by Susan Dunlap
“So Delaney took in a lot of seawater. What about a secondary cause? Did you find ecchymosis around the eyes?” she asked, wondering about telltale broken blood vessels.
“Not enough to say he was strangled first.”
“The damage to the foveal cones and the choroid layer? Just how bad was it?”
Rosten flinched. The expert witness was piqued at being asked a question he’d hoped to avoid. Kiernan fought back a smile. So much for keeping it merely an interview. The old competitiveness was too ingrained. Rosten could, of course, stop answering her questions, but she was willing to bet he wouldn’t. Too much like throwing in the towel.
He didn’t. “All the foveal cones had been compromised. That fitted with the ophthalmologist’s report. The choroid was ninety percent dysfunctional too.”
“Did the ophthalmologist say what had caused that? Heredity? There are no signs of albinism.”
“The ophthalmologist guessed scotoma, but couldn’t say what disease caused it. He did say it wouldn’t be something communicable.”
She wasn’t surprised that had been Rosten’s first concern. One of the goals of the coroner’s department was to spot a contagious disease before a second body came in with it. “So Carlos Delaney had poor color vision and little acuity, right?” That would explain the tinted goggles, Kiernan thought, but not why he was wearing them at night. Maybe he hadn’t been able to take them off? If Robin Matucci had tied him up earlier … She’d need to think about that later.
Kiernan realized she’d reached the limit of Rosten’s knowledge of eyes. She stared again at Delaney’s disfigured face, trying to refocus herself, then asked, “What did toxicology show?”
“Point two three alcohol in the bloodstream.
“Point two three! Serious drinking.”
“Right.”
“So we can assume maybe six, seven ounces?”
“The level in the stomach was noticeably higher than in the liver.”
Kiernan nodded slowly. “He did his drinking so close to his death that the alcohol didn’t metabolize. Was he an alcoholic?”
Rosten wagged a finger just above Delaney’s liver. His hand looked brown against the white of the corpse. The familiarity of the movement suggested a bond between him and the deceased. Or did it indicate possession? His case.
“Well, now, that’s an interesting question. There was some fibrosis in the liver, nothing significant, but enough to make me wonder, so I checked the striated muscles.” He paused.
She could tell he was waiting for her to ask what he found, but she couldn’t bring herself to cheerlead. She waited.
Finally, he said, “Rhabdomyolysis.”
She nodded, impressed. Finding that microscopic change, the distortion of the fibers of the skeletal muscles, was good work indeed. “So signs of heavy alcohol consumption, but not necessarily recently.” She wondered if Delaney’s brain had shrunk away from the skull, leaving excessive liquid, as was the case with many long-time alcoholics. “Given the length of exposure he’d been subjected to, I suppose there was no way to check for wet brain?”
Marc’s hand stopped midair. “The tissue was like tapioca; nothing was firm enough to section.”
“Did you preserve it? You can section it after it firms up in the formalin.” She could hear the sharp edge to her voice.
“Of course I’ve preserved it,” he snapped. “I am very thorough.”
He didn’t have to mention the conclusion she had not reached in the autopsy that led to her firing. No other pathologist had called that a lack of thoroughness. But then no one else had refused to support her. She tried to relax her steel-tight neck muscles before asking, “Did you check—”
“Look, the guy was loaded and he drowned in a storm that capsized the boat. It’s very straightforward.”
Kiernan struggled to restrain her annoyance. “Okay, so Delaney had been a heavy drinker some years back, but his physical symptoms hadn’t progressed as would have been expected had he continued. Is that a safe guess?”
“A guess, yes.” Another unstated rebuke.
“And yet, Marc,” she said turning to face him, “Delaney had a real hard fall off the wagon right before he died. How do you explain that?”
“It’s not my job to justify behavior; I thought you’d remember that.”
Betting that he couldn’t deal with silence, she forced herself to wait.
She won. He said, “If you want my opinion, the drinking was a reaction to the storm. The coast guard said there were thirty-foot waves. That’s nearly three stories high. It’d be enough to drive me to drink. You done here?”
“For now.” So he had talked to the coast guard, or at least read their report. Chances were he had information he wasn’t giving her, information he wasn’t likely to offer now.
She watched him push the gurney into the freezer. Was he still the man she had known? His passion, the exuberance of a man who flung the bedclothes aside to get to her, was that entirely gone? Or had it been leashed and taught obedience? She felt a great sense of relief knowing that in a couple of minutes she’d be walking toward her Jeep, and her contact with Marc Rosten would be no more than a phone call in the morning. “I need to read the autopsy report.”
He shrugged. “Public record. When it comes back from typing.”
“Which will be?”
“A week, maybe.”
“Ah, the bureaucrat’s cloak!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You can get me a copy of your own notes.”
He slammed the freezer door, turned and put a hand on her arm. She recalled the warmth of his touch, in this very room, but there was no warmth now. “You’ve seen Delaney. The debt’s paid.”
She shook off his hand. “This is not a contest, Marc. Delaney’s not lying half-eaten on the slab because he took a wrong step. You’ve got a guy here with no recent history of alcoholism who gets himself so loaded he can’t see straight, who does it in the kind of storm where he could barely free one hand, much less drink, and he’s out there in the dark wearing tinted goggles. And you call this accidental drowning? Obviously you are no longer the hotshot diagnostician I remember.”
“I’m a lot of things you don’t remember.”
“Right. And sloppy seems to be one of them.”
He glared at her, then, in one of those split-second changes of mood she recalled as so characteristic of him, he said, “I’ll call you in the morning. Give me the number where you’re staying. And after that we’re quits. Got it?”
“Right. Fine.” She pulled out a card, wrote down Skip’s phone number, slapped the card in Rosten’s palm, and walked out. Once in the Jeep, she admitted she’d allowed her rage to run the interview. That could have cost her any number of vital findings. Not a contest, indeed. Who was she kidding? The last time she’d let passion rule her behavior was twelve years ago. She slammed into reverse and backed into the fog.
12
HOURS AFTER KIERNAN O’SHAUGHNESSY left, Maureen Brant’s heart was still pounding. She’d been terrified that Kiernan would refuse the case.
She waited until dinner was over, then walked rapidly over to the studio, stuck a note on the inside of the door, closed and locked it behind her. Then she ran back across the yard before Garrett could react to the sound of the key turning.
She grabbed her purse, ran for the car, and drove as fast as she dared along the rock-strewn, rutted dirt road. By the time she got to Highway 1 she was tense and her back was filmed with sweat despite the evening chill.
She pulled into the Barrow’s Grocery lot, ran inside, nodded at Jannie Barrow sitting behind the counter. Did the woman ever get up from that easy chair? Or had she been there so long the chair would move with her if she did?
Maureen could tell Jannie wanted to talk. Quickly, she picked up the phone and dialed. As she waited for the number to ring, she thought how odd it was that Jannie Barrow had had this public phone installed at the far side of the shop r
ather than close enough for her to eavesdrop on her customers.
“Olsen,” the voice said.
“Skip, it’s Maureen.”
“So what d’you think of Kiernan O’Shaughnessy?”
“She’s sharp, no-nonsense, just what I need. And, Skip, she’s going to look at Delaney’s body.”
“Good,” he said, relief clear in his voice. More relief, Maureen thought, than was appropriate in a man who had assured her there would be no problem getting his associate on the case. It made her uneasy. “Skip, she didn’t say definitely she’d take the case, she just said she’d check the body.”
“It’s the best we could hope for. If anyone can find something suspicious on that corpse, Kiernan O’Shaughnessy can. Believe me, I had a couple of stiffs she worked on years ago. When it was over, she’d spent more time with her hands on liver, heart and kidneys than a French chef. She checked every single inch of skin of one guy under the magnifying glass—and he was a three-hundred pounder. The guys at the tox lab hated her; she must have doubled their work load.”
“Skip, don’t tell her about Delaney. Not until she’s committed herself.”
“Well—”
“Please, Skip. I can’t take the chance. She has to take the case.
There was silence on the line, and then a groan. Olsen lowering himself into his chair. “Okay, Maureen. Once she’s committed herself it won’t matter. It’ll be too late.”
13
KIERNAN DROVE THROUGH THE Mission District, thinking of the morgue and of Marc Rosten. How could she ever have been attracted to that niggling, tight-assed … Her head throbbed, her hands were sweaty against the wheel. The strength of her passion for Rosten had not diminished. It just had a different name. But she couldn’t allow herself to be as angry as she had been when she was—what? In love? Lustful? Or just caught up in the drama of it all?
She had to be realistic. Which, in this case, meant admitting that she wasn’t doing such a hot job of separating the present from the past. She turned right sharply, tires squealing.
At least she was done with Rosten, wasn’t she? No. She knew better than that. She wouldn’t be done with him until she’d made him say why he’d left without a word. There had been no promises between them, no plans for marriage, a family, or even adjoining offices. Adjoining offices least of all. He’d been planning to go into family practice in those days, and would scarcely have wanted his waiting room next to her morgue. Would he have made plans? A moot point, since she’d insisted on none. She’d seen her parents tied to each other by habit and fear, too deadened by her sister’s death to care about the small cage of their own lives. Her two goals as an adolescent had been to get out, and to uncover the truth about Moira’s death. She did not intend to get sidetracked by any man. And Marc Rosten had known that. It wasn’t a demand for commitment that had caused him to vanish.
The Mission District gave way to Noe Valley. Fog obscured the street signs, and she had to come to a dead stop before she could read them. Dixie Alley was an unlighted wooden staircase leading from Grand View to Upper Market Street, several hundred feet higher up. Skip Olsen lived at number 17, which turned out to be a two-room “in-law” apartment, converted from the basement recreation room of a house that faced Upper Market. She must have been directly above it when she had stopped to stare down at the light of San Francisco a couple hours earlier.
She followed a cement path behind the house to the back steps—actually the front steps of this unit—and climbed to a tiny wooden porch. Sliding-glass doors opened onto a pine-paneled living room–kitchenette, with a stone fireplace the size of Maureen and Garrett Brant’s. It was a hunting-lodge hearth, one that suited the black leather couches and thick rya rug.
It was Skip Olsen himself, limping toward the glass doors, who looked out of place. He was, Kiernan realized, as out of place here as he had been leaning against a patrol car. He was too short, too sallow, too balding, too toddler-plump to fit the hearty masculinity of the room. And his walk, she noticed, was a list to the left and then a painful pull-up to the right, as if his hip socket sat too low on the leg. Had he been in an accident? Had a car crushed his ilium into his spine? Or was it a gunshot that had severed …
“So you’re out of the permafreeze now,” he said, using the term she recalled him perpetually assigning to the morgue refrigerator where they kept the “stiffs.” She felt as if no time had passed since she last encountered his adolescent bravado.
“And you’re off the police force?”
He motioned to a round maple table next to the sliding doors. Kiernan pulled out a chair and sat. “Almost a year now.”
“What happened? I knew you hated the morgue, but I assumed you liked being a cop.”
“Maybe.” He dropped into the chair facing her.
The smells of liniment, old cooking oil and long-settled dust rose as if to reassert possession of the tiny dining area. “So why did you leave the force?” she insisted.
“I took a fall wrong, landed on my butt hard enough to sprain a ligament. It never healed. Driving around on patrol all day was too much for it.”
“You’re on disability?”
“Nah.”
She slammed a hand down on the table; the table was sticky. “Olsen, I’m a doctor. Don’t give me this whitewash. If you have sciatica, or sacroiliac dysfunction, or a ruptured intervertebral disc, you apply for disability. Now what really happened?” She was giving Olsen what she hadn’t thrown at Rosten, she knew that.
“I have a client who may not be telling me everything, an acting chief coroner who definitely isn’t, and now an ex-cop who can’t even be straight about his own history.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, slumping forward. “Look, you probably read part of this in the newspaper: One of the guys was leaving, so a bunch of us got up a send-off party for him at the Flamingo Club. A gang of locals crashed it. There was a brawl. That’s when I landed on my tail.”
Still not the full story. “What was the entertainment at the party, Olsen? Coke? Strippers? Hookers?”
He squirmed, sandy hair falling over his round face. “Couple of G-stringers. One of the guys from vice knew them.”
“And word got out to the papers?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t call them.”
Olsen’s pale blue eyes shifted continuously, side to side, as if checking for a sneak attack.
“But the rest of the guys at the station figured you did, right?”
“Yeah. And when it came time for the disability hearing, the only guys who testified said I seemed horse-healthy to them. Back problems don’t always show up on X-rays, you know.”
She nodded. “And you’re probably not getting much business thrown your way now that you’re private.”
Olsen snorted. “I’m lucky to walk past a puddle and not have a patrol car spray me.”
Kiernan leaned back, watching as he squirmed in his chair. Clearly the man was in pain, that dull pain that grabs the inside of the flesh and squeezes until it plucks excruciatingly at the sciatic nerve the whole length of the leg. She had seen those squirming movements, that expression of fear, anger, resignation often enough when one of Tchernak’s old football injuries kicked up. But there was something about Skip Olsen that precluded any sympathetic pats. He wasn’t a man she wanted to touch.
“What about the press? How are your relations with them?”
“You don’t believe me, do you?” He was halfway out of his seat.
“Of course not.”
Glaring, he lowered himself back down. “Well, you’re wrong. I didn’t plan to expose the whole affair, I just wanted to get two guys I knew would hang around later with the G-stringers. How could I know there would be a brawl, and the press guys would hear the squeal and come racing out while everyone was still there?”
“Olsen,” Kiernan said slowly, “I don’t care about your relations with the force. But I do need to know where you stand. If I am going to work with you, maybe entrust my life to
you, I need to have some basis to assume that you will … tell … me … the truth.”
He looked directly at her. For the first time, his eyes were still. “I don’t have the luxury of tossing aside trust, not any more. I’m at rock bottom.”
She leaned back. Did she believe his story, his last story? More than she would have expected. But not enough to bet her skin on it.
“Okay, Olsen, tell me about the Garrett Brant case. You’re the expert.”
“Yeah,” he said, the adolescent belligerence gone, “the expert by default. No one else gave a shit. Just another hit-and-run to them.”
“And to you, it was … ?”
“Someone left the guy to die there. It was June, coldest June in a decade. San Francisco summer. You know what it’s like by the Great Highway, out there by the beach: icy cold, winds shredding flags on flagpoles. Sand could have blown over him in half an hour.”
“How was he found?”
Olsen snorted. “Some lunatic jogger out to freeze his balls off.”
Kiernan pictured the wind blowing hard across the beach, up the dunes. “The hairs that were stuck in the blood on Brant’s face, how come they didn’t get blown away?”
“Luck. Just blind luck.” Olsen rested an arm on the back of his straight chair. “Brant was wearing a hood. It shielded him from the wind; that, and the dune beside him. Luck.”
“And you were on patrol?”
“Yeah, I was hauling my bum butt out from behind the wheel fifty times a day. Cold and damp are hell on a bad back. Nothing ever dries out there on Great Highway. When I first saw Brant I thought he’d be DOA. I’ve seen a lot. On the force nine years. But that, it got to me. Then when I found the hairs and got the okay to run them, I thought I’d get the sucker who left him there.”
“And you didn’t find a match until now?”
“Yeah, ironic isn’t it? O bugged ’em to run them every time they closed a hit-and-run, which, as you can guess, is not like every Tuesday.”