by Osborne, Jon
Dana shook her hear. No, she couldn’t. God knew she wouldn’t have wanted to know that her loved ones had been taped after death, either. Not to mention how much tape they must have used in her case, considering all of the many loved ones she’d lost in her life.
How many loved ones she’d lost recently.
“So are all the autopsy procedures videotaped?” she asked.
Lawson moved a pile of papers on her desk to one side and nodded. “Yeah. That’s our policy now. There was a big lawsuit brought a couple of years ago by a family that contended that their grandfather’s body had been mistreated and it cost the city four million bucks to settle everything in the end, so I guess the big-wigs downtown finally got the message and wanted to cover their butts.”
A nervous ripple fluttered through Dana’s stomach. The thrill of the chase at work again. “Does Dr. Johnson have access to the tapes?” she asked. “If so, I’d like to take a look at them. One in particular.”
Lawson rolled her eyes halfway around her pretty face. “Hell, to tell you the truth, Agent Whitestone, I’d be surprised if that man even knows the camera is in there. Or even what a camera is, for that matter. He’s completely lost when it comes to technology. From the way he looks at a computer, you’d think he was still living back in 1963.”
The woman paused and lifted her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “Probably still is living back in 1963 – in his mind, at least.”
Dana slipped her FBI shield back into the inside pocket of her leather jacket and resisted the urge to scream. Once again, it looked to her as though Dr. Phillip Johnson would be of absolutely no help at all on this case. Then again, what else was new? He’d never been any help to her.
Quite the opposite, unfortunately.
She gritted her teeth and fought back another powerful wave of irritation in her chest. She couldn’t wait for the day that a new, more competent ME took Johnson’s place. Because catching murderers was hard enough as it was without constantly being hamstrung by people like him – people who were supposed to be on her side. “Who else has access to the tapes?” she asked.
Lawson fiddled with one of her gold hoop earrings and slid her small pink tongue across her sparkling white teeth. Dentures, Dana guessed. Nice ones, too.
“Funny you should ask,” the receptionist said. “Believe it or not, I’ve actually got access to them. But they’re not actually tapes because everything’s gone digital these days. The fact that I’ve got access to them creeps me out, too, but we’re so shorthanded around here that I was designated as the backup A/V person, even though I barely know the difference between a USB port and a telephone wire myself.”
The woman shook her head, looking annoyed now herself. “No raise to go along with it, though, of course.”
“Who’s permission would you need in order to get me the footage of Christian Manhoff’s autopsy?” Dana asked.
Lawson glanced around the lobby. The place was mostly empty, save for a tired-looking janitor who was mopping up the tiled floor beneath a television set in the southwest corner that was tuned into a rerun of The Golden Girls but turned down too low to hear.
“Theoretically, I’m supposed to talk to Dr. Johnson before I release anything like that,” the receptionist said, “but he always acts so damned irritated whenever I ask him a question that I stopped doing that a long time ago. The videos are public record anyway since the taxpayers pay for them, so I’m not too worried about that. Do you know the date of the autopsy you’re looking for?”
More hope tickled Dana’s chest, but it was swallowed up quickly by even more anger at the chief coroner. For all intents and purposes, autopsy probably wasn’t the right word to use for it. She highly doubted that Johnson had taken more than five minutes to examine Christian Manhoff’s lifeless body, much less shown the initiative to actually cut him open to see what might be inside. As with everything else regarding the good doctor, it had no doubt been an open and shut case for him. The faster he was done with it, the better, as far he was concerned.
“I’m not sure when the autopsy took place,” Dana said. “In the past couple of days or so. Couldn’t you just type the name into the database?”
Lawson nodded. “Well, now, there’s an idea, isn’t it? I suppose I could do just that.” She leaned forward in her chair and punched a few keys on the computer in front of her before looking back up at Dana. “What’s the name again?”
Dana spelled it out for her. “Christian Manhoff. M-A-N-H-O-F-F.”
Lawson pecked away at the keyboard some more. After another moment or two, she glanced up and said, “You can come over here if you want. I don’t like watching these things very much. They make my skin crawl.”
Dana pressed her lips together and gave the woman a sympathetic look. She didn’t blame the receptionist one little bit for her squeamishness. After all, who in their right mind would like watching videos filled with nothing but blood and guts and despair? With the obvious exception being the killers and other dregs of society out there who actually got off on watching such dreadful things, of course.
Dana came around Lawson’s desk, bumping her hipbone painfully against the sharp edge of one corner in the process. “Not exactly must-see TV, huh?” she asked, wincing at the hot jolt of pain shooting through her hip.
Lawson shook her head and stood up, offering Dana the chair. “Whoa, careful there, honey,” she said. “When you get to be my age, your hip will crack just like a breadstick if you’re not careful. And, no, it’s not must-see TV at all. Anyway, sit down, Agent Whitestone. I don’t know about you, but I have to sit about six inches away from the screen to see anything clearly any more. Old age is no fun, dear. If there’s any way you can possibly avoid it, please do so. Just try to remember that you heard it here first, though, OK? I’d actually like to get some credit for my world-class brilliance one of these days.”
Lawson paused and sighed deeply. “Ah, what the heck am I talking about? You’re still so young and pretty still that that’s something you don’t need to worry about for a very long time. Lucky girl.”
Dana sat down in the chair, and Lawson leaned over her right shoulder, positioning the cursor over the PLAY button on the screen.
“Just tap the trackpad once and you should be good to go,” Lawson said, straightening back up again. “Anyway, I think I’ll go grab a quick cup of coffee while you’re looking for what you need. Would you like one, as well?”
Dana shook her head. “No, thank you, Miss Lawson. But are you sure you won’t get into any trouble for this? I could always come back later on when you get the proper clearance – or when I get a search warrant. I’m not going to lie, though – this is a huge help to me. It definitely saves me some time.”
Lawson waved a hand in the air and looked around the lobby again. “Hell, sweetie, nobody ever comes in here,” she said, almost underneath her breath. “Nobody who’d raise a stink about it, anyway. Besides, if we get caught I’ll just say that you overpowered me and threatened to arrest me if I didn’t let you see the video. Sound like a plan to you?”
Dana smiled. “Sure does. Thanks again for all your help, Miss Lawson. I really appreciate this.”
Nancy Lawson squeezed her right shoulder. “No problem, sweetheart. After all, we girls need to stick together, now don’t we? Anyway, I’ll be back in just a minute or two, OK?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Dana waited until the sound of the woman’s high heels clacking against the tiled floor had faded away down the long hallway before tapping the trackpad on the computer. Movement sprang to life at once on the screen.
From the look of the angle of the footage, the camera Lawson had told her about had been mounted to the north wall of the autopsy room, mostly hidden by a potted plant that Dana only now realized she’d subconsciously thought looked out of place amongst all the cold gray steel when she’d been in there earlier.
In the footage, Dr. Phillip Johnson stood over Christian Manhoff’s naked body, a
ccompanied by a pathology assistant.
Dana grimaced at the image of the huge rawhide bone shoved halfway down the dead man’s throat. The idea itself was bad enough to think about, but actually seeing it up close and personal and in living color like this really hammered home the point just how horrific Manhoff’s death must have been.
There was no audio on the video, but Dana could see that Johnson was talking by the way his assistant was scribbling down notes on a clipboard.
She leaned in closer to the computer. Unbelievably, thirty seconds later Johnson actually left the room.
Dana cursed sharply underneath her breath. Obviously, five minutes had been far too generous of an estimate of how much time the head coroner had spent with Christian Manhoff’s lifeless body. More like five seconds.
She clamped her teeth together until the muscles bulged against her jaw-line and leaned in even closer to the computer screen, focusing on the pathology assistant now.
The man looked to her to be somewhere in his mid-forties, with thinning gray hair that was parted sharply on the left side of his head. The paper mask covering the lower half of his face made determining any facial features difficult, but she felt certain that Nancy Lawson would know who he was. The coroner’s office wasn’t all that big of a place – people-wise, at least – for the man to be an entirely unknown entity. Unfamiliar faces wouldn’t go unnoticed around here, and Dana had a sneaking suspicion that Lawson was exactly the sort of woman who noticed everything.
A minute or so after Johnson had left the room, his pathology assistant followed suit, closing the door behind him.
Dana frowned as the image on the video stood still for what seemed a lifetime, just Christian Manhoff’s dead body alone in the room with a large rawhide dog bone shoved halfway down his throat. She found the fast-forward button on the computer and watched the same scene unfold for two more minutes, according to the time-stamp in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.
And then the door to the autopsy room opened up again.
Dana widened her eyes in shock. A woman who looked to be somewhere in her late-thirties or early forties entered the room, dressed to the nines in a designer dress and high-heeled shoes.
She was holding something in her right hand.
Turning directly to the camera hidden behind the potted plant, the woman smiled up at the viewfinder before lifting the picture of Dana’s half-brother and mouthing three distinct words that you didn’t need to be a professional lip-reader to figure out.
Fuck you, Dana.
Dana recoiled from the computer screen, as though the woman might somehow reach through the computer monitor and grab her hard by the throat. Her pulse skipped three beats in a row in her neck while the woman calmly attached the picture of Nathan Stiedowe to Christian Manhoff’s nipple ring. Then the woman simply turned around, flipped off the camera with both her middle fingers and left the room.
Dana rewound the video and watched it again. And then for a third and fourth time.
Fuck you, Dana.
Fuck you, Dana.
Fuck you, Dana.
Dana’s ears rang. Her hands shook. Perspiration flooded into her palms.
She took in a deep, shuddering breath to steady herself. It was clear that the woman in the autopsy video had absolutely zero interest in concealing her identity, no fear whatsoever about her face being captured on tape, and that worried Dana. A lot. Because only someone with nothing left to lose would ever display such carelessness.
But how in the heck had the woman known that the camera had been hidden behind the plant in the first place? Did she work there?
Dana shook her head. Didn’t seem likely considering the fact that it would have taken all of about five minutes to identify her if she did work there. So if that wasn’t it, what was it? Was she a disgruntled former employee? A relative of one? And just how, exactly, had she gained access to the autopsy room in the first place? Nancy Lawson had told her that the camera had been installed just a couple weeks prior, so that meant the woman must have been privy to that information too. But how could she have known that if she didn’t work there?
Dana tapped the trackpad to stop the video and called up the Internet browser on Nancy Lawson’s computer before saving the footage in a zip file and e-mailing it to herself.
Just then, a voice sounded directly behind her in her left ear, nearly causing her to jump right out of her skin.
“Find anything interesting, Agent Whitestone?”
Dana snapped her neck around and leapt to her feet, almost knocking over the chair in the process. A cold trickle of sweat slid down her back. Her heartbeat thudded in her chest.
“Not a thing,’ she lied, moving quickly around to the other side of the desk and instinctively putting some distance between herself and the coroner’s office employee. “I’m afraid I didn’t find anything at all.”
Nancy Lawson pressed her lips together in disappointment. “Hmmn. That’s too bad.”
Dana narrowed her eyes and stared across the desk at the human-resources worker. The well-dressed woman in the autopsy footage didn’t resemble Nancy Lawson in the least little bit, but she’d been burned in the past by such simple oversights and she didn’t want to get burned again. Not this time. Everyone had to remain a suspect until she could rule him or her out, which she hadn’t done with Nancy Lawson yet.
Dana tried to keep the adrenaline out of her voice when she spoke again. Didn’t work, though. Not even a little bit. “Thanks again for all your help, Miss Lawson. I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”
Nancy Lawson blew off a thick cloud of steam from her piping-hot Styrofoam cup of coffee before taking a tentative sip.
“Don’t mention it, honey. That’s what they pay me the big bucks for.”
CHAPTER 27
Hands still shaking, Dana ducked into the gleaming public restroom down the hall in the coroner’s office building and again tried to steady herself. Once again, it didn’t work.
Not even a little bit.
A familiar dread washed through her stomach as she splashed some cold water onto her face in an effort calm down. No good. She was still too shaken up from the shocking video she’d just watched to even breathe properly right now, much less think straight.
A shocking video she hadn’t been expecting to see at all.
What had the woman in the surveillance footage been trying to tell her by attaching the photograph of her brother to Christian Manhoff’s body, anyway? Besides “fuck you”, of course. That part of the message hadn’t been very difficult to figure out.
Dana rolled her narrow shoulders forward and stared into her reflection in the mirror above the sink. It was clear that the woman had been calling her out by name – literally, just as Nathan Stiedowe had done during the Cleveland Slasher investigation – but to what end and for what purpose? And could the woman in the video be a murderer? Just like Dana’s half-brother had been? Could Dana be sure of that? Had the woman in the video been the same person who’d shoved a large rawhide bone down Christian Manhoff’s throat until he’d choked to death on it? Or was she simply connected to the murder somehow? And if so, just how was she connected to it?
Dana took in several deep breaths through her nostrils in order to get some oxygen pumping through her system again. Nothing made any sense to her right now. Still, what the hell else was new? She’d been in a daze ever since she’d first emerged from her coma three weeks earlier, and from the look of things she doubted she’d snap out of it anytime soon. That being said, she knew that she’d need to do just that – and quick. Because one person was dead already and there could be more to come soon. Would probably be more to come soon. With suspects like this one – people who went to such great lengths to actually draw attention to their terrible crimes – there were always more to come.
But Dana didn’t see how the woman in the video could have possibly pulled off the murder by herself. She just didn’t appear physically capable.
&
nbsp; Christian Manhoff had been a big man. A huge man, even. He must have easily outweighed the woman in the video by at least a hundred and fifty pounds. Surely the woman in the video couldn’t have overpowered him. She looked tall, sure – a little bit taller than the average female and certainly a lot taller than Dana – but she didn’t look anywhere near strong enough to pull off the deed by herself. So did that mean she’d had help killing Christian Manhoff? And if so, from whom? Or – for some odd reason – had the woman in the video simply been piggybacking on a murder that had already committed by someone else, one to which she had no other link?
Dana didn’t know, but she sure as hell planned to find out.
Flipping open her cellphone, she accessed her e-mail account and downloaded the attached zip file that she’d sent herself a few minutes earlier before watching the autopsy video several more times, her heart pounding progressively harder against her ribcage each time she worked her way through the soul-freezing footage.
On the fourth or fifth repeat viewing, she finally noticed the watch strapped around the woman’s left wrist as she entered the autopsy room and held up the photograph of Nathan Stiedowe to the camera.
Dana paused the video and selected the portion of the image featuring the watch before zooming in. The watch had caught her eye mostly because it looked so out of place when compared to the rest of the woman’s hopelessly trendy attire. The dress that the woman in the video had been wearing looked like it had cost a pretty penny, indeed – along with her shoes, jewelry and haircut. Something of a closet clotheshorse herself, Dana knew quality when she saw it, and the bird-flipping, profanity-mouthing woman’s get-up was definitely quality.
Dana bit down gently her lower lip – an unfortunate habit she’d formed in grade school and still hadn’t quite gotten over yet – while she continued to think things through. The mystery woman’s wardrobe had obviously selected with great care, so the cheap watch stuck out to Dana like the proverbial sore thumb. It was almost like topping off a piece of perfectly prepared filet mignon with a healthy dollop of two-dollar whipped cream that you’d picked up at the grocery store as an afterthought: a small addition but one that was nonetheless large enough to completely ruin the overall presentation.