Dying For Revenge (The Lady Doc Murders Book 1)

by Barbara Golder

  I came out from behind the desk and interposed myself between them, another power play on my part.

  “Sorry, can’t be done,” I told him. “I finished it about half an hour ago.”

  Bedsheet keened and covered his face. I was surprised at how anguished he sounded; this clearly wasn’t a theoretical issue for him. I wondered offhand what Mitch Houston had meant to him. Putting one lawyer and one gentle eccentric together, I guessed that Houston — none too tightly wound himself — might have fallen for Bedsheet’s religious philosophy, which as I recalled, was of the total passivist, let-nature-take-its-course variety. I wasn't too far out on a limb to suspect that Bedsheet and his followers looked at medicine in general and my brand in particular as some sort of cosmic insult to nature and humankind. It explained the lawyer’s ridiculous position that doing my duty was somehow trampling on Houston’s religious freedom.

  The lawyer cleared his throat, and I turned my attention to him. His eyes glittered in predatory fashion, angry to have been bested.

  “That’s too bad. We’ll just have to see you in court and teach you something about the First Amendment. Performing an autopsy on my client was against—clearly against—his deeply held religious beliefs.” I wondered how deep these beliefs could be, given that Houston had only been in Telluride a few months and Bedsheet had little sway outside our own little box canyon, but no matter. This was a lawyer tussle, not reality.

  Monaghan’s eyes drifted over to the corner of my office and came to rest on the overstuffed chair there, prayer book open on the seat, crucifix on the wall beside it, and at present, a cobalt glass rosary threatening to slide off its open pages. I’d been interrupted the last time I used it, for I usually put it carefully away. I had carried it when John and I were married. Something blue.

  I kept it close to me in the wake of my husband’s death, but I wasn’t sure why. From years of experience, I knew that people affected by violent death either turned to God or away from Him. My work had propelled me toward God years ago to make sense out of the victims and those who murder them. Now that John was dead and that violence was personal, not professional, I was as precarious as my cherished rosary, not turning away from God exactly, but not turning toward Him, either. I couldn’t remain suspended forever, and lately I was threatening to slide off into who knows what kind of oblivion.

  Monaghan looked back with renewed malice, and his words brought me back to the moment, back in balance — if still in darkness — for the time being.

  “It looks like the only religion you are prepared to respect here is your own. I might just have to add on the fact that you are using government facilities to promote your own religious beliefs at the expense of others.”

  That’s one of the things I hate, absolutely hate, about lawyers. Here this little Napoleon had come to try to keep me from doing my job by getting the county’s stupidest judge to issue him an injunction that ultimately wasn’t worth the paper it had been faxed on. You’d think that once he found out that he was too late to do what he came to do, the lawyer would have gracefully retreated. Instead, he decided to attack.

  Bad decision. I’d had enough fun with him for one day, Bedsheet’s sobbing was getting on my nerves, and I was willing to bet my coffee was cold. I went over to my file cabinet, leafed through a few folders, and pulled out a copy of a case. I handed it to the lawyer.

  “Take a look at that, counselor. Chin-Ho v. Florida went all the way to the nine old men. Had to do with performing autopsies on young immigrant Asian men who died in their sleep. Their community sued the medical examiner—that would be me—for violation of the right to practice their religion, which forbade autopsies. The Supremes decided in my favor that the M.E. law trumps religious preference when there is a suspicion of foul play. Law of the land, counselor. All the land. Even here.” I smiled again, baring my teeth. “Just for the record, I also argued the case.” I nodded at the papers in his hand. “You can keep that. I have several copies.”

  I went back to my desk, sat down and took a swig of coffee. I was right, cold.

  Bedsheet by now had sunk to the floor. His shoulders still heaved, but he was crying quietly. The lawyer grabbed a wad of tissues from the dispenser on the corner of my desk; it comes in handy in my business. He helped Bedsheet to his feet again and started for the door, his arm around the gray shoulders. At the threshold he looked back and spoke again. Poor guy, he didn’t know when to quit.

  “We’ll see about that,” he growled. “In any case, I am sure the ACLU will be happy to listen to me about that shrine over there.”

  He flung an angry hand toward the corner. He had exceeded my tolerance for fools.

  “While you are at it, sue about those damn Buddhist prayer flags that are on the barn as you come into town,” I snapped.

  The presence of those tattered scraps of cloth irritated me every time I drove past them.

  “And then take a look at the plaque on the door, counselor. This is my office, not the state’s, not the county’s and not the town’s. I own the building, and I rent out the lower two floors—and only the lower two floors—for the M.E. facility. The rest is mine, private property. Which,” I added, “I suggest you leave. And close the door behind you.”

  He did, with a bang. I swiveled in my chair to put my coffee cup into the microwave on the shelf behind me. The timer had no sooner rung than there was another knock on the door, and Quick stuck his head around the door again.

  “Another lawyer, boss.”

  He winked, then pushed the door open for the visitor.

  This time the offending professional was of the more low-rent variety and younger. Fresh out of law school, unless I missed my bet. Things were looking up; this one at least offered his hand and apologized for interrupting me.

  “Eric Johanssen. I hate to bother you when you must be pretty busy with the Houston case.”

  Brown eyes looked out of a freckled face that had seen too much sun for its own good, and they neither wavered nor plotted.

  “All part of the job.” I shifted forward enough to shake his hand, then waved him toward one of the two chairs that faced my desk. “Have a seat.”

  “How did he know I’m a lawyer?” His forehead wrinkled in confusion. “I just told him my name.”

  The accent was local, and the name was familiar.

  “Playing the odds,” I said. “We’ve had a run on attorneys this morning. You’re up early.”

  Johanssen nodded and pressed on. “That was Mitch Houston’s lawyer I just passed, wasn’t it?”

  Local, but shrewd. “It was. But enough about him—what are you here for?”

  I saw him recoil a bit. If this fellow was going to succeed in the fields of the law, he would have to get a thicker hide and a poker face. I softened my tone. “Sorry. He got under my skin. What can I do for you?”

  “I represent Marla Kincaid.”

  He shifted in the chair but kept his eyes on mine. I let the silence grow as I waited for an answer to my question. Impatience got the better of me this time, and I sighed loudly.

  “And….?” I added expectantly.

  “She’s been arrested for murdering Mitch Houston.”

  No surprise there, I thought. She was found standing over him with the gun hidden in her unmentionables.

  “I need to know what you found out in the autopsy.”

  “Mr. Johanssen, the body’s hardly cold and the report isn’t even finished. When it is, I promise you a copy.” I cocked my head a bit and looked at him again. “What’s so urgent?”

  He glanced down, then his eyes fixed me again. “Marla thinks people will believe she had a good reason to shoot him. She didn’t. Shoot him, I mean. She may have had reason to, though.”

  “Needed killing, did he?” I asked. The lawyer’s name finally rang a bell in the recesses of my mind. The youngest son of Montrose’s most prominent and flamboyant attorney, he’d joined the family firm a few months ago. Marla would have needed someone fast, a
nd Montrose was the closest place to get a decent lawyer who knew something about criminal law. Daddy must have been out of town; otherwise Eric would have been carrying his briefcase and I would have had to deal with another blowhard. I thanked St. Swithen, my own personal patron and the saint of rainy days, for this particular bit of luck.

  A small smile formed on Johanssen’s lips. “Maybe not, but from what she tells me, I’ll have my hands full if what she says is true. Then again, I might have a case for diminished capacity. If she were the killer, of course—and she isn’t.”

  He paused.

  “Marla is pregnant. I have reason to believe that Mitch put her and the baby at serious risk. She was distraught when she found out.”

  “Ah.” Daddy Johanssen was going to be real proud of his boy. I thought back to the autopsy. Spun the right way, the fact that America’s heartthrob had a very active HIV infection — and had very likely infected his lover and the mother of his child — might well get her off with not much more than a slap on the wrist. “That could be.” I smiled back. “The report will be ready in a couple of days. Leave me your card and I will see that you get a copy when I send the final report to the state’s attorney.”

  Johanssen pushed his card across the desk. Tasteful black and white, no raised lettering.

  “Thanks.”

  I called after him in spite of myself, the lawyer in me racing ahead to the fertile fields of litigation. “You thought about a suit against the estate? Might finance her defense.” Marla Kincaid was a shack-up honey, not Houston’s wife.

  He turned back and grinned, hand on the doorsill. “Why Dr. Wallace, that would be premature. I’ll wait for the report, but I think Telluride might be the perfect venue, don’t you?”

  God spare me from lawyers, I thought as I put my coffee back in the microwave yet again to warm—but he was right. I picked up the top folder on my desk and wondered what was coming next.

  *********

  Isa heard him slam the door against the wall as he came in, drunk and loud as always. El Pelirojo, the only one of us, she thought, who could pass for American because of that red hair, even though he was as Latin as she was. As Latin and totally consumed with machismo, that arrogant, woman-defiling pride that plagued so many of her countrymen. That sense of worth and privilege so out of place in a man so poor and unskilled and incapable. And just plain ugly.

  It came, she thought, from the fact that he had not had any real work to do, nor had his brothers or father or uncles. The women in his life coddled him. First his mother, who sacrificed everything to raise her worthless son, then a string of girlfriends and a wife back in Mexico. And soon he expected every woman to take care of him and swoon at his feet, enchanted by his sour, sweaty charm. Even now, here, when they all had jobs, he expected the women to take care of his every need, when the women worked two and three jobs themselves. And none of the other men would stand up to him—he was too mean, too powerful. He was the one who arranged the coyotes to bring family members across the border.

  Cross him, and your money or your family — and likely both — would disappear.

  She was not going to let her Pablo grow up that way. She would find a way to get out of this small house, stuffed to the rafters with people. She would not let him grow up thinking that El Pelirojo was the kind of man he should be. She folded a pair of jeans and smoothed them as she put them on the shelf that she shared with three other women, and listened as he crashed through the living room, swearing in Spanish. A chill ran up her back as she realized she was alone in the house with him. It was only a matter of time before he found her and took out his drunken rage on her because she was here, she was defenseless, and she was female.

  She scooped Pablo up and put him, along with his blanket and toy cars, into the bathroom on the floor. Kissing him on his head, she admonished him to be quiet. She shut the door and turned back to the laundry on the bed, smoothing the front of her new, blue blouse. She would find a way out. Pelirojo crashed his fist against the wall outside her door, and she made the sign of the cross.

  CHAPTER TWO

  JUNE 6, EARLY AFTERNOON

  I left my office only once that morning, just long enough to go up the street to my favorite breakfast joint for chorizo and eggs. I was back enjoying the relative quiet of my office by noon, away from the media circus that the Houston murder was cooking up in town, a veggie sandwich from the same shop a guarantee against my having to venture out again before heading up to the courthouse. Tom Patterson had called to tell me the first appearance for Marla Kincaid was scheduled for first thing in the morning. Don’t let anyone tell you the rich don’t get treated differently. Anyone else would have rotted in jail all weekend. The local judiciary was in overdrive, first Lotham and now whatever judge had fallen victim to the call schedule and was about to become the next in a long and undistinguished line of celebrity murder justices.

  I opened a bottle of water, propped my feet up on my desk and started thumbing through the latest forensic journals, taking a few more minutes’ respite before starting to go through the stack of reports on my desk. One in particular beckoned, a folder that Ben had left. “Urgent—Mom, take a look and call me right away” on a neon green sticky. I fingered it for a moment, then decided that nothing to do with the dead could be that urgent. In the words of Ben’s generation, I needed some space.

  I’d just finished an article on new methods of blood spatter analysis when the phone jolted me out of my thoughts. “Jane Wallace,” I answered. I knew that Tina had already screened the call, and whoever it was had the right number.

  “Dr. Wallace? This is Dr. Wallace, the medical examiner, right?”

  I resisted the urge to tell the reedy female voice that Dr. Wallace was on vacation and replied, as kindly as I could, in the affirmative. God spare me from the ditzes of the world.

  “This is Dakota, down at Regent Clinic. We have a patient in here who says she’s been raped.”

  There was a pause and I thought I heard a catch in her voice.

  “Dr. Brownmiller told me to call you.”

  Dakota was a relative newcomer to town, or she’d have known that Regent Clinic was up valley, not down.

  Most people in Telluride use the local medical center, which has been here since time began, or at least since there were enough solvent people in town to allow a primary care physician to make a living. About a year ago, an entrepreneurial type who had just settled in the area decided it was time to establish a “world-class” medical facility. He headquartered it just past the cemetery on the outskirts of town on the tag end of land that once housed the outbuilding of a now-abandoned mine. A tag end of land that faced another development of high-end homes owned by wealthy clientele was sprouting.

  The land was cheap, there was plenty of parking, and it was far enough out of the historic district that he could use his generic floor plan, though he had to pretty it up some to get it past all the necessary approvals. He sweetened the deal by adding some low-cost apartments with a floor of offices, home to a variety of local entrepreneurs, dirt lawyers and real estate agents, both temporary and more established. His plan was to siphon off the lucrative medical business from Mountain Village and the ski slopes as well as his immediate neighbors — wealthy visitors who, when feeling under the weather in town, would want to indulge their snobbishness as well as their illness, to get “boutique” care.

  It was not well received. There was a pretty spirited fight when it came time to permit the place, and the doc-in-a-box had to compromise by offering regular emergency care to the community as well as its high-end services. Not too many in town had taken them up on it, making the expenditure for the brand-new, state-of-the-art emergency department almost pure loss for the company. Except for now. I wondered how a rape victim had ended up in the Regent Clinic.

  Not for the first time did I also wonder how in the world I ended up getting called to do the rape exam myself. As always, the answer came back to Father Matthew Gregor
y. Matt Gregory is the newly installed, and nearly freshly minted, priest just a few years older than my oldest sons. He took over shepherding St. Pat’s when the circuit got too busy for one priest to handle, and the deacon moved on to a mission parish in Aspen. When funds — mine — suddenly became available to support a priest in this exorbitantly expensive town, Father Matt’s relative youth was seen as an advantage in Telluride, and the bishop quietly overlooked the fact that he’d only been an assistant for a few years in sending him to the post.

  He is one of the few people in the world who intimidates me just by his presence. At almost six-feet-even in my stocking feet, and with a pugilistic personality, it takes a lot to make me want to run for cover, but Father Matt can do it. He claims to be Irish and Italian, but I'm pretty sure a Russian peasant sneaked into the family tree somewhere. He's the very incarnation of Rasputin, six-and-a-half feet tall, with dark, curly hair, an uncontrollable beard, and a definite edge to his otherwise warm personality. We had a familiar, if sometimes uneasy, relationship. I find myself unable to decide whether he was genuine, rebellious, cynical or a showman — or all four rolled into one.

  He was in my office one afternoon when a letter from San Miguel Combined Services arrived asking me to take over processing the collection of physical evidence from rape and assault victims, as part of the mission of the forensic center. As it turns out, Fr. Matt is as nosy as an old maid. He saw the letter and scanned it upside down, a skill much prized by those of us who like to get information on the sly and use it at the most inconvenient time. As we finished our discussion, he rose to leave, looming over me like a tower in a black cassock. He looked at me for a long minute before he spoke. There was a bit of cunning in his brown eyes.

  “So are you going to do it?” he asked.