“It’s a busy practice, for a small town. Doctor Philips is going to be pleased, except that she’s going to have to work with Jerry Mandell,” he said.
He was sitting at the kitchen table with Lenore in the early afternoon, drinking coffee. Lisa was shopping in town. Her daughter, Sharon, had a class at the University, and Gary was dropping off hay in the South pasture.
The original proposal to take a temporary job in West Virginia had come from Gary, which in retrospect, seemed more than a little suspicious. Jerry Mandell was an old friend of his. Kurtz would be doing a surgical colleague in need a big favor and at the same time could spend some long overdue time with the family.
It was supposed to be a simple arrangement: a base salary plus 25% of the amount charged for every patient that he treated, with a guaranteed minimum. He would pay for his own malpractice insurance but Mandell and Stewart, LLC (soon to be Mandell and Philips, LLC), would reimburse him for the cost.
And hell, it was only for a month and a half. What could go wrong?
Kurtz’ partner, David Chao, had urged him to accept. “Get away for a few weeks. Broaden your horizons and make the old man happy.”
Sure. Why not? And the fishing was excellent. It had been too long since Kurtz had floated a line on a stream that contained trophy sized fish.
So, he told his father he would do it and Jerry Mandell had called him that evening. On the phone, Mandell had seemed animated and enthusiastic. “You’d be doing me a big favor,” he said. “We’ve tried locum tenens in the past. We weren’t too happy with the results.”
Kurtz knew what he meant. Locum tenens is a Latin term meaning “place holder.” Lots of physicians, mostly those who are unsure of what sort of career they ultimately would like to pursue, spend a few years working for locum tenens agencies. They go from hospital to hospital, state to state, often filling in for physicians on vacation, or in this case, a physician who unexpectedly becomes disabled or drops dead. Most often, these are physicians right out of training, and while their training might have been excellent, they almost always lack experience, which means that they’re usually below average on the scale of physicianly greatness.
“You’re probably more of an insurance policy than anything else,” Lenore said. “It’s not that he needs you so badly. He wants back-up, just in case.”
Kurtz shrugged. “Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s go fishing.”
“Sure,” Lenore said.
Lenore, somewhat surprisingly to Kurtz, liked fishing, so long as she didn’t have to put any worms on hooks. Worms, Kurtz had been firmly informed, were icky. Well brought up Jewish girls from Brooklyn did not put worms on hooks.
Fly fishing did not involve worms. The first time he had taken Lenore fly fishing, she had turned out to be a natural. Since then, they went fly fishing as often as they could.
One of the best parts about West Virginia was the abundance of cold, clear streams and rivers, full of fat, happy trout. Just a few hundred yards from the farmhouse, a stream, too small to have a name, flowed into Bradley’s Creek, which flowed into the Tygart Valley River, which flowed into the Monongahela.
The un-named stream contained a population of mostly small native brook trout, but Bradley’s Creek held both brown trout and rainbows lurking under its banks, more than a few of which were trophy size. They put on their waders, gathered their rods, vests and creels and hiked across the field. A few minutes later, they were both knee-deep in clear, flowing water.
Bradley’s Creek widened every few hundred yards into placid pools, which narrowed again into swift moving currents. There were sections with smooth, gravel bottoms and others with jagged rocks poking up above the water. A few trees overhung the banks but mostly, thick grass grew close to the water’s edge. Kurtz took one of the pools, which he knew from prior experience, contained a deeper drop-off. He cast a wet fly and after a few minutes, had his first bite. He could tell it was a small one and after less than a minute, he netted a seven-inch brookie. He slipped it off the hook and let it go.
He could see Lenore, downstream and around a bend. Lenore, while she always seemed to have a good time, wasn’t interested enough to delve into the finer nuances of the sport. Lenore stuck to dry flies. Dry flies, she claimed, were easy. You cast it out there and it floated. You stared at it, watched for the dimple on the water when a fish sucked it in, pulled back on the rod and set the hook. Easy.
Kurtz had never found it to be all that easy, but Lenore caught a lot of fish on those dry flies. He heard her whoop as she caught her first one and a few seconds later, Kurtz felt a solid tug on his line. He fought it for nearly three minutes before netting a nice sixteen-inch rainbow. Dinner, he thought, and placed it in his creel.
Lenore shrieked. It took a few seconds for Kurtz to register that this was not the usual happy shriek of a fisherman with a big one on the line. Concerned, he raised his head. “You okay?” he yelled.
She was silent for a moment, then, “Come over here,” she yelled back.
He scrambled out of the water and hurried along the edges of the creek until he was opposite Lenore. She was still in the water, staring at something in her hands. “What’s up?”
“This is up.” She raised the object she was holding so Kurtz could get a good look at it.
A vague sense of unreality floated through Kurtz’ brain. He couldn’t help it. He laughed. “Put it over here on the bank,” he said. “And let’s go call the cops.”
Chapter 4
Drew Hastings was first elected Sheriff of Clark County nearly five years ago and had been re-elected with a solid majority four years later. Mostly, it was a quiet job, the folks around here being mostly a law-abiding bunch, and when one of their own caused trouble, they mostly handled it themselves.
This was Drew Hastings’ first dead body aside from car crash victims, a couple of hunting accidents and a few old folks dying from natural causes at home.
Though it was not exactly a body. A skull, he told himself, did not constitute a body. Oh, there must have been a body involved somewhere, somewhen, but that just might have been a hundred years or so ago. He hoped so. He hoped that this was the skull of some long dead homesteader or native American who wasn’t going to disturb the peace and serenity of Clark County.
Have to follow the rules, though. Have to investigate. Could be a murder in there somewhere, though to Drew Hastings’ certain knowledge, nobody in Clark County had gone missing for at least five years, since well before his election to the position of County Sheriff.
Richard Kurtz…Drew Hastings remembered Richard Kurtz. Drew had been two years behind Kurtz in High School. Kurtz had played football and basketball and got good grades and then vanished, first into the Army and then into the big city. Kurtz had never been a trouble maker. And his brand new wife, a good looking woman, that’s for sure, with those big green eyes and that long, blonde hair and those big, big tits.
Drew Hastings had married his High School sweetheart, who while perhaps not as well endowed as Lenore Kurtz, knew how to use what she had, and she had quite a lot, for which Drew Hastings was eternally grateful. Still, a man can’t help but look.
Drew Hastings looked up from the skull, lying all alone on the bank, and looked Lenore Kurtz in the eye.
“You stepped on it?” he said.
“Yeah. I felt something rolling under my feet. It didn’t feel like a rock, so I picked it up.”
Drew grunted. “I’ve called a forensics team in. We’ll see if the rest of him is down there.”
“Her,” Kurtz said.
Drew looked at him. “The skull is from a female. She was young.”
Drew took a moment to think about this. “Even if she died young, she might have been lying in that creek for a hundred years.”
Kurtz shook his head. “It looks pretty fresh to me. I’m not an expert but I would say no more than a couple of years, if that.”
Kurtz was a surgeon, Drew reminded himself. He probably knew what he was t
alking about. “Shit,” he remarked.
Solemnly, Kurtz nodded.
Clark County is the smallest county in West Virginia, squeezed between Preston and Marion Counties, North of Taylor and just South of Monongalia, too small to have a Medical Examiner of its own. The ME from Monongalia County, which contained Morgantown and the medical school, arrived a couple of hours later. By this time, the forensics team had swept the river for a hundred yards in each direction. A few finger bones, a humerus and a tibia had been discovered.
Ordinarily, a civilian wouldn’t be allowed to get near a suspected crime scene, but Kurtz was a surgeon and he did know something about bones. Drew Hastings and the ME, a big guy with light blonde hair, named Bart Taylor, didn’t mind Kurtz taking a look.
“What do you think?” Bart Taylor said.
Kurtz glanced at Bart Taylor’s blandly smiling face. “I think you’ve got a big problem,” Kurtz said.
“Yup.” The ME nodded. “I think so, too.”
Drew looked back and forth between the ME and Kurtz, already dreading what he was about to hear. “How so?”
“The humerus and the tibia are from two different people,” the ME said.
“How about the skull?”
“It probably goes with the tibia,” Kurtz said. “They’re both on the small side. DNA analysis will tell for sure.” Kurtz hesitated. “If you can even get DNA from bones that have been sitting in water for a few years. Like I said, I’m not an expert.”
“I think that the crime lab will be able to do it,” Bart Taylor said.
Drew Hastings sighed. Kurtz shrugged.
“I thought,” the face in the screen said with no little amusement, “that a man doesn’t shit in his bed. You did say that, didn’t you?”
Seamus Sullivan was displeased. Truly, he didn’t see how this could have happened. Seamus Sullivan was a careful man. He selected his victims from far away, mostly from young, relatively inexperienced whores and runaways, the sort of young girl that nobody was ever going to miss. He transported them in the dark and kept them isolated in the basement until he was through with them. He buried their bodies deep in the woods. He would never, never be so careless as to throw them into a stream. A very large river, perhaps, but even that would have been risky.
It must have been a bear, he thought. A lot of black bears in West Virginia, maybe even a pack of coywolves. Actual wolves had been extinct in West Virginia for nearly a hundred years, but wolf-coyote hybrids had become common in the past couple of decades. Neither bears nor coywolves would hesitate to chow down on some prime carrion.
Not that it mattered. Somehow or other, at least one dead and carefully buried body had managed to find its way into some local farmer’s trout stream. Luckily, the stream was over a mile from the actual burial site, which was over ten miles from his house.
Still, ten miles was too close for comfort. The police had no reason to suspect him of anything at all. Seamus Sullivan was a fine upstanding citizen. He briefly considered. His latest victim was nearly used up. Probably better to finish with her sooner, rather than later. And get rid of her somewhere else, somewhere much farther away.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Seamus Sullivan said. “It has nothing to do with me.”
The face in the screen puffed up its cheeks and stared at him moodily. Then it smiled a crooked smile. “Well, Seamus, old boy, that may or may not be true, but what is undoubtedly true is that it has nothing to do with me.” The smile grew wider and then the face vanished from the screen.
“Asshole,” Seamus Sullivan said.
The news spread rapidly. Richard Kurtz, only yesterday the little man who wasn’t there, suddenly found himself a figure of general interest.
Joe Partledge was one of the two gynecologists. Kurtz had been introduced to him the day before by Emily Carvalho, both before starting their first cases. He had given Kurtz a perfunctory handshake and uttered a couple of meaningless pleasantries but hadn’t seemed inclined to talk.
Today was different. Today, everybody wanted to talk.
Partledge carried a tray with two burgers, a side of fries and a big slice of cheesecake. He sat down at the table without asking and gave Kurtz a big grin. “So, what’s this about a skull?”
Partledge was tall, bald and portly, but he was light on his feet. Kurtz had seen the type many times, particularly in the country. The guy looked fat but he probably spent a lot of time outdoors and there was muscle underneath the fat.
Drew Hastings had politely asked Kurtz to keep quiet about it, but someone, obviously, was talking.
“Yeah,” Kurtz said. “In the creek.”
“I heard your wife found it?”
“Correct. We were fishing.”
“They find anything else?”
Kurtz frowned. He knew enough about investigating crimes to know that perpetrators were often tripped up by revealing information that nobody was supposed to have. If Partledge didn’t know it, Kurtz wasn’t going to tell him. “They asked me not to talk about it,” Kurtz said.
Partledge sat back in his seat, looking skeptical. “Not much usually happens in this town. Hard to keep something like this secret.”
“Nobody’s been reported missing?”
Partledge shook his head. “Not so far as I know. Not from around here.”
“Water flows out of the creek,” Kurtz said. “It doesn’t flow in. There’s no way that skull should have been there.”
“Unless it was put there.”
“I imagine the police are working on that.”
“I hope so,” Partledge said, and took a bite out of his burger. “None of our business, though, now is it?”
Drew Hastings liked to think of himself as a solid professional, and to the best of his ability, he was. A solid professional doesn’t hesitate to consult other professionals when confronting a situation outside of his own expertise. A man’s got to know his limitations. Clint Eastwood got that one right.
“Hasty.”
Drew Hastings looked up as Bill Harris walked into his office. “Thanks for coming by,” Drew said.
Bill Harris sat down in one of the two big visitors’ chairs across from Hastings’ desk. He opened a paper bag and removed a jelly donut, raised an eyebrow in Hastings’ direction.
“Sure.”
Bill Harris placed a second donut on a napkin on top of Drew Hastings’ desk. “So,” Bill Harris said, “tell me about it.”
Upon election to the position of Sheriff, Drew Hastings had attended the usual training course at the State Police Academy. Theoretically, he knew how to investigate a suspected murder, but he had never had occasion to do so. Bill Harris had. Bill Harris was an old friend of Hastings and a Sergeant in the West Virginia State Police, stationed at the Morgantown Detachment of Troop 1 Command.
Harris sipped coffee and ate his donut as he listened to Hastings’ summary. “Those bones could have been down there for years,” he said.
“Kurtz doesn’t think so. The ME agrees with him.”
“Kurtz,” Harris said. He frowned. “Tell me about Kurtz.”
“You have to be careful with Polymerase Chain Reaction, particularly in a case like this. These bones haven’t exactly been kept clean. There’s going to be plenty of DNA here, but most of it is going to be contamination.”
Bill Harris nodded. He had heard it all before. “Does that mean you can’t do it?”
Jose Alvarez reared his head back and gave Harris a scandalized look. “Of course, we can do it. It’s just going to take a little longer.”
“Oh,” Harris said. “That’s a relief. I thought you were saying that you couldn’t do it.”
Alvarez narrowed his eyes at Harris. “Are you fucking with me?”
“Certainly not,” Harris said.
Alvarez sniffed. “Hochmeister et al, 1991; he found that there was no problem extracting and identifying DNA from a human femur after eighteen months under water. One of the seminal papers in the field.�
�
“What if it’s longer than eighteen months?”
Alvarez peered down at the scattering of bones sitting on a metal tray. He shook his head. “Two years at the most,” he said. “Maybe less.”
“Good,” Bill Harris said. “Let us know.”
Chapter 5
“Oh, fuck me,” Lew Barent said. He stared at the phone.
“Excuse me?” Bill Harris said.
“Sorry.” Barent cleared his throat. “It just slipped out.”
“Right,” Harris said. “So, what can you tell me about this guy, Kurtz?”
“It appears,” Bill Harris said, “that there is more to Dr. Kurtz than meets the eye.”’
Drew Hastings looked at his old friend, sitting across from his desk with a pleased smile on his face. “So?”
“You knew him in High School. Anything special about him?”
“Not particularly. He played football and basketball. I wouldn’t have thought it at the time, but it seems that he finished near the top of his class. He was popular enough.” Drew Hastings shrugged.
“He’s had quite a career since leaving West Virginia.”
“He’s a surgeon. So?”
“I don’t mean that career. It seems, purely by chance and happenstance, that your Dr. Kurtz has been instrumental in helping to solve at least four murders in New York City. And he’s a police surgeon with the rank of Inspector in the NYPD. The guy I spoke with knows him quite well, considers him a close friend, also a loose cannon and a loaded gun. Supposedly, the guy is a magnet for trouble.”
If a Tree Falls Page 3
