by Kathy Reichs
Pain ripped from my ankle. Too much pain. My calls for help morphed into agonized moans.
Defeated, I fell back, panting, sweat cooling on my icy flesh.
A parade of faces marched through my mind. Katy. Ryan. My sister, Harry. My cat, Birdie. My ex-husband, Pete.
Would I never see them again?
Great heaving sobs racked my chest.
Perhaps I lost consciousness. Perhaps not. My next awareness was of sound.
A noise outside my body. Not of my making.
I froze.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
A cerebral crack opened.
Memory slipped through.
2
ANOTHER WRISTWATCH CHECK. ANOTHER SIGH. MORE shifting feet.
Above us, a wall clock ticked steadily, indifferent to Ryan’s restlessness. It was the old-fashioned analog kind, round, with a sweep second hand that jumped in one-second increments with sharp little clicks.
I surveyed my surroundings. Same plastic plant. Same bad print of a street scene in winter. Same half-empty mugs of tepid coffee. Phone. LCD projector. Screen. Laser pointer. Nothing new had magically appeared since I last looked.
Back to the clock. A logo identified the manufacturer as Enterprise. Or perhaps that was a name for this particular model.
Did people christen timepieces? Arnie Analog? Reggie Regulator?
OK. I was as edgy as Ryan. And very, very bored.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Old Enterprise said it was ten twenty-two. Oh-six. Oh-seven. Oh-eight. We’d been waiting since nine o’clock.
Finger-drumming recommenced on the tabletop. Ryan had been performing off and on for thirty minutes. The staccato beat was getting on my nerves.
“He’ll meet with us as soon as he can,” I said.
“Our coming here was his idea.”
“Yes.”
“How do you lose a stiff in a morgue?”
“You heard Corcoran. They’ve got over two hundred bodies. The facility is overstretched.”
While I have been described as impatient, Lieutenant-détective Andrew Ryan, Section des crimes contre la personne, Sûreté du Québec, takes the term to a whole new plane. I knew the routine. Soon he’d be pacing.
Ryan and I were in a conference room at the Office of the Cook County Medical Examiner, on Chicago’s West Side. We’d flown from Montreal at the request of Christopher Corcoran, a staff pathologist with the CCME.
More than three years earlier, a fifty-nine-year-old woman named Rose Jurmain had taken a trip from Chicago to Quebec to view the fall foliage. On the fourth day of her visit she’d left her country inn for a walk and never returned. Her belongings remained behind in her room. No one saw or heard from her again.
Thirty months later remains were discovered in a forested area half a mile north of the inn. Decomposition was advanced and animal damage was extensive. I’d done the ID. Ryan had led the investigation. Now he and I were bringing Rose home.
Why the personal service? For me, friendship with Corcoran and an excuse to visit the old hometown. For Ryan? A free trip to the Windy City.
For Chris Corcoran and his boss? That would be one of my very first questions. Surely a CCME employee could have come to Montreal to collect the remains. Or a transport service. Until now the family had shown no interest in what was left of Rose Jurmain.
And why the request for our presence in Chicago nine months after resolution of the case? The Bureau du coroner had ruled Rose’s death an accident. Why the special interest now?
Despite my curiosity, so far there’d been no time for questions. Ryan and I had arrived to find media vans lining Harrison Street and the facility in lockdown.
While parking us in the conference room, Corcoran had provided a quick explanation. The previous day, a funeral home had attempted to collect a body for cremation. Inexplicably, the corpse was nowhere to be found.
All hands were engaged in crisis control. The chief was spinning for the press. A frantic search was under way. And Ryan and I were cooling our heels.
“I suppose the family is going ballistic,” Ryan said.
“Oooh, yeah. And the media is loving it. Lost bodies. Shocked loved ones. Embarrassed politico. It’s the stuff of Pulitzers.”
I’m a news junkie. At home I read, or at least skim, each day’s paper from front to back. On the road, I tune in to CNN or a local station. Earlier, in my hotel room, I’d flipped between WFLD and WGN. Though aware of the story, I’d not anticipated the resulting chaos. Or the impact on us.
Sure enough, Ryan got up and began pacing the room. I checked my pal Enterprise. Inspector Irritable was right on schedule.
After logging roughly thirty yards, Ryan dropped back into his chair.
“Who was Cook?”
I was lost.
“Cook County?”
“No idea,” I said.
“How big is it?”
“The county?”
“My aunt Dora’s fanny.”
“You have an aunt Dora?”
“Three.”
I stored that bit of familial trivia for future query.
“Cook is the second most populous county in the U.S., the nineteenth largest government in the nation.” I’d read those facts someplace.
“What’s the largest?”
“Do I look like an almanac?”
“Atlas.”
“Some almanacs contain census data.” Defensive. After the trip from Montreal, I was no longer in the mood for teasing.
Though generally cheerful, Ryan is not a good traveler, even when the aviation gods are smiling. Yesterday they’d been grumpy as hell.
Instead of two hours, our flight from Pierre-Elliot Trudeau International to O’Hare had taken six. First a weather delay. Then a mechanical complication. Then the crew went illegal for dancing naked on the tarmac. Or some such. Annoyed and frustrated, Ryan had passed the time nitpicking everything I said. His idea of jolly good banter.
Several moments passed.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Ryan was pushing to his feet when the door opened and Christopher Corcoran entered, dressed in lab coat, jeans, and sneakers. With his pale skin, green eyes, red hair, and freckles, Corcoran was a walking Irish cliché. And decidedly nervous.
“I’m really sorry for the delay. This missing body thing turned into an Italian opera.”
“I hate it when corpses go walkabout.” The old Ryan wit.
Corcoran gave a mirthless smile. “Especially when the decedent’s under your care.”
“It was your case?” I asked.
Corcoran nodded. As I looked at him, a million memories flooded my mind. A scrawny kid, all spindly limbs and wild carrot hair. Wrought-iron desks floor-bolted in long straight rows. Impromptu street games on hot summer nights. Interminable Masses on hard wooden pews.
As kids, Corcoran and I were back-fence neighbors in a South Side neighborhood called Beverly, and card-carrying members at St. Margaret’s of Scotland. Keep in mind that Chicago Catholics map people by parishes, not geography. An oddity, but there you have it.
When I was eight, my father and baby brother died, and my family relocated to North Carolina. Corcoran stayed put. We lost touch, of course. I grew up, attended the University of Illinois, then graduate school at Northwestern. He studied at Michigan, undergrad through med school, then completed specialty training in pathology. It was forensics that brought us back into contact.
Reconnection occurred in ’92 through a case involving a baby in a suitcase. By then Corcoran had married, returned to Chicago, and purchased a house on Longwood Drive. Though a little farther east and a lot upmarket, Corcoran had returned to the old spawning ground.
“Turns out it was here all along.” Corcoran’s voice brought me back. “The guy was so scrawny he got hidden behind an obese woman on an upper gurney shelf. The techs just missed him.”
“Happy ending,” Ryan said.
Corcoran snorted.
“Tell that to Walczak.”
It was said of Stanley Walczak that only his ego surpassed his ambition in raw tonnage. His cunning was fierce too. Upon the resignation of the previous ME nine months earlier, having forged a complex web of political connections, to the surprise of few, and the dismay of many, Walczak had called in his chits and been appointed Cook County Medical Examiner.
“Walczak is pissed?” I asked.
“The man detests bad publicity. And inefficiency.” Corcoran sighed. “We handle roughly twenty pickups a day here. Between yesterday and this morning the staff had to phone over sixty funeral homes to see if a delivery had been made to the wrong place. Four techs and three investigators had to be pulled off their normal duties to help check toe tags. It took three sweeps to finally locate the guy. Hell, we’ve got half a cooler set aside just for long-term unknowns.”
“Mistakes happen.” I tried to sound encouraging.
“Here, misplacing a body is not considered a career-enhancing move.”
“You’re a fantastic pathologist. Walczak’s lucky to have you.”
“In his view, I should have been on top of the situation sooner.”
“You expect fallout?” Ryan asked.
“The family’s probably lawyer-shopping as we speak. Nothing like a few bucks to assuage unbearable anguish, even when there is no injury. It’s the American way.”
Corcoran circled the table and we all sat.
“Walczak says he won’t be long. He’s closeted with the Jurmain family lawyer. You’re gonna love him.”
“Oh?”
“Perry Schechter’s a Chicago legend. I once heard him interviewed. Explained his style as confrontational. Said being abrasive knocks people off their stride, causes them to reveal flaws.”
“Character flaws? Testimonial flaws?”
“Beats me. All I know is the guy’s a pit bull.”
I looked at Ryan. He shrugged. Whatever.
“Before they arrive,” I said. “Why are we here?”
Again, the mirthless smile. “Ever eat a Moo-Moo Bar or a Cluck-Cluck Pie?”
When Harry and I were kids, Mama had packed dozens of the little pastries into our lunches. Though uncertain of the relevance, I nodded recognition.
Ryan looked lost.
“Think Vachon,” I translated into Québécois. “Jos. Louis. May West. Doigts de Dame.”
“Snack cakes,” he said.
“Thirteen varieties,” Corcoran said. “Baked and sold by Smiling J Foods for two generations.”
“Are they still available?” I couldn’t remember seeing the little goodies in years.
Corcoran nodded. “Under new names.”
“Quite a slap in the face to our barnyard friends.”
Corcoran almost managed a genuine grin. “The J in Smiling J stood for Jurmain. The family sold out to a conglomerate in 1972. For twenty-one million dollars. Not that they needed the cash. They were bucks-up already.”
I began to get the picture.
So did Ryan.
“Family fortune spells political clout,” I said.
“Mucho.”
“Thus the kid gloves.”
“Thus.”
“I don’t get it. The case was closed over nine months ago. The Jurmain family got a full report but never responded. Though the coroner sent registered letters, until now no one has shown any interest in claiming the remains.”
“I’ll do my best to summarize a long but hardly original story.”
Corcoran looked to the ceiling, as though organizing his thoughts. Then he began.
“The Jurmain family is blue-blood Chicago. Not ancient, but old enough money. Home in East Winnetka. Indian Hills Country Club. First-name basis with the governor, senators, congressmen. North Shore Country Day, then Ivy League schools for the kids. Get the picture?”
Ryan and I indicated understanding.
“Rose’s father is the current patriarch, a sorry old bastard named Edward Allen. Not Ed. Not Al. Not E. A. Edward Allen. Rose was a black sheep, throughout her life refusing to follow any course Edward Allen deemed suitable. In 1968, instead of making her debut, she made the Tribune for assaulting a cop at the Democratic National Convention. Instead of enrolling at Smith or Vassar, she went off to Hollywood to become a star. Instead of marrying, she chose a lesbian lifestyle.
“When Rose turned thirty, Edward Allen pulled the plug. Deleted her from his will and forbade the family to have any contact.”
“Until she saw the light,” I guessed.
“Exactly. But that wasn’t Rose’s style. Thumbing her nose at Daddy, she chose to live on a small trust fund provided by Grandpa. Money Edward Allen was unable to touch.”
“A real free spirit,” I said.
“Yes. But things weren’t all sunshine and poppies. According to her partner, Janice Spitz, at the time of her disappearance, Rose was depressed and suffering from chronic insomnia. She was also drinking a lot.”
“That clicks with what we learned,” Ryan said.
“Did Spitz think she was suicidal?” I asked.
“If so, she never said.”
“So what gives?” I asked. “Why the sudden interest?”
“Two weeks ago, Edward Allen received an anonymous call at his home.”
Corcoran was always a blusher, did so often and deeply when embarrassed or anxious. He did so now.
“Concerning Rose’s death?” I asked.
Corcoran nodded, avoiding my eyes. I felt the first stirrings of uneasiness.
“What did this anonymous tipster say?”
“Walczak didn’t share that information with me. All I know is I was tasked with overseeing a review of the case from this end.”
“Tabarnouche.” Ryan slumped back in disgust.
I could think of nothing to say.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Corcoran broke the silence.
“Edward Allen is now eighty-one years old and in failing health. Perhaps he feels like a schmuck for having driven Rose from his life. Perhaps he’s still the same controlling sonovabitch he always was. Perhaps he’s nuts. What I do know is that Jurmain called his lawyer. The lawyer called Walczak. And here we are.”
“Jurmain thinks the case was mishandled?” I asked.
Corcoran nodded, gaze locked on the tabletop.
“Walczak shares that belief?”
“Yes.”
“Mishandled by whom?” It came out sharper than I meant.
Corcoran’s eyes came up and met mine. In them I saw genuine distress.
“Look, Tempe, this is not my doing.”
I took a calming breath. Repeated my question.
“Mishandled by whom, Chris?”
“By you.”
3
I GLANCED AT RYAN. HE JUST SHOOK HIS HEAD.
“You can’t let on that I shared any of this.” Corcoran looked more anxious than I’d ever seen him.
“Of course not.” My tone was surprisingly calm. “I appreciate—”
The door opened. Corcoran and I sat back, casual as hell.
Two men entered, both wearing suits fitted by Armani himself, one blue, one gray.
I recognized Blue Suit as Stanley Walczak, peacock and legend in his own mind. Especially concerning his impact on women.
I had met Walczak at American Academy of Forensic Sciences meetings over the years, been favored by his attention on at least one occasion. For a full five minutes.
Why’d I bomb? Easy. I’m forty-plus. Though well past fifty, Walczak prefers ladies just out of training bras. Big ones.
Gray Suit, I assumed, was Perry Schechter. He had sparse black hair and a long craggy face that had taken at least six decades to form. His briefcase and demeanor screamed attorney.
As we rose, Walczak performed a quick but subtle assessment. Then he crossed to Ryan and shot out a hand.
“Stanley Walczak.”
“Andrew Ryan.”
The two shook. Corcoran jiggled keys in his
lab coat pocket.
“Tempe.” Yards of capped dentition came my way. Walczak followed. “Each time we meet you look younger and younger.”
Digging deep, I managed to resist the famous Walczak charm.
“Nice to see you, Stan.” I proffered a hand.
Walczak enveloped my fingers in a double-palm grip, held on way too long.
“I understand you and Dr. Corcoran are already acquainted.”
Corcoran and I answered in the affirmative.
Walczak introduced Schechter.
There followed more pressing of palms.
“Gentlemen, Dr. Brennan.” Again, a lot of teeth were displayed for my benefit. “Shall we proceed?”
Walczak strode to the head of the table and sat.
Ryan and I withdrew files, he from his briefcase, I from my computer bag. As Schechter settled beside Corcoran, I booted up my laptop.
“So,” Walczak began. “I suppose you’re both wondering why the passing of an eccentric old lady with severe alcohol and psychiatric problems necessitates such extraordinary inconvenience on your parts.”
“Any death deserves proper attention.” Even to myself, I sounded pedantic. But I meant it. I share Horton’s worldview. A person’s a person. No matter how eccentric. Or old. Rose Jurmain was not even sixty.
Walczak regarded me a moment. With his silver hair and salon tan, I had to admit, he was pretty. On the outside.
“Precisely why I’ve asked Dr. Corcoran to do oversight on this case,” Walczak said.
Corcoran shifted in his chair, clearly uncomfortable.
“Dr. Brennan and I will be happy to answer all questions concerning my investigation, her examination of the remains, and the coroner’s finding,” Ryan said.
“Excellent. Then I’ll turn this meeting over to Mr. Schechter and Dr. Corcoran. Please let me know if there’s anything, anything at all, that you need.”
With a meaningful look in Corcoran’s direction, Walczak left the room.
“I’m pleased you speak English, detective.”
A subtle tensing around the eyes suggested that Schechter’s first words did not sit well with Ryan.
“Mais oui, monsieur.” Ryan’s accent was over-the-top Parisian.
“Mr. Jurmain requests clarification on a number of points.” Schechter’s tone indicated that Ryan’s humor was not appreciated.
