Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop: 2 Bugman Novels in 1

by Tim Downs

  “I agree, timing is very important for you. The next time you blow that whistle, you better have something substantial to show for it. You better have proof.”

  “That’s the problem,” Riley said. “Proof is the product of evidence, and Lassiter controls all the evidence. When he locks me out of an autopsy, all I can do is read the report when he’s finished—and the report says whatever he wants it to.”

  “You could urge the next of kin to request a second autopsy. They can do that, can’t they?”

  “Yes—but what do I say when they ask me why? Who pays for it? And worst of all, what if it turns up nothing? Then word would get back to the coroner’s office for sure.”

  “At least you have a couple of things going for you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the fact that Dr. Lassiter is your supervisor, so you have ongoing access to him. Like the fact that you’re part of a fellowship program, so you’re expected to ask questions around the office—you’re not nosy, you’re a resident. You have knowledge of this anomaly—knowledge that Dr. Lassiter doesn’t know you have. And doesn’t Lassiter work a scheduled rotation? Then you’ll know when he’s up for an autopsy, and you can poke around and see what you can find.”

  “See what I can find. Nick, I have a medical degree, and I’ve done a five-year residency in pathology. I’m an experienced pathologist, but I still know next to nothing about forensics. I’m not exactly sure how to ‘poke around.’ ”

  “Whereas I am experienced in forensics,” Nick said, “but I know far less about pathology. Maybe it would help if we formed a partnership: I’ll do the forensics, you provide the pathology. Together, we’d make one mean forensic pathologist.”

  “Thanks,” Riley said, “but to be honest, I can’t afford to pay for your ongoing services. This is a personal expense, remember?”

  “My prices are very reasonable. Didn’t I just give you a 100 percent discount on my first bill?”

  Riley looked at him. “You don’t know me, Nick. I could be a crackpot for all you know. This whole thing could be just my imagination.”

  “The blue bottle flies weren’t your imagination.”

  “Why would you want to do this? Why would you want to help me?”

  “Because you remind me of me: you’re smart, you’re good-looking, and you’re broke.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “OK,” Nick said with a sigh. “If you must know, it’s my mother. She’s been after me to join the Sons of Poland. She keeps trying to feed me pierogies—I hate pierogies. I’ll pay you if it gets me out of the house.”

  “Nick. Why?”

  Nick returned her gaze at last. “Bottom line?” he said.

  “Bottom line.”

  He shrugged. “I like the way you smell.”

  He pulled out of the driveway at exactly seven o’clock, the same time he did every Thursday night, after the same old argument with Melissa over his one night out with the guys. It’s not like he did this every night—didn’t he skip a poker night just a couple of months ago? Didn’t he take the boys to a Penguins game?

  So Melissa’s got the kids all day. So what? What was he doing at PPG all day? And besides, a man needs to stretch his legs once in a while. Once a week, for crying out loud! Melissa’s got her girlfriends; she’s off to Starbucks at the drop of a hat—is one night a week too much to ask? Once a week is a bargain. For once a week, she oughta be grateful. He straightened a little and took a firmer grip on the steering wheel.

  He took a left on Franklin, then a right on Kittanning, just as he did every Thursday night. He passed the same endless parade of indistinguishable row houses, all lined up like books on a shelf, each with its own overcrowded porch, overhanging roof, and tiny rectangle of neatly trimmed ryegrass.

  Two blocks down, the neat little houses gave way to a different kind of neighborhood. Porch roofs began to dip and sag, long streaks of gray peeked out through peeling flecks of paint, and the occasional gutter drooped to the ground like a dying limb. After another two blocks the houses crumbled away entirely, leaving nothing behind but a graveyard of pawn shops, convenience stores, and razor-wired storage yards. In the stark mercury vapor lights, the early evening shadows cut like straight razors, and everything that wasn’t black glowed the same electric blue.

  He unconsciously leaned his elbow on the door lock, just as he did in this exact location every Thursday night.

  At the end of Kittanning he would turn left again, away from the porn shops and the boarded-up churches, and into a better neighborhood. But at the end of Kittanning he did something he had never done before—he came to a stop. The left lane was blocked off by a flashing orange barricade, and a white-and-black detour sign pointed him in the opposite direction.

  He slammed his hand against the steering wheel. What’s wrong with those idiots at PennDOT? Why would anyone bother to repair a road in this shell hole? The whole place should be condemned; the whole neighborhood should be scraped level and buried in some landfill. He was the only car on the road—he was always the only car on the road. Do they think one lousy car merits road work? Go figure—your tax dollars at work.

  He looked to the right. Just a block or two, then he’d take a left on the best-lit street he could find; two more quick lefts and he’d be back on track again. He shrugged and turned the wheel slowly to the right.

  Two blocks down, a second detour sign beckoned him to the left. He turned up a narrow, lifeless, two-lane road walled in by empty back porches and buckling garage doors. In the dusk ahead, his headlights discovered a cherry red BMW, barely off the road, that leapt out from the shadows like blood on a newspaper. The trunk was open, and the car sagged limply to the left.

  Beside the left rear quarter panel, holding a tire jack, stood a beautiful young woman with long, auburn hair. Her V-neck blouse was pristine white. As his car approached, she swept back her hair with the back of her hand, locked on to his eyes, and mouthed the words, “Help me—PLEASE.”

  He felt a rush of excitement. He pulled his car over just ahead of hers and looked quickly around the area the way a man does when he comes across a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk. He got out of the car, tucked his shirt front in tight, and approached.

  “Need some help?”

  “I feel like such a girl,” she said. “I should know how to change this thing myself, but—it’s so sweet of you to stop.” She stood with one leg just in front of the other, like the women in the catalogs always do. She wore black stiletto heels, and her skirt was tight around her knees. He tried to imagine her squatting down to wrestle off a set of stubborn lug nuts. He smiled.

  “You picked a heckuva place to get a flat tire.”

  “Didn’t I, though?”

  “Look,” he said, considering their surroundings for the first time, “maybe I should drive you to the nearest Tire and Auto. They can help you out.”

  She turned up her lower lip. “It’s just that I’m running so late,” she said, holding the jack away from her like a dripping umbrella. “I was hoping you’d be one of those big, strong types—you know, the kind who has a whole garage full of tools back home. I guess that was kind of stupid of me.”

  He hitched up his pants. “Let me take a look at it,” he said, taking the jack from her. He squatted down and began to pry off the hubcap with a rusted squawk.

  “Is your spare in good shape?”

  “I really don’t know. I guess I should check that from time to time.”

  He glanced up at her. “Doesn’t your boyfriend help you with these things?”

  She winked. “Maybe that’s what I really need—a spare boyfriend.”

  He started to say, “Are you from around here?” But then he looked at her again: smiling down on him like his very own moon, leaning back against the driver’s door in that long S-curve. Whoever she was, whatever she was, she was not from around here.

  He felt electrified. He felt feverish. His head was covered in a cold sweat, and he c
ould almost feel his own pulse. She was so close to him, so completely present, that his senses allowed room for nothing else: not the tug of the shirt that clung to his back, not the grainy grit of the grease on his fingertips, not the weight of the tire in his hands—not even the sound of quiet footsteps that approached him from out of the shadows.

  He glanced up at her again. He saw the smile disappear from her face, and he saw her cover her eyes with her left hand.

  He felt himself slump forward against the tire, and then he felt nothing at all.

  Good morning, Dr. McKay.”

  Nathan Lassiter was dressed in sea green scrubs, ready for the morning’s round of autopsies. The Allegheny County Coroner’s Office averages two or three autopsies every day of the calendar year. With luck they would finish by lunchtime, leaving the afternoon to review histology slides and begin the autopsy reports. Riley glanced at her watch: it was almost nine-thirty. She had already been there for an hour, reviewing the day’s cases and arranging assignments with the autopsy techs and assistants. By now she was used to Lassiter’s utter disregard for schedule—her schedule—but it still never ceased to irritate her.

  “Good morning, Dr. Lassiter. I was looking over the chart—I’ve had a little time to kill. We’ve got three today: One is a drowning victim, a little four-year-old girl from Penn Hills. That’s a sad one.”

  “I hate floaters,” Lassiter said. “I’ll leave that one to you. What else have we got?”

  Riley looked up at him. Lassiter was fifteen years her senior. The hair coloring he used was two shades over the top, a kind of glaring chestnut brown that contrasted badly with his colorless face. The skin along his jawline was beginning to sag and pouch, and faint brown liver spots already dotted his temples. He dressed the way middle-aged men do when they lose touch with the times—when they lose touch with women. “We’ve also got a peri-operative death from Allegheny General,” she said, “plus a homicide—gunshot to the back of the head. I assume we’ll do the homicide first.”

  “I’ll do the homicide first,” he said. “You’re heading over to the University of Pittsburgh Medical School.”

  “What? Why?”

  “You’re giving a lecture there today on the proper way to fill out a death certificate.”

  Riley tossed her clipboard onto the counter. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Not at all. There’s not a single class in all of medical school that teaches doctors how to fill out a death certificate. You wouldn’t believe some of the garbage we get here: nonmedical terminology, indistinguishable causes of death—it’s a serious problem.”

  “Dr. Lassiter, surely one of the deputy coroners could—”

  “Not a chance,” Lassiter said. “I’ve done the lecture; so have all the other pathologists. Why should you get special treatment?”

  “This is bogus,” Riley said. “My fellowship program requires participation in two hundred and fifty autopsies.”

  “Your fellowship program requires participation in all the activities of the coroner’s office: crime scene investigation, toxicology, ballistics, everything—including community and educational activities.”

  “Come on, Dr. Lassiter. I did a hundred autopsies on natural deaths during my residency. Today we’ve got a homicide. Isn’t that what I’m here to learn about?”

  “You’re here to learn about lots of things.”

  “Look, I’ve done five years of postgraduate training in both anatomical and clinical pathology, and I did a subspecialty in renal pathology—yet you keep sending me out on errands a schoolgirl could do. Why is that?”

  “Because around here you are a schoolgirl—unless you want to take your five years of training and get yourself a nice job in a hospital lab somewhere. You’re a pathologist, Dr. McKay, but you’re not a forensic pathologist—not until you finish this fellowship program and take your boards.”

  “Then let me finish it! Let me stay here and do autopsies—that’s what this fellowship program ought to be—”

  “Don’t tell me how to run your program!” Lassiter barked. “You think that med school lectures and community seminars are somehow beneath you—well they’re not, Ms. McKay, and as long as I’m your program supervisor, you’ll do anything and everything I assign you to do. Is that clear? Maybe in the process you’ll learn that there’s more to being a forensic pathologist than just performing autopsies. Maybe you’ll learn a little humility.”

  Riley bit her lip hard. To have to stand there and listen to this man preach on the need for humility. It took all of her resolve to say nothing in reply. Lassiter was, after all, a senior pathologist and a member of the coroner’s office staff. She knew that if she ever hoped to work there she had to hold her tongue—but not her imagination. In her mind’s eye, she imagined Lassiter lying on his back on the cold, stainless steel autopsy table. She saw herself make the classic Y-shaped incision, from both collarbones to the sternum and then straight down the abdomen.

  “I think we both have our assignments this morning,” Lassiter said. “The sooner you leave to do yours, the sooner I can get started on mine—unless you have any more objections?”

  Now Riley made the circular incision around his skull, applied the bone saw, removed the skull cap, and found … nothing at all.

  “Then get moving,” Lassiter said. “The day isn’t getting any younger.”

  Riley ran her tongue across her lower lip and tasted blood.

  She wheeled around and charged down the hallway and up the stairs, ignoring a morning greeting from the chief deputy coroner. She headed for her tiny second-floor office, intending to stop just long enough to drop her lab coat and grab her purse—but on the way she passed the open doorway of Lassiter’s office.

  She looked back at the stairway. In a few minutes the autopsy would begin, and then Lassiter would be occupied for at least two hours—three or four if there were abnormalities. She glanced across the hall at the cubicles that filled the center office. She saw the tops of heads just visible above the fabric-covered panels. No one looked up; no one met her eyes; no one was watching.

  She stepped back into Lassiter’s office and quietly shut the door behind her.

  She turned and rested against the door, surveying the office. Her anger had somehow left her, replaced by a strange sense of exhilaration. She felt lightheaded, almost giddy, the way she felt as a teenager playing a midnight game of Capture the Flag—but this was no game. She had acted impulsively; she had acted out of anger; she had entered Lassiter’s private office without even knowing what she was looking for. You’d better figure it out fast, she said to herself. Her exhilaration was quickly giving way to gnawing fear.

  And then she remembered—autopsy dictations.

  During every autopsy, the senior pathologist wore a headset microphone and kept a running verbal commentary on a voice-activated digital recorder. These were his notes, the observations and details he would use to refresh his memory as he composed the final autopsy report. The recording sounded nothing like an organized presentation; it was always broken, choppy, filled with the pathologist’s off-the-cuff remarks and unconscious reactions. Riley had heard comments made about a victim’s attractiveness, or ethnicity, or even about his obvious guilt or innocence—comments that would never appear in written form. In the course of a two-hour autopsy, who knows what Lassiter might have said? His dictations might reveal evidence that never made it to his final reports.

  Riley stepped around the desk and sat down at Lassiter’s computer. She knew that the digital recordings were downloaded onto the pathologist’s computer, where the session could be audibly reviewed or the file could be e-mailed to an outside vendor for transcription. On the monitor, a screen saver of a cherry red Dodge Viper was displayed. Riley jiggled the mouse and the image instantly vanished, replaced by the Windows Desktop. She quickly hunted through the dozens of icons, searching for the medical dictation program.

  And then she heard the doorknob turn.

 
A pure panic-reflex caused her to jump to her feet just before the door opened wide. Nathan Lassiter stood looking at her without expression.

  “Can I help you?”

  Riley’s brain flooded with adrenaline, and a thousand lame excuses and ridiculous explanations competed for her approval. But none of them was adequate—none was even close—and Riley stood there looking guilty and ashamed, like a little girl caught with a quarter pressed tightly in her hand and her mama’s purse at her feet.

  From the corner of her eye Riley saw the computer monitor, and she almost audibly gasped. The screen saver was gone; the Windows Desktop was still in view.

  Lassiter charged forward. Riley quickly stepped out to block him from circling the desk.

  “I came in to … leave you a note,” she stumbled.

  “You couldn’t leave it with my secretary?” He moved forward again. Riley stepped as far forward as she could and still keep the screen in her peripheral vision.

  “It was … personal in nature,” she said.

  Lassiter softened a bit. “Oh?”

  “It was … an apology.” She stood uncomfortably close to him now, but it was the only way to keep him from the computer screen.

  “Well, here I am. Let’s hear it.”

  Riley winced. “I just wanted to say … I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “For … for my attitude.” Riley felt her stomach turn. She felt as though she were vomiting up each detestable word. “You’re my supervisor, and I was … disrespectful.” She eyed the monitor; how long does it take for a screen saver to reappear? Thirty seconds? A minute? She didn’t know how much more of this sniveling she could endure. She was sure of one thing: Lassiter could listen to it all day.

  “Well, I appreciate that,” he said beneficently. “It takes a little perspective to see these things clearly, and I suppose that comes from experience.” He reached out and placed one hand on her shoulder. It had all the warmth of a cadaver. From the corner of her eye, Riley saw a flicker of light and a change in hue from Windows blue to cherry red. She felt an overwhelming rush of relief, but she had no idea how to break off this touching encounter.