Body of Evidence (20 page)

Whatever the case, I thought, feb Price meant business. Glaser Safety Slugs were one of the worst things out, the cartridges packed with small shot that disperse on impact and tear through flesh and organs like a lead hailstorm. Mac Tens are a favorite occupational tool of terrorists and drug lords, the machine pistols a dime a dozen in Central America, the Middle East, and my hometown of Miami.

"You might consider putting a lock on the fridge," Marino added.

"I've already alerted Buildings and Grounds," I said.

It was a precaution I had put off for years. Funeral homes and squads had to be able to get inside the refrigerator after hours. The security guards would have to be given keys. My local medical examiners on call would have to be given keys. There would be protests. There would be problems. Damn it, I was getting so tired of problems!

Marino had turned his attention to Harper's body. It didn't require an autopsy or a genius to determine the cause of death.

"He has multiple fractures of the skull and lacerations of the brain," I explained.

"His throat was cut last, like in Beryl's case?"

"The jugular veins and carotid arteries are transected, yet his organs aren't particularly pale," I answered. "He would have hemorrhaged to death in a matter of minutes if he'd had a blood pressure. In other words, he didn't bleed out enough to account for his death. He was dead or dying from his head injuries by the time his throat was cut."

"What about defense injuries?" Marino asked.

"None."

I set down the scalpel to show him, one by one forcing open Harper's unwilling fingers. "No broken nails, cuts or contusions. He didn't attempt to ward off the blows of the weapon."

"Never knew what hit him," Marino commented. "He drives in after dark. The drone's waiting for him, probably hiding in the bushes. Harper parks, gets out of his Rolls. He's locking his door when the guy comes up behind him and hits him in the back of the head--"

"He has twenty percent stenosis of his LAD," I thought out loud, looking for my pencil.

"Harper goes down like a shot and the squirrel keeps swinging," Marino went on.

"Thirty percent of his right coronary."

I scribbled notes on an empty glove packet. "No scarring from old infarcts. Heart's healthy but mildly enlarged, and he's got calcification of his aorta, moderate atherosclerosis."

"Then the guy slashes Harper's throat. Probably to make damn sure he's dead."

I looked up.

"Whoever did it wanted to make sure Harper was dead," Marino repeated.

"I don't know that I'd attribute such rational thinking to the assailant," I replied. "Look at him, Marino."

I had deflected the scalp back from the skull, which was shattered like a hardboiled egg. Pointing out the fracture lines, I explained, "He was struck at least seven times with such force that none of the injuries was survivable. Then his throat was cut. It's overkill. Just as it was in Beryl's case."

"Okay. Overkill. I'm not arguing," he replied. "I'm just saying the killer wanted to make sure Beryl and Harper was dead. You nearly cut someone's damn head off, and you can walk away with the certainty your victim ain't going to be revived to tell the story."

Marino made a face as I began emptying the stomach contents into a cardboard container.

"Don't bother. I can tell you what he ate, was sitting right there. Beer nuts. And two martinis," he said.

The peanuts had barely begun clearing Harper's stomach when he died. There was nothing else but brownish fluid, and I could smell the alcohol.

I asked Marino, "What did you find out from him?"

"Not a damn thing."

I glanced at him as I labeled the container.

"I'm in the tavern drinking tonic and lime," he said. "I guess this was about quarter of. Harper walks in at five on the nose."

"How did you know it was him?" The kidneys were finely granular. I set them in the scale and jotted down the weights.

"Couldn't miss him with that mane of white hair," Marino replied. "He fit Poteat's description. I knew the second he walked in. He takes a table to himself and don't say nothing to nobody, just orders his 'usual' and eats beer nuts while he waits. I watch him for a while, then go over, pull up a chair and introduce myself. He says he's got nothing he can help me out with and he don't want to talk about it. I press him, tell him Beryl was being threatened for months, ask if he was aware of that. He looks annoyed, says he didn't know."

"Do you think he was telling the truth?" I was also wondering what the truth was about Harper's drinking. He had a fatty liver.

"No way for me to know," Marino said, flicking a cigarette ash on the floor. "Next I ask him where he was the night she was murdered, and he tells me he was in the tavern at his usual time, went home afterwards. When I ask if his sister can verify that, he tells me she wasn't home."

I looked up in surprise, the scalpel poised midair. "Where was she?"

"Out of town," he said.

"He didn't tell you where?"

"No. He said, and I quote, 'That's her business. Don't ask me.'" Marino's eyes fixed disdainfully on the sections of liver I was cutting. He added, "My favorite food used to be liver an' onions. You believe that? I don't know a single cop who's seen an autopsy and still eats liver ..."

The Stryker saw drowned him out as I began work on the head. Marino gave up and backed away as bony dust drifted on the pungent air. Even when bodies are in good shape they smell bad when opened up. The visual experience isn't exactly Mary Poppins, either. I had to give Marino credit. No matter how awful the case, he always came to the morgue.

Harper's brain was soft, with numerous ragged lacerations. There was very little hemorrhage, verifying that he hadn't lived long after sustaining the injuries. At least his death was mercifully quick. Unlike Beryl, Harper had no time to register terror or pain or to beg for his life. His murder was different from hers in several other ways, as well. He had received no threats--at least none that we knew about. There were no sexual overtones. He had been beaten versus stabbed to death, and no articles of his clothing were missing.

"I counted one hundred and sixty-eight dollars in his wallet," I told Marino. "And his wristwatch and signet ring are present and accounted for."

"What about his necklace?" he asked.

I had no idea what he was talking about.

"He had on this thick gold chain with a medal on it, a shield, sort of like a coat of arms/' he explained. "I noticed it at the tavern."

"It didn't come in with him, and I don't recall seeing it on him at the scene ..."I started to say "last night."

It wasn't last night. Harper had died early Sunday night. It was Tuesday now. I had lost all sense of time. The last two days seemed unreal, and had I not replayed Mark's message again this morning I would wonder if his call were real, too.

"So maybe the squirrel took it. Another souvenir," Marino said.

"That doesn't make sense," I answered. "I can understand the taking of a souvenir in Beryl's case, if her murder is the handiwork of a deranged individual who had an obsession with her. But why take something from Harper?"

'Trophies, maybe," Marino suggested. "Pelts from the hunt. Could be some hired gun who likes to keep little reminders of his jobs."

"I would think a hired gun would be too careful for that," I countered.

"Yeah, you'd think so. Just like you'd think Jeb Price would be too careful to leave a film box in the fridge," he said ironically.

Peeling off my gloves, I finished labeling test tubes and ether specimens I had collected. I gathered my paperwork and Marino followed me upstairs to my office.

Rose had left the afternoon newspaper on my blotter. Harper's murder and his sister's sudden death were the front-page headline. The accompanying sidebar was what ruined my day:

CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER ACCUSED OF "LOSING" CONTROVERSIAL MANUSCRIPT

The dateline was New York, an Associated Press release, and the lead was followed by an account of my "incapacitating" a man named feb Price after catching him "ransacking" my office yesterday afternoon. The allegations about the manuscript had to have come from Sparacino, I thought angrily. The bit about Jeb Price must have come from the police report, and as I shuffled through message slips, I noted that the majority of them were from reporters.

"Did you ever check out her computer disks? I asked, tossing the paper to Marino.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "I've been through 'em."

"And did you find this book everybody's in such a tizzy about?"

Perusing the front page, he muttered, "Nope."

"It's not there?" I broke out in frustration. "It's not on her disks? How can that be if she was writing it on her computer?"

"Don't ask me," he said. "I'm just telling you I looked at maybe a dozen disks. Nothing recent on 'em. Looks like old stuff, you know, her novels. Nothing about herself, about Harper. Found a couple of old letters, including two business letters to Sparacino. They didn't excite me."

"Maybe she put the disks in a safe place before she left for Key West," I said.

"Maybe she did. But we ain't found 'em."

Just then Fielding walked in, his orangutan arms hanging out of the short sleeves of his surgical greens, his muscular hands lightly coated with the talc lining the latex gloves he had been wearing downstairs. Fielding was his own work of art. God knows how many hours each week he spent sculpting himself in some Nautilus room somewhere. It was my theory that his obsession with body building was inversely proportional to his obsession with his job. A competent deputy chief, he had been on board little more than a year and was already showing signs of burnout. The more disenchanted he got, the bigger he got. I gave him another two years before he retreated to the tidier, more lucrative world of hospital pathology, or became the heir apparent to the Incredible Hulk.

"I'm going to have to pend Sterling Harper," he said, hovering restlessly at the edge of my desk. "Her STAT alcohol's only point oh-three, nothing in her gastric that tells me much. No bleeding, no unusual odors. The heart's good, no evidence of old infarcts, her coronaries clear. Brain's normal. But something was going on with her. The liver's enlarged, around twenty-five hundred grams, and the spleen's about a thousand with thickening of the capsule. Some involvement of the lymph nodes, as well."

"Any metastases?" I asked.

"None on gross."

"Put a rush on the micros," I told him.

Fielding nodded and briskly left.

Marino looked questioningly at me.

"Could be a lot of things," I said. "Leukemia, lymphoma, or any one of a number of collagen diseases-- some of which are benign, and some of which aren't. The spleen and lymph nodes react as a component of the immune system--in other words, the spleen is almost always involved in any blood disease. As for the big liver, that doesn't help us much diagnostically. I won't know anything until I can look at the histologic changes under the scope."

"You want to speak English for a change?" He lit a cigarette. "Tell me in simple terms what Doc-tor Schwarzenegger found."

"Her immune system was reacting to something," I said. "She was sick."

"Sick enough to account for her flaking out on her sofa?"

"That suddenly?" I said. "I doubt it."

"What about some sort of prescription drug?" he suggested. "You know, she takes all the pills and tosses the bottle in the fire, maybe explaining the melted plastic you found in the fireplace and the fact we didn't find no pill bottles or nothing in the house. Just over-the-counter crap."

A drug overdose was certainly high on my list, and there wasn't any point in my worrying about it at the moment. Despite my pleading, despite promises that her case would be a top priority, the toxicology results would take days, possibly weeks.

As for her brother, I had a theory.

"I think Gary Harper was struck with a homemade slapjack, Marino," I said. "Possibly a segment of metal pipe filled with bird shot for weight, the ends packed with something like Play-Doh to hold in the shot. After several blows, a wad of the Play-Doh flew out and the shot scattered."

He thoughtfully tapped an ash. "Don't exactly fit with the 'soldier of fortune' shit we found in Price's car. Not with anything Old Lady Harper might have thought up, either."

"I assume you didn't find anything like Play-Doh, mod eling clay, or birdshot inside her house."

He shook his head and said, "Hell, no."

My phone did not stop ringing the rest of the day.

Accounts of my alleged role in the disappearance of a "mysterious and valuable manuscript," and exaggerated descriptions of my "disabling an attacker" who broke into my office, had made the wire services. Other reporters were trying to cash in on the scoop, some of them prowling the OCME's parking lot or appearing in the lobby, their microphones and cameras ready like rifles. One particularly irreverent local DJ was sending out over the airwaves that I was the only woman chief in the country who wore "golden gloves instead of rubber ones."