The Price of Innocence (8 page)

Theresa retrieved another envelope and collected a piece of paper-thin fabric from the stump of the left leg. It remained entirely possible that someone meant to blow up the Bingham building and not themselves, using a detonator with a timer. She herself could have placed a nuclear reactor in the sublevel storage chamber without notice, as long as she brought it in piece by piece in cardboard boxes. Nairit could be an unlucky soul who went to drop off some data entry sheets exactly when the storage unit across the hall went kablooey. Maybe his company could not be located because they had moved, or had a name change.

Or Nairit had been manufacturing or storing extremely explosive devices, and accidentally – not even the most desperate terrorist would consider the Bingham worth a suicide attack – set them off. Explosive devices utilizing nitrogen triiodide. But why? What had he hoped to do with it?

And if he had achieved his goal, how many bodies would they have on their hands right now?

Christine straightened, rubbed her lower back with one hand. ‘So what’s on your mind?’

‘Huh?’

‘You seem distracted. What’s bugging you?’

Theresa glanced back at the dead fitness center worker, as Dr Banachek made the Y incision down her chest. ‘Other than a building collapsing on a bunch of people as they went about their daily business?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not to mention on top of nearly every piece of Medical Examiner’s Office evidence accumulated during the last century?’

‘Yes.’

‘And almost on top of me and Frank?’

‘Your face is looking better, by the way. But yeah, aside from that.’

Theresa paused to find a whitish crystal on the exposed patella, but it crumbled to dust – and without exploding – when she tried to remove it. Plaster. ‘Well, I did have a police officer shot to death while at a scene. That hasn’t been too easy to shrug off.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Theresa never knew how doctors did this, how they could look at the tone of your skin and gauge your weight and figure out what you didn’t even know that you didn’t want to tell them. They must spend a whole semester of med school on it. She tried again. ‘I met a man.’

‘
Hah
!’ Christine exclaimed, so loudly that Theresa jumped away from the steel table and nearly stabbed herself with the tweezers. ‘Sorry, I’ll stifle myself. What man? What is he like? Where did you meet him?’

‘Down, girl, down. I didn’t mean it like that. I meant—’ Theresa discovered she didn’t know exactly what she meant, so instead she started from the beginning, and told Christine about David Madison. Then she added what Frank had told her about David Madison’s wife.

‘Eww. Weird.’ The doctor wiggled a sharp object from behind the dead man’s shin bone.

‘Finding a sliver of concrete wedged between his tibia and fibula?’

‘Having an affair with a thirteen-year-old. The concrete is clean, it probably got in there during excavation. It’s one thing to have your wife leave you for another guy, but a kid? What does that say about you? Is he some kind of hulking brute that made her think of herself as helpless, so that she started to see this kid as a peer?’

‘He struck me as a big teddy bear. Of course, I only talked to him for about three minutes. How do you sleep with someone who’s the same age as your own child?’

‘Men do it all the time,’ Christine pointed out. ‘Though we hope they’re at least over forty and their daughters are grown. So you have to ask yourself, how much sympathy does this guy warrant? How many women have had to face the fact that their husband is sleeping with a student, or the office intern, or the babysitter? No one ponders what that does to
their
self-esteem.’

‘Maybe his self-esteem is OK. He probably just wonders what to tell his boys. The older they get, the more questions they’re going to have, if they haven’t asked them already. He must cringe every time he sees a news camera.’

Christine hadn’t left the topic of cheating men. ‘It’s not surprising men are attracted to younger women. Biology and society trains them for that. But when they cross the line from “younger” to “child”, then—’

‘They’ve crossed the line from scumbag to pedophile.’

‘Exactly. And there’s such a double standard for boys and girls, of course. Some people actually claim that early sexual activity isn’t as damaging to boys because they can’t get pregnant. Granted, it’s not going to disrupt their life like having a baby at twelve would, but their minds aren’t just going to brush it off because their bellies don’t grow.’ Christine warmed to her subject as she took a rubber hose and washed off a spot on the dead man’s wrist. ‘All I know is, kids have a right to be kids and grow at the same rate as their peers, and if that was my boy I’d show up at that woman’s house with a two-by-four and not a jury in the world would convict me.’

Theresa opined, ‘I say reverse the genders. If you would put a man in jail for molesting a thirteen-year-old girl, and of course we would, then you have to do the same for this woman. I just feel sorry for the ones she left in her wake. What do you have there?’

‘He’s got a deformity on the outer edge of his ulna.’ She pointed at the bone that ran on the outside of the arm, from the left hand to the elbow. It had an indentation, like a rough crater, just above the wrist.

‘An old break?’

‘No, not a break, not a calcium deposit … it almost looks like a burn.’

Theresa raised her eyebrows. ‘Burn? The man’s entire body is
crispy
.’

‘Don’t get cute with me, missy. I mean an old burn. The bone healed around it.’

‘Oh.’ Theresa leaned in closer. The campfire smell of the body competed with the scent of iodine and ammonia until she had to back up again, or sneeze.

‘Maybe not a burn,’ Christine muttered aloud. ‘But I don’t know what else could cause this, a cut would have … too bad I don’t have any flesh to see … we’ll have to get his medical records, ask his next of kin if he had an injury to his arm. OK, I’m going to hose the rest. Are you done?’

‘Yeah. I’ve pulled off every piece of trace evidence I could find. Do we
have
a next of kin for him?’

‘The Feds are supposed to find out. The parents are deceased, they told me that, but they’re searching for siblings, spouse, etc.’

‘No.’ A woman in a suit, the same woman Theresa had met at the scene, entered with her dour partner. ‘Sorry we’re late. They had a water main break on Euclid and we had to go around. I see you’ve started on our suspect.’

‘Victim,’ Theresa said. ‘No, you aren’t searching, or no, he has no next of kin?’

‘No,’ her partner answered. A man of few words. Though his face softened when he gazed at Christine, the Dudley-do-Right chin slacking just a millimeter. Christine’s source, no doubt.

‘None that we can find,’ the woman expounded. Nothing softened the lines that the intervening days had etched into her face; the agents had probably been working around the clock. ‘Parents died in Pittsburgh years ago, no siblings, never married.’

‘How does an Indian guy wind up part of a Georgian splinter group?’

‘The Vlads might have taken responsibility, but they don’t make a lot of sense. They’re a small group, no real activity on the board and we can’t confirm their numbers. They’ve created some riots in Georgia but no bombings, and have never done anything more violent in the US than write letters to the editor.’ The female agent said all this. When he could tear his gaze from Christine, the male agent merely looked around him as if he personally found everything in the room as repulsive as the flayed-open bodies.

‘So you think they’re just claiming the credit for someone else’s work?’

The woman shrugged. ‘It’s a theory. It also means whoever
did
stockpile the explosives is not about to step up and claim ownership.’

‘Sounds like they didn’t really mean to blow up the building. Makes me feel a little better,’ Theresa admitted.

‘I don’t see why,’ the woman sighed. ‘They were hoarding it for some purpose. If they didn’t intend to use it on the Bingham—’

‘Then their target is still out there.’

The woman nodded, and evaded a few more questions. Theresa couldn’t blame her. No one at the M.E.’s office had an official security clearance and several of them were incurable gossips.

Besides, Theresa told herself, this isn’t my case. Even the samples she had removed from the body would be turned over to the Feds, to be analyzed and identified by their laboratories.

Of course, no one said she couldn’t take a good look at them before she sealed them up. ‘I’ll just get out of your way, then.’

She took her envelopes and left. She didn’t ask if Nairit Kadam, when alive, had a deformity to his left wrist, or what he had done for a living, or how long he’d been in Cleveland. Christine, she knew, would question the agents without cease for every moment they were present. If one wanted to hang around that particular doctor’s autopsies, one had to pay the price.

Maybe the dead man knew nothing more about terrorists than what he saw on TV. But maybe he did. Maybe more destruction would explode in the city, today, tomorrow or the next day.

Keep working, she told herself. Just keep working.

L
ily Simpson must not have waited for the dog to dry before presenting herself to receive the booty of her inheritance, because she appeared in front of Frank the next morning as he stepped off the elevator.

‘Oh, hi,’ she said. ‘I was just coming to find you.’

‘Yeah?’ He juggled a Styrofoam cup of coffee without a lid and a lengthy list of felons to re-interview regarding the depth of their dislike for Marty Davis. Angela had gone to get the car and he needed to get out to the Ontario Street sidewalk before she had to double-park and create a traffic hazard. RTA bus drivers cut no slack for official cars.

‘I went to that lawyer like you said, and he said yeah I’m the beneficiary, but I can’t go get Marty’s stuff yet. It has to go to the probate court first or something like that.’

‘Well, that’s for lawyers to determine. It’s really got nothing to do with me.’ He sipped the coffee and tried to sidestep, but she moved more quickly and planted herself in front of him, bouncing her weight from toe to toe. She had put on jeans for her trip out of doors, with a thin sweatshirt and a zippered hoodie.

‘But it belongs to me now, so why do I have to wait for it? I’ve got a daughter in jail who needs a lawyer
now
. Marty would want me to have it,’ she added with solemn piety. ‘Can’t you hurry them up? You were his friend.’

‘I never met him.’

‘But you came to my house—’

‘I’m investigating his death. I was not part of his life. I’m sorry, Miss Simpson, but I have to go.’ He stepped around her and made for the revolving glass doors.

She stayed on his heels, even gaining ground during the trip. ‘So you need to talk to me, if you’re investigating. I know more about Marty than anyone.’

‘You hadn’t seen him for over a year.’

‘I know what matters.’ She plunged through the glass doors ahead of him. Angela waited on the other side of the row of marked and unmarked police vehicles at the curb, causing a minor backup. He circled through the doors and prepared to run the gauntlet of Lily Simpson, hoping to do so without spilling coffee on his semi-good pants.

‘I’m just saying,’ she said as soon as he broke out of the pocket of glass, ‘that maybe whoever killed him came from way back, too, like me.’

‘Because of an old grudge? You got someone in mind?’

‘No,’ she admitted, drawing out the
o
.

He studied her eyes, blue and jumpy. ‘Are you on something?’

‘No.’ This time with more firmness but less conviction.

Frank would have bet his paycheck that Lily had seen a windfall coming and celebrated, the only way she knew how – not with champagne but with another kind of crystal. He could haul her back inside, do a DRE exam by making her follow his pen with her gaze to check her pupils, and then arrest her if she failed. But Lily would be out smoking more of it before nightfall and he needed the time to investigate a murder. ‘I really can’t help you with his estate, Lily. As far as I know, those things take time and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. He only died on Monday,’ he added, wishing he could use the impolitic but blunt phrase
his body’s barely cold
. He dumped the coffee cup – nothing without a lid could enter the pristine Crown Vic – and dove into the sanctuary of the passenger seat.

‘Horns are blaring,’ his partner informed him.

‘They’ll get over it.’

Somewhere in the middle of this statement the rear door opened and Lily Simpson jumped into the back seat, just as the vehicle began to move.

‘Um—’ Angela said.

‘
Ma’am
.’ Frank still knew how to say the word with that voice of absolute authority, perfected during his patrol days, and he used it now. ‘Ma’am. You can’t
do
that.’

‘We don’t usually have people jumping
into
a cop car,’ Angela remarked. ‘They try to get out, yes, but not in.’

Lily seemed quite at ease there, her face slightly screened by the metal mesh divider. She hugged herself with both arms and said, ‘I need a ride. My car died again, and I figure you guys are probably going to Marty’s place anyway, right? I need to talk to his landlord.’

Frank said, ‘Lily, I can’t help you with the legal process, and we are not a taxi service. You’re going to get out at the next light.’

‘I can’t get out. This is a cop car, right? Handles don’t work in the back seat?’

‘You would know,’ Frank said.

‘What?’

Perhaps he could annoy her out of the vehicle. ‘I ran your stats. They’re pretty impressive for the beneficiary of a cop. Four warnings and eight arrests in the past fifteen years, five for drug possession and three for soliciting.’

This only made Lily settle deeper into the upholstery and stare out the window with a sullen cast to her face.

Frank spoke to his partner instead. ‘Convicted of three of these eight offenses, serving a total of two years in two different sentences.’

Angela said, ‘That’s our justice system. Eight arrests and she serves two years.’