‘Call me when you’ve read it, will you?’ she said as she turned in at her gate.
But after she’d read the first five pages, she got too worried to wait. She called him and said, ‘They don’t make it easy, do they? All these long medical terms!’
‘Yeah. Now you see,’ Stuart said, ‘why he likes me again.’
‘Sure. He read it twice and still had no idea what it said. I’m pretty vague about a couple of places myself, and I’m still in the first half. And if it’s hard for me, think how much worse it is for him.’
‘Exactly. So he’s counting on us to figure it out.’
‘Little does he know, huh? What in hell is carboxyhemoglobin? I can’t even say it without hurting my tongue.’
‘Google it. But not yet! First, talk to me about how we’re going to do this, Alice. Because I think he’s going to be mad if we tell him what it means, and even madder if we can’t. He must be very angry already, whether he knows it or not.’
‘Oh, dear. Psychology 101.’
‘Make fun of it if you must, but what’s your answer? When we figure out what this report says, how do we tell Mort without sounding condescending?’
‘If I promise to think about that, will you please help me figure out what killed our victim? I haven’t read it all yet, but so far it seems to be all about what didn’t. Why should I care that he didn’t have a heart attack, he wasn’t diabetic, he showed no signs of Hepatitis or TB? Why do they test for all those things, anyway? The guy died in a fire.’
‘I don’t know. I’m going to read it through to the end, see what I can find in my anatomy textbooks and then probably just Google the hell out of it.’
‘Call me back about carboxyhemoglobin, will you?’
‘OK.’
‘And mucosal necrosis. I’m sure I’ve read that before but it’s not in my dictionary and I need to be sure …’
‘Everything’s on the Internet. I’ll find it.’
‘I can find it there too but the explanations are just as complicated as the question.’
‘Whining doesn’t help, Alice.’
‘But you’ll call me back tonight?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because I won’t be able to sleep until—’
‘Alice, I promise I’ll call you back tonight.’
‘Good. Is your mom nearby?’
‘Very close. Dishing up dinner, in fact.’
‘Ask her to call me when she’s done feeding all you brutes.’
‘Ask her yourself – she’s walking over here with her hand out and she—’
After a scuffle, her sister’s voice said, at a little distance, ‘Go on, now, eat it while it’s hot. I’ll take care of this hussy.’ Then Betsy said, into the phone, ‘Alice? If you want dinner I’ve got plenty, but you need to come right now.’
‘I don’t need your food, I need your brain. When you’re done stuffing that mob, will you come down here and talk to me? I’ll feed you half a steak, a pasta salad and a nice glass of Shiraz.’
‘Alice, what have you done?’
‘Something not so smart, maybe. Will you come?’
‘Would I miss hearing this? Pour the wine.’
Twenty minutes later, the putt-putt of Betsy’s old Pontiac sounded in the drive. She came in smelling like the pork chops and potatoes she’d left behind, and sank into a dining-room chair. On the table in front of her, late sunlight gleamed through two stemmed glasses of red wine.
‘Is this the good stuff?’ She took a hearty sip. ‘Ah, lovely. Come on, now, that’s enough cashews. Sit down here and confess so we’ll have an excuse to get pie-eyed.’
Alice sipped her wine, sighed and told her sister how she’d responded to Mort’s request for a Saturday morning meeting with a demand for a hefty raise.
‘Was anybody else around?’
‘Yeah, Stuart was there.’ She looked at her sister and sighed again. ‘Dumb, huh?’
‘Alice, what came over you?’
‘Well, I just – all of a sudden I got so sick and tired of getting called “Teach,” and being treated like an elderly joke all the time – I’m six months younger than he is! But then, when he needs something, he gets all collegial till I promise to work crazy hours. Damn it, I felt as if I’d earned—’
‘Oh, please. Of course you’ve earned it, times over. That’s not the point, is it?’
‘No, not with Mort. What you’ve earned is never what you get. Why is he such a putz, Bets? Is it still the father thing, you think?’
‘I’m afraid so. You remember what Charlie Weatherby was like.’
‘So tall and handsome,’ Alice remembered. ‘And mean as a snake.’
‘He so enjoyed making his son look stupid in front of people, didn’t he?’
‘I wonder why Mort didn’t leave, after school?’
‘Well, Charlie dished out money and treats along with ridicule,’ Betsy said. ‘Gave him a job on the paper and didn’t make him go to college to earn it. Mort hated the punishment but he couldn’t resist the rewards.’
‘Uh-huh. I did a dumb thing when I insisted on a raise in front of Stuart, didn’t I?’
‘I’m surprised he let you have it.’
‘For a minute, after he gave in he looked as if he’d like to kill me. He’ll probably find a reason to fire me next week.’
‘But he’s put off doing that because you have this important job tomorrow morning that Stuart won’t talk about …’
‘He can’t. We’re not allowed to.’
‘Uh-huh. So my suggestion is for a couple of days make it look as if all the good ideas come from Mort Weatherby.’
‘That’s going to be pretty hard—’
‘Do it anyway. Do you want to get fired or do you want to keep working there where you’re having fun and helping Stuart with his promising career?’
‘You know the answer to that.’
‘Then be shameless and devious. Butter him up.’
‘You think he’ll believe me if I say he’s a smart cookie—’
‘Yes.’
‘Even though he knows perfectly well—’
‘Alice, you know yourself the man is a bottomless pit of the need to be on top.’
‘That’s true. OK, I’ll do it.’ She touched her sister’s arm. ‘Thanks, Bets.’
‘You’re welcome. Now you cook the steak and potatoes and I’ll toss the salad, because I have to eat something before I can have another glass of this wonderful wine.’
Stuart called a couple of times that evening. Luckily, he had taken more science courses than she had, and more recently. After he shared his insights into the language of autopsies, she told him about the approach she wanted to try on Mort Weatherby. When Alice was pretty sure they were on the same page about everything, she said goodnight. She would have liked to go over it all again, but she sensed he was about ready to start calling her ‘Teach,’ so she let him go.
Clark’s Fort got its first hard freeze of the season Friday night. Stuart and Alice crunched through a brilliant clutter of new-fallen leaves on their way downtown Saturday morning, and came into the newsroom looking rosy-cheeked and jolly.
Mort was sitting at his desk, with a copy of the report in front of him. As they took seats in front of his desk, he said, without looking up, ‘Alice, you think you could rustle up a cup of coffee?’
Stuart started to get up – fresh pots of coffee had been one of his regular chores his whole first year at the Guardian; he knew where all the supplies were. Alice waved him silently back into his seat as she said, ‘Of course.’
You won a round, Betsy had warned. He has to make you pay.
While she worked at the coffee console, she heard Mort say to Stuart, ‘They sure like the nine-dollar words, don’t they? It seems like the more I read this thing the less I know.’
‘Well, the ID is going to be incredibly hard,’ Stuart said, ‘because there are no printable surfaces. Almost everybody has a print record on file somewhere these days.
But this corpse – wow, not only no fingers, he doesn’t even have palms, or footprints.’
‘But it says they found enough blood and usable tissue to be pretty sure of a good DNA test,’ Mort said. ‘And apparently they can also test teeth for DNA. Did you know that?’
‘Not until now,’ Stuart said. ‘And I see they put a rush on the test and are starting to circulate the search requests.’
‘But DNA testing is only going to establish identity if the subject had DNA tests before,’ Alice said, bringing three steaming mugs to the desk. ‘Which he wouldn’t have had unless he was a criminal, would he? And they haven’t found a match at any state institution so far, or that national one, CODIS.’
‘Well, they can still try law enforcement,’ Stuart said, ‘and armed forces.’
‘Would a cop be taking an information walk-along, though? Not likely,’ Mort said.
‘Oh, good point,’ Alice said. ‘I never thought about that.’
‘He was alone when the fire caught him,’ Stuart said.
‘Yeah, about that,’ Mort said. ‘I asked that Judy, the one you said was your guide up there? She insisted they never let anybody wander around unescorted. Typical government response – we’re always right. Yet here he is, found alone.’
‘Right. And under a log which, by the way, the autopsy docs don’t think is what killed him either – did you see that?’
‘Is that what they meant about contours not matching?’ Mort shook his head. ‘Why in hell should anything match?’
‘Well, see, that fallen tree he was under was a pretty good size,’ Stuart said. ‘Almost a foot around. Canny old Sheriff Tasker had his crew cut out the section that was on top of the body, mark the spot that was on top of the victim’s head and bring it along. The doctors say the front of the skull shows a small bump that might be a contusion, but nothing big enough to cause death, and it certainly doesn’t match that section of log we sent along.’
‘OK, so the tree fell on him but it didn’t kill him. What did?’
‘Well, let’s keep working our way through this report of what they tested,’ Stuart said, ‘because that’s what people will want to know, isn’t it? What do you make of the blood evidence?’
Mort grew one of his trademarked sneaky looks. ‘That part with all the multi-syllable words? I haven’t quite deciphered that yet.’
‘Alice has some insight into that,’ Stuart said. He had pushed her to try this gambit, saying, ‘Let’s give him a reason to keep you on the team.’ Now, as Mort fixed resentful eyes on her left shoulder, she thought, This had better be a world-class lie.
‘My neighbor teaches the Advanced Placement classes at the high school,’ she said. ‘I asked her to explain, and she sent me this.’ She took a deep breath and read, ‘“Carboxyhemoglobin (COHb) is a stable complex of carbon monoxide that forms in red blood cells when carbon monoxide is inhaled.”’ Alice had said ‘carboxyhemoglobin’ aloud ten times before she went to bed, and ten more times this morning. It slid out of her mouth now without a hitch.
‘So all that long fancy word means is that he was breathing in a fire zone,’ Mort said.
‘Except he wasn’t,’ Alice said, ‘apparently. What the report says is, “We were curious to know why we found no traces of carboxyhemoglobin in the victim’s red blood cells. This seems consistent, however, with the absence of soot within the airways, which should be present if he was breathing when the fire caught him. It also dovetails with the fact that microscopic tests on the day of autopsy found no inflammatory reaction to extreme heat.”’
Alice stopped reading and looked up. Mort was still watching her shoulder. He looked puzzled and angry.
Careful to keep her voice level and pleasant, Alice said, ‘So I don’t know how you reached it, but it looks like your hunch about this body must be right.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ Mort sat back in his big chair and squinted out the window. ‘Tell me which part you agree with.’
‘Well, I remember how closely you questioned Judy at the headquarters office about whether she’s ever lost anybody she was guiding at a fire. Like you had a feeling there was something hinky about those reports.’
‘Yes,’ Mort said, pushing papers around on his desk, ‘and she just sort of blew me off. But now—’
‘Now,’ Alice said, ‘just as you suspected, it appears this victim did not die in the Meredith Mountain fire.’
FIFTEEN
Mort opened and closed his mouth twice before any sound came out. Finally he cleared his throat and managed, ‘Well, but Alice—’
‘What?’
‘He was in the fire. That’s where they found him. In Grizzly Gulch, the hottest spot in the whole fire, all burned up.’
‘I know.’
‘Well, he can’t be in the fire and not in the fire. Come on. What are you trying to say?’
‘I believe the doctors are trying to say that he must have been dead before he got to Meredith Mountain.’
‘Got to …’ Mort leaned back in his big, padded chair and stared at the ceiling light. ‘Isn’t got what you English teachers call an active verb?’
‘Uh … yes.’
‘So how did this dead person get so active that he got to Meredith Mountain?’
‘Ha!’ She turned to Stuart. ‘Did you hear that? The publisher just did a gotcha on the English teacher!’ She clapped her hands, smiling brightly. ‘And he did it with the word got – how do you like that?’ The Betsy plan was working very well.
Stuart watched her efforts, wearing his most naive smile with just a little worry line between the eyes. He had agreed to this strategy but now he was afraid she might be overdoing it a little. Nodding pleasantly, he said, ‘Mort’s a real alligator when it comes to those active and passive verbs, isn’t he?’
‘Yes, he is. So let’s say the victim was found on Meredith Mountain. Is that passive enough?’
‘I think so,’ Stuart said. ‘The corpse was found there, but we don’t know by what means he arrived. If he was dead on arrival, we don’t have to answer the riddle of why he went there, do we?’
‘Well … We don’t need to wonder about his motivation. But we’d sure like to know why somebody else put him there.’
‘Why would anybody move a corpse?’ Stuart said. ‘How many anybodys would it take?’
‘And if they cared enough about a body to move it, why would they put it where the fire was going?’
‘And if the exploding fire blew his shoe up into the tree, where’s the other shoe?’
‘And the biggest question of all,’ Alice said. ‘If the fire didn’t kill him, what did?’
‘This is all beginning to sound really crazy,’ Mort said. ‘Stuart, how confident are you that these docs have got it right? You think they’ve proved there wasn’t any smoke in the lungs?’
‘My roommate in senior year went on to med school in New York. He’s done some assisting after urban fires, so I emailed him a couple of questions. No names,’ he said, to Mort’s alarmed reaction. ‘It won’t leak – he doesn’t even know where I am. Here’s what he sent back—’ He scrabbled through his notes and came up with: ‘“Everything they say sounds credible, but if they want to prove the body was moved why don’t they check lividity?”’
Mort said, ‘What’s lividity?’
‘You know when you die your blood stops circulating?’
‘I believe I’ve heard that, yes. This is what you learn in college?’
Stuart ignored the sneer and went on patiently, ‘So when you’re dead, if your body’s left undisturbed, the blood collects in the low spots and makes kind of, like, purple bruises. If you get moved, that reaction will be confused, harder to spot and you may get partial lividity marks in different areas. Or none, if you were moved several times.
‘I asked the autopsy docs if they checked. They sent me this—’ He pulled up another note. ‘“The epidermis and dermis skin layers are both just toast. And the burns are so deep, even the subdermal tissue is scar
red by fire. No lividity check is possible.” So, we’re probably never going to see proof he was moved. But he was found roasted, and did not have soot in his airways.’
‘Which is probably good enough to convince most reasonable people he was moved,’ Alice said. ‘It doesn’t help with any of the other questions and right now I don’t know what will, do you?’
‘No. I’m hoping we get a chance to talk to Jim Tasker before we have to send this to the printer.’
‘Good idea. So, for now, shall we move on to the tox screen?’
It was five pages long and covered with charts and graphs and chemical symbols. Surrounding text claimed to describe the substances present in what was left of the victim when he was found on the mountain.
‘Or to be honest,’ Stuart said, ‘two to three days later when the sheriff’s crew got him down from there and into a lab.’
‘Well, and then there was another move to Missoula.’
‘But didn’t they say they drew the fluids for these tests at the Helena morgue before they sent him to Missoula?’
‘Oh, that’s right. Can’t do anything about the time spent on the mountain before he was found, though. Don’t even know how long it was.’
‘Can’t be any longer than since the fire went out, can it?’ Stuart said.
‘No. Nor much shorter, come to think about it. It was in deep ashes that hadn’t been disturbed, they said.’
‘OK, kiddies,’ Mort said, ‘quit proving how smart you are and tell me what’s in the damn test.’
‘I knew we were never going to decipher that,’ Stuart said. ‘So I emailed the head of the chemistry department at the university. He gave me a list in plain English. It’s quite a cocktail. This person had been sampling several opioids as well as marijuana. Only one of the doses present was large enough to be lethal, though. Our man had enough Fentanyl in him to kill a horse. Several horses, actually – maybe a whole team of Clydesdales, like they have on that beer truck.’
Burning Meredith Page 12
