by Susan Dunlap
“How come?”
“The rule is the first user gets the rights. And they can sell those rights and ship the water to L.A. so the Angelenos can wash their cars and water their lawns.”
Kiernan nodded, recalling that Stu had represented a couple of losers in water battles recently. “Stu, I know water’s a big problem here in the desert. But the retreat builders already have use of the water they need. They’re promised it in perpetuity. So that’s not an issue. They’ve got the land. They’ve had it for years. What is it that’s changed?”
“What’s changed, Kerry, is that all those years no one had much financial know-how or connections. Then Vanderhooven came along.”
“Okay, so the land had been sitting around and Dowd had been pondering maybe someday building a retreat out there. Then Vanderhooven came along and took charge. Did he form a committee?”
Wiggins shook his head. “Vanderhooven wasn’t the committee type. What he did do was contact some of the money men and lay the groundwork.”
“Which money men?”
Wiggins shook his head. “Now, that I don’t know. Could be legit. Could be his father’s associates. Could be a mix.”
A middle-aged man in Bermuda shorts settled at the counter. Kiernan said, “What about Vanderhooven’s friend Joe Zekk? Where does he fit in? Elias Necri said Vanderhooven labeled Zekk a deadbeat. Elias thinks Zekk was getting money from Philip Vanderhooven and he’s pretty pissed that he’s not. As for Philip, he denies even hearing Zekk out.”
“You believe that?”
“I’m withholding judgment. Which is more than Bud Warren was doing last night. To hear him—”
“Now, Kerry, Bud Warren is not as pure as the driven snow.”
Kiernan tensed. She could hear the defensive tone in her voice as she asked, “How-many-days-old snow is he?”
Wiggins leaned back in his chair. “Not like a gutter pile back there in New York City, if that’s what you’re thinking. Bud’s an okay guy. But he is a speculator. He’s always got something going. So far nothing’s worked out, but Bud’s always managed to come out smelling okay. He’s always gotten backing. Money men don’t veer off when they lay eyes on him. But he’s not one of them, and he’s learned to watch what he says.”
“What he said was that Dowd stood to gain power over a retreat that would attract Catholic money and influence nationwide. And what Elias Necri said was that Zekk got Austin to contact his father for him. Austin himself was paying Zekk two hundred dollars a month, and he’d set him up in a house in the mountains.”
“Ah hah! Well, then let me give you a spot of news.”
Kiernan raised an eyebrow.
“That house is above a hamlet called Rattlesnake, on the Rattlesnake River. It’s not all that far from the retreat site and Hohokam Lodge. And Kerry, it’s right on the way to Sylvia Necri’s construction site. If Sylvia knows where it is, you can bet Elias does. And that there’s something up there he doesn’t want you to uncover.”
28
KIERNAN’S FIRST THOUGHT AFTER Wiggins dropped her at her motel was to launch into a series of Viparita Chakrasana: backbend to handstand to forward bend, one after another. But she was already too wired, and backbends would only make her more so. Forward bends would calm her down, but they could sap what energy she had. She compromised on a long, easy headstand, letting the blood flow gently downward, feeling her scattered thoughts come into focus.
But the headstand didn’t dislodge the cold ache of loneliness, the angry twelve-year-old’s stab of abandonment she always felt when she’d talked about Moira.
Despite the time she’d spent at breakfast, it was not yet eight o’clock. Really too early to call home. Grinning, she lowered her legs to the floor, stood up, and dialed. The phone rang eight times before Brad Tchernak’s thick voice said, “Yeah?”
“Hard night?” Kiernan asked.
“Huh? Oh, Kiernan. It’s barely dawn, you know.”
“Be glad Arizona doesn’t have Daylight Savings Time or I might have called an hour earlier.”
“I’m glad we didn’t have an earthquake, too. But I wasn’t planning to get up with the sun to celebrate it.” The rustle of cloth rubbing over the phone, followed by a groan, suggested Brad was getting up. “I suppose you want to speak to him.”
Kiernan nodded. She always felt ridiculous doing this. It was like childhood prayer, when she’d mouthed words to a Being she pretended was listening. “Put him on.” Now she pretended big, brown eyes were widening in anticipation.
“Okay, go,” Brad said.
Feeling even more ridiculous, Kiernan glanced around, half expecting to see faces at the window peering in on her foolishness. “Ezra,” she crooned into the receiver. “Ezzzzraaa. How’s the guy? Have you been a good dog?” She pictured his long feathered tail wagging wildly. Was that panting she heard? “Good boy, Ezra.”
Ezra gave a high-pitched yelp.
Kiernan laughed, picturing the big Labrador/wolfhound wriggling like a beagle. “Ah, Ezra.”
Ezra gave the phone an unmistakable slurp.
“Gees!” Brad said. “If I had known this was going to be such a sappy job—”
“Come on, where else could you get a flat by the beach and still be in the sack at eight A.M.? Would you like to guess where I’ve spent the night?”
“Is this going to be something I’d be happier not knowing?”
Ignoring that, she said, “Jail.”
Tchernak groaned. In his “servant” voice, he intoned, “So humiliating! How am I going to face the other guys below stairs. Their employers are sunning in Tahiti or gambling in Monte Carlo; mine’s in jail!” He laughed.
“I suppose you’re wringing your hands in despair—on an apron. No, of course not. You can’t reach one. You’re still in bed.” She could almost see his dark brown eyes squinting against the intrusion of morning, his wiry hair poking out above his ears, the pelt on his tanned chest peeking above the unzipped extra-long sleeping bag he used for a blanket.
“Kiernan, I always wear an apron to bed, just in case. I aim to please, at any hour.”
“And you do.”
“So,” he said, his voice softening, “when are you coming home?”
“The sheriff, the bishop, and the father of the deceased would like me to leave now.”
“So that means you won’t, right?”
“Not yet. I can’t abandon a case midway. I have a dog and a housekeeper to support.”
“Well, give me fair warning so I can shovel the beer cans out of your flat.” He paused. “Seriously, call me tonight, huh?”
She smiled. “I can take care of myself, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. But Ezra misses you. When we go for our runs on the beach, he’s so anxious to turn around and start home he can barely keep up with me. When we get near the house he races to your door, with his ears perked up and his tail wagging so hard it almost knocks him over. He searches through your flat inch by inch; then, finally, he gives one long moan and drops down to the floor.”
“He’s not off his food, is he?” Kiernan asked, worried.
Brad laughed. “Well, no. There are limits to mourning. But he does miss you. And, frankly, so do I. So call me, huh?”
“Okay,” she said softly.
At nine A.M. it was already too hot to climb into the high desert. It was too hot to climb into the Jeep. Kiernan put the plastic water bottle behind the seat and steeled herself against the searing heat that would penetrate her jeans as soon as she touched the seat. Jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt were too warm, but the unknown desert was no place to go bare-limbed.
By the time she’d come to the first stoplight, between the Aqua Fria Shopping Center (salmon and teal) and the Lost Dutchman Mall (ragged mountain facade), the backs of her shirt and jeans were soaked. A mile later, when she pulled onto the Superstition Freeway, they were icy. The freeway ended a few miles on and she detoured onto Apache Boulevard. No longer were there shopping centers. Rathe
r, dust-worn clusters of auto-parts shops, plumbing suppliers, and gun stores stood between grassless fields and brown dry land that looked as if it should hold bleached bones but instead sported a spindly ironwood tree here, a group of squat cholla there.
The road began to ascend. The sun burned through the windshield onto her jeans. Beside the road there was some foliage now—pale green thin-leaved trees and insubstantial shrubs.
She wished she knew the names of the plants, how they were related, how the Pimas and before them the Hohokam, who were said to have lived here centuries before the Spanish invasion, made use of the plants.
She laughed. Years ago botany had fascinated her briefly, as had astronomy and mathematics. Those interests had always led back to medicine, to forensic pathology. The lure of the stars had never measured up to her passion to know about the body, to find out what made it live and what specifically caused it to cease living. To learn enough to find out what really killed Moira.
Her shoulders tightened and she was aware of the pressure above her eyes. She shook her head sharply, surprised that she could still feel the dismay she had felt when she finally accepted the fact that forensic pathology was no absolute. Forensic pathology would not reveal the truth. She had been with the coroner’s office three years before she was forced to accept that. During those years she had seen court cases where experts staked their reputations on opposing theses. Doctors can be mistaken, she had told herself. Doctors can even be bought. The truth lay in the body, in the vials, in the tests. The truth was there, but some of those “experts” simply had not seen it. Some weren’t sharp enough to spot it, some were too lazy to keep up with the research, some had preconceived notions to which they tried to fit their findings, some … She had built walls of excuses, desperately refusing to face the fallibility of the dream that had sustained her, the dream of explaining why Moira had died. As the ground beneath become more unstable, she’d patched and plastered those walls thicker and thicker, putting her faith in each new test, in every increasingly sophisticated machine, till the dream became like a solid adobe house sitting atop an earthquake fault. That house might have held forever if the killer quake hadn’t hit.
That call—the quake—had come six years ago, at shortly after two in the morning: a high-speed head-on collision between two pickup trucks. Three dead.
The driver of the Datsun pickup was a thirty-seven-year-old man from San Francisco. In the Plymouth were two teenagers from town, a boy and a girl, who had been driving. The boy was in his first year at junior college. The girl had gone off to a New Age boarding school for two years and been back in town the last two years. In September she would have started college. Kiernan had seen them in town, had met their families, knew some of their friends, knew of their “wild” reputations. When she’d looked at their bodies she’d felt almost relief to find their faces unrecognizable.
The autopsies had taken hours. Because organs had been ripped open, some of the contents of stomachs and intestines had splashed into the abdominal cavities, mixed in with lung and heart tissue. The smell had been nearly overwhelming. She had cleaned away the splashings, keeping them separate from the fluids still inside the organs, and bagged samples of both for the lab. She’d held severed flesh against bones, checking the fit, assuring herself that this flesh belonged to this body. She’d searched through the mangled bodies for signs of alcohol, drugs, aneurysm, heart disease, pressure behind the eyes, pressure in the Eustachian tubes.
She had taken the boy first. As she’d suspected, he was the least difficult. Then she did the man, a long, tedious procedure. There were signs of alcohol in his stomach, but owing to the condition of the body, it was impossible to guess how much was in his system.
Finally, there was the girl, Kimberly Everett. The force of the crash had snapped her neck. The engine had smashed back into the cab, sending the steering column through her right shoulder and crushing the arm to a red pulp.
Kiernan had drunk a cup of coffee outside in the fresh air, cleared her mind from the last postmortem, then gone back in. She scrubbed and began her description of the body: “Decedent is a well-nourished Caucasian female, eighteen years old …” There had been no abnormal occlusion of the arteries, no old petechial hemorrhages on what she could find of the epicardium. The liver, gallbladder, spleen, pancreas, gastrointestinal tract, adrenals, kidneys, and bladder showed no sign of disease or insult prior to the fatal injuries. She did find the lung tissue discolored, the odor of alcohol coming from the stomach, and signs of both pregnancy and gonorrhea.
Suddenly it all got to her. For the first time in an autopsy she ripped off her gloves, raced from the room, and leaned against the wall outside, shaking. She had seen bodies more mutilated, more decayed, handled smells much worse. But as she had looked down at the exposed corpse, she had a clear vision of what would become of Kimberly Everett’s memory.
For the first time Kiernan considered omitting her findings from an autopsy report. Kimberly Everett had been driving, but neither her pregnancy nor her gonorrhea had caused the crash. Nonetheless, they would create a sensation when the insurance companies battled to assign guilt. In a court hearing these findings would overshadow the issue of alcohol. Kimberly Everett, like Moira, would be labeled a girl who had it coming.
Standing there, leaning against the wall, she told herself this case was not like Moira’s, where competent forensic work might have shown evidence of LSD, a little-known substance in those days, or of some other little-known drug that could have led to her death. A decent autopsy might have moved the police to investigate Moira’s death, instead of assuming, along with everyone else, that Moira had been turning tricks in the Sunset Hotel, had been distraught, and had thrown herself out the hotel window, as a girl of her character deserved to do. She told herself that in this case it would be all right to leave the findings about the pregnancy and gonorrhea unmentioned.
But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She went in, turned the microphone back on, and finished the autopsy, moving from the organs of the pelvis and the thorax outward to the legs, the arms, the shoulders, neck, and head.
Later the newspapers would say she had been too anxious to get it over with, that she should have taken more time. At the hearing, county supervisors would say that she should have spaced the autopsies better. They would say she could have done Kimberly Everett’s body the next day; the early stages of decomposition would have been setting in, but they wouldn’t have compromised her findings too much.
She told herself the same things for the next two years. But at the time she had simply finished the Everett autopsy, gone home, had three stiff drinks, and slept for twelve hours.
It wasn’t till months later—during which time the Everett family swore that their daughter indulged in neither sex nor alcohol, and the insurance companies hedged, and every facet of Kimberly Everett’s life was hashed over in print and by word of mouth—that one of the insurance investigators turned up a neurologist who swore that the girl had had no feeling in her right hand. The nerves at the point where her neck had broken had been damaged in an accident three years earlier, during the time she had been away at school. Nerve damage, he had explained, was individual. A patient can lose control but still have feeling, or vice versa. In this case, there was some control, but no feeling. In other words, the neurologist had explained to the reporters, instead of moving with precision in response to the danger, Kimberly’s hand had reacted clumsily. By then she was dead. She had, the neurologist concluded, no business driving. Certainly none drinking and driving.
The scars from Kimberly’s earlier surgery were small, but a competent forensic pathologist should have spotted them, the insurance companies said as they altered their settlements. Faced with the threat of lawsuit, the county supervisors concurred. Pathologists from surrounding counties disagreed. In view of the greatly compromised condition of the body, and particularly of the arm and neck, overlooking the scar tissue was a mistake anyone could have made, they insi
sted. The families of the victims called for Kiernan’s resignation. Her supporters urged her to fight.
But there was nothing to fight for. She had been wrong. Because of her error the scandal she had so desperately wanted to avoid had had time to blossom and flourish. The thought of Kimberly Everett filled her with grief. Over and over, she pictured the life that Kimberly would never have, the child she’d never bear. It was a grief she’d been too young to feel for Moira. And seeing the agony of the Everetts pictured on the local newscast, alluded to in the paper, bemoaned in the supermarket, she felt anguish for them, and for her own parents, who had been too intimidated by the notoriety of Moira’s death, too shocked, too humiliated, to grieve at all.
But even more devastating than that was the undeniable fact that the science of forensic pathology had failed. If it had been merely her own failure, she might have handled it. She could have researched more, worked harder and longer; she could have given up friends, given up her lover, spent her free hours with medical journals, police journals, forensic journals, pharmaceutical journals, gone over every facet of every postmortem twice. She could have clambered on till she grasped the truth.
But forensic pathology, she learned, was just another tool. Her life had been a joke. Even if she had spotted the scar tissue and discovered the nerve damage in question, there was no way she could have known how greatly it had affected Kimberly’s hand, whether it caused her death or not. If a competent forensic pathologist had found evidence of LSD in Moira’s body, who could have said that LSD had made Moira jump? No drug residue would have explained whether Moira had braved the Sunset Hotel to find her sister, or had abandoned that search, met a friend with the drug, and later wandered into the hotel whose name stuck in her jangled mind. Sophisticated scientific analysis would have changed nothing. It had always been impossible to pronounce with certainty. Moira O’Shaughnessy was not a tramp. Or Kiernan O’Shaughnessy was not guilty.