No Way Home

by Annette Dashofy

“I have a new kid helping at the barn.” Thank heavens for the ever-eager Noah Tucker’s willingness to do chores. “He’s taking care of the horses this morning.”

  “You don’t have to be here for this, you know.”

  Zoe suited up outside the autopsy suite of the morgue. “I thought you wanted me to assist more.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Franklin said. “Of course I wanted you to get more involved in this end of the job. But after all your hasty escapes to the restroom, I’d given up hope.”

  So had Zoe. She’d always avoided participation at autopsy, but after agreeing last summer to assisting in six of them, she’d reached the conclusion that a career in the coroner’s office wasn’t in her future. Field investigation? Yes. Delving into the bodies? Not so much. “I need to see this one through,” she said. “If I can.”

  The coroner shrugged. “You know the drill. If you’re going to be sick, don’t contaminate the suite.”

  Attired in surgical scrubs, a surgical gown, a waterproof apron, layers of latex and Kevlar gloves, and rubber boots, Zoe always felt like she was dressed more for work in a butcher shop than in the basement of the Brunswick Hospital. Of course, considering the task at hand…

  She shook off the morbid thought and followed Franklin into the autopsy suite.

  Forensic Pathologist Ernest “Doc” Abercrombie already stood near the stainless table containing the remains of Dale Springfield. Doc’s assistant snapped photos of the body.

  “You missed the first one,” Franklin told Zoe.

  “The girl who ODed? Yeah, I heard about it.” A grown man was one thing. A kid was another matter entirely. “I don’t think I’d have made it to this one if I’d tried to assist on the first one too.”

  Doc Abercrombie choked out a laugh. “You mean you actually think it’ll make a difference?”

  “Cut her some slack,” Franklin said. “She did the preliminary investigation yesterday, and the deceased was found on her property. Let’s give her a chance to make it all the way through this one, okay?”

  Well, technically not her property, but she didn’t correct him too grateful that Franklin was standing up for her instead of encouraging Doc to assign her the more disgusting chores.

  Doc moved toward the body. “Whatever you say.”

  Zoe hung back, but craned her neck to watch the assistant pick up a scalpel and begin the Y incision, cutting from the front of each shoulder to the xiphoid process at the bottom tip of the sternum before finishing with an incision from there to the pubic bone.

  “Do you have any idea why he was so cold when I found him?” she asked Franklin without looking away from the autopsy.

  “Only one. He was dead longer than you estimated.”

  “But I heard the gunshots that must have spooked his horse. And I was there when Cisco came back to the barn. I don’t have any scientific proof, but it seems to me the distance from where I found the body to the barn is about right for the horse to have galloped straight home.”

  “Maybe the victim fell off earlier and his horse took the scenic route.”

  “Cisco knows his way back to the barn better than a GPS. And he wouldn’t waste any time getting there.” She wasn’t going to explain the herd mentality or the term “barn sour” to Franklin, who probably had never set foot on a farm unless he was investigating a death.

  “You asked if I had any explanation for the discrepancy in body temp. And that would be it,” the coroner said. “Otherwise, the external examination of the deceased supports your assessment of a fall from a horse followed by being dragged over rocks. Massive trauma to the posterior of the skull.”

  As the autopsy continued, Zoe waited for Doc to assign her some task. He did shoot a glance at Franklin when the bone cutters—a tool that always reminded her of pruning sheers—came out, but the coroner shook his head.

  “You’re being unusually nice about me being here,” Zoe said.

  “You’ve already proved you can handle the tasks and sights of autopsy,” Franklin said. “It’s the smells that bother you.”

  That was putting it lightly.

  “So you can just stand here and hold your nose. Like I said. This is your investigation. I want you present for it, not cuddling the toilet in the ladies’ room.”

  For the moment at least. They hadn’t yet gotten to the gut, where the really rank aromas lurked. “Thanks.” She tempered the sarcasm in her voice.

  “So where are you calling home these days?”

  Her current lack of a permanent address was no secret, but the change in subject startled her. “Mostly I’ve been bunking at the ambulance garage.”

  “I thought you were staying with your partner and his family while he recovers.”

  Earl Kolter had been shot in the line of duty two months earlier, and Zoe and her two cats had moved in, theoretically to help care for him while his wife was at work. The truth was Zoe had worn out her welcome at Rose’s house and needed a pet-friendly alternative. Earl’s family had welcomed her and her felines to crash at their place. “I was. I am. Sort of. My cats are still there until I find someplace permanent.”

  “Are you so difficult of a houseguest that no one can put up with you for more than a few weeks?”

  She huffed a short laugh. “In this case, it was my choice to bail out. Have you ever lived in a house with three kids and a dog? Plus my cats. Plus one very unhappy man. Earl’s doing much better, but he has two more weeks before the doctor will release him to return to work, so he’s…underfoot.”

  “Feeling a little claustrophobic, are you?”

  “Not a little. A lot.”

  They fell silent as the assistant removed the chest plate and Doc stepped in to work on the heart. At least Franklin hadn’t offered Zoe a couch to sleep on like everyone else had been doing. For that, she was grateful. It had been four months since the fire claimed her house and left her a vagrant. She needed to find a real home instead of taking up temporary residences with friends and colleagues.

  Pete’s open invitation to move into his guest room appealed to her and terrified her at the same time. Guest room. Right. She’d played the scenario out in her mind dozens of times. It started out sweet and romantic, evolved into hot and passionate, and ended with them bickering over nonsensical stuff. She knew she was in love with the man. What she didn’t know, and feared finding out, was if she could cohabitate with him.

  “Is something wrong?”

  Doc’s question jolted her out of her reverie. However, he wasn’t directing his concern at her but at his assistant. He’d made the usual incision across the top of the head, from behind one ear to behind the other, and was working on freeing the skin from the bone at the rear of the skull. Instead of his no-nonsense expression, though, the young man wore a look of puzzlement. “Maybe,” he said.

  Doc stepped forward. “What is it?”

  The assistant moved aside. “You tell me.”

  The forensic pathologist slid his gloved hands behind the victim’s head. After a moment of prodding he glanced in Zoe’s direction. “I thought you said he hit his head when he fell from a horse.”

  “I did,” she said. “Why?”

  He made a humming noise in his throat. “If that were the case, I’d expect to find jagged lacerations from the rocks.”

  Franklin moved to Doc’s side. “You mean there aren’t any?”

  “Yes. There are. But there’s something else.”

  Zoe edged closer. “What?”

  “A single hole,” Doc said.

  “A single hole?” she echoed, almost wanting to stick her hands in there and feel it for herself.

  “Yes.” Doc fixed his assistant with an intense gaze. “We need to pull the skin back over the skull and shave the hair to get a better look. But I’m pretty sure we have a gunshot wound.”

  Monday morning, Pe
te arrived at the station early with the hope of getting a little paperwork done before the inevitable deluge of calls from concerned citizens and the news media. He soon realized he’d been delusional. The OD over the weekend would have been enough to create a demand for action. The additional death of a well-liked public official stirred up nothing short of an informational feeding frenzy.

  Pete left orders with Nancy, his secretary, to field the constant phone calls with different variations of “the case is under investigation and we have nothing new to report at this time.”

  The one call she put through to him was from Wayne Baronick.

  “What have you got?” Pete asked.

  “No surprises in the dead girl’s autopsy. No definitive answers either,” Baronick said over the rustle of papers and a cacophony of background conversation. “As for whether she ODed from heroin or meth—or a combination—we won’t know for sure until we get the lab work. For the moment, the coroner’s report lists the cause of death as accidental overdose. The county lab is still processing all the shit we found at the mobile home. It’s gonna take a while to sort out what’s useful from what’s plain old trash.”

  “Anything on the rehab centers?”

  “I have calls into all of them, but no one in administration works on Sunday. Your turn. Did you talk to the girl’s friends?”

  “I spoke with four girls she went to school with, but the only one who seemed to know Shannon well or cared was Courtney Dinsmore.” Pete related their conversation, including the two partial names.

  “Nick Greenfield?” Baronick sounded stumped.

  “Or Green-something. She wasn’t sure about the last name.”

  More sounds of paper shuffling. “How about Greenslate?”

  “Could be.”

  “Nicholas Greenslate. We’ve busted him a couple of times for distribution. Small amounts. The task force has been watching him, hoping to get a lead on his source. What did you say the other name was? Wolf?”

  “The Dinsmore girl says Shannon referred to him as Wolf Man or Wolfie.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell, but I’ll ask around and get back to you. I have another name to toss into the mix. I got the phone records on the 911 call reporting the OD. Came from a cell phone registered to a Michael Liggett of Mount Oliver.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Pittsburgh police are trying to track him down. I’ll keep you posted.”

  After they hung up, Pete finished reading through the last of his officer’s reports. Nate hadn’t learned anything new after canvassing the properties around the mobile home where Shannon had died, nor from the Vincentis’ neighbors.

  Which left them with three persons of interest—Michael Liggett, who must have been present when Shannon ODed, Nicholas Greenslate, and someone who called himself Wolf Man. It wasn’t a helluva lot, but Pete had worked cases with less.

  He was halfway down the hall when the station’s front door swung open, setting the attached bells to jangling. Sylvia Bassi, his former secretary and one of the current township supervisors, blew in like a hurricane. If a hurricane looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy’s grandmother.

  Sylvia acknowledged her successor at the front desk with a quick wave before storming in Pete’s direction. “What have you found out about Dale Springfield’s death?”

  “Good morning to you too,” Pete said.

  She tugged off her polar fleece jacket. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  Exasperated, she repeated, “Dale Springfield.”

  “He was killed in a horseback riding accident yesterday.”

  “I knew that much. It’s all over the news.”

  “That’s all I know until I get the autopsy results.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Any time now.” Pete folded his arms. “What has you so worked up this morning?”

  Sylvia grabbed his arm and turned him toward his office, giving him a motherly but firm shove. Once inside, she closed his door and stood blocking it as if she expected him to bolt. “Dale Springfield being dead is what has me so worked up.”

  Pete reclaimed his desk chair, still warm from the last three hours he’d spent in it. “I didn’t realize you and he were that close.”

  She draped her jacket over the back of the chair opposite his. Instead of sitting, though, she crossed to his coffeemaker, inspected the empty pot, and pulled the can of Maxwell House from the shelf beneath it. “Dale was supposed to speak at the supervisors’ meeting tonight.”

  “I know. He’s heading a group opposing the gas industry.”

  “Not the gas industry. Fracking.” She busied herself dumping the old grounds and filling a clean filter with fresh. “We want to keep fracking out of Monongahela County and especially Vance Township.”

  “We?”

  Sylvia hesitated. “Yes, we. Including me. But as a supervisor, I feel a need to appear neutral.” She continued her coffee preparation. “At least until both sides have their say. And Dale wasn’t simply the head of the group. As county commissioner, he was the heart and soul of it. His death seriously hinders our efforts.”

  With her back to Pete, he couldn’t read her expression, but her voice sounded thick. “I’m not sure why you’ve come to me with this. From all accounts, his death was an accident.”

  She turned to face him, hugging the empty pot close to her chest. “Are you sure? Because there have been threats.”

  “Threats? Against the commissioner?”

  “Against the entire group. You’ve seen what’s happened elsewhere in Pennsylvania. It’s big business versus the environmentalists. Both sides believe they’re right.”

  “What kind of threats?”

  “Nothing specific.”

  Sylvia wasn’t one for lying. Then again, she wasn’t one for getting in the middle of this kind of battle either. “Sylvia. What kind of threats?”

  She squirmed and looked down at the pot in her hands. “I need to get water.” She spun and flung the door open, bustling out without answering the question.

  A moment later the bells jangled again from the front of the station. “Is he in?” Zoe’s voice filtered back to him.

  He couldn’t make out Nancy’s response, but heard Zoe thank her. By the time she appeared at his office door, he’d climbed to his feet.

  Her short blond curls were more askew than usual, and her perfect cheeks were flushed. But her face lit into a smile as she entered. “Morning, Pete.”

  He resisted the unprofessional urge to pull her into his arms. “What brings you here?”

  The smile faded. “I just came from Dale’s autopsy.”

  Pete glanced past her to the open door and wondered where Sylvia was. “You could have called.”

  “Yeah, but we found something interesting.” She lowered her face. “Besides, I’d rather see you in person.”

  “I didn’t say I was complaining, did I?” He grew serious. “What did you find?”

  “A gunshot wound. In the back of Dale’s skull. We all missed it at first because of the damage from the fall and being dragged. But he was definitely shot. We’re ruling Dale’s death a homicide.”

  A sharp intake of breath from the doorway drew Pete’s attention before he could comment on the “we” part. Sylvia, clutching the coffee pot filled with water in one trembling hand, pressed the other to her lips. “I knew it,” she said.

  Zoe leapt to grab the pot before it slipped from the older woman’s fingers. Pete came around his desk to guide Sylvia into the chair. Zoe filled the coffeemaker and clicked the power button. While she was there, she grabbed a bottle of water from the bottom shelf, loosened the cap, and handed it to Sylvia.

  Pete planted one hip on his desk and fixed his former secretary with a hard stare. “You mentioned threats.” In his peripheral vision, he noticed Zoe react t
o the word. “What kind of threats?”

  Sylvia took a slow slug from the bottle. Swallowed. “Like I said. Nothing specific.”

  “Dale Springfield’s homicide is definitely specific, Sylvia.”

  “Yes.” She looked down at the bottle as if it held answers. “I didn’t want to believe it would go this far.” Straightening, she lifted her chin, meeting Pete’s eyes. “You know as well as I do how cash strapped Vance Township is. Kids don’t want to take over the family farms because there’s no money in it. There are quicker and easier ways to earn a living, for sure. So the old farmers see leasing their acreage to the gas companies as a blessing from heaven. Some big company is going to give them money without them having to do any extra work for it.”

  “It’s a hard offer to turn down,” Pete said.

  “And when they start drilling wells and producing gas, there will be royalties.”

  Zoe rested a hand on the back of Sylvia’s chair. “A lot of folks are looking forward to the new income. I know the Krolls sure are. They’ve been scraping by for so long, they see this as a chance to finally get their heads above water.”

  “Exactly,” Sylvia said. “But at what cost? Ruined water supplies. Heavier truck traffic damaging the roads. I’ve read of increased incidents of earthquakes in some parts of the country that never experienced them before. All because of fracking. Plus, look at what’s happening in surrounding counties. They’re not saving the farming life. They’re destroying it. Building pump stations and processing plants. Turning the rural countryside into industrial eyesores.” She paused to stare at the bottle and blew out a breath before continuing. “Dale’s fought fracking for years. He belongs to the Nature Conservancy and a bunch of other environmental groups. But now there’s this big push to bring drilling here.”

  Pete leaned toward her. “You still haven’t told me about the threats.”

  Zoe’s cell phone rang. She glanced at the screen, apologized, and stepped out of the office.

  Sylvia held Pete’s gaze. “Most of it has been pretty generalized. The usual angry phone calls to the township, pressing us supervisors to support their side and promising to vote us out of office if we don’t. As a county commissioner, Dale got twice as many.” She waved a dismissive hand. “Those don’t bother me. But Dale’s wife confided in me that he’s been getting some especially nasty crank calls. Someone telling him to back off or else.”