Flashpoint

by Lynn Hightower

  “We’ll talk later, gotta go.” She hung up, listening to sputters.

  Sonora headed down the hallway, nodding once to a surgical resident working off his bout of indentured servitude.

  She went past the viewing window, where families could look through meshed glass to identify their loved ones, provided features were intact. She passed a sign warning of biohazard, wondered what was up in algebra, and paused outside the green swing doors by a metal cart that held, among other odds and ends, goggles, shoe covers, and plastic aprons. She skipped the apron but took time for shoe covers and goggles. The gloves, coated with something powdery to make them go on smoothly, were way too big, leaving an inch of latex hanging loose from her fingers. She double-checked her camera awkwardly through the gloves, made sure it did, indeed, have film and working batteries, then went through the double swing doors.

  There were several autopsies in progress, the sound of running water, large gray trash cans overflowing with waste. The smell of blood was strong but overpowered by the cloying scent of Calgon Vestal Lotion soap.

  Dr. Bellair, hands on her hips, was studying a set of X rays illuminated on the wall. Eversley was looking over her shoulder. Bellair pointed.

  “Right there.”

  Eversley nodded.

  “What you got?” Sonora asked.

  “Bullet frag.”

  Sonora scratched the back of her head. “You mean he was shot too?”

  “Talk about your overkill.”

  The gurney carrying Mark Daniels’s body was moving, as if by magic, toward the table. Sonora craned her neck, saw that Marty was at the other end, blocked by the rise of Mark Daniels’s head. She took a cautious step backward to avoid being run over. Marty always swore he could see where he was going, and no one liked to argue and lay themselves open to a charge of political incorrectness toward dwarves, but a month ago he’d given one of the pathologists a solid thump, and last week he’d knocked over one of the technicians. With Marty, of course, it might have been intentional.

  He eased the gurney beside the examining table—stainless steel, raised edges, water hoses, and drains.

  “Nothing about it in the hospital report,” Eversley said.

  Bellair turned away. “They had other things to deal with. Let’s get him on board.”

  Marty shoved his stool up under the head of the table and climbed to his perch. Like most dwarves, he was solidly built and broad featured. Sonora noticed that his gloves fit snugly, but his hands were larger than hers. His hair was brown, coarse, and curly, his thick handlebar mustache going gray.

  Two women, both senior medical students, took their places beside the table. The brunette, Annette something or other, Sonora recognized, the redhead she did not. Annette, as usual, was unfathomably hostile, her dippity-do hair flipping up neatly all the way around. She had disliked Sonora on first sight, and Sonora saw no reason not to return the favor.

  The bag was unzipped, and everyone except Sonora took a hand in lifting Mark Daniels from the gurney. They rolled him facedown on the table. Sonora rubbed the bridge of her nose, thinking how uncomfortable he looked. The backs of his thighs and his buttocks had not been burned. Blood had pooled there after death, giving the skin a dark, bruised-looking lividity. A small trickle of blood ran from Mark Daniels’s nose and trailed to the table.

  “No clothes, right?” Sonora said.

  Eversley sounded exasperated. “Hospital says they’re at the morgue, morgue says the hospital has them, EMT won’t be available—”

  Bellair was shaking her head. “From the look of these burns, Detective, there aren’t going to be any clothes to speak of. The ER doctor could tell you for sure, but with burns like these, the clothes would have been embedded in the skin, unless it was a belt buckle or something.”

  “The arson guys didn’t find a thing. I’m just double-checking. Actually, we think the killer took them, so if you find a fragment or something, let me know.”

  They all nodded thoughtfully. Everyone in the room liked being in on the whodunit stuff.

  The body was turned, supports positioned. The neck sagged, the eyes wide. Nobody home.

  Eversley picked up a hose and began to rinse the body. Marty worked his fingers along the back of the white, sluglike head.

  The redhead was touching Mark Daniels’s belly. “Is this a knife wound?”

  Sonora grimaced. “Come on. Not a gun and a knife.”

  Eversley touched the split in the skin. “I’d guess it’s a fissure from the burns. Let me grab a magnifying glass.”

  Bellair pushed the recording pedal with the slipcovered toe of her shoe and began her external examination of the body. The others, Sonora included, stood poised at the edges of the table, waiting to take the puzzle apart.

  “Subject is white male, age twenty-two, sustaining several …”

  It was long and tedious, the burned skin carefully examined with a five-power magnifying glass. Sonora yawned and stood on one foot, and wondered if Tim had been turning in his algebra homework.

  She studied Mark Daniels’s concave belly, the flattened buttocks, the hairless blistered scalp, and tried to connect what was left to the snapshots she’d seen. He would not get the chance to follow in his big brother’s footsteps.

  Eversley held up his camera. “Another Kodak moment.”

  They took turns shooting the blistered scalp, the charred stump of ear, the second-and third-degree burns, the blackened stubs of the hands. Bellair probed the bullet wound, and Sonora made notations in her notebook. The gloves were hot, and her fingers and palms were sweating inside the latex. Bellair wrestled the ventilator tube from Daniels’s open mouth. The plastic popped and buckled.

  Eversley put his camera back in the cabinet. He arched his back and stretched. “Get your scoopers, people. Time to make a canoe.”

  Sonora heard the whir of the small circular saw, the blade cleaving a Y shape at the top of Daniels’s chest. The thick layer of skin pulled away like a heavy apron, exposing a butcher-shop panoply of meat and fat and fouling the air with the dark, human smell of an open body cavity. As always, the yellow globs of fat made Sonora promise herself that she would begin regular exercise. Tomorrow. First thing.

  “I don’t feel so good,” Sonora said mildly.

  Eversley and Bellair looked up sharply, always in expectation that anyone outside the closed circle of death specialists would give way and hit the floor. It was considered bad form to go from the morgue to the emergency room—even worse to make the complete circle and come back dead from the ER with a fractured skull.

  “Just kidding,” she said.

  Bellair’s expression was tolerant. Eversley stuck out his tongue. He took a large pair of lopping shears and cut through Mark Daniels’s ribcage, and the orchestrated mayhem began. The intestines were scooped out, the internal organs removed, weighed, then set on a cutting board where a med student took slices and chunks and put them in specimen bottles.

  Bellair took a cup of blood from the chest cavity, and the redhead used a syringe to extract urine from the bladder.

  “No gallstones,” said the brunette. She wrestled a knife across the tough yellow-opaque membrane of the gall bladder. Bellair slit the stomach, and Sonora suddenly smelled the loud odor of bourbon.

  “Bourbon. Undigested popcorn. Some other stuff here, eaten a few hours earlier. Eversley can figure it out in the lab.”

  Sonora made a note. Mark Daniels’s last meal. Bourbon and popcorn—Cujo’s?

  Sonora looked up in time to see Marty peeling the scalp over the top of the head. It pulled away like skin from a chicken, looking like a thick Halloween mask, and exposing the blood-reddened skull beneath the skin. Marty took a circular saw and cut through the back of the skull, a fine grind of bone clouding the air like chalk dust.

  He took the carefully cut pieces of skull away, and Sonora thought of removing the shell from a horseshoe crab. Marty was precise and orderly, and instead of crabmeat, his reward was Mark Dan
iels’s brain.

  “Epidural hemorrhage,” Marty said.

  Sonora looked up. “A blow to the head?”

  Bellair raised a hand. “Maybe.” She examined the tough membrane covering the skull and cut the back section. “I’d say this is from the heat.”

  Sonora picked her camera up and took a picture of the skull and membrane Bellair had exposed, then stepped back out of the way.

  The sounds that came from the med students’ cutting boards made Sonora think of boning chicken. It was all much too much like what one found in the meat department at Winn-Dixie, which, Sonora thought, at least provided a small insight into cannibalism. She hadn’t eaten meat for several weeks after her first autopsy.

  Bellair was frowning. “Soot in the air passages. Pulmonary edema.”

  Sonora made notes on the details of Mark Daniels’s agonizing death. And it was over at last, Bellair pulling off her gloves, intestines and various odds and ends belonging to Mark Daniels packed into a plastic bag, tied off, and left to rest between his legs.

  Even dead people had stuff to keep up with.

  Eversley wadded his soiled gloves into a ball, tossed them underhand into an overflowing trash can. “You know the accelerant?”

  “Gasoline.”

  “I’ll get back to you on the carbon monoxide levels, and the levels of hydrogen cyanide or sulfide nitrous oxide.”

  “What’s the cyanide from?” Sonora asked.

  “Died in a car, right? All that stuff is petroleum-based plastic. Which means it burns like hell and gives off toxic gas. Likely he’s dead from a combination of carbon monoxide and cyanide.”

  “Not the burns?”

  “They didn’t help. But if it was just burns, he would have hung on for about three days, probably even lived. We’ll see what the carboxyhemoglobin levels are, but cyanide disappears from the blood and tissue at a rate that in no way relates to the concentration.”

  “Tell me what you’re saying, Eversley.”

  “He likely died of a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide poisoning. The cyanide levels will be hard to pinpoint, especially if the EMT was smart and gave him thiosulfate.” He looked at Bellair. “They do that?”

  “Wouldn’t cyanide have killed him in a matter of minutes?” Sonora asked.

  “Nope. Even with a hefty dose. Don’t opt for the cyanide capsules if you ever hit death row.”

  “Thank you, Eversley. I’ll write that down.”

  “It isn’t a fun way to die. DA could make something of it in court.”

  “Eversley, he was handcuffed, doused with gasoline, shot in the leg, and set on fire. DA should be home free.”

  “Plus you got pictures. Because the defense attorney—”

  “Eversley, you got to quit watching so much TV.”

  16

  Sonora had always liked the Mount Adams area—the town houses crowded cheek by jowl, teetering over the hillside, overlooking the river and the city proper. The gears of her car made whirring sounds as the street rose at a twenty-five-degree angle.

  A man stopped on the sidewalk and paused to look at the window display in the kind of jewelry store where they didn’t bother to show prices. Something about the man, the set of his shoulders, the very shape of him, made Sonora hit the brakes and look back over her shoulder.

  He did not notice, did not even look up, and it took no more than a quick second glance for Sonora to know that this was not Zack, didn’t even look all that much like him.

  She pulled the car back into traffic, feeling the sag in her shoulders, an ache in her back. She hadn’t done this in ages, and she hated herself for it, that quick moment of recognition—yes, there he is—paths of logic in her mind setting off warning bells—no, Sonora, this can’t be right.

  For months after Zack’s death she had unconsciously looked for his face in every crowd—mall, movie, grocery store—expecting, God knew why, to run across him at the Dairy Mart buying Shredded Wheat. Some part of her held those everyday mundane images, some part of her refused to believe that she would not walk into the bathroom and see him shaving.

  The nightmare really was over.

  She realized that the man reminded her of Zack because he looked angry—angry because she worked long hours, or because the kids were noisy, or because he was unhappy and any unhappiness was her fault, and life was unjust, and no one ever treated him right. Angry just because.

  Sonora inched the car up the steep hillside, moving into the residential part of Mount Adams.

  Years ago the area had been favored by university students, but the Volkswagons and Karmann Ghias had given way to four-wheel-drive Jeeps, Audis, and Saabs. Every other town home had been gentrified, and everything, from the facade of a bar called Longworth’s to the Buckeye Security signs in a sprinkling of front yards and the trimmed and beribboned sheepdog prancing down the sidewalk, said yuppie loud and clear.

  For Sale signs were common.

  Sonora passed Rookwood Pottery, all wooden beams and English Tudor attitude, maneuvered around a blue truck that said H. JOHNSON MOVING AND STORAGE, and smiled to herself when she spotted a town home that was in bad need of paint, with a yard gone to weeds and an old church pew on the front porch. Rebel heart.

  The church pew proved to be too much of a distraction, and she barely missed a brown metal Dumpster that said RUMPKE on the side.

  If she did not have children, Sonora thought, she would live here. Provided a bag of money fell on her head.

  Daniels lived in one of the better ones—a renovated, slender, three-story building of reddish pink brick trimmed in the shade of dark blue that the paint stores called Early American. The tiny patch of lawn was neatly landscaped and lovingly groomed.

  Keaton Daniels had the front door open by the time she was parked and halfway down the walk. He was unshaven and did not look well, beard stubble against chalk white skin. He wore khakis again, a white T-shirt, thick cotton socks.

  In Sonora’s mind came the image of the brother, violated on the metal gurney, Marty massaging the scalp before peeling the face away and baring the skull beneath. Sonora pushed hair out of her eyes, trying to shed the image, focusing on Keaton. I do not want to see this man on an autopsy table, she thought.

  “Mr. Daniels?”

  He nodded and opened the door, mouthing polite words that ran together and sounded absent and empty.

  He bypassed the living room and headed into the kitchen. Light streamed into the breakfast nook. Daniels led her to a round oak table covered with white terry cloth, a half-filled coffee cup at one place, along with a brittle-looking piece of buttered whole-wheat toast, one large bite off a corner.

  A red dishcloth was thrown across the middle of the table. A rolled-up newspaper was thrust to one side, the red rubber band peeled off, the paper uncurling. A stack of mail sat next to the plate, two or three envelopes ripped open. Sonora saw a water bill. Visa.

  She took out her notepad and sat down across from the interrupted breakfast and waited, chin in hand, elbows on the tablecloth.

  Daniels did not sit. He rested a knee in his chair and shoved a thick finger toward a cheap white envelope with an Elvis stamp, canceled.

  “I didn’t go out yesterday, I didn’t even get my mail. But this morning, I tried to at least get back in some kind of routine, so I made breakfast, got the paper and stuff.”

  Sonora checked the tape recorder, saw it was working, then resumed eye contact. Daniels leaned his weight on the knee.

  “All that time, this was sitting in the mailbox.”

  He picked up the red dishcloth and uncovered a Polaroid snapshot. The picture was upside down from Sonora’s point of view. She moved Keaton Daniels gently to one side.

  Mark Daniels looked through the open window of the car, shirtless, hair wildly mussed. His hands were cuffed, stretched to the limits of their rings as he tried to pull them free. Sonora could see something wrapped through the steering wheel and looped around his waist. His hair loo
ked wet, like he was sweating. No, she realized. Gasoline. He’d been doused with gasoline.

  Just before ignition, Sonora thought. The look on his face was one she hoped never to see on someone she loved.

  Sonora had gone through some nasty little caches before, but she had never known a killer to send one of the pictures to the victim’s family. She sat down slowly in the hardbacked Windsor chair.

  Her first impulse was to throw the dishtowel back over the picture, but the cop took over and she let it be. Keaton Daniels was beside her, pointedly looking away.

  She took his arm. “Come on.”

  She had liked the look of the living room when she’d come in, the honey beige love seat nestled between two worn bookcases filled with paperbacks, a few hardcovers, children’s books and games. An old walnut desk sat perpendicular to the couch, making a corner of comfort amidst the black-leather-and-chrome furniture tastefully grouped on the other side of the room.

  Sonora looked from one side to the other.

  “The good stuff belongs to the guy who owns this place,” Keaton told her. “His company sent him to Germany for nine months. The junky stuff is mine.”

  “By all means, the junky stuff.” Sonora sat on the love seat, and Keaton sat on the edge of the cushion beside her.

  “There’s more,” he told her. “I called my mother after the picture came. I was afraid she’d gotten something.”

  “And?” Sonora had her notebook out again, the recorder going.

  “No. But she had an odd visitor. She’s … she’s in a sort of convalescent home. She’s young but … it’s complicated.”

  “What kind of visitor?”

  “A young lady. My mother’s words. Who wanted to talk about Mark, and about me.”

  “About you? Did your mother describe this young lady?”

  “Small and blond. Kind of fragile.”

  Sonora ran a hand through her hair. “Name?”

  “Wouldn’t give one.”

  “What did your mother think of her?”

  “She was puzzled. She didn’t like the woman’s questions, she was too familiar, that’s how she put it. She means—”