by Lisa Black
It wasn’t going well.
Theresa sat up and rubbed her neck. Neither of them took the hint.
‘Are you done?’ Shephard asked. ‘Is it him?’
Without looking at him she said, ‘Go sit down. Over there. Both of you.’
Theresa gestured with the pointer, and they must have intuited how ready she felt to use it as a weapon because they finally shuffled off. She bent over again, long enough to produce twinges in both her neck and her spine.
Shephard, as it was turning out, tended to be chatty. ‘So why is your ME under scrutiny from the county?’
Don shrugged.
Theresa said, ‘Isn’t everyone?’
‘Think they’ll find anything?’
‘No,’ both scientists answered in unison.
‘Nice to see people with faith in their boss.’
‘It’s not that,’ Theresa said. ‘It’s just that the medical examiner’s office isn’t a likely center for corruption.’
Don translated: ‘There’s not a lot of money in dead people.’
Theresa spoke while following the black and white ridges under the loupes. ‘On the rare occasions that a coroner or medical examiner have been prosecuted for wrongdoing, it’s usually because they were overcharging for private or out-of-county autopsies. That’s one of the few avenues to bring in extra cash around here. But I’ve never noticed us having a significant number of non-county autopsies.’
‘Me, neither,’ Don said. ‘Or jobs, the county loves to trade in jobs. But we don’t have that big of a staff, so it’s kind of hard to hide a full-scale giveaway in a place like this. I don’t know anyone here who’s related to this or that bigwig. Anyone who is has managed to keep it really quiet.’
‘And that would never work,’ Theresa said. ‘You can’t keep a secret in this place to save your life.’
Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words, since apparently someone had a secret, and lives were exactly what keeping it had cost.
She straightened both prints and started over, going over every area on each one, just to make sure.
After a while she stood up and dropped the pointers on her desk.
Once she had disarmed, Shephard asked, ‘Well? Is it him?’
Theresa shook her head. ‘Whoever was lying on that gurney when I came in this morning, it wasn’t Justin Warner.’
TEN
That, as they say, changed things.
‘Are you sure?’ Shephard asked for the third time. Don knew better – Theresa never said anything about a fingerprint if she was not sure.
‘The print from the gurney is from the hypothenar region,’ she said, illustrating with her own hands. ‘The section of the palm toward what we think of as the outside of the hand, under the pinkie.’ (Examiners may not write it, but that doesn’t mean they don’t say it.) ‘The other two sections are the thenar, the side by the thumb, and the interdigital, which is across the top, above the lifeline and below the fingers. The ridges in these areas have pretty distinct flows and patterns, making it easy to distinguish one from the other. So, I’m satisfied that I have the right region, hypothenar. Justin has a somewhat unusual hypothenar, with a whorl in it.’ She held up his fingerprint card and pointed to wear the ridges swirled to form a circular pattern in the middle of his palm.
‘Maybe it’s his other palm,’ Shephard suggested.
She thought of pointing out to him that she still had her spiky pointers within reach, but didn’t. She never assumed her own infallibility, especially with such a positive identification as fingerprints, and said, ‘He has one in both palms. People usually do, with hypothenar patterns. If they have a vestige in one, they’ll have a vestige in the other—’
‘So you’re sure.’
For the fourth time. ‘I’m sure that the man who put this palm print on this fingerprint card did not put that print on the gurney, yes.’
He rubbed the bridge of his nose.
They were sitting at the Trace Evidence Department table again, the big, high one in the center of the lab which got used for everything from opening the mail to monthly meetings to bedding examinations (it could be difficult to get a good look at a king-sized comforter on a three-by-six examination table). Even Neenah had grown bored with them and had gone back to typing reports, when not fielding phone calls from elsewhere in the building to rehash Darryl’s grisly end and the relative odds of Justin’s guilt in same. So far the betting went ten to two, and not in his favor.
Don handed her a fresh cup of coffee – apparently the only sustenance they were going to get that day, the way things were going – and asked if the print could have been left by another deskman, someone who washed down the gurney earlier.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘You would think they’d grab the bars on the sides for washing and stacking, but it could have been there already, though it seems kind of unlikely that someone could climb on and off the gurney without smearing it, and it’s in the correct position for someone sitting up on top of it, but of course anything is possible.’
‘Could it be Johnson’s?’ Shephard asked.
‘Darryl’s? Again, anything’s possible, but if it is then it’s probably not relevant. There was no blood by the print, and his hands were covered in it after the murder. If he left it there it would have been before the attack and wouldn’t really tell us anything. He could have washed the gurney last.’
Shephard stared at her while he mulled this over. He had been working his math of two minus one equaling one, and now somehow he had two minus one equaling two. It obviously did not make him happy.
Tired of calling him by his last name, she asked him what the L on his name badge stood for.
‘Louis,’ he said.
‘Oh.’
‘Maybe this third guy used the gurney to move Justin’s body,’ Don said, sitting next to Theresa.
‘Or unconscious form,’ Theresa said. She had already lost two co-workers and maybe another. She wasn’t going to give up on Justin, even mentally, until she had to. ‘It would explain why he was still here an hour or so after killing Darryl.’
‘Why take him and leave Johnson?’ Shephard asked.
Don said, ‘Maybe he meant to take them both. He had put Justin in his car—’
‘Or Justin’s car,’ Theresa said. ‘Since it’s missing.’
‘Then he comes back for Darryl, but is interrupted.’
‘By me,’ Theresa said, and for the first time it really hit her that she had walked right past a violent killer without the slightest inkling, utterly at ease in the place she thought of as a second home. It would never have occurred to her to be wary inside the medical examiner’s office. She felt safer there than anywhere, even home, because at the office there was always someone else around, and that someone was usually both friendly and relatively large. Yet this morning she had been ten feet from someone with blood on their hands. ‘Why didn’t he kill me, too?’
This time she couldn’t keep her voice from shaking, and Don got up and hugged her shoulders. Restrained by the presence of Shephard and Neenah she didn’t hug him back but wrapped her arms around one firm biceps and let her head rest in the fragrant crook of his neck for the briefest moment before, reluctantly, disengaging.
‘I mean,’ she went on, coughing to get her vocal chords under control, ‘he had just killed one man and possibly two.’
Shephard had been studying her, perhaps wondering if Theresa could have been spared because she might be somehow involved, or if all medical examiner’s personnel were so huggy. ‘Maybe he was sated, maybe he wasn’t a stone-cold exterminator, maybe Johnson’s murder wasn’t planned – or it would have gone much smoother. He planned to remove both bodies, clean up the place, and let their disappearance confuse everyone. Or it was Justin Warner and the print on the gurney is irrelevant. He was going to move Johnson’s body and clean up, tell everyone the guy went home sick or off on a bender. Sounds like the wife wouldn’t be terribly surprised if her man stayed out a couple
of nights.’
That story sounded better to her. Justin would still be guilty but not a born killer, with Darryl’s death simply a fight that got out of hand. A good chunk of our clientele came to the ME’s office in that manner. Anger had been the cause of the first murder and would, she felt certain, be the cause of the last.
But then what about George Bain and Dr Reese?
‘It would help a lot if we could find Warner.’ Shephard spoke through gritted teeth. ‘Then we could just ask him.’
‘Nothing on the BOLO?’ she asked. She assumed they’d put out a Be On The Lookout notice so that any cop in the city would call in if they saw Justin.
‘No. Nothing on his car, no one at his place. Where would he go if not home? Does he have relatives, a girlfriend?’
Don and Theresa shook their heads; they wouldn’t know even if he did. Theresa refilled their cups in silence and started another pot while they all pondered current events. She also pondered what Shephard was still doing there, apparently on his own time, trying to do the detective’s job for them – a job he obviously missed. Shift sergeant might pay more but it was largely a management job, overseeing, coordinating, communicating with a group of patrol officers. Perhaps, like George Bain, Shephard had jumped ship too early, and now regretted it.
She muttered George Bain’s name.
‘What?’ Don asked.
‘Let’s say for the sake of argument our three murders are connected.’
‘Three?’ Shephard asked.
‘Let’s assume for the sake of argument that George’s death is a murder. And since we don’t know where Justin figures in or whether he’s a murder, a kidnapping or a suspect, leave him out completely. So we have Bain, Reese, and Darryl Johnson.’
‘So what’s your connection?’ Shephard said. ‘Other than working here?’
Don said, ‘I can’t see one. Different ages, races and socio-economic rank. They lived in different areas of town.’
‘The only connection is working here,’ Theresa said.
‘Was there any incident that involved the three of them?’ Shephard asked. ‘A fire in the building, did they all get stuck in the elevator at one time, did they wrestle a distraught family member to the ground, were they brought up on charges for some reason?’
‘No, no, no, and we don’t have “charges” in the medical examiner’s office.’ She thought that was funny, but Shephard didn’t smile. ‘No scandals involving them that I know of, I don’t think all three would fit in the elevator, and no physical crises in the building.’
Don said, ‘Unless you count evacuating due to the presence of an explosive, but that involved everyone, not just them.’
Shephard raised one eyebrow, but Theresa didn’t feel like getting into her checkered past just then. Instead he asked, ‘What about a case? Maybe there’s a family member out there who feels they’re not getting the whole story, that mom came in here with fourteen thousand dollars worth of diamonds around her neck that didn’t make it into the coffin. Or that their loved one was actually Elvis in disguise. Or shot by cops and you’re covering it up.’
‘Yes, we’re agents of the state,’ Theresa said. ‘We’ve heard that before. But there haven’t been any controversies lately. A funeral home lost a pair of shoes that the family is still complaining about. A homeless guy got drunk, crawled into a car and froze to death and his parents insist that he was murdered. Other than that—’
‘We’ve got that poor mom who comes down every time we have an unidentified body, insisting that it’s her missing son,’ Don offered.
‘Yeah. Other than that, we don’t really attract a lot of controversy,’ Theresa explained to Shephard.
‘If we’re looking for one case that all three had something to do with—’ he began.
‘Hundreds,’ Don said.
‘Thousands,’ Theresa said.
‘Maybe into the five digits,’ Don said. ‘All three men had been here for a long time – at least ten years, maybe fifteen.’
‘Say we focus on just the past year – or rather the twelve months before Bain retired. Is there a way we can get a list?’ Shephard asked.
A pause.
‘Neenah?’ Theresa asked.
‘No,’ the secretary said. ‘Uh-uh.’
‘Use Reese as a limiter,’ Don suggested, to no one in particular. ‘That’s the easiest way. He will be front and center of the report for any case he autopsied. The other two guys probably won’t even be listed.’
‘Find a case where George transported the body. And Darryl would be on the intake screen if he filled out the sheet.’ Theresa meant the legal-size form filled out when the victim arrived, listing their vitals, name, address, apparent method of death and all clothing and property with or on them. The deskman had to sign and date this inventory, but it would remain handwritten. Nothing went into the computerized database except the name and address and the deskman’s initials, since no one felt a need to digitalize every T-shirt and sock. ‘He would also list the property, if the victim came in with property, meaning valuables. Many don’t, especially if they’re coming from a hospital – the family has already collected it.’
Don continued to calculate a ballpark figure. ‘It might not be that bad. We average three thousand cases per year.’
Shephard looked puzzled. ‘I would think it was more than that.’
‘Only about fifteen percent of deaths come here,’ Theresa explained. ‘Most occur under a doctor’s care and don’t require additional examination. Of those fifteen percent we only autopsy a little more than a third, plus the ones we do for other counties. Say twelve hundred. Reese was one of six pathologists …’
‘So he probably does about two hundred autopsies a year?’ Shephard finished, showing off his own math skills. Theresa felt like she should get out a package of self-stick gold stars.
‘Neenah?’ Don said.
‘Uuhh-uh. You don’t want to do that.’
‘Just search the past year. Show the sergeant here what we’re up against.’
‘Don’t act like it’s my fault,’ Shephard said.
‘Fine,’ she said, and typed a few commands on her keyboard. The computer thought. And thought. And thought some more.
‘Told you so,’ she said.
Finally – after the computer froze once and had to be rebooted (the county’s IT budget wasn’t exactly generous) – she swiveled her monitor slightly to the right so they could see the scrolling list of case numbers.
‘Now search those results for Darryl’s initials on the intake screen.’
‘Sure,’ our secretary said. ‘How exactly do I do that?’
Don moved his lanky form next to her to help find a way through the menu options.
‘It might be easier to simply take the list of cases and go through the ledger downstairs by hand,’ Theresa told Shephard. ‘Every case – every deceased person – that comes in is entered on a numbered page, and the deskman’s initials will be next to the entry.’
‘You still write things by hand?’
‘There’s a lot to be said for it. It can’t be hacked. It can’t be corrupted or destroyed by an electromagnetic pulse.’
‘What if the building burns down?’
‘I didn’t say it was perfect. But there are advantages. When I started in this field we were still stapling the bags shut and writing the evidence number on them with a Sharpie marker, using this slightly complicated numbering system that the first Trace Evidence supervisor devised. But, unlike the stickers – labels – that we use now, Sharpie marker couldn’t fall off. You could pick up a piece of evidence twenty years later and, in about four minutes, find out what it was, where it came from, who signed it in, what was analyzed on it and what the results were, and who it had been released to. Not so bad.’
He raised that eyebrow at her again.
‘I’m not proposing we go back to movable type and quill pens. I love Google as much as the next guy; more, even. But it work—’
> Theresa broke off. Shephard said something, she could see his mouth moving, but the words were lost in the haze of her revelation.
She moved over to her desk, rummaged around its surface, and found the piece of paper upon which she’d scribbled down the numbers from the note in Justin Warner’s locker: 1432, 1433, 1555, 1830.
She could be wrong, of course, but – she could be right.
Shephard had followed her, apparently intrigued by this sudden trance. Don did too, after a moment, leaving Neenah’s computer churning through its paces.
‘What?’ Shephard asked her.
She held up the paper so Don could read it, saying, ‘They could be evidence numbers. Old evidence numbers.’
He squinted at the sheet. ‘But there’s no year.’
They stared at each other.
‘What?’ Shephard asked again.
ELEVEN
Sergeant Shephard watched them with arms crossed as Don and Theresa pulled the old ledgers out of their supply closet. Each book – one for each year – measured about eighteen inches long by a foot wide and was covered in red with the year embossed in gold, very similar to the deskmen’s ledgers she had just described to Shephard. She wondered if you could still buy them, if anyone still manufactured them, or if they’d gone the way of pagers and Walkmans in a world where kids weren’t even taught cursive writing any more. (A policy she remained on the fence about, should anyone care to ask.)