At Risk

9

The forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy on the train fatality died one week later during a Sunday afternoon of skydiving when his parachute didn’t open.

If Sykes didn’t have the original case file in front of her, she might not believe it. Bad karma, she thinks uncomfortably. As a kid, she loved archaeology. It was one of the few subjects that interested her, maybe because it wasn’t taught in school. She lost interest when she read about King Tut’s tomb, about curses and people mysteriously dying.

“Twenty years ago, Mrs. Finlay’s death,” she is saying to Win over the phone. “Two years before that a train death, then the ME’s death. I’m getting a little freaked out.”

“Possibly coincidence,” he says.

“Then why was the picture stapled to Mrs. Finlay’s personal-effects inventory?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this right now,” says Win, who doesn’t like cell phones and certainly doesn’t assume that any conversation on them is secure.

Sykes is alone in the small morgue office on the eleventh floor of a tall, beige building behind the UNC–Chapel Hill medical school’s hospitals. She is bewildered, seems the more she looks into Vivian Finlay’s violent death, the more mysterious it gets. First, her case file has disappeared except for an inventory of clothing she supposedly had on when she was murdered, tennis clothes that would appear to be the wrong size. Second, a train fatality may somehow be connected to her case, and now the ME and his skydiving accident.

“Just a few things,” Win adds. “Keep the details to a minimum. How?”

“Chute didn’t open.”

“There should have been an autopsy on the chute.”

“How about I e-mail all this to you,” Sykes says. “How about you read it yourself. When you getting back this way?”

She’s feeling very isolated, abandoned. He’s up there with that DA, the two of them headline news. As far as Sykes is concerned, he was involved in a shooting, should get out of town and be down here to help her out. It’s his case. Well, that’s not how it’s feeling anymore. But the fact is, it’s his case. Typically, now that something sensational has happened, an old lady murdered twenty years ago is a throwaway. Who cares.

“As soon as I can,” is all Win has to say about it.

“I know you got some real problems up there,” she replies as reasonably as possible. “But this is your case, Win. And if I don’t get back to the Academy, the TBI will be all over me like white on rice.”

“Whatever happens, I’ll fix it,” he says.

He always promises that and so far he hasn’t fixed a damn thing. She spends all her time talking to him, doesn’t study or hang out with the other students discussing what they just learned that day in class, then gets behind and doesn’t fully comprehend the newest forensic technology and investigative techniques or have friends. She complains and he says, Don’t worry. You got me and I’m a great tutor. She says maybe she shouldn’t devote so much of herself to a man almost young enough to be her son, and he says he doesn’t care about age, then pays attention to some younger woman or obsesses about that DA, Lamont, who’s smart and beautiful, well, maybe damaged goods now. Not nice to think it, but a lot of men don’t want a woman after she’s been raped.

Sykes goes through the medical examiner’s case. His name was Dr. Hurt. That figures, might be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Fell from an estimated five thousand feet, she reads, suffered massive trauma to his head, part of his brain avulsed, femurs driven up into his hips, crushed and fractured this, ruptured that. The only mention of the parachute is a brief description by a police officer who responded to the scene. He stated it appeared the chute was improperly packed. Witnesses claimed Dr. Hurt packed it himself. The possibility was raised that he might have committed suicide.

Colleagues and family acknowledged he was deeply in debt and getting divorced but claimed he wasn’t depressed or acting oddly at all — in fact, seemed to be in good spirits. Sykes has heard that tall tale before, people didn’t notice a thing. Well guess why. If they admit there was even the slightest reason for concern, they might feel guilty about being so caught up in their own lives that they couldn’t take a moment to worry about somebody else. She looks up as a knock sounds and the door opens. The chief medical examiner walks in, a mousy kind of pinched-looking woman somewhere in her fifties, granny glasses, a loose lab coat, a stethoscope around her neck.

“Now that’s something,” Sykes says, looking pointedly at the stethoscope. “You making sure everybody’s dead before you start cutting and sawing?”

The chief smiles, says, “My secretary asked me to check her lungs. She’s getting bronchitis. Just making sure you don’t need anything.”

It’s more than that.

“I don’t guess you were around here when Dr. Hurt died,” Sykes says.

“I succeeded him. What’s this about, exactly? Why all the interest?” She glances at the two case files on the table.

Sykes isn’t going to tell her, says, “Several seemingly unrelated deaths may have something in common. You know how it is, you have to look at everything.”

“I think it was pretty clear he was a suicide. Why’s the TBI involved?”

“It’s not, exactly.”

“Then you’re not working the case?” she interrupts.

“I’m helping. It’s not my case.” As if Sykes needs to be reminded of that one more time. “Like I said, I’m just checking out a few things.”

“Well, I see. I guess it’s all right. I’ll be in the morgue if you need me,” the chief says, and she shuts the door behind her.

Guess it’s all right. As if Sykes is a Girl Scout.

Then she thinks about Dr. Hurt, wonders about his state of mind, his level of professional competence, the effort he put forth if he was anxious and depressed and no longer valued his life. She imagines herself in a similar situation and is fairly certain she would miss important details, might not try very hard, maybe wouldn’t care. She keeps that in mind as she reviews the train fatality, a terribly mutilating death that occurred at a rail crossing on a two-lane rural highway, the freight train’s engineer stating that when he rounded a sharp curve at approximately eight fifteen that morning, he saw the decedent lying facedown across the tracks and couldn’t stop the train in time to avoid running over him. The victim’s name was Mark Holland, a thirty-nine-year-old detective with the Asheville Police Department.

His widow, Kimberly, was quoted in the newspaper as saying that her husband left their Asheville home early the previous evening en route to Charlotte, where he was to meet with someone, she didn’t know who, but “it was related to work.” He was not depressed and she could think of no reason whatsoever to account for his alleged suicide, that she was extremely upset and adamant that he would not have done such a thing, especially since “he just got promoted and we were excited about starting a family.”

The autopsy revealed a laceration to Mark Holland’s head and an underlying fracture (Well, no friggin’ wonder) that was consistent with a fall.

Dr. Hurt wasn’t just depressed, Sykes thinks, he was lights on, nobody home, bought into the Charlotte cop’s suggestion that Holland was crossing the railroad tracks on foot, perhaps on his way to have a secret meeting with a witness, tripped, fell, knocked himself unconscious. Dr. Hurt signed out the case as an accident.

Forensic scientist Rachael — or “Rake,” as Win calls her — places the letter on top of a porous metal platen called a vacuum bed. She hits a switch and begins vacuuming down the box.

He has watched her work the electrostatic imaging system before, and sometimes they’ve been lucky, most recently in a kidnapping case, the ransom note written on a sheet of paper that obviously had been under one the kidnapper had used earlier to jot down a phone number that led the police to a Papa John’s Pizza where he had placed a take-out order and paid for it with a credit card. Rake wears white cotton examination gloves, was happy when Win told her he hadn’t touched the letter with his bare hands. After they’ve finished looking for indented writing, the letter the man in the red scarf left for Win at the Diesel Café will go to the fingerprints lab to be processed with ninhydrin or some other reagent.

“How’s Knoxville?” asks Rake, a nice-looking brunette who started out with the FBI lab in Quantico but decided after 9-11 and the Patriot Act that she didn’t want to work for the Feds. “You gonna start talking with a dueling-banjo twang?”

“That’s North Georgia, Deliverance country. No dueling banjos in Knoxville, just blaze-orange everywhere.”

“Hunting?”

“UT football.”

Rake covers the letter and the platen with a clear plastic imaging film that reminds Win of Saran Wrap.

“Win?” she says without looking up. “Sounds trite, but I’m sorry about what happened.”

“Thanks, Rake.”

She passes what she calls a corona discharge unit over the surface. Win always smells ozone when she does it, as if it might rain.

“I don’t care what anybody says. You did the right thing,” she adds. “I don’t see how anybody can even question it.”

“I didn’t realize anybody was,” he says, getting one of his uneasy feelings.

She tilts the tray and cascades toner-coated beads over the image film — covered document, says, “Heard it on the radio during a coffee break.”

The electrostatic charge causes the toner to migrate to indentations that aren’t visible to the unaided eye, areas of the paper with microscopic damage caused by handwriting.

“Go on. Tell me,” Win says, already knows.

He’s being screwed.

“Just that Lamont said you’re being investigated, like maybe it wasn’t a good shooting. A big story’s being run tomorrow and they’re already promoting it with teases.” She looks at him, adds, “How’s that for grateful?”

“Maybe what I expected,” he says as latent images appear in faint black, partial words, confusing.

Rake isn’t impressed, points out something on the threatening letter the man in the red scarf left for Win, decides, “Think we’d better try three-D enhancement.”

Toby Huber is cold, shivering as he sits on his balcony of the Winnetu Inn in South Beach, Edgartown, smoking a joint, looking at the ocean, at people in long pants and jackets walking along the beach.

“I’m sure it’s gone, just not where, exactly,” he says over his cell phone, annoyed but with a nice buzz going. “Sorry, man. But at this point, it doesn’t matter.”

“That’s not for you to judge. Try to think for once.”

“Look. I told you, okay? It must be when I threw out everything in trash bags, whatever. And I mean everything, including any food in the fridge, any beer, anything. Even hauled the trash about five miles away to a Dumpster behind… some restaurant, can’t remember which one. Damn it’s freezing here. I’ve checked and rechecked and it’s not here. Man, you need to chill before you have a stroke….”

A knock from inside the one-bedroom suite, and then the door opens, the housekeeper is startled as Toby steps inside and glares at her.

“What is it you don’t understand about Do Not Disturb!” he screams at her.

“Sorry, sir. The card’s not on the door.” She quickly vanishes.

Toby returns to the balcony, takes a toke, almost yells into the phone, “I’m out of here. You got that? Where it’s warm. Boring as goddamn hell here. You’ve put me through enough and it’d better be worth it.”

“Not quite yet. It will look suspicious if you’re suddenly flying off to L.A. You need to stay put a few more days. We’ve got to make sure it’s not someplace where it might be found and cause us a lot of trouble. Think, Toby!”

“If it’s anywhere, it’s still inside the damn apartment. I don’t know….” Something glimmers. He’s not sure he checked under the bed, mentions that, adding, “You know, when I was reading it, could have stuck it there. Why don’t you go check your goddamn self?”

“I already have.”

“Then you’re so spazzed out about it, go check again!”

“Think! Where did you have it last? You sure you didn’t leave it at the office….”

“I told you. I took it with me, know that for fact because I was reading it.”

“I didn’t tell you to take it so you could read it!”

“Yeah, so you’ve said about a hundred times by now, so you can just shut up about it, okay?”

“You put it in your car, drove it there? What? Reading it in bed? So you could look at the damn pictures? Are you insane! Where did you have it last!”

“I told you to shut up, don’t act like such a hysterical old woman. It’s not like I can exactly go look. So you help yourself, look ’til the cows come home. Maybe I missed it, okay? I had it all kinds of places when I was there. In a drawer, maybe in a pile by the bed, under the pillow. At one point I had it in a basket of dirty clothes. Or maybe it was in the dryer….”

“Toby, are you sure you didn’t take it with you to the Vineyard?”

“How many times you going to ask me! What difference does it make. So what if it’s gone? Nothing worked the way it was supposed to, anyway.”

“Well, we don’t know it’s gone, now do we? And that’s a problem, a very serious problem. You were supposed to leave it where it would be found. The last thing you did before you left. But you didn’t. You completely ignored my orders.”

“So it probably ended up in the trash, okay? That’s probably what happened when I cleaned things out.” He takes another toke. “You know, it’s not like I didn’t have a lot on my mind, right? And he kept wanting to know about the money, said I’d better give it to him in advance, and I said half of it up front, and then you took forever getting it for me….”

“How the hell did I end up with someone like you?”

Holding in smoke. Exhaling. “Because you’re lucky. So far. But that can change, you know.”

Rake is lost in a software world of pixels and Z ranges and histograms, panning, zooming, rotating, manipulating light angles, surface reflection, contour enhancement while Win stares at the big flat screen, looking at shadowy shapes in magnified 3-D.

He starts seeing a word, maybe numbers.

“An e, an r, a w, lowercase?” he suggests. “And three and ninety-six?”

There’s more. She keeps working, the words and numbers materializing. Odd-looking, almost overlaid.

“More than one note that’s left indented writing?” Win considers.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Rake says. “Could very well be indentations from different writings on different sheets from the same pad of paper. You know, you write a note, then another page down, write another one, and the pressure of the pen or pencil pressed against the paper is sufficiently strong to create an indented image multiple sheets down.”

She works some more and they make out what they can: three-year market exclusivity, and okay, and partly overlaying that, suggesting it was a separate writing on a separate sheet of paper, is $8.96 and what appears to be up from an earlier forecast of $6.11.