Remains Silent mm-1

by Michael Baden

  Please, God, deliver me. End my suffering.

  Have mercy on my soul.

  I d la S Manny could hear the sound of her own heart beating as she stood up. Poor tortured creature. What did they do to you?

  Warm air touched the back of her neck, and for a moment she couldn’t identify its source. When she did, it was with a terror so great she knew what she was experiencing now would haunt her forever. Breath. Rhythmic breathing. Human. Somebody’s standing behind me.

  Her own breath died in her chest. She wheeled around, the flashlight making kaleidoscopic designs on the padding. “Who are you?” But there was nothing in the room except the meager furniture and the white padding to protect the insane. The open door testified to the route the intruder had taken.

  There was someone here. I know it. Too shaken to scream, but not to run, Manny raced out of the Seclusion Room, up the hill past Promise House and Serenity Hall, and into the security of Kenneth’s waxed arms and the glorious smell of safety.

  SHE CALLED JAKE and told him what had happened. He was still in his office.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “My apartment. Kenneth drove me.”

  “Is he with you?”

  “I sent him home.”

  “Then I’ll come over.”

  She was tempted. “Why?”

  “I don’t want you staying alone. You’re in shock. The reaction might be bad when you come out of it.”

  “I’m over the shock. Really. I was scared. Now I’m more than scared. I’m pissed off and really angry.”

  “At least come to my office first thing tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “I want you to tell me everything again. See if you left out anything.” He paused. “And I want to see you. Make sure you’re all right.”

  Kindness. Warmth filled her like helium. “Say that last part again.”

  “I want to make sure you’re all right.”

  “No. Just before that.”

  “I want to see you.”

  Yes.

  ***

  She checked the locks, drew a bath, checked the locks again, and wallowed in warm water until the tension in her body eased and she was able to breathe normally. Dressed in a cashmere sweat suit- she realized with astonishment that she didn’t care how she looked- she took Mycroft for a walk, came home, fed him, and, not hungry herself, went to bed.

  The phone rang. Don’t bother. It kept ringing. “All right,” she grumbled, and picked up the receiver.

  “I’ve decided not to go any further.” A mumbled voice. Patrice.

  “What did you say?”

  “I’m not going any further with this, Ms. Manfreda. I’ve given it some more thought, and I don’t want to go ahead.”

  Who got to her? “What are you talking about? We’ve taken the first step, got the court to sign the order keeping the skeletons.” All right, so we lost the bones. We’ll find them again. “We’re on the way to finding out about your father’s death, after all these years.”

  “I’m sorry. I-”

  “At least let me come to New Jersey and see you and your daughter.”

  “That’s just it. My daughter’s going to make something out of her life. She’s at the top of her class. I can’t risk anything interfering with that.”

  “Why would investigating your father’s death bring any harm to your daughter?”

  Patrice was silent.

  She’s scared. “Has something happened? You’ve got to tell me.”

  A whisper. “You shouldn’t have gone back to Turner.”

  My God! “How do you know I went there?”

  A pause. Then: “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You have to. This is important- for your father.”

  “My father’s been dead to me for forty years. My daughter’s alive now. I intend to keep it that way. Let his past stay buried with him.”

  “Someone’s threatened you, haven’t they?”

  Silence.

  “I can hire a private investigator to protect her, protect you, until we get the police-”

  “No police! When the man calls again, I’ll tell him I’m through. I’m finished with you and my father. I thank you, Ms. Manfreda, but please don’t try to contact me again.”

  ***

  Jake slept on the couch in his office, waking up periodically with thoughts of Manny- that there was no call from her was either good or bad news, good if she was resting comfortably, bad if she was still frightened but didn’t want to disturb him. Or if something else had happened to her, a thought he pushed away immediately by thinking of Pete.

  What was so important that people generations apart would kill for today? The four skeletons were missing. What would they tell him if they were found? Even without her whole body, Jake still had Mrs. Alessis’s liver samples, proof she had been poisoned. Now he needed scientific proof that Pete had been murdered- the kind that would convince a prosecutor to take the case.

  In the morning, he called Elizabeth on her cell phone. It was something he dreaded- the worst, in a career that necessitated tough calls.

  “It’s Jake.”

  “Jake! I never thanked you for picking up my dad’s things.”

  “I’m sorry the place was ransacked after I was finished.”

  “So you heard about that.”

  “Yes.”

  “And about Mrs. Alessis?”

  “Actually, I was up there a few nights ago. Her daughter asked me to do her autopsy.” He took a breath. Now or never. “Which brings me to why I’m calling.”

  Ice on her end of the line. “Oh?”

  “The autopsy showed Mrs. Alessis was poisoned. It turns out the poison was in a bottle of whiskey I took to your father that we shared the last night I was with him. Obviously, the poison was added after I left. I found the bottle in Mrs. Alessis’s apartment. It had carbon tetrachloride in it, which showed up in Mrs. Alessis’s liver. She may or may not have been the intended victim.”

  Jake waited for Elizabeth to realize the implications. “Go on,” she finally said.

  Spell it out. “I think the poison was meant for your father. The only way to know for sure is to exhume the body and look for the very specific damage to the liver this poison would cause.”

  “Noooo!” It was more a wail than a word.

  “Elizabeth, please. I need to find out.”

  He could hear her fight for control. “You mean you want to dig him up and cut him into pieces?”

  “You know it’s not like that. It’s science. Science your father pioneered.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s exactly like that. When I was twelve, Dad took me to an autopsy. He thought I was old enough to handle it. He was wrong. Everlastingly wrong. I still have nightmares. And the thought of you doing that to my father-”

  “Look at it from his point of view. The death certificate says he died of natural causes. I don’t think he did. Pete was a scientist. He’d want us to know the truth.”

  “I don’t know his point of view. I only know mine and Daniel’s. He thinks the autopsy process is barbaric.”

  “Hear me out. If he was murdered, don’t you want whoever did it to be punished? Doesn’t he deserve justice?”

  “What if it turns out he poisoned himself? I don’t want to know that. Suicide’s a sin against God. Besides, I have enough justice to deal with here in my job. Please, Jake. Dad’s buried. He died of cancer. Let it be.”

  ***

  Manny didn’t see it that way. She came to Jake’s office around eight, looking haggard-and beautiful. His impulse was to put his arms around her, but instead he just listened as she went through the events at Turner.

  “I want you off the case,” he said when she’d finished.

  “And you’ll carry on alone?”

  “Until I get enough to call in the police.”

  “Enough as in ‘I don’t have the bones, I don’t have Mrs. A’s body, Pete is six feet under, and if I keep investigat
ing I’ll probably be killed’?”

  He laughed. “That’s about it.”

  “Well, with all that good stuff going for you, I stay on the case.” She saw indecision in his eyes. “We once compared lists of things we hate. Threats and intimidation have just taken first and second place on mine. I’ve seen you look at me- you think I am a frail and helpless female. That is so male. But I’m a monster when I’m mad, and whoever it was who breathed on me last night has gotten me pissed off. We work together. That’s final.”

  Now he did hug her. Got up, walked around the desk, stood by her side, and hugged her. His heart, he realized, was dancing.

  Back behind his desk, he told her about his conversation with Elizabeth.

  And then, because Manny simply had to do some of her own work, they agreed to meet the next night at Jake’s house.

  IT WAS AN unseasonably cold morning in Queens. Like so many other things that belonged to the city, the heater in Jake’s official car wasn’t working, and he stood at the gravesite, wishing the sun would rise faster. Armed with the exhumation order, Jake had awakened the cemetery director at midnight to fax a copy to him and arrange for a 6 a.m. start.

  He was dressed in jeans, old sneakers, a polo shirt, and a light jacket, inadequate insulation for a chilly morning but perfect for a dig.

  He looked at his watch: 6:32. The grounds crew hadn’t arrived yet.

  At this hour, the cemetery was peaceful- even, he had to admit, beautiful. The rising sun glinted off the stained-glass windows of the mausoleums, elaborate monuments to the wealthy and powerful of a bygone era, painting the simpler stones with fantastic hues. The cemetery, he knew, had plots dating back to the late eighteenth century. It had expanded in every direction, not slowing down until the 1990s when the Catholic Church had begun to allow cremation. When Jake had started at the ME’s office, almost all bodies were buried; now nearly a third were reduced to ashes.

  Jake had just taken out his cell phone to call the grounds crew when he heard them coming. It had been only a week since Pete’s burial, so their job would be simple. Jake took photographs of the plot and the flat temporary marker identifying it: PETER JOSEPH HARRIGAN, 1933-2005.

  The backhoe appeared, crawling toward him down the cemetery road, doing no more than five miles an hour. Jake waved as two workers got down from the rig. They wore jeans and work boots. One was tall and thin with shoulder-length blond hair and a mustache; the other was thick around the middle, with thinning black hair. They introduced themselves as Boris and Ned.

  “Not the sort of thing we do very often,” the tall man, Boris, said. “Not for criminal justice purposes, anyway.”

  “Sometimes when someone wants to transfer a loved one to a different site, we move ’im,” Ned added. He sipped Starbucks coffee.

  “I have a friend who works in Jersey,” Boris said, leaning against the backhoe tire. “Once he dug up a casket, there were two bodies in it-two.”

  Ned shrugged. “Joe Bonnano, the mob boss who owned a funeral home, hid his victims by burying their bodies in caskets with a rightful inhabitant- one on top of the other.”

  “In my friend’s case,” Ned said, “the funeral home was ripping off the families.”

  “Fascinating,” Jake said. “But don’t you have a job to do?”

  The backhoe scraped at the earth, stripping off the neat layer of sod that had been laid a week ago. In less than ten minutes, the top of the cement liner that contained the casket was exposed. Boris scrambled into the hole, clipped chains to four metal loops on the liner top, and inserted a pry bar to loosen the epoxy that sealed it shut. He climbed back out and gave Ned a thumbs-up. With the shift of a lever, the backhoe’s arm lifted, chains straining against the cement. Boris pried at the seal again; the cover came off and was set down on the nearby lawn of an underground neighbor. This was the reason, Jake knew, that exhumations were done early; no relative of a buried body was likely to turn up.

  Boris connected a sling to the backhoe, which lifted the casket out of the cement liner and placed it by the hole. Jake stepped forward.

  “No water got in,” he said. “Good.” He hopped into the grave and scooped soil into small plastic containers.

  Ned stared at him. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting some soil samples. Six containers: four sides, top, and bottom. Standard procedure. You want to make sure the body hasn’t picked up anything from the groundwater.”

  “Like what?”

  “Arsenic, for one thing. People have been wrongly accused of murder because an ME made that mistake. Two Englishmen in the early nineteen hundreds were hanged for poisoning their wives; turned out later that rainwater had washed arsenic from the soil into the coffins.”

  “Shouldn’t that cement box keep everything out?”

  Jake climbed back up. “Depends on how much groundwater there is and how well the seal holds. Best to be careful.”

  He examined the casket. Save for adherent soil, the wood was shiny and clean, as though it had just been lowered into the ground. The court order had mandated he perform the autopsy in situ. He had brought his implements from the car.

  Ned unscrewed the lid and Jake gently pushed it open. His heart lunged. Pete’s face, ruddy in life, was pale in death. Jake knew it was because of the removal of blood during the embalming. But otherwise it was Pete as he had been in life- dressed in his favorite brown tweed suit, white shirt open at the neck- and the sight of his friend, free from pain, filled Jake with an unexpected poignancy. Maybe the killer had done Pete a favor, but shouldn’t that have been Pete’s decision? Shouldn’t this beloved man have been allowed to live to the last moment, savoring what little time he had left?

  Sentimental. You don’t know if he was even poisoned or if he killed himself, unlikely as that is. Get to work.

  Jake needed to examine Pete’s heart to determine whether the death certificate was right in stating natural causes; his liver, for evidence of poisoning; and his pancreas, to see if the cancer had spread. He removed Harrigan’s jacket and shirt, easy because the mortician had already cut them up the back to make them easier to put on, then his pants, underwear, and socks; Pete wore no shoes. Jake could dissect the organs and remove small pieces for microscopic examination, but the court order forbade his taking any organs from the body.

  He made the Y-incision. Pete’s heart was in good condition for a heavy-drinking, seventy-two-year-old man. It was not enlarged, and there were few signs of coronary disease. It wasn’t his heart that killed him. The pancreas was hard and gray, almost completely replaced by the cancer, but there was no evidence it had spread to other organs. And the liver? From the outside, he could see that the capsule was wrinkled, and on section he found the lobules were necrotic. Significant but not definitive. I’ll do a frozen section right away.

  Jake gave Boris and Ned the customary tip. Then, briefly, for the second time, he told his mentor goodbye.

  ***

  “It’s Wally, Dr. Rosen, reporting in. In my new role as Dr. Winnick, aka Sam Spade.”

  Even the sound of his assistant’s voice gave Jake pleasure. “Shoot.”

  “I think I’m on to something.”

  “Excellent! What’d you find?”

  “I’d rather not say till I’m sure. But I may have to spend another night or two.”

  It was like Wally to say nothing until he had the full answer. “Take as much time as you want. Are you comfortable?”

  “In Turner? Are you nuts?”

  Jake hung up, laughing. His door burst open: Pederson, his fury barely contained.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” His cheeks were bright red, his eyeglasses slipping down the bridge of his nose. Bad signs.

  “Charlie, it’s not what you think.”

  “It’s what I know. Stacy called me just now from the lab. Said you checked in a second case under a lab number that doesn’t correspond to any of the cases downstairs, autopsy or sign-out. You’ve been here how long?
You know what the rules are covering private work: never, without my permission. You’re second in charge here. You could hurt both of us.”

  Jake had expected the rebuke, but its intensity stung. “Let me explain.”

  “Does it have anything to do with Harrigan?”

  “He was poisoned. Murdered. Carbon tetrachloride. I have the frozen liver section right here, under the microscope.”

  “I don’t care if he was bitten to death by grasshoppers. He didn’t die in New York City. We have no jurisdiction.”

  “Actually, we do: a court order obtained by the District Attorney of Queens County.”

  “You did that without consulting me?”

  Jake shrugged. “You wouldn’t have consented. And I had to know. What would you have done if you thought your best friend was murdered and the killer was getting away with it?”

  Pederson’s tone softened. “Let me take a look.” He put his eye to Jake’s microscope. “Centrilobular necrosis- guess you’re right. Sad, but I’m not surprised.”

  “Not surprised?” The words hit Jake like a bee sting. “What do you mean?”

  “Pete wasn’t the person you think he was. He was a good forensic pathologist, probably a great one. But I know a few things about him that you don’t. It just may be that his past caught up with him.”

  “He botched a case? Got in trouble as a kid? Be specific.”

  Pederson sighed. “Leave it alone. If I had pancreatic cancer, I’d want to die. Let him rest.” He turned toward the door. “Stick to your job. The morgue doesn’t belong to Harrigan, you, or me.”

  “Charlie, I have to call Elizabeth. It’s her right to know.”

  “And to not know. Why do you want to hurt her? I thought you were his friend.” He walked out.

  Confusion swirled in Jake’s brain like mist. I was his friend. I knew him better than any other man on earth. What did Pederson mean about Pete’s past? He got up and paced his office, trying to reconstruct the years. They had met when Jake was in med school; it was then that their friendship had blossomed. True, Pete hadn’t talked much about his childhood or about his own training, but then neither had Jake. The two men worked in the present, lived for the present, and often, when they shared a case, lived for each other. Everything about Pete was open, even transparent. Still, Jake thought, I’ve been wrong before. I thought my marriage to Marianna meant love forever. Hah! But that was only a few years. With Pete it was decades.