by D. F. Bailey
“He knew Ray.”
“I heard the news early this week. On Monday,” Finch said. “Sorry to hear about it. Quite a shock. I mean what happened,” he added to emphasize the bear attack.
Whitelaw’s eyes swept the floor as if he were searching for something. “Unbelievable,” he said. “Who ever thinks these things still happen?”
“I know. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what he was doing up in the switchbacks. His car parked. The window open.”
Whitelaw cocked his head. “Sorry — you knew Ray?”
“Briefly. We spoke a few times.”
“And that was how?” His head ticked from side to side and he fixed his gaze on Finch.
“I interviewed him.” He was about to be outed and knew that his only recourse was to come clean. “For the eXpress. I wonder if you could tell me when you last saw him.”
Whitelaw seemed stunned, took a step backward and glanced at Gianna.
“Apart from the boys, who followed him up to Saddle Mountain, same as all of us,” Gianna said as her father tried to determine who exactly was sitting at his table drinking his coffee. “The morning he died we were both standing right here, in fact.” She pointed to the floor. “Except when Raymond put out his hand to say goodbye, Daddy, you wouldn’t shake it.” Her jaw wobbled and in a weak voice she added, “Would you, Daddy?”
“All right. Enough.” He waved his hand in a motion to keep her in her chair. “Do you realize who you’re talking to?!”
“Somebody who knows how to listen,” she spat out. “For a change!”
“I said, enough.” Whitelaw’s eyes narrowed and his body shook with a violent twitch.
Gianna wrapped her arms across her chest and her head sank a notch.
“Mister Finch, I want you out of this house immediately.” He marched over to the back door. “I consider your presence here an unlawful trespass.” He stuck his head out the door and called toward the tennis court. “Justin. Evan. Get over here!”
“Gianna, nice to meet you. You need anything, you call me. I’m at the Prest Motel.” Finch gave her a business card and turned to Whitelaw. “There’s no cause for alarm, Senator Whitelaw. I’m leaving now.” He made his way to the kitchen door and eased past the senator. Whitelaw matched Finch’s height, but the senator’s frame was leaner and more taut due to the decades of his legendary running routine.
“I appreciate your help,” Finch said as he looked toward the tennis court. The Whitelaw boys stood slack-jawed, tennis rackets dangling from their hands as they tried to make out who was standing in the kitchen shade.
“Everything I said — and whatever you heard from my daughter — is off the record. Do you understand that?” the senator barked.
“Now that you’ve requested it, from this moment on, yes,” Finch said and clipped a parting salute to him. He rounded the corner and made his way to the front of the house. Two men were weeding the garden flower beds. He nodded at them and strolled down the gravel driveway toward his car. Fortunately, he didn’t need any quotes on the record from Whitelaw. What he needed was facts. And now he had a fistful of them.
For the first time in weeks — since he’d checked out of Eden Veil — Finch felt completely alive. I’m back, he whispered to himself. Back in the game.
※
Five minutes later, as he entered the village of Cannon Beach, his phone rang. When Finch saw that the call was from Jennie Lee he pulled over in front of a gift shop on South Hemlock Street.
“Where are you?”
“Cannon Beach.” He studied the shop window next to the car. “In front of a store selling what looks like varnished sea shells strung from hemp necklaces.”
“Could be any one of a dozen.” She laughed and shifted her voice tone. “Okay, a deal’s a deal. You sent me the info from the DA’s press conference and I promised you’d be first to read my report once I publish it.”
“So it’s out?”
“Not yet, but something’s come up.”
“You’ve got news?”
“More than news. We got the bear. Just below the Lewis and Clark River. About a mile from where they found Toeplitz’s corpse. My guess is that the bear found a shallow cave or hollow tree and just went to ground.”
Finch detected some warmth in her voice. She seemed more amiable on the phone than she’d been in person yesterday. Something had changed, but he had no idea what. “Are you sure it’s the right bear?”
“I haven’t seen it yet, but Manfred Dilkes said the top of the right front paw was shot through.” She paused as if no further proof were needed. “We can verify it by the end of the day. I’ll probably start the necropsy after lunch.”
“Who’s Manfred Dilkes?” Finch’s eyes wandered the length of the street. Dozens of tourists slipped in and out of the cafés and shops.
“My autopsy technician intern. He usually handles our milk runs.”
Milk runs. Obviously a trade euphemism for hauling in the dead and laying the cadavers onto a dissection bench.
“He took the call from another pair of hunters. They shot the bear this morning after it took a half-hearted run at them. I guess with his wound he hadn’t eaten since Saturday.”
Finch thought of Toeplitz. Neither of them wanted to bring up his name. Not in this context.
“Any chance I can sit in?” In all his years at the San Francisco Post, the medical examiners barred the press from their autopsy procedures. But never had a crime been linked to the death of an animal. Maybe the rules were different for necropsies.
“It’s not normal,” she said, “but with an animal it’s not technically prohibited. I can see how it might be allowed as an education piece for the press. So I’m not — ”
“I’ll be there.” He interrupted her before she could backtrack. “Just say when.”
“Look … it’s not going to be pleasant.” She paused so he could absorb this. “Just so you understand: I don’t do necropsy hand-holding.”
“No problem. I rarely do actual hand-holding of any kind.” He laughed, tried to make this into a joke. “Just tell me where to show up.”
“Normally wherever we find the animal. But since we need tissue samples to confirm a link to Toeplitz, I’ll operate in the pit,” she said. “Otherwise known as the medical examiners room.”
※
The examination room was windowless, well-lit, clean — but not spacious. “The pit,” as Jennie Lee called it, was located at the rear of the ground floor of Jennie’s building. Two french-style, steel doors opened onto the driveway where a van could back in and unload the corpses entrusted to the medical examiner. At the center of the examination room lay a stainless steel bench the size of single bed. Surrounding the bench stood an array of open shelves, closed cupboards, surgical trays, audio and video recording devices. An integrated sink and tap were attached to the foot of the examination bench and tilted at a slight angle to create a gravity drainage system for disposable fluids. Of all the implements at hand, only the sink and tap made Finch shudder. He knew they were essential for procedural hygiene, but they suggested the finality of the whole business. He’d seen quite enough of this during his time in the army field hospitals in Iraq. The Astoria medical examination room reminded him of the lesson he’d learned overseas: death commands an endless tyranny.
For a moment he reconsidered Jennie’s warning about hand-holding but she quickly had him suiting up in a plastic apron and pants. She then handed him a clear face mask. The plastic sizing strip on the back of the head band was identical to most baseball caps. He made a guess, snapped the strip into place and fitted the band around his head, with the shield peaked upward, open like a welder’s hat.
“Okay. I want you to stand at the far end of the table. And keep out of our way.” She turned to her colleague and nodded. “Manfred, you ready?”
“You bet.”
Manfred, a recent grad from Oregon Health & Science University had started an autopsy technician internship w
ith Jennie in January. He appeared to be bright, focussed, eager. Finch wondered how long Manfred could maintain his sunny disposition for the job.
The intern led the way to a collapsed stretcher stowed next to the french doors. He clicked some hidden buttons that released four wheels under the accordion legs, heaved on one end — and suddenly the stretcher became a sturdy mobile unit that he ushered through the double doors. Manfred opened the rear of the van and the three of them worked together to slide the tarp supporting the bear onto the stretcher and then wheeled the cadaver back into the examining room. With another coordinated effort they angled the stretcher to a twenty-degree slope and slid the bear onto the examining table. The whole operation took less than five minutes. Considering the weight of the bear — he looked to be at least five hundred pounds — it was an impressive performance. Finch shut the double doors and watched as Manfred clicked the buttons again and shuffled the collapsed stretcher back into a storage locker.
Jennie turned on an overhead light and the bear immediately became the centerpiece of the room. She stepped over to a desk next to the wall, clicked on an audio recorder and spoke into a microphone suspended from the ceiling. “This is Jennifer Lee, Clatsop County ME, on Thursday, May 13 at 13:20 hours. Manfred Dilkes, ME intern, is attending.” She paused, glanced at Finch and continued. “Mr. Will Finch from the San Francisco eXpress is observing. We’re performing a standard necropsy procedure on an Olympic black bear — Ursus americanus altifrontalis — suspected of the fatal attack on Mr. Raymond Toeplitz on or around May 8.”
As she completed a few tasks at the desk, Manfred used a steel tape to record several measures of the bear: length, girth, leg spans. He noted the weight, calculated by a scale built into the examining table. “Five hundred and eight pounds,” he announced and raised his eyebrows in a pique of surprise. “I imagine he lost some mass over the past week.”
“It depends.” Lee turned her chin to one side. “If he was in shock, his metabolism could easily emulate the hibernation process. In which case he wouldn’t eat or defecate.”
“In which case,” Manfred said as he looked at Finch, “the stomach contents should tell us something about Toeplitz.”
Jennie hesitated and then approached the table. “Here’s our sad friend.” She cast her voice toward the microphone as she walked to the bear’s side. She looked into his face and at his left shoulder which had absorbed a rifle shot a few hours earlier. Her gloved fingers explored the wound and after some initial probing, she inserted her index finger into the bullet hole. “One shot to the upper left shoulder. No exit wound,” she announced. “Obviously a disabling shot.” She focussed her attention on the massive head and turned the snout in her hand and leaned over to examine the back of his skull. “A second shot, fired into the forehead, with an exit wound directly opposite to the point of entry. Whoever put him down was humane about it.”
Then with a tenderness that surprised Finch, she lifted his right front paw in her gloved hands and examined the wound inflicted by Ben Argyle’s Winchester rifle. The paw was little more than a torn piece of blood-matted fur clotted with green pus.
She continued her recording: “The wound to the right front paw is consistent with the claim from Ethan and Ben Argyle that they injured the bear five days ago. The deterioration of the exposed flesh and the state of infection on the site is also consistent with their claim.”
Finch stood in one corner of the room, mentally chronicling the procedures. But now, above the sound of Jennie’s clinical assessment, he became aware of something new. He could smell the bear. The damp odor of mildewed rot washed through him in a wave. He was no longer watching the bear; instead, the bear was invading him through Will’s nose and mouth. He gasped and drew a long breath and then stepped backward until his shoulders rested against the wall.
“Mask,” Jennie said and flipped the clear plastic shield into place in front of her face.
With his eyes on Finch, Manfred slid his mask forward and slowly shifted it back and forth, as though Finch needed a demonstration of how to proceed. After a final adjustment he set his face shield into place and began to assist Jennie.
Finch drew another breath and pulled the mask over his face. The plastic shield covered him from his hairline to his throat. Jennie had yet to make the first incision and he wondered if he’d be able to watch the entire procedure. He forced his eyes to stare at the massive corpse on the examining bench.
“If you need to, go back through the door we came in. We won’t be more than twenty minutes,” Jennie said looking at him. Her eyes reflected a concern that he might not hold up.
Finch nodded and without another word, Jennie drew a surgical saw from the tray beside her, clicked it on and under the whine of the saw she muttered something into the microphone above her head.
Twenty minutes, Finch thought. As he set his jaw, determined to see the necropsy through, he began to argue with himself, one part articulating how his presence was unnecessary to writing a decent report, the other part demeaning his mental weakness and insisting that a first-hand account would strengthen the story that he knew could be a critical part of Toeplitz’s obituary.
He watched Jennie cut a line from the bear’s chest down through the pit of his stomach to what Finch assumed was the pubic bone. Except for some clotted spatter, the cut was clean and bloodless. Perpendicular to the incision, she made two additional cuts, one on each side that opened the bear’s slack belly. Manfred then applied two clamps to pull the carcass open and expose the bear’s stomach and intestines. A new wave of terrible rot — the unmistakable stench of death — flooded through the room and into Finch’s nostrils.
“We’ll be quick now,” Jennie said and proceeded to incise the bear’s stomach.
In an effort to block the rank horror, Finch shut his eyes and began to debate the idiocy of his reaction. He’d witnessed so much living human horror in Iraq. How could a few incisions into a dead bear be so unnerving? He forced himself to stare into the eviscerated stomach, once again held open by Manfred’s expert use of surgical clamps. At first Finch couldn’t make out what he was seeing. Then it came to him: the bear’s last meal, mashed by his powerful jaws and partially digested over the last five days as his digestive system began to collapse.
Finch’s head spun and he had no idea what the bits of exposed bone and flesh might be. He hoped that none of this could make any claim to Toeplitz, that what Manfred began to extract from the stomach was a collection of berries and fish, maybe a deer or several rats. On the other hand, Finch knew that soon Jennie and Manfred would take this sordid collection and test it against the DNA samples they’d collected during the Toeplitz autopsy.
He pressed the back of his head to the wall. He now stood rod-straight in the corner of the room, as far as possible from the examining table. But the room was so compact that he could clearly see everything that Manfred laid in two stainless steel pans between the bear’s outstretched legs. Finch could feel his stomach rising, a wedge of his own undigested food, knotted and climbing steadily toward his throat. He drew another long breath through the mask and forced himself to step away from the wall. Stand tall, damn it.
“Well, look at this,” Jennie said and lifted something into one gloved hand. “Hello. What have we here?”
“And here’s another,” Manfred said and pinched a pellet between his right thumb and index finger. “What are they?”
Jennie took the object from Manfred and held both slugs against the light. She studied them a moment. “They look like small caliber bullets. Check the carcass again, Manfred. Maybe we missed some entry wounds.”
She inserted her hand into the exposed belly again. This time she extracted a third object, another oval, and held it to the light. Finch was transfixed by the opaque, gelatin ball.
“Oh dear,” she whispered. “It’s a human eye.”
These were the last words Finch could make out. At the same moment that Manfred Dilkes turned to re-examine the carca
ss for entry wounds from the new-found bullets, Finch crashed into the autopsy technician’s arms and broke his fall. A second later he pitched forward onto the concrete floor in a dead faint.
※
“Manfred gave you a five-point-five.” Jennie turned her head to one side and frowned with a look of doubt. “Sorry, but I have very strict standards. I could only go as high as a four-oh. That’s out of ten, by the way.” She smiled again, a look that forced Finch to turn away. He shook his head with embarrassment.
In the moments after they’d stripped the mask from his face and dragged Finch through the examining room into her office, apparently Manfred and Jennie had assigned olympic-point scores to the reporter’s sudden pirouette and collapse at their feet. Jennie had taken the trouble to wipe his mouth and nostrils to ensure his airways were clear before she snapped a vile of smelling salts under his nose. Manfred then propped him in a chair with his head slung between his spread knees, and they told him to stay put while they completed the necropsy on their own. Fifteen minutes later Jenny returned to the office, took his pulse and blood pressure, determined that he was fit to drive and told him to meet her at Three Cups Coffee House in an hour.
When Finch opened the door to the café he spotted her sitting next to the windows at the far end of the room, one table away from where he’d sat with Sheriff Gruman. Finch, still feeling the knot of food in his belly, bought a cup of tea and joined her.
“Maybe you can give me another chance to better my score,” he said, certain that the only way to save face was to play along. “Next time I’ll stand on the lip of the examining table. Then make my move.”
“Uh, noooo.” She waved a finger. “Sorry, that was a one-time trial with permanent disqualification.”
“What?” He sipped his tea and set the cup aside.
“Sorry.” She tipped her head and her attitude shifted to a more serious tone.
“All right,” he conceded. “But tell me, did the DNA match Toeplitz?”