by Lyle Howard
With a flick of her wrist, Julie unlatched the car door and held it open for Lance. “I wouldn’t want you to be late for your important meeting with the coroner.”
Lance reached for the door and once again, his hand fell upon Julie’s. “Toby isn’t the coroner; he’s the head of Miami’s forensics lab.”
“Whatever.”
“Why do you always get like this?” Lance asked without trying to hide the frustration in his voice. “And why do you always run away from me?” Julie countered angrily.
Lance slid in behind the opened door. “I’m not running away from you, Julie. I just have to get down to Miami before Toby leaves his office. No matter what’s happening between us, I have to find out why these people are just going up in flames.” He rubbed the back of Julie’s hand. “Now that the lines of communication have been reopened, can’t we finish this discussion later? Maybe over a plate of spaghetti and a nice bottle of house red at Vito’s?”
Julie’s favorite restaurant. Lance knew how to press all of the right buttons. She scanned his face with a judicious gaze, checking for the slightest indication of insincerity. “Do you think I can trust you to show up?”
Lance let a grin spread across his mouth. “I don’t want to keep you waiting at the restaurant.”
Julie frowned. “You’ve done it before.”
“How about if I call you when I’m leaving Toby’s office?”
“Do you care to venture a guess as to when that might be?” Julie asked, knowing how absorbed Lance could get in his investigation.
“A few hours.”
“A few hours?”
“I promise I’ll call you by seven o’clock.” He held his finger over his heart and crossed it. “I swear.”
Julie’s eyes narrowed. “If you’re late, you can kiss my ass goodbye as it leaves through the front door.”
It was a veiled threat, but Lance couldn’t help smiling at the image. “And a truly petite ass, it is!” he extolled.
Julie slapped his hand on the door. “You leech! Get going, or you’ll miss your appointment.”
Lance squirmed in behind the wheel and slipped the key into the ignition. “I’m really looking forward to later.”
Julie slammed the door shut and waved her hand back at him as she walked away. “Yeah, yeah … we’ll see.”
As Lance pulled out of the parking lot, he gave a short blast from his horn to obtain Manny Garcia’s attention. Manny looked up from under the hood of the fire engine he was scrutinizing and held up the truck’s greasy oil dipstick in Lance’s direction. Lance returned the wave through his windshield then pulled out onto the busy street heading south toward Miami.
SIX
Toby Bilston felt relieved that everything in the lab seemed to be getting back to normal. After a string of some of the most bizarre murder investigations he had ever been assigned, it was a glorious feeling to be back in his old familiar surroundings again.
With the same considerate skill that a sculptor would use to create a fine work of art, Toby carefully sliced an intermastoid incision over the top of the corpse’s skull, making sure he cut all the way through the scalp down to the bone. The sound of the scalpel was barely audible as it gracefully sliced through the old woman’s wilted flesh.
Out of the corner of his eye, Toby glimpsed a familiar face peering in through the tiny square window inserted into the autopsy room’s stainless steel outer doors. With a wink of his eye, he acknowledged Lance’s presence. Even though the bottom half of his cherub-shaped face was covered by a surgical mask, Lance knew that Toby was smiling. He had rarely seen the man when he wasn’t.
Lance looked on as Toby motioned to one of his assistants. He saw the younger man reach up and press a button on the microphone which hung suspended on a wire from the ceiling. Suddenly, Toby’s voice boomed out of a loudspeaker mounted outside in the hallway above Lance’s head. “Had dinner yet, Cutter?” Toby asked, in an easygoing tone.
“I’ve already got a date tonight, sorry, Toby!” Lance replied.
Toby shook his head and motioned with a glove-covered, blood-stained finger to his ear. Lance quickly looked around and saw a small red button and a speaker on a wall next to the door. He pressed the tiny button and repeated his response to Toby’s question. “Can you hear me now?”
Toby nodded his head. “I wasn’t inviting you to eat, Cutter. I just wanted to make sure that you wouldn’t throw up when I remove this woman’s brain.”
Lance clearly cringed through the window causing Toby to chuckle under his mask. “Your timing is impeccable, Cutter. Do you want to wait for me in my office?”
Lance held up a small plastic bag to the window so that Toby could see it. “When you hear what I have for you, Toby, you’ll know why the sight of mere brain tissue doesn’t nauseate me anymore.”
Toby reached down and pulled the woman’s scalp forward until it covered her expressionless face like a thick red shroud. “Are you sure you don’t want to wait in my office?” Toby asked, as if the woman’s new condition would persuade Lance to leave.
Lance could feel his lips drying out so he tried to wet them with his tongue, but for some reason, he couldn’t make spit. “What are you trying to do? See how much I can take?”
Toby reached over to his instrument table and lifted a surgical saw to the woman’s forehead. To Lance, it looked like a drill with a small circular saw attached to the bit. Toby squeezed the trigger and it whined like a dentist’s drill. “I’m not trying to scare you, kid.” Toby said matter-of-factly. “It’s just that if you’ve never seen a craniotomy before, it can be a bit … shall we say … repulsive?”
Toby leaned over the body and carved a wedged-shaped section where the woman’s forehead once was and lifted off the loosened portion of skull revealing the seventy-five-year-old brain. As if he were handling a Ming vase, Toby lovingly lifted out what had been the heart of the old woman’s intelligence and carefully placed it in a plastic tray that another one of his technicians was holding. “Weigh and section it for microscopic analysis,” Toby ordered. “Still with us, Cutter?” he quipped.
Toby could tell that Lance’s words were coming out of a mouth that was probably as dry as a barn in Phoenix during the dog days of summer. “You can’t get rid of me that easily, Toby.”
The lines on the sides of Toby’s eyes wrinkled when he smiled. “That’s good.” He stepped back from the table and snapped off his gloves revealing another pristine pair underneath. He threw the soiled gloves away into a waste can designed specifically for such contaminated materials. “Do you think that you can handle the rest of this for me, Phil?” he questioned, looking across the body to his rookie technician, Phyllis Warshaw.
The young woman’s chest brimmed with pride as though she had just been given a promotion. “You mean, you want me to make the ventral incision, too?”
Toby stepped further away from the stainless steel autopsy table and slipped off his surgical cap which had been hiding his graying crown of hair and sweating bald pate. Then he removed his mask to expose his mouth, surrounded by a full salt-and-pepper beard. “Not unless you want to reach down her throat! There isn’t any other way to remove the internal organs unless you cut open the body, Phil.”
“But …”
“But what?” Toby persisted. The young woman’s hand was shaking like a tuning fork as she lifted the scalpel off of the instrument table.
“Stop that shivering, Phil. I want to see a good, clean, straight incision, not one that looks like a road map of the Jersey Turnpike.”
The woman looked up at Toby’s face for compassion, but found none. His expression was rock solid and unforgiving. “You can do it, Phil,” Toby preached confidently. “I only work with the best. Go ahead … you can do it.”
Warshaw wasn’t aware of it until she glanced down at her hand, but the trembling and apprehension had been extinguished by Toby’s display of faith in her ability.
She reached over the body and w
ith a firm but supple touch, slit the woman’s chest open from shoulder to shoulder and then continued downward with the knife, slicing the woman open from her breasts down to her pubis. “How was that?” she asked, hunting for praise, the way a student would ask a teacher after solving a math problem at the blackboard.
Toby grinned like a proud father, but that was the only praise the young doctor received. “Crack the ribs; sample the blood from the heart and lungs. Weigh, segment, and analyze all of the vital organs, and then have the report on my desk by eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”
Warshaw looked up at the digital clock on the green-tiled wall. “But it’s almost quitting time,” she protested, her voice slightly muffled by her paper mask.
Toby smiled. “Isn’t life a bitch?”
Warshaw looked over at the other technician who had been working long enough in Bilston’s lab to have grown used to working Toby’s endless hours. He just shrugged back at her with futility radiating from behind his mask.
As he backed out of the autopsy room through another set of steel doors, Toby motioned at Lance with his hand. “I’ve just got to wash up. I’ll meet you in my office in five minutes.”
Lance acknowledged Toby with a nod of his head through the tiny window. At first, Lance considered hanging around to see how the young assistant did with the rest of her assignment, but once she dissected the abdomen and folded back the severed epidermis, Lance’s rumbling stomach warned him that he had seen more than enough blood and guts for one day.
Lance turned to his right and walked fifty feet down the brightly lit corridor until he came to an office. The nameplate next to the door read “Cealia King,” but the office was empty and the lights were turned off. The next office along the hallway was Toby’s.
Lance stepped into the spacious office and took a seat across from one of the most beautiful mahogany desks he had ever laid his eyes upon. The desk’s tremendous proportions filled up most of the office’s ample floor space. Toby had received the exquisite piece as a goodwill gesture from a foreign dignitary for his help in solving a case that had baffled his own country’s police force. While it was improper procedure for a public servant to accept such grand display of benevolence, when Toby tried to politely reject the generous souvenir, the dignitary insisted that Toby’s wife, Harriet, accept the gift. That was the story of how the infamous mahogany desk ended up back in Toby’s office.
Lance ran his hand along the edge of the desk and his fingers around the intricate engraving on its side. In any other office the massive piece of furniture would have seemed too overwhelming, but somehow knowing that someone as prominent as Toby Bilston would be sitting behind it made Lance realize that it was perfect for this office.
Toby Bilston was in his middle forties and never tried to conceal it. His life was a constant battle with his weight, his superiors, and anyone who labored to conceal the truth, not necessarily in that order. He was a bear of a man, a grizzly to his staff, and a teddy to anyone who knew him better than that.
“So what brings you down to my neck of the woods again?”
Lance swung around in his chair when he heard Toby enter through the office door behind him. “I need your help.”
Toby hung his white lab coat up on a coat rack in the corner of the room. “You always need my help.”
Lance held his hand over his heart as if the words had mortally wounded him. “That’s cruel, Toby. Can I help it if your lab is better equipped than ours?”
Toby walked behind his desk and surveyed the bulletin board hanging on the wall behind it. Written on it appeared to be a schedule of some kind, containing a list of at least fifteen names. Toby lifted a magic marker out of the channel beneath the board and crossed out a woman’s name that was on the top of the chart. Then he replaced the marker.
“I’ve never seen your schedule so full,” Lance commented. Toby shook his head in despair. “Yeah, Cealia is still on vacation. As much as I hate to admit it, she does pull her weight around here.”
Lance shot Toby a puzzled stare. “You’re still not bitter about sharing the department head title with her, are you?”
Toby scratched at his beard. It was too bristly, he thought. It needed to be conditioned. “It’s water under the bridge.”
“Are you sure? I can’t help but detect a slight ….”
Toby whirled around and jabbed his finger in Lance’s direction. “Hey pal, if the lady wants to take three weeks’ vacation during the busiest time of the year, that’s her prerogative.”
Lance put up his hands as if to surrender. “Whoa, old buddy. I didn’t mean to strike a nerve!”
Toby put his hand over his mouth. “I’m sorry, Cutter. I didn’t mean to snap at you like that.” He shrugged meekly like a small child that had been caught stealing a few cents from his sibling’s piggy bank. “I guess it’s been a long day.”
Lance reached over to a pitcher of water that was sitting on the corner of Toby’s desk and poured half a glass of the liquid into a paper cup. “Sit down and relax for Pete’s sake. You look like you’re at the end of your rope! Here, take a sip.”
Toby swiveled his high-backed leather chair around and sat down in it. He took the paper cup and swallowed the entire contents in one gulp. “I probably need something stronger.”
Lance looked shocked. “Stronger? An old teetotaler like you?”
Toby held his hand up to his forehead like he had a headache. “Hey, if I filled you in on some of the kind of cases I’ve been working on, you wouldn’t believe me.”
Everyone in southern Florida who owned a television or could read a newspaper was aware of the headline-grabbing case involving Miami’s own Peter Marko, a wealthy shipbuilder who was involved with stealing a top-secret defense weapon from right under the Navy’s nose. Toby had been involved in solving that case with the help of Cealia King and others. It was discovered that Marko wasn’t as prosperous as the community thought he was; he needed the extra money from the sale of the weapon to help finance his dream of bringing Major League Baseball to Miami. His fantasy had almost become a reality until his ulterior motives and his traitorous source of financing were uncovered. The baseball commissioner quickly revoked the club’s charter, but since then, other investors stepped in and South Floridians finally obtained their own professional baseball team.
“I know about the Peter Marko case,” Lance said.
Toby shook his head. “You only know what you’ve read in the papers, or heard on the idiot box.”
“There’s more?”
Toby rolled his eyes. “That’s just one part of the strange caseload I’ve been working on lately. Just suffice it to say that I’ve witnessed some events that would boggle your mind.”
Lance looked quizzically. “Now you’ve got my curiosity peaked.”
Toby leaned back in his chair and uncurled a paper clip between his fingers. “Maybe someday, when I have the time, we’ll trade war stories over a bottle of Perrier. I’m sure you’ve got some of your own that are pretty fascinating, right?”
Lance reached over the side of his chair and picked up the plastic bag he had been carrying with him. “I’m not trying to change the subject, but have I told you how svelte you’re looking these days, Toby?”
Toby cocked an eyebrow. “Stop trying to kiss my ass. What’s in the sack?”
Lance set the clear bag down on Toby’s blotter and gingerly slid it toward the scientist with the tips of his fingers. Toby’s eyes opened wide. “Jesus H. Christ, Cutter, that’s a human hand in there!”
Lance nodded. “Yep.”
“What the hell are you doing carrying a human hand around with you? Why isn’t it being kept on ice?”
“I had it in an ice chest in my car, but I didn’t want to drag the cooler all the way up here. The ice weighed a ton.”
Toby’ s face contorted. “So you just carried it up here like this? Didn’t anyone in the elevator question you?”
Lance shrugged his shoulders. �
�I hid it behind my back. No one noticed.”
Toby rubbed his chin thoughtfully and snickered a bit. “God, I can’t believe you carried a severed human hand into this building and no one blinked an eye. That’s police security for you.”
“So what do you think?” Lance asked. Toby held the bag up to the fluorescent lights on the ceiling. “Looks pretty badly burned. How’s the rest of the body?”
“Same condition.” Toby accidentally let the bag slip through his fingers and the contents dropped like a piece of granite onto his desk. “Whoops … jeez, this thing’s as hard as a rock!”
“You should have seen the rest of the body,” Lance admitted.
Toby poked at what remained of the fingers through the plastic with a pencil that he removed from the top drawer of his desk. “She looks like she was a few degrees away from cremation.”
Lance grinned because Toby was already at work. Lance never had to mention that it was Gretchen Peter-Smythe’s hand. “You can tell it’s a female’s hand?”
Toby didn’t even look up from the lump of charred human wreckage lying like a lump of coal on his desk. “Don’t patronize me, Cutter. The size and shape of the hand are dead giveaways. Do you want to fill me in on what you want from me?”
Lance leaned forward. “I need to know the cause of death.”
Toby’s lips curled into a smile. “Fire.”
“Very funny.”
“Oh, lighten up, Cutter. Just tell me everything you know.”
For the next fifteen minutes, Lance related the events of the past two weeks while Toby continued to prod at the hand with his pencil. Occasionally, the scientist would use the pencil as a lever and would flip the hand over on its back so that the contorted fingers would point up to the ceiling like a crab that had been overturned.
“I can’t believe what you’re telling me, Cutter. Spontaneous combustion is a pretty far-fetched theory.”
Lance took a deep breath. “Do you mind if I pour myself a glass of water? I’m not used to talking this much.”
Toby looked into the young arson investigator’s violet-colored eyes. They mesmerized him every time he gazed into them. “Here,” he said, pouring a cupful of water and handing it across the desk, “drink all you want.”
