Stiff Competition

by Annelise Ryan

  Of course, she arrived looking like she’d spent all night getting ready. Her hair was perfectly coiffed, her makeup expertly applied, and her clothing clean and pressed. She also smelled divine, and while one part of me wanted to ask her what perfume she was wearing, another part of me would have rather died first.

  Feeling self-conscious, I made an effort to smooth down my hair and realized that Matthew’s parting gift hadn’t been confined to my blouse. On one side of my head was a thick strand of hair that was hard and crusty. Realizing there was little I could do about it at that point, I shifted my focus to the job at hand.

  Not a great way to start the day, but now—more than an hour later—we are ready to load Lars Sanderson up and take him back to the morgue. Izzy calls the Johnson Funeral Home to come and transport the body, and informs them it will be a bit of a hike out to the woods from the closest available parking space. The Johnson Funeral Home is a family-run business, and body pickups are typically done by the oldest twin daughters, Cass and Kit, whose Goth-like tastes make them seem perfect for the job. And while the girls are young and relatively fit, hauling a deadweight like Lars half a mile across a rocky field might be more than just the two of them can handle.

  Knowing this, Hurley volunteers Brenda to stay and help. Brenda frowns and rolls her eyes. She confided to me once that the Cass-Kit sisters give her the heebie-jeebies. At least she won’t be alone. It will take all six of us to walk the deadweight of Lars Sanderson back to the hearse.

  I help Izzy bag up Lars in preparation for the twins’ arrival, and when we’re done, Hurley motions to me. He is standing at the far edge of the small clearing we’re in and no one else is around him at the moment.

  I walk over to him with a tired smile and he gives me one back.

  “I’d really like to kiss you right now,” he says in a low voice.

  “I don’t think I have the energy to kiss you back.”

  “Still not getting much sleep?”

  “Actually, I got a little more than usual this morning. Matthew slept longer than two hours for the first time. I’m hoping it’s a sign of things to come.”

  “My offer still stands.”

  The offer he is referring to is twofold. One, he wants to marry me, or so he says, but I can’t shake the feeling that he’s offering only because he feels it’s the right and proper thing to do. Two, he has offered to let Matthew and me move into his house so we can share the parenting duties. I would have bit on this one in a heartbeat if it wasn’t for Emily. But with all the issues she has right now—including an apparent resentment of Matthew that makes me leery about letting her around him much—I don’t think it’s a good idea. Plus I have Dom.

  “Thanks,” I tell him. “I’m still open to the idea down the road, but I think we need to keep the status quo for now. At least until Emily comes around a little more. How are the counseling sessions going?”

  Hurley makes a face. “I don’t know. I’m not a big fan of shrinks.”

  “Tell me about it,” I say, rolling my eyes. “I hate shrinks. But Maggie is really good and I have to admit, she’s helped me a lot over the past year.” Maggie Baldwin, or Dr. Naggy as I call her, is Emily’s shrink, and I know her well. She knows me even better. I spent some time in her office while I was pregnant, sorting out the issues in my own life. As a result, she was familiar with many of Emily’s issues long before Emily started seeing her.

  “We’ll see,” Hurley says, scowling and sounding unconvinced. “So far, we’ve had two sessions together, and Emily has had three alone. Maggie says she wants to continue with Emily alone for now, but I’m not sure it’s going to help. I haven’t seen any changes in her behavior yet.”

  “It takes time,” I say. “At least she’s going. That’s some progress.”

  When Hurley first suggested the counseling idea to Emily, she threatened to run away. I’m not sure if it was insight, frustration, or exhaustion that made Hurley call her bluff, but he did. He told her to go ahead and do it if that’s what she really wanted. But if she wanted to stay with him, she was going to have to see a counselor. We both spent a few nail-biting days waiting to see what would happen once Hurley made the first appointment and informed Emily. Her frown deepened, she slammed a few more doors, and she stomped her feet harder, but in the end she went.

  “I don’t know,” Hurley says, still looking skeptical. “I think the whole counseling thing is a long shot. And speaking of shots, when is Matthew due to go to the doctor’s again?”

  “Not for another month. But I called the pediatrician yesterday with some questions. I was hoping to hold out until the three-month checkup to ask if I could start mixing a little rice cereal in with his bottles, but Matthew seems hungry all the time and this every-two-hour feeding schedule is really wearing me down, especially now that I’m back at work.”

  “Did he say it would be okay?”

  “He did. I started it last night and I think that’s why Matthew slept longer this morning.” I sighed and shook my head. “I have to tell you, that extra hour of sleep was heavenly. But when I woke up and realized how much time had gone by, I panicked, thinking something had happened to him.” My voice catches on the last few words. The memory of that momentary panic is enough to make my emotions well up. Stupid hormones.

  “I wish I could be there more,” Hurley says, looking sad.

  I reach over and take his hand, squeezing it. “It will get better,” I say, hoping I’m right. “And I’m surviving, thanks to Dom. Although . . .”

  Hurley juts his head forward, looking worried. “What?”

  “He hit me up with something this morning that kind of caught me off guard.”

  “He’s not going to stop sitting for you, is he?”

  “No, not at all. In fact, he wants to add to the fray. He thinks he and Izzy should get a child.”

  Hurley considers this for a second and then shrugs. “Is that a problem?”

  “Possibly.” I roll my eyes and then amend my answer. “Probably. For one thing, Dom hasn’t discussed it with Izzy yet.” I glance over my shoulder to make sure we’re still a safe distance from the others. “Izzy is no spring chicken, you know? I don’t know if he’s going to want to start a family this late in the game, particularly since it will take a fair amount of time to adopt a child, assuming he’s even willing to go that route.”

  “I’ve heard overseas adoptions can be a lot quicker,” Hurley says.

  I nod. “True, but even those can be expensive and time-consuming. And a lot of those foreign orphanage kids have emotional and developmental problems. I think that’s why Dom is considering a different option.” I’m about to tell him about Dom’s surprising request when we hear Cass and Kit holler from the edge of the woods.

  Half an hour later, we have carried Lars—securely tucked inside a body bag—across the glacial minefield and loaded him into the girls’ hearse. It wasn’t an easy trek; we almost dropped Lars twice when first Izzy, and then Hurley caught a foot on a half-buried rock. There is a cop car parked behind the hearse, and an officer named Ben Rittenour has walked up to Hurley with a notebook in hand.

  “The Lexus over there belongs to your victim,” Ben says, pointing toward a beige SUV parked two cars up. He rips a page out of his notebook and hands it to Hurley. “Here’s the DMV info on the others that are parked here. I have a tow truck on the way to take the Lexus back to the garage.”

  Hurley hands Ben an evidence bag that contains the set of keys we found in Lars’s pocket. “Is it locked?” Hurley asks.

  “It is,” Ben says. “Want me to open it here?”

  Hurley considers this a moment and then shakes his head. “Nah, just tow it to the garage and let Jonas look it over.”

  “Will do.”

  Hurley sends Brenda back to the woods both to help Charlie and KY, and because she is KY’s ride. “See if you can find any other hunters in these woods,” he tells her. “I want names and data on anyone out here. Get statements from all of
them. Find out if anyone heard or saw anything that might be relevant. And be careful. Not only might our killer still be out here, but there’s also a bunch of fools with guns running around, and even this early in the day half of them are probably drunk.” Brenda nods dutifully and heads back across the rock field.

  As Hurley and I head back to our respective cars so we can follow the hearse and Izzy to the morgue, he gets on his phone and has Heidi arrange for an officer to head to Lars’s home to see if anyone is there. If not, he instructs her to tell the officer to sit on the place until we can get there.

  By the time Hurley disconnects the call, we are back at our cars and he makes good on his kiss wish, giving me a quick peck on the lips. “See you back at the morgue,” he says with a wink.

  “Now there’s a pickup line you don’t hear every day.”

  It takes us about ten minutes to get back to the office and as soon as we arrive, Izzy instructs me to “check Lars in.” This task involves supervising the unloading of his body and switching it from the funeral home stretcher to one of our rolling carts. Once this is done, I let the Morticia twins leave, and wheel Lars to a scale that calculates his weight by automatically deducting the weight of the cart and displaying the remainder. From there, I wheel him to the X-ray room and take head-to-toe films. While these are processing, I wheel Lars into the autopsy suite and park his cart next to one of the tables. Then I measure him from head to toe to get his height, document it on the intake sheet, and then add some other details, such as eye color, hair color, and a description of his clothing, jewelry, and other personal items. I also fingerprint him, a task I always find distasteful. Thanks to my nursing career, the sight, smell, and feel of blood and guts doesn’t bother me much, though the smell of decomposing bodies can be a challenge. But there’s something about the cold, rubbery feel of the hands and fingers when I fingerprint the dead that gives me the creeps.

  With that done, I head for the locker room, switch out of my puke-stained clothes and into some scrubs. My breasts are already beginning to tingle, a sign that my milk is letting down, but I don’t have time to pump because Izzy will be ready to start by now. So I stuff a couple of extra pads into my bra and head back to the autopsy suite.

  Both Hurley and Izzy are in the autopsy room when I arrive and they have already pulled Lars’s body onto the autopsy table. With that done, Hurley settles onto a chair off to one side and checks his phone for messages. Not all of the detectives sit in on our autopsies—they are all welcome to do so, though some don’t have the stomach for it—but Hurley always does if he has the time.

  Sometimes duty calls, however, and autopsies are a time-consuming task. Merely undressing the patient can take half an hour or more, especially when the weather is cold and there are several layers to remove. It’s not easy undressing someone who is flaccid and dead, and it’s even harder once rigor has set in. Each item has to be examined for trace evidence before it is bagged and tagged. Before we start undressing, Izzy takes a few more photos of the print in the blood on Lars’s neck after treating it with some solutions and powders that then make the print glow under a special light. Once we have Lars naked, we carefully examine the body for any other injuries, evidence, or abnormalities. Izzy gently washes Lars’s head and face using a hose that extends down from the ceiling. The wash water falls onto the table and into channels that run along the edge. This way any trace evidence that might be rinsed off is captured in a drain at the foot of the table.

  With his head and face cleaned off, it’s easy to see that our victim is, indeed, Lars, though Izzy won’t make the ID official until he has fingerprint or dental records to verify. It’s also easier to see the wound Lars has on the back of his head.

  “That rock hit him pretty good, causing a two-centimeter laceration in the scalp and significant bruising,” Izzy says. “It looks like whoever hit him came up from behind. And there’s a slight upward trajectory of the wound, suggesting that whoever hit him was shorter than Lars.”

  Hurley is writing as Izzy speaks and without looking up from his notebook he asks, “How tall is Lars?”

  “He’s five-ten,” I tell him.

  With the head examination complete, Izzy and I move on to the rest of the body. Lars is in pretty good shape for a guy in his late forties, and the only other thing of significance is the elephant in the room—the arrow through his neck.

  Izzy goes there next, carefully dissecting the neck tissues until he has exposed the arrow’s track. As I snap pictures of the neck and the wound, Izzy turns on the mic hanging down from the ceiling and describes the wound both for Hurley’s benefit and for his dictation. “It appears the arrow went in at the base of the neck on the left just above the clavicle, punctured the left carotid artery, the esophagus, and the trachea, and then exited on the right side just below the mandible. There is no evidence of reverse sheering of the neck tissues as one might see if the arrowhead had hit the ground as the victim fell. Therefore, based on evidence at the scene, and the angle of the arrow’s track, it appears the victim was shot with the arrow while lying on his side on the ground.”

  “He bled to death?” Hurley asks.

  “Can’t say just yet,” Izzy says. “He would have bled out quickly based on the damage to the carotid, but most of the blood escaped inside the body, not outside. So he may have drowned in his own blood before he actually bled to death. I’ll be able to tell you more once I get a look at his lungs. I think it’s safe to say the arrow was the weapon that caused his death, and given the combination of that and the head wound, I’m willing to call this a homicide.”

  Izzy then makes note of the angles the arrow took through Lars’s neck and compares these results to a second set of measurements he takes using the X-ray films. Then, using a rod that is nearly six feet in length, he has me hold the far end while he matches the angle of the arrow with the other end. “Definitely an upward trajectory,” he says, snapping some pictures of the rod. “But it’s not a steep angle. It’s enough to say that there had to have been a distinct difference in the heights of the two people involved, and given the angles, Mattie’s theory fits best. Lars was likely on the ground and the shooter was standing close by, near Lars’s legs when the arrow was shot.”

  After setting the rod aside, Izzy removes the arrow and sets it on a tray that I then carry over to a side table. Using a magnifying light, I carefully examine the arrow. “There’s a small hair stuck on the tail of this thing,” I say, spying a black hair a little over an inch long clinging to one of the arrow’s plastic feathers under some dried blood. Using a pair of forceps, I carefully remove the hair and place it in a small plastic baggie and label it. “It’s black,” I say, holding it under the light, “and Lars has dark blond hair, so it might be significant.”

  “Good find,” Hurley says.

  “There are some numbers on the shaft,” I say. “Anyone know what they mean?”

  Hurley has walked over to look at the hair and as he stares at the numbers, he shrugs.

  Izzy says, “Arnie will, or if he doesn’t, he’ll be able to find out. Send it and the hair up to him.” After Hurley jots down the numbers, I bag and tag the arrow and set both it and the hair aside so I can take them up to Arnie’s lab later.

  Hurley says, “I’m going to head out and assist with the investigative part of this. Let me know if you find anything else on the internal exam that changes the picture.”

  I look over at him with a sad expression. I don’t want him to leave. It seems like we never get to spend much time together lately, and while this is certainly not an ideal setting, these days I take what I can get.

  Hurley looks back at me and winks. Then he looks over at Izzy. “Can you free Mattie up to come and assist me once you’re done with the autopsy?”

  “I don’t see why not. Unless we have another body come in.”

  Hurley looks back at me. “Give me a call when you’re done and I’ll let you know where we’re at, okay?”

  I nod,
happy that there is a prospect on the horizon of some us time, but still sad to see him go. Having the majority of our time together take place amidst dead bodies and homicide investigations isn’t the kind of quality time I’d prefer.

  We are already an hour into the process by the time Hurley leaves, and as Izzy prepares to make his Y-incision to start the internal exam, he turns off the microphone hanging overhead and switches the focus of our conversation.

  “How are things with you two?” he asks.

  I shrug. “Not great,” I admit. “I feel like there are so many obstacles in our way all the time. As soon as we eliminate one, another seems to pop up. It’s like the Fates are telling us that it’s not meant to be.”

  “Don’t think that way,” Izzy says. “You have to stay positive. All relationships have their ups and downs, and there will always be times when things seem insurmountable. But if you truly love one another, you’ll find a way to work it all out.”

  “I suppose.”

  Izzy has made the top of his Y-incision, but he pauses before completing the rest of it and cocks his head to the side, looking at me. “You’re not giving up on the two of you, are you?”

  I shake my head. “Of course not, but I don’t have it in me to fight that hard, at least not now. All of my energy, time, and attention are devoted to Matthew and my job. If Emily wasn’t causing such a ruckus, it might be easier, but as it is, the relationship I have with Hurley at the moment is a little too demanding, you know? Sometimes it’s just easier to accept the status quo.”

  “You sound like you might be suffering from some postpartum depression,” Izzy says with a worried frown.

  “No, I’m suffering from reality,” I snap back. “I haven’t had more than three hours of consecutive sleep in the past two months, my daily schedule is nonstop, and my little boy is literally changing from day to day. New milestones pop up all the time and I don’t want to miss them. I want to relish every last minute of it. Frankly, Emily is too much of a headache, too much of a time drag and killjoy for me to want to be involved with her right now. And I can’t be involved with Hurley without being involved with her. So the easiest answer at this point in time is to focus on me and Matthew, let Hurley deal with Emily, and sneak tidbits of quality time with Hurley whenever I can.”