I looked up in surprise, the scalpel poised midair. "Where was she?"
"Out of town," he said.
"He didn't tell you where?"
"No. He said, and I quote, 'That's her business. Don't ask me.'" Marino's eyes fixed disdainfully on the sections of liver I was cutting. He added, "My favorite food used to be liver an' onions. You believe that? I don't know a single cop who's seen an autopsy and still eats liver…"
The Stryker saw drowned him out as I began work on the head. Marino gave up and backed away as bony dust drifted on the pungent air. Even when bodies are in good shape they smell bad when opened up. The visual experience isn't exactly Mary Poppins, either. I had to give Marino credit. No matter how awful the case, he always came to the morgue.
Harper's brain was soft, with numerous ragged lacerations. There was very little hemorrhage, verifying that he hadn't lived long after sustaining the injuries. At least his death was mercifully quick. Unlike Beryl, Harper had no time to register terror or pain or to beg for his life. His murder was different from hers in several other ways, as well. He had received no threats-at least none that we knew about. There were no sexual overtones. He had been beaten versus stabbed to death, and no articles of his clothing were missing.
"I counted one hundred and sixty-eight dollars in his wallet," I told Marino. "And his wristwatch and signet ring are present and accounted for."
"What about his necklace?" he asked.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
"He had on this thick gold chain with a medal on it, a shield, sort of like a coat of arms/' he explained. "I noticed it at the tavern."
"It didn't come in with him, and I don't recall seeing it on him at the scene…" I started to say "last night."
It wasn't last night. Harper had died early Sunday night. It was Tuesday now. I had lost all sense of time. The last two days seemed unreal, and had I not replayed Mark's message again this morning I would wonder if his call were real, too.
"So maybe the squirrel took it. Another souvenir," Marino said.
"That doesn't make sense," I answered. "I can understand the taking of a souvenir in Beryl's case, if her murder is the handiwork of a deranged individual who had an obsession with her. But why take something from Harper?"
'Trophies, maybe," Marino suggested. "Pelts from the hunt. Could be some hired gun who likes to keep little reminders of his jobs."
"I would think a hired gun would be too careful for that," I countered.
"Yeah, you'd think so. Just like you'd think Jeb Price would be too careful to leave a film box in the fridge," he said ironically.
Peeling off my gloves, I finished labeling test tubes and ether specimens I had collected. I gathered my paperwork and Marino followed me upstairs to my office.
Rose had left the afternoon newspaper on my blotter. Harper's murder and his sister's sudden death were the front-page headline. The accompanying sidebar was what ruined my day:
CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER ACCUSED OF "LOSING" CONTROVERSIAL MANUSCRIPT
The dateline was New York, an Associated Press release, and the lead was followed by an account of my "incapacitating" a man named feb Price after catching him "ransacking" my office yesterday afternoon. The allegations about the manuscript had to have come from Sparacino, I thought angrily. The bit about Jeb Price must have come from the police report, and as I shuffled through message slips, I noted that the majority of them were from reporters.
"Did you ever check out her computer disks? I asked, tossing the paper to Marino.
"Oh, yeah," he said. "I've been through 'em."
"And did you find this book everybody's in such a tizzy about?"
Perusing the front page, he muttered, "Nope."
"It's not there?" I broke out in frustration. "It's not on her disks? How can that be if she was writing it on her computer?"
"Don't ask me," he said. "I'm just telling you I looked at maybe a dozen disks. Nothing recent on 'em. Looks like old stuff, you know, her novels. Nothing about herself, about Harper. Found a couple of old letters, including two business letters to Sparacino. They didn't excite me."
"Maybe she put the disks in a safe place before she left for Key West," I said.
"Maybe she did. But we ain't found 'em."
Just then Fielding walked in, his orangutan arms hanging out of the short sleeves of his surgical greens, his muscular hands lightly coated with the talc lining the latex gloves he had been wearing downstairs. Fielding was his own work of art. God knows how many hours each week he spent sculpting himself in some Nautilus room somewhere. It was my theory that his obsession with body building was inversely proportional to his obsession with his job. A competent deputy chief, he had been on board little more than a year and was already showing signs of burnout. The more disenchanted he got, the bigger he got. I gave him another two years before he retreated to the tidier, more lucrative world of hospital pathology, or became the heir apparent to the Incredible Hulk.
"I'm going to have to pend Sterling Harper," he said, hovering restlessly at the edge of my desk. "Her STAT alcohol's only point oh-three, nothing in her gastric that tells me much. No bleeding, no unusual odors. The heart's good, no evidence of old infarcts, her coronaries clear. Brain's normal. But something was going on with her. The liver's enlarged, around twenty-five hundred grams, and the spleen's about a thousand with thickening of the capsule. Some involvement of the lymph nodes, as well."
"Any metastases?" I asked.
"None on gross."
"Put a rush on the micros," I told him.
Fielding nodded and briskly left.
Marino looked questioningly at me.
"Could be a lot of things," I said. "Leukemia, lymphoma, or any one of a number of collagen diseases- some of which are benign, and some of which aren't. The spleen and lymph nodes react as a component of the immune system-in other words, the spleen is almost always involved in any blood disease. As for the big liver, that doesn't help us much diagnostically. I won't know anything until I can look at the histologic changes under the scope."
"You want to speak English for a change?" He lit a cigarette. "Tell me in simple terms what Doc-tor Schwarzenegger found."
"Her immune system was reacting to something," I said. "She was sick."
"Sick enough to account for her flaking out on her sofa?"
"That suddenly?" I said. "I doubt it."
"What about some sort of prescription drug?" he suggested. "You know, she takes all the pills and tosses the bottle in the fire, maybe explaining the melted plastic you found in the fireplace and the fact we didn't find no pill bottles or nothing in the house. Just over-the-counter crap."
A drug overdose was certainly high on my list, and there wasn't any point in my worrying about it at the moment. Despite my pleading, despite promises that her case would be a top priority, the toxicology results would take days, possibly weeks.
As for her brother, I had a theory.
"I think Gary Harper was struck with a homemade slapjack, Marino," I said. "Possibly a segment of metal pipe filled with bird shot for weight, the ends packed with something like Play-Doh to hold in the shot. After several blows, a wad of the Play-Doh flew out and the shot scattered."
He thoughtfully tapped an ash. "Don't exactly fit with the 'soldier of fortune' shit we found in Price's car. Not with anything Old Lady Harper might have thought up, either."
"I assume you didn't find anything like Play-Doh, mod eling clay, or birdshot inside her house."
He shook his head and said, "Hell, no."
My phone did not stop ringing the rest of the day.
Accounts of my alleged role in the disappearance of a "mysterious and valuable manuscript," and exaggerated descriptions of my "disabling an attacker" who broke into my office, had made the wire services. Other reporters were trying to cash in on the scoop, some of them prowling the OCME's parking lot or appearing in the lobby, their microphones and cameras ready like rifles. One particularly irreverent
local DJ was sending out over the airwaves that I was the only woman chief in the country who wore "golden gloves instead of rubber ones."
The situation was quickly getting out of control, and I was beginning to take Mark's warnings a little more seriously. Sparacino was perfectly capable of making my life miserable.
Whenever Thomas Ethridge IV had something on his mind, he dialed my direct line instead of going through Rose. I wasn't surprised when he called. I suppose I was relieved. It was late afternoon and we were sitting inside his office. He was old enough to be my father, one of those men whose homeliness in youth is gradually transformed by age into a monument of character. Ethridge had a Winston Churchill face that belonged in Parliament or a cigar smoke-filled drawing room. We had always gotten along extremely well.
"A publicity stunt? You think it likely anybody's going to believe that, Kay?"
the attorney general asked as he absently fingered the rose-gold watch chain looped over his vest.
"I get the feeling you don't believe me," I said.
His response was to reach for a fat black Mont Blanc fountain pen and slowly unscrew the cap.
"I don't suppose anyone will get the chance to believe or disbelieve me," I added lamely. "My suspicions aren't founded on anything concrete, Tom. I make an accusation of this nature to counter what Sparacino's doing and he's going to have all the more fun."
"You're feeling very isolated, aren't you, Kay?"
"Yes. Because I am, Tom."
"Situations like this have a way of taking on a life of their own," he mused. "Problem's going to be nipping this one in the bud without generating more attention."
Rubbing his tired eyes behind hom-rimmed glasses, he turned to a fresh page in a legal pad and began making out one of his Nixonian lists, a line drawn down the center of the yellow page, advantages on one side, disadvantages on the other-advantages or disadvantages to what I had no idea. After filling half a page, one column dramatically longer than the other, he leaned back in his chair, looked up, and frowned.
"Kay," he said, "does it ever strike you that you seem to get more involved in your cases than your predecessors did?"
"I didn't know any of my predecessors," I replied. He smiled a little. "That's not an answer to my question, Counselor."
"I honestly have never given the matter any thought," I said.
"Wouldn't expect you to," he surprised me by saying. "Wouldn't expect that at all because you're focused as hell, Kay. Which is just one of several reasons I solidly backed your appointment. The good side is you don't miss anything, are a damn good forensic pathologist in addition to being a fine administrator. The bad side is you tend to place yourself in jeopardy on occasion. Those strangling cases a year or so ago, for example. They might never have been solved and more women might have died were it not for you. But they almost cost you your life.
"Now this incident yesterday."
He paused, then shook his head and laughed. "Though I have to admit I'm rather impressed. 'Decked him,' I believe I heard on the radio this morning. Did you really!"
"Not exactly," I replied uncomfortably.
"Do you know who he is, what he was looking for?"
"We're not sure," I said. "But he went inside the morgue refrigerator and took photographs. Photographs of Gary and Sterling Harper's bodies. The files he was looking through when I walked in on him didn't tell me anything."
"Alphabetized?"
"He was in the M through N drawer," I said.
"M as in Madison?"
"Possibly," I replied. "But her case is locked up in the,front office. Nothing about her is in my filing cabinets."
After a long silence, he tapped the legal pad with his 'index finger and said, "I've been writing out what I know, about these recent deaths. Beryl Madison, Gary Harper, Sterling Harper. Has all the trappings of a mystery novel, doesn't it? And now this intrigue over a missing manuscript that allegedly involves the medical examiner's office. What I have to say to you are a couple of things, Kay. First, if anybody else calls about the manuscript, I think it will make life easier if you refer the interested parties to my office. I fully expect some trumped-up lawsuit to follow. I'll get my staff involved now, see if we can head off the posse at the pass. Second, and I've been giving this a lot of careful consideration, I want you to be like an iceberg."
"What, exactly, is that supposed to mean?" I asked uneasily.
"What protrudes from the surface is but a fraction of what's really below," he answered. "This is not to be confused with keeping a low profile, even though you will be keeping a low profile for all practical purposes. Minimal statements to the press, making yourself as much a nonissue as possible."
He began fingering his watch chain again. "Inversely proportional to your invisibility will be your level of activity, or involvement, if you will."
"My involvement?"
I protested. "Is this your way of telling me to do my job, nothing but my job, and to keep the office out of the limelight?"
"Yes and no. Yes to doing your job. As for keeping the medical examiner's office out of the limelight, I'm afraid that may be out of your control."
He paused, folding his hands on top of his desk. "I'm quite familiar with Robert Sparacino."
"You've met him?" I asked.
"I had the distinct misfortune of making his acquaintance in law school," he said.
I looked at him in disbelief.
"Columbia, class of 'fifty-one," Ethridge went on. "An obese, arrogant young man with a serious character defect. He was also very bright and might have graduated top of the class and gone on to clerk for the chief justice had I not gotten compulsive."
He paused. "I went to Washington and enjoyed the privilege of working for Hugo Black. Robert stayed in New York."
"Has he ever forgiven you?" I asked, a cloud of suspicion gathering. "I'm assuming there must have been a lot of rivalry. Has he ever forgiven you for beating him out, graduating at the top?"
"He never fails to send me a Christmas card," Ethridge said dryly. "Generated from a computer list, his signature stamped, my name misspelled. Just impersonal enough to be insulting."
It was beginning to make more sense why Ethridge wanted all battles with Sparacino routed through the AG's office. "You don't think it's possible he's causing this trouble with me to get to you," I offered hesitantly.
"What? That the missing manuscript is all a ruse and he knows it? That he's causing a stink in the Commonwealth to indirectly give me a black eye and a lot of headaches?"
He smiled grimly. "I think it's unlikely this would be the whole of his motivation."
"But it might be added incentive," I commented. "He would know that any legal snafus, any potential litigation involving my office would be handled by the state's attorney. What I hear you telling me is he's a vindictive man."
Ethridge began slowly tapping his fingertips together as he stared off and said, "Let me tell you something I heard about Robert Sparacino when we were at Columbia. He's from a broken home and lived with his mother while his estranged father made a lot of money on Wall Street. Apparently, the kid visited his father in New York several times a year, was precocious, a prolific reader quite taken with the literary world. On one such visit he managed to persuade his father to take him to lunch at the Algonquin on a day that Dorothy Parker and her Round Table were supposed to be there. Robert, no more than nine or ten at the time, had it all planned, according to the story, which he apparently told to several drinking buddies at Columbia. He would approach Dorothy Parker's table, offer his hand, and introduce himself by saying, 'Miss Parker, it's such a pleasure to meet you/ and so on. When he got to her table, what emerged instead was 'Miss Parker, it's such a meet to pleasure you.' Whereupon she quipped, as only she could, 'So many men have said, though none quite as young as you.' The laughter that followed mortified Sparacino, humiliated him. He never forgot it."
The image of the little fatso offering his sweaty hand and saying such a thing
was so pathetic I didn't laugh. Had I been that embarrassed by a childhood hero, I never would have forgotten it, either.
"I tell you this," Ethridge said, "to demonstrate a point that has been corroborated by now, Kay. When Sparacino told this story at Columbia, he was drunk and bitter and loudly promising he would get his revenge, show Dorothy Parker and the rest of the elitist world he's not to be laughed at. And what's happened?"
He looked appraisingly at me. "He's one of the most powerful book lawyers in the country, mingles freely with editors, agents, writers, all of whom may privately hate him but find it unwise not to fear him. Supposedly he regularly lunches at the Algonquin, and insists on signing all movie and book contracts there while he no doubt inwardly smirks at Dorothy Parker's ghost."
He paused. "Sound farfetched?"
"No. One doesn't need to be a psychologist to figure it out," I said.
"Here's what I'm going to suggest," Ethridge said, his eyes fixed on mine. "Let me handle Sparacino. I want you to have no contact with him at all, if possible. You mustn't underestimate him, Kay. Even when you think you've told him very little, he's reading between the lines, is a master at making inferences that can be uncannily on the mark. I'm not sure what his involvement with Beryl Madison, the Harpers, really was or what his real agenda is. Perhaps a mixture of unsavory things. But I don't want him knowing any more details about these deaths than he already knows."
"He's already gotten a lot," I said. "Beryl Madison's police report, for example. Don't ask me how-"
"He's very resourceful," Ethridge interrupted. "I advise you to keep all reports out of circulation, send them only where you must. Tighten the lid on your office, beef up security, every file under lock and key. Make sure your staff releases no information about these cases to anyone unless you're absolutely certain the person calling in the request is who he says he is. Every crumb Sparacino will use to his advantage. It's a game to him. Many people could be hurt-including you. Not to mention what could happen to the cases come court time. After one of his typical publicity blitzes we'd have to change the damn venue to Antarctica."
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