by Gary Kinder
The St. Benedict’s morgue is in the basement, a full seventy-five yards from the elevator. For those who must travel that distance to identify a loved one, it is a seemingly endless journey. The first half is a beige corridor rigidly lined with floor-length lockers and tiled with linoleum squares. Abruptly, the ceiling lowers, the floor turns to colorless concrete, the walls change to ice white, and the air becomes chill. It is a tunnel, and every twenty feet a short, austere fluorescent tube dimly lights the way. But what attacks the senses is the dull moan of the generators emanating from behind the walls. The sound is like the hum of a choir.
In silence the trio entered the tunnel, feeling the cooler air and hearing the choir-like sound around them. Dr. Naisbitt walked languidly between the other two. I knew that we were going to the morgue, and I knew what we were going to see, and I had a feeling of deep loneliness. My thoughts would flash back to Cortney upstairs, and I wondered what was going on up there, because that was the only hope I had left.
The two doctors stood aside as Fran Heward unlocked the door to the morgue. Air, stale and refrigerated, settled like dust about the dreary room, covering the grim tools of the pathologist. Fran He-ward slid open the top metal drawer, but before she could draw back the white drape covering the body, Dr. Naisbitt had already glimpsed a tag of red material showing from beneath it.
“I think that’s the dress she was wearing tonight,” he mumbled.
The supervisor drew back the drape.
That’s a shock. That’s a shock no one can describe. Here’s your wife that you’ve known and loved and lived with and raised your family with and shared experiences with nearly all your life… . And here she is, she looks grotesque, she hasn’t been cleaned up. I don’t know how you describe the feeling. I don’t know how in the hell you can describe feelings that rip your guts. It’s remorse and despair and agony in your heart, and you get real pain in your chest. When you hear someone say they’ve got a heartache, they’ve got a heartache, a heartache. It aches. It hurts, it pains, it throbs. When I looked at my wife, I had real pain in my heart.
They left the morgue and journeyed back through the tunnel. The generators droned behind the walls. The fluorescent lights clipped slowly by. Byron Naisbitt’s mind was as numb as during those moments just before waking when the clamor of thoughts cannot be grasped as fact or the fantasy of a fresh dream. Or rather a nightmare. As he walked silendy through the tunnel, he kept waking up to it.
That’s where the feelings and thoughts were, down in that basement. My wife and son, the victims. What was going through their minds? Lord, the fear and the terror and the torture. They didn’t care what happened to my wife and son. Pouring acid down their throats and then shooting them! God Almighty! You can face a lot of things, but when somebody’s abusing you at their own whim and in their own fashion, that’s terror and that’s torture and no one should have to experience it in a lifetime, no one should! I can’t believe that! It’s out of my realm of thinking! Someone takes you and ties you up and makes you helpless and then terrorizes you and you’re completely at their mercy and they have no feelings for you, they don’t care, they’ve already decided what they’re going to do with you, and then they take their own sweet time and torment you! No one should have that right over another person! No one! I don’t … I don’t … I can’t believe…
They were through the tunnel and abreast of the nurses’ lounge when suddenly his knees buckled, and he crumpled onto the shoulders of the nursing supervisor. Dr. Wallace caught him from behind.
“Fran, let’s take him in here.”
There was no emotional outbreak, only tears welling up in his eyes as he sat, hunched forward on an old sofa with his head cradled in his hands.
I was devastated. I’ve got a family of six and two of them, a third of my family, are wiped out. My wife is dead and my son is not expected to live. I don’t know, what do you do with something like that? Grief is bad. Grief is a terrible thing to have to confront. I shed a tear or two and some of the things of the afternoon, of her wanting to go, went through my mind, and I wondered why I hadn’t gone myself. I had a real feeling of loss and despair. You lose your wife of thirty-something years and it’s a little tragic, I think. But from then on I had to put her out of my mind, I couldn’t keep thinking about her because I couldn’t get functioning if I did. I had to put her out of my mind because I knew there was nothing I could do for her. But flashes of the pain and discomfort and anxiety and loss kept coming back, and I just had to keep squelching them down and get done what I had to get done. Because there was one fact that was an absolute fact and that was never going to change, and that’s the fact you’ve got to look at right off the bat: She was out of my life; forever.
Suddenly I realized that my son was alive upstairs and that brought some hope, and I was anxious to see how he was doing and if there was anything that I could do. He had looked dead and nobody would tell me he would be alive by morning, but it gave me something to hold on to, something to hope for. I had terrible feelings about how a kid could be put through that kind of stuff, but at least he was alive.
DILEMMA
It was after midnight. Don Moore, a former homicide investigator and now a member of Ogden’s new Tactical Squad, knelt in the middle of the Hi-Fi Shop basement, thinking. The beam of his flashlight crisscrossed each wall methodically, rippled over the boxes and stereo components on the floor, then slowly drew semicircles on the carpet around his feet. In front of him bits of cord and tape were strewn across the bloodstains where Youngberg had first spotted the teen-age boy and woman lying on their backs, gurgling for air. Moore observed, but touched nothing.
Moore had arrived at the Hi-Fi Shop with the rest of the Tac Squad, just after the first ambulance had departed for St. Benedict’s. Because of his previous experience working in homicide, he had been assigned by the squad leader to head up the initial investigation at the murder scene. After speaking briefly with Youngberg, he had secured the building, instructed a guard not to let anyone through the back door, then eased down the stairs himself to inspect the basement for evidence. A short while later the crime-scene technicians had reported to the scene with their processing equipment, and the new homicide investigator, D. K. White, who would be in charge of the actual case, had viewed the basement quickly from the bottom step. White had talked with Moore, then left immediately for the McKay-Dee emergency room to interview his eyewitness, the survivor, Mr. Walker.
While the technicians were combing the scene for evidence, the county coroner had arrived and pronounced the two remaining bodies officially dead, and funeral directors who were to transport the bodies to the State Medical Examiner in Salt Lake City had been admitted to the basement. Wearing gloves to avoid contact with the caustic that had blistered the victims’ faces, they had slipped the bodies into plastic bags and sealed the bags to deliver to the pathologist’s table exactly as they had been found at the scene of the crime. With the help of police officers, they had then carried the bodies slowly up the stairs, through the back door, and into the alley, where bright lights had opened up from reporters bunched a short distance from the building. In the flood of light and frequent flashes the bodies had been slid into the funeral home station wagon, and the driver had eased the car forward, cutting through the small crowd.
As Moore sat in the center of the room, it now seemed vaguely larger, though still dreary and smelling of death. Overhead, the dim light had been turned on, and the faint shadows cast by the crime-scene technicians glided among the stationary angles of gray thrown by the piles of stereo boxes. Through photography the technicians had already reconstructed the scene as they had found it, taking pictures of the bodies, the boxes, the bloodstains, before anything had been moved. Now with the bodies gone, they were systematically measuring and collecting the physical evidence. In clear bags and plastic bottles they sealed the lengths of cord used to tie the victims, the .25 caliber cartridges that had randomly ejected into some of the boxes, the
.38 caliber slugs found imbedded in the carpet beneath where two of the victims had lain. They searched for a container of liquid that could have caused the burns on the victims’ faces, but found none.
Hanging over the basement was a pall unlike any crime scene any of them could remember. Something in the room made it forbidden to speak. When their work demanded, they communicated, but it was official and terse, their movements methodical, as though they feared a casual move or an unnecessary word would allow empathy to seep into their thoughts and paralyze them with emotion. Some of them would later hear the voices of the victims pleading for their lives, and others would have nightmares about that single crime scene. The longer they were in the basement, the further each man receded into his own shell.
With his eyes Moore followed the beam of the flashlight around the room, silently noting the vacated positions of the bodies, a fresh gouge low on the north wall, the circle of pale blue residue on the stairs. He had crouched in the middle of dozens of murder scenes before, looking, thinking, filling his mind with a list of the Ogden criminal element and trying to match the murderer’s style with someone on the list. Imagining suspects was that meager point of beginning where the momentum of an investigation got rolling. But as Moore looked around the room, he noticed nothing familiar, nothing that betrayed some subtle quirk of anyone he had pursued in the past.
During his two years as a homicide detective Moore had been assigned thirty murder cases, and when he left the Detectives to join the new Tac Squad, only a single case of his remained active. Even now, that one case was unresolved, and it gnawed at Moore. From the beginning the investigation of the case had been a strange ordeal, full of potential witnesses glancing worriedly over their shoulders at nothing, then suddenly becoming tongue-tied. Unlike the present murders, there had been but a single victim, and he had been murdered quickly and quietly in his sleep. But for sheer brutality, the weapon and the fashion in which it was employed rivaled what had happened at the Hi-Fi Shop. Having that one open file still gnawed at Moore, not because it marred his otherwise perfect record, but because he knew who the murderer was, and couldn’t prove it.
He watched the beam flicker across the bloodstains in front of him. On the stairs footsteps were coming down into the basement, and then D. K. White, returning from his interview with Orren Walker, appeared in the room and called the technicians together for a briefing. When White had first seen Walker in the emergency room, a physician was extracting a dark blue, plastic shaft over six inches long from Walker’s ear. The survivor had already been treated for a gunshot wound at the back of his head and chemical burns around his mouth, on his forehead and across his shoulder. With the pen safely removed, the doctor had dropped it into a plastic bag, sealed the bag, and laid it on the counter for White to take as evidence. A bloodstain ran upward from the tip of the pen almost five inches.
Though groggy from pain and fatigue, Walker had still been coherent after the operation. As White jotted quickly in his notebook, Walker had recounted the evening from the time he had entered the parking alley behind the Hi-Fi Shop until he had left there in an ambulance. His story was long, chronological, and specific; as he lay in the basement, Walker had promised himself that if he survived he would forget nothing.
He had described the two men as black, one short and one tall. The tall one had fine features and his skin was not too dark. The shorter one was very dark and husky, his face was rounder than the taller man’s, and his features were coarse. Both of the men, Walker had estimated, were in their early twenties, and each wore his hair in a short, trim Afro. To enter the shop from the alley, Walker had remembered having to walk around a van pulled up nearly flush with the back door. The van had been light in color, maybe green or yellow, he wasn’t sure.
As White now read from his notes, additional suspects began to surface in Moore’s mind, though none of them seemed capable of committing a crime of this magnitude. He knew men who could shoot someone outright, men who, surprised or cornered or merely angry, could point a gun at another man and pull the trigger. But he could think of no one who would first torture and rape his victims, or tie them up and execute them one at a time.
When White had finished recounting Walker’s story of what had happened that night in the Hi-Fi Shop basement, one of the technicians echoed Moore’s thoughts.
“Who do we know around here who would be savage enough to do this?”
The murderer in the single case that Moore could not solve had seemed not so much savage as he had inhuman. The previous fall Moore had gathered enough evidence to interrogate the man, and had told him to his face that he knew he was the murderer. The man had sat stone-still, not a tremor in his face, not a tic of regret or a twitch of anguish that Moore could see, nothing but his narrow eyes seeming to glaze over. He had been the strangest suspect Moore had ever come up against. He had been fingerprinted, photographed, and interrogated twice again, but Moore had not been able to pierce that placid face and those glazed eyes. Nor had he been able to produce a witness or the murder weapon. For months after the initial investigation he had continued piecing together a strong case of circumstantial evidence, but not enough for a murder charge. The man had been set free, and Moore had known then that when he needed to, he would kill again.
What Moore didn’t know was that the same man he had been circling all those months had knelt where he was now kneeling only a few hours before.
Dr. Richard Rees was an aggressive thoracic surgeon, brilliant and at times theatrical. If he detected anything salvageable in a patient, “Is there anything left of the squash?” he would say, tapping his head with a forefinger. He would stop at nothing to save the patient’s life.
That night in Intensive Care, Rees was confronted by the heaving, rubbery-blue body of a young boy. A bloody tube gurgled out of the boy’s neck, a nasogastric hose rolled from his nostrils and IV lines disappeared into each arm. In the back of his head was a bullet hole.
Dr. Rees scrubbed quickly in a nearby sink, called for a cutdown tray, hunched over Cortney’s body, and began a meticulous but rapid procedure he called “shotgun therapy.” He sliced Cortney’s wrist and slipped an arterial blood sampling catheter into his radial artery for a computerized analysis of his blood gases. He cut into his sub-clavian vein and threaded a thin IV catheter toward the right ventricle of his heart. He shot Decadron and Lasix into the IV tubes to help control his edema. He administered digitalis to strengthen the action of his heart. He cut down on the saphenous vein of his groin and inserted a catheter to measure his venous pressure. He injected antibiotics to fight infection. He pumped atropine into his body to counteract his slow pulse and build up his blood pressure. He wired his heart to an electrocardiograph. He told the inhalation therapists, Chad and John, “Take him off that little ventilator, get the MA-One in here, he’s got to have more oxygen!”
As Rees worked, he issued a constant flow of orders for instruments, drugs, and tubing for the lines he was installing in Cortney. So many things had to be done at once, the nurses didn’t know whether to obey one order or remain next to Dr. Rees for the next. Hands fluttered across the boy’s body. Hands slicing, hands fastening, hands reaching, hands gripping, hands peeling. Hands attaching, tying, pulling, suctioning, inserting, assisting. Shotgun therapy. Pull all the stops. Do everything you know to keep the patient alive.
The flurry continued for two hours. While Dr. Rees and the nurses plugged Cortney’s body into the life-support machines, Chad and John methodically squirted ethyl alcohol down his tracheostomy tube and suctioned out the converted red liquid. It came slowly at first, but after an hour the edema began to clear, and more of the oxygen pumping from the new ventilator was now slipping into his lungs. With tubes and wires curling into Cortney’s body, the machines began blipping back his life signs, and the nurses monitored the signals, administering drugs as they dictated.
While Rees was operating, Byron Naisbitt returned with Dr. Wallace to the ICU. His demeanor had calm
ed, but the lines in his face were deeper now and his eyes were red and misty. He gazed through the glass at his son, barely visible beneath the flailing of skilled hands, and saw that he was still alive. For a few minutes Byron watched quietly as Dr. Rees performed his special magic; then he stepped away from the glass. Around him people were running in and out of his son’s room, carrying things for his son’s survival. Standing there, he could do nothing but watch; watch and worry and feel powerless to help his son.
He left the ICU and in the hallway talked briefly with a police officer stationed there to guard Cortney. From the officer he learned that the other survivor, Mr. Walker, was still alive at McKay-Dee Hospital, and was able to talk. Byron began walking down the hall toward the elevator.
“Where are you going,” called Wallace.
“To the McKay,” said Byron.
“Don’t you think you ought to calm down a little bit first?”
Byron turned his head back halfway and continued walking. “I’ll calm down when I find out what the hell’s happened!”
On the return trip from the morgue, when Byron had collapsed, Fran Heward, the nursing supervisor, had left him and Dr. Wallace in the nurses’ lounge and hurried upstairs to phone Byron’s brother, Paul. Adhering to a tacit policy of the hospital, she would tell him only that there had been a serious accident involving his sister-in-law and that his brother needed his support. Shortly after Byron left for the McKay-Dee Hospital, Paul and his wife Maureen arrived at St. Benedict’s. Mrs. Heward met them at the emergency room door and escorted them to the ICU. As they walked, she explained that Carol and Cortney both had been shot, that Carol was dead and Cortney was in Intensive Care, not expected to live.
When the door to the ICU swung open and they saw their nephew straight ahead of them, Maureen gasped, threw her hand over her mouth, and turned her back to the window. The boy in the window was long and thin and gray, and needles punctured his body. Dr. Hauser had returned to take another look at him and was conferring with Dr. Rees and Dr. Wallace in an alcove adjacent to the boy’s cubicle. Paul, a quieter, more serious version of his older brother, left Maureen and walked over to the huddle of doctors.
