Shannon’s glazed eyes were peeled to the distant darkness. Laurie didn’t wait for a consensus before delivering her summation.
“I’m going alone to the office to get my car and come back for you. The four of us walking together attracts too much attention.” Her head poked up like a feral cat sensing danger. “Listen—Christ, I can already hear the sirens—”
“Go,” Shannon ordered Laurie. “We’ve got to scram fast.”
Laurie pedaled off in her flats, hyperventilating and heroic, looking back once to confirm we were really there and waiting for her, still a team. Shannon was standing up straight, fearless, like always, and pulling her Camels out of her jacket pocket.
Beth, small and shivering, hugged herself and again declined a smoke. “We can’t just pretend we didn’t see anything.”
Shannon puffed hard. “Don’t be a baby. We just got shitfaced at a Do Not Visit bar and it’s after one in the morning. You know what a defense attorney will do to us on a witness stand?”
“Yeah, but . . .” I stepped in. “Beth might be right this time. If we’re not careful, tonight will come back to haunt us—”
Shannon stabbed her cigarette at me. “Why? Because we saw the body being dumped? What else did we really see?”
“The car,” Beth said. “We saw the car speed away. I’m not an AAG. I can’t try the case. I should give them a statement.”
Shannon shook her head, looking at me to explain to Beth why none of us could admit our presence on the scene. At that moment, despite the fact that we were about to get behind the wheels of our cars and drive home, we would have, to the man, flunked Breathalyzer tests, Beth included. And AAG employees entrusted with enforcing the laws of the community aren’t permitted to carouse after midnight emptying vodka bottles in off-limits bars in the middle of downtown Providence. Any hypothetical statements we swore out would be discredited, lambasted left and right on the witness stand by even a third-rate defense attorney. Whether or not we ended up losing our jobs, our reputations would still be shredded, composted, and turned into low-grade garden mulch. And for what? Per Laurie’s persuasive analysis, we hadn’t seen a thing that would help nail the bastard, and coming forward as witnesses might even help his case.
“Okay, Beth,” I said. “Morally you’re right, but I think I’m getting Shannon’s gist. Here’s the scenario. The cops are going to ask you exactly where you were tonight and who you were with. Will you lie to protect us? It’s still perjury even though it’s only a statement to the cops.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“And did you really see the car, Beth? The car that dumped the body? What make was it? Model? Color?”
She thought a second and shook her head, then answered softly, “It was right there in front of us. I should have seen it. The color at least.”
“Neither did I,” I said. “Or Laurie or Shannon, I’m guessing. We were all too busy staring at the thing being tossed from it. And did anyone see the driver? A face? Male or female?”
I knew the answer, but gave Beth a second of silence to mull it over.
“See?” I plowed ahead. “Nothing we say is going to help. And in fact, AAGs as witnesses could turn the case into such a public fiasco that the perp will find some oily defense lawyer to get him off on a technicality.”
Beth shook her head. “But isn’t this a crime, not saying anything—”
“Less so,” Shannon said. “And nothing’s gained by coming forward. Evidence-wise, we didn’t see much, and there’s way too much to lose—including the case. You understand what a mistrial is, right?”
Beth neither answered nor nodded in assent. She was unconvinced but had no counterarguments. As luck would have it, I, deep in my homegrown Roman Catholic soul, agreed with Beth. My papist upbringing was taking the form of a wily guilt ghost, a moral hot flash. My instincts were to tell the truth and let the cards fall where they might. But it wasn’t only my reputation that would get tossed in the dung heap if I came forward and fessed up to the authorities; Laurie, Shannon, and Beth would end up garbage-side too, rotting right behind me on the welfare line. And that responsibility I wouldn’t bear alone. So straight into the icy waters of the conspiracy to obstruct justice, I plunged headfirst.
Two more minutes of chilly silence followed before Laurie pulled up to the curb in her antique VW bug. We piled in silently. None of us said a word as we made the thirty-second ride to the AG’s lot.
Once alongside my Jeep, Laurie shifted her car into park and spoke over the idling engine.
“There’s a dozen cruisers there already,” she told us. “Dumbshit Detective O’Rourke was at the body while I was being waved through the intersection at Dorrance Street. I hope he doesn’t screw the report up.”
Fear over our narrow escape was already inching after us like a creeping oil spill. We slinked into our respective cars and drove home to wait for the morning news.
NEXT DAY, AS SOON as I arrived for work, my boss AG Vince Piganno called me into his office. When I walked through his open doorway, he was on the phone.
“. . . and you don’t have a fucking clue what I have in store for you, you miserable cocksucker!”
Vince slammed the receiver into its cradle and gave me a rare, juicy smile. “Have a seat.”
I was too hopped up on adrenaline to sit. I remained standing while Vince recited the sparse details of the previous night’s big news event. A coed from nearby Holton College by the name of Melinda Hastings had been hit by a drunk driver in downtown Providence while she was lying in the middle of a one-way alley, apparently already dead and cocooned in a bloody blanket. The body, faceless and mangled, was found torpedoed through the windshield of a parked car. The bloodied blanket was recovered nearby.
“How in hell do you think that happened?” As if trying to re-create the scene, Vince was staring out his window overlooking South Main Street, a Merit menthol cigarette stuck between the yellowed fingers of his right hand.
I thought to myself, A girl by the name of Melinda Hastings.
“Who dumped her there?” he went on insistently. “And how does she end up smashed through a parked car?”
Vince Piganno, or “Pig” as we called him behind his back, was short, stocky, and muscular, a purebred bulldog. He seemed to pant and drool as he fired these routine-sounding questions at me.
“And what I can’t figure out is why nobody sees a body get dumped.”
“It was in an alley after one, Vince.”
“Yeah. So it was. Almost one-fifteen to be exact.” He stubbed his cigarette out, peering at me with his muddy brown eyes. “What is this anyway?” he barked at me. “Have you already seen the report?”
Here was my moment of truth. Now was the time to come clean, fess up to Vince. The girls would understand. Eventually. Maybe.
“And what is it with you this morning? You look sick. Are you coming down with something?”
“No, no. Nothing, Vince. I’m tired, you know. Kind of weary, that’s all.”
“Yeah, I think you’re kind of hungover, looks like to me.”
“Vince, can we talk a minute?”
Vince seemed to wince at the premonition of an impending touchy-feely moment. His facial expression and silence had all the indicia of downright terror at the possibility that I might break down in tears, or worse, want to give him a big hug.
“Vince, sometimes things happen you have no control over. An innocent act—like throwing a match into the street and it catches fire on a tossed gum wrapper—and the next thing you know the entire city is up in flames, a conflagration of events that blow up faster than you can control them—”
“Shut up, Meloni. I don’t have time for your version of Dante’s Inferno.” He lit another Merit with a very pretty sterling lighter. “Clear your calendar. I want you buried in this Holton case up to your neck.”
Vince refused to call me Melone with a silent e. He’d look at me as if he’d just stepped in fresh dog crap and say, “If you don’t p
ronounce that e at the end, Melone sounds like a fucking Irish name. You think being Irish is better than Italian?” When Vince said “Melone,” he said it with an ending i, and punched his voice up a notch, smashing the last voweled syllable in my face like a carnival cream pie.
“But why me? I don’t want this case. Give it to Jeff. He’s a Holton alumnus.”
“Jeff Kendall’s as dumb as a doorknob and I don’t trust him because he is an alum.” He leaned over his desk. “And don’t you repeat that.” Sitting back with the slit eyes of a skeptic, Piganno went on, “And why don’t you want it? You’re always begging for the high-profile cases. Suddenly you’re shy?”
“No, but . . . well . . .”
“I want you on this because you’re one of my smartest AAGs. You got a lot a class and you don’t swear as much as these other assholes. And with that fake Irish name you adopted, Carlyle’ll think you’re one of them. And bringing him down to his bony knees will be sweeter if I do it with an Italian girl from the Hill.”
Dean Kenneth O. Carlyle, the head honcho at Holton, was Joker to Vince’s Batman. Their ongoing feud was a minor subplot in the old Italian-WASP power play in little Rhody. As in a gang war, one of these factions was always trying to corner the market on power in our small state.
“What is it with you and Carlyle? It can’t just be that he’s ethnophobic.”
“Ethnophobic. Hah! I like that, Meloni. You’re a real stitch.” Vince’s smile drained from his face. “It’s nothing personal. But I just got off the phone with him. The dead kid’s folks want a powwow with us. You’re going on a road trip to Holton College and I gotta tell you what to pack.”
My head began to spin as it always did when Vince was loading his dueling pistol to send me out at sunrise. And he always seemed to pick me for the away games, those times when he needed an emissary from the AG’s office to meet with the public. It must be all that class he thought I had; I “cleaned up” well. But there was no way I was going over to Holton. No way I was taking this case. There was absolutely no ethical way this scenario could play out without me ending up at the bitter end of the employment line.
“Not me. I can’t go there. I’m not prosecuting this case. Why? Why, you ask? Because . . . Because I’ll get too emotional over it.” I flopped in a chair and breathed deep, got up, and immediately threw myself into another chair. “See, this is the problem, Vince. I saw this girl get hit by a car and thrown across the street—”
“I don’t want to hear about your troubled childhood. Tell it to the shrinks.” As he spoke, he threw papers around his desk in search of something. A pink message slip appeared in his chubby fist. “Shit. Here the fuck it is.” Vince donned a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses, so smudged I could barely see his eyes through the lenses. “You’re gonna meet with the girl’s parents . . . and with that no-good-son-of-a-goddamn-bitch-bastard-prick, Dean-fucking-Carlyle.”
I winced at his biologically limited vocabulary.
“The bum’s office. Holton College. Ten a.m. Be there, or be fired.”
“You aren’t listening to me, Vince. This girl from Holton. She rolled out of the car like a sack of garbage and then flew through the air like a fly ball into the parked car across the street—”
“Yup, and she’s lying on a slab in the morgue, which reminds me, get over there now. O’Rourke’s waiting on you for the autopsy. I want the results before Carlyle gets them.”
The morgue. Okay. Yes, I could do that. Go to the morgue. Vince unwittingly gave me a brief reprieve from my confessional. I now had an extra twelve hours to see the girls and run my plan by them first: I would give Vince an abridged version of the previous night’s events. First thing in the morning I would tell him that I alone saw the Hastings body get dumped. I would take the hit by myself and let the girls rally behind me to keep Vince from firing me. It was the only chance we all had of getting out of this mess in one undivided piece.
Tomorrow. In good Scarlett O’Hara fashion, I’d worry about it tomorrow.
CHAPTER THREE
Morgue 101
FROM VINCE’S OFFICE I went straight to the Rhode Island morgue, where I found not just Detective O’Rourke from the Providence Police Department but the dead girl, whose body lay supine before me in the freezing-cold autopsy room. It was now my job to whip up a soufflé of evidence against an unknown assailant and, to make Vince happy, try to implicate Holton College in a nightmarish murder whose aftermath I had witnessed.
I looked across the room at the mass of bloody flesh on the table and breathed in the familiar scent of refrigerated steel, the feeble odor of pine disinfectant, and the sweet sticky humidity of blood and organs. I went wobbly on my feet, feeling my knees weaken. A trickle of sweat traced its way down the hollow of my chest. I did not want to approach the girl’s body but there was no exit for me now, nothing I could do but move forward and do my job.
“You all right?” called out O’Rourke. “You’re white as a ghost.”
He remained near the door as I marched to the counter where boxes of rubber gloves in assorted sizes were stacked up against the wall. I thrust my hand into the open box marked Medium and extracted two pair. As far as I knew, I was the only prosecutor with this persistent need to touch the bodies of the dead, but we were all required to pull gloves over our hands anyway, not so much for our own protection but to protect the dead from the only thing they had left to give us: evidence.
Draped in the crisp cotton sheeting of a tea party, the high stainless steel table lay smack in the middle of the room under a stark white light. I walked closer. The face of the young woman was pretty much gone—a mere memory now in her parents’ minds—but I knew from the chart that she was eighteen, two years older than my little sister Cassie. This thing before me, the tissues and bones constituting the child’s remains, was naked and ready for autopsy. Lucky Dack, an investigator from the state medical examiner’s office, usually accompanied the bodies from the scene and then undressed them in preparation for the postmortem. But in bona fide murder cases like this one, no one was permitted to touch the corpse until the forensic physicians had done their thing. Some of the best evidence is found on clothing and skin.
Lucky Dack and I had gotten to know each other pretty well over the years. He’d taught me much of what I knew about real death—the kind that hadn’t been dressed up in its Sunday best yet. Lucky had evidently left Detective O’Rourke in my care knowing I’d stop O’Rourke from doing anything stupid. By protocol we weren’t supposed to be left alone with the bodies. But there was no need to worry about O’Rourke. He wasn’t going to budge from the counter he was leaning against. His stomach for death, especially the messy kind, was on a scale with his taste for steak tartare. On that day O’Rourke’s presence was required because, as luck would have it, he’d been around the corner at the local Dunkin’ Donuts having a gratis Coolata when the body took flight. He’d been right there with us. Barely yards away.
I shot a pair of gloves over to him, aiming at his head, then pulled my own high over the cuffs of my crisp white shirt. I pressed my belly muscles into the table’s rolled edge, looking at the young body, still lank in its final stages of leveling off at adulthood. Even though, post-expiration, modesty shouldn’t matter, I was embarrassed for her. I wanted to flip a sheet over her nipples, still a live translucent pink, and wanted to cover her pubic area, to protect it now, belatedly, its patch of wiry pubic hair matted down and sticky with fluid. Her head was oddly bloodless: a china doll whose face had cracked and fallen away.
As soon as O’Rourke saw me wince at the shattered mass that had been the girl’s face, he addressed me from the distant safety of the counters.
“A drunk in a Cadillac Escalade struck her in that alley off Pine Street. Then the girl’s head scored a bull’s-eye on the windshield of a neon blue Eclipse. Went through it like a projectile. That’s how I found her. Her head inside the windshield, body spread over the hood. Here.” He picked up a file from one of the coun
ters, removing several photographs. “Did you see these?”
In the flesh, a few minutes before you.
He held the photos out to me like an overweight kid showing off stolen candy. I walked over and plucked them out of his gloved hand.
In the first picture the girl looked like she’d been trying to fly. Facedown on the bright blue car hood in her yellow summer dress, her arms and legs spread open like butterfly wings. Her head simply disappeared, plunged into that other, invisible world past the windshield. Through the looking glass, the voice in my head said. Time had weirdly slowed for me. I walked back to the steel table as if the empty air had become crystalline-clear water I was wading through. O’Rourke continued his juicy slide-show narrative, and his words took on vivid, preternatural colors in my mind. Maybe I was coming down with something. Or it was a hangover from the night before. Or some different, some new kind of misery . . .
“Look at the shots taken from inside the car. I bet the judge won’t let you show those, right? A mush of face on the dashboard. But Piganno’ll love it. Your boss hit pay dirt this time.”
I flipped through the pictures. Vince grooved on the gory ones. The girl’s face was raw hamburger sprinkled with gray brains, sauced with blood. By the time the photographer had shown up to shoot the film, whatever liquids were still inside the kid had drained from her head wounds into the car, pooling on the floor. One of her cornflower blue eyes was hanging from its socket. I came out of my daze to discover I was gritting my teeth. I took three or four enormous breaths and then had what felt like another hot flash.
I placed the snapshots on the autopsy table next to the girl’s body and then heard O’Rourke say, “Hi, Doc.” I looked up.
A young man in blue surgical scrubs walked in and stepped solemnly to the table. The downtown medical examiners were unfailingly polite, though the younger of them often resented the intrusions of nonmedical personnel. T. Gannon, MD, his name badge read. He looked like he was in his late twenties and was probably in forensic pathology training at Brown University Medical School. Workmanlike he leaned over the lump of cherry Jell-O and purple Play-Doh that was the girl’s face and blew air out of his lips like he’d just broken the record for a three mile run.
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