Mortal Remains Read online

  They passed a gleaming Cadillac hearse parked at the head of a curved driveway. A haphazard cluster of lesser vehicles reached all the way out to the street. Mark had suggested they walk the block from Dan’s office so as not to add a police car to the mix. He shipped most of the local dead here, and in exchange for the business got to keep his coroner cases in the refrigerator locker alongside the corpses slated to be embalmed. But, as old man Blair always reminded him, he had to keep his comings and goings out of sight and not disturb the viewings upstairs.

  Mark led the way around to the back door, to which he had the key. They went down a wooden staircase and passed through a dimly lit hallway stacked with empty caskets. Some had sticker prices on them. There was a cloying sweetness in the air, offset by a hint of something sour.

  Everett looked around and curled up his nose. “You do most of your autopsies in a mortuary? This place looks like it’s owned by the Addams family.”

  “They let me use a slab in their refrigerator now and then. Autopsies we do at the hospital in Saratoga, or in Albany,” Mark said.

  With a second key he unlocked a large metal door at the end of the corridor and ushered them into a gleaming tiled room that was markedly colder than the temperature outdoors. A stainless-steel table with a drain at its center and a bucket underneath occupied the middle of the floor. Suspended from the ceiling was a large OR lamp, and around the walls stood big yellow vats connected by beige tubing to shiny silver probes that looked like giant needles. Glass jars containing various colored fluids lined the counters, and two metal cabinets filled with stainless-steel instruments were against the walls. The aroma of formaldehyde picked at the back of his nostrils like a swarm of ants. “Better breathe through your mouth, gentlemen,” he warned, crossing over to what looked like a built-in filing cabinet with half a dozen giant drawers. He reached for the third handle down, and pulled out what was left of Kelly McShane.

  Her bones had mostly come apart during the retrieval operation, and trying to lay them out in the correct anatomical order had taken Mark an entire weekend. He wasn’t sure he got all the small phalanges of the fingers exactly right, and everything was still discolored brown. The forensics pathologist he’d talked to in New York had told him to do the best he could and not clean the specimen until their own cold-case specialist could view the remains. Consequently, the piecemeal skeleton and remaining strands of tissue had the appearance of something dug up from antiquity.

  “Race you to the raft, Mark!”

  A flash of golden skin parted the water, and the splash sparkled white in the sun. He plunged after her, laughing with delight as he frantically swam through her wake, then drew alongside, managing to touch the bobbing platform first.

  Only now did he realize she had let him win.

  “So what do you have?” Everett asked, quickly removing his overcoat and snapping on a pair of latex gloves he took from a box on the counter.

  “First, what we didn’t find. No jewelry, no buttons, no belt buckle, and not so much as a shred of clothing, some of which we figure should have survived in all that cold mud, so we assume she was stripped before going in the water…”

  As he spoke, Mark envisioned her plunging through the murk, sleek and white as a taper, her strawberry blond hair streaming out behind her.

  “… nor were there any distinctive marks on the anchor and chain used to weight her down. What we do have are the remains you see before you, the obvious feature being the skull fracture.” Mark retrieved a pen from his jacket pocket and used it to indicate a three-inch crack that cut across her right temple. Filled with debris, it stood out like a leech on the subtler corrugated markings where the various bony plates in the cranium joined together. “Whoever hit her knew exactly the spot,” he continued. “The point of impact measured two finger widths above the zygomatic arch and a thumb width behind the frontal process of the zygomatic bone itself. That’s directly over the middle meningeal artery.” He picked up the skull, turned it over, and held it so the detective could look inside the cranial vault through the foramen magnum, the large opening through which the spine had been connected to the brain.

  The interior emitted a whiff of rot.

  Everett screwed up his nose and jerked his head away.

  “See how there are bony splinters pressed inward,” Mark continued, shoving the specimen back in front of his eyes. He’d be damned if he’d let this worn-out little man evade a single detail of what had been done to Kelly. The trick to getting the best out of cops was the same as with doctors – make them care. “They probably tore the vessel, setting off a massive hemorrhage. Pray to God she was still unconscious going in the water.”

  “Still?”

  “Trauma that tears the meningeal artery causes a bleed between the lining of the brain and the skull. Sometimes victims stay unconscious until they die. Sometimes they wake up and are lucid for a while. There’s a chance she was sent to the bottom awake and aware.”

  “My God,” Dan said.

  Even Everett looked taken aback. He rotated his neck as if it needed loosening up. “That’s it?”

  “There’s nothing else to look at.”

  “So it’s still a cold case.” The detective pulled off his gloves.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I’d love to spend a couple of weeks up here and work the evidence with you. Hell, I’m in love with your town, even though I can’t see it. It’s everything New York’s not, quiet, clean, and slow. Bet the fishing’s great. Trouble is, you don’t have any new evidence to work, and I got recent caseloads up the wazoo back home that do.”

  “But it’s murder.”

  Everett’s thin shoulders slumped, and he let out a rattling sigh. “It’s a body, what’s left of it, with a skull fracture. That anchor, chain, and padlock your retrieval team pulled up? We checked them out already. Virtually untraceable, they’re so common. Otherwise, there’s not a thing to point us where we haven’t already been. NYPD investigated the hell out of her disappearance twenty-seven years ago, the same as if she’d been a murder case. Not only did every lead come up empty – especially anything having to do with our prime suspect back then, her husband – but the PIs hired by the girl’s parents couldn’t find anything either. Factor in all the clout old man Braden still has in New York City, no one’s willing to put his son through a first-degree shit-ride again without a damn solid reason.”

  To this point, Mark had considered the detective’s visit as simply the necessary first step in the NYPD resuming the hunt for Kelly’s murderer. That they’d try to dump it never occurred to him. “That sucks!”

  “You bet.”

  “And what would it take to reopen the case? I can’t just let it go.”

  Everett shrugged and began pulling on his overcoat. “Well, say, you find a lead on the mystery man she met up with. We’d be on him in a New York minute.”

  “I find a lead?”

  “You want more done, do it yourself, Doc. You and the sheriff here.” He picked up his briefcase, snapped it open, and took out a pair of files, each the size of the Manhattan phone book. “I made copies of our records on the case, the basic stuff. Your body, your jurisdiction, guys. Sorry, but it’s the best I can offer.” He jammed the two tomes of paper into Mark’s chest and walked out the door.

  “Jesus, what an asshole,” muttered Dan, and hurried after him.

  Mark remained where he was, too astonished by the kiss-off to say anything. A slam echoed down the corridor, and once again he found himself alone with Kelly.

  A half hour later he looked up from leafing through the material Everett had left, startled to see Dan standing at the door watching him. “Christ, I didn’t hear you return.”

  “You were pretty engrossed in your reading. Find anything?”

  “No. It’ll take forever to go through this stuff.” Mark slammed the files closed. “Can you believe that guy, laying the whole thing on us?”

  Dan walked over and flipped on
e of the dossiers open again. Scanning the front page, he said, “Actually, it kind of makes sense.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know what cracks cold cases?”

  “What?”

  He nudged the folder he’d been looking at back toward Mark. “One guy who can’t get it out of his head. I’d say that’s you, buddy.”

  5:00 P.M.

  Geriatrics Wing,

  New York City Hospital

  Dr. Bessie McDonald didn’t like seeing the sun go down. The gathering blackness reminded her too much of her own end of days, and her breathing got worse at night.

  She felt depressed, stuck in her hospital room. At least the nurses had allowed her more than the usual personal effects to help make it easier. She had a dozen framed photographs – a black-and-white of Fred in his uniform, smiling before he went off to Korea to be slaughtered and leave her a widow; color snaps of her son, Fred Junior; portraits of her three young grandsons, all grinning at her with various front teeth missing. She’d also brought a set of figurines depicting a young woman doctor performing her daily functions: administering to a newborn baby, listening to an old man’s chest, comforting a sick child. Though she never told anyone, the face on the porcelain statues was hers as a young woman, fired especially for her by a craftsman who had been her patient in the first years of her practice. She took nearly as much comfort looking at the figurines as at her family, not out of narcissism, but from pride at how she’d spent her life, from those early halcyon days up until the moment her own rendezvous with illness clipped her wings as a general practitioner.

  She’d always been at risk of a stroke because of her crazy heart flying in and out of funny rhythms: a racing yet steady-as-a-jackhammer burst called PAT, or paroxysmal atrial tachycardia, when she was forty-three; then, in later years, atrial fibrillation, a chronic, wildly erratic tattoo. Whatever the beat, the muscle began to wear out, and eventually she slipped into congestive failure. Luckily, Melanie Collins saw her through it all. But she hadn’t suffered her first embolic event until four years ago at age sixty-six, when a blood clot formed in the fluttering upper chamber, broke off, and flew into her brain. Initially paralyzed on the right side, she’d been left with just her speech affected, again thanks to the precise diagnostic skills of Melanie and the quick use of clot busters – thrombolytic enzymes that break down the blockage before damage is done. Therapy got her back to talking so that no one would notice; however, at times, she had trouble finding the word she wanted.

  The lasting harm had been done to her work, the ordeal derailing her from the practice of medicine for nearly a year. Although she’d arranged for a temporary replacement, many of her patients worried that she would stroke out again despite her intention to return, and found new doctors. With each departure, the sense of purpose she fought so valiantly to regain shriveled a little more.

  Then, just three months ago, while digging in her garden, her right side went numb. She tumbled to the ground, her arm and leg like deadwood for all the good they were to her. She lay there, her face pressed into the earth, dirt up her nose, and bugs crawling between her lips. A worm’s-eye view of the world, she thought, wondering if it would be the last thing she ever saw.

  She’d had no pain, and knew this was the same kind of stroke as before, a blockage, not a bleed. If she got help fast enough, maybe the clot-busting enzymes that rescued her before could help again. Yet second by second, her time nearly ran out. When a neighbor spotted her and called an ambulance, she knew the three-hour window for treatment would soon close.

  Once she got to the hospital, there had been no Melanie on hand to speedily diagnose and treat her.

  “Since she’s already anticoagulated, it must be a bleed,” one of the ER residents, a sleepy-eyed kid, had said to her nurses as he methodically checked her reflexes.

  No! she’d wanted to scream as she pawed feebly at his arm trying to get his attention.

  He’d ignored her, and added, “Besides, we don’t know how long it’s been since she stroked out.”

  Two hours, forty minutes, asshole! There’s still time.

  “Send her for a CAT scan?” one of the women had asked, recording her vitals.

  “Of course,” he said, and wandered out of the room.

  No, don’t leave. Talk to the radiologist yourself. Bump me to the head of the line!

  Three hours too late they’d made the correct diagnosis.

  Her speech returned, but the delay cost her partial use of her right arm and her ability to walk normally. It also turned her into an old woman overnight.

  “Hi, Bessie.” A pint-sized nurse with a GI haircut and a name tag that read NURSE TANYA WOZCEK pinned to her uniform bopped across to her bed. “All set for your meds?”

  “As much as I’ll ever be.”

  Everyone called her Bessie. It sprang from her insistence that she be registered as Mrs. Bessie McDonald, not Dr. McDonald, during her admissions. “Things go wrong when they know you’re a physician,” she’d repeatedly explained to the admitting office. “Doctors, nurses, techs – they all start doing what they wouldn’t normally do, second-guessing themselves. Leads to mistakes.”

  But since the night of this most recent stroke, she’d had plenty of time to do some second-guessing herself. Had they known she was a doctor, would they have listened to what she was trying to tell them?

  “Here, let me prop up your pillows,” Tanya said.

  Bessie grew short of breath if she didn’t sleep partially upright. The result of heart failure. “Thank you, dear.”

  “And here are your pills.” Tanya handed over a paper cup that had five tablets in it.

  Bessie poured herself a glass of water from her pitcher, then downed the bunch of them in a swallow. She’d been on them for years: Digoxin to control her heart rate and increase its pump action; furosemide to keep water from accumulating in her lungs; rampril to relax her arterial tree and reduce the cardiac workload; warfarin, also known as rat poison, the anticoagulant that had led the resident off track; and a baby aspirin, to thin the blood and prevent more clots. As easy as one, two, three, four, five. Except having to take pills at all bored her, and the treatment, like all regimens, wasn’t perfect.

  To control her angina, she had to take a spray of nitroglycerine under her tongue, in addition to wearing a patch of it on her skin. The latter could be worn anywhere, but most patients put it on their arm or chest. She stuck hers on her ass every morning just to be contrary, having precious few other ways to say, I’m here and I’ll do things my way.

  “Skin’s skin,” she told the residents whenever they objected.

  “You go right ahead and put it where you want, girl,” Tanya would say to her in private.

  She liked Tanya. The woman always worked evenings, which led Bessie to try figure out what this nurse did during the days. She never talked about herself, and, of course, Bessie never pried. The fun lay in the guessing, not the answers. Bessie’s active mind grated against the hours of idleness and pounced on any puzzle for entertainment.

  “I see you’ve been reading about Kelly McShane,” Tanya said, picking up a newspaper from the nightstand that lay open to the article. “The whole hospital’s buzzing about it.”

  “I’ll bet. How’s Chaz Braden taking it?”

  Tanya looked up from scanning the column. “Do you know him?”

  “He was my cardiologist the first time I got admitted for my heart, about six months before his wife disappeared. Didn’t like him.”

  The nurse’s expression slipped into neutral, and she glanced nervously at the doorway. “Can I get you anything? How about some juice?” Obviously, she wasn’t about to engage in a round of bad-mouthing the man, which, of course, was professionally correct.

  But not fun.

  Tanya leaned in close as if fluffing up the pillows a second time. “Our supervisor’s warned us not to gossip about it, but I bet you want to tell me every word of what went on back then, don’t you?” she
whispered, dispatching propriety with a grin.

  Nice girl, Bessie thought. “Of course I do.”

  “Well, it’ll have to wait. You’re not my only patient, you know.” She gave a conspiratorial wink. “But maybe later, when I drop by with your needle.”

  6:00 P.M.

  St. Paul’s Hospital,

  Buffalo, New York

  Earl sat rereading the article for the tenth time when a quick rap on the door startled him.

  Janet walked in. “Hi, love. Got a minute for me? It’s been a hell of a day in the case room.” She came up to him and pulled off her surgical cap, her short blond hair popping out from its confines like a golden star burst. She flipped the paper aside and pulled him to his feet, slipping her arms around him.

  He felt his wife’s slim body beneath her OR greens, but returned the hug woodenly.

  “Hey! That’s no way to treat a lady,” she said, pushing back and smiling up at him. Tall as he was, his six-foot frame outranked hers by only a couple of inches. Whatever she saw in his expression, she immediately knew that he was upset as hell. “Earl, what’s the matter?”

  He sighed and handed her the article.

  “Did you know her?” she said after skimming through it.

  “She was in my class.”

  “My God! That’s awful. I’m sorry. Were you friends?”

  “She was in my study group. Along with Melanie Collins, Ronda Collins’s older sister, and, of course, Jack MacGregor,” he quickly added, giving her names he knew she’d recognize.

  On hearing Jack MacGregor, Janet grimaced, and a pained expression crossed her face. MacGregor had died two years ago saving Earl’s life.

  “There were a few others with us whom you don’t know,” Earl continued, feeling uneasy.

  She read a little more of the column. “How creepy. Did you have any idea she’d been murdered?”

  “No.”

  “Even after she just disappeared without a trace?”

  “We all thought she’d run away from her husband. It really wasn’t a happy marriage.”