by Sharon Pape
Rory shifted her weight, wishing that he’d get to the point, if in fact there was one.
If Zeke noticed her impatience, he didn’t let it bother him. “Like I said, we didn’t think much more about it,” he went on in the same languid drawl. “But ’round about the same time there was a bank robbery up in Phoenix. Three men killed the guard and got away with ten grand—a big haul in those days. And they were wearin’ masks so no one could identify them. We had no reason to think that the deaths of Paco and the guard were connected, till Henry stopped in. Henry rode the trains with Paco from time to time, you see. Anyhow, Henry was so scared he couldn’ stop stammerin’ long enough to get two sensible words out. When I finally got him calmed down, he told me how he and Paco had seen the robbers runnin’ out of the bank that day in Phoenix. Seen them pull off their masks. So when Paco turned up dead, poor Henry was sure he was gonna be next. But once we knew that both deaths were connected to the same bank robbery, we were able to catch up with the robbers before they got to Henry.” Zeke finished his story with a satisfied nod.
“So you’re trying to tell me that you think Mac was murdered?” Rory asked, the pizza all but forgotten.
“I’m just sayin’ that sometimes when things don’t seem to have any connection, they’re connected right down to the core.”
“But we know that Mac died of a heart attack,” she protested. At least the doctors and her parents were certain that he had, and she had no concrete reason to believe that they were wrong. Still, as she’d said to Jeremy, when someone dies alone there are always questions left unanswered.
“Did they do an autopsy?” Zeke asked.
She shook her head. “His doctor said it was a massive myocardial infarction. My folks didn’t see any point in violating his body with an autopsy.”
Zeke looked her squarely in the eye. “You listen to me, Rory. If Mac was murdered ’cause he was lookin’ into Gail’s death, then you could be next. And that car that was followin’ you could’ve been the first step in that direction.”
Chapter 15
In spite of Rory’s own difficulty in accepting her uncle’s sudden death, she was not ready to buy into Zeke Drummond’s theory that he’d been murdered. The marshal had altogether too much time on his hands, and it was no doubt easy for him to see murder lurking everywhere, since he himself had been a victim of that crime. Still, she struggled over what if anything she should tell her parents. On one hand, they had a right to know if there was even a slight chance that Mac had been killed. On the other hand, such an investigation would no doubt involve exhuming Mac’s body, and she preferred to spare them that trauma if possible. In the end, Rory decided that she owed it to her uncle, as well as to her parents, to find out whether his heart had actually been attacked by something more sinister than saturated fat.
She made an appointment to see Dr. Barrett Browning III, the chief medical examiner for Suffolk County. She’d met the man on two other occasions and then only briefly. It was common knowledge that he came from a long line of distinguished physicians, and that his family, expecting him to follow in his progenitors’ footsteps, had given him a name commensurate with that lineage. Rory could only imagine their horror when Barrett eschewed private practice to become a coroner and chose to go through life known simply as BB. But even though he was the blackest sheep in the Browning family, everywhere else he was well loved.
Rory agreed to meet BB where he worked at the Department of Health Services. With one of his assistants away and another out sick, he was almost literally up to his neck in cadavers. When she reached the door to the autopsy suite, she peered through the panel of glass. BB was hard at work on one of his corpses. With age, the patrician features he’d inherited from a long line of Brownings were melting into the doughy roundness of his face. Rory wondered if he ever worried about his own mortality as he spent his days digging through the remains of his fellow man. But by all accounts, BB was a happy man, clever, upbeat and fun to be around.
As Rory watched, he removed a dark red organ from the body cavity and deposited it in the scale above the table. She took a deep breath to steady herself. Although she’d been at the morgue on several occasions as part of her police academy training, her stomach was never completely at peace there. To her way of thinking, there were some sights and smells that were better left to the imagination. She knocked on the door, glad that she’d skipped lunch.
“Entrez,” she heard him say, his jovial voice muted by the door. “Bienvenido, come on in.”
Rory let herself in but stopped several feet shy of BB and the autopsy table, which was fine since she had no intentions of shaking his gloved and gory hand. For his part, BB greeted her without missing a beat as he went about disemboweling his subject. After assuring one another that they were “quite fine, thank you,” Rory explained why she was there.
“I guess what I’m asking, is whether there are drugs that can precipitate a fatal heart attack and make it seem as if it occurred from natural causes.”
BB didn’t stop working, but his brows bunched together in a frown. “If you were a writer asking me that question, I’d figure you were plotting out a murder mystery. But you’re not. You’re a cop. An artist cop, but still a cop. So now I’m thinking you have a decedent and very possibly a murder on your hands. Am I getting warm?”
“Toasty,” she replied.
“Mac.” BB nodded as if he didn’t need her confirmation.
“Everyone was so sure his lifestyle killed him that an autopsy seemed like an unnecessary indignity.”
“Don’t torture yourself, Detective,” he said, piling intestines onto the scale like a butcher weighing sausages. “There’s a good chance an autopsy wouldn’t have found anything anyway. There are drugs that don’t stay in the body long enough to be detected. And there are injection sites that the best coroner could miss.
“So there wouldn’t be any point in exhuming the body?”
“I don’t think there’d be much if anything to gain from it.”
“But there might be?”
BB turned to face her. “Do you mind if I ask why you think your uncle was murdered?”
Rory hesitated. She had to be careful about how she worded her reply. She couldn’t mention Zeke’s name, nor did she want to sound as paranoid as she was beginning to feel.
“His passing was so sudden, it just never seemed right somehow,” she said. “And then I found out he was investigating another suspicious death at the time he died.” She gave BB a quick rundown of what she knew, ending with the theory that the two deaths might be linked. She made a silent apology to Zeke for stealing his theory.
“I see. Entendu. Understood.” BB’s jowls drooped like a hound dog’s as he considered this new information.
“I’d still have to say that in all likelihood his heart just gave out. Hard as it is to bear, it happens more often than you’d think. As for the timing? Probably coincidental. Do you happen to remember who autopsied the Oberlin gal?”
“Blake,” Rory said, having seen the name on the autopsy report.
“Tom Blake’s a good man, bright man, conscientious. I’d be surprised if anything got past him.”
“So, if you were in my position?”
“Well, you still don’t have any hard evidence that Oberlin was murdered. If you’re able to establish that she was, then I might push for an exhumation and autopsy on Mac. But time is not on your side here, Rory. The fact is, even if you were to exhume his body today, I doubt we’d be able to come up with anything definitive.”
“That’s pretty much what I was thinking. I guess I just needed to hear it from an expert.”
“Always glad to accommodate.”
“One more thing,” Rory said before he could turn back to his work. “Since this theory is still just a theory . . .”
“Not to worry.” BB smiled like a giant Pillsbury Doughboy. “Mum’s the word. Silence is golden. My lips are sealed.”
At four o’clock Rory left
what she now thought of as her paying job and went to Mac’s office to continue her pro bono work. She had to be out of there by tinue her pro bono work. She had to be out of there by the end of the month if she didn’t want to pay additional rent. It was taking her longer than she’d anticipated to transcribe the notes in Mac’s files and send them out to the respective clients. Between her paying job, moving into Mac’s house and investigating Gail’s death, she was often too tired to put in additional hours on the languishing files. But as the month drew to an end, the prospect of having to pay more rent was proving to be a great motivator.
When she arrived at the office and turned her key in the lock, it met with no resistance, as if the tumblers weren’t engaged. Her first thought was, “Great, I’m so preoccupied that now I’ve even forgotten to lock the door.” But as she stepped across the threshold into the reception area, it was clear that her memory was not at issue. She’d had a visitor during her absence. And it wasn’t the cleaning lady. The desk drawers that she’d emptied shortly after the funeral had been pulled out and thrown onto the floor.
For a moment she stood frozen in place, her mind trying to process what her eyes were seeing. Then her training kicked in. She set her purse on the floor and drew her gun out of its holster before advancing farther into the room. She knew that once she passed the partitioning wall, she’d be visible to anyone who might still be in the office proper. She waited another minute, holding her breath and listening for sounds of movement inside. She could hear the mechanical click of the wall clock, the muted sounds of traffic on the street below, the ringing of a phone in another part of the building and louder than all of them, the hectic thudding of her heart.
The odds were that the intruder was long gone, but since odds didn’t always favor the gambler, she flattened herself against the wall and edged forward. When she reached the doorway to the inner office, she gripped the gun in both hands to steady her aim and swung into the room shouting, “Police! Drop your weapons!”
The room had been thoroughly ransacked, but it appeared to be unoccupied. She checked behind the door and within the narrow coat closet. The only bathroom was out in the building’s common hallway. There was nowhere else for anyone to hide. She was alone. She didn’t realize that she’d been holding her breath until it exploded out of her lungs with relief.
She looked around her. Nothing was where it belonged. All the furniture had been moved. Desk and filing cabinet drawers hung open, their contents scattered everywhere. The ceramic planters had been thrown to the floor and smashed, out of frustration perhaps when the intruder hadn’t found what he was looking for. The ridiculous thought crossed Rory’s mind that this was actually a worse mess than Mac had ever made.
Although she couldn’t be certain, it was a good bet that the intruder was looking for the file on Gail Oberlin. But that file was back in the house on Brandywine Lane. Unlike Mac, Rory had no hesitancy about arming the security system at night or whenever she went out. Since the central station hadn’t called on her cell phone to report a break in, whoever had trashed the office had not yet tried to gain entry to the house. Of course, if Zeke were right about Mac being murdered, then it was possible that the same intruder had already been in the house at least once. Regarded in that light, the office break-in took on a decidedly more troubling aspect.
As Rory started to clean up the room, it occurred to her that she’d broken her promise to Leah. She should have left the office and called for backup as soon as she realized that there’d been a break-in. But then she might have missed an opportunity to capture the intruder. Okay, okay, she knew she was just rationalizing, and that as rationales went, it wasn’t a great one. Still, no one had threatened her or made a move to harm her. If they did, she would have no choice but to let Leah and her captain know. Anything less would reflect a serious lack of judgment on her part. She could hear Leah’s voice in her head saying that that ship had already sailed, along with a few of its sisters.
“Hello?” a man’s disembodied voice came from the reception area.
Rory jumped up from the floor where she’d been trying to collate the blizzard of papers. In that instant she realized that she’d left the outer door open as an escape route and had forgotten to close it once she’d confirmed that the intruder was gone. For that matter, she’d also left her handbag out there.
“Who is it?” she called, her hand poised on the hilt of her gun. She tried to place the man’s voice as she positioned herself once more against the wall that separated the two rooms, this time on the opposite side.
“Rory? It’s Jeremy.”
Her hand dropped off the gun as she came around the wall into the reception area.
Jeremy was standing just inside the doorway with a stunned expression that she imagined was pretty similar to the one that she’d worn upon her arrival.
His face was flushed, and he was wearing shorts and sneakers and a tee shirt that clung to his chest in dark patches of sweat.
“Was there a burglary?” he asked, crossing the room to her. “Were you here when it happened? Are you all right?” His voice ratcheted up a notch with each question.
“I’m fine. I came in after the fact.”
Standing beside her now, Jeremy could see into the inner office. He shook his head as if rendered speechless by the view. “What on earth were they looking for?” he murmured finally.
“I have no idea.” Rory bent to pick up her purse and set it on the desk. “I don’t think anything’s missing. It could be they had the wrong address.” Privately she didn’t think that was the case, but she didn’t want to make Jeremy more agitated than he already seemed to be. She really didn’t have time to do any serious hand-holding.
“Do you think they were after the file on Gail?” he asked.
“There’s no way to know for sure. But if that’s what they were after, they must be disappointed, because I have it at home.”
Jeremy bobbed his head and chewed on his lower lip for a moment. “Whoever murdered her might want to know what your investigation’s turned up so far.”
“Whoa,” Rory said. “Let’s back up a bit there. I know you’re convinced your sister was murdered, but I have yet to find any real evidence of that.”
“You haven’t discovered anything worthwhile then?”
“I would have told you if I had,” she said, a sharpening edge to her tone. She was beginning to feel as if she was being questioned, and she didn’t like the experience one bit.
Jeremy’s tone became conciliatory. “It’s just that I wouldn’t want you to get hurt or anything on my account.”
“I don’t intend to get hurt on anyone’s account,” Rory assured him. “Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Oh, uh, no, not really. I just went for a run in Hecksher Park and figured I’d stop in, see if you were here, say ‘hello.’ ”
“I’m afraid it’s not the best time for a visit.” She couldn’t help thinking that it was awfully coincidental for Jeremy to have chosen this particular day and time to stop by.
“Yeah, sorry.”
“I’ll give you a call as soon as I actually have some news.” She took Jeremy’s arm and piloted him to the door.
He stopped at the threshold. “Look, I’m sorry if I came across a little too pushy there. I know you have a ton of other stuff on your plate. And you—”
“That’s okay,” Rory said, hoping to end the discussion.
“You have no idea how grateful I am that you’re even helping me with this investigation.”
“I’ll call you soon with an update.”
“Right. Right, thanks.”
Rory closed and locked the door as soon as his feet had cleared the doorway. She glanced at her watch. It was almost six and Vince Conti was picking her up for dinner at seven. As much as she hated to leave the office in its present state of disorder, the rest of the cleanup was going to have to wait.
Chapter 16
Rory jumped into the
shower as soon as she got home. Although she was pressed for time, she took a few minutes to simply stand there and let the warm water cascade over her. She could feel the muscles in her neck and shoulders relax as the tension from the office break-in began to drain out of her. She’d never been more grateful that Mac had renovated the bath-been more grateful that Mac had renovated the bathroom with every modern amenity, particularly the state-of-the-art shower with multiple heads. As much as she loved historic homes, it was hard to summon up any nostalgia for the old claw-footed tub that had been there when he’d bought the house.
She would have loved to linger there in a semi-hypnotic water trance, but it wouldn’t be right to cancel her dinner date with Vince at such a late hour. Unexpectedly, she found that thinking about him seemed to reinvigorate her. If she ever made the mistake of telling her mother about that, she would no doubt receive the overly dramatic “this could be the one” speech. Rory didn’t subscribe to the theory that there was necessarily a perfect someone out there for her, but she understood how her mother might feel comforted by the thought.
She quickly washed and loofahed, shampooed and conditioned her hair, and was in the process of shaving her legs when the lights in the bathroom fluttered. Muttering some mild obscenities about “bad timing,” she dropped the razor, turned off the water and grabbed the bath towel that she’d left on the heating rack just outside the shower stall. She pulled the door to the stall shut and was still in the process of wrapping the towel around herself when Zeke appeared beside the sink. The frosted glass between them made him look distinctly more wraithlike, as if in his haste he’d left some important molecules behind.