The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  Theresa stared. Perhaps ‘punchy’ described her condition after all.

  ‘I had Oliver run everything we could – because the brain cells had some funny damage that couldn’t have come from the gunshot, because the victim was a cop, and because I like giving Oliver orders – and the GC/Mass Spec found ricin.’

  ‘Ricin? Someone poisoned this cop with ricin and then shot him?’ Theresa found the ammo can and sank down to its uncomfortable top. ‘I don’t get this. This guy was nobody – I mean, nobody like the rest of us are nobody. He went to work and drank beer with his friends and that was about it. He didn’t carry a stainless steel briefcase handcuffed to his wrist or vacation in Biarritz. Some ex-con with a bad temper shooting him, that I can see. Poisoned like a Russian spy, that I can’t.’

  ‘I hear you. But the GC/Mass Spec doesn’t lie. Neither does Oliver. He may be a pain in the ass, but he’s a truthful one.’

  Theresa stared at the cabinets under Christine’s desk, without seeing the yellowed cartoons taped to them or even the funny magnet signs. She stared so long that the doctor stretched out a foot and kicked her shin, gently. ‘Don’t you want to hear the rest?’

  ‘There’s more? You’re going to tell me someone smothered him, too, or maybe garroted the body when we weren’t looking?’

  ‘Calm yourself. Being the astute and thorough physician that I am, I then asked myself, how did this guy get ricin in his system? It didn’t kill him, after all, the gunshot did. Perhaps he’d chewed a castor bean or otherwise ingested it earlier, and it had made him sick but he’d recovered by the time you saw him. But his stomach contents were negative. So were the lungs. His brain cells, however, were swimming in the stuff.’

  Theresa waited, her own gray cells too tired to keep up.

  Christine sighed, and went on without her: ‘The bullets used were 380 Glaser safety rounds, also called anti-personnel, the kind of handgun bullets that act like a shotgun. Instead of a solid slug of lead, they have a hollow copper jacket filled with tiny lead shot, held inside by a plastic plug. When the bullet hits the person, the impact breaks off the plastic plug and the tiny shot is free to keep moving through the body, shredding the organs and tissues in its way.’

  ‘What’s safe about that?’ Theresa asked, though she knew the answer. A bullet that mushroomed and disintegrated inside the target took the target down, whereas a solid lead bullet might pass completely through the person threatening you and leave them able to continue threatening you. The bullet might also continue on to hit other people, bystanders for whom it had not been intended.

  Christine knew she knew that, and didn’t bother to answer. ‘We had pulled out most of the shot and the shell fragments, of course—’

  ‘Ballistics?’

  ‘Maybe. There’s a few shreds of the slug base, if we’re lucky they have some usable toolmarks. Point is, I had Oliver test the pieces. Tiny lead shot hadn’t been the only thing contained behind the little plastic plug. The shot had been coated with ricin before being released inside this officer’s skull.’

  ‘So someone didn’t just want him dead. They wanted him dead, gone and buried before I could even step out of the house.’ Theresa rubbed her forehead, feeling the knots in her temples. ‘Who needed this cop dead so badly? Who the hell was Marty Davis?’

  Theresa scrubbed her face and changed into a clean shirt she kept around for such emergencies. Unfortunately after a month or two in her desk drawer it had absorbed the odors of the lab and now smelled like a combination of xylene and nitric acid. She tucked the Payne Avenue box under her desk and washed down a granola bar with a fresh cup of coffee. Then she reported the night’s events to Leo, who appeared entirely too bright-eyed to have remained at the garage all night to supervise the unpacking and storage. It came as no surprise to learn that he had given the keys to Don and then gone home for a cozy dinner and eight hours of beauty sleep. She would have glared at him had she had sufficient energy left to do so.

  He absorbed the information about Marty Davis’ ricin bullet with the same uncomprehending disbelief that she had. Then he told her that the pathologists were cutting Lily Simpson as they spoke and Theresa must write up her report posthaste so they could ship the body off to the potter’s field. ‘You have to get with the receptionist. Some guy keeps calling the switchboard wanting to know what will happen to the body, when the death certificate will be available and did she really kill herself or did she have help? He’s driving her so nuts that she’s transferring the calls to me, and that is not going to continue.’

  ‘Ken Bilecki, I’m sure.’ Just like Lily’s pestering of Frank. ‘These meth addicts are so impatient.’

  ‘Hyper,’ Leo said. ‘They’re like that in the up phase. That’s the beauty of meth. They can work double, triple shifts without ever having to eat, drink, sleep or go to the bathroom. And won’t even slur their words.’

  Theresa nodded, knees drawn up to her chest, fingers pressing her eyes gently to keep from rubbing them and creating wrinkles. ‘The beauty and the curse. That’s how meth has hung around long enough to get a stranglehold on this country, especially in the heartland where people pride themselves on being hard workers. It’s a drug for people who want to work, without the social stigma of laziness like heroin or even pot. Heck, it used to be legally prescribed in the United States for everything from weight loss to post-natal depression until the 1970s.’

  ‘You could use some right now,’ Leo observed.

  She shuddered, only partly for effect. ‘No, thanks. Like all drugs, it only feels good for a while. Once it’s depleted your neurotransmitters, nothing feels good any more except more meth. Then the neglect your body has suffered begins to show up, in dehydration, sleep deprivation and paranoia.’

  ‘Then before you know it you’ll be telling me that black helicopters are buzzing the lab. I had a cousin who saw them, insisted they were going to Napalm his house. His house wound up strafed, all right, but by irate customers. He’d gotten so fond of his own product that he was using everything he cooked, and selling rock candy for a hundred buck a bag. That bought him about twenty minutes before they came back and shot him to death.’

  ‘Wow.’ This marked about the third time in fifteen years that Leo had ever mentioned a friend or relative. ‘Were you close?’

  ‘We grew up together. Don’t forget to give me your comp time request for last night’s work by the end of the day.’ He shuffled off to his office.

  Theresa, trying without success to picture Leo as a boy, made a prompt exit with the box from the explosion on Payne Avenue tucked under her arm. She had earned herself a break. Ken Bilecki and the receptionist could wait.

  File cabinets ringed the records room on the second floor, leaving space only for the door. Usually Theresa could chat with Norma and then request any file she liked, for she got on well with her. Sarah, however, never approached friendly by so much as a mile, and liked to pretend that she had the right to refuse access – to non-doctors only, of course. Doctors, even doctors for dead people, were second only to gods. Theresa crossed her fingers that Sarah would be occupied.

  However, the same crisis which had kept her up all night now interrupted the secretaries’ day, for the files from the Bingham building had to be resettled, and Norma had her hands full directing the traffic. She and a deskman hauled a file box to the very top of a precarious pile of such boxes. As all three people at that end of the room watched the stack sway, Theresa ducked into the archive room, found the Manila folder bearing the correct case number, and got back out while the getting was good.

  One flight down took her to the ground floor. In the autopsy suite, a diener sewed up Lily Simpson’s torso with heavy black thread and a practiced hand. ‘Find anything interesting?’ Theresa asked him.

  ‘Aside from her bein’ dead?’

  ‘I should hope so, seeing as you’ve taken all her organs out. Who did her?’

  ‘The Block,’ the man sighed, and tilted his head toward the b
ack of the room without missing a stitch. He referred to a recently hired transplant from a tiny former-USSR country, but the nickname didn’t refer to the eastern bloc. It alluded to the doctor’s build, as close to a monolith of granite as a human could get and still breathe. Theresa found him sectioning the liver, explained about the victim’s connection to Marty Davis, and asked that Lily Simpson’s bloodwork be given the full treatment, every assay that the Toxicology department had at their disposal.

  ‘Leo in hurry for results,’ he protested.

  ‘Leo’s always in a hurry.’ She told him about the ricin, and he found that fascinating enough to push threats of Leo’s ire from his mind. He also told her that the inside of Lily Simpson’s body looked like – he muttered a few foreign words which he then translated to mean ten miles of bad road, but neither that nor any other detail of it seemed surprising. Her stomach had been empty, lungs clear of foaming, no indication of overdose.

  Theresa thanked him and moved to the amphitheater. The old teaching room gave her the closest thing to privacy and peace that she could find in the cramped building. Even better, it had not yet been pressed into service as a storage area and the examination table gave her room to spread out. She opened the box.

  NINETEEN

  Phil Banachek, his handwriting a bit firmer then, had kept the autopsy report brief. Firemen had removed victim Joseph Darryl McClurg from 2401 Payne Avenue, a former hotel which had been converted to student housing. The victim’s body had been near the center of the building and ‘at or near the point of origin’. Both hands and both feet were missing, not terrifically unusual in bad fire cases. The collections of small bones which make up the extremities could easily be consumed in a very hot fire, or simply fall away to be lost in the surrounding debris. The body had been identified via dental records as Joseph McClurg. Cause of death, smoke inhalation, as his lungs had been full of the stuff. He had definitely been alive when the fire began. There were no apparent pre-mortem injuries to the bones, she noted, and took this to mean that no one had hit the boy over the head or slashed his body – at least not deeply enough to strike the skeleton – and left him there in the fire to cover it up.

  Two parents were listed as next of kin, Robert and Rosemary McClurg. No address noted.

  Phil left no other notes about the cause of the fire or the circumstances. The dead body had been his responsibility, and only the dead body. The rest of the file contained the death certificate, the body release form made out to a funeral home on the east side, and a newspaper clipping about the fire – only two paragraphs, which surprised Theresa. Residential building fires usually got a lot of press. No subpoenas or trial dates had been noted. No one had ever been prosecuted for the death.

  According to the Plain Dealer, the hotel on Payne had been turned into twenty-four efficiency apartments, all occupied by CSU students who would be displaced from their living quarters indefinitely, perhaps for good, since the extensive damage to the ground floor threatened the integrity of the entire building. The state fire marshal now worked to find the point of origin as well as the cause of the fire, but the police had implied that a clandestine methamphetamine laboratory had been operating at the location. Students on the second floor reported hearing a loud bang several minutes before they smelled smoke. McClurg had been the only victim. Four other students had been treated for burns and smoke inhalation and released.

  She would have to get Frank to look up the case. The cops would have interviewed all the students and the victim’s parents, and confirmed the presence of a clandestine lab.

  But first, she’d open the box.

  The cardboard box from the 2401 Payne Avenue case held four sealed bags and one quart-sized paint can, with notations in black magic marker listing the case number, item number, and a description of the evidence inside. There were additional numbers and letters in a thinner blue marker, in an unfamiliar hand and giving unfamiliar details – obviously work had been done by some agency other than the M.E. Indeed, three yellowed sheets of paper also enclosed turned out to be the state fire marshal’s report. She snatched them up.

  But the report only listed the volatile compounds found on the evidence in the four bags. Referencing the fire marshal’s numbers explained which results related to which items. Theresa pulled a fresh piece of brown butcher paper over the examination table and cut open the first bag. A collection of broken glass fell out, tinkling gently.

  It had been clear glass at one time, and the larger pieces appeared to be curved. Meth cookers would have used rounded glass flasks, probably pilfered from the school’s chemistry labs. She had spent plenty of time in such labs with such flasks. It seemed that every organic chemistry lab assignment required distillation, which added an hour to each procedure. She still resented the very word.

  But some pieces seemed too thick to be delicate chem lab flasks; they were heavier, like Pyrex bakeware. Soot and smoke residue coated each piece, overlaid with water drops, except where the fire marshal’s investigators had apparently swabbed off samples for analysis.

  She returned to the report. Remnants of methanol, toluene, acetone and other organic compounds had been found. All these compounds were used in the process to synthesize methamphetamines and all were extremely volatile. This was why meth labs were so prone to explosion and fire, Theresa thought to herself, because at least half the ingredients used were flammable. Combine that with the locations in which the work occurred – old, rundown rooms that no one cared about and that were not likely to be visited by any responsible party, sometimes abandoned places rigged with temporary power, with careless wiring and inadvisable hook-ups. Ventilation would be kept to a minimum lest the noxious odors alert the neighbors, increasing the potential power of any explosion by containing it. Housekeeping would also be kept to a minimum, both by the typically less-than-organized nature of the participants and by the need to keep evidence from the prying eyes of neighbors and garbage men, so that large amounts of trash piled up to serve as kindling. Add in any booby traps that the cooks might include to protect their merchandise from thieves, to destroy, if necessary, anything the police could use as evidence, or simply because too much use of their own product had made them paranoid. By definition, every meth lab became a powder keg, needing only a spark to remove itself from the face of the earth.

  Along with the usual solvents, however, the fire marshal had listed iodine. Iodine was not particularly flammable in itself, and she knew it could be used in one of the several routes to crystal meth. Why had she had run into iodine – and nitrogen – at every turn lately? A deep sniff of the broken glass didn’t bring any of the Bingham building and its nitrogen triiodide odors to her nose – but then it had had twenty-five years to dissipate. She folded the paper to funnel the broken shards back into the bag, sealed it and went on to the next.

  The second bag held another piece of apparatus – a metal clamp designed to encircle a rod, brace or glassware at each end, while able to pivot in the middle so that the items could be maintained at any given angle to each other. Standard chemistry lab fare; Theresa had a pile of them in the lab upstairs. Not the kind of thing one would normally find in a dorm room.

  A clump of bluish material like melted plastic clung to one of the rounded brackets, and she considered pulling it off for further study. But she thought better of it. The plastic most likely belonged to some item of clothing or upholstery destroyed in the fire and identifying its compounds would not be of any help so many years later. Besides, she could not warrant consuming any of the meager evidence left out of mere curiosity.

  And why was she so curious? Why was she doing this?

  Because she felt guilty about Marty and Frank felt guilty about Lily. And if David Madison had any skeletons in his closet she wanted to know about them.

  And the curiosity might not be so mere. Lily had suggested that Marty’s death related to his college days, and now Lily was dead.

  The third bag measured only two inches across. Inve
rted over a clean piece of paper it coughed up a ring, a blackened, dented piece of metal barely recognizable as jewelry. Theresa switched on the magnifying lamp attached to the table. Her eyes, having passed their fortieth birthday, had begun to grow balky in tight quarters.

  Designed as a plain band for the most part, about one-quarter of the circumference had an overlay of a vine-like decoration, broken at one end and tapering down to two wispy tails at the other. She rubbed at it with one gloved finger, offsetting some of the tar. The vines didn’t meander but entwined each other in a uniform manner, with equal space on each side, up to a leaf at their top, which protruded slightly from the edge of the ring. It seemed somehow familiar.

  She turned the ring on its side and recognized the design. The two vines weren’t vines, they were snakes, surrounding a central rod with wings at the top – a caduceus, sometimes used as a symbol of the medical profession. Perhaps the unfortunate McClurg had been a pre-med student. Or the ring belonged to a doctor father.

  The paint can apparently contained a piece of the victim’s clothing – denim cloth, of course, what else did students wear? The can seemed to weigh almost nothing and she did not open it. It seemed unlikely that a scorched piece of denim would prompt any insights and she did not want to release the compounds that a sealed paint can could easily contain, even for a quarter of a century – just in case the idea came up to re-analyze the evidence.

  She put the can back in the box and picked up the papers. The fire marshal’s report stated the obvious: that the ring had been found with the victim’s body, having probably been on one of his fingers before the bones were crushed by the collapsing upper floor, and that the clamp and the glassware would have been used in a chemical process such as methamphetamine production. The situation seemed clear to the report’s author. Analysis indicated a healthy amount of toluene with smaller amounts of acetone on the denim. No wonder the kid died. He had been soaked in solvent when the place went up.