The Body Box

by Lynn Abercrombie

  “How many more cases you got up your sleeve?” I said. “You got four, five more solved homicides floating around? Huh? Ten? Twenty?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Pretty much shot my wad today.”

  I shook my head in disgust. “Next time you get in his way, the Chief’s going to crush you. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Lt. Gooch just looked at me.

  “It’s not just you, you know,” I said. “If you go down, I go down, too.”

  “Then again,” Gooch said, reaching down to unlock the drawer where he kept his cup of spit, “if you’d of stayed away from them funny white powdery substances, you wouldn’t be in this fix anyway. Now would you?”

  “Kiss my black ass,” I said.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Let me ask you a question,” I said, as we drove off in Lt. Gooch’s car the next morning.

  “No,” the nex morning Gooch said. “How ’bout I ask you a question. We been working this case together for a while.”

  “I’m not sure if together is quite the right word.”

  Lt. Gooch glanced at me, looked back at the road. “My question to you is, have you narrowed things down at all yet? Come up with any actual names?”

  My heart started tripping along. Was he trying to trap me or something? I wasn’t sure. Maybe it was just paranoia. “I’m still kind of puzzled by this whole thing,” I said. “The DNA says we got nothing.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “But then we’ve got all these calluses on the kid’s shoulders, the two to three months’ captivity, that whole bit. So I just don’t know.”

  “Okay, what’s the one name that you can attach to every single case on our list?”

  “There isn’t one. I mean unless you count this mysterious stranger, who might or might not exist.”

  “Nope, you’re missing one name.”

  I thought about the cases. I’d read the files thoroughly, and there just wasn’t a single name that ran through them all. “Now come on. If there was a single name that had popped up every time, Lieutenant, we’d have been on it like white on rice.”

  The Lieutenant was driving through the caverns of downtown Atlanta. He turned left into the lot behind the Medical Examiner’s office, then pulled the car up to the curb in a spot that said RESERVED FOR DR. PLEASSANCE.

  “You sure?” he said.

  I blinked. “Oh my God. The autopsies,” I said.

  Lt. Gooch nodded. “I picked up a copy of Dr. Vale Pleassance’s curriculum vitae. That’s a fancy word for a ré-sumé.”

  I blinked, a cool feeling running through my veins. “Every single autopsy on our list was performed by Dr. Pleassance. That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Dr. Vale Pleassance, MD, you might be interested to know, is some type of big expert on dead kids. Wrote a book six, eight years ago called Aspects of Juvenile Forensic Pathology. On this here curriculum vitae thing, he’s got list of these papers he’s wrote, runs about a yard long. Did him a study over in Ethiopia of all places called ‘The Etiology of Starvation, colon, A Study in Juvenile Mortality.’ How’s that grab you? Here’s another one: ‘Restraint, colon, A Survey of Certain Features in the Presentation of Perimortem Restraint in Juveniles.’ Got a bunch more along those lines. A wide variety of papers he’s wrote about child abuse, how a forensic pathologist can smoke it out in a dead kid’s body.”

  “Based on the usual pattern of things in this case, in which you insist on staying about ten steps ahead of me and just kind of dribbling out the information whenever you feel like it, I’m guessing you’ve probably read all these papers in great detail?”

  “No,” Lt. Gooch said. “The one that’s wrote in German, I more or less only skimmed that one.”

  “Are you saying you seriously consider Vale Pleassance to be a suspect in this case?” I said. “Are we here to talk to him about that? Are we here to find out why a guy who’s supposedly a big expert in child murder would have missed putting together all these cases where there’s this one puzzling feature in common? Are we here to accuse this man, see if he somehow finagled his way into doing autopsies in cases where he might actually have killed these kids himself? And if he did the autopsies, he’d be in the perfect position to plant bogus DNA evidence, evidence that would lead to other suspects? Is that what you’re hinting around about?”

  “Those’d be some fairly rich and interesting questions, huh?” Gooch climbed out of the car, spit his wad of Skoal onto the pavement next to the car, and strode into the door of the ME’s office. “But, no, that’s not why we’re here.”

  The Chief Medical Examiner of Fulton County was a woman named Doris Shumacher. She was thin and tall and pale, and had an irritating voice that had a shouted, hectoring quality, even when she was speaking at a normal volume.

  “Dr. Shumacher, good to see you,” Lt. Gooch said, walking into her office without knocking.

  The Medical Examiner looked up at him, squinting through a thick pair of glasses with bright pink frames. “Yes?” she said in her big, awful voice.

  “Here it is. This old boy called me. Sheriff’s detective over in Birmingham? They got a kid murdered over there, I imagine you read about it in the paper this morning?”

  “No.” Dr. Shumacher seemed very irritated at Lt. Gooch’s presence.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know the particulars. But they was looking for somebody got expertise in juvenile pathology. He give me a call, wondered if I knew of anybody with that type of specialty who did a little freelance work, time to time.”

  Dr. Shumacher raised her eyebrows slightly. “They want Dr. Pleassance then.”

  “Yeah, I heard he was good in that arena. But I didn’t know if he freelanced much.”

  The Medical Examiner pursed her lips disapprovingly. “I am of the opinion that freelancing is a bad idea. It promotes overwork and slipshod technique. However, there are no rules against it in this office.”

  “So Dr. Pleassance, he does do a little freelancing then?”

  Schumacher grimaced. “There are times when it seems that is all he does.”

  “Oh, terrific,” Lt. Gooch said. “Who for? GBI, something like that?”

  “As I’m sure you know, many of the rural counties in this state don’t have medical examiners. Frequently they rely on the staff forensic pathologist for the GBI, Dr. Albritten. But Dr. Albritten, I gather, values Dr. Pleassance’s expertise, and so he calls him frequently. Particularly in cases where child abuse is suspected.”

  I smiled. “Sorry, Doctor, I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Detective Mechelle Deakes.” I put out my hand. The medical examiner stared at it.

  “I’ve got formaldahyde on my hands,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, what I was going to say, I guess Dr. Pleassance doesn’t mind traveling, then? Gets around the state a good deal?”

  Dr. Shumacher’s eyes looked huge behind her glasses. She trained them on me for a while. “Dr. Pleassance conducts his autopsies in the GBI medical examiner’s facilities in Decatur.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I got the impression talking to him the other day he was gadding about the state all the time. Have scalpel, will travel.”

  She continued to glare. “Have makeup, will travel, perhaps.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Dr. Pleassance thinks of himself as a thespian,” she said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “I can’t imagine where he finds the spare time. Personally, my administrative duties leave me little time for frivolous hobbies. But somehow he manages.”

  “Manages what?”

  “He founded some sort of acting troupe when he first moved to Atlanta.” She pronounced the words acting troupe as though someone had forced a tablespoon full of dirt in her mouth. “The Bread-and-Butter Children’s Theater? If you’ve spent ten minutes in his company, I’m surprised he hasn’t approached you for a donation.”

  “He probably knows us cops are always flat broke.” I smiled. Shumacher did not s
mile back. “So this theater group . . . He travels around the state with them?”

  “The city has a rather overgenerous vacation policy, if you ask me. Whenever he’s most needed around here, he always seems to be off on some tour of the more benighted parts of the state.”

  “How about that,” I said.

  “Well, I suppose when one is unmarried and childless, one can just get up and go whenever one wants. Some of us are comfortable with responsibility and obligation, and some of us are not.”

  “Hey,” I said, “responsibility and obligation have never been my strong suit either.” I grinned. Why I bothered, I don’t know; the smile was obviously not a part of her facial repertoire.

  “Dr. Pleassance, as it happens, is away. Do you want me to pass on a message to him?”

  “I tell you what,” Lt. Gooch said, “how ’bout I call my buddy over in Alabama, see if they haven’t got somebody already before you bother him.”

  Dr. Shumacher looked down at one of the many papers on her desk and began scribbling fiercely in the margin with a red felt tip pen.

  “Just in case, though,” I said, “you don’t happen to know where he is, do you?”

  “He maintains what he calls a ‘country place’ downstate. He had been inviting us down there for several years, and finally I just couldn’t say no. Harold and the girls and I came down, and it turned out to be the most hideous little cabin. A shack, practically. I gather he enjoys hunting. Which is fine, I suppose. We drove up and there was a dead deer just hanging from a tree, flayed open like a cadaver. A pile of flyblown entrails just lying there on the ground! If one must do that sort of thing, fine . . . But there’s no need exposing little girls to it. Also Harold has a weak stomach, and he nearly threw up.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Lt. Gooch said. “I do a little hunting myself. Where’s his place at?”

  “Downstate.” She said this in the sort of tone you might apply to Bangladesh.

  “Near, what, Macon?” I said. “Columbus?”

  The medical examiner frowned at her papers, willing us to leave her alone, apparently.

  “Good hunting in Troup County,” Lt. Gooch said. “So many lawyers and doctors got hunting land down there, ain’t hardly nothing left for the locals to live on.”

  “Troup County, that’s right. It’s near LaGrange, north of Columbus.”

  “Thought that might be the case,” Lt. Gooch said.

  The Medical Examiner looked up from her papers, her large eyes swimming behind her glasses. “Are we through talking? Because I really have a great deal to do.”

  We got back in the car, and Lt. Gooch took out a notebook and wrote some things down. “A while back you asked why I wanted you working on this unit,” he said, not looking at me. “Well, what happened in there, that’s your answer. I got no patience with paper pushers like that gal in there, think the whole world orbits around their file drawer. You, on the other hand . . .”

  He fired up the car and backed out into traffic, making a massive Lincoln Navigator come to a screeching halt so it wouldn’t hit us. Lt. Gooch smiled a little into the rearview mirror.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “So I talked to Darlene Wink,” Lt. Gooch said as we drove away. “The gal over in sex crimes? You know her? Anyway, she tells me there was a molestation charge against Vale Pleassance. Lodged and then dropped.”

  I raised my eyebrows slightly. For the first time, things seemed like they might make sense in the case. If anybody was in a position to plant DNA, it was Vale Pleassance. “How long you been looking at Pleassance?”

  “Not long.”

  I sighed loudly. “Is that why you were saying our boy isn’t a cop?”

  Gooch grunted.

  “So, am I gonna keep bitching till I’m blue in the face, or are you gonna finally start trusting me?”

  Gooch didn’t say anything.

  “Take for instance, where are we going right now? Who are we talking to now?”

  Lt. Gooch looked at me, pretending he was puzzled. “If you’d listen instead of talking, you’d find out that’s what I’m doing. Telling you what we’re doing next.”

  I sighed a second time. Only louder.

  “Kid’s name is Kelli Lynn Peters, eight years old. She was in this youth-theater troupe–type deal that Pleassance runs. Happened back when she was five, six years old. We’re going over to Decatur where Kelli Lynn lives. We gonna talk to her mama. That enough information for you?”

  “Why did Wink say the charges were dropped?”

  “She didn’t. She just said, go talk to the woman and the kid yourself, see what you think.”

  The Peters family lived in a small brick bungalow in the Atlanta suburb of Decatur between Emory University and the Virginia Highlands neighborhood. The oaks and maples around the house were large and pretty, but the grass was patchy and sunburned and scattered with faded plastic toys.

  We knocked on the door, and after a few minutes the door opened, and a woman with large eyes and a bad blond dye job looked at us apprehensively without speaking, the door secured by a chain.

  “Mrs. Peters? Detectives Deakes and Gooch,” I said, showing my badge and smiling broadly. “How you getting along today?”

  The woman eyed me suspiciously, then reached through the four-inch-wide crack and pulled my badge close to her face, peered at it for a while. Finally she closed the door. There was some scrabbling with the locks, then the door opened again. “I’d rather speak outside,” she side, coming out onto the porch. “The house is a mess.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said.

  “Besides, my husband doesn’t like people in the house.” The woman stepped outside. Her fake blond hair was a mess, held up on her head, more or less, with a random collection of bobby pins and mismatched barrettes. It seemed obvious to me that there was something wrong with her, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Something pharmacological, I suspected.

  “Mrs. Peters,” I said. “Your daughter Kelli Lynn, she made some allegations regarding a man named Vale Pleassance. Can you tell us about that?”

  “That man!” Suddenly she was angry. “That man did not recognize the talent of our little girl.”

  “Uh-huh. But about these charges—”

  “Bread-and-Butter Theater is not exactly Actor’s Studio or Circle in the Square. This is one step above amateur hour. And Kelli Lynn has a great deal of talent. She is a talented child.” There was a slight tremor in her hands, her body was rail thin, and her pupils were the size of pinheads. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out: she was tripping—diet pills at a minimum, but possibly something stronger.

  “I saw a picture of your daughter over at the station,” I lied. “Some kids, the talent practically shines right out of the picture.”

  “Right! Right! That’s what I’m saying. And this, this, this, this Pleassance person, this—my God, he’s a guy who cuts up dead people for a living, he’s not even an actor, he’s not even a real director—he has the gall to say that Kelli Lynn is not a good fit for the role.” The angry smile went off and on. “Not a good fit! Agh! I’d like to strangle that man.” She gritted her teeth, her hands balled up into fists, and her whole body trembled under a wave of momentary rage.

  “Ma’am,” Lt. Gooch said, “I appreciate this whole picture of artistic differences of opinion you’re painting here, but what we need to know about is these charges she made.”

  Mrs. Peters chewed on her bottom lip and looked malevolently at the Lieutenant. “Inappropriate. Touching.” She hissed the words out through clenched teeth.

  “Inappropriate touching? That’s what she alleged?” I said.

  “Alleged!” The bitter smile came and stuck this time. “Oh, gosh, I sure do love how you people just bandy those words around. Alleged! Why don’t you just come out and say you think she made up a big fat stinker?”

  I smiled back pleasantly. “Nah nah nah. It’s not like that. We police officers have to use terminology very carefully these days. Due to t
he legal climate, defamation lawsuits, all that type of thing. When we say alleged, hey, that’s just the disposition of the charges. See? We’re required by law to say that. Otherwise we’d be in violation of Section 112B.” The head of the narcotics squad once told me that any time I had to explain my behavior to junkies, I should invoke Section 112B. When I asked what Section 112B was, he just laughed. I looked in the statute books later that week and found that the last criminal statute in the book was 112A.

  “Oh. Section 112B, I see.” The woman’s hand fluttered at her hair. “Well. Anyway. She came to me and said, ‘Mommy, Vale’—he insists on having the children call him Vale, as though he were just some teenager—‘Mommy,’ she says, ‘Vale inappropriately touched me.’ ”

  “I see. It was those words exactly?”

  The mad smile came and went. “What, you don’t think a six-year-old is capable of articulating herself with those kind of words? Oh-ho! Well, you obviously haven’t met Kelli Lynn. She’s a very, very articulate child.”

  “Fair enough. So you went to the police?”

  “Of course!”

  “And what happened?”

  “Oh, they had some little person talk to her. A woman detective, an alleged detective, named . . .” She snapped her fingers rapidly, thinking.

  “Wink? Detective Wink?”

  “No. No, it was Detective Link.”

  “Wink. I think her name’s Wink.”

  “No. Absolutely not. Link, with an L. Anyway, this Link person takes Kelli Lynn—who is a very special and sensitive child—into some terrible little room and absolutely gives her the third degree. It was shocking.”

  “You watched the questioning?” I said.

  “Well, naturally! From behind a mirror. I couldn’t let her go through that without somebody watching. Somebody had to protect her interests!”

  I nodded. “Of course. Of course. So what happened in the interview?”

  “Well, this alleged detective, this Link woman, she grilled my baby girl like she was some sort of criminal, you know, waving one of these disgusting little anatomically correct dolls in her face, you know, and she kept saying, ‘Did Vale touch you here?’, ‘Did he show you his pee-pee?’, ‘Did he make you touch his pee-pee?’ ” She let out a strangled noise, and ground her teeth together. “It was the most sickening, perverted, horrible, outrageous, disgusting, gross, reprehensible—”