All Mortal Flesh

FIFTEEN

Mark Durkee had met the Washington County medical examiner before. He wasn’t sure what made him uneasy in the man’s presence-the fact he spent his days elbow-deep in dead bodies, or the mad-scientist look he had perfected, thanks to an assault two summers before, which had left him with a white scar that twisted out of his short gray hair to bisect one eyebrow. He also had a permanent limp he treated with a silver-topped cane. Thumping his way down the mortuary hall toward them, his white coat flapping behind him, Dr. Dvorak looked like a figure straight out of one of the Stephen King novels Mark had devoured in his teens.

Dvorak raised his eyebrows when he saw the chief. Or rather, he raised the one that was still mobile, giving his face a satanically lopsided look. “Good lord. Are you completely lacking in good sense?” he said. “Are you sure you want to be part of this?”

The chief nodded.

“Idiot. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to.” Dvorak pivoted on his cane and limped back up the way he had come. The chief and the dep followed, so Mark went along, too, wondering as they moved slowly up the institutional, lino-and-fluorescent hall if they were going through the battered metal doors at its end. He wasn’t sure what was behind there, past the public rooms of the mortuary, and he desperately didn’t want to find out. Which, he knew, didn’t make any sense for a career cop. He had seen dead bodies before. Three. But the sight was endurable in the crime scene, with the blood and the violence attending. Maybe because the bodies didn’t seem like dead people there. They were evidence.

But laid out on a steel slab, with blue lips and black thread suturing up their cold skin… He shivered.

“Durkee?”

Mark snapped to. MacAuley was standing by one of the doorways, waiting for him. “You okay?” the deputy chief asked.

“Yes, sir,” Mark said, and he was, because he saw through the door that there was nothing in the room except the same sort of 1960s government-issue office furniture they had in the MKPD.

There were only two chairs facing Dr. Dvorak’s obsessively neat desk, so Mark took up a stance next to the door while the chief and MacAuley made themselves as comfortable as they could.

Dvorak sat. He picked up a manila file folder and squared it on the green baize blotter in front of him. “First thing,” he said. “I am not going to show you any pictures.”

The chief nodded.

“Second thing,” the pathologist said. “As is my custom in the case of a homicide, I moved directly from the recorded autopsy to the preliminary report. Therefore, I won’t be ready to release the body until tomorrow at the earliest.”

He meant, Mark realized, that he had to finish putting the pieces that had been Mrs. Van Alstyne back together.

The ME splayed his fingers across his scarred forehead. His nails were very clean and very blunt. “I have to tell you,” he said, “this has been the most disturbing autopsy I’ve done since I started in this position.” He lowered his hand and looked at the chief. “The bulk of my work is as a pathologist. If I have more than two suspicious deaths a year, it’s a banner event. That’s what I wanted when I came here. Peaceful work in a quiet county. I never really stopped to think that sooner or later I’d be autopsing,” his voice broke sharply, “someone I know.” He looked at the chief. His pale eyes were wet.

The chief reached across Dvorak’s immaculate desk and squeezed the doctor’s forearm. “Thank you, Emil.”

The ME cleared his throat and dropped his gaze to the folder in front of him. He flipped it open. “The subject was a healthy, well-nourished, and physically fit Caucasian, reported age fifty-one.” He traced the edge of the paper. “She had wonderful skin elasticity. She easily could have been a decade younger.”

The chief nodded. “Yeah. She…”

They all waited for a few seconds, but nothing else came out.

Dr. Dvorak cleared his throat again. “Since we know the identity of the victim, why don’t I just skip over to the forensically critical parts.”

“Why don’t you,” MacAuley said.

“The victim was not sexually assaulted in any way,” the doctor began, and the chief, who had been sitting at attention, sagged in his chair. The ME went on. “The fatal assault seems to have been swift and unexpected. There were, as you noted at the crime scene, Deputy Chief MacAuley, no defensive wounds. Nor was there any bruising which might indicate a struggle or the confinement of the victim. Death was the result of a well-placed knife thrust to the throat, severing the esophagus, the airway, and the larynx simultaneously. Then the knife was withdrawn at a slight angle, severing the jugular vein. I suspect the assailant struck from behind, in what might be deemed the classic ‘sneak attack’ position, pulling the victim’s head back to expose the neck and striking before the victim has organized a response. There would have been an almost instant loss of consciousness as the blood pressure to the brain crashed. Clinical death followed within minutes.” He spread one hand over the papers in the folder and paused for a long moment. “It may be a commonplace, Russ, but from a medical viewpoint, I can assure you that she felt, at the most, a moment of surprise. She did not suffer.”

The chief nodded. “Thank you,” he said. His voice was hoarse.

“You said a well-placed knife thrust,” MacAuley said. “Was the perp someone who knew what he was doing? Who had training?”

Dr. Dvorak pressed his already thin lips into an invisible line. “Someone who knew what he or she was doing, yes, I would say that. As to how that experience was gained…” He shrugged. “Military training, some forms of martial arts or self-defense, an experienced hunter. That’s your call.”

“He or she?” Mark said. The chief and the dep turned to look at him. He felt himself flushing, but he pressed on. “I mean, can you tell if we’re looking for a man or a woman?”

The doctor shook his head. “No. As I said, I believe Mrs. Van Alstyne-the victim was surprised from behind. Since she was a somewhat petite woman, the angle of the blow would easily be within the reach of any assailant between the heights of, say, five and six feet.”

Mark nodded. Let the dep chase after his bad-guy-coming-after-the-chief scenario. He knew that most murders were committed by someone close to the victim. Someone involved in the victim’s life. He had his own scenario.

“Fixing time of death was difficult. The house was cool to begin with, and according to Officer McCrea, the mudroom door was open from the time the body was discovered until I got there. Lividity was less useful than usual because of the significant blood loss. I can narrow it down to a twenty-four-hour window between roughly Sunday afternoon and Monday afternoon, but I can’t be more precise than that.”

“What about the…” MacAuley waved his hand over his face.

The ME’s wince was faint, but noticible. “The postmortem facial wounds? They are numerous, all delivered within, I estimate, a half hour of death. Some were quite shallow. Tentative, one might say. Others were deep and decisive. The victim’s body was also pierced in several places, a fact not readily apparent from the initial evaluation at the crime scene. These postmortem wounds to the torso were stabbing rather than slashing wounds, and were themselves almost completely bloodless. Again, not readily apparent until the victim’s blood-soaked clothing had been removed.”

“So… what sort of assailant are we talking about here?” MacAuley asked. “Someone who hated Mrs. Van Alstyne personally? Someone who saw her as a stand-in for something else they hated?”

“I’m a pathologist, not one of these so-called profilers,” Dr. Dvorak said. “And I’m not all that convinced you can tell what’s going on in someone’s mind based on the pattern of assault. The body moves and reacts in ways the mind cannot control. However, having said that, in my opinion, we have here an assailant who was technically adept enough to kill with one stroke, but who was inexperienced with death itself.”

“What does that mean?” MacAuley asked.

“If I may continue,” the doctor said, giving the deputy chief a measured look. “The postmortem injuries strike me as a sort of experimentation, rather than deliberate mutilation. Seeing what happened when flesh was sliced or stabbed.”

The chief shuddered. Dr. Dvorak kept his eyes on him. “Often in cases where the killer enjoys having control over a body, he will treat it as a child treats a doll, moving it about, removing clothing, inserting objects into it, marking it.”

It was a gruesome image, but Mark could picture exactly what the pathologist was getting at. He had seen Maddy play with her Barbies and baby dolls in precisely that way, right down to coloring them with Magic Markers.

“In this case,” Dvorak continued, “the best analogy might be… a boy poking at a dead bird.”

MacAuley nodded. “So… someone familiar with knife fighting but not with actually killing someone.”

“In my opinion. Which may or may not be worth the paper it’s written on.” Dvorak looked at the folder lying in front of him with distaste. “The one other solid thing I can contribute is the murder weapon.”

The chief sat up straighter. “From knife cuts? It usually takes at least a week for the state crime lab to get back on weapons.”

“That’s right. Which is why I bypassed the state lab. I e-mailed the photos to a friend in Virginia and let him know how important it was to me. He got back to me right before I called you.” The doctor removed a sheet of paper from the folder and slid it across the desk. It was a printed version of a Web-page photo, showing a nonreflective, efficiently lethal knife.

“I’m sorry about the poor quality of the print. As you can see, it’s a K-Bar, and according to my friend, it’s mostly found on the secondhand or military surplus market, because-”

“This is my knife,” the chief said.

“It-what?” Dr. Dvorak stared at him. Then his face softened. “It’s not an uncommon style, Russ.”

“I know it’s not,” the chief said impatiently. “It used to be marine issue, and everybody in the army bought ’em because they were so much better than the crap knives we were issued. I kept mine when I retired. This is the same knife that’s missing from my barn.”

“Russ,” MacAuley said, “the doc’s right. I mean, my hunting knife’s from the army-navy surplus, and it looks a lot like this-”

“I’m not having guilt-induced hallucinations, Lyle. Think. The murder weapon was a K-Bar. My K-Bar is missing. The last time I can positively place it on my workbench would be a few days after hunting season ended. Someone could have gotten into the barn easy and taken it.” He leaned forward. “Maybe someone in that car the Tracey kid saw in the driveway Sunday.”

“If the perp broke into your barn to get a weapon, why the hell didn’t he take your Weatherby or your shotgun?”

“Because it’s a lot harder to sneak up on someone with a rifle,” Mark said.

The chief nodded at him. “Exactly.”

“Okay,” MacAuley said. “I’m willing to go with it. I just want to point out that whether it’s the chief’s knife or not, it’s probably at the bottom of the Kill right now.”

Mark grimaced. A lot of things could disappear beneath the ice-crusted waters of the river.

“Mark, let’s have you get back on that list of released cons the chief dealt with.” The dep was standing, settling his hat on his head. “Thanks, Doc.”

Dr. Dvorak reached over the desk and shook MacAuley’s hand. The deputy chief clasped Mark on the shoulder and steered him out the office door. “Let’s give them a sec,” he said, once they were a few steps down the hall.

“Look,” Mark said, “about the released-con theory-”

“Track down their parole officers or their wardens. We’re looking for someone who had knife training while in the army, or who got in trouble for knife fighting inside. That shift switch you wanted? You got it. You’re on days starting now. Investigating, not patrol.”

The bump up in status that Mark had wanted so long flashed by, an irritating detail he had to hear before he got to what really mattered. “I want to spend some time looking into Reverend Fergusson,” he blurted out.

“What?” MacAuley held him at arm’s length. “What are you talking about?”

“Clare Fergusson. You told the chief yourself. She’s in the circle of suspects.”

“You mean back at the station? I was trying to crowbar some sense of discretion into the chief, for God’s sake. I don’t really think she’s a credible suspect.”

“Why not?”

MacAuley threw up his hands. “I don’t know. Because I know her, I guess. I just can’t picture it. I mean, okay, maybe she could possibly maybe get mad enough to lose it in a fit of temporary insanity. But cover it up? No way. She’d be signing a confession before you could finish Mirandizing her.”

“But think about it. She’s got the means-she did some sort of fancy survival training for helicopter pilots. She’s got the motive”-MacAuley shook his head, but Mark surged on-“she does, you know she does. You think the chief was ever going to divorce his wife?”

The deputy chief paused. “No.”

“Motive. And she had the opportunity-she was up in the mountains all alone for a week, including Sunday and Monday. She could have come down to the chief’s house, done the deed, and split before anyone saw her.”

“Durkee,” the deputy chief said, “I appreciate the level of thought you’ve put into this. That’s one of the things that tells me you’re going to have a great future as a cop. But the reverend is not a suspect. Put it aside. You’ll have more than enough to do compiling this list. Understand?”

“Yessir.” Mark tried to conceal his seething frustration. If the deputy chief spiked the investigation, that was it. No way was anyone going to look at the most likely suspect. Unless…

He thought of the now-crumpled letter from the state police waiting at home on his dresser. Unless he could find someone with the authority to take the case from MacAuley. Someone who wouldn’t be swayed by the chief’s friendship with the priest.