Close to the Bone (28 page)

‘
My
ambition?’

‘You knew I’d never promote you to Leo’s position. So, get me out of the way and that sap Banachek becomes ME. You know you can get him to give you whatever you want.’

‘That’s insane.’

‘It is insane, because it will never work. I’m the Medical Examiner. You’ve only maintained your position because you and your cousin work the system. You probably framed Leo—’

‘
What
?’

‘—and the trauma of the past few days, added to the traumas of the past few years, have worked upon your delicate little mind until it broke. You’ve lost it, and no one is going to listen to you.’

She spoke through gritted teeth, determined not to let him get to her. ‘You might be surprised. And I am not leaving this office without this jar.’

‘Yes, you are. And when you do, it will be for good. You’re fired.’

‘Where’s James’ cellphone?’

He blinked. ‘What?’

‘You got the number from Don’s caller ID, when you huddled with him and Shephard, waiting for James to call. When you had a minute alone you called him and arranged a meeting. What did you tell him, that you knew who killed Diana, that you knew where the ring was? But then your call could be traced from
his
phone, so you had to take his phone with you. Is it here somewhere, too? I would think you would have learned to get rid of the evidence, given your line of work and all.’

‘Why would James agree to meet me? He didn’t even know me.’

‘Because James was about as desperate as a man could be. He wanted answers and knew the window to get them closed by the second. Did you know I was in the trunk?’

‘If I were the killer and I had—’ he smiled – ‘would you be standing here now?’

How could he not know? Theresa flashed back a few hours: James had said, ‘I’m
stashing
this woman.’ The listeners huddled around the phone had no idea where they were. They could have been in a safe house or a friend’s place where James locked her in a room or basement. Stone wouldn’t have heard her voice during the phone call. Unless James specifically mentioned her current location – and he hadn’t been in a sharing mood – Stone could have missed the possibility altogether.

It all fit. But she held the only possible proof in her hand, with no way out.

Like James, Stone had six inches and a hundred pounds on her, with those ski-pole-strengthened arms. And she had to let him attack first; otherwise he would use it as a sign of her mental instability. But he was also getting angry, frustrated at not getting his way, teetering on the brink of showing that famous temper.

‘I’m leaving with this jar,’ she said.

‘No.’

She started to walk past him. He put one hand on her neck and grabbed the jar with the other one, as if it were going to be that easy. She could smell his aftershave and the remnants of bourbon on his breath.

The movement caused the organ to shift inside its liquid bath. It bumped against the side of the jar, and in their frozen tableau they both heard the tiny, distinctive sound of metal against glass.

Suddenly, she knew. She could feel her eyes widen, and he returned her stare with narrowed lids. A decision had just been made, on both parts.

She hung on to the jar with both hands and kicked him in the groin. The angle wasn’t helpful and it wasn’t much of a kick, but she wrenched the jar back.

He bent slightly, then punched her in the face. It snapped her head back and put her off-balance. He pulled at the jar. There was no sound in the universe except their assorted puffs of breath and grunts of exertion.

Theresa kicked at his shin as hard as she could, and much more effectively than before, since she had gotten her spare work boots from her office closet. The steel toes came in handy. She tried for the groin again, but he knocked her back across the armchair, cracking her spine in not one but two places.

He leaned over and put his hands around her neck.

He can’t kill me, she told herself. He’ll never be able to explain it.

But she knew he could. He could take her body out the back, drop it in the park system somewhere and hope she’d be badly decomposed when found. The staff would come up with all sorts of scenarios in which she had gotten connected with James’ world and it’d bitten her in the ass.

Or he could hang her from a tree somewhere, or even in her office. Make it look like a suicide – it wouldn’t fool a decent pathologist for a second, but when he thoughtfully performed the process himself, sparing the other doctors and especially her pal Dr Banachek, then he could make her death look like anything he wanted. She had been upset. She had been traumatized. It wouldn’t look like a stretch to anyone who didn’t know her well.

Breathing in became an impossibility. Her throat burned as if it were on fire, and her face probably looked as red as his did, as it contorted with effort and fury and a force beyond reasoning. The back of her neck rested against the thin padding of the wooden arm, so her neck would snap if the suffocation didn’t get her first.

She tried to kick his sensitive areas, but her thighs stayed pinned open by his legs. She couldn’t attack his face because her hands were full with the jar. No handy letter openers or even a stapler sat within reach on the desk. Her vision began to narrow, the view nothing but stars.

She slid the jar out from between them and raised it over her head, let the other hand join them. Then she brought it down on to his skull as hard as she could. She heard the clunk, but missed the sound of breaking glass – the first indication she had that the jar had shattered were the nicks of small cuts from the broken glass against her fingers and then the stinging pain as wetness found them.

The effect was not immediate. The tension around her larynx eased by only an iota, not enough to let her suck in the oxygen she so desperately needed. But then the formalin coursed over his head and along his scalp. Theresa closed her eyes and turned her head as much as she could, but still she felt the cold drops on her temple and ear.

Then the corrosive formaldehyde mixture reached his eyes, and with a roar of pain he let go of her and straightened up. Theresa slumped to the side and fell to the floor, feeling more stabs to her palms and forearms. But that came as a distant sensation, far secondary to the glorious oxygen that now flooded her lungs. They pumped in and out, frantically, while the rest of her body lacked the energy to do anything else. She could have stayed unmoving for the rest of the night, but the pricks of searing pain in her hands and the burning of her skin and the spastic gruntings of the medical examiner as he lumbered around the room told her that she had to move.
Now
.

She opened her eyes, blinked for focus that didn’t want to come. A few inches away sat a smooth pink triangular balloon. Next to it sat a silver ring with a cluster of blue and white stones.

She pushed herself up, forcing slivers of glass further into her fingers.

The blurry figure of the Medical Examiner stumbled out of his office doorway, hands held to his face. A keening wail filled the air, and despite everything it made her want to go help him, to find a sink and a towel to flush out his eyes.

Then she thought of Diana Allman and instead reached for the phone.

She called the police, then scooped up the organ and the ring and went down the front staircase to the deskmen’s office.

THIRTY-THREE

T
he cops found Stone still in the men’s room, flushing his eyes with fresh water; a smart thing to do, except that every copious dousing found more formalin in his hair to bring forward, so a complete cleansing took quite a while. He had used the time to formulate a plausible scenario, in which a deranged forensic scientist broke into his office and attacked him, accusing him of multiple homicides to which she had a much closer connection than he had. He was lucky not to have lost either his sight or his life.

It wasn’t a bad job, Shephard admitted to Theresa. The man had an ability to think fast when it came to covering up his crimes. But as soon as the officers had gotten a look at the bruises on Theresa’s neck, the story abruptly became much less plausible.

Now she sat on a vacant autopsy table while a medic applied ointment to her irritated skin and bandages to the myriad of small cuts on her fingers. Don had brought her coffee, caffeine being her only prop with which to stave off a complete collapse. Zoe held a scale next to Theresa’s collarbone to get photos of the purplish handprints. The photographer had to shove Shephard out of the way more than once to get close enough.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Theresa said to him.

‘I’ll drive you home,’ he said immediately. ‘You’ve had a horrific day. I just want you to know … I’m sure you know that you shouldn’t be alone—’

‘I meant, for you to be a witness,’ she explained. ‘To whatever Christina might find in there.’

The pathologist stood at the stainless steel counter, carefully conducting the sectioning and examination of the uterus that should have been done ten years previously. The recovered sapphire ring sat on a clean cutting board under a magnifying lamp.

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘I don’t count?’ Zoe asked.

Theresa said, ‘We need someone who isn’t an ME office employee. We could all be conspiring to frame our boss.’

Her back to them, Christina snorted. ‘If I thought it would work I would have done the old lech in years ago. Any chance the formaldehyde bath will kill him? It’s highly toxic.’

‘Nah. He’d have to drink an ounce of close to forty percent solution. The stuff we fix organs in is more like four percent.’

‘Darn.’

The medic gave up, and Zoe went to photograph the disrupted interior of the office on the second floor.

Seated on the other vacant table, Don said, ‘I can’t believe he kept Diana’s uterus and her ring in a jar on his shelf for ten years like some sort of sick trophy. How could he be that warped, yet rational enough to run this place?’

‘Because Janice actually runs this place,’ Theresa said, ‘at least, to hear her tell it when she thinks no one can overhear. But I don’t think he’s warped, not that way – I think he hung on to them out of sheer paranoia. No way of getting rid of them would seem good enough. If he got caught with the ring he’d be sunk. If he took it home his wife might find it. If he threw it out a car window it might land in the lap of the rare honest person who could describe the vehicle. If he tossed it into the biohazard bag with the rest of her organs, the funeral home might find it when raking out the incinerator, and then he’d be worse off than before. We’ve seen so many ways in which the killer gets caught that, I’ll wager, nothing seemed like a sure thing. But he could send a biological specimen out of this room and be sure no one would want to handle or examine it closely. The uterus was a handy disguise. It also contained the only other piece of evidence against him.’

‘No maybe about it,’ Christina said. She turned to face the rest of the people in the room. ‘It’s here.’

‘She was pregnant?’ Theresa clarified.

Christina nodded. ‘I’ll make a tube for Don to test.’

The room fell silent, reflecting on both the child who never had a chance to be, and its dead mother.

‘So he had the stupid ring all along,’ Shephard said.

‘James was right,’ Theresa said. ‘The ring was the only piece of concrete evidence that would support his story. Stone found a moment alone with Diana’s body – not hard to do since there would have been hardly anyone else in the building. He removed the bag, took off the ring, put on a fresh bag and closed it with evidence tape, scribbled a passable facsimile of Cousin Casey’s initials. No one ever looks at them that closely.’

Don said, ‘And I didn’t; I just cut them off like I’d done a hundred times before and since. But why did he worry about the ring at all?’

‘I don’t know. It didn’t look wide enough to be engraved. But it was expensive – I didn’t say so to James, but those stones were definitely real. Maybe it was custom-made, or at least pricey enough that he thought it could be traced to him. He couldn’t be one-hundred-percent sure that Diana hadn’t told someone – me, her mother, a second cousin – about the affair, and that ring would be the only physical evidence of it. That and the baby, of course. That the missing ring cemented a case against James became the icing on the cake – just the man I want to see.’

Mitchell Causer had entered the room. He seemed disappointed to find her neither horizontal nor naked.

His expression went from salacious to suspicious. ‘Why?’

‘You said Stone kept bitching about having to be diener for Diana’s autopsy because he had trouble at home. Why did you say that?’

The man’s piglike eyes looked blank. ‘I dunno.’

‘You said you thought he had an argument with his wife. Why? What made you think that?’

‘I don’t know! It was a hell of a long time ago.’

‘But you told me that only yesterday. It must have been stuck in your mind for a reason.’

‘Yeah, but—’ The smoke in his eyes cleared. ‘Yeah – he had a red mark on his cheek. Like somebody smacked him.’

‘And you thought his wife had slapped him?’

‘No, I thought she laid him out with a right hook.’ Causer pondered this further, hand on his chin, thinking so hard that he almost looked intelligent. ‘He had, like, a scrape on his jaw and the beginning of a bruise. I ragged him about it for a while, but you know Stone. He don’t give nothing up.’

Theresa exchanged a look with Don, who hopped off the opposite table and went to where the ring sat. He pulled on gloves and raised it to the magnifying lamp for a closer look.

‘It’s got tissue in all the little settings and prongs,’ he said. ‘But that could all belong to Diana. Having sat in formalin for ten years isn’t going to help, either.’

‘Don’t give up,’ she warned.

‘Not until I’ve extracted every last cell.’

‘Take this too.’ Christina handed him a plastic tube with a screw top. ‘I’m giving the rest to Histology.’ She left the suite and, since Theresa clearly did not intend to start shedding clothes, Causer followed Christine’s bosom right out the door.