Dead at Breakfast

by Beth Gutcheon

  Before he rose to his present heights, Shep had been a crime scene technician, having graduated from the Maine Criminal Justice Academy, and had special forensic training at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police College in Ottawa. No one outside the fire marshal’s office knew more about arson than he did, so when he got the word that the fire at Oquossoc Inn might be suspicious, and there was at least one body, he let Bangor know that this one was his.

  The half circle of driveway at the main entrance to the Inn was clogged with response vehicles. The crime scene van was stopped half-blocking the road, and the deputy sheriff’s car, and a half dozen other police cars, plus the private cars of some of the firefighters, had pulled in and been left wherever they stopped. Shep clocked the scene, then drove his 4X4 around to the side of the building and into the parking lot from which he could see the blown-out window and charred surface of the upper-story room where the fire had burned hottest. It was blackened and wet and no longer smoking. He got out and stood in the bleak early sunlight of what promised to be another heart stopper of a day, and stood studying the patterns of smoke and damage on the outside walls.

  Within seconds he was swarmed by a crowd of reporters from god knows where, asking unbelievably stupid questions. Assholes with flashbulbs, what were they doing here? They had a weekly paper in this part of the county that told you who got married, who had died, what went on at the selectmen’s meeting, and gave people a place to write in to complain about the road commissioner or to advertise yard sales, and he thought that was about enough in terms of minding other people’s beeswax. Once when he had just been promoted he gave an interview to some bimbo from the Bangor Fishwrap. Came out sounding like Jed fucking Clampett. Wasn’t ever making that mistake again.

  He bulled his way through the swarm of assholes all stretching microphones toward him, yammering. What was the matter with these people, couldn’t they see he just got here? The two words he kept hearing were arson and Artemis. What Roman gods had to do with it, he didn’t know and didn’t care. He wanted to talk to Denny Robertson, big-time.

  The Special Response team from the fire marshal’s office was working carefully through their list of procedures in Mr. Antippas’s charred bedroom when Shep got there. It was a large room, with what had once been pale blue wallpaper. What was left of the paper was now grimed with smoke and peeling in wet strips off the walls. The carpet, once plush navy wall-to-wall he judged, was sodden and mostly melted, especially in the area from the king-size bed to the blown-out glass slider leading to a narrow balcony overlooking the parking lot. The floor-to-ceiling curtains, what was left of them, dangled in wet black tatters from the hooks along the left side of the balcony wall. There had been an enormous old-fashioned TV sitting on the dresser opposite the bed, with built-in DVD and VCR players. The cathode tube had exploded. The rest of the furnishings in the room were a desk and chair by the window, an upholstered chair and a floor lamp, and a bench at the foot of the bed. The deceased’s suitcase was in the closet along with his hanging clothes. The floor of the closet was being used as a laundry basket, judging from the socks and enormous wrinkled undershorts tossed there. Farthest from the source of the fire, the contents of the closet were mostly intact. There was a stack of drawers, one containing clean underwear, one with fresh shirts still in their laundry packaging. Nice stuff. Shep checked for labels in the gigantic undershorts to see where they came from but there weren’t any. Must be custom-made. Damn.

  He went through to the sitting room next to the bedroom, which also overlooked the parking lot and the mountains beyond. The damage here was mostly from water, as someone had left a terrace door open. There was a laptop open on the desk, pretty well soaked. An ice bucket sat on the coffee table full of water, and beside it a coffee cup the victim had been using as an ashtray had a disintegrating cigar butt in it. On the arm of the chair, open and facedown, was a hardcover book. Shep peered at it. Brothers Karamazov. That surprised him. Guy was a self-improver, either that or his wife made him join a book club. A coat closet near what served as the front hall of the suite held a hotel safe, locked, and a minibar. Shep opened the minibar and peered in. Expensive nuts, chips, and cookies, all were gone. Other stuff too, probably. The tech guys would have a list.

  The electricity was out in this wing of the hotel, so the team had had to set up lights and run extension cords out from the old part of the building. Photographs of the rooms were taken from every angle. There were fingerprints beside the light switch and on the doorknobs. The fingerprint tech had carefully lifted them, after treating them with superglue fumes to heighten their definition. Sketches were being made, measurements taken, everything duly noted. Shep went back to the bedroom.

  The body on the bed was enormous, even larger than Shep’s. It was on its back, lying peacefully on the side of the bed nearest the slider, charred and roasted. If it had been wearing any nightclothes, they were gone now. The facial features were blackened gristle; the lips were burned off so the expression seemed to be all teeth. Padding and upholstery of the headboard was mostly burned away, and the bedcovers were a combination of ash and melted synthetics, stiff and shiny. The crime scene tech was gingerly sampling materials into jars and labeling with precise notes the locations they came from.

  Lem Perkins, the local coroner, was lounging in the corner of the room with Buster Babbin, watching.

  “Lem,” said Shep.

  “Shep,” said Lem.

  “Morning, sir,” said Buster. Shep gave him a minuscule tip of the head.

  “What’ve we got here?” he asked Lem.

  “White male, about three hundred and forty-five pounds, sixty-one years old, name Alexander Antippas. That’s according to Gabe Gurrell. I can’t tell much of anything as things are. Don’t dare turn him over for fear he’d come all apart. We’re waiting for the hearse from Morrison’s to come bag him up.” Morrison’s was the funeral home in Bergen Falls. They would take the corpse to the medical examiner’s office in Augusta.

  “Cause of death?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-dollar question. I’m guessing he was dead before the fire started, otherwise why is he just laying there?”

  Shep grunted. “What’s Denny say? Arson?” He was going to wait for the tech team to finish, but he wanted to have a closer look at the way the fire had moved, where it had been hottest.

  “Guy was a smoker,” said one of the techs. “Cigars. He might have fallen asleep with one in the bed. Wouldn’t be inconsistent with what we’ve found so far.”

  “Know if the lights were on or off?”

  “Can’t tell. You can turn them on or off from either the switch at the door or the ones beside the bed. The position doesn’t tell us anything.”

  “Bathroom been dusted and photographed?”

  It had. Shep went to have a look.

  The bathroom door had been closed when the fire broke out. There wasn’t much left of the door, beyond hinges and the doorknob, but it had minimized the damage to the room. The toilet seat was up. There was a cashmere dressing gown on the hook on the back of the door. Chapstick and Kleenex in the pocket. Towels were neatly stacked on the vanity; clearly the room had been cleaned since the guy last took a shower here. A toilet kit was open beside the sink. Mouthwash, shaving gear, surprisingly grotty manicure kit, toothpicks, dental floss, earplugs, sleep mask. Either the room was dark enough for him as it was, or he hadn’t gone to sleep yet. There were a clutch of amber prescription vials, no surprise for someone in the kind of shape the deceased was in. The evidence techs would bag the meds and log them in.

  The toothbrush and toothpaste were lying on the counter. Not standing in a glass. He opened the mirrored cabinet above the sink. No glass in there either. He went to the door.

  “You guys notice there’s no glasses in here?”

  “Yeah, Buster did. No wastebasket either.”

  Shep looked. He opened the cabinet under the sink. No wastebasket. He went out again.

  “You find the
m out here?”

  “We found parts of a glass, was probably on the bedside table. Must have broken in the heat; the lab will tell us what was in it.”

  “Wastebasket?”

  “No trace. The manager said they’re made of raffia, the ones they use in the bathrooms. Lacquered.”

  “What is that, raffia?”

  “Like straw or something. Totally flammable.”

  “Huh,” said Shep.

  The day dragged on. Martin Maynard made no secret of his belief that the local talent were in way over their heads on this one, if indeed there had been a crime. Personally he didn’t think there had been. He was restless and deeply resentful that they wouldn’t let him go for his run. They were treating him like a suspect instead of an ally. Officious clowns. He spent a lot of time on the phone to the Bureau and already knew that in fact the police had no power to keep any of them where they were, unless they were prepared to arrest them, but his bosses thought he should stay and cooperate, at least until morning.

  Gabriel had given up trying to follow regulations where Colette the dog was concerned. She couldn’t be left in the room with Mrs. Antippas. She howled and cried when she was carried past the hallway to Mr. Antippas’s room. Glory had her in the bar on her lap.

  Hope came into the bar and told Margaux Kleinkramer she was wanted in room 3B. One by one they were being called to present their bona fides and be fingerprinted.

  “Even me!” said Hope, amazed. “I’m the deputy sheriff’s mother!” She watched as Margaux left the bar with none of her usual ebullience.

  “I have to wash my hands,” Hope said to Maggie. “Come with me.”

  When they were sequestered in the powder room, with the water running, having checked to see no one was in the stalls, Hope said, “I know you think this is a joke, but I have to tell you, there is no way on God’s green earth that Margaux Kleinkramer is an Aquarius. I really think I should tell Buster.”

  Maggie could picture that scene.

  “Do you suspect her of something?”

  “I suspect her of not being who she says she is. I’ll bet you lunch at the Four Seasons; she’s a Capricorn, probably with Leo rising. Aquarians hate liars, and we already know her name isn’t really Margaux. What kind of person lies about her sun sign?”

  “Running her prints should be interesting.”

  “I think the whole thing is going to be interesting.”

  Maggie suddenly asked, “You know Jorge Carrera, my security guy at school? Who took us to the Rangers game?”

  “He was fun.”

  “He is fun. He was chief of detectives in the NYPD before he came to us.”

  “I had a feeling he was a big deal.”

  “His retirement gig was to bodyguard a boy whose mother was prosecuting terrorists. She had fatwas and death threats all the time. When the boy graduated, Jorge stayed. He has the most depressing view of human nature.”

  “I knew there was a reason I liked him so much,” said Hope. “I wish he were here.”

  “Buster is going to do fine.”

  Hope didn’t look convinced, and Maggie understood that that was what made her think of Jorge. She too wished he were here.

  Buster was still with the Major Crimes guys when the van from Morrison’s Funeral Home arrived. The day had turned a glorious blue and gold, which gave him a needed lift. He’d been up since two-thirty in the morning and had had nothing to eat except a handful of fancy cookies at the meeting in the hotel dining room that morning.

  No one had said he was expected to stay, but no one had said he couldn’t. He was the first responding officer in the case, and he’d had some training, mostly in Nevada before he came back east. Even though school, even criminal justice school, was never going to be his long suit, he had hopes of making detective, and if he wanted to marry Brianna, which he was pretty sure he did, he’d need the pay raise.

  Hartley Morrison, third-generation funeral director and rhythm guitarist for Buster’s favorite local rock band, Burn Permit, arrived at the door of the charred bedroom, having been led through the dank wet corridors by one of the crime techs. Hartley was a short man in his thirties with a broad muscular torso and very little neck, so that his head appeared to grow directly out of his shoulders. He was wearing corduroys and a flannel shirt, rather than the black suit he would have donned to greet the family of the deceased.

  “Buster,” said Hartley. “Shep.” Then, “Whoa, that’s a big sucker,” as he looked at the body on the bed. “I hope the double-wide gurney is big enough.” He turned to help his assistant lift the gurney over the power cords and debris in the hallway. The crime techs and Shep and Buster watched as the two of them maneuvered it into position by the bed as close to the corpse as they could get, and lowered it to match the height of the mattress. No one was quite sure how they were going to handle a corpse this size and in this condition.

  Talking in shorthand to each other, Hartley and the assistant agreed to position the open body bag over the corpse, roll him bag and all onto the gurney, and then zip him in facedown, rather than risk turning him more than once. Nobody questioned the wisdom of this. No one wanted to see the flesh coming off the bone like overcooked barbecue.

  “In ’Nam, they called these ‘crispy critters,’” said Hartley. “My dad said.”

  Buster suddenly felt he might be sick.

  Two of the crime techs moved into position to help.

  “All right, me hearties,” said Hartley. “Heave ho.”

  With surprising smoothness, the four men rolled the body off the bed and onto the gurney. The crunchy noise as the charred flesh of the front of the deceased was suddenly compressed under the full weight of the rest of him made Buster’s gorge rise again, but it was nothing compared to the sight that greeted them next.

  After a beat, Detective Gordon spoke for all when he said: “What the fuck is that?”

  Crushed into the mottled flesh on the dead man’s backside was the flattened, partly coiled body of a good-size gleaming black snake.

  “I’d say it was a timber rattler,” Buster said. “Some kind of pit viper anyway.”

  Shep turned to stare at him. “What are you, a fucking herpetologist?”

  Buster shrugged. “I had a thing for snakes at one time,” he said. Obsession was more like it, as his mother could have told them all, and no doubt soon would. His boyhood bedroom had been lined with poster-size pinups of photogenic reptiles from National Geographic and the like, and his bookshelves were filled with books on snakes of the world collected from used bookstores and library sales with what was left of his paltry allowance, after it had been docked because he couldn’t sit still or hadn’t done his homework. The most upsetting set-to Buster ever had with his mother had occurred when he turned ten and she refused to consider getting him a boa constrictor for his birthday. “They’re really not dangerous until they get to ten feet long!” he’d insisted tearfully, unable to understand how anyone could resist this argument.

  After staring at him for a beat longer, Shep said “We don’t have any fucking rattlesnakes in Maine.”

  “Yeah, we do, sir. Or we did. They’re supposed to be extinct in the state, but nobody knows for sure.”

  One of the crime techs said, “I’d say that was a less interesting question than how the hell did this one get into the guy’s bed.”

  There was no way to keep a thing like a three-foot rattlesnake embedded in a dead man secret for long, so they’d have to move on this quickly. Standing in the sodden, blackened bedroom after the corpse was removed, Detective Gordon had listened to Deputy Babbin on the subject of Crotalus horridus long enough to decide to cede all snake-related investigating to Buster for fear that otherwise he’d still be standing here at dinnertime, and Buster would still be talking. Buster thought a necropsy on the snake would be interesting, and urged them to preserve it in the same conditions as they kept human bodies awaiting autopsy. Shep thought it wouldn’t but in self-defense he agreed to convey tha
t request to the M.E.’s office.

  Freed at last from Buster’s viper disquisition, Shep went out to his car to tell the M.E.’s office what they had found, and to point out that they needed to know which of the exciting possibilities, multiplying by the minute, it seemed, would prove to be the cause of death. Buster was to help keep the civilians in the inn out of the way as Morrison and the others maneuvered the gurney with its overflowing cargo through darkened hallways to the undamaged part of the hotel and into the back elevator. There was no way they could safely carry a load that heavy and fragile down the stairs, and there would be hell to pay if they dropped it.

  The press swarmed Shep when he stepped into the Mountain Inn parking lot. Was the autopsy finished? Did he have a statement? What was the cause of death? Was the victim alive when the fire started? Did they have a suspect? Had he heard that the funeral for Artemis had been postponed in light of the second tragedy? Had he been in touch with the victim’s children?

  “No comment,” said Shep as he waded through the throng. Had he been in touch with the victim’s children? What? How the hell would he know how to be in touch with the victim’s children?

  Meanwhile, downstairs at the front of the Inn, Buster found various kinds of chaos erupting. In the dining room, the tables had been moved to the walls and a woman called Bonnie was leading an aerobics class. In the lounge, people were playing cards, cribbage, or Boggle. On the glassed-in porch overlooking the mountains and the parking lot, Mrs. Detweiler and his mother had laid out a two-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle they had found in the bench of a window seat.