by Susan Dunlap
“Couldn’t be real. Must be fake. Faux garlic, that’s great. Find out how they make it!”
“Tchernak, this a murder investigation, not a recipe swap. I need to think about the morgue, not the kitchen. I need to see a body, tonight.”
Tchernak handed her a plate.
“You’re not eating?” she asked, walking back into her own half of the duplex.
“Carb day.” Tchernak followed.
Ignoring the intricacies of his training regimen, she sat at her trompe l’oeil table, put her plate atop its painted likeness, and dug into the omelet. Ezra scarfed down his tithe of the food, then trotted over to Tchernak and plopped canine head on human knee. “He’s giving you a chance to make up for moments you haven’t been thinking of him,” Kiernan said.
Tchernak stared in the dog’s eyes, shaggy head to shaggy head. “You know you’re always first in my heart,” he said, scratching the hound behind both ears. To Kiernan he said, “So what is this crisis that draws a humble servant out of his bed at an hour for which he should be paid time and a half?”
“You heard about the stunt woman who died at Gliderport today?”
He nodded. “The one you went to see? I figured that’s why you were so late. You investigating that?” Tchernak’s brown eyes lit up. “Who’s your client? What do you figure happened? What do you need me to do? Let me think who I know with the Parks Department?”
“No need, humble servant. It’s the morgue where I need a connection.”
“What do you need from there?”
“Entry. Tonight.”
“That shouldn’t be any problem for you. Surely you know someone there from when you were a forensic pathologist.”
“Not well enough to call them at one in the morning and convince them to trot down to the morgue and twiddle their thumbs while I go over one of their corpses with a magnifying glass.”
“Ah, to be a pathologist, formidable enough to be allowed to sleep,” he said, glancing down at his own bathrobe. “Perhaps, Kiernan, they’d be more amenable in daylight hours.”
“By then, Tchernak, they’ll be dissecting Lark Sondervoil’s body. I need to see it before they’ve cut it open.”
“So delicately put. I’m just sorry I didn’t have cold chicken, so you could be gnawing on a leg while you’re talking.”
She grinned. It hadn’t occurred to her when she hired a former offensive lineman with a record of more surgeries than quarterback sacks that he would be queasy about autopsies. “To get in legitimately, I’d have to be under the umbrella of Lark’s lawyer or next of kin, whoever that might be. By the time I track down either of them and convince them to hire me, the body will be in the ground. What I’m looking for is the minute indentation that a slender needle leaves, and I’ll be searching in spots where the skin isn’t smooth. As you know,” she said, aware that she was moving into the area of more-than-he’d-wanted-to-know, “even in the freezer a corpse deteriorates, and we’re talking about a body that was battered as it fell and then lay under the hot sun for some time. It wouldn’t have been in too good a condition when it got to the morgue. If I have to go through channels and time passes, there won’t be anything left worth looking at. So, Tchernak, I need to get in there tonight.”
Tchernak leaned back against the green sofa cushions.
“I’m not about to endanger my license… No professional suicide.”
Tchernak ran his fingers down Ezra’s back.
“There’s no decent ruse I can use there at this time of night.”
“Nope. No decent ruse you can use.”
Kiernan stopped, her laden fork midway between plate and mouth. “What does that mean?”
“We all have our resources. Or right about now”—he grinned—”all but you.”
“By which you mean you do have a resource?”
He sprawled back on the couch, stretched his arms, and clasped his hands behind his head. “I might.”
“Tchernak! Who?”
“The morgue attendants.”
“You know the morgue attendants? All of them?”
“Well, maybe not the new ones.” He patted his knee, an invitation to Ezra. The big hound stretched his neck forward. Tchernak watched until the wiry head was on his thigh. “I could contact the senior guys.”
“Because?” she prodded.
Tchernak grinned. “Well, Kiernan, you were a forensic pathologist; you were busy rushing into the autopsy room, cutting up one corpse, and rushing on to the next. You had the exciting job. But time hangs heavy for the poor morgue attendant. The morgue attendant is a contemplative man.”
The light was beginning to dawn. Kiernan smiled. “And what he contemplates is football?”
Tchernak nodded. “You maybe recall five years ago, we had a defense known as The Morgue. The morgue for quarterbacks. They dissected the quarterback. The morgue attendants loved that. They sent us a body bag. The team got them a block of seats for the games. During one game every time we sacked the quarterback, the morgue held up a body bag. They loved it.”
“Why’d they stop coming?”
“Defense stopped getting sacks. And the city fathers,” Tchernak said with a raise of the eyebrows, “felt the body bag was insensitive. But the thing is, Kiernan, we had those guys to a team party. They loved being part of the ‘team’—well, there’s nothing like it.” He gave his head a quick jerk as if to shake off the memory. “They joked about owing us—offense and defense—offering us the best spots in the fridge, moving us to number one on the autopsy schedule. Getting a friend in for a free gaggle at one of their corpses will be a snap. Whoever’s on duty, it’ll make his night.” Tchernak pushed himself up. “Of course, nothing is without cost.”
“And what might that cost be to a servant who makes more than a first-year lineman?”
“A spot on the case roster.”
Kiernan groaned. When she hired him, they both thought they knew what they wanted. She had wanted a servant; he had wanted a job that would give him time to get in shape for a comeback. It should have been a perfect arrangement. It wasn’t. There were too many temptations on both sides, not the least of which was the lure of investigating. She understood the attraction it held for Tchernak. She loved the thrill of investigating—knowing she was dependent solely on herself. She didn’t want an assistant. And if she had wanted an assistant, it wouldn’t have been Brad Tchernak. Tchernak had once admitted that when he was a starting offensive tackle with the Chargers, he was forever after the wide receivers to run one more route and let him practice the short out, “just in case the team needs a fourth-string quarterback.” She didn’t want him protecting her flanks, much less greedily eyeing the ball and second-guessing her pass patterns. And yet the thought of never finding out about Lark Sondervoil, or Greg—“What about your training schedule?”
“I’ll work around it.”
“And if it conflicts?”
“It won’t.”
And if you fail a tryout by an inch? She didn’t want to think of that possibility. Tchernak would never let on how distraught he’d be. But they would both know. Of course, that meant he wouldn’t be dragging those three ruptured discs of his out onto the football field.
Tchernak grinned. “Take it or leave it, Kiernan.”
She laughed. “How soon can I be in the morgue?”
Harris, the morgue attendant, was torn. His small, pale face shifted from his logbook to point up at Tchernak. He smiled, an expression that seemed ill-fitting on his thin, bluish mouth. Tchernak loomed over him, easily a foot taller, a hundred pounds heavier, and twenty years younger than the pale man with pen resting on logbook.
“I thought you might be interested in the huddles,” Tchernak offered. “You watch the game on the tube, it looks like the quarterback does nothing but call the play and give the snap count. Hardly.” Tchernak laughed conspiratorially. “I’ll have some time while she’s inside.”
Harris nodded, his long nose and pointed chin bobbing in ant
icipation. Nervously, he glanced down the corridor, his darkening expression belying the echoing emptiness. His gaze returned to his logbook. He shook his head. “I got my responsibilities here. I can’t be letting a stranger, even a doctor-stranger, into the morgue at night. I got to list every single person who comes in and out.” Tapping a wizened finger on the book, he added, “My log can be subpoenaed into court. I’m taking a big risk.”
Tchernak nodded.
Behind him, Kiernan mouthed “Go on.” Harris was raising the ante, but he was using the wrong bluff with Tchernak. Tchernak had protected against the strongest, fastest defensive ends in football; he was used to faking out big guys. But conning a little old guy who needed his job, a guy begging for his protection—it was like asking him to kick his own quarterback in the knee.
Go on.
“Harris, you remember the Cleveland game, when they intercepted and ran the ball back for a touchdown? The strong safety—who was that then?—changed the defensive alignment twice at the line of scrimmage. Fouts was watching like a hawk. What never came out in the papers … but you don’t have time to hear that.”
Harris glanced down the corridor, lifting his nose as if sniffing the air. He ran his tongue over his thin, bluish lips, glanced at the logbook and back at Tchernak. “The thing is, see, they got this inspection party scheduled to swoop in here tonight. I don’t know when. Checking up on the cleaning crew. Stuff’s been missing, you know what I mean? Could be the cleaners, could not. But they find I let someone in here, they’re not going to be worrying about no cleaners, if you get my drift. I got my pension, my health insurance, my dental insurance to think of.”
Tchernak paled. He’d missed the pitch of the morgue man’s voice rising at the end of his sentence—Harris’s ante. What he saw was the prospect of a superannuated indigent huddled outside the poorhouse doors. In a blizzard. Surrounded by wolves. The way things were going here, Tchernak would be throwing the inspection crew to the ground to protect Harris, and she’d still be standing here in the hall. Go on!
Tchernak glanced at her—Madame Defarge, that glance said.
Kiernan waited, and when Tchernak didn’t speak, she said, “I don’t want to get caught in the storage room any more than you want me to.”
Harris jerked toward her, as if he’d forgotten she was there.
“Someone grabs me, they wonder if you took a leak when you should have been on duty. Maybe your supervisor chews you out. But me they haul off to jail and I lose my license. Without that, I don’t work at all.” That was an out-and-out lie, but what were negotiations for, if not bluster and deceit?
Harris, however, was not swayed. This man, Kiernan thought, was cagey enough to barter bones in the underground skeleton market.
“Harris,” Tchernak said, “I suppose you heard about Ron Lynn’s morgue award.”
Harris didn’t respond, but the twitch at the corner of his left eye gave him away. The Chargers’ former defensive coach had been the nearest thing to a god in the cynical world of the morgue attendants. “Okay,” he said slowly, “but I’m not kidding you about the inspection team. If they head in there, there’s nothing I can do to stop them.”
Kiernan nodded and followed Harris to the corner autopsy room, noting the door to the intersecting hallway, one she hoped she wouldn’t have to use.
Harris flipped on the light, strode across the icy room, opened a drawer, and pulled out a double-decker gurney. “Okay to do your looking here?” he asked. “You can shove it back in quick if you got to.”
Lark Sondervoil’s body was on the top—higher than Kiernan would have liked. She nodded, waited for Harris to leave, then listened as the slap of his footsteps disappeared. Tchernak and Harris would be talking now, but she couldn’t make out a sound. Not a good sign. If the inspectors came by, there would be no way for Tchernak to warn her.
Kiernan shivered in the icy room. Automatically she began breathing through her mouth to thwart the smell of decay that clings to the air in every autopsy room, no matter how many waves of Clorox wash over the walls and tables, the scales and the exhaust fans. By the end of her time as forensic pathologist, she had felt as if the Clorox no longer cleansed her but merely coated the smell of rotting flesh that nestled under her nails and in her nostrils.
She let her eyes close, as if changing the lenses through which she viewed life, and when she raised her eyelids, five years had been blinked away. As if she were in green scrubs, mask over mouth, hands gloved, staring down at the body of a man who had been found dead a week in his kitchen by an electric meter reader who noticed the smell, of the corpse of a boy pulled from the cab of his pickup. As if she were assessing this body before making the Y-shaped incision from the acromioclavicular joints of the shoulders, below the breasts, and straight down to the pubis. The room she was standing in slipped to the edge of her awareness, and in her mind she was in the small autopsy room that had been hers back then, a space large enough to handle one postmortem comfortably, two in an emergency. There had never been an occasion when they’d needed to double up. Even the crash victims in the case that had led to her firing she had done sequentially. If she had called in help and worked on them side by side, she might still be on staff there. Might still be a forensic pathologist. Now, five years afterward, she felt relieved in the certainty that pathology was not the highway to Truth she’d always assumed, and yet she also felt adrift, without that certainty that had shaped her life.
The picture of Yarrow staring at his deceptively clear glass bricks flashed in her mind. He’d left stunt work just as abruptly. She hadn’t asked why. The man was limping around, hadn’t worked in a decade, yet still clung to the lodestone of “the business.” It still worked its magnetic magic, even though he’d seen Lark Sondervoil die in a gag a few hours earlier.
Lark looked small lying on the gurney constructed to hold nearly every corpse that came through. One size fits all. As many bodies as Kiernan had seen, this first viewing of them never became rote. The dead always looked abandoned by life.
The body was naked, the blue-white of death. When they brought her in, the staff would have taken her to the staging room, placed her on a gurney for weighing, removed her clothing layer by layer, photographing each piece of clothing, photographing the body in the remaining garments—the necrophiliac’s striptease, they’d called it in medical school. The techs would have taken prints then, and the investigating officer would have turned in a receipt for any evidence and personal property he’d recovered at the scene of death. In this case, there wouldn’t have been much of either.
Purposely she didn’t touch Lark’s skin. After hours in the fridge it would be cold; she’d learn nothing from a touch. No point in disturbing the evidence unnecessarily. Ragged abrasions laced the limbs, and to a lesser degree the torso and face. Sand had stuck in the blood caked around them. The skin wouldn’t be washed until the pathologist had a chance to observe the skin as it was, then correlate those observations with his findings when he considered the tissue and organs beneath.
“Abrasions presumably from the fall,” Kiernan mouthed silently, as she once would have noted into the microphone hanging over the autopsy table. “High density of sand mixed with blood on anterior surfaces of both hands.” The blood there was closer to pink than anywhere else; the ratio of sand mixed in with the blood greater. The sand on the palms would have rubbed in as Lark futilely grabbed at the bluff wall for purchase. The redder abrasions on the backs of the hands would have come from being flung uselessly against the jagged wall.
Kiernan’s breath caught. Uncharacteristically, she wanted to reach out, to put a comforting hand on those battered hands. She shook off the urge; she’d seen too many bodies to allow herself to get caught like this. She focused on the abrasions. The lines of movement on that outer forearm spread not up, as they would from being abraded while the body slid down against the rough surface. They spread down; Lark had been falling headfirst, and so out of control that her arms had been han
ging useless, to be scraped on the outside. Had Lark lost consciousness partway down? God, she hoped so. She didn’t want to think of the terror of falling to death. Never in the autopsy room had she let herself speculate on the emotions of the dying.
She glanced at Lark’s face. It was pale, almost cyanotic. No, she hadn’t landed head down.
Kiernan stood unmoving, listening for sounds outside. She heard nothing but her own breath. “Significant quantity of blood.” Skin wounds and head wounds bleed heavily. Blood would have gushed until shortly after Lark hit the beach, until her heart stopped pumping. “Little ecchymosis visible.” There wouldn’t be much bruising—death had come too quickly for the heart to push much blood into the tissues.
But there was lividity. Without lifting the body, Kiernan could see the blood settled at both sides of the neck and lower thoracic area—and doubtless in between. Not the normal pattern for a decedent who died lying face up. Normally the blood would have been spread evenly but concentrated in the areas that were neither constricted by clothing nor pressed against a hard surface, areas into which gravity-pulled blood could seep easily. The softness of the beach sand would have allowed more lividity than the table on which she rested now. But too little blood had settled in the neck and shoulders; they were barely colored. The upper pelvic area was darker, and darkest of all were the feet. “Lividity in the feet apparent from the superior posterior calcaneus to cuboid.” She nodded slowly. That line sloping from the knob of the heel down to the arch meant Lark had hit the beach heel first and come to rest at that angle in the sand. Bones would have shattered, spinal discs ruptured, organs burst. The skin, a remarkably tough organ, had held, camouflaging the extent of the damage beneath. Kiernan’s teeth jammed together so hard, her head hurt.
Angrily she shook off the emotion. If she couldn’t be objective in the autopsy room, she was useless. Dammit, she had never been like this. In medical school she had been the one who scorned the squeamish, the mawkish guys who wanted to wallow in what the decedents felt. “Leave that to the forensic psychiatrists!” she’d told them. “We deal in facts.”