Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (11 page)

“I’m worried about the bugs you might let in—especially the dermestids. They’re dry-tissue eaters, and they’d love to make a snack out of my mounted specimens.”

Kathryn stood motionless in the open doorway until he finally glanced up reluctantly from his microscope.

“Pretty please?”

Nick studied the standing form of Kathryn Guilford. She was tall, he observed, about 175 centimeters—maybe more. She was wide in the shoulders, with a very lean body mass—perhaps
an athletic background. The thorax tapered tightly toward the abdomen, producing a full, rounded curve of the hips. The legs were long and tanned and very lean. The face was equally lean; the zygomatic arch was prominent, producing a high cheekbone, and the nose was long and straight, ending almost in a chisel point. The eyes were wide and very green. The hair was a deep auburn, and she seemed to make less fuss about it than women typically do. Right now she wore it down, but he could imagine it pulled back in a thick ponytail. Green eyes, auburn hair, and a spray of freckles across the nose. Overall it was a pleasing figure, one that Nick imagined some men would find quite beautiful.

Kathryn stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind her. She rolled out a chair from under the table to her right and sat down across from Dr. Polchak. “You’re probably surprised to see me.”

“I’m surprised to see anyone at this hour. Don’t you ever sleep?”

“I have something for you.” She reached into her purse and handed him a folded slip of paper. “It’s a check.”

“Yes, I’ve seen one before.” He turned the check over and held it up to the light as if it might not be real. “One thousand dollars. That’s slightly less than the amount we agreed upon.”

“I think a thousand dollars is an adequate fee for a single day’s work,” she snapped. “I see no reason to continue this investigation after … after tonight.”

Without a word Nick turned back to his microscope. He carefully removed the glass specimen slide and slid the edge of Kathryn’s check under the chrome holding clips instead. He peered once again into the eyepiece. For several moments he studied it—focusing, shifting, then focusing again.

“For crying out loud,” Kathryn said, “it’s good.”

“Not good enough.” He looked at her again. “Give me one good reason why you should drop this investigation.”

“One good reason! The only reason I started all this is because I believed that Jimmy could never have taken his own life—and then tonight I learn that he was a user! I never thought that could be true of him either. Maybe I was wrong about him … maybe I was wrong about everything.”

“The sheriff believes that cocaine had nothing to do with your friend’s death—that his drug use was a symptom of his struggle, and not the cause. Do you agree?”

She thought carefully. “Yes,” she said slowly, and then with more confidence, “yes, I do.”

“Then the cocaine tells us only two things: one, that your friend was indeed troubled—which we already knew—and two, that your friend the sheriff is willing to withhold information from you.”

“He did it to protect me.”

“So he said.” Nick studied her eyes closely. “And you obviously believe him.”

Kathryn ignored the remark. “So you think there’s good reason to continue the investigation?”

“I don’t think there was ever good reason to begin—but then, this is not about reason, is it? You came to me because you had a hunch. Your friend could not have died by suicide, you said, because he was incapable of taking his own life. Nothing has changed about that. I just hate to see you give up a good hunch for a bad reason.”

Kathryn gazed at him in confusion, trying to make sense of this strange assortment of riddles. Suddenly it all became clear to her.

“This is all about money, isn’t it? Give me back my check!”

Nick reached into his breast pocket with two fingers and removed the folded paper. Straightening his arm, he dropped the paper to the floor in front of him and slowly slid it forward with his left foot. Kathryn snatched up the check and spread it out on the worktable beside her, furiously crossing out numbers and figures and writing new ones in their place.

“There!” She tossed the check back on the floor in front of him. “Five thousand! Now is there a good reason to call it off?”

Nick sat motionless, continuing to study Kathryn’s eyes.

“The body was moved,” he said quietly.

Kathryn was stunned. Jimmy’s body—moved? But who would move it? And why? Her mind raced with all the possible implications of this revelation—but all that came out of her mouth was an astonished, “What?”

“The blood that circulates in your body is red due to the presence of oxygen. When a body dies, the blood becomes purple—almost
black—and it pools in the lowest parts of the body. The blood actually stains the surrounding tissues, and after six to eight hours the stain becomes permanent. This is a condition known as ‘fixed lividity.’”

Nick laid his right arm out flat on the table beside him, palm up. “I die. My body falls to the ground—like this.” He nodded to the arm. “The blood drains to the dorsal surface—down here—and eight hours later the bottom of my arm is permanently stained. Now if someone comes along after eight hours and flips me over, the blood will no longer pool to the bottom—the stain will stay on top. I died this way”—he flipped his arm over—“but my body was discovered this way. Guess what? I was moved.”

Kathryn squinted hard.

“At the funeral home, our two young body baggers told us that they found the body like this.” He leaned back in his chair and extended his arms and legs straight out. “Exactly like this. The sheriff seemed to concur. Flat on his back was the way he put it, I believe. But during our little examination I removed your friend’s shoes. The left foot was stained along the heel, continuing up the back of the leg—exactly as it should be if the leg lay flat for the first few hours after death. But the right foot was completely purple, top and bottom, with the stain ending just above the ankle. That means, Mrs. Guilford, that he may have been found ‘flat on his back’—but he didn’t die that way.”

Kathryn sat more and more erect as the full meaning of his words began to sink in.

“That means,” she said excitedly, “that when Jimmy died his leg must have been in a position more like … like …” She dropped to the floor and stretched out, then drew her right foot up tight against her buttock with her knee pointing toward the ceiling. “Something like this.”

“Very good, Mrs. Guilford.”

“And then later—six to eight hours later—someone must have laid it flat. But if someone was there within hours of his death, then someone may have been involved in his death. That means Jimmy didn’t kill himself!”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“But,” she said, snapping upright, “somebody moved the body!”

“Not necessarily. All we know is that somebody—or something—moved the leg. Suppose your friend shot himself, as the sheriff is convinced, and when he fell the leg was somehow propped up.”

“But what would keep the leg in that position?” She lay back again and experimented with her foot in different positions. Each time her leg swung outward and fell. “There’s no way,” she said. “It won’t stay like that.”

“Suppose something supported it.”

“Like what?”

“A rock. A branch. A bush.”

“Was there anything like that around?”

“I have no idea.”

“And even if something did support it,” she went on, “what would make it lie flat again?”

“The rock shifts. The branch breaks. The bush dies.”

“How likely is that?”

“I have no idea.”

“Then all we’re doing is guessing here. Isn’t there any way we can check this out? Can’t we go see the spot where the body was found? Can’t we look around for dead bushes and broken branches?”

Nick leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in front of him. “You mean, can’t we investigate?”

Kathryn sat quietly for a moment, then picked herself up from the floor. She walked very slowly around the office, carefully considering the choice she was about to make. She came to the large, glass-doored unit in the corner of the room and stopped. Looking in, she saw the collection of plastic containers. Each contained three or four wiggling white maggots hungrily feeding on strips of raw chicken liver—all except for two containers. One contained the infamous Bubba, who was responsible for beginning the entire brouhaha earlier that evening. The other, containing a single specimen of ordinary size, bore the simple label “?”.

“What is this thing?” she asked, running her hand along the polished chrome trim.

“It’s a Biotronette—a breeding unit,” he said. “It allows us to simulate the precise environment in which the larvae were collected. It allows us to rear them to adult flies.”

“Why do we need to do that?”

“When they mature, we’ll be able to identify their different species.”

“And what will that prove?”

“Everything. Nothing. It all depends on what we find.”

Kathryn sat down again across from Dr. Polchak. She sat staring at his frosted glasses, trying somehow to connect with the elusive spheres behind them. It was impossible; they darted and evaded her gaze like startled minnows. She knew that she was at a decided disadvantage in this negotiation. He could peer into her thoughts, but she had no access to his.

“If this is not about money,” she said cautiously, “then why do you want to finish this investigation? You never wanted to start this in the first place—so why do you want to continue now?”

“I have my reasons. The only thing that matters to you is that I’m willing to continue. A more important question—and one that may have a direct bearing on this case—is why you want to continue.”

“I didn’t say I did.”

He said nothing in response, but slowly raised one eyebrow; it arched up from behind his glasses like a cat rising from sleep. He leaned forward until his elbows rested on his knees.

“What I want to know,” he said slowly, “what I need to know—is why this is so important to you. Why do you have to know what happened to Jim McAllister?”

For an instant the elusive eyes came almost to rest on hers. The sudden intensity of his gaze startled her, and she rose so quickly from her chair that she sent it clattering across the linoleum floor. She turned and started for the door—then stopped. A full minute later, without turning, she began to speak.

“My father died when I was seven. For my sixth birthday, he gave me a beautiful sweater. It meant everything to me, especially … after. One day the sweater just disappeared. Gone. I looked all over town for it. Did I lose it? Was it stolen? I asked everyone I knew, and a lot of people I didn’t. You know, I never found it. Never,” she said with a shrug. “At first, all I wanted was the sweater back. But the more I searched for it, the more I just wanted to know what happened to it. By the end, I think I would have given up the sweater itself if only I could know.”

“So this is all about a sweater.”

Kathryn wheeled and glared at him. She gave her chair an angry shove and it rocketed across the floor toward Nick. He stopped it with his foot, nudged it a few feet away, and motioned for her to sit down. She stood silently for a moment, carefully weighing the potential benefits versus the definite risks of continuing her story.

She straddled the chair and slowly sat down again.

“I told you that the three of us grew up here—Jimmy, Peter, and me.” She paused. “There was a fourth. His name was Andy.”

“Ah,” he said, recalling Mr. Schroeder’s inquiry that afternoon. “That would be Andy whose ‘body has never been recovered.’”

“You don’t miss much.”

“That’s what people pay me for.”

“The three of them were like brothers—too much like brothers. It was always who is the fastest, who is the toughest, who is the best. If one of them went out for football, all of them had to go out for football. And then it was who is the captain, who scores the touchdown, who is first-string.” She shook her head. “You know how boys can be.”

“I’m familiar with the species.”

“They competed for everything.”

“Including you?”

Her face reddened slightly but she made no reply. “About ten years ago they all took a drive up to Fort Bragg together—that’s where the 82d Airborne is based. One of them decided to sign up and—”

“I’ve got the picture.”

“Andy and Jimmy were assigned to one unit, Peter to another. In the spring of 1990 things were heating up in the Persian Gulf and the U.S. was starting its buildup of forces. The boys got the word that the 82nd Airborne might be deployed to Saudi Arabia—”

“And Andy decided to make sure the cow was tied up before he left the barn,” Nick broke in, “as they say in Holcum County.”

“We were married in July. Three weeks later they were called up. Andy …” She stopped. She couldn’t stand to look at Nick any longer. Even if he really needed to know, she couldn’t bear to tell the rest of the story to those eyes—eyes that would flit and hover over her words but never care enough to land on any of them.

“Andy was apparently killed in action near Al Salman Airbase in Iraq.”

“Apparently killed?”

“Remember Vietnam? By the time it was all over, there were more than eighteen hundred MIAs. It was an unbelievable mess—mothers waiting to hear about their sons, kids praying for Daddy to come home. It’s still going on today, thirty-five years later. After Vietnam the Defense Department said ‘never again.’ They started collecting a DNA sample from every soldier. Now if they find nothing but a finger on the battlefield, they still know it’s you. No more eternally grieving mothers, no more Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.”

She glanced up to check for telltale signs of inattention or indifference, anything that would give her an excuse to protest and bring her story to a premature end. But Nick sat transfixed, waiting patiently for her to continue.

“Do you know how many MIAs there were in the Persian Gulf? None. Zero. But what they don’t tell you is that there were thirteen soldiers who just disappeared. Oh, they know what happened to them—so they say. A Tomcat missed the net and rolled off the flight deck, there was a direct bomb hit, that sort of thing. So they came up with a new category to cover those situations: ‘Killed in action, body not recovered.’”