Close to the Bone

by Lisa Black

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t count?’ Zoe asked.

  Theresa said, ‘We need someone who isn’t an ME office employee. We could all be conspiring to frame our boss.’

  Her back to them, Christina snorted. ‘If I thought it would work I would have done the old lech in years ago. Any chance the formaldehyde bath will kill him? It’s highly toxic.’

  ‘Nah. He’d have to drink an ounce of close to forty percent solution. The stuff we fix organs in is more like four percent.’

  ‘Darn.’

  The medic gave up, and Zoe went to photograph the disrupted interior of the office on the second floor.

  Seated on the other vacant table, Don said, ‘I can’t believe he kept Diana’s uterus and her ring in a jar on his shelf for ten years like some sort of sick trophy. How could he be that warped, yet rational enough to run this place?’

  ‘Because Janice actually runs this place,’ Theresa said, ‘at least, to hear her tell it when she thinks no one can overhear. But I don’t think he’s warped, not that way – I think he hung on to them out of sheer paranoia. No way of getting rid of them would seem good enough. If he got caught with the ring he’d be sunk. If he took it home his wife might find it. If he threw it out a car window it might land in the lap of the rare honest person who could describe the vehicle. If he tossed it into the biohazard bag with the rest of her organs, the funeral home might find it when raking out the incinerator, and then he’d be worse off than before. We’ve seen so many ways in which the killer gets caught that, I’ll wager, nothing seemed like a sure thing. But he could send a biological specimen out of this room and be sure no one would want to handle or examine it closely. The uterus was a handy disguise. It also contained the only other piece of evidence against him.’

  ‘No maybe about it,’ Christina said. She turned to face the rest of the people in the room. ‘It’s here.’

  ‘She was pregnant?’ Theresa clarified.

  Christina nodded. ‘I’ll make a tube for Don to test.’

  The room fell silent, reflecting on both the child who never had a chance to be, and its dead mother.

  ‘So he had the stupid ring all along,’ Shephard said.

  ‘James was right,’ Theresa said. ‘The ring was the only piece of concrete evidence that would support his story. Stone found a moment alone with Diana’s body – not hard to do since there would have been hardly anyone else in the building. He removed the bag, took off the ring, put on a fresh bag and closed it with evidence tape, scribbled a passable facsimile of Cousin Casey’s initials. No one ever looks at them that closely.’

  Don said, ‘And I didn’t; I just cut them off like I’d done a hundred times before and since. But why did he worry about the ring at all?’

  ‘I don’t know. It didn’t look wide enough to be engraved. But it was expensive – I didn’t say so to James, but those stones were definitely real. Maybe it was custom-made, or at least pricey enough that he thought it could be traced to him. He couldn’t be one-hundred-percent sure that Diana hadn’t told someone – me, her mother, a second cousin – about the affair, and that ring would be the only physical evidence of it. That and the baby, of course. That the missing ring cemented a case against James became the icing on the cake – just the man I want to see.’

  Mitchell Causer had entered the room. He seemed disappointed to find her neither horizontal nor naked.

  His expression went from salacious to suspicious. ‘Why?’

  ‘You said Stone kept bitching about having to be diener for Diana’s autopsy because he had trouble at home. Why did you say that?’

  The man’s piglike eyes looked blank. ‘I dunno.’

  ‘You said you thought he had an argument with his wife. Why? What made you think that?’

  ‘I don’t know! It was a hell of a long time ago.’

  ‘But you told me that only yesterday. It must have been stuck in your mind for a reason.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’ The smoke in his eyes cleared. ‘Yeah – he had a red mark on his cheek. Like somebody smacked him.’

  ‘And you thought his wife had slapped him?’

  ‘No, I thought she laid him out with a right hook.’ Causer pondered this further, hand on his chin, thinking so hard that he almost looked intelligent. ‘He had, like, a scrape on his jaw and the beginning of a bruise. I ragged him about it for a while, but you know Stone. He don’t give nothing up.’

  Theresa exchanged a look with Don, who hopped off the opposite table and went to where the ring sat. He pulled on gloves and raised it to the magnifying lamp for a closer look.

  ‘It’s got tissue in all the little settings and prongs,’ he said. ‘But that could all belong to Diana. Having sat in formalin for ten years isn’t going to help, either.’

  ‘Don’t give up,’ she warned.

  ‘Not until I’ve extracted every last cell.’

  ‘Take this too.’ Christina handed him a plastic tube with a screw top. ‘I’m giving the rest to Histology.’ She left the suite and, since Theresa clearly did not intend to start shedding clothes, Causer followed Christine’s bosom right out the door.

  Don put the ring in a Petri dish and made to leave also. ‘You go home and get some sleep,’ he told Theresa. ‘I mean it.’

  ‘I will. I—’ But she spoke to his disappearing back and let her words trail off.

  Then she was left with no one save Sergeant Shephard, who watched her with arms crossed.

  ‘I get it,’ he said without preamble. ‘He’s Just Not That Into You, but you don’t want to accept it. We’ve all been there. It sucks.’

  She didn’t have the strength to deflect the topic, and she certainly did not have the strength to begin this conversation.

  ‘But I’m here.’ He came forward and put his hands, quite deliberately, over hers, letting his palms spill over on to her thighs. His brown eyes were soft and deadly serious. ‘I’m right in front of you.’

  Very slowly, her cheeks lifted into a smile.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘So you are.’