Shadow Image

by Martin J. Smith

  “Get the freezer door, just hold it open,” one of the men said. “Whew, baby!”

  “Who’d we piss off, anyway?”

  “Fucking floaters.”

  Christensen recognized the term. Floaters were an inevitable consequence of living in a river town where the number of reported bridge suicides always seemed to spike each year in the late stages of Pittsburgh’s relentless gray winter. He also knew that the local mob used the city’s three rivers as a convenient repository for unwanted union bosses, disloyal employees, and debtors who fell too far behind in their payments. But surely two floaters at one time was unusual; he’d have to check tomorrow’s Press.

  Christensen paused near the morgue’s front entrance to catch his breath, which he’d held since that first putrid whiff of death. He sniffed tentatively at first, testing to make sure the odor hadn’t followed him around the building, then took a dozen deep breaths, one after another, purging his lungs as best he could.

  The morgue’s front doors opened into a lobby of what could have been an overdecorated house trailer. The off-white marble extended four feet up the walls like a giant splash guard, and the room was trimmed in varying shades of cheerless gray paint. Only touches of the building’s once-grand architecture peeked through its sad redecoration. The lobby was dominated by a large, half-moon-shaped reception desk that all but blocked passage to the lobby’s three exits. Empty, the desk seemed ridiculously out of scale. Just behind it was an unmarked door leading toward the rear of the building. On the wall just outside the stairway hung two large black-and-white photographs showing the entire morgue building being moved nearly three hundred feet from its previous location along Forbes Avenue, photographs he recognized from a historical documentary about Pittsburgh’s colorful past.

  Though he’d never been inside the morgue before, it seemed vaguely familiar from that documentary and from Brenna’s descriptions. Decades earlier, the morgue had had a macabre feature on the first floor—angled viewing windows that allowed even casual visitors to peer through the floor into the basement room where unidentified bodies in all states of disrepair were displayed like prone department-store mannequins. With a predictable supply of indigents and other nameless unfortunates, the windows had been the county coroner’s first crude attempt at victim identification. But because the lobby was open twenty-four hours a day, the viewing windows also became a favorite stop for death freaks, practical jokers, and blindfolded prom dates.

  Christensen sniffed tentatively. The place smelled stale, but nothing like what had just cleared his sinuses. The air was almost fresh, artificially fresh, no doubt the product of some heroic odor-masking products retrofitted to the building’s ancient ventilation system. Robust and cheery spider plants hung at random intervals around the lobby, but their placement seemed uncoordinated.

  To Christensen’s right were the low modular walls of what looked like a small corral. This, he knew, was the modern replacement for those old viewing windows, where the coroner’s staff allowed a victim’s grieving family or friends to review the basement inventory by closed-circuit television without having to confront the chilling realities of death. The fiber-covered cubicle walls apparently were the budget-minded county commission’s laughable way of giving them privacy.

  Where was the receptionist? He read the stenciled letters on the glass panels of the heavy wooden doors that branched off from the lobby—Histology Lab, Investigator’s Office, Photo Lab. An elevator stood open and ready to his left, but a hand-painted sign on the wall of a nearby stairway seemed more promising: Records. He followed the arrow to the second floor, emerging into a nightmare of bureaucratic design. An impossibly thin black man sat behind a counter among what seemed like a disorganized collection of computer terminals, file cabinets, and institutional desks. He looked up from the keyboard of his computer as Christensen set his briefcase on the counter and pulled a business card from his wallet.

  “Help you?” he said.

  “Thanks.” Christensen handed the card across the counter. “This where I’d find death certificates?”

  The man stood up and took the card. He was maybe 6-foot-5, head shaved, with thick black Malcolm X specs whose lenses magnified his eyes to an almost comical size. They looked like Grade AA extra-large eggs, hard-boiled, muted only by his heavy, dark eyelids. He smiled suddenly, revealing a prominent overbite that gave his face yet another unfortunate dimension. The name tag on his maroon shirt read Bragg.

  “You didn’t look like a lawyer or a reporter,” he said.

  Christensen nodded. “Is that good?”

  “Neither way with me. It’s just lawyers and the news people that come in, mostly. I can tell you ain’t either of them.” He looked at Christensen’s card again, put out his hand. “I’m Lemonjello,” he said, pronouncing it le-MON-jello.

  “Jim Christensen.” The man’s hand felt smooth as talc, his handshake firm. “This is my first time trying to do this, actually, digging out records. Any help you can give me would be great.”

  “Death certificate’s what you’re looking for?”

  “One. And any other paperwork you might have on the same case. I assume all that’s public record.”

  Bragg slid a form across the counter. “Fill this out, just the top five lines. Name, address, records you want. We got certificates, autopsy reports, all that. What’s the name so I can start?”

  Christensen tipped his briefcase on its side and snaked a hand in to retrieve a pen and the yellow legal pad he’d been using to take research notes. “Underhill.”

  Bragg waited. “I’ll need the first name.”

  “Vincent. The third, I think.”

  Bragg smiled again, less natural than the first time. He put Christensen’s card into his shirt pocket. “The Carrie Crusade,” he said. “You people sure keeping us busy over here. That one, seems like I copied it already.”

  Christensen cocked his head. “Sorry, I don’t follow.”

  “You’re with Carrie Haygood, right?”

  “Who?”

  “CDRT?”

  Christensen shook his head.

  “No?” Bragg squinted through his thick lenses. “What you want that file for?”

  “Sorry, you’ve lost me here. I’m just doing some independent research, looking for information about this one particular case.”

  “What for?”

  Christensen offered a defensive smile. “Research,” he said, adding: “They’re public records, right?”

  Bragg nodded stiffly, gesturing to the records-release form. “Just fill all this out. Don’t forget the address and phone.”

  When Bragg disappeared through a door labeled “Indexing,” Christensen began filling in the requested information, stopping only to scribble “Kerry or Carrie Haygood?” and the acronym “CDRT” on the second page of his notebook. He also added Bragg’s name, spelling the first name phonetically. Within a minute, the records clerk was back with a file as thin as the man himself.

  “That’s it?”

  “Everything we’ve got,” Bragg said.

  Christensen opened the manila file. He flipped through four documents inside and read the title of each one: Certificate of Death, Autopsy Protocol, Toxicology Report, and Coroner’s Investigative Report. None was more than two pages long. He’d expected the bureaucracy of death to be more substantial.

  Chapter 21

  Christensen began with the death certificate. Name: Vincent Charles Underhill III. Date of death: October 6, 1996. Race: Caucasian. Date of birth: July 6, 1993—just over three years old. He scanned past the names of the child’s parents, although he jotted down Ford and Leigh Underhill’s Sewickley Heights address. Near the bottom, typed in capital letters, under “Cause of Death”: SUBDURAL HEMATOMA.

 
Bragg was back at his computer, pecking at the keyboard like an elegant black crane hunched into a rolling desk chair. Christensen decided not to ask for a definition. He copied the cause of death into his notebook, as well as the name Simon Bostwick, the deputy coroner whose signature was at the bottom.

  The toxicology report was a check-off sheet listing dozens of drugs, starting with acetaminophen. They’d tested specimens from the boy’s heart, blood, urine, stomach, kidneys, liver, and the fluid from inside his eyeballs. All along the page, the “None” box was checked.

  The coroner’s investigative report was a short account by another deputy coroner who actually retrieved Chip Underhill’s body from the hospital where paramedics took him after the accident. That deputy’s role, it seemed, mostly involved delivering the boy’s body to the morgue and tracking the final disposition of his size 4 clothing, the only personal property noted in the report. Nothing useful.

  The autopsy protocol began with a brief history of the death, an account of the horseback-riding accident that injured Chip Underhill. It offered little information beyond what Christensen had seen in the newspaper account. He noted, though, that the lines estimating the time of death and the time of the emergency call reporting the incident were left blank. The rest was a narrative catalog of Bostwick’s external and internal examination of Chip Underhill’s body, and Christensen was struck by the dispassionate language of death science. The deputy coroner described the boy’s height, weight, hair color, eye color, and complexion. The pupils were dilated and equal, but he noted retinal bleeding, again in capital letters. The nose, atraumatic and intact. The upper and lower lips appeared unremarkable, as were the mucous membranes of the oral cavity. His teeth were natural and in good repair. His external genitalia were those of a normal male child. No external injuries were noted, save for an abrasion on the boy’s left shoulder.

  Christensen imagined Ford Underhill’s confusion: His son must have lost consciousness at some point after the riding accident, but from this account he also must have appeared uninjured. What would haunt a parent more? Seeing his child injured in some obvious and horrible way? Or watching him die quietly while seemingly asleep?

  Bostwick’s account of the internal examination—the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, gastrointestinal tract, pancreas, hepatobiliary system, spleen, pituitary, thyroid, and adrenals—was an inventory of the unremarkable, a grim listing of organ weights and fluid measures.

  Christensen scanned to the section describing Chip Underhill’s head. There were no contusions or hemorrhages in the deep scalp tissues. The cranium and base of the skull were intact and without fractures. The brain weighed an unremarkable 964 grams, but with “severe edema in the cavity”—blood, apparently, from an “intercranial hemorrhage on both the left and right sides.” The fall, or the horse’s kick, apparently had sent Chip Underhill’s brain crashing around the inside of his skull like a doomed ship caught between rocks.

  Christensen shuddered. He didn’t fully understand the arcane medical terminology describing the injuries, but he understood right away that a brain injury had killed Chip Underhill. He closed the file, pushed it back across the counter, and paid the preoccupied clerk to photocopy each of the documents. As he waited, he thought dark thoughts about Molly, about Annie and Melissa, about Brenna and Taylor and the depressing fragility of life.

  Chapter 22

  The house was as quiet as a tomb in the late afternoon. If not for the sound of his computer’s fan and the spider-crawl of his fingers across the keyboard, Christensen knew the silence of solitude would overwhelm him.

  He’d come straight home from the morgue, forgoing his planned stop at Brenna’s office and the chance to pick up the kids early. He was following a bread-crumb trail into Floss Underhill’s forgotten recent past, hoping for a break. He checked his notebook for the name that the records clerk had mentioned: Haygood. He typed it in and waited while the computer searched. The screen blinked and, to Christensen’s surprise, it announced that it had found one story. It was published in Pittsburgh Magazine seven months earlier and was titled “The Worst Job in the World.” The headline alone made it worth the $1.50 it cost him to download it and print it out.

  Christensen leaned back in his chair, put one foot up on his desk, and read. According to an information line at the top of the six-page printout, the story had run with a full-page photograph of “Carrie Haygood, head of Allegheny County’s new Child Death Review Team.” The secondary headline read: “Why ghetto-born Ivy Leaguer Carrie Haygood is taking on the toughest homicides of all.”

  The Child Death Review Team was created by the county commission less than a year ago as a logical outgrowth of the child-abuse awareness movement of the 1980s, the story explained. The team’s mission was to scrutinize the circumstances surrounding the death of children in Allegheny County for indications of abuse or foul play, and its initial goal was to begin a systematic review of all child death cases in the county during the past ten years.

  He scanned the pages, slowing down to absorb the details of Carrie Haygood’s biography: Braxton Heights High School honors student; University of Pittsburgh undergrad; Georgetown University Medical School; forensic training at the University of Virginia; a standout forensic specialist during her fourteen years with the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. She called the opportunity to return to Pittsburgh to lead the county’s Child Death Review Team “the worst job I can imagine, and an irresistible obligation.”

  Christensen stopped reading. If the morgue clerk had made copies of Chip Underhill’s file for Haygood and her team, was it just part of that routine records review of cases going back ten years? Or had the case been singled out by someone who suspected the official version of the boy’s death? He wasn’t finding answers, only more questions.

  He checked his watch—fifteen minutes until he had to leave to pick up Annie and Taylor at Kids’ Korner. What now? He picked up his notes from the morgue and read through them again, stopping at the name Simon Bostwick, the deputy coroner who signed Chip Underhill’s death certificate. He found the phone number of the coroner’s office on his receipt for photocopying the documents and dialed.

  “Simon Bostwick, please,” he said to the woman who answered “Cahnny Corner” in an unmistakable Pittsburgh accent.

  After a long pause, she said, “He’s no longer with this office. Somebody else I can direct you to?”

  Christensen cleared his throat, stalling for time. Allegheny County still elected its coroner even though most of the rest of the country had gone to an appointed medical-examiner system years earlier. There’d been a change in administration the year before—a comically bombastic Democrat named Cyrus Lawrence Walsh was swept into power on his vague promise to “professionalize” the coroner’s office—and he’d replaced much of former coroner Nagiv Pungpreechawatn’s staff with political patrons. There’d been lawsuits.

  “Your office went through a big transition this past year, I guess,” he said.

  “Well, uh—” the woman said. “Dr. Bostwick retired before that, I think.”

  Other lines were ringing, and Christensen could hear the impatience in her voice. “I know you’re busy, but do you know if he’s still in the area?”

  “Hold aahn,” she said. WDVE was just coming out of a back-to-back Pearl Jam set, but then, what would be appropriate hold music for the county morgue?

  Christensen checked his watch again, dashing his thoughts about making a salad for dinner before he picked up the kids.

  “He’s up near Seven Springs somewhere, is alls we know,” the woman said. “Sorry I can’t help you more. Nobody here knows much abaaht him.” The line clicked, and she was gone.

  Christensen dialed directory assistance.

  “What city?”

  The question stumped him. “Somewhere in the
Laurel Highlands?” he said.

  “Let’s try Somerset. Business or residence?”

  “Residence.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Simon Bostwick,” he said, checking his notes again. “B-O-S-T-W—”

  “Here’s your number,” the operator said, turning the conversation over to a synthesized electronic voice. Christensen copied it down on a bright-yellow Post-it note, stuck it on the top page of his notebook, then checked his watch again. Kids’ Korner levied oppressive fines that increased every five minutes that a pickup parent arrived after 6 p.m. Simon Bostwick would have to wait.

  Chapter 23

  Vincent Underhill’s study was silent, but for how long Brenna wasn’t sure. When he’d finished telling the story of his grandson’s death, Underhill had closed his eyes and sat perfectly still, so still that Brenna wondered if he’d fallen asleep. The air in the room shifted, subtle affirmation that the giant house’s air conditioner had kicked on. She glanced at the Atmos clock on the mantel. Later than she thought.

  As soon as she stood up, Underhill opened his eyes.

  “I should go,” she said.

  “It’s late. I know you’ve got kids of your own to worry about.”

  She nodded. “Evenings can be pretty hectic, and I’ve still got some work at the office.”

  “Of course.”

  In the weight of the moment, Brenna resisted the impulse to apologize. She was doing her job, doing it well, checking the seams of the family’s story, exploring all the possibilities that she knew Dagnolo and the investigators intended to explore, possibilities Myron Levin apparently had explored already. The Underhills would commend her thoroughness if things ever got weird, if the D.A. did file charges and tried to prove in court that Floss was shoved off that deck.