A Body To Die For

by G. A. McKevett

  Savannah felt a little chill run over her, remembering the hole in Bill Jardin’s skull. “Yeah, like one firearm wasn’t lethal enough.”

  Chapter 8

  Savannah and Dirk were about ready to leave the Vehicle Examination Bay when Savannah decided to bend down and take a look at the Jaguar’s tires.

  Once, she and Dirk had gotten a major lead in a case because the getaway vehicle had left a distinctive tire tread in some dirt at the scene. And since then, she had been as obsessed with tires as Dirk was with luminol.

  The two tires on the driver’s side of the car were unremarkable. And so was the front tire on the passenger’s side. But the rear passenger’s tire had a material embedded in the treads that got her attention right away.

  With her rural Georgian upbringing, the grayish-white substance was all too familiar. She would know it anywhere.

  “There’s poultry excrement back here on the tire,” she told Dirk, who was giving Ramon and Caitlin last-minute luminol illumination lessons—much to their dismay and irritation.

  “What?” Dirk shouted, his fatigue and resulting crankiness all too apparent.

  “I said, ‘There’s fowl emission back here on this tire, and I’m not talking about carbon monoxide pollution, either.’”

  He hurried around the end of the car, stood, hands on his hips. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Watch your tone with me, boy,” she snapped back. “I haven’t slept either and my coffee’s worn off, too.”

  “Sorry,” he said, giving in far too quickly. He really was tired. “What is it you’re trying to tell me.”

  “That there’s chicken shit on this tire.”

  He looked at her as though she’d just spoken a foreign language. “What?”

  “You heard me. Gran had chickens. Lots of them. Believe me, I’ve stepped in enough of it to know.”

  He squatted down beside her. “Where?”

  “Right there.”

  He squinted at her newfound evidence. “How do you know it’s not gull poop? Looks a lot like gull shit to me.”

  “Oh? Have you seen a lot of red gulls? Huh? Have you?”

  She reached down and pulled a bright, auburn-colored feather off the tire and held it up to him. “That, my friend, is from a chicken. I used to play tag with a rooster that color in my backyard when I was a kid. If you don’t believe me, call Gran.”

  He held out another brown paper sack to her. “Then by all means,” he said, “let’s bag the bugger and get it to the lab. Or better yet, we’ll just send it to Malden, Georgia, and let Granny Reid have a gander at it, get her best professional opinion. Will that suit you? Ow-w-w! Damn, that hurt!”

  “Good. I meant for it to.”

  As Dirk drove down the 101 Freeway toward the morgue, Savannah beside him, they both mulled over their findings at the crime lab.

  “How long do you think it’ll take Eileen to run those prints, once Ramon and Caitlin get them to her?” Dirk asked.

  Of course, Dirk knew the process and how long it took and what to expect as well as Savannah, but she knew why he was asking. He wasn’t asking. He was lodging a complaint about the slow service he hadn’t even gotten yet.

  He was the same way in restaurants, and someday she was going to kill him over it.

  She could see it all now. He’d say something like, “They’re slow tonight! We’ve been here for fifteen minutes! How long can it take them to flip a friggen burger and fry up some fries? Where’s that waitress with my second beer? This one’s warm and flat and I hate warm, flat—”

  She’d smack him upside the head with a ketchup bottle, pour the warm, flat beer on his cold, lifeless corpse for good measure, pay the tab, and walk out.

  Dr. Liu would rule it: “Cause of Death—Blunt Force Trauma to the Skull. Manner of Death—Justifiable Homicide.”

  She sighed. “Eileen will have the prints run and results back three hours before they even give them to her.”

  “What?” He gave her a puzzled, then irritated look. “What kind of a stupid answer is that?”

  “The only kind you’ll accept without bellyaching about it. She’ll be done when she’s done. That’s it; that’s all.”

  “Well, that’s brilliant.”

  “It’s the best I can do on no sleep.” She glanced at her watch. It was 1:25pm. “And no lunch,” she added.

  “Hey, that’s right. No wonder I’m hungry. Why don’t we go by your house and you can feed us some of that leftover fried chicken? Throw some potato salad in there and—”

  “No.”

  “But I bought breakfast.”

  “If I go home, I’m going to take a hot bath and then drop into bed. Is that really what you want?”

  “We could pick up a couple of dogs off that roach coach—the one that parks in the lot next to the morgue.”

  “Oh, yum.”

  By the time they arrived at the morgue, the refreshment vendor and his infamous vehicle were gone.

  Savannah decided she could live with the disappointment.

  The moment they entered the front door, Dirk announced that he had to visit the little boys’ room and get rid of some of his coffee, which left her alone to face one of her least favorite people on God’s green earth.

  “Savannah! Hey, babe! You are lookin’ fine, honey!”

  Kenny Bates sat at a desk behind a waist-high counter, wearing a lecherous grin and a uniform that was two sizes too small—not to mention stained with some sort of suspicious greasy substance on the front of his shirt.

  He was also sporting a new toupee—a very bad toupee. It sat, lopsided on his head, the flesh-colored matting exposed far too low on his brow.

  Miracles did happen, after all. Kenny Bates had managed to make himself even uglier than he’d been the last time she’d seen him.

  “It’s been too long!” he gushed, scanning her figure up and down with the same degree of unhealthy interest that he probably showed to a double-decker pastrami and salami hero.

  “Not long enough,” she muttered under her breath as she approached the counter, looking for the clipboard with its sign-in sheet.

  “I’ve missed you!” he said, standing up so quickly that his belly banged into his desk and slopped coffee onto a stack of papers.

  Lust-besotted, he didn’t even notice.

  Savannah signed the sheet as quickly as she could—using the name Ura Schitt—and shoved it in his direction. “There,” she said. “I’m going back to see Dr. Liu.”

  “Wait! Wait a minute!” He yanked open one of his desk drawers and took out a magazine. Rushing around the counter, he said, “Here. You gotta see this! I just got this yesterday, and I saw this and thought: Hey, this looks just like Savannah!”

  The next thing she knew, he had opened the magazine to its centerfold and had shoved one of the ugliest pieces of porn that she’d seen in a long time directly under her nose.

  She only looked at it half a second—long enough to form the vague impression of a dark-haired, curvaceous female in a most unladylike position, with her lack of modesty pretty much in your face.

  Two seconds later, Savannah had grabbed the magazine away from Kenny, rolled it into a tight, hard tube, and was stabbing at him like a psycho wielding a foot-long butcher knife.

  Over and over again, she used all of her considerable strength to jab him with the end of the roll. It made a surprisingly effective weapon, especially with an enraged woman on the other end of it.

  “Show me that piece of disgusting filth, will ya?” she shouted at him. “Talk dirty to me? What the hell are you thinkin’, boy?”

  “Hey, ouch, stop it! Savannah, don’t! Damn! Stop it, girl. That really hurts! I don’t—ow-w-w!”

  He danced around, waving his arms, tripping over himself as he tried to get away from her. But she continued to chase him, attacking him with a vengeance. He had been asking for it for years, and in her sleep-deprived condition, she was all too happy to give it to him.

&n
bsp; Pinning him in a corner between his desk and the wall, she continued the frenzied attack with wild and joyous abandon, ignoring the voice of reason that was saying, “Don’t! Savannah, stop it! What are you doing?”

  “Leave me alone,” she told the voice. “This trashy, lowlife peckerhead has tormented me for years and—”

  She couldn’t continue arguing because she had gone from stabbing to pummeling Kenny about the ears and head with the magazine, which was now coming apart in her hands, and that took every ounce of her strength. Bits of paper were sailing through the air with every whack and smack, like an X-rated snow globe.

  “Savannah, you need to stop that,” the voice cautioned again. The voice sounded a lot like Dirk’s. “They installed a security camera in here last month. Everything you’re doing is on tape.”

  Cold reason washed over her.

  If there was anything worse than assaulting a police officer in his own station house, it was being filmed while assaulting a police officer in his own station house. Especially if the brass didn’t like you anyway. And although it had been many years since Savannah and the SCPD had parted under less than amicable circumstances, all was neither forgiven nor forgotten on either side of the issue.

  She turned around to see Dirk standing there, watching her, with a big grin on his face.

  He pointed to the camera that was mounted on the ceiling in the far corner of the room. “Former police officer, Savannah Reid, beats desk clerk to death with a rolled-up newspaper,” he said. “Film at eleven.”

  The moment she ceased to batter him, Kenny went from whimpering to indignant. “Yeah!” he said, straightening his shirt, trying to reaffix the toupee that was now desperately askew. “And it’s not a newspaper. It’s a magazine that I paid a lot for.” He held out his hand to Savannah. “Gimme that right now! It’s mine!”

  She held it out of his reach and stepped away from him, toward Dirk. “Not on your cotton-pickin’ life!” she told Bates. “I’m keeping this as garbage as evidence. And before you go daydreaming about how you’re going to be the star of the evening news, you better think how happy the chief’s gonna be when I sue you and the whole department for sexual harassment.

  “Just remember…” She pointed to the camera. “We’ve got you on tape, too, shoving that centerfold under my nose.”

  “He did what?” Dirk was instantly outraged.

  “Yeap. Told me she looks like me, and he’s been getting off looking at it. Why? Did you think I was giving him a beating for no good reason? To give myself a bit of exercise?”

  Dirk walked over to Kenny and grabbed a handful of his shirtfront. “If I’d known that,” he said, his nose inches from Kenny’s, “I would have just gone ahead and let her beat the crap outta you. And if you try it again, I’ll do the job myself…or worse yet, sic her on you again. Got it?”

  Kenny nodded, looking sick as he collapsed back onto his desk, clutching his chest.

  For a brief moment, Savannah thought he might be having a heart attack. Then, with a great deal of satisfaction, she remembered giving him a particularly vigorous blow to the sternum. That one was bound to leave a mark.

  Good, she decided. It was a little something to remind him of her the next time he decided to indulge in creepy fantasies where she played the starring role. The very thought made her want to scrub her brain with a steel wool pad and bleach.

  “Let’s go,” she told Dirk as she left the reception area and headed down the hallway toward the autopsy suite in the back of the building.

  He followed close behind and watched as she unrolled the magazine and shoved it into her purse. “Hey,” he said. “That’s the new issue. I didn’t think the centerfold looked all that much like you.”

  Savannah shot him a dirty look. “If you look at that kind of crap, I don’t want to know about it, okay? I hold you in very high regard—as in, I like to think you’re above all that—and I want to keep it that way.”

  “The same way you like to think that your favorite Hollywood hunks never use the bathroom?”

  “Exactly. Denial can be a wonderful thing.”

  Their footsteps echoed down the long corridor with its shiny gray linoleum and its drab gray walls. Florescent tubes flickered overhead, desperately needing to be changed.

  But the county’s budget didn’t allow for such luxuries. If anything wasn’t directly related to the tourist industry—and the county morgue’s hallways weren’t exactly major attractions—it didn’t receive funds.

  “I don’t know how Dr. Liu can stand working here,” Savannah said as they neared the end of the hallway and the double doors of the autopsy suite. “If they tiled these floors bright yellow and painted rainbow murals on the walls, it would still be the most depressing place on the planet.”

  He nodded in agreement. “At least at a hospital, happy things happen, too, like babies being born. Here…nothing good ever happens.”

  They reached the double swinging doors and found they were locked. This probably meant that an autopsy was under way. Dr. Liu didn’t want anyone to inadvertently stumble through the door and see sights that would haunt them for a lifetime.

  Savannah knocked on the door, and a moment later, it was opened by a scruffy fellow in his thirties, a week-old stub of a beard and uncombed hair, dressed in bloody surgical greens.

  “Hey, it’s Igor,” she said, giving the guy a big smile.

  What Igor—whose real name was Phil—may have lacked in personal grooming, he more than made up in personal warmth. And besides, he had a wealth of ghoulish jokes with which he regaled folks at the local bar and tailgate parties.

  “Got a good one?” Dirk asked him.

  “Mediocre,” Phil admitted, “but the price is right.”

  Dirk said, “Let’s hear it.”

  Phil took a deep breath and began. “A guy’s mother-in-law dies and the funeral parlor wants to know if they want her cremated or buried. He says, “Better not take any chances. Do both!’”

  Savannah groaned. “Is Dr. Liu in there?” she asked, trying to see around him.

  “Yeah, she’s working on that Jardin dude. Wanna watch?”

  “Absolutely.” Dirk didn’t exactly push Phil aside, but he did hurry past him and so did Savannah.

  They knew not to get too close to the table without the proper hat, booties, gloves, and greens. Having been yelled at before by the tempestuous Liu, they weren’t about to repeat errors of the past.

  About five feet from the steel table they stopped short and waited patiently for the coroner to look up and greet them.

  Normally, they wouldn’t have been so respectful—especially Dirk—but the good doctor was looking particularly irritable, and they didn’t want to get thrown out before they found out why.

  Dr. Liu looked very different than she had in the field earlier that morning. Her high-heeled stilettos were gone, replaced by sneakers, covered with disposable booties. Like her assistant, she wore surgical greens and gloves. The fact that she wasn’t wearing a protective mask or face protector of any kind told them that she hadn’t begun any sort of cutting yet.

  Bill Jardin’s naked body was lying on its back, staring sightlessly at the ceiling with eyes that were glazed and flat. Savannah could see a small incision on his belly, but other than that, he looked pretty much the same as he had at the river, except undressed.

  Dr. Liu had placed a small white towel over his groin area, and not for the first time, Savannah was touched by the coroner’s respect for the bodies—and the people who had once inhabited them—who came across her threshold.

  It was common knowledge that Dr. Liu was nicer to dead folks than to living ones. She made no bones about the fact that she preferred their company.

  Finally, she set aside the instrument she was using and acknowledged them. “I suppose you want answers,” she said. “Where, when, what, how, all that good stuff.”

  Dirk brightened. “You’ve got all that already?”

  “Not even close. Y
ou’re not going to believe this. It’s a weird one. I can’t even get a probe into his liver to take his temperature.”

  Both Dirk and Savannah forgot protocol and stepped closer to the table.

  “What do you mean you can’t get it in?” Dirk wanted to know.

  “Well…” Dr. Liu pointed to various reddish areas on the skin. “…I was wondering what that pink lividity was all about. I can’t say I’ve seen that exact color before.”

  “Yes,” Savannah said, “we noticed that out at the river. Tammy asked me if it’s from carbon monoxide poisoning, but I told her it isn’t really red enough.”

  “That’s true. I’ve seen that before myself, and it looks different from this.”

  “What do you think it is?” Dirk asked.

  “Oh, I know what it is…now. I couldn’t get the liver probe all the way in because he’s frozen.”

  “What?” Savannah and Dirk said in unison.

  “That’s right. He was frozen, and he’s in the process of thawing out. That can cause whatever lividity is present to look pink, like that, instead of the usual blue, red, or purple.”

  Dirk shook his head, astounded. “I thought he felt pretty cold when we picked him up and put him on the gurney. But I figured it was just the river water that had chilled the body.”

  “No river is that cold. At least not in this area,” Dr. Liu replied. “This victim was not only shot but also frozen solid.”

  “For how long?” Savannah asked.

  The doctor shrugged. “I have no way of telling for sure. As you know, it’s hard enough to establish time of death through body temp. Contrary to TV forensics, it’s iffy at best. But this…? I can’t even go by the rate of decomposition. Decomposition would have been arrested at the time the body was frozen. The tissues would only start to break down again after they’d begun to thaw.”

  Phil walked to the foot of the table and looked at the body’s foot. “He’s starting to look bad fast, now that he’s thawing out.”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Liu, “once tissues have been frozen and then thawed, the decomp rate is faster than normal.”