Forgotten Place

by LS Sygnet

"Am I interrupting something?"

  "Helen! You're awake!"

  "Yeah, Crevan, I'm awake. And starving. And sore as the day I got shot. Why'd you let me sleep so late?"

  He and Ned shared a look.

  "All right you two. What's going on?"

  "I called Johnny last night and asked him if he thought we should wake you up for dinner –"

  "Dinner? What the hell are you telling me?"

  "It's morning, Helen. You slept all night. He said if you were that exhausted, we should let you rest, that your body probably needed it more than anything else."

  "Bastard," I muttered. No wonder I ached so badly. Not to mention, I was supposed to be in physical therapy in ten minutes ago, and there was no way I'd get there before my session was scheduled to end. "I'll go change. Somebody should call Amy and let her know I'm running late this morning."

  "Uh... John asked her if she could treat you here this morning, Helen. She'll be here at seven."

  "I don't have the equipment she needs."

  "He took care of it, Helen," Crevan said. "I'll get your medication and some breakfast started. Why don't you go shower and get dressed in the meantime?"

  "Where are Journey and Devlin? These plainclothes officers Orion planned to send?"

  "His men are outside. The new shift got here a little while ago, and as far as I know, Dev is still sleeping. He hadn't had a break since Monday, so we figured since all of us were around..."

  "Well at least something normal happened around here last night, Ned. How is the review of Ireland's notes coming along?"

  "Helen, I really think you should get ready for therapy," Crevan said. "We'll bring you up to speed on the case after Amy leaves."

  He steered me into the kitchen and procured two pain pills, a Prozac and a glass of water. "Drink up."

  By the time I got out of the shower, Amy was setting up her portable equipment in the recreation room upstairs. Crevan had a bowl of fresh fruit and yogurt waiting for me in the kitchen. I hadn't seen so much dietary variety in my kitchen in months. Since I was too hungry to argue, I focused on emptying the bowl of energy into my stomach.

  "Want some toast?"

  "Sure, why not," I grumbled.

  He buttered two slices and chopped them in half after cutting off the crusts. I arched one eyebrow.

  "Johnny says you never eat the crusts."

  "Does he," I muttered. Correction to my earlier epithet. Observant bastard. I itched to ask when said nemesis planned to make an appearance again, but the arrival of a mussed and groggy Devlin Mackenzie distracted me. Spikes of ebony rose like the spines of a stegosaurus from his scalp. He rubbed sleepy eyes and grinned at me.

  "Mornin' Eriksson. You gotta tell me what kind of mattress you've got on the bed I slept in last night. My God, I feel like a new man." His hand draped over my right shoulder and massaged lightly. "How do you feel this morning?"

  "All right," I muttered.

  "You look fuckin' gorgeous, like a different girl than the one I met on Monday." He accepted the coffee Crevan handed him with soft thanks and sipped the bitter brew before glancing down at me.

  "What? Did I say something wrong?"

  "I'm no longer on the pathetic side of a Hindu cow, I take it."

  Color rose to his cheeks. "He shouldn't have told you that, Helen. I didn't mean it in a derogatory way. It was simply an expression of frailty, which is clearly a thing of the past."

  "I could show my tits and revise your opinion of that."

  Crevan choked on his coffee.

  Devlin smirked. "I'm sure your tits are just fine, ma'am," he drawled. "I'd accept the offer if I didn't think doing so would get me shot."

  "Free country, Dev, and I'm a single woman," I grinned and nudged his side with my shoulder. "I'll save a spot on my dance card for you Saturday night."

  "Your therapist made enough racket upstairs to rouse the dead. You should probably head up there before she wakes Snow White," Devlin said. "We've got a female officer coming over today to do the bedside gig so I can get back on the case."

  He raised his arms over his head and stretched mightily, revealing the rock hard abs that drew my eyes immediately. I licked my lips and noticed Crevan's frown.

  "Did she consent to the search?"

  Devlin nodded.

  "What search?"

  "Johnny will want us on that right away," Crevan ignored my question.

  Devlin perched on the stool beside me and propped his chin on his fist. "We're gonna go over every inch of the Ireland home looking for whatever this Southerby guy might've been searching for in the office. Journey said that other than the drop cloths over the furniture, everything is pretty much as it was when he died. Wanna come along?"

  "I'd love to."

  "I think Johnny wants you here with Ned going over David's paperwork."

  "Johnny isn't here, so I don't think I have to do what he says," my words were for Crevan, but my eyes hadn't left Devlin's face. "Will you be ready to go when I'm done with the torture session?"

  "I'll wait for you," he winked.

  Crevan cleared his throat. "Johnny might have something else to say about –"

  "Show a little respect for the lady," Devlin interrupted. "If she wants to go, she can go. This is our case after all. Who died and made Orion God?"

  "Helen isn't cleared for active duty yet."

  "And we all know how many perps are gonna pop out of the closets in a house that hasn't been lived in for three years," I said. "Wait for me, Devlin. Don't listen to Johnny's mouthpiece. It would do me some good to get out of here for a few hours."

  "Great," he murmured. "We can hit the morgue first and see if Dr. Winslow has more answers about McNamara's death than she did last night."

  I hustled off for rehab with Crevan shooting daggers at both of us.

  The way I saw it, if Orion could move on so easily, maybe I should too.

  Chapter 22

  Maya gave a curt nod to Devlin and launched into what she learned from the autopsy to me. "It's the damnedest thing, Helen." Disgust dripped from her words. "When I have the final toxicology reports back on the tissue samples, I'll have a better idea of what we're really looking at here."

  "Meaning what exactly?"

  "There is no test per se for what I suspect happened to McNamara based on what the autopsy shows," she said. "But the tissue samples we were able to test so far show off the charts potassium, which could've been the cause of death."

  "So someone injected him with potassium chloride and induced a fatal heart attack. Maybe Storm didn't lie about the cause of death, that fatal arrhythmia thing," I said.

  "Oh, Helen, if only," she rolled her eyes. "One of the ways we can presumptively ascertain the presence of succinylcholine postmortem is that it is metabolized as yes, you guessed it, potassium levels in the soft tissues. I don't have blood on this guy. What I do have, is a shit load of potassium in his tissues."

  "Wait a minute," I started pacing. "What are the odds that the guy who Jerry Lowe replaced died from a drug Jerry Lowe used to incapacitate his victims and it's not related?"

  "My point precisely," she said. "Then again, there is only a presumption here, because the half-life of succinylcholine is about ten minutes. Which means unless another drug doesn't quickly sedate someone, it wears off fast."

  I clasped my hands together and pressed them to my lips.

  "Helen, did you hear what I just said?"

  "Yeah, and the picture it conjured isn't a good one."

  "Talk to me," Maya said. She perched her hands on her hips. "Tell me what you're thinking."

  "It has come to my attention that nobody seems to bat an eye in this city when paramedics pronounce death and deliver bodies to the morgue."

  "Since when?" Maya scoffed. "I've been here an hour shy of a year, and I can tell you right now, no ambulance has ever pulled up and delivered a body, Helen. They might pronounce at the scene of an accident or in the event that a body is discovered before some
moron realizes that it's decomposed, but at no time would they be charged with delivery to my world. My office always retrieves the bodies, no matter where they die in Bay County."

  "And you're certain that this isn't something that happens? Anywhere? Ever?"

  "Darkwater Bay is its own corrupt corner of a very bad alternate reality. I can promise you it will not happen here now. Please tell me that it didn't happen to poor Harry McNamara."

  "If I said that's exactly what Orion told me happened, what would you say?"

  Maya's posture wilted. "Oh my God. Oh. My. God."

  "Please talk to me," I reached for her hand and squeezed. "How bad is it?"

  "What has had me stumped for the better part of twenty four hours is how this state of embalming took place, Helen. It made no sense. Upon further examination, I found several other injection sites into major vessels that were used to pump in chemicals and remove blood. I couldn't imagine why someone would... Jesus."

  "It makes more sense now?"

  She nodded and dragged one hand over her face. "The horror of what this man must've suffered."

  "Explain it to me. Let's start with why multiple injection sites would've been used."

  "I could think of only one reason," Maya said. "Someone wanted to rapidly infuse his body with Formalin, which is unusual, because it's something we'd use here, or in medical examiner's offices to preserve samples, and not the same compound you'd find in a funeral home. Formalin is thirty-seven percent formaldehyde, Helen, professional grade stuff used by pathologists to preserve histologic or biologic samples, you see.

  "But Crevan told me that there was a somewhat sensible reason for the fast funeral. Everything was planned in advance, so there was no grieving widow being indecisive about what coffin to choose and whatnot. It didn't make sense to me on the other hand because why rush it when it meant not properly preparing the remains? Then I started cutting."

  "And?" Devlin spoke from across the room.

  "The reason this guy is so well preserved without the usual process of removing the internal organs that shall we say, make decomposition a messy process, is because his internal organs were flooded with Formalin. So I thought, maybe this is some technique I'm not familiar with, you know? Some way to offer preservation to people who would ordinarily refuse based on religious grounds or being creeped out by the notion that even though there would be no autopsy, that the postmortem butchery is part of a ritual anyway."

  "You searched for such a procedure."

  Maya nodded at me. "There isn't one, Helen. So when Crevan let me know the name of the funeral home yesterday, I thought I'd give them a call and ask what the hell they were doing over there."

  "And they said?" Devlin asked.

  She glanced over at him. "The verbatim or the paraphrased version?"

  "Give me the gist, Maya," I said.

  "Unless I had a badge and a warrant, I could go fuck myself."

  I chuckled. "And did you give us the paraphrase or verbatim version?"

  "Pretty much verbatim."

  Devlin grinned. "I have a badge. Let me see if I can get a little more cooperation from them."

  "Did you reference the specific case?" I asked her.

  "No, we didn't get that far."

  "Details on Harry McNamara's funeral, got it," Devlin said and slipped out of the room.

  Maya's voice dipped low despite the fact that we were in a deserted autopsy bay with only the remains of a long dead man. "Helen, I'm horrified, because I think I know exactly what happened to McNamara."

  "What was it?"

  "He was alive when he came to the medical examiner's office. Think about it. Lowe was the guy who allegedly found him, who resuscitated him until EMS arrived. He's delivered here instead of a hospital. We know Lowe had access to a drug that would've made it look like McNamara was dead to the untrained eye."

  "But paramedics aren't untrained. Neither was Riley Storm."

  "How do we know they were really paramedics? What if these were guys just like Lowe? Like Riley Storm? What if, for the right price, they broke all the rules and declared a living man dead?"

  "So how did he die after he got here? Have you found something definitive?"

  She swallowed hard. "I didn't realize it until you started talking about paramedics bringing him here instead of a hospital, Helen, but yeah, it makes sense, in some nightmarish kind of way."

  "So what killed him?"

  "Technically? I suppose it's a toss-up between poisoning and exsanguination."

  "You're not saying... Maya, please tell me you're not saying what I think you are."

  "I believe that Harry McNamara was embalmed antemortem."

  The cry was muffled by the hand that clapped over my mouth.

  "Yeah, pretty fucking sick, huh?"

  "Was he conscious? Would he have realized what was happening to him?"

  "Not for more than a few minutes, but yeah, I believe he would've known initially that he was being murdered, frozen in a paralyzed body and unable to stop what was happening to him."

  "Jerry goddamned Lowe," I groaned. Would we ever stop uncovering the extent of his crimes? He had warned me that some secrets aren't meant to remain buried. Was this what he meant? "It had to be what they did to Mitch Southerby too, Maya. And Johnny screwed everything up when he went to court to force Riley into doing more tests."

  "Hence the incredible disappearing body and tissue samples. Just like McNamara here, Dr. Storm didn't bother collecting any. Why document evidence when the scene of the crime was his autopsy table?"

  "Lowe was at Downey Division when Southerby collapsed."

  "Do you think Datello owned Jerry Lowe?"

  "He was determined to get the position of chief of detectives. Datello had to recognize that kind of raw ambition when he saw it. What he didn't realize, couldn't have known, was that in tapping Lowe to be his man inside Central Division and wielding authority over all of Darkwater Bay's detectives, he had chosen a cold blooded killer who certainly had the means to take out Datello's enemies."

  "That doesn't explain why Riley Storm would be part of this, Helen. You're talking about a man, a physician no less, who literally murdered people in this building. What could possibly lure someone down that path? I told you. Prior to McNamara's autopsy, Storm was not only competent, he was meticulous."

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and started pacing. "Did you happen to hear the local news yesterday?"

  "The thing with Chief Weber? I didn't hear it personally, but Ken and I talked about it when he showed up with dinner last night."

  "Good men can be compromised, Maya. It might behoove us to have a conversation with Dr. Storm, or at the very least, do a little bit of digging into his history and see what points of vulnerability might've existed. He could've been forced to be... morally flexible."

  "It sort of makes me wonder if Lowe didn't pressure him to be less than thorough with Brighton Bennett's autopsy when what was left of her was fished out of the river a few months after McNamara died," she said. "This is beyond disturbing, Helen. I think I'm going to be physically ill."

  The door to the autopsy bay swung open.

  "You're never gonna believe this," Devlin was a little breathless. "I just got off the phone with that mortuary. All they did was put the guy in his casket and order the flowers, book the church, have the grave dug."

  "Tell me," I said.

  "According to the owner, Dr. Riley Storm told him that one of his assistants was studying mortuary science and that they got authorization from McNamara's family for this kid to embalm the guy here before he was sent to the funeral home."

  "Fantastic," I muttered. "No wonder nobody questioned what went on here. Did he say who this alleged student was?"

  Devlin nodded. "Some guy named Billy Withers. Wasn't he the one with you at Helen's place the other night, Dr. Winslow?"

  "Helen, you can't possibly believe Billy had anything to do with this," Maya protested before I could add my theory to
the conversation. "He is the best lab assistant I've ever had, and even if he did study mortuary science twenty years ago –"

  "That part is true?" I interrupted.

  "Yes, and with a boss like Riley Storm, can you really blame him for weighing his options once upon a time?"

  "I can't blame him one damned bit. Unfortunately, he gave Riley Storm the perfect patsy should anybody start asking questions or, heaven forbid, exhume McNamara's body."

  "Still think Storm could be a good guy with a vulnerability that got exploited?" Maya asked.

  "Not on your life. Devlin, call Crevan and tell him that we need to know everything possible about the history of Riley Storm. I want to know when he was weaned from the bottle, potty trained, who his third grade teacher was. Everything."

  "Clearly I missed something crucial while I was gone."

  "Harry McNamara was alive when he rolled into the morgue," I said. "I'm sure you're right, Maya."

  "So they killed him here? How?"

  "They embalmed the poor man before he was dead. Let's go. We've got things that take precedence over searching the Ireland house today, Devlin."

  "Do you plan on telling me what those things are?"

  "Depends." My eyes roamed from Devlin to Maya and back. "Can I trust both of you to keep this under wraps?"

  "Sure, whatever it is, Helen," Devlin said quickly.

  Maya wasn't quite so eager. "It depends on how risky it is, Helen. I'm not going to be responsible for you getting hurt again."

  "I'll have Devlin with me. I'm not going without backup."

  "Going where, exactly?"

  I paused, chewed the inside of my cheek, debated whether I could trust my alleged best friend to keep her mouth shut and let me do my job. "Orion won't like it. That's why I need the oath of secrecy, Maya. The bottom line is, either you want justice for the man on your table or you don't."

  "That's hardly fair. Of course I want justice. I don't happen to see how you getting killed in the process is the right way to see McNamara's murderer punished."

  "Excuse me – she said she's got backup," Devlin said, more of an irritated, affronted growl. "Do you think I'd let someone hurt her?"

  "I think you haven't known my dear friend long enough to realize how slippery she can be when she believes circumstances warrant such behavior."