back, moving the electronic device slowly until he was sure that there wasn’t another bug in the front hall, then returned. He shut it off, pushed the antenna back in, and stowed it back in his bag.

  Kenzie sat in the living room as Zachary went about in the kitchen, getting something together for dinner. Kenzie just stared at Zachary’s bag. She couldn’t believe that her own father would betray her like that. The only reason he had shown up at her house was to be able to put a bug on her? A bug that she would then take with her back to work so that he and the governor and whoever else was putting pressure on Dr. Wiltshire could listen to their conversations. It was unbelievable.

  When she had been a little girl, she always saw Walter as a sort of knight in
shining armor. The way that he and Lisa described the work they did—how he helped to protect people from big companies that wanted to take their money and big government that wanted to take away their rights—he had seemed larger than life to Kenzie. He was her protector and the protector of everyone else in the state. Kenzie grew up and adjusted to a more mature world view. And then Amanda had died and she had seen him as something else. Someone willing to bend and break a few rules to get what he wanted. He would put his ethics behind him if they prevented him from protecting his family or getting his own way. He had excused his behavior, saying that it had been for Amanda, just as he would justify his conduct in this case, saying that it was for the greater good, but it wasn’t.

  But she wasn’t sure Walter was a bad guy, either. He did what he did out of love and passion and a sense of fair dealing. He really did believe in the causes that he lobbied for. And if he occasionally went a little overboard, out of passion, did that make him a bad person?

  But he had tried to use her. To spy on her. She couldn’t deny what she had seen. She didn’t know how he had managed to slip the bug into her purse without either of them realizing it, but was grateful that Zachary had seen through his mask and had taken the time to check.

  “Do you want some dinner?” Zachary asked tentatively, framed in the kitchen doorway.

  “Yeah... I need to eat, but I don’t know what I want...”

  “I heated up some of those frozen burritos. I know it’s not a great supper, but...”

  “That’s just fine,” Kenzie said. She forced herself to get up off the couch, even though her body felt so heavy and slow that she could barely move it. She wanted to go to bed. To shut off.

  But her feet moved in the direction she pointed them and she walked into the kitchen and sat down in her chair. Zachary had managed to heat a couple of burritos without filling the kitchen with smoke and had even melted cheese over top of hers.