Dying For Revenge (The Lady Doc Murders Book 1)

by Barbara Golder

  Jim arced to the right almost to the overhang where he would have to power himself over. Surely he'd turn around there. Hunter watched intently, saw him reach for the ledge, then stiffen and jerk. Improbably, the long legs lost their footing, the hands let go. As the pile driver kept up its rhythm, James Madison Coolidge Webster IV fell, and Hunter Dimanio screamed like a little girl.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  JUNE 9, AFTERNOON

  Quick’s call about the climbing accident and the intrepid reporter from the more reputable of the two local rags cornered me at the same time with news of Webster’s death. I was mailing my weekly letter to Seth. I maintained the archaic habit of writing a real, handwritten letter to one of my absent offspring every Sunday after church, usually in the quiet of my office or, on days like this, in the shade of a tree in the quiet of Town Park. I figured that way my children might someday have a few scraps of correspondence to remember me by.

  I had just stepped out of the sterile, new post office building when my cell rang. It was Quick letting me know to get my sorry bones down to the morgue to do the autopsy. Pete Wilson loped up as I finished. He wanted a scoop. I was seeing entirely too much of that man lately, and I scowled as he approached.

  Fortunately for me, Wilson is usually one of the more reasonable members of the fourth estate. A big-city reporter who got tired of the rat race and retired to Telluride, he’s sensible and easy-going, even if his politics — like most of the denizens of this granola-laden part of the world — are almost far enough left to make him a card-carrying communist. That particularly annoys me, given that the Telluride economy, the engine that keeps him in business, is the complete and utter result of unbridled capitalism at its best, and worst.

  “So what do you think, Doc? The scanner said he fell free-soloing on Ophir Wall. What’s that going to look like? Did he suffer much? Was it quick?”

  Wilson kept pace with me as I hurried past the library. I could see the morgue hearse coming up on the broad double doors that marked the rear entrance. Quick was on the sidewalk shooing a gathering crowd away. The jungle telegraph works fast in Telluride, and this celebrity death hit home more than Houston’s had. Webster wasn’t exactly a local boy, being the scion of a Back-East political dynasty, but he was a local hero.

  I thought of the little house along the main street I had seen Webster coming and going from. He seemed like a nice kid, polite, cheerful, and—except for his penchant for scaling high mountains and vertical surfaces without much assistance — reasonably level-headed. I remembered seeing his exotic, doe-eyed —and very pregnant — wife standing in the doorway waving him off. He was a fool, I thought, to be tempting fate by climbing mountains and rocks and whatever else he encountered when he had a wife and an almost-family. There were too many other things in the world that would conspire to snatch him away without his cooperating with them.

  I turned reflexively away from the crowd gathering down the street, looking past Pete to the mountain that stands sentinel at the end of our box canyon and watching the course of Bridal Veil Falls for a moment before I answered. The thin cascade against the rock quieted my angry thoughts just enough for me to be civil.

  I shook my head, in part to communicate with Wilson, in part to rid it of the images of Webster that were already forming in my mind. Hollywood would have you think that you can sustain a multi-story fall and still look human, the only evidence of death arms or legs akimbo and a trickle of blood from the mouth. The reality is a lot different. After about five stories — and Webster had fallen from a greater height than that — the body is pretty well distorted: bones broken, skull shattered, spine telescoped, skin torn either by the force of the fall or the ends of protruding bones.

  And there is blood, lots of it, everywhere. It’s not a pretty sight. The Jim Webster on my slab wouldn’t look much like the handsome, charming guy who had been a regular in the Steaming Bean and Sofio’s. According to the report, he’d fallen about a hundred feet and had landed in a pile of rocks at the base of the wall. I’d be surprised if I found anything intact.

  “Let me do the case and I’ll give you a call. Off the record—I think it’s a pretty damn foolish hobby for anyone, but especially someone with a family.” Sometimes my judgmental side comes out in spite of my best efforts. We’d reached the door to the Forensic Center. “Give me a couple of hours, Pete, and try to leave the family alone.” I added the last as reparation for my earlier comment.

  Quick had rolled the gurney into the autopsy suite, and I helped him move the zipped, black body bag onto the steel table. We wrestled the body out of the bag and onto the cold steel, a process made more difficult by the fact that, as I suspected, there was hardly an unbroken bone. Moving it onto the slab took both of us.

  Once we had Webster on the table, I sent Quick for the camera and stood at the head of the table, trying to steel myself for the unpleasant job ahead of me. This job was getting harder and harder as I got older, harder still since I no longer had a husband to help me keep balance when I lost my distance as I had with this one. The body in front of me looked more like a broken, battered doll than a once-vibrant young man about the same age as my own sons. I closed my eyes to shut out the image for a moment and breathed a quick Hail Mary.

  Quick was back by then with the camera, and I did my usual photographs before starting my examination of the body. I started by cutting off the bright red tee-shirt, stained with blood and dirt and torn, front and back. I laid it out on the spare table, smoothing it, looking at it more out of forensic habit than out of the expectation of really finding something. As I ran my hands across it, I noticed a neat, round hole over what would have been the mid-back. Once I noticed it, it stood out glaringly, a tidy defect in a shirt otherwise in tatters from rocks and the ends of bones. Puzzled, I returned to Webster’s body, face up on the table, and had Quick help me roll it over again.

  Like the initial move, it was hard, because there wasn’t the usual resistance of an intact skeleton, something every M.E. learns to use like a set of tools to move a corpse around for examination. We managed with a minimum amount of swearing, and sure enough, I found it. It took me a while, because of the scrapes and tears that the fall had left. Patience is power, though, and by methodically covering every inch of the back, lens in hand, I found it amid the blood and the dirt: a corresponding hole, beveled edges and all, that told me this death wasn’t an accident.

  Quick saw it then, too, and whistled low as I ran my gloved finger reflexively over the edges of the wound.

  “Damn,” he said. “That ain’t good.”

  “Nope.” I straightened up. “Let’s get some x-rays and see what we’ve got here.”

  I stepped back and watched him roll the gurney down the hall to the x-ray unit. Within an hour, I was looking at a full set of computerized x-rays on the mortal remains of Jim Webster: adventurer, husband and about-to-be father. Among the broken bones I expected, just under the skin just below what would have been the upward arc of the ribcage, there was a tiny, flattened shard of metal, the remains of a bullet. He must have had his body flat up against the rock when he was shot. I made a mental line between the hole in the lower back and the spot that more or less corresponded to the exit wound. The shot had come from below. No great surprise there.

  Well below, the trajectory I envisioned was sharply upward. I'd soon be using my reconstruction software to get a better angle; then we could head back out to the wall and try to figure back from the height on the wall to where the shooter might have been. I wondered what the first responders had seen, heard, and written down in their report.

  Not for the first time, I blessed my compulsive mentor who taught me to do everything according to the book, every time. This wasn’t the first murder I had discovered simply because I never skipped a step. It probably wouldn’t be the last, either. Jim Webster might have been a risk-taking daredevil, but someone had murdered him, counting on a through-and-through wound getting lost amid all the damage that a
ten story fall would create.

  I closed the computer file and pushed my chair back from the counter. “I’ve got to make a phone call,” I said.

  The sheriff was not going to be a happy man when I told him; best to get it over with. I climbed the stairs to my third floor office, my steps echoing in the narrow well.

  “Tom? I need you to meet me out at Ophir Wall.”

  “I just got back from there. I was on the other end of town when that climber fell. I’ve got his buddy here giving me a statement.”

  “You might want to keep him, and bring him along. It wasn’t an accident. Webster was shot.”

  I heard his trademark epithet again, just before the line went dead.

  “Shit!”

  When I came into my office, I found my son Ben putting a file on my desk.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  His neck gave him away again, something that was getting to be too much a habit. My boy was getting ready to tell me another whopper just like the one on the way to church, but his face was an odd combination of excitement and concern.

  “You gotta see this, Mom. I found something pretty interesting in the files.”

  I noted he neatly sidestepped my question. Although the Center had been open less than a year, we had a decade worth of records that my youngest, an IT major at Georgia Tech, was entering into the system by a variety of low-budget labor. He’d been analyzing the data over the last few weeks, and I had grown accustomed to hearing various exclamations coming from his cube in the lab on the first floor. I was even more accustomed to his eccentric work habits. Like most of his peers, his attitude toward work was give me the job and I’ll get it done in my own way and on my own time. I hoped he would learn to punch a time clock with some regularity one of these days, but it hadn’t happened yet.

  “Can it wait, babe? I just found out that accident is a murder.”

  “The trustafarian?”

  I looked puzzled. I wasn’t quite familiar with Telluride slang, despite living here. Ben had arrived only a few weeks ago—I suspected as part of a well-orchestrated plot on the part of my family to provide me company—and he already talked like a native.

  “Somebody who lives on a trust fund, Mom, an old one. The last of the line gets money his great-great-granddad left lying around. Was your victim a trusty?”

  A remainder-man. That was a term I knew—someone usually banished with that money by a wealthy family to live outside the family sphere so as to avoid embarrassment, though I wasn't sure that was what had brought Webster to Telluride.

  When I first arrived, I had been surprised to see some of the scruffier residents of town motoring about in expensive, late model SUVs and regularly taking cash out of the local ATM. It was clear to me that in Telluride, what one saw was not necessarily what one got.

  “Webster had a trust fund, but he was a legit kind of guy,” I replied. “He had made a name for himself. He worked, at least once in a while. He’d accomplished a lot. Why?”

  “Cause every death we’ve had since spring has been a trusty. Every…one.”

  “Come again?”

  Ben pointed at his spreadsheet. “Look here. There have been four deaths before this week, all in the last two months, way, way above the average for Telluride. The explosion up on Silver Pick. Three cars off the road with no explanation, one on the Jeep trail above town, two on 145 coming into town.”

  I looked skeptical. “Those were accidents. This is a murder.”

  Even as I said it, something nagged at the back of my brain. This one might have been mistaken for an accident, too. A less exacting medical examiner, one with less time on his hands, might have made this a “sign-out” case, one in which massive injuries were documented only by external exam. I knew I needed to take a second look at those cases. Unfortunately, I didn’t say it to my son and the light faded from his eyes.

  Ben folded his chart and looked at me, his fair face flushed, eyes now distant and vacant — what I called his “going to Timbuktu” look. It meant he had taken a mental vacation from me because he was so upset he needed to be somewhere — anywhere — other than in my presence. Odd man out in the family with his red hair and pale skin, he sometimes felt he had to prove himself to us all, and especially to me, these days. It didn’t help that, as the baby, he really was often ignored, even when he was right as he often pointed out.

  “It’s just like the fire, Mom. I’m right, and you’re not going to listen.”

  Ben had been about five when we were visiting his grandparents and fire had broken out in the nearby woods. The adults were all in the living room when he had come running in, telling us that the fire was in the back yard. We patted him on the head and ignored him until we smelled the smoke and saw the flames creeping across the wooded lot. It had become his oft-employed standard for being right and misunderstood. He was flying it now, and unfortunately, the metaphorical breeze was stiff enough to make it crack in my mind. I backed off. The sheriff could wait.

  “Show me what you got.”

  Ben opened the chart again and walked me through his data. When he was done, I dispatched him with instructions to retrieve the files and meet me at home with a six-pack and a pizza for dinner. We had a lot of work to do. He gave me a quick hug and left my office smiling.

  It took me a few seconds to finally stop staring at the spreadsheet he left behind and to pick up the phone. I was lucky and caught the sheriff before he headed out again. When I heard Tom’s familiar voice, I broke the bad news.

  “Looks like we might have a serial killer here in Telluride — and Jim Webster’s the latest victim.”

  I filled him in briefly, promising more when I’d had a chance to look at Ben’s data and hoping aloud for some luck when we processed the area around the bottom of the Wall. The crime scene would have been hopelessly contaminated, but perhaps there was something we could learn.

  Life is never easy. And this time, neither was death.

  **********

  I beat the sheriff by ten minutes or so, even though I was driving our Center SUV. I went past Society Turn at the base of the mountain and up towards Mountain Village, pulling through the curves with more care than dispatch, unusual for me. I’d gotten several warnings and finally one ticket from an exasperated deputy for taking the last turn into town on a rolling stop from a somewhat advanced rate of speed. After all, there wasn't a body to recover and the scene was already disturbed. Because the state program that established me as the Chief Medical Examiner for the Western Slope and the Forensic Center as its base also made me the head man in charge of all crime scenes, I did not have to wait on Tom Patterson.

  Nelson Gorman, the tech on call for the day, and I started shooing the spectators away from the wall as soon as we arrived. We first made them empty their pockets and backpacks. In twenty years of medical examiner work, I have discovered there is no end to the ghoulish tendencies of on-lookers, who have been known to carry away all manner of evidence as souvenirs. As it was, we commandeered a few blood-stained rocks, a tattered piece of cloth that looked like it might be from Webster’s pants, a broken carabiner that clearly had not been used by the deceased, a mangled triangular piece of metal that looked like a decorative plate, still bright with tiny nail holes to show where it had once been attached to something proud, and several tufts of rope, of equally dubious provenance. Gorman silently logged them all, bagged them, and took the names and contact information from everyone who was still at the scene. None of them had been there when the accident actually happened.

  We were stringing crime scene tape when Tom Patterson roared up in one of the San Miguel County Sheriff's Office SUVs, spewing gravel as he pulled up by the Ophir Wall Recreation sign. The vehicle was still rolling when he popped the door, and it rocked to a halt as he slammed it into park as he exited. His expression was dark and his creased brow had leveled out his brows, which, when his face was at rest or in good humor, tended downward at the corners in a perpetually drea
ry way. He tilted his cowboy hat back and grunted at Norman and me. The day had started to warm, and his dark green shirt was already sweat-stained across his mid-back.

  A young man climbed out once the SUV was safely stopped, trotting obediently and deferentially behind, wearing the red embroidered tee-shirt of the Telluride EMS. He carried a silver clipboard. Patterson motioned for him to hurry up, to bring the papers forward. He did, then melted back into the background. I gathered that our sheriff wasn't in the best of moods.

  Patterson took a cursory glance at the paperwork, then shoved it at me.

  “You’ll probably need this. What the hell is going on? “

  “Nice to see you, too, Tom.” I replied. “What’s going on is that someone shot Jim Webster, causing him to fall — though it looks to me from the trajectory of the bullet, he wouldn’t have had much chance even if the fall hadn’t killed him.” I took out a computer-generated sketch showing the upward angle of the bullet in a man crouched in what I hoped was an approximation of the position Webster had been in while ascending the wall. “Here's what we have so far. “

  I had already explained the findings; now he had a chance to see exactly what I was talking about. The clouds in his face deepened as he considered the sketch, and he made no comment. The paramedic loitered back by the sign, quietly watching the interchange between the sheriff and me, looking for signs of trouble. His expression told me that, so far, at least, he didn't see any as far as he was concerned. Across the way, Norman was tying off the last bit of tape and striding back in my direction.

  Patterson had nothing to add, so I pressed on.

  “I need to have some idea where he was on the wall. If we can establish that, we might have a prayer of figuring out where the shooter was. “