The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  ‘Thanks for your time,’ Frank said, and turned to go.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I get all his stuff?’

  ‘You’re apparently his beneficiary, yes. Once it goes through probate.’

  ‘Did he have a TV?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Frank lied.

  Angela, too soft-hearted, said, ‘Yes. A big screen, probably fifty-two inches.’

  ‘Plasma?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. That’s still cool, though.’ She scratched the dog’s ears. ‘Thanks.’

  They left her standing in her damp kitchen and moved carefully down the wooden steps. ‘Nice to brighten someone’s day,’ Frank muttered.

  ‘It’s not like they were that close,’ Angela pointed out. ‘She was going to say something else, about why Marty became a cop, and then didn’t.’

  ‘I noticed. But I don’t really care what happened to him twenty-five years ago. I’m more interested in what happened to him two days ago.’

  At least, he noticed, their new car appeared unmolested, and he used the remote to unlock the doors. As they pulled away from the curb, a thump at the rear made him jump. Braking, he and Angela craned their necks round to see a browned, rotting apple splattered on to the trunk, its mushy guts glistening against the deeply black paint.

  And from his sagging roof, his ample butt depressing the shingles underneath him, Lily’s son Brandon grinned until the afternoon sun reflected off his teeth.

  SEVEN

  Thursday

  The death toll from the explosion had been arrested at seven and the various sets of initialed agencies working the scene seemed fairly certain that all the victims had been found. Theresa had not had the time nor the inclination to revisit the area but would have to, and soon. They needed a plan to excavate their stuff. She wondered if any other crime lab in the country had ever had a similar situation. What did the New Orleans PD do after Katrina? She should make some phone calls …

  She’d spent all morning drafting a written plan of attack to excavate, move and store their stuff. Leo had requested the SOP and she had nearly finished expanding ‘dig the stuff out, pack it into boxes, truck them back here and put the boxes into the garage’ to three pages in true civil service tradition. Once she had completed it, Leo glanced over it, told her that the average fourth-grader could have produced a more comprehensive plan, demanded that she start over with a more clear focus on her professional responsibilities. So she changed five or six words and altered the font from Arial to Times New Roman. Leo grumbled while shuffling out of earshot, then went to the second floor and presented it to M.E. Stone as his own work. After fifteen years, Theresa knew the process.

  Hence freed to get back to work, she hovered absently around portly Dr Banachek’s autopsy table. He detailed this particular victim’s injuries on a preprinted diagram as Theresa examined the body for any trace evidence left after the clothing had been removed. The dead person, a female in her forties wearing hospital scrubs, had worked in the building’s fitness center. Beams from the collapsing upper floors had crushed part of her skull and compressed her chest into her backbone. She had not been burned, however. The fitness center had been located at the back of the building to the west, and the blast apparently originated between the center and the front, possibly in one of the lower levels. No other information had been released. The Feds were playing their cards close to the chest. They had only now released these bodies for the county to autopsy.

  She pulled a white sliver from a gash on the woman’s arm.

  ‘What’s that?’ Christine Johnson asked. Her lab coat a snow white against the black skin, the pathologist stood at the next table over a body that only loosely resembled a man. Christine was young, fit and gorgeous, but Theresa tried not to hold that against her.

  ‘Looks like ceramic tile to me,’ Theresa said. ‘I wish I knew what the rest of the building looked like before the blast. I never went anywhere in it besides sublevel two. And the suicide’s apartment.’

  ‘You sure he didn’t set a fuse but then wanted a more certain death for himself?’

  ‘No apparent connection.’

  Christine leaned closer to the burned and shredded man than Theresa would have been comfortable with. ‘We’re lucky the place didn’t have more people in it.’

  ‘The tenants are all yuppies, I guess, out at work. Another thing that makes me think the explosion itself was accidental, that someone had stored stuff there that shouldn’t have been stored there. Why purposely blow up a mostly empty building with no political or financial significance?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Dr Banachek, ungloved, used a plastic stick to prod the jagged edge of the dead woman’s broken mandible. ‘I see a whole lot of crushing injuries here and not much else. No burns or signs that she got too close to explosives, no signs that she was tortured into cooperating with terrorists. She doesn’t even smell as nasty as some of the other ones. I’d say she was a good distance from the explosion. Just not good enough to survive.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Theresa used disposable tweezers to pluck a bundle of white fibers from the woman’s ankle into a small Manila envelope. Then she sealed it up, smiled at Dr Banachek, took her collected samples into the amphitheater to store on a lab tray, changed gloves and returned to the autopsy room to start on the next victim.

  ‘He ain’t looking so good,’ she pointed out to Christine.

  ‘Nothing a little aloe and lanolin won’t fix,’ the doctor said absently. ‘Maybe. This is Nairit Kadam, born in Pittsburgh, family from India. Fairly or unfairly, he is the closest the Feds have to a suspect, simply because he is the only victim who didn’t live or work in the building and he was obviously closest to the explosion. Of course, if you were going to blow someplace up, you’d think you’d take great pains to be the farthest person from the explosion. Oh, and the Middle Eastern name isn’t helping his case any.’

  The cleaning agent odor filled her nose. Theresa stared at the blackened husk, trying to sort the charcoal-colored protrusions into parts of a body she could recognize. ‘The blast took off his hands and feet.’

  ‘Maybe. Or they were crumbled to dust by falling concrete.’

  ‘Why was he there?’

  ‘For the same reason you go there, to store stuff. That’s how they know who he is – or at least how they’re making a guess at who he is; we’ll have to wait for DNA results because I don’t think dental is going to be completely accurate,’ Christine said, squinting at the decimated skull. ‘A little bird told me that Nairit here had signed in to visit his storage unit just before the blast, and we only know that because the building manager had been chatting up the receptionist when Nairit came in.’

  ‘The same building manager who then left for a doctor’s appointment?’

  The doctor nodded. ‘Which saved his life.’

  ‘So what did Nairit store in his storage facility?’

  ‘According to the lease, files and miscellaneous paperwork from a data entry company called Blount Enterprises.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound too explosive.’ Theresa used a fresh pair of disposable plastic tweezers to pull a melted glob from the man’s rib. He might have been wearing a polyester shirt, or he might have been standing near plastic when the explosion occurred. Or it fell on him from one of the eight upper floors.

  ‘Except that Blount Enterprises doesn’t exist.’

  Theresa nearly lost the glob before dropping it into an envelope. She had been so hoping for a rational, accidental, non-malicious explanation. Life didn’t often strike her speechless but right now she could come up with nothing more than, ‘Doesn’t exist?’

  ‘That’s all I know.’

  ‘So he has a fake company, but not a fake name?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Who is this little bird?’

  Christine smiled, without bothering to lift her eyes from her work, only made a scribble on the anatomy diagram to represent a fracture of the man�
�s right ulna. Hadn’t Leo said one of the Feds observing the autopsy had been single and handsome? Christine had only to look at the average man and he would chatter away simply to have an excuse to stay in her presence. If she smiled, he might cough up anything, from his own bank account numbers to gossip straight from the corridors of power.

  ‘Can you tell if that occurred before or after death?’ Theresa nodded at the right arm.

  ‘Like maybe terrorists tortured him and then left him to die with his own explosives? Man, I wish I could say you’ve been watching too much TV.’

  ‘I have,’ Theresa said grimly. ‘The non-fiction type.’

  They both leaned over the broken bone until their heads bumped. After a few moments, Christine said: ‘I can’t be positive, but I don’t think so. I don’t see any change in what’s left of the tissue around the break or any healing at the end of the bone. Most likely it’s a post-mortem crushing injury.’

  Theresa retrieved another envelope and collected a piece of paper-thin fabric from the stump of the left leg. It remained entirely possible that someone meant to blow up the Bingham building and not themselves, using a detonator with a timer. She herself could have placed a nuclear reactor in the sublevel storage chamber without notice, as long as she brought it in piece by piece in cardboard boxes. Nairit could be an unlucky soul who went to drop off some data entry sheets exactly when the storage unit across the hall went kablooey. Maybe his company could not be located because they had moved, or had a name change.

  Or Nairit had been manufacturing or storing extremely explosive devices, and accidentally – not even the most desperate terrorist would consider the Bingham worth a suicide attack – set them off. Explosive devices utilizing nitrogen triiodide. But why? What had he hoped to do with it?

  And if he had achieved his goal, how many bodies would they have on their hands right now?

  Christine straightened, rubbed her lower back with one hand. ‘So what’s on your mind?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You seem distracted. What’s bugging you?’

  Theresa glanced back at the dead fitness center worker, as Dr Banachek made the Y incision down her chest. ‘Other than a building collapsing on a bunch of people as they went about their daily business?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not to mention on top of nearly every piece of Medical Examiner’s Office evidence accumulated during the last century?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And almost on top of me and Frank?’

  ‘Your face is looking better, by the way. But yeah, aside from that.’

  Theresa paused to find a whitish crystal on the exposed patella, but it crumbled to dust – and without exploding – when she tried to remove it. Plaster. ‘Well, I did have a police officer shot to death while at a scene. That hasn’t been too easy to shrug off.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Theresa never knew how doctors did this, how they could look at the tone of your skin and gauge your weight and figure out what you didn’t even know that you didn’t want to tell them. They must spend a whole semester of med school on it. She tried again. ‘I met a man.’

  ‘Hah!’ Christine exclaimed, so loudly that Theresa jumped away from the steel table and nearly stabbed herself with the tweezers. ‘Sorry, I’ll stifle myself. What man? What is he like? Where did you meet him?’

  ‘Down, girl, down. I didn’t mean it like that. I meant—’ Theresa discovered she didn’t know exactly what she meant, so instead she started from the beginning, and told Christine about David Madison. Then she added what Frank had told her about David Madison’s wife.

  ‘Eww. Weird.’ The doctor wiggled a sharp object from behind the dead man’s shin bone.

  ‘Finding a sliver of concrete wedged between his tibia and fibula?’

  ‘Having an affair with a thirteen-year-old. The concrete is clean, it probably got in there during excavation. It’s one thing to have your wife leave you for another guy, but a kid? What does that say about you? Is he some kind of hulking brute that made her think of herself as helpless, so that she started to see this kid as a peer?’

  ‘He struck me as a big teddy bear. Of course, I only talked to him for about three minutes. How do you sleep with someone who’s the same age as your own child?’

  ‘Men do it all the time,’ Christine pointed out. ‘Though we hope they’re at least over forty and their daughters are grown. So you have to ask yourself, how much sympathy does this guy warrant? How many women have had to face the fact that their husband is sleeping with a student, or the office intern, or the babysitter? No one ponders what that does to their self-esteem.’

  ‘Maybe his self-esteem is OK. He probably just wonders what to tell his boys. The older they get, the more questions they’re going to have, if they haven’t asked them already. He must cringe every time he sees a news camera.’

  Christine hadn’t left the topic of cheating men. ‘It’s not surprising men are attracted to younger women. Biology and society trains them for that. But when they cross the line from “younger” to “child”, then—’

  ‘They’ve crossed the line from scumbag to pedophile.’

  ‘Exactly. And there’s such a double standard for boys and girls, of course. Some people actually claim that early sexual activity isn’t as damaging to boys because they can’t get pregnant. Granted, it’s not going to disrupt their life like having a baby at twelve would, but their minds aren’t just going to brush it off because their bellies don’t grow.’ Christine warmed to her subject as she took a rubber hose and washed off a spot on the dead man’s wrist. ‘All I know is, kids have a right to be kids and grow at the same rate as their peers, and if that was my boy I’d show up at that woman’s house with a two-by-four and not a jury in the world would convict me.’

  Theresa opined, ‘I say reverse the genders. If you would put a man in jail for molesting a thirteen-year-old girl, and of course we would, then you have to do the same for this woman. I just feel sorry for the ones she left in her wake. What do you have there?’

  ‘He’s got a deformity on the outer edge of his ulna.’ She pointed at the bone that ran on the outside of the arm, from the left hand to the elbow. It had an indentation, like a rough crater, just above the wrist.

  ‘An old break?’

  ‘No, not a break, not a calcium deposit … it almost looks like a burn.’

  Theresa raised her eyebrows. ‘Burn? The man’s entire body is crispy.’

  ‘Don’t get cute with me, missy. I mean an old burn. The bone healed around it.’

  ‘Oh.’ Theresa leaned in closer. The campfire smell of the body competed with the scent of iodine and ammonia until she had to back up again, or sneeze.

  ‘Maybe not a burn,’ Christine muttered aloud. ‘But I don’t know what else could cause this, a cut would have … too bad I don’t have any flesh to see … we’ll have to get his medical records, ask his next of kin if he had an injury to his arm. OK, I’m going to hose the rest. Are you done?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve pulled off every piece of trace evidence I could find. Do we have a next of kin for him?’

  ‘The Feds are supposed to find out. The parents are deceased, they told me that, but they’re searching for siblings, spouse, etc.’

  ‘No.’ A woman in a suit, the same woman Theresa had met at the scene, entered with her dour partner. ‘Sorry we’re late. They had a water main break on Euclid and we had to go around. I see you’ve started on our suspect.’

  ‘Victim,’ Theresa said. ‘No, you aren’t searching, or no, he has no next of kin?’

  ‘No,’ her partner answered. A man of few words. Though his face softened when he gazed at Christine, the Dudley-do-Right chin slacking just a millimeter. Christine’s source, no doubt.

  ‘None that we can find,’ the woman expounded. Nothing softened the lines that the intervening days had etched into her face; the agents had probably been working around the clock. ‘Parents died in Pittsburgh years ago, no siblings, never married.
’

  ‘How does an Indian guy wind up part of a Georgian splinter group?’

  ‘The Vlads might have taken responsibility, but they don’t make a lot of sense. They’re a small group, no real activity on the board and we can’t confirm their numbers. They’ve created some riots in Georgia but no bombings, and have never done anything more violent in the US than write letters to the editor.’ The female agent said all this. When he could tear his gaze from Christine, the male agent merely looked around him as if he personally found everything in the room as repulsive as the flayed-open bodies.

  ‘So you think they’re just claiming the credit for someone else’s work?’

  The woman shrugged. ‘It’s a theory. It also means whoever did stockpile the explosives is not about to step up and claim ownership.’

  ‘Sounds like they didn’t really mean to blow up the building. Makes me feel a little better,’ Theresa admitted.

  ‘I don’t see why,’ the woman sighed. ‘They were hoarding it for some purpose. If they didn’t intend to use it on the Bingham—’

  ‘Then their target is still out there.’

  The woman nodded, and evaded a few more questions. Theresa couldn’t blame her. No one at the M.E.’s office had an official security clearance and several of them were incurable gossips.

  Besides, Theresa told herself, this isn’t my case. Even the samples she had removed from the body would be turned over to the Feds, to be analyzed and identified by their laboratories.

  Of course, no one said she couldn’t take a good look at them before she sealed them up. ‘I’ll just get out of your way, then.’

  She took her envelopes and left. She didn’t ask if Nairit Kadam, when alive, had a deformity to his left wrist, or what he had done for a living, or how long he’d been in Cleveland. Christine, she knew, would question the agents without cease for every moment they were present. If one wanted to hang around that particular doctor’s autopsies, one had to pay the price.

  Maybe the dead man knew nothing more about terrorists than what he saw on TV. But maybe he did. Maybe more destruction would explode in the city, today, tomorrow or the next day.