Scared Stiff

by Annelise Ryan

  Hurley says, “I’m betting she was killed after six that night. The husband definitely has some issues and I think that whole thing with the separation papers set him off.”

  I frown and Hurley catches it. “What? You still think he’s innocent?”

  I shrug. “I’m having a hard time believing he could do this, based on what I know of him.”

  “Want to make a friendly wager on it?”

  “I don’t know. It sounds like you already have your mind made up. How do I know you’ll even try to find another suspect?”

  Hurley sighs and gives me an are-you-kidding-me? look. “I always keep an open mind,” he says.

  “You seem pretty convinced that Erik did this.”

  “At the moment I am.”

  “See, I knew it.” I look pointedly at Izzy, who wisely shrugs and says nothing. “Taking this wager would be a sucker bet.”

  “Then find me someone who looks better for it,” Hurley says.

  “Will you let me do some of my own investigating?”

  “As long as you keep me in the loop, don’t do anything that would interfere with the official investigation, and promise to share anything you find with me.”

  “And you’ll share evidence with me?”

  “Tit for tat,” Hurley says with a suggestive grin.

  I consider the idea. I’m competitive by nature and something about Hurley brings that trait out even stronger in me. “What are the stakes?” I ask.

  Hurley shrugs, thinks a moment, and then says, “How about dinner? The winner picks the place and time, and the loser gets to pay.”

  “Deal,” I say without hesitation, so excited over the prospect of dinner with Hurley that, for a moment, I don’t care who wins the bet.

  “Good.” He closes his eyes, licks his lips, and says, “Mmmm. I can already taste my filet mignon from Harvey’s, medium rare, wrapped in bacon, with a baked potato on the side.”

  I’m so transfixed by the sight of Hurley licking his lips and moaning that it takes me a second to remember that a dinner at Harvey’s will cost me more than half a week’s pay. My hands start to shake and I’m not sure if it’s out of fear or lust. I realize Izzy has finished cracking Shannon’s chest and is in the process of removing one of her lungs, so I tear my gaze from Hurley and try to focus on the work instead. Trembling hands, sharp scalpels, and slippery organs make for a bad combination.

  Shannon’s chest cavity is filled with clots of blood, and as Izzy scoops some of them out of the way, the idea of a medium rare filet mignon is suddenly nauseating. Izzy severs the connections for the right lung, removes it from the chest cavity, and hands it to me. I weigh it on the scale, noting that its color is a dull gray rather than the healthy pink it should be, an indication that Shannon was a smoker. Once I take it from the scale and lay it on the dissection table, I can see that it also has two bullet holes in it: one in the front of the lower lobe, which is most likely the entry point, and a second on the back of the middle lobe, the probable exit point.

  Izzy confirms my suspicions when he finds a bullet lodged next to Shannon’s thoracic spine. He pulls the bullet out, cleans it off, and shows it to Hurley. “Looks like a .38,” he says.

  “Yup,” Hurley agrees. “And guess who owns a .38 caliber handgun?”

  “Half the people in Wisconsin?” I offer, knowing it’s not the answer he’s looking for.

  “I don’t know about half,” he says, “but I know Erik Tolliver owns one. He bought it two years ago.”

  I sigh, and start calculating how many pints of ice cream I’m going to have to forgo in the future so I can save up enough money to pay for our dinner date. I might have to ask Izzy for a raise, which would be rather brazen considering that I’ve only been on the job for a couple of weeks.

  “Lots of people have guns,” I counter. It’s a feeble argument, but a true one. The NRA is alive and well in Wisconsin, where deer season means closed-down businesses, hunting widow parties, and men who become live oxymora by dressing in camouflage clothes topped with blaze orange vests. Every year, one or two yahoos are mistaken for a deer and get shot . . . Darwinism in action.

  “A .38 is pretty common, isn’t it?” I continue. “That alone isn’t enough to convict the guy.”

  “Maybe not,” Hurley says. “But it’s one more piece of the puzzle.”

  “Did you find Erik’s gun?” Izzy asks.

  Hurley shakes his head. “Apparently he was smart enough to ditch the thing. I had a couple guys execute a search warrant on his place early this morning.”

  We have removed the second lung, and after noting that Shannon had a hiatal hernia—a typically benign condition where there is a hole in the diaphragm that allows a portion of the stomach to slide into the chest cavity—Izzy cuts loose Shannon’s stomach. As soon as it’s out, he slices it open.

  “Her stomach is empty,” he says.

  “What does that mean?” Hurley asks.

  “Well, it takes four to six hours after ingestion for food to empty out of the stomach and move into the intestines. So if Shannon ate around twelve-thirty as her coworkers said, it’s unlikely she was killed before four-thirty. Once I get a look at her intestines I might be able to finesse that estimate some more.”

  For the next half an hour the room is relatively silent except for the sounds of slicing, dicing, and sloshing organs. We find a second bullet in the abdominal cavity and my initial suspicion that Shannon’s liver was hit by one of the bullets is confirmed. The damage to the organ is extensive and would have caused significant bleeding. Some of the blood, most of it eventually, would have oozed out through the bullet wound. But a fair amount had also spread throughout the abdominal cavity, a condition that would have been excruciatingly painful. It might also have been a blessing of sorts since the bleeding into the chest cavity, along with the gradual collapse of the shot lung, would have caused a slow form of suffocation had she not bled out from the liver first.

  For a moment I imagine Shannon, wounded, frightened, weak, and in pain, dragging herself down the hall of her house and out onto the porch in hopes of finding help. She had to have known she was seriously wounded and likely dying, and her will to live must have been strong. That she lost her life in such a cruel, horrifying, and painful way both saddens and angers me.

  Nothing new is discovered during the examination of the remaining organs other than the fact that Shannon’s uterus is riddled with large, fibroid tumors, something that would have made it very difficult, if not impossible, for her to get or stay pregnant. With Shannon’s abdominal cavity now devoid of organs, Izzy shifts his attention to her intestines, which we’d removed earlier and placed in a large basin on the dissection table. He runs the twenty-some feet of small intestine like a garden hose, examining it inch by inch, opening sections along the way. Then he does the same with the large intestine.

  “The only food I see here is in the ascending colon,” he says when he’s done. “That would take, on average, about eight to twelve hours. So if we assume she ate nothing else after her lunch at Dairy Airs, it’s likely she was killed sometime between the hours of eight P.M. and midnight, give or take an hour or two.”

  “What a coincidence,” Hurley says, shooting me a smug look. “Our primary suspect has no alibi for those hours.”

  “You mean your primary suspect,” I grumble.

  Hurley ignores my comeback and instead closes his eyes and licks his lips, an action that leaves me with my jaw hanging. “I can taste my steak already,” he says.

  His display of arrogant confidence brings out my competitive side. But though I want desperately to be right about Erik and his innocence, I know I have to be careful not to lose my objectivity.

  “Don’t get too cocky,” I tell Hurley. “It’s still only an estimate and I’m sure crow doesn’t taste nearly as good as filet mignon.”

  Chapter 11

  Hurley’s challenge leaves me more determined than ever, so Monday morning I phone the office to tell t
hem I’ll be in late. Cass takes the message and informs me that Izzy is also tied up this morning so my delay shouldn’t be a problem. I then make a phone call to the hospital to see if Erik Tolliver is on duty. He is, but I have another stop I want to make first.

  Ten minutes later I pull into the parking lot of Dairy Airs, head inside, and settle in at one of the tables.

  The waitress who serves me is Jackie Nash, an ex-classmate of mine and the owners’ daughter. I know Jackie not only because of our school connection, but because she’s had a number of surgeries at the hospital. Back in high school she had big plans, as did the rest of us, for escaping her small-town roots and moving to the big city. But a tragic car accident in her junior year left her burned over seventy percent of her body, and that changed everything. She still bears some horrific scars despite several plastic surgeries for grafts and scar revisions, and the gnarled tissue on her legs has given her a chronic limp. It might not have been so bad had the damage been contained to her torso and limbs but the flames also reached one side of her face. As a result, she resembles the Batman villain Two Face, looking relatively normal—and quite pretty—from one side, and horribly maimed from the other.

  Jackie has been working the family business ever since her recovery from the accident. Those of us in town who know her are used to her scars, but occasionally, when strangers drop in, she is forced to face the awkward stares and rude comments of brutally honest children and tactless adults. Not surprisingly, those moments along with the trauma of the accident and the disruption it caused to her personal life have left her with more than a few emotional scars to go with the physical ones. During the years I worked in the hospital ER, I took care of Jackie during several of her mental breakdowns, though I’ve heard she’s doing better these days.

  Today she greets me with a smile, takes my order for a bowl of peach ice cream—I figure fruit is a good choice for breakfast—and brings it back a few minutes later. As I watch her walking back to the table something about her seems different, though I can’t figure out what it is. I finally decide it’s her face, which seems to have a new glow to it. Had she had another graft revision surgery, or was she simply using new make-up?

  “What’s new?” she asks, sliding into the chair across from me as I swallow my first spoonful. “What’s this I hear about you and David?”

  As if the whole town didn’t know already. “It’s true,” I tell her. “We split up. I’m filing for divorce.”

  “I also heard you changed jobs. Someone said you’re working for the coroner now.”

  I suspect Jackie is merely being nosy, trying to earn a little leverage in the gossip commodity. But it’s okay because her veiled inquiry offers me the perfect opening.

  “That’s also true,” I say after swallowing another bite. “In fact, that’s one of the reasons I’m here. I’m looking into Shannon Tolliver’s murder.”

  She shakes her head, looking stricken. “It’s a terrible, terrible thing that happened to Shannon. Do they have any idea who did it?”

  “Nothing solid yet. Do you have any ideas?”

  Jackie rears back and looks at me, clearly startled by the question. “Me? Why would you ask me?”

  I shrug. “You worked with Shannon so I figured you might have some insight into her life and the people in it.”

  Jackie glances around at the other tables and then looks down at her hands in her lap, her fingers fidgeting. “I suppose they’ll suspect Erik,” she says in a low voice. “Things have been kind of strained between him and Shannon ever since they split up.”

  “I heard they had an argument of some sort a couple of days before she died. Were you here when it happened?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jackie says, rolling her eyes. “It was pretty intense. Shannon served Erik with separation papers and he didn’t take it too well.”

  “Do you remember what they said?”

  Jackie cocks her head to one side and looks up at the ceiling for a moment, giving me time to eat another spoonful of ice cream. “Well, I remember Erik telling Shannon he didn’t want a divorce. He told her he wanted to try to work things out. But Shannon was pretty adamant about going ahead with it. Erik got mad, called her a bitch, and threw the papers at her. Then Shannon yelled at him to leave.”

  “Did he?”

  Jackie nods. “He stormed out, got in his car, and peeled rubber out of the parking lot.”

  “What did Shannon do or say after that?”

  “Well, she was pretty upset, crying and all. It was the end of her shift so she went into the back room for a bit to try to collect herself. Then she came out, ordered a bunch of food to go, and as soon as it was ready, she left.”

  “Did you see Erik again after that?”

  Jackie shakes her head. “Nope, but he never did come around much. He’s lactose intolerant so there isn’t much here he can eat.”

  “Who else was working that day?”

  “It was me and Shannon up front here. Mom was working in back.”

  “Did your mom witness the argument between Shannon and Erik?”

  She nods. “Mom spent some time afterward trying to calm Shannon down.”

  “Is your mom here today?” I doubt it since I haven’t seen her, and Jackie confirms my guess with a shake of her head.

  “Dad’s here today. Mom had a doctor’s appointment.” She takes out her order pad, scribbles something on a blank page, rips it out, and hands it to me. “Here’s our home phone number,” she says. “Give her a call if you want.”

  I take the paper and slip it into my purse. “Thanks. I will. If you can think of anything else about Shannon that might be significant, let me know. You can reach me at the ME’s office.” I give her the number, she writes it on another blank page of her order pad, and stuffs it in her pocket.

  “Will do,” she says. As a new customer enters, she gets up and adds, “Gotta run, but it was good talking with you, Mattie. Good luck with the whole marriage thing.”

  It only takes me another minute to finish my ice cream because I manage to resist the urge to lick the bowl. Then I get back in my car and head for Mercy Hospital, my old employer.

  The hospital is an emotional place for me. Not only is it where both the birth and death of my marriage took place, it’s where I worked for over twelve years. A good portion of my adulthood has been spent there, and I have tons of memories, both good and bad.

  Many of the good ones are from my years in the ER. Things there can go from monotonous to chaotic in a matter of seconds, and it can be wonderfully, disgustingly messy—emotionally messy, blood-and-guts messy, and life-and-death messy. I left the ER to go work in the OR so I could be closer to my husband, David. But in the end, I lost two things that were very important to me: David and my job in the ER.

  These days I’m a topic of lively gossip at the hospital—the nurse who caught her husband playing tonsil hockey with someone else in one of the operating rooms; the nurse who was suspected of murdering the lipstick on the dipstick; and the nurse who now slices and dices in a whole new environment. Oh, yeah, and the nurse involved in the infamous nipple incident.

  It’s been a few months since David and I split and since then there have been other topics to occupy the hard-core gossipers. While those events offered some distraction, they weren’t enough to divert attention away from me altogether. I still get stared at and I swear I hear my name whispered in corners every time I go there.

  Hoping to minimize the scrutiny today, I bypass the main hospital entrance and go in through the ER instead. The ER staff is a little less judgmental than your average hospital worker. The scale of what’s weird, newsworthy, and important gets altered once you’ve cared for a man with a flashlight up his rectum, a condition that was later dubbed a “butt light.”

  As I walk through the ER doors, I can feel that familiar surge of excitement thrumming just below my skin. The air here always feels different. Today it sounds and smells different, too. Instead of the typical antiseptic sm
ells, there is a distinct odor of feces in the air, and the low thrum of heart monitors, vital sign machines, and soft-soled shoes has been replaced by the sounds of a woman screaming like a banshee from behind one of the curtains. A nurse sitting behind the desk, a veteran ER warrior of some twenty-plus years named Debbie Hanson, greets me.

  “Mattie! Welcome to the madhouse.”

  I smile and nod toward the noise. “That sounds ominous.”

  “It’s a major Code Brown,” Debbie says, lowering her voice. “She’s been on Vicodin for a month without any stool softener and now her bowels are backed up to her eyeballs.”

  The screaming reaches a new crescendo and then suddenly stops, replaced by exhausted panting. A moment later, one of the ER techs emerges from behind the screaming woman’s curtain carrying the bucket from a bedside commode. Debbie hops up and walks over to the tech.

  “Let me see,” Debbie says.

  The tech proffers the bucket and a pungent fecal smell permeates the air.

  “Wow,” Debbie says with a look of respect. “I might have to give that one a name and an Apgar score.” She looks over at me. “Want to see?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Debbie hands the bucket back to the tech and says, “Don’t even try to flush that down the hopper without breaking it up first or we’ll be mopping for the rest of the day.”

  The tech nods, makes a face of disgust, and disappears into the dirty utility room carrying her prize. Debbie shakes her head with amazement. “I think that one might have set a record,” she says, stepping back behind the desk and plopping down in front of a computer to make an entry in the patient’s chart. “So what brings you here?” she asks as she types.

  “I was hoping to talk to Erik Tolliver about what happened to his wife, Shannon.”

  Debbie frowns. “Oh, yeah, I heard about that. Scary stuff.” She pauses and her eyes grow big. “Do you think Erik did it?”

  I shrug, not willing to commit one way or the other. “It’s very early in the investigation. I’m still trying to sort through the preliminaries.”