ColdScheme (2 page)

“Jesus!” Ken dropped the shopping bag.

My training kicked in. I dropped my groceries.

We turned the body over. Ken set to do the mouth-to-mouth. I
climbed on the hood and straddled the body.

I heard a sloshing sound when I started compressing his
chest. It sounded as if I stuck my hands into a washing machine, redistributing
soaking laundry.

The 7-Eleven was well lit. So was the gas station. The
victim’s sweatshirt was dark but I saw the blooming brown splotch when my
stacked hands pressed down. The Malibu was light metallic gray. There were
blood smears and rivulets streaming from the body. They beaded on the
hard-shine waxed surface. I couldn’t see an obvious point of bullet entry. His
entire chest felt ragged, spongy.

It had to be a large caliber projectile. When discharged, it
should have awakened the whole neighborhood. We didn’t hear anything while
inside the 7-Eleven. The clerk had been playing somber, classical music, a
dirge. The bullet that had left the man’s chest feeling like a freshly ploughed
field had to have been accompanied by a sonic boom. The 7-Eleven should be a
windowless shack by now.

Why didn’t we hear anything,
I wondered? The victim
could not have walked here without a rib cage. That’s what it felt like under
my hands.

“His chest is caving in. I have no place to compress,” I
said and raised my hands, dripping with blood.

“Keep trying.” Ken puffed and pinched the victim’s nose.

“Compressing his thighs is not going to do it. That’s the
only part of him that feels reasonably solid.”

“Find something!”

“There’s nothing more we can do here, Ken,” I sighed and sat
back.

I climbed down, picked up my purse and it stuck to my hands.
I shook it off, dropped it and looked around. There was nothing to use to wipe
my hands. I went for emergency measures—my suit pants—then picked up the purse
again.

Ken straightened up and backed away.

I found my phone. “I’m calling it in.”

“Hold on. His pockets look full.” He reached around the
bloody mess to search the man’s pockets. “Wallet.” He held out a fat black
square.

“Nothing else? No car keys?” I hefted the cell phone. We had
to call it in.

“Just a stuffed wallet.” He looked through the bulging
portfolio.

I glanced at the gas station again. “Maybe that’s his car.”
I pointed at the vehicle standing at the gas pump.

“Meg!” his voice rang sharply. “Take a look at this.”

I went over. “Are all those his…” We could have made a
couple of fans with the amount of plastic the victim carried in his wallet.

“Six driver’s license IDs, five credit cards, four
plasticized birth certificates, seven social security cards. Meg?”

I looked at the dead man. The fatal brown rose had spread
and started to soak into his jeans. His face was rigid, like a monument. His
cold stare looked up toward heaven. I hoped he would not get stuck in the
waiting line.

“A con artist, Ken?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe—but look at this and tell me I’m not
crazy?” He plucked two plastic squares from the wallet.

One was a plasticized social security card. It wasn’t legal
to cover documents in plastic but people did it for convenience and protection.
The other was a Maryland driver’s license.

“Jonathan Anderson Brick,” I said, dryly. The mountain of
paperwork on my desk sculpted in my head.

“He disappeared four years ago from a convenience store in
Dundalk,” Ken murmured.

In my mind’s eye, I saw him smoothing out the papers,
closing the folder and stacking it neatly between the metal partitions on my
desk.

“His was the third cold case file we worked on this
morning.”

Ken turned to look at the convenience store. “You don’t
think that…”

“No, Ken. Don’t you dare to even whisper it! He disappeared
from a 7-Eleven in Dundalk. We’re in Baltimore.”

“We’re in front of a 7-Eleven.”

“Ken! No one would spend four years, browsing through snack
aisles in a 7-Eleven. The selection is just not that great. I’m calling it in.”

* * * * *

I phoned Mrs. Tavalho. She knew what my job was.

My daughter and her friends were asleep—in a tent they’d
pitched in the living room. I thanked her and closed the cell. I dared not
imagine the mess of bedclothes and sheeting I would find in the morning.

Joe Smeddin had finished fencing with his tools above the
victim’s body. He stood aside, fingering his chin, steeped in thought. I knew
that forensic pathologists must not be disturbed when ruminating—lest they feel
threatened and draw their gun. Joe did it to me in the morgue, when I crept
closer to peek over his shoulder. I settled for evaluating the Malibu’s hood
ornament from the concrete sidewalk.

As a medical examiner, Joe abhorred educated guessing. When
he said something, it was gospel. He was over forty, tall, athletically wiry and
unpredictable. He could be as cranky as an eighty-year-old, or as spritely as
an elf. When he slouched, his humor was napping and caution was advised.
Squared shoulders and forward thrust head meant he was ready for a challenge.
The forensic staff was dusting the car for prints. It was a routine procedure,
calming like all steps that defined the infrastructure of police work. It gave
us an illusion of control. I doubted they would find any other smudges, besides
ours and the victim’s.

A couple of our colleagues were inside the 7-Eleven,
placating the owner with clichés. They urged him to play more classical music.

We’d already checked the gas station and come back. The
night attendant was a college kid. He liked his school crest so much that he
had the colorful Maryland globe tattooed above his wrist. He was morbidly
delighted with the flashing police lights. Then again, his job probably didn’t
stimulate anything but his bank account.

The black Grand Prix, sitting by the pumps, belonged to the
victim. According to the attendant, the customer never came in.

“Well, he got out of the car, reached for the pump and then
sort of looked up my way—surprised,” the attendant told us.

“Was there anything happening around here that might have
caused his reaction?” I asked.

“Nah.” His eyes skipped over my bloodstained pants. “He was
shot, wasn’t he?”

“Did you hear any unusual loud noises?”

“Nah. It’s been pretty quiet since I came on shift at six
o’clock. Gas prices shot up this morning.”

“So there was nothing unusual going on?”

He shrugged. “I guess he was surprised because his gas tank
lid was on the other side. You know, he pulled up the wrong way. A lot of
people do that, especially when driving someone else’s car.”

We had already searched the Grand Prix—and would do so
again. We just wanted to get the attendant’s first impressions, before the
incident became influenced by anyone’s imagination.

We had found three more IDs in the car—ownership and
insurance papers for Jonathan Anderson Brick and a business card for Mr. Jonathan
Anderson Twain, Assistant Sales Manager, Guilford Fine Cars, Import and
Domestic, Roosevelt Park, the Jamieson Car Market.

The car belonged to the victim. Whether anything else was
true, would be confronted later when we checked the car’s registration and the
insurance. Brick’s strange reaction had to be on account of something else.

“Did he look happily surprised or shocked?” I asked.

He blinked. “Well, no, I mean like he looked
startled…worried.”

“But you didn’t hear any loud noise?” I thought he might
have been shot as he got out of his car. Ken looked at me and I knew what he
thought. With a caved-in chest, Brick couldn’t have walked fifty feet to
collapse on top of the Malibu. Besides, if he were shot as he got out of his
own car, there would be blood and fragments all over the gas pump.

“I think I’ve seen him around here before, gassing up. He
was probably scoping out this place. Do you think he wanted to rob me and
decided to check out the convenience store first, you know, make sure there were
no witnesses around?” The kid was shopping for a story to spin for his buddies.

“Do you have a habit of leaving this place unattended?” I
asked crisply.

“Of course not. I never leave my station when I’m on duty,
never. You have nothing on me…”

“Then if he had scoped out the place before and was coming
back to rob your station, he would know that you never leave your post. He
wouldn’t have looked surprised when he saw you.”

The kid grimaced. “He might have pulled up, thinking the
place would be empty, you know, an attendant takes a washroom break.”

“So you do leave your station after all.”

“Never!” he replied indignantly.

“Then you have a good bladder.” I left him with that
compliment.

We went outside. The Grand Prix had been already packaged in
yellow tape, to make sure it would not be disturbed. The tow trucks should be
coming. I didn’t think we’d find anything revealing in Brick’s car. We already
had a ton of IDs, for Maryland, New York, Virginia and DC. We didn’t need more
false identities. We were going to be busy checking out those we already had.

“No sound, no chest, no clue,” I murmured.

“No luck,” Ken sighed. He looked to where his car sat, also
covered with police tape. The victim’s body still lay on the hood because the
photographer hadn’t finished. The vehicle would be taken for detailed analysis.
Its hard-wax shine probably wouldn’t survive. I could tell that Ken was
worried.

It was a beautiful night. The air felt soft, caressing. I
wanted to go home, sit on my porch with a cup of coffee and wonder whether Fate
had scribbled the words 7-Eleven on Brick’s birth certificate.

I hoped that Joe would not invite us to visit the city
morgue. He’d done it often enough, asking us to bring lunch, dinner or a
midnight snack. I didn’t mind dining in the morgue, as Joe skipped around,
flagrantly ignoring most basic laboratory procedures. He always liked to show
off with a saw in one hand and a piece of pizza or a drumstick in the other.
What I did mind was that Joe never paid his share for our group meals.

We stopped on the sidewalk and waited with stoical
acceptance of the pathological procedures in motion at the scene.

Finally, Joe finished his evaluation. He straightened up.
His shoulders settled into a perfect “T.” He thrust his neck forward. It was a
sign that we now had a permission to speak. He was in good humor but I was
aware that I still had to be careful about what I said.

“Approximate cause of death?” I smiled at the pathologist
who claimed he spent half his life studying to become an expert on death, just
so he could live twice as long as the rest of us.

“His chest exploded,” Joe said and folded his hands on his
chest.

“Immediate cause of death?” I had to get through protocol.

“His chest exploded.”

“Mechanism of death.”

“Blew the hell out of his chest and everything that was in
it.”

“Manner of death.”

I saw Joe’s evil smile even in the smoky shadow of the
store’s lights. “Natural causes.”

“I have ten bucks left, Joe. You can have a bucket of
chicken wings or whatever else ten bucks will get you. That’s it.”

“Nando’s Chicken is just a block up from the city morgue.”
His smile twisted even more.

“We have no car, Joe.” My eyes went to the Malibu, still
draped with its large human ornament.

Joe fished out his car keys and tossed them to me. “Take
mine. I’ll ride in the ambulance.”

“Joe…” I said slowly.

A shadow slid over his face, erasing the levity. His
shoulders sagged and he sighed.

“I think he had a pacemaker but I can’t be sure. I don’t
want to go burrowing through his chest out here.”

“Pacemakers don’t explode inside a patient’s chest.” I was
taken aback.

He shook his head. “This one did. Or at least I think that’s
what happened.”

“A silent explosion?” Ken asked.

“Revolutionary,” Joe said, giving him a troubled nod.

“Pacemakers aren’t installed into a patient’s chest under a
great deal of pressure. Not the kind that would do this,” I said.

“Like I said, revolutionary. It not only exploded inside his
chest but also damn well liquefied his internal organs. It had to be filled
with something powerful, corrosive, though I can’t think of anything that would
do that to a man’s organs so quickly.”

We had enough reasons to follow Joe and the ambulance to the
city morgue. A pacemaker that would result in the kind of damage he had
suggested was highly suspicious. I wondered whether any patient would
voluntarily let a doctor insert such a deadly device into his chest.

We were frequent visitors at Nando’s Chicken. We got quick
service but for once, I didn’t appreciate haste. It only got us to the morgue
that much faster.

“Whatever it was, it had to be filled with a powerful
toxin,” Joe said, as he rummaged through the food bags.

“Standard precautions?” I asked, already resigned to a short
life.

“No need. Whatever it was had burned out seconds after it
made a mess of him. It was that quick and potent.” He took a drumstick and
circled the table with Brick’s body.

Most forensic pathologists shied away from lifting human
bulk. That’s why they had dieners.

Joe was an exception. He had a hobby—popular mechanics.
Under his rule, the morgue was a cybernetic heaven. He had installed electronic
gadgets to move the bodies. Everything in the morgue was mechanically
controlled and operated. He liked to push buttons, move levers and twist knobs.
He delighted in turning screws and poking plates. All such motion produced
results—rotation, tilt, slide, angle, roll and slither. He could spare one hand
on food while doing his job with the other.

I heard a whispering noise. The table with Brick’s body
rotated so Joe could examine the chest. We moved to the other side.