by Ken Oder
Shirley’s Tears
March 6, 1967, Monday night
At ten p.m., Shirley West joined Cole in Randy Hotchkiss’s kitchen. Cole watched her look over Randy’s corpse. In her midforties, average height, chunky figure, she wore a shapeless, wrinkled gray dress and no makeup. Her short, stiff brown hair looked as though she’d cut it herself with a pair of dull scissors. On her best day, she looked bedraggled, but that night she looked worse—grief-stricken, devastated.
Cole was surprised. Shirley was the consummate professional. Unmarried with no children and no close friends other than lab workers and law enforcement personnel, her job was her life. In fifteen years of working with her, Cole had seen her maintain a stoic attitude throughout the most graphic, heartbreaking crime scenes but that night she wept openly.
Cole put his hand on her shoulder.
She wiped tears from her face. “When the Virginia Chief Medical Examiner appointed me the assistant in charge of the Western District Office, I was thirty-one. He passed over several older men who did everything they could to undermine my authority. Almost everyone treated me like an amateur. The local medical examiners were the worst of the lot. Randy was the only one who supported me. He never once questioned my direction and spoke up for me every chance he got. Firing him broke my heart.”
“You made the right decision. He wasn’t fit to do the job.”
“I know, but it’s a shame. Just a few years ago, he was a fine doctor. A careful medical examiner. A good man. What the hell happened to him?”
“Betty Lou Mundy happened to him.”
Shirley looked surprised and troubled. “What do you mean?”
Cole told her about his suspicion that Randy was Betty Lou’s lover, that Betty Lou killed Hazel Emley, and that Randy covered it up. Cole had sent Mabel home to take care of her kids before Shirley arrived, so she wasn’t there to explain her reasons for believing Randy might also be Betty Lou’s murderer. Cole laid out the circumstantial evidence supporting her theory. “The evidence is weak. I’d hoped to learn enough from Randy to rule him out as her murderer. His suicide leaves us without answers to a passel of questions.”
Shirley gazed at Randy morosely. “What a tragedy. Such a waste of talent.” She stared at Randy for a long time. Then she seemed to remember her professional responsibilities. She walked around to Randy’s right side and looked at the syringe on the table and the puncture mark in his arm. A perplexed frown came across her face. She looked at the vial beside the bottle of vodka. She stepped closer to it and peered at it, then straightened up and looked at Cole. “Something’s wrong here.”
Cole looked at Randy, the syringe, and the vial. “What do you mean?”
“The wound from the injection is in Randy’s right arm. If he gave himself the shot, he used his left hand to do it. Randy was right-handed, and he had severe right hand dominance. Using his left hand to inject a drug into his right arm would have been unnatural and awkward for him.”
Shirley was right, Cole thought. Randy had rarely used his left hand to do anything. “He was drunk. Could that explain it?”
“Intoxication would have made it more difficult for him to accomplish the injection with his left hand.” Shirley pointed to the vial. “Besides, Randy would never have chosen to kill himself with succinylcholine.”
“Why?”
“Succinylcholine is a skeletal muscle relaxant. An overdose paralyzes you within thirty to sixty seconds after the injection. You’re trapped inside your body, immobile and helpless, while the drug shuts down your lungs. You suffocate slowly, your breath growing shorter and shorter until you can’t breathe at all, and you don’t lose any brain function while this goes on. You know exactly what’s happening to you right up to the moment of death. No one would choose to die that way, least of all a doctor, who knew what the drug would do to him.”
Cole stared at Randy, digesting the implications of Shirley’s reasoning. “Are you saying someone poisoned Randy with that drug?”
“That’s a more logical explanation than suicide for what we’ve found here. It may not be the only explanation. I’ll reserve judgment until I perform an autopsy.” Shirley withdrew a pair of plastic gloves from her bag, put them on, picked up the vial of succinylcholine and held it up to the overhead light. “Randy had no use for succinylcholine in his medical practice. He was an internist. Succinylcholine’s an anesthetic that enables intubation.”
“What’s intubation?”
“An anesthesiologist gives a patient succinylcholine so he can slide a tube down his throat to help him breathe during surgery. In small doses, it paralyzes the throat and the patient feels no pain when the doctor inserts the breathing tube. But in large doses, it’s lethal. As an internist, Randy wouldn’t have kept a supply on hand.”
“Where did he get it, then?”
“He had privileges at Dolley Madison. He could have gotten it there, I suppose, but there’s still no way in hell he would have killed himself with it. There are a hundred easier ways to die, and as a doctor, Randy knew them all.”
“I’ll get Frank and the forensics team out of bed again,” Cole said wearily.
Shirley set the vial on the table. “Tell them to scour the whole house for signs of an intruder.”
Cole thought about murder by injection of a lethal drug. “We’re looking for a doctor, a nurse, or someone in the medical field. The run-of-the-mill murderer wouldn’t know about such a drug, much less have access to it.”
Shirley started to say something and then seemed to reconsider.
“One thing we know for sure,” Cole said. “If Randy didn’t kill himself, we’re looking for one hellacious cruel son of a bitch.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Healing Time
March 7, 1967, Tuesday morning
Ray awoke in bed shortly after dawn. He rolled over and looked out the bedroom window. Behind the apple orchard at the rear of the property, a red sun rose into cardinal, gold, and russet clouds. Crimson dust motes floated in a shaft of light pouring in the window.
He had slept fully dressed under an old musty quilt for nearly seventy-two hours. His clothing and the sheets beneath him were wet with his perspiration. He had hoped to sweat out the poison of infection, and it seemed to have worked. He felt much better.
He stroked the bandage that covered his forearm. The drunken doctor had lanced the wound, sterilized and dressed it, and had given him a tetanus shot, antibiotics, and an injection of morphine. Afterwards, Ray rummaged through the doctor’s cache of drugs and stole enough amoxicillin, morphine, and gauze to treat the wound himself from there on. Since then, he had changed the bandage twice and given himself periodic shots of morphine, the last twelve hours ago.
The morphine had worn off and his arm hurt again, but not as badly as the day before. He was on the mend, but he needed at least another day’s rest to regain the strength to eliminate the last target, the softest of the five.
He ran his hand over his brow and sighed. He’d be relieved to finish up. This project had very nearly become his white whale. If he hadn’t realized at the last minute that he could make the doctor help him, he would have perished.
He sat up on the edge of the bed. He held his head in his hands and waited for the dizziness to pass. He needed another shot of morphine. He’d have to cut himself off from it soon, though. One more shot, maybe two. That would be his limit. He could take out his last target even if he was in the midst of withdrawal, but when he turned to Cole, he would need all his faculties. No weaknesses. No distractions.
The lightheadedness subsided. He stood and walked carefully out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and through the hallway to the kitchen where he’d stored the drugs.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Autopsy
March 8, 1967, Wednesday afternoon
Cole stood at the door of the Western District’s autopsy laboratory, a large room with stainless steel counters and sinks, white tile walls, recessed fluore
scent lighting, and a gray linoleum floor. Three stainless steel gurneys stood parallel to one another in the center of the room. Shirley West, dressed in a blue smock, mask, and cap, leaned over the middle gurney where Hazel Emley’s cadaver lay naked, her chest and belly fileted and hollowed out, her breastbone still in place, bleach-white, with rib bones fanning out from it like bedsprings.
The commonwealth’s attorney had filed a petition for an expedited exhumation Monday night and Judge Blackwell granted the application first thing Tuesday morning, primarily because Rachel McNiel consented to the exhumation and autopsy on behalf of Reba. The body was exhumed late Tuesday and transported to the autopsy room in Roanoke overnight. Shirley began the autopsy Wednesday morning. Cole arrived at her laboratory that afternoon.
He ran his eyes over the length of Hazel’s body sprawled on the gurney. Stringy gray hair, long, thin face, eyes closed, blue lips parted slightly, bony arms at her sides, a patch of gray pubic hair, mottled cellulite along stick-thin thighs, knobby, bunioned feet. George Hollingsworth had done a good job with the corpse, Cole thought. Hazel had been in the ground for three months and Cole saw little sign of decay.
Cole cleared his throat to get Shirley’s attention. She looked up at him, a scalpel in her hand poised over the corpse. She set it on a tray at the head of the gurney and crossed the lab to a small office with a half window looking out on the autopsy room, gesturing for Cole to follow. They went inside.
Shirley stripped off her surgical gloves and took off her cap and mask and tossed them in a bin by the door. She sat down behind a gray metal desk by the window.
Cole sat down across from her. “Mabel said you wanted to talk to me right away.”
“I haven’t finished the autopsy, but given the pace of homicides in your county, I figured you’d want to discuss my tentative conclusions as soon as possible.” She paused. “Conclusions is too strong a word. Educated guesses would be more accurate.”
Shirley straightened a pile of documents and handwritten notes on her desk and folded her hands on top of it. “I think someone killed Hazel with succinylcholine, but I can’t prove it. Results from the blood and tissue samples won’t be ready for a few days, but they won’t support my guesswork. We won’t find succinylcholine in her system. It disappears within minutes of injection, breaking down into metabolites that normally exist in the body. It’s a poison that can’t be traced. The perfect murder weapon.”
“If you can’t trace it, how do you know someone murdered Hazel with it?”
“I don’t know. I’m guessing, and I wouldn’t venture such a guess if Randy hadn’t died from an injection of succinylcholine. I found visceral congestion, severe pulmonary edema, and petechial hemorrhage of the lungs in Hazel’s corpse. All the same conditions were present in Randy’s corpse and are consistent with a succinylcholine injection, but they could have natural causes as well. Certain metabolites are present in both corpses at higher than normal levels, but that could also occur for health-related reasons. Beyond that, all I’ve got to support my guesswork is circumstantial evidence, suspicious minor injuries on Hazel’s corpse that may indicate a forcible injection.” Shirley handed Cole three photographs.
He looked them over. The first depicted a fist-sized purplish bruise in the center of Hazel’s back. The other two were close-ups of her right forearm, showing an inch-wide bruise about three inches above the wrist.
“The elderly tend to bruise easily,” Shirley said, “and the discoloration lingers, so these injuries could have been inflicted within minutes of her death or hours earlier. I’m betting on minutes before.” Shirley handed Cole another photograph. It was a close-up of Hazel’s buttocks, her cheeks gray and cratered with cellulite. Shirley pointed to a spot in the center of the right buttock. “Look closely there.”
Cole held the photo up to the light and squinted at it. The wound was almost invisible, a small dot the size of a pinhead. “What is it?”
“The entry point of a hypodermic needle. I think someone held Hazel facedown, placed his knee on her back, grabbed her right arm as she tried to fight him off, and plunged a syringe into her hip.”
“You think Randy did this?”
“He’s the most logical suspect. His external examination of the corpse was cursory to nonexistent; he ruled the cause of death as pneumonia in the absence of any evidence; and he released the body to the undertaker in record time. It’s possible he conspired with Betty Lou to murder Hazel with a drug he hoped would be untraceable and then rushed the body to the funeral home to make sure no one had a chance to discover what they’d done. The problem with that theory is I can’t establish where Randy would have gotten the succinylcholine he used to kill Hazel.”
“You said the other night he had privileges at Dolley Madison.”
“He had access to the succinylcholine at Dolley Madison, but the succinylcholine we found in his home beside his corpse didn’t come from the hospital. The label on the vial says it was manufactured by Sandoz, a Swiss company. The succinylcholine Dolley Madison has in stock was manufactured by Pfizer.”
“Could he have bought the drug directly from Sandoz?”
“Drug manufacturers typically don’t sell directly to doctors. Randy could have purchased it from a wholesaler, but I don’t think he did. I talked to his partner, Ralph Packer. He says he orders all the drugs for their office and he’s never ordered succinylcholine. He talked to their wholesaler to see if Randy had purchased any drugs on his own. The wholesaler hadn’t taken an order from Randy in more than a year.”
“So where did Randy get it?”
“One possibility would be a veterinarian. Vets sometimes use it to euthanize livestock and household pets.”
“Why would Randy go to a vet, rather than a hospital or his wholesaler?”
“If he was trying to cover his tracks, an obscure source makes sense.”
Cole thought about that. He didn’t believe Randy was capable of murder, but if he fell under Betty Lou’s spell, maybe he lost his bearings. “I’ll have one of my men canvass the veterinarians.”
Cole looked through the window at Hazel’s cadaver. He stared at the soles of her feet splayed at a forty-five-degree angle, blue-gray, withered. A cold anger came over him. That old lady sold her daughters to men who raped them. He couldn’t help but feel she deserved the hard death succinylcholine inflicted on her.
“Are you all right, Cole?”
“I’m fine.”
When he put his hands on the desk and pushed himself up to stand, his back clenched and his knees buckled. A groan escaped his lips. Shirley jumped up and grabbed him by the arm to hold him up.
He leaned forward on the desk, breathing hard.
“Cole?”
“Spinal stenosis. It comes and goes.”
“Maybe you should take some time off. Give your back a rest.”
“No need. I’m fine now.” He walked out of the office and through the autopsy room, pain shooting down his legs with every step.
Chapter Thirty
The Veterinarian
March 9, 1967, Thursday morning
Deputy Karson Deford took on the assignment of determining where Randy Hotchkiss purchased succinylcholine. Neither of the first two veterinarians he visited used the drug to treat animals. The third, Dr. Creasy Ashburn, was a different story.
Ashburn’s Animal Hospital was in a little brick building next to a Dairy Freeze on Wellington Street in Jeetersburg. On Thursday morning, Karson stepped into a small room that smelled faintly of cat urine. A black leather sofa and a matching chair sat in front of a fiberboard desk on a green wall-to-wall shag carpet. A little white-haired old woman sat in the leather chair holding an aged, bony Chihuahua in her lap. When Karson entered the room, the Chihuahua snarled at him.
A pimply-faced teenage girl with collar-length black hair sat behind the fiberboard desk, chewing and popping gum. When she looked up at Karson, her eyes widened and her jaw froze midchew.
“I’m looking f
or Dr. Ashburn,” Karson said to her.
The girl swallowed hard. “Well . . . what exactly you want him for?”
The Chihuahua jumped to its feet in the old lady’s lap, barking furiously. He tried to lunge at Karson, but the old lady held him in check. She shrugged and smiled sweetly. “Ain’t nothing I can do,” she said, raising her voice to be heard. “He don’t like coloreds.”
Karson gave her a cold look and turned to the teenage girl. “I’m here on official business,” he said, also raising his voice. “Is Dr. Ashburn in?”
The girl shouted back at him. “We don’t normally serve . . . I mean y’all don’t never come here!”
“Y’all,” Karson repeated silently in his head. He had been down this road so many times he knew every bend and twist in it, but it never failed to raise his temperature.
“I’m not a customer,” he shouted. He pointed to the badge on his chest. “I’m here on official business. Is Dr. Ashburn in?”
The Chihuahua’s racket reached an ear-splitting decibel; spittle was flying from his toothless jaws and his rheumy eyes were wild with rage. Karson glared at him. Here for a rabies shot, no doubt. The old lady continued to smile fondly at the dog and made no attempt to calm him.
Karson looked at the girl. She stared at him vapidly, her mouth hanging open, a wad of gum lodged between her bottom teeth and lip.
“How old are you?” he shouted.
“Fourteen,” she shouted back.
“You have a work permit?”
“No.”
“You’ve got five seconds to tell me where Ashburn is before I strip you of your job and write him up for unlawful employment of a minor.”