Frozen Stiff

by Annelise Ryan

  I finish scarfing down my slice of pizza ahead of Colbert and eye what’s left in the box. But Richmond has a go-ahead-make-my-day look on his face that tells me he’s shared all he’s going to.

  “We have four more buckets of snow to bring up,” I tell him. “Want to give us a hand?”

  He shoves a half-eaten slice of pizza in his mouth and lets it hang there while he claps his hands.

  “Very funny,” I grumble.

  He shrugs and takes the slice out of his mouth, tearing off a large bite as he does so. “I’m here in a supervisory capacity only,” he mumbles around a mouthful of pizza.

  “Come on,” I urge. “The exercise will do you good.”

  Judging from the look Richmond gives me, the word exercise is akin to the Antichrist. His smug laziness pisses me off, but rather than show it, I shrug to feign indifference and turn like I’m going back down to the crime scene. Then I accidentally on purpose nudge the pizza box, causing it to slide off the hood of the car. I make a half-assed attempt to catch it, ensuring that it tips upside down, dumping its contents onto the road.

  “Oops,” I say. “Sorry about that.”

  “Goddammittohell!” Richmond slurs past another mouthful of pizza. With a grunt and a groan he bends down and starts picking the slices up from the ground, placing them back in the box. If I think I’ve saved him from himself, I quickly realize otherwise as I watch him flick some gravel off one of the slices and then proceed to eat it.

  Muttering to myself, I head back to the body site and trudge two more buckets up, passing Colbert along the way. I wait for him to bring the final two up and place them in the back of the hearse.

  “Thanks, I appreciate the help,” I say loudly for Richmond’s benefit. I slam the tailgate door closed and glare at Richmond, who is still stone-picking his slices. “I’m ready to head back to the morgue,” I tell him.

  “I’m not,” he says, shoving more pizza into his maw of a mouth.

  “Guess I’ll see you back there then.”

  He shakes his head at me and swallows down his food. “I should go with you, to ensure the chain of evidence.”

  “As a deputy coroner, I can do that alone. But if you want to come with me, you better do it now because, ready or not, I’m leaving.” I climb in my car, start the engine, and have the satisfaction of seeing Richmond’s face flush nearly purple as he grabs his pizza box, throws it into the passenger seat of his car, and then dashes—if that lumbering gait can be called a dash—to the driver’s side of the car. As he squeezes in behind the steering wheel his car dips heavily to one side, and as I pull out I see him start his car with one hand as he shoves another piece of pizza into his mouth with the other.

  Chapter 4

  Richmond follows me back to the morgue, steering with one hand while he shovels food into his mouth with the other. I want to be disgusted by him, but truth is, I’m envious. My love affair with food rivals his, and his who-gives-a-shit attitude about his physique is one I wish I could adopt. Maintaining my weight has always been a battle, and lately it’s become more like a war. Just being within breathing distance of food makes me gain.

  Plus I have a theory about weight ups and downs. I’m convinced there are set amounts of fat that exist in the universe, as well as within every little microcosm of society, be it a work group, or a family, or a set of friends. Like other forms of mass, fat can’t just disappear, and it tries to maintain a state of equilibrium. So if one person in a given microcosm loses weight, someone else in the same group has to gain. It’s the basic physics of fat and, unfortunately, my little niche of the universe seems to be populated with a bunch of persistent, consistent losers who keep trying to shift their share of the fat onto me. If I ever figure out who they are, I’m going to start spiking their meals with Ensure.

  I realize then that I should be nicer to Richmond. Since he’s now within my circle of acquaintances, he may be the only thing keeping the local animal advocates groups from thinking I need to be pushed back into the ocean. Well, that and the fact that there’s no ocean within a thousand miles of here.

  By the time I pull into the morgue garage, some of the snow in my buckets has started to melt and the weight of them seems to have tripled. I struggle to lug two of them inside and then commandeer Izzy and our lab assistant, Arnie, to help with the rest. Richmond, who followed me inside with the first batch, stands by watching as the rest of us do all the work. We store the buckets in a utility room where Arnie will oversee the straining of the resultant water to look for trace evidence.

  After taking off my coat and boots, I change into scrubs and make my way into the autopsy area, where I find our victim already laid out on one of the tables. Someone, Izzy I assume, has removed her body bag and plastic shroud, leaving her exposed to the room air so she can thaw out. As I look at her, I’m struck once again by how lovely she is, even in death.

  Within minutes Izzy joins me, followed by Richmond, who has managed to dig up a jelly doughnut from somewhere. I watch as he bites into the pastry on one end and a huge glob of strawberry jam oozes out the other, landing on his shirtfront.

  “Sorry, there’s no food allowed in here,” Izzy tells him.

  Richmond shrugs, crams the rest of the doughnut into his mouth, scrapes the jelly from his shirt with a finger, and then shoves that in his mouth, too, leaving a huge, red stain on the shirt. It reminds me of the frozen smear of blood on the victim’s chest and I turn to look at it. The blood doesn’t look frosted anymore, leading me to think it may have thawed, but it is still mostly solidified from clotting.

  “Mind if I watch?” says a male voice.

  I look up and see Colbert has joined the fray.

  “The chief said I could since I’ve never seen an autopsy before.”

  Izzy and I exchange looks. One’s first autopsy is always a dicey experience and about half of the people who watch them either recycle their last meal or pass out. Sometimes they do both.

  Izzy says, “Sure, but stand over there by the chair and if you start to feel light-headed, sit down immediately. If you think you’re going to puke, the bathroom is right down the hall.”

  Colbert nods his understanding and waves away Izzy’s concerns. “I’ll be fine,” he says.

  Izzy walks over to the X-ray viewer and slides a film onto it. After studying it a minute, he frowns and says, “The knife pierced her left ventricle, which should have caused fibrillation and instantaneous death. But if it had, there should have been very little blood loss since her heart wasn’t beating and the knife would have served as a tamponade. Clearly that’s not the case, which makes me think there’s another stab wound under all that blood.”

  Izzy and I don special goggles and turn on an overhead black light, and then carefully start washing away the clotted blood. The resultant maroon-colored water makes its way into channels that run the length of the stretcher and empty into a sieved drain that will collect any trace particles that might be in the water. After a minute or so of this, a second stab wound is revealed nearer the center of the victim’s chest. “I’m betting that one hit the aorta,” Izzy says. “That’s why she bled out.”

  One of the overhead fluorescent bulbs flickers off, then on again, and in the resultant flash something catches my eye.

  “I see something sticking out of the blood here,” I say, picking up a pair of forceps. “It looks like a hair.” I grab the end I can see with my instrument and tug. It comes free with a little resistance, revealing a short, black hair about an inch and a half in length. “I don’t see any root,” I say, examining the ends closely. “So no DNA.”

  Izzy holds out an envelope for me and I drop the hair inside. “It still may help narrow down suspects,” he says.

  Richmond snorts. “If we ever get any. It would help if we knew who she was. The fact that no one locally has been reported missing confirms my suspicion that she’s not from around here.”

  The door to the autopsy room opens and a young lad dressed like an e
arly twentieth-century newsboy walks in.

  “Hey, Cass,” Izzy says.

  I do a double take and remove my goggles. This isn’t the first time I’ve been surprised by Cass Zigler’s appearance. In addition to being our file clerk-slash-secretary-slash-receptionist, she also spends time acting with our local thespian group. As a result, she often tries out her characters by dressing and playing the parts at work. I’ve never seen Cass as Cass, and I’m not sure I’d recognize her if I ran into her on the street.

  “Cass?” Richmond says, his eyebrows arched. “You’re a woman?”

  “Not today. Today I’m Henry,” she says, adopting a cockney accent and dropping the H on the name. “I’m your local newsboy, which seems appropriate at the moment because Alison Miller is out front asking if she can come back and get some information on your latest victim.”

  Alison Miller is Sorenson’s ace reporter and photographer, and she and I share a long, and recently turbulent history. I’ve known her since high school and over the past month or so she has also been my chief competition for Hurley’s affections. Fortunately she seems to have given up on this latest pursuit. When Hurley was injured and on his way to the OR drugged up on morphine with Alison at his side, he kept mumbling my name. Alison didn’t take it very well and as a result she has quit hound-dogging Hurley and speaking to me.

  “Let her come back,” Izzy tells Cass. “Maybe she can help us identify our victim.”

  “What are you going to do?” Richmond says as Cass leaves the room. “Put a dead woman’s picture in the paper?”

  “No,” Izzy says with an admirable degree of patience. “But the handle on this knife is quite unique and a picture of it might give us some leads. As might a picture of this tattoo on her ankle,” he adds, pushing one of the woman’s trouser legs up and revealing a colorful butterfly.

  Not one to tolerate a public reprimand very well, Richmond tries to save pride by going on the offensive. “You have cross-dressers working your front desk?” he says, shaking his head with dismay. “What the hell is this office coming to, anyway?”

  Colbert gives Richmond a wary look and does a little sidestep, as if to separate himself from the other man’s insanity.

  “Cass isn’t a cross-dresser,” Izzy says, his voice tight. “But if she was I would still hire her, as long as she did her job.”

  Richmond clucks his tongue and shakes his head woefully. “What a fine impression she must make on the public.”

  Since most of our “public” is dead on arrival, I’m with Izzy; I don’t see what the big deal is. I start to say so but Izzy speaks before I can.

  “Cass is an actor,” he says. “And I see no harm in letting her practice some of her roles while she’s working.”

  “An actor,” Richmond harrumphs. “That explains a lot.”

  “Yes, an actor,” Izzy repeats. His eyes have narrowed and I can tell he’s starting to lose his patience. “She works with the same thespian group my partner, Dom, does. He’s an actor, too. And gay. As am I. Do you have a problem with any of that?”

  Despite the fact that Izzy is shorter than most twelve-year-olds and you could fit at least three of him into Richmond’s mass, he looks quite intimidating. The two men have a little stare down—quite literally down, in Richmond’s case since Izzy is only chest high to him—before the bigger man backs off.

  “No,” Richmond mutters finally, looking down at his feet. “No problem.”

  A long, tension-filled moment follows, during which I can hear water dripping from the faucet in one of the sinks. Everyone finally breathes again when Alison breezes into the room, her ubiquitous camera hanging around her neck. She glares briefly in my direction, then dismisses me and addresses Izzy.

  “Whatcha got?” she asks. She walks toward the table, stopping when she’s about a foot away. “Oh, my,” she says, paling. “That’s Callie Dunkirk.”

  “You know her?” Izzy says.

  “Know her? Hell, I want to be her,” Alison says. Then she winces and adds, “Well, except for the dead part.”

  “Are you sure it’s her?” Izzy asks.

  “Oh yeah,” Alison says with a definitive nod. “I’d know her anywhere. Aside from her obvious physical attributes, the woman is . . . was one of the best investigative reporters in Chicago. She used to do a beat for the Trib, but about a year ago she got hired by that TV news show, Behind the Scenes. What is she doing up here?”

  “We have no idea,” Izzy says. “Until you got here, we didn’t even know who she was.”

  Alison’s eyes grow wide. “She must have been onto something big, something that got her killed.”

  “We don’t know that,” I caution. “For all we know she might have been just traveling through town, or meeting a boyfriend, or maybe she has family up here.”

  Alison shakes her head vehemently, her eyes bright with excitement. “Nope, she was here for a story. I just know it. All I have to do is figure out what it was.”

  “That might not be a wise avenue to pursue,” Richmond says.

  Alison turns to look at him and blinks her eyes several times. “Bob Richmond? I thought you were retired?”

  He shrugs. “I still do some part-time stuff.”

  “Where’s Hurley?” Alison asks, looking over at me.

  “Sick. A stomach bug or something,” I tell her, despite my knowledge to the contrary. “Richmond is going to handle this one.”

  Alison turns back to Richmond. “You might want to be careful yourself then,” she tells him. “People who work with Mattie have an uncanny way of ending up injured or dead.”

  Chapter 5

  I manage to bite my tongue and not snap back at Alison’s snide comment. I’m assisted in this incredible show of restraint by Izzy, who wisely shoos Alison from the autopsy room and asks her to wait in the lobby or the library until we have the murder weapon removed.

  It turns out that Callie’s body isn’t frozen but it is in full rigor—making it likely that the time of death was actually hours before we found her. Izzy carefully documents the wound trajectories and when that’s done, he removes the knife. It’s a wicked-looking thing, just over nine inches in length with a five-inch blade. There’s a small nick in the blade near the hasp, and the handle, which appears to be ivory, has a dragon carved into it. After taking his own pictures and cleaning the blood off the knife, Izzy sets it in a tray in preparation for Alison’s pictures.

  When we open Callie up we discover that Izzy’s guess about the cause of death is correct. The knife pierced both her aorta and her left ventricle. Eventually the first wound alone would have been fatal as it caused massive bleeding. Since the second wound would have stopped the heart, the amount of blood lost suggests that some time elapsed between the two wounds, making me wonder if the woman was alive and aware she was dying during the interval.

  The remainder of the autopsy is relatively uneventful. Colbert does himself proud by managing to not only stay upright throughout the entire thing, but also asking intelligent, thoughtful questions about our findings, which other than the knife wounds and the single hair, consist mainly of some tiny metallic-looking globs we find entangled in Callie’s hair. The metal pieces will need to be packaged and taken to the Madison crime lab where they can analyze them using energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. We also discover that Callie had caps on her teeth and breast implants, both of which will make it easier to confirm Alison’s tentative ID.

  I let Izzy deal with Alison and the knife photography, and after cleaning up the autopsy room, I change into my regular clothes, and head home. I’m eager to get to Hurley’s place but need to stop by my own first to let my dog, Hoover, out for a break.

  I’ve had Hoover for all of three weeks. I found him—filthy, frightened, and emaciated—hovering beside a grocery store Dumpster. Judging from his coloring, his ears, and the shape of his head, I’m guessing he’s part yellow Lab or golden retriever. Judging from the way he inhales food, I suspect the other part is vacuum
cleaner, hence his name.

  So far Hoover has proven to be gentle, friendly, and quite smart. He has already mastered the come, sit, and stay commands, and he and my cat, Rubbish, entertain themselves quite nicely when I’m gone. Hoover’s only negative is his predilection for eating the crotch out of any panties I leave lying around, a habit made even more annoying by the fact that I just committed a lot of money to a major underwear upgrade.

  Hoover greets me now as he always does, with a happy yip and a wagging tail. This makes him the best companion and roommate I’ve ever had. My husband, David, never greeted me with that much enthusiasm, not even on our first anniversary when I met him at the door wearing nothing but some well-placed dollops of whipped cream.

  After letting Hoover outside to do his business, I reward his devotion by indulging him in a few minutes of belly scratching. My cat, Rubbish, watches this with a look of disdain. Though he has tolerated the addition of a dog to our household, I sense there are times when he’s not happy about having to share my attentions. And he seems to be all about self-expression, often making his displeasure known by barfing up a hairball on my bed, or taking a dump just outside the litter box rather than in it.

  Once the animals are fed, watered, scratched, and otherwise attended to, I spend a little time on myself. I take a quick shower and wash my hair to get rid of the lingering smells of death, decay, and formaldehyde. Then I don some peach-colored, lace-trimmed undies that have fortunately evaded Hoover’s teeth, and a matching bra. In case things go well at Hurley’s tonight, I want to be ready and look my best. I then try on several different outfits and study each one carefully in the mirror, trying to find the one that hides my flaws the best. This involves checking out the rear view as well as the front, as the wrong combination of slacks and top makes my butt look as wide as a house. I finally settle on a pair of forgiving gray slacks and a long, loose-fitting, baby-blue sweater with a cowl-neck collar.