The Dead Room

by Robert Ellis

  “What time’s the autopsy?” Barnett asked.

  “In another hour.”

  “You okay about going?”

  In spite of his doubts, Teddy nodded.

  It would be another afternoon spent with dead bodies. He was glad Powell was bringing Holmes’s checkbook. He’d called her on the drive into town from prison. Although she still appeared distant, she confirmed that the police had the checkbook and agreed to bring it with her to the medical examiner’s office. Any distraction would help him get through it.

  “We need this to end,” Barnett said quietly, “so that we can both get back to work. I’ll make this up to you. I swear I will.”

  Teddy laid the newspaper on his desk. Barnett gazed at Holmes’s photo, then turned the paper over and shook his head.

  “In another week or two the evidence will be in,” Barnett said. “By then Holmes will have gotten tired of living in a jail cell. We’ll go out together, Teddy. We’ll show him what they have and talk to him. I’m sure he’ll agree that a plea is his only way out.”

  Teddy didn’t say anything. Instead, he nodded like he thought Nash would and hoped Barnett would come to his senses. But as he left the office, he thought about what Holmes had admitted to him just an hour and a half ago. That he didn’t want to know what happened because he thought he might be the one. If Barnett wanted the man to plead guilty, Oscar Holmes was just about there.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Teddy hadn’t prepared himself for the smell....

  It rolled toward him in waves, growing more oppressive as he moved deeper into the medical examiner’s building and finally reached the examining rooms. The smell of death was so thick Teddy thought it might knock him down. As a boy, he’d once found a deer lying by the side of the road. As a student, he remembered opening a refrigerator that had been switched off for a week or two. But nothing he’d experienced in his past even came close to this.

  They stopped before what looked like a prep room. Teddy followed Andrews, Powell, and Detective Vega inside. As two medical examiners passed out jumpsuits, Teddy caught Andrews staring at him. The man was laughing at him, and must have been waiting for Teddy’s reaction to the foul odor.

  “You get used to it,” Detective Vega said.

  “How long’s it take?”

  “A couple of years,” Andrews shot back.

  Teddy ignored Andrews, stepping into the jumpsuit carefully because it was made of paper. In the corner of the room he saw several jumpsuits in the trash and realized the protective clothing was meant to be thrown away once the autopsies were completed. He glanced at Powell, noticing her long legs as she slipped the paper suit over her short black skirt. She hadn’t mentioned Holmes’s checkbook. She hadn’t said a word to him since they entered the building. He knew she was still angry with him, still didn’t believe his story about how he’d found Valerie Kram’s body at the boathouse. Even worse for her, it was over now. It had ended the moment Andrews took credit for finding the body. She looked frustrated—trying to balance her job in the face of Andrews’s political career. As he watched the two of them interact, they seemed as different as night and day, and he wondered if they got along.

  Teddy buttoned himself up. An ME handed him a shower cap and a pair of goggles, pointing to the face masks and a box of latex gloves on the table while he warned him about the dangers of tuberculosis and HIV. When everyone was suited up, they entered the examining room.

  The walls were tiled. The stainless steel gurneys tilted forward slightly with the naked bodies of Darlene Lewis and Valerie Kram lying side by side like dead twins.

  Teddy shuddered at the hideous sight and looked away. When he caught Andrews staring at him again, even smiling behind his mask, he knew the man had been waiting for this moment, too.

  The ME gave Teddy a nudge and pointed out the rails on the gurney. They looked more like gutters on the roof of a house. He saw the holes at the foot of the gurney and now understood why they were tilted forward slightly. In a few minutes, body fluids would be streaming down the rails venting through the holes like rain onto the floor.

  “If you begin to feel faint,” the ME said, “then leave the room. Believe me, you want to limit your contact with the floor.”

  Andrews was smiling again; Carolyn Powell and Detective Vega gazing at him evenly. Teddy grit his teeth behind his mask, determined to hang on. But it was tough. He glanced at Valerie Kram’s body on the far table, her chest already open like a jacket. Then back at Darlene Lewis’s face with her eyes bulging out of her head. As his gaze moved down her body, taking in her bruised neck and the missing patches of skin, the ME made his first cut.

  It was a long, deep slice, as if Darlene Lewis was a piece of meat. Even more horrific, the incision looked identical to the wound the murderer had already inflicted on Valerie Kram. The cut formed the letter Y, running from the girl’s shoulders across her upper chest, then straight down to the missing skin just above her vagina. When the ME pulled out the gardening shears and began clipping the girl’s ribs away, Teddy realized he’d seen enough and kept his eyes on the ME’s face the rest of the way.

  They worked for hours. The ME showing no emotion, just an ample supply of curiosity and professionalism. With each step, he recorded his observations into an audio recorder and often stopped to wipe off his hands and write something down. Sometimes he would confer with the ME working on Valerie Kram at the next gurney. Occasionally, Teddy’s eyes would wander down to one of the bodies. But as the autopsies proceeded, the view became progressively worse and his eyes popped back up again. Every time he glanced at Andrews, he found the man staring at him. It was almost as if the DA was using the horror of the autopsy as some sort of initiation or dare. Almost as if Andrews was taunting him and hoping he might faint.

  But the gruesome ordeal bore fruit. It had been worth it because they were learning something. When the ME examined Darlene Lewis’s neck, he found torn cartilage and a broken bone which indicated she died from strangulation. And it had been quick, the ME noted, the murder performed by someone with powerful hands. Teddy tried not to think about the size of Holmes’s massive hands, or his client’s fingerprints that glowed about the girl’s neck like a string of pearls under the black lights at the crime scene. As he glanced about the room, it was obvious that everyone else was thinking the same thing, but wouldn’t be letting the thought go.

  Although the end came quickly for Darlene Lewis, the ME concluded she had been tortured by the murderer for perhaps as long as two hours before her death. The ME pointed to the missing skin. He likened it to foreplay, and said it had probably been removed while she was still alive. Detective Vega seemed to have already guessed as much, saying this would account for the amount of blood at the crime scene. The ME agreed, and told them the killer probably removed the skin and waited for her to bleed out. Then for some reason, he changed his mind and strangled her to death. Holmes’s name was mentioned freely, as was a lengthy discussion on what he’d done with the skin. All conclusions were preliminary, and Teddy listened without saying anything. At some point he began to wonder if they’d forgotten he was in the room. But when the ME offered his own theory—that Holmes ate the girl’s flesh before her eyes, then killed her when she passed out—the room suddenly quieted.

  The silence underlined their theory. Holmes got off on the shock. The minute Darlene Lewis passed out, he’d lost his audience and the thrill was gone. This was the work of someone who was more than troubled and a long way past being sick. When she fainted, he strangled her—simple as that.

  Valerie Kram’s fate was much less conclusive because of the time she’d spent in the river. Still, the cold water had preserved her better than either ME would have guessed. Although she was an avid jogger and probably in good shape the day she vanished, her muscle tone had wasted away before her death. She’d been worn down, perhaps even starved. An examination of her neck revealed that Kram had died in exactly the same manner as Darlene Lewis. It hadn’t been
the cut. The hyoid bone was broken indicating that she’d died as a result of strangulation as well.

  Andrews seemed to get off on the connection and threw an exalted fist in the air.

  While the others ignored the DA’s outburst, Teddy noticed that both MEs found Kram’s open chest particularly intriguing. Inside her body things weren’t necessarily where they were supposed to be. The tube top had held her together, her organs remarkably preserved. The word cannibalism came up again, in spite of Teddy’s presence. The MEs discussed the length of time she’d been in the water again, and agreed they couldn’t be sure what happened. What troubled both of them was the appearance that things were handled inside her body and deliberately moved around.

  Teddy felt his head lighten and begin to spin. It had been a valiant effort. He’d fought the fight, lasting for hours, but knew he was done. As he excused himself from the examining room, Andrews cackled.

  “What did I tell you,” the DA was saying in his wake. “He couldn’t hack it. He’s just a kid, and doesn’t have the stuff.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Teddy ripped open the door, bolting through the main entrance of the medical examiner’s office in search of fresh cold air. He grabbed the handrail and held on. A noisy bus was lumbering up University Avenue loaded with people who looked like they were alive and on their way home. He realized it was night and wondered where the day had gone. When he turned toward the parking lot, he noticed the press assembling with their video cameras and microwave transmitters. No doubt the DA would be holding another press conference.

  Teddy dug into his jacket pocket and found his cigarettes, then lit up trying to get rid of the rotten smell lingering about him. The sounds of garden shears and images of death that were seared into his mind, his memory. As he inhaled the nicotine rich smoke and blew it out, he saw a man with long hair take his photograph then fade into the crowd.

  The front door opened and Powell walked out of the building. He turned away, needing a break from her, too.

  “Alan Andrews is a world class asshole,” he said in a quiet voice.

  Powell didn’t respond. He thought she might have gone back inside. But when he turned, he found her still there. He looked at her face, her wide-open blue-gray eyes staring at him. The distance was gone. She held Holmes’s checkbook in her hand.

  “You made it all the way through,” she said gently.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re taking fluid samples and sewing them back up. What’s left will take time and be in the ME’s report. You didn’t miss anything at all.”

  She was trying to soften the blow. Teddy knew that he’d flamed out. This wasn’t his world. He’d done the best he could to hang in and wasn’t about to beat himself up for it.

  She held the checkbook out and smiled. “If you want a look, you better do it now,” she said. “It’s gotta go back with Detective Vega tonight. If you’re not feeling up to it, you can go down to the roundhouse in the morning and look at it there.”

  Teddy was up to it and got rid of his cigarette. As he took the checkbook, Andrews strode out of the building with Vega. The district attorney looked as if he might hit Teddy with another wise crack, but the camera lights powered up as soon as he cleared the entrance and the man knew he was on. Andrews raised his arms in the air, fending off questions that hadn’t come yet and hustling down the sidewalk to the news vans. As he greeted the press wearing the look of concern Teddy had seen him practicing at the boathouse the other night, Teddy couldn’t help thinking of the flaw in Barnett’s plan. He’d thought it before, but it was even more apparent now. Andrews loved what was going on. The two bodies they’d spent the afternoon ripping apart were a godsend to the man. A leap forward, not two steps back.

  “There’s a connection,” Andrews said in a dramatic voice to the reporters huddling around him. “A definite connection between the murders of Darlene Lewis and Valerie Kram. The medical examiner’s results won’t be in for a while, but let me tell you what I’ve got. The cause of death in both cases wasn’t from the wounds these two poor souls endured. The cause of death was strangulation. If I haven’t said it before, I’m saying it now. Our hearts go out to the families of both these young women.”

  The man’s tone of voice was over the top, his pretense abhorrent. All afternoon he’d been dancing on their graves.

  Teddy stopped listening and opened the checkbook. Glancing at the register, he noted that Holmes wrote checks on the first and fifteenth of every month without much variation. Between rent, telephone, insurance, and utilities, it amounted to only seven checks a month. His balance averaged about ten grand. Once a quarter Holmes wrote a check to an investment firm for two thousand dollars.

  Teddy paged back to October. Unfortunately, Holmes kept to his routine. There were no entries made on the day Valerie Kram had been kidnapped—no checks written between the fifteenth of the month and November 1. Oscar Holmes didn’t have an alibi for the twenty-sixth, and trying to figure out what he was up to on that day seemed like a dead end.

  He looked at Powell, hiding his disappointment. She was watching Andrews field questions, but he could tell she was thinking about something else. He wondered if she didn’t have a husband, even children to go home to. He glanced at her left hand and didn’t see a wedding ring. It had been a long day. Maybe she just needed a break, too.

  “What about the ten others?” a reporter shouted, pushing his way toward the DA. “Families are worried. Our phones are ringing off the hook.”

  Teddy turned sharply. Powell must have noticed because he could feel her eyes on him. To Teddy’s surprise, Andrews was ready for the question.

  “We’ve isolated ten missing persons we think require a closer look,” Andrews said. “I’m meeting with their families in the morning to give them a full briefing. There’s no question that the investigation is widening out. But remember, Holmes is already confined to a cell. We’re saddened by what these families have lost. There’s no reason for anyone to jump to any conclusions. There’s no reason for anyone else in the city to panic right now.”

  Teddy looked at the reporters’ faces and realized they wanted to believe the district attorney but were still frightened. He turned away, thinking about the ME’s initial conclusions.

  Nothing he’d heard anyone say today discounted his own theory about what might have happened—the idea that in Darlene Lewis’s case Holmes may have interrupted someone else. In some ways the observations made in the examination room actually bolstered his theory. Darlene Lewis had been cut, the murderer waiting for her to bleed out. Then, for some reason, he strangled her. It had been a sudden act, a quick and powerful move, the kind of response someone might have if they needed to end things in a heartbeat because they were interrupted. It didn’t explain why the killer hadn’t kept the girl alive for a month as he did with Valerie Kram. Teddy knew it didn’t shed any light on why the murderer cut Lewis up at her home rather than stealing the girl away and wearing her down. Still, his theory had survived the autopsy, and he didn’t think he was grabbing at straws. The possibility that everyone was caught up in the details and missing what really happened—the chance that Holmes might actually be innocent—still had legs.

  His mind was rolling. Teddy was thinking clearly again. When he looked up, he found Powell appraising him. She took a step closer, staring at him like maybe she’d been reading his mind. Teddy shrugged it off and handed her the checkbook. When he thanked her, she didn’t step back.

  “Let’s go get a drink,” she said.

  TWENTY-THREE

  It had begun to snow. The restaurant was just off campus and nearly empty, and they were shown to a table by a window in the back. Powell ordered a Bombay martini, dry with three olives. Under normal circumstances, Teddy would have asked for a beer. But with the weight of what he’d seen that day still with him, he told the waitress to make it two.

  As they waited for their drinks, Powell gazed out the window watching the snowflakes
float to the ground without saying anything. Teddy realized that what Detective Vega had told him before the autopsies wasn’t necessarily true. Getting used to it was something a medical examiner might achieve, but for the rest of the world the prospect would take more than time. Even Powell, a seasoned prosecutor who’d probably attended a hundred autopsies, looked as if the afternoon was still preying on her mind.

  The waitress arrived with their drinks. As she set them down on the table, Teddy couldn’t help but notice something was wrong. She stepped away quickly, her banter forced.

  “It’s the smell,” Powell said when they were alone. “That’s why we got the window table in back.”

  Teddy wasn’t sure what she was talking about until Powell sniffed her own blouse. On her cue he pulled his shirt to his nose and inhaled. It was the smell of death. The scent he thought he’d only been carrying around in his head. The odor had permeated their clothing.

  “You’ll have to get your suit dry-cleaned,” she said. “It’s the only way I know to get it out.”

  They sipped their drinks. The gin was smooth, rolling through him and sparking an immediate glow. He could feel his shoulders and neck loosening up and was glad he’d ordered the martini rather than a beer.

  “There’s a problem with your story,” Powell said after a moment.

  “What story is that?”

  “The way you found Valerie Kram’s body at the boathouse. The reason you were there.”

  She wasn’t grilling him. Instead, she appeared relaxed, and he thought he detected a faint smile.