by Alex Kava
“Apple Market had all their refrigerated items discounted. Ground beef, twenty-five cents a pound.”
“Aren’t your own refrigerators full enough?”
“Maybe I’ll take the grill and do up a few burgers alongside the hot dogs.”
“Are you really taking the canteen out on the beach today?”
“Thought I would for a few hours around lunch.”
“People are going to be packing up. Everything will be closing down.”
“Exactly, and folks are still gonna need to get a bite to eat.”
She prepared their plates and, again, stopped herself from commenting. The canteen had saved him. Liz was willing to recognize that even if Trish wasn’t. It had given him something to do after their mom was gone. He didn’t need the money. The house was paid for and his pension as a retired navy commander seemed to be more than enough for him. But he did need the routine the Coney Island Canteen had brought into his life. More important, it surrounded him with people. Everybody on the beach knew the hot-dog man, or if they knew him well, it was “Mr. B.”
“So what will they have you doing today?” He asked as he dipped the corner of his toast into his egg yolk.
“Little bit of everything, I imagine. Patrolling the waters, warning boaters, at least until the winds get out of hand. Then we’ll probably be helping evacuate.”
“You know Danny? Works on the beach cleanup crew? Little guy. Loves to surf.”
She watched her dad out of the corner of her eye. He was devouring her breakfast and she wanted to smile. That was probably the biggest compliment Walter Bailey could pay her.
“I’ve seen him around.”
“Lives in his car. An old red Chevy Impala.”
“Yeah, he lives in that car?”
“Make sure he evacuates, would you? He’s from Kansas where they try to outrun tornadoes. I just want to make sure he doesn’t think he can do the same with a hurricane.”
“Sure. I’ll look for him.”
“Say, whatever happened to that fishing cooler?”
Before Liz could answer there was a knock at the front door, a twist of a key followed by, “Hello, hello.”
Trish stomped into the kitchen. She didn’t seem to notice that she was interrupting a meal. She led off with: “I’m going to kill that husband of mine.”
CHAPTER 34
Maggie stared down at the male torso on the stainless-steel table and couldn’t help thinking how much it looked like a slab of meat.
“Body was refrigerated, possibly frozen,” Dr. Tomich, the medical examiner, said into the wireless microphone clipped to the top of his scrubs. His comments were meant for his recorded notes, not necessarily for his audience. “Cuts are precise. Efficient, but not surgical.”
“What does that mean?” the Escambia County sheriff asked from the corner. This morning he paced out his impatience along the wall of the autopsy suite. “I don’t want to be in the way,” he’d said earlier. But he didn’t want to miss anything, either.
Technically the contents of the fishing cooler were under Sheriff Clayton’s jurisdiction. When pieces of a body are found, the county with the heart—in this case, the whole torso—usually holds jurisdiction. Maggie had watched law enforcement agencies argue over who got to be in charge. This sheriff had put up a good fight to not be in charge. In his defense, Maggie understood that he was preoccupied with hurricane preparations. Making sure people were safe and ready for the storm certainly held more urgency than a body that had been missing and frozen for who knew how long.
“It means the person who did this knew how to dismember a body. But he or she is not necessarily a doctor or surgeon.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Tomich straightened from his hunched-over examination. He reminded Maggie of Spencer Tracy: silver-gray hair, black square glasses framing sparkling blue eyes that could pierce as well as charm. The Eastern European accent—Russian, maybe Polish—threw the image off a bit. When he turned to look at Clayton again, he reminded her more of her high-school history teacher, who also had been able to quiet his students with that piercing glare.
“I’m just saying”—the sheriff would not be deterred—“where do you learn to do this to a body if not medical school?”
“Perhaps practice?” Maggie interrupted and both men furrowed their brows, almost in unison. “Serial killers oftentimes perfect their craft simply by trial and error.”
“You’re presuming who did this has done it before?” Tomich admonished.
“Can you tell me with any certainty that he has not done it before?”
This time he looked perplexed rather than irritated. “Let me rephrase. You are presuming foul play. As of this moment I don’t know the cause of death. And I do not see any evidence of murder.”
“Come on, Doc,” Clayton said. “How do pieces of a person end up in a fishing cooler in the Gulf if it’s not foul play?”
Maggie was interested in the answer but the sheriff interrupted himself.
“What’s that smell?” He sniffed the air but still didn’t venture any closer to the autopsy table.
“Menthol?”
“Vicks VapoRub,” Maggie said with certainty.
“That’s weird.” The sheriff was still sniffing.
“Not necessarily,” Maggie assured him. “Not if you want to cover up the smell of decomposition.”
“Still, it indicates no evidence of foul play,” the medical examiner insisted.
A man in blue scrubs came through a side door, wheeling a stainless-steel cart. At first Maggie thought he was another doctor or pathologist until he said to Tomich, “Here are the other contents, sir.”
“Thank you, Matthew.”
“The X-rays are on the shelf below. I’ll be next door if you need me.”
“Next door? Boiling my bones?”
“Yes, sir.”
Tomich looked from Maggie to Clayton, enjoying their wide-eyed reaction.
“Someone found a set of buried bones. I doubt they’re human but we shall see. Matthew is my faithful diener. He gets to have all the fun.”
“Right. All the fun.” The young man smiled as if it was a joke they shared. He certainly didn’t seem to mind what sounded like a grunt assignment of boiling bones when, in fact, most dieners Maggie had met in the past were as proficient at dissection as their bosses.
Matthew left and Tomich pulled down his plastic goggles. He picked up the electric bone saw, ready to cut. Maggie watched the sheriff’s face lose all color.
“Oh hey, I have to make a few phone calls,” he said, pointing a thumb at the door and doing a remarkable job of keeping the panic out of his voice.
Tomich watched him leave, waited for the door to latch shut behind him. He turned back to the task at hand. Without looking at Maggie he shook his head and said, “Politicians. I should ban them from my autopsies.” Suddenly he glanced up at her. “You don’t mind if I proceed?”
“Not at all. Please do.”
He clicked on the saw and in seconds severed the rib cage. He set the saw down. With long gloved fingers inserted in each side he opened the front of the chest, spreading the ribs and exposing the heart and lungs. Almost immediately he noticed something and started poking around inside.
“What is it?” Maggie wanted to know.
“I believe we are in luck. I shall be able to tell you exactly who our victim is.” He grabbed a forceps and a scalpel and began cutting.
CHAPTER 35
Scott worked his way through the Yellow Pages. How could there not be a single generator left in this city? He’d even called Mobile and Tallahassee. The last Home Depot manager he talked to had just laughed at him. Couldn’t stop laughing. Scott finally hung up on the asshole.
He didn’t have any employees coming in until after lunch today. He hadn’t even started preparing for the memorial service. He’d make his people earn their keep today. Thank God he didn’t have to embalm the body. The family had opted for
a closed casket. They’d never know that dear Uncle Mel wasn’t even inside. It was the storm’s fault, not his. If the electricity went out and he didn’t have a generator for the walk-in refrigerator, he couldn’t just take all those body parts home with him.
“Oh, by the way, Trish,” he imagined saying, “I’ve got a few things to stuff into our fridge.” Not like he had room there, either. He wasn’t like his father-in-law with two extra refrigerators in the garage.
His father-in-law also had more than one generator. He was sure of it. He put the phone down. In fact, during the last hurricane threat Walter had bragged about having two or three generators. Why hadn’t Scott thought about it sooner? He could just borrow one. No, Walter would never lend him something that substantial. Would he? No. He was fussy about his possessions. That included his daughter.
The only other alternative was to move everything from the walk-in cooler to the stand-alone freezers.
The buzzer for the back door startled him. This time it was FedEx.
The guy had already unloaded two boxes and dropped a third on top as he handed Scott the electronic signature pad.
“The tag doesn’t say anything about liquids,” the guy told Scott. “Whatever that is”—he pointed at the last box and the pink fluid oozing through the seam and running down the side—“it’s probably against regulations.”
“I’m not the one who sent it.” Scott put up his hands in defense.
The guy didn’t say anything, just gave him an accusing look and headed back to his truck. Scott scooped up the boxes and moved them inside the door, out of sight and out of the heat. These had to be the deliveries Joe had mentioned. But he had gotten sloppy and not wrapped them properly. What was Joe thinking?
Scott picked up the leaking package, grabbed a towel, and wrapped it around the busted seam. He hauled the box to the walk-in cooler and decided to leave the packages for Joe to deal with. Once inside the cooler Scott stopped, almost dropping the box. On a gurney in the middle of the floor was the naked corpse of a boy. On closer inspection he realized it was a small young man.
Joe hadn’t mentioned a body, only parts. Did he intend to disarticulate this one, too, before the storm hit? And exactly how and from where had he transported a corpse in the middle of a Sunday night?
Scott guessed it was possible that Joe simply picked it up from another one of his networks. He had told Scott when they first met that he obtained corpses from university donor programs, county morgues, and crematories. That’s probably what happened. Some other place was unloading inventory before the storm.
Oh that was just—
This time Scott did drop the box. Either he was going nuts or that corpse just moved.
CHAPTER 36
Maggie didn’t recognize the contraption Dr. Tomich had extracted from the torso, but she had a good idea what it meant. Sheriff Clayton had returned and now he stood at the sink, his lanky frame towering over Dr. Tomich’s hunched right shoulder.
“It’s a defibrillator,” Dr. Tomich said as he flushed it with water, keeping the device pinched between his forceps. He reached to the side, practically elbowing Sheriff Clayton out of his way, and punched the intercom button.
“Matthew, come here. I need you to look up a serial number.”
“It seems too easy,” Clayton said. “You’re telling us there’s a number on this apparatus and you’ll be able to match it to a name?”
“Yes. That is exactly what I am telling you.”
“Sir.” Matthew was there in the room before anyone heard him enter.
Maggie found herself checking out his footwear, except he wore paper shoe covers like the rest of them.
Dr. Tomich placed the defibrillator onto a stainless-steel tray and handed it to Matthew.
“Look this up, please. Bring me the patient’s name and the physician’s.”
“Yes, sir.”
As the medical examiner returned to the torso, he caught Maggie eyeing the cart with the severed foot and hands.
“You’re intrigued with the parts.”
It was an odd thing to say.
“Occupational hazard,” she answered, without further explanation.
Tomich nodded, bowed his head as if paying homage, then he did something Maggie didn’t expect. He picked up the severed foot and placed it on a separate stainless-steel table.
“We’ll take a look,” he said. He poked his glasses up the bridge of his nose with one gloved hand and waved his other at the torso. “This gentleman won’t mind if we wait for Matthew to tell us his name.”
It was an unexpected and rare courtesy. Maggie knew her surprise registered on her face, but Dr. Tomich didn’t notice. He was already pulling open a new tray of instruments and resetting his wireless recording. Sheriff Clayton, who had been squeamish about watching the torso, didn’t have a problem with getting a closer look at the severed foot.
“Are you trying to match any of these to one of your cases?”
It took Maggie a second to realize that Tomich was talking to her and not his wireless.
“Not this time. How many different victims do you think are here?”
“At least two.” Tomich slouched over the table as he began his examination. “Or it could be five. I may be able to tell you that quickly with a simple blood test. Process of elimination. If all the parts are the same blood type, we’ll need to wait for DNA tests.”
“If the hands don’t belong to the torso,” Sheriff Clayton asked, “we might not figure out whose they are. Fingerprints don’t make much difference if we can’t match them to somebody already in the system.”
“This is interesting.” Dr. Tomich poked at the ankle. “Something beneath the skin.”
He picked up the scalpel and moved the severed foot onto its side, the inside of the ankle facing up. At first glimpse the object Dr. Tomich began to remove looked like a piece of metal. Another medical device? A pin or clip jabbing its way up to the surface?
Tomich cut, then held the small object up to the light, clasped in his forceps.
“Is it a bullet fragment?” Sheriff Clayton asked.
The medical examiner gave it only a cursory look before dropping it into a stainless-steel basin.
“There’s more,” Tomich said.
One after another he plucked and dropped into the basin four more pieces of metal that had been embedded deep into the foot.
“Shotgun?” asked the sheriff.
Before the medical examiner had a chance to decide, Matthew appeared alongside of them. This time the sheriff jumped, but cleared his throat and shifted his weight as if he had been just readjusting his stance.
“Sir, I have the information you requested.”
“The patient who belongs to the defibrillator? This soon?”
“Yes, sir. The number is registered to Vince Coffland of Port St. Lucie, Florida.”
“Port St. Lucie?” Sheriff Clayton interrupted. “That’s over six hundred miles away. And it’s on the Atlantic side. How the hell did he end up in a cooler floating in the Gulf?”
“Any information on what happened to Mr. Coffland?” Tomich asked his diener.
“He’s been missing since July tenth. He disappeared after Hurricane Gaston.”
“Missing?”
“Disappeared.”
CHAPTER 37
Sometimes a corpse moved. Scott knew it was a fact that no one liked to talk about except at conferences after a few drinks. It’d never happened to Scott, but he’d heard stories of others who had experienced what they called “spontaneous movement.” A leg or a foot twitched. He couldn’t remember exactly what caused it. Some kind of biochemical reaction. But it usually occurred in the first ten to twelve hours after death. Maybe that’s all this was, but when Scott called Joe he opted for the extreme. After the morning he’d experienced, he couldn’t hide the stress.
“That stiff you left in my cooler is still alive.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He
moved.”
Silence. Long enough that Scott second-guessed his approach. Would Joe think his partner prone to hysterics? That he couldn’t handle the extra business?
“Look man,” Joe finally said in his usual calm and cool manner, “it’s just your imagination playing tricks on you.” Then he added like a buddy, a friend, “Dude, you did have a lot to drink last night.”
There was something about Joe’s voice—his calling him “dude”—that made Scott relax … a little.
By the time Joe arrived half an hour later, Scott had almost convinced himself that it probably was just his imagination. His head still throbbed. Earlier his vision seemed blurred. He hadn’t gone back into the cooler and now he felt a bit ridiculous.
Scott tried to concentrate while he kept his employees busy in the funeral home preparing the memorial service for Uncle Mel, the reclusive bachelor whose family wanted him buried before the hurricane rolled in. Scott told the employees they couldn’t go to the back offices because he was fumigating the walkway. It seemed like an absurd excuse even to him. Why fumigate anything before a hurricane? But no one questioned him, which further validated his salesmanship. Damn, he was good. Even in a crisis with all the stress he could make up stuff to believable levels.
He had left Joe for twenty minutes, tops. As soon as Scott could, he sneaked back, going outside and avoiding the walkway. Joe was closing and latching the walk-in refrigerator.
“Hey Scott,” Joe said. “I have to tell you, man, I wish you could have heard your voice. ‘The stiff moved.’” He laughed as he slapped Scott between the shoulder blades.
“Yeah, probably too much Scotch.”
“Or not enough,” Joe said as he pulled out his money clip and started peeling off hundred-dollar bills. “I’ll have a few more specimens to add before the storm, if that’s okay,” he said as he placed the bills on the corner desk.