Dr. Greene walked toward the victim’s head, pulling back the sheet to reveal only a portion of Theo’s throat. I could see a neat cut on the right side of his neck, much smaller than I’d anticipated given the amount of blood in the shed. I was expecting to find the throat slashed from ear to ear, but this slice was only about three inches long and was positioned an inch above the clavicle.
“See this?” he asked, pointing to the cut. “This is the cause of death.”
“All that blood came from one cut that size?” I asked, still vividly remembering the sight and smell of Theo’s blood in the shed, the pool beneath the victim’s chair, the spurts on the walls.
“Yes, ma’am,” Dr. Greene affirmed. “The key isn’t the size of the cut but the placement. This incision severed the carotid artery and jugular vein, which led to massive blood loss, cardiac arrest, and finally death.”
Vincent leaned slightly closer to the body. “It’s extremely precise,” he said with a quick glance over his shoulder at Dr. Greene.
“Indeed,” he said. “The killer knew exactly what he was doing. There were no hesitation marks or misses. The victim exsanguinated in less than two minutes.”
I stared at the cut. Of all the people we’d spoken to in conjunction with this case, who had the knowledge to make such a precise incision?
My first thought was Kathy Vanderbilt. After feeling her revolver in my back and knowing she wouldn’t have hesitated to kill Marston or me in order to escape, I had not only lost my respect for the feisty redneck but would also have no problem believing she had killed Theo herself. She had the biggest motive and might have had the knowledge to cut the jugular and carotid artery so precisely. After all, she had recently received medical training.
Still, there were problems with that idea. Kathy and Theo had been in the fraud scheme together and planned to disappear to the Caribbean. If she had wanted to kill him, why choose such a messy method? Why not poison or gunshot? And would she have been able to overpower Theo in order to cut him so neatly?
It didn’t seem likely. Besides, Theo’s killer would have been covered in blood. Kathy only had one swipe of blood on a sleeve when she tried to abduct Deputy Marston and me.
And I believed Kathy when she said she didn’t intend for Theo to die. I believed she loved him.
Vincent straightened and faced me. Obviously, he’d been thinking of suspects too. “Hunters might kill this way,” he said. “It’s not recommended practice today, but old-timers would slit an animal’s throat to bleed it out right away.”
Hunters.
Hell, that could be almost anyone we’d spoken to, but Fred Thomas leapt immediately to mind. He owned a hunting store. Of course, now Fred was missing, and, given the amount of blood at the Bait and Tackle, he might have been attacked in the same way.
“LEOs would also be familiar with the anatomy needed for this sort of death,” I said, thinking of Sheriff Harper, “but I can’t fathom a cop killing that way. Too messy.” And Harper had been at the SWAT meeting, also clean.
“Before you go on compiling your suspect list,” Dr. Greene said, “let me add another monkey wrench to this. Come over here.”
Dr. Greene led us to the other table and pulled the sheet to one side, revealing the head and neck of the charred female body. He didn’t say a word, but amid the burned flesh, I saw it.
A cut nearly identical to the one on Theo, only this one was slightly more open.
“What the hell?” Vincent said. “The same person killed both victims?”
“Well, not really,” Dr. Greene said. “The female victim did not die as a result of exsanguination.”
“How did she die then? Smoke inhalation?” I asked.
Dr. Greene shook his head. “Despite the length of this body’s exposure to the fire, we were still able to collect fluid samples, and we dissected and retrieved samples from several organs to view under the microscope. Based on the condition of the body, one would assume that the victim had burned to death and that we would find signs of smoke inhalation, particularly in the moist areas of the nose and throat and also in the lungs. We did not.”
“Blunt force trauma to the skull?” I asked, thinking of the damage to the victim’s head visible in the fire scene photos.
Dr. Greene shook his head. “The fire caused the damage present in the skull.” He pointed to the fracture pattern. “Prolonged exposure to fire causes the bone to harden and become brittle, and it can crack in various patterns. Under a microscope, it was clear that this damage was done by thermal insult and not mechanical means.”
“Then how did she die?” Vincent demanded. He looked like he wanted to bang a frustrated fist on the autopsy table, but fortunately he restrained himself.
“Ah, always impatient, you investigators,” Dr. Greene chided. “It appears that this victim died of a myocardial infarction.”
Vincent and I looked at him blankly.
“Heart attack,” he explained.
“So this woman died of natural causes?” I asked as I stared down at the body, confused.
Dr. Greene smiled cryptically. “Well, maybe yes and maybe no. The cause of death was certainly a heart attack, but the means of death—the circumstances that led to the cause of death—well, those are less certain. This person did likely die of natural causes, but I’ve sent fluid and tissue samples to the toxicologist for further testing to rule out poisons. Unfortunately, we won’t have the results for at least ten days.”
Vincent and I grimaced in unison at the timetable, and Dr. Greene noticed.
“But there’s something even more important here,” he said. “When I began the internal portion of the autopsy, I noticed a distinct lack of blood.”
“Could it have evaporated in the fire?” I asked.
“Yes, but that doesn’t explain the presence of formaldehyde and other such preservative chemicals in the body.”
“Formaldehyde?” Vincent and I repeated.
“Are you saying that this woman had been prepared for burial?” I asked, frowning.
“That’s precisely what I’m saying. Look at this wound here.” Dr. Greene pointed to the incision on the woman’s neck. “This is where an embalmer likely inserted an arterial drainage tube. I also found evidence of the insertion points of a trocar, the tool used for removing fluids and other debris from the organs after death.”
Vincent and I were silent as we absorbed his words.
“Knowing that this victim had previously been embalmed changed our search parameters drastically,” Dr. Greene continued. “We stopped looking for missing women and began a search of recently deceased women in Cranford County. Just before I called you, we were able to identify her as Merle Cummings, a retired schoolteacher from Cranford County who died of a heart attack a week ago. Her niece, Charlene Twilley, discovered Mrs. Cummings’s body at the decedent’s residence last Monday. Her obit was simple, and there was no mention of a service, so I’m not sure who prepared her body for burial or where she was interred.”
Questions leapt to my mind.
When and where had she been buried? How had her body shown up early Thursday morning in Theodore Vanderbilt’s LTD?
But I asked a different question. “Is Charlene Twilley the victim’s next of kin?”
Already I was dreading the idea of paying Mrs. Twilley a call with our news about her aunt’s body. Breaking the news of a loved one’s death was difficult enough, but this situation was so convoluted that I had no idea how to proceed. How did we even begin to explain to Mrs. Twilley that her loved one’s body had been used in an insurance fraud scheme and been burned in the process?
That scenario wasn’t covered at the police academy.
“Yes, ma’am,” Dr. Greene said. “I’ve got the information in the report. I guess I could have just emailed it, but to be honest, I’ve gotten real interested in this case. Particularly given the similarities in the incisions on both these bodies.”
“What do the similarities tell you?” I
asked, wondering if I were interpreting the information correctly.
“Well, maybe nothing, to be honest. But maybe those incisions were made by the same person.”
“Maybe we’re looking at someone in the funeral business,” Vincent supplied.
“Exactly,” Dr. Greene said. “And if you don’t mind, I’d like to hear what you learn after talking to Mrs. Twilley. We don’t get to do any investigative work here in the ME’s office. We usually just run the test and send on the results, but I’ve got to admit that this one has me curious.”
“Yeah, it’s got me curious too,” I said, anxious to figure out the next step and take it. “I’ll let you know what we discover.”
As Dr. Greene led us out of the autopsy suite, my mind reeled with the possibilities of what might have happened. But Morton Ivey was now my primary suspect. He’d been on the fire scene. He’d had access to Merle Cummings’s body, and he would have been familiar with the anatomy necessary to kill Theo Vanderbilt with one precise cut.
Plus, he’d had that creepy reaction to seeing Theo’s body when he’d first arrived at the crime scene. Maybe the sicko was admiring his own work.
Without even realizing we’d done it, Vincent and I had disposed of our masks and gloves, checked out of the lab, and signed for the autopsy report.
As we walked out of the crime lab building and back to the car, he looked at me and said, “I’m willing to bet that the Eternal Rest Funeral Home is somehow involved.”
I nodded. “But we should talk to Charlene Twilley and find out the details of her burial arrangements to be certain.”
Before we even reached the GMC, I was already looking up Mrs. Twilley’s home phone number in the ME’s report, and about ten seconds later, I was making the call.
Twenty-five
The ride from the crime lab to Cranford was quiet. I didn’t know about Vincent, but I wasn’t sure what to say. This case had been strange from the beginning, but now it had taken an even stranger turn.
“So did Theo exhume Merle Cummings?” Vincent asked at length. Then he paused for a beat and added, “That’s far more screwed up than I anticipated.”
“At this point, I could believe almost anything of Theo,” I said, sadly shaking my head. In the course of proving him guilty of attempted insurance fraud, we’d considered possibilities from suicide to murder and now grave robbery.
What would be next?
A mistaken identity kidnapping?
Perish the thought.
At least we were certain that Theo was not a murderer. He was just an ordinary guy who wanted to get rich quick. Only he clearly chose the wrong way to go about it.
Had he thought we wouldn’t realize the body in the car was an elderly woman?
I shook my head again.
Sometimes I was truly amazed at the schemes people concocted to try to get something that didn’t belong to them.
And this time, apparently, the scheme had included desecrating a poor old woman’s body.
Located in a 1950s tract home community in Cranford County, Charlene Twilley’s house fit in with all the others—small, boxy, and clean. As Vincent and I walked to the front door, I looked over my shoulder at his 1970s GMC. Somehow, it seemed to blend in with the vintage flavor of the neighborhood as it sat in the driveway.
I thought of mentioning that fact to dispel some of my nervousness at having to break such horrible news to someone, but Vincent had gone into serious cop mode, marching up the steps and ringing Mrs. Twilley’s doorbell with a violent stab of his finger.
After a few minutes, the door opened, but only a crack, and I saw a short, blue-haired woman peeking out from below the security chain.
Vincent looked to me to take the lead, so I smiled at the woman and asked, “Mrs. Twilley?”
“Yeah, who’s asking?” she demanded in a shockingly strong voice for someone so tiny.
“Um,” I said, trying to conceal my surprise at her harsh tone. “Georgia Department of Insurance, ma’am. We called earlier.”
“You got ID?” she asked.
I produced my badge and held it in front of the crack in the door.
Mrs. Twilley squinted at it and then eyed Vincent. “Where’s yours?”
He yanked it from his belt and held it through the crack for her inspection.
Then, without warning, the door slammed closed, and Vincent tried to jerk his hand back, but not quickly enough. His badge clattered to the ground as he pulled his fingers from between the door and the frame.
“Ow!” he said, and I felt sure he was holding back a string of curses.
I knelt down to pick up his badge. “You okay?”
He examined his red fingers. “That hurt like hell.”
I stood and took his hand, examining it as if I could tell if something were broken. Other than the fact that it was starting to swell, I could tell nothing. I shrugged at him. “You’ll live,” I said, handing him the badge.
Vincent made a noise like a snarl as he took the badge and turned back to the closed door. He was looking as if he were about to pound it into oblivion and demand that the old lady apologize when the door swung open all the way, revealing Mrs. Twilley in her five-foot-tall glory.
She took in Vincent’s red face and watched as he tried to rub the pain out of his fingers. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.
But Mrs. Twilley didn’t wait for a response and gestured at us to enter. “Well, let’s get this over with. I got things to do today.”
Vincent and I followed her quick steps into the house, which was laid out in a typical tract home fashion. The front door opened into the living room with the kitchen beyond, and the opposite side was devoted to bedrooms and bathrooms. A collection of canes stood in an umbrella stand in the front room, but it was clear that Mrs. Twilley did not require one herself.
She moved like an Olympic sprinter, hurled herself into the wingback chair in front of the TV, and sat there staring at us. “All right,” she said, “what’s this about?”
Vincent and I took seats on the couch, and I found myself disappointed that she hadn’t followed typical Southern protocol and offered us a glass of sweet tea. Or water at least. I’ll bet Vincent would have liked to hold a nice cold glass in his injured hand to keep the swelling down.
Instead, he seemed to have completely forgotten about the incident.
“Mrs. Twilley,” he began, taking the lead this time. Obviously, he was no longer worried about her fragility.
And I was pretty sure Mrs. Twilley could handle herself well enough against an invading hoard.
“We’re here about a deceased relative of yours: Merle Cummings,” Vincent continued.
“Great-aunt Merle?” Mrs. Twilley asked, pronouncing “aunt” a bit like “ain’t.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I affirmed, wondering just how old this Great-aunt Merle had been when she died. Judging by Mrs. Twilley’s blue hair, her niece had to be at least seventy.
“She’s been dead about a week now.”
“Yes, ma’am, we know that,” Vincent said. “We’re here to tell you that her body has been discovered.”
Mrs. Twilley narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean her body’s been discovered?”
“We found her remains in the course of another investigation,” Vincent said, and I could tell he was trying to make the strange crime sound logical.
“Her remains?” Mrs. Twilley repeated, looking at him as if she’d like to slam his hand in the door again. She looked abruptly at me and jerked her thumb back toward Vincent. “What’s he talking about?”
I glanced at him and shrugged. “We found your great-aunt’s deceased body in a burned vehicle.”
Mrs. Twilley didn’t even pause to think before saying, “That’s ridiculous. Great-aunt Merle didn’t drive.”
I looked at Vincent again. Might as well be as plain as possible. “We believe someone used your aunt’s body to attempt to fake their own death,” I said.
That seemed to get
through to Mrs. Twilley, who looked as if she were considering this new information. “Why are you so sure it was Great-aunt Merle?”
“Dental records confirm it,” I answered.
She looked at me blankly. “You got pictures of Great-aunt Merle’s teeth?”
“Yes, we compared those taken from the body with dental records of recently deceased women in this area. We’re certain it was your great-aunt, I’m afraid.”
“But Great-aunt Merle was cremated,” she said. “How could her body be used to fake someone’s death? It doesn’t make sense.” Mrs. Twilley stood and walked to the brick fireplace. “We had a small, private service at Eternal Rest, and then Mr. Ivey, the owner, sent me her ashes.”
Vincent and I nodded at each other. Now we had confirmation that the Eternal Rest Funeral Home and Morton Ivey were definitely involved in this somehow.
“No, ma’am, it doesn’t make sense,” Vincent agreed. “That’s why we’re here to talk to you. To figure out how this could have happened.”
We watched as Mrs. Twilley rose to her toes and reached toward the mantel for a wooden box that slightly resembled a hope chest.
She pulled open the lid and looked inside. “Well, if Great-aunt Merle was burned up in that car fire you’re talking about,” she said as she held up the urn, “who the hell is this?”
Then, before either Vincent or I realized what she intended to do and long before we could think to stop her, she turned the urn completely upside down and gave it a great shake.
“Holy shit,” Vincent said.
“Mrs. Twilley, no!” I said.
And then there was a heavy crack as the contents of the wooden urn hit the floor, followed by a cloud of gray dust.
I closed my eyes tightly. I didn’t want the remains of Great-aunt Merle—or whoever was in there—to get in my eyes, and when I opened them, the dust had settled and we all stared at the solid chunk of…well…we weren’t sure what, sitting on the floor in front of Mrs. Twilley.
Vincent leapt up and gently pushed Mrs. Twilley away from the area. “Please step back, ma’am. This could be evidence.”
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