Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (13 page)

One of the victims was male, the other female, Waters related in the sheriff’s office. “We could tell because the uterus and the prostate gland are remarkably resistant to decomposition. Both victims were over the age of sixty-five and under the age of seventy-five—we could tell that from bone deterioration, particularly in the spinal column. If you need to narrow it down, I’d say the male was about seventy and the female maybe a couple of years younger. Any questions?”

There were none.

The pathologist and coroner sliced away bits of liver, heart muscle, and spleen, which they would need for tissue studies. They collected dried blood and cardiac fluid and a small amount of vitreous humor from one eyeball of the female corpse. The male corpse had no eyes. “Coyotes go for the soft stuff first,” Dr. Beckmann had explained to Waters. He had considerable experience at examining bodies recovered in summer following the previous winter’s avalanches. “Ears, nose, lips, eyes … This bother you?”

“Yes,” Waters admitted, wishing he hadn’t had poached eggs and pork sausages for breakfast.

Waters said now, “They had no broken bones. There was no evidence of violence. They both suffered sudden cardiac death. Heart attacks.”

Dennis said, “Does that mean it was a natural death?”

“Not at all. I’m just telling you the technical cause of death. Normally if we can’t find an obvious reason for death and people are far along in years, we call it ‘sudden cardiac death.’ It’s a catch-all. In this case, however, because of the peculiar circumstances, we did preliminary tissue and blood studies, and we found evidence of Versed and Pentothal in both bodies.”

“Tranquilizers,” Ray Bond explained, his face twitching.

“They’re a bit more than that,” Waters said patiently. “Call them control drugs. Versed is a quick-acting, strong sedative, a Valium derivative but more powerful than Valium. Hospitals use it before major operations. It’s for conscious sedation. If you had a badly dislocated shoulder and the doctor wanted to work on it without you screaming so that the patients in the waiting room would freak out, he’d use Versed. It’s also used in death-penalty states, like Texas. It precedes the lethal injection. Pentothal, on the other hand, is an anesthetic. Combined with Pentothal, Versed puts you to sleep, and for a couple of hours you don’t feel a damn thing.”

Dennis made some notes, then asked, “How available are Versed and Pentothal?”

“Hospitals, medical supply houses, and pharmacies all have them.”

“Then they’re not hard to find.”

“Not if you have access to those places.”

“Can either of those drugs cause a heart attack?”

“I personally don’t know of any cases where that’s happened. Neither did Otto Beckmann.”

Dennis frowned. “So Versed and Pentothal did
not
kill the two people at Pearl Pass.”

“That’s correct. I told you they died of a heart attack. But the heart attacks were induced. There was a
second
set of injections administered after the Versed and Pentothal—in other words, after the Does had been sent off to sleep. You follow?”

Dennis nodded. “What was in the second set of injections?”

“Beckmann and I did a study of liver tissue in both bodies, and we found a trace of potassium chloride. You know what that is?”

“A lethal poison.”

“Right. Quick-acting but not necessarily painless, unless the subject is premedicated with something.”

“Like Versed and Pentothal,” Dennis said.

“You see the sequence?”

He saw it: sedate them, then kill them. Theoretically a humane way to go, if the deaths were in any sense necessary.

“Potassium chloride goes into a vein with a hypodermic needle,” Waters said. “It induces immediate coronary infarction. You quit breathing, although in some instances the heart may actually keep on beating weakly for twenty or thirty minutes. Then you die. Heart stops, brain quits functioning. Dead by any definition.”

“How available is potassium chloride?” Dennis asked.

“Same deal. Hospitals, supply houses, pharmacies. Veterinarians too.”

“If it’s a lethal poison, how come it’s so readily available?”

“For doctors to give to people who have a major potassium imbalance. But I’m talking about very small doses, like three cc’s in a thou- sand-cc bag.”

“How much of it would you use if you wanted to kill someone?”

“It comes in vials of twenty milliequivalents mixed in with ten cubic centimeters of fluid for injection. Altogether, about a teaspoon. Ten of those vials—maybe a tenth of a liter—would do the job easily.”

“So you’re saying these people were tranquilized first and then murdered.”

Waters smiled thinly. “Murder is a legal term, isn’t it? I’m just telling you how they died. It could just as well have been euthanasia.”

“Wait.” Josh Gamble raised a hand. “In this state,” he said, for the benefit of both Dennis and the young coroner, “euthanasia is classified as murder.”

Dennis digested that and didn’t like the feel of it going down.

“Who would know how to mix up those injections?” Queenie O’Hare asked. “And how to administer them, and in what amounts? I sure as heck wouldn’t know. Would you, Josh?”

The sheriff shook his head. “I have trouble mixing a margarita.”

“And you, Mr. Conway?”

“Please call me Dennis. And the answer is no.”

Queenie was making notes on her yellow legal pad even as she spoke. “You’d have to be a doctor or nurse, or a medical technician of some sort, wouldn’t you?”

“Probably,” Waters said.

The sheriff groaned. “So have we got another Dr. Kevorkian in business around here?”

“Kevorkian never used a bow and arrow to kill his patient’s dog,” Queenie said.

“Yes, the dog.” Dennis leaned forward. “Would you mind backtracking a bit? I’d like to hear a little more about this dog.”

Queenie told Dennis about the Clark brothers’ discovery of the dead Scottish deerhound, the probability that the deerhound had been shot with an arrow, and how she tracked down its ownership to the late Henry Lovell Sr. of Springhill. She told him about her peculiar phone call to a less than candid Jane Lovell, and then to Hank Jr. at the Springhill marble quarry.

“There were no ID tags, so there’s no proof that it was
that
Scottish deerhound,” Dennis pointed out. Granted, it’s a rare breed. However, it could have been a different dog.”

“Faintly possible,” Queenie agreed. “But highly unlikely.”

She was naive on that score, Dennis realized. She didn’t understand that criminal defense attorneys made a handsome living pointing out to juries
that faintly possible
was the equivalent of reasonable doubt.

Josh Gamble, like a man conducting a small orchestra, waved back at the coroner.

“There’s another reason you’d have trouble drawing an analogy to Dr. Kevorkian in this instance,” Waters said.

“And what is that?” Dennis asked.

“I told you we found the cause of death,” the coroner said. “But we also searched the corpses for evidence of disease. Degenerative tissue, a tumor, anything. There was none. These people weren’t dying. These were remarkably healthy older people. Excellent muscle tone, all organs in good condition. Why would anyone need to commit a mercy killing?”

No one answered.

The sheriff said slowly, “Jeff, isn’t it possible that you guys missed something? Some esoteric brain or bone disease?”

“Possible,” Waters said. “Beckmann isn’t perfect. But it’s unlikely.”

Another
unlikely
to remember.

“Anyway”—Jeff Waters continued—”the bodies were pretty much mummified and frozen after the cold weather set in this past October, although the animal population up there had had their share of the extremities. We think both people died about the second week of August, but we could be off by as much as two weeks either way. We got good fingerprints, because there’s what we call skin slippage. The epidermis detaches, just like a glove.”

Josh nodded at Queenie. She said to Dennis, “But those prints don’t match up anywhere. Neither of the Does had a criminal record. Neither one was in the armed forces.”

“What about teeth?” Dennis asked.

“Dr. Beckmann called in the forensic odontologist, who also happens to be my dentist.” Queenie showed those near-perfect white crowns again, as well as some ingrained laugh wrinkles around the eyes. “His name is Howard Keating. I’ve got a little crush on him but he’s married to an ex-model from L.A. and they’ve got three-year-old twins, so I’ve given up a long time ago. Anyway, Howard produced a full set of postmortem X-rays for Jane and John Doe. I took them up to Springhill. Before I went to see your mother-in-law, Dennis, I dropped in on the local dentist, the one that Jane Lovell works for. You know him?”

“Edward Brophy,” Dennis said. “A good friend of my wife’s. I’ve skied with him. Tends to skid his uphill ski on the turns, but otherwise he’s a fine fellow.”

Queenie smiled and said, “Dr. Brophy still had the Lovells’ X-rays in a file cabinet in his storeroom, and we compared the ones from the postmortem on the Does. They didn’t match.”

“So the bodies in those graves at Pearl Pass are
not
Henry Lovell and Susan Lovell,” Dennis said. He was pleased, although he couldn’t work out precisely why.

“Doesn’t look that way,” Queenie said. “Also, before I left Springhill, I dropped in on Dr. Pendergast and had a quick look at the Lovells’ death certificates. Cause of death was congestive heart failure for him, pneumonia for her.”

“Then who are these people you found up there at Pearl Pass?” Dennis asked.

“The clothes are too rotten to trace them. We’ve given them over to a lab in Denver, but we don’t have much hope. We’re trying to track the rifle we found in the dog’s grave, but of course we don’t even have any proof that it belonged to either of the Does.”

Dennis leaned back in the easy chair and folded his arms. “Then will you tell me why you think my client, Beatrice Henderson, mother of three, woman of advanced years, is involved? That silver pillbox you found is hardly proof. She told you she lost it three years ago. Silver boxes, as I’ve pointed out, are not rare.”

Queenie glanced at the sheriff, and Josh Gamble said to Dennis, “It’s what’s in the box, my friend, that gives us pausé for thought.”

“And what is that?” Dennis asked, already unhappy in his anticipation of the answer.

“Pills,” Queenie said. “We had them analyzed. They turned out to be Cardizem, Ismo, and nitroglycerin whose brand name the chemist couldn’t determine with one hundred percent certainty, although he believes it’s Nitrostat. I’m sure those names are familiar, Dennis, after what your mother-in-law told us.”

“Yes,” Dennis said, “they do ring a bell.”

“We checked every pharmacy in the valley. There are only two other people besides Mrs. Henderson registered for all three prescriptions. One of them is a Glenwood man of eighty-six who’s paralyzed and gets around in a motorized wheelchair. The other is Judge Florian.”

Everyone smiled. Dennis said, “I see.”

“But as far as we know,” Queenie said, “neither the man in the wheelchair nor Judge Florian ever kept pills in a silver pillbox made in France.”

“Hold it,” Dennis said. “You’re leaving something out. Bibsy Henderson told you she lost her pillbox three years ago in Glenwood Springs. Scott Henderson, an officer of the court, confirms that. Even if the box you found in the dog’s grave could be proved to be my mother-in-law’s previous property, it’s probable that someone else had it in his or her possession or control the past few years. And that someone could have dropped it by accident, or even left it deliberately, up at Pearl Pass. Although I can’t for the life of me figure out why.”

“Yes, at first that’s what I thought,” Queenie said. “That would certainly be possible, except for one thing.”

“And what is that one thing?” Dennis asked, feeling a little battered. As a lawyer he had been battered before, in trial and in judges’ chambers and in deposition, but he never quite got used to it.

“Nitroglycerin pills start turning to powder after roughly twelve to eighteen months,” Queenie explained, “depending for the most part on whether the bottle they originally came in has been opened or is still sealed. I spoke to the cardiologist who prescribed the pills. People who use nitro are supposed to renew their prescriptions every twelve to eighteen months. If Mrs. Henderson lost that pillbox three years ago, the way she told us she did, the nitro inside it would be just white dust by now. But the Nitrostat in the pillbox was fresh. Without doubt it was less than fifteen months old. To kind of corroborate that, it was only last June that Mrs. Henderson renewed her prescription.” Queenie shrugged. “So you see, it makes no sense that she lost the box in Glenwood three years ago, and then someone found it and dumped the old nitro, and put in fresh nitro last August, and then planted it in the dog’s grave up at Pearl Pass. That would be a little unreal, don’t you think?”

“But not impossible,” Dennis said.

“That might be for a jury to decide,” Ray Bond said.

Dennis wheeled on him, glad to have an opponent. “You can’t be serious.”

Josh Gamble had already snapped an unfriendly look in Ray Bond’s direction. He turned back quickly to Dennis.

“Look, friend and able counselor, I personally find it hard to believe that a woman in her sixties who’s never done an illegal thing in her life, at least as far as we know, could be responsible for a wilderness murder and burial of two older people, whoever the hell they were. If she is, she sure as shit couldn’t have done it alone.”

Dennis said nothing in reply.

“What I
can
believe, however,” Josh said, “and what the evidence suggests, is that she or her husband might be mixed up in a case of euthanasia. Depends a lot on what Beckmann says about evidence of disease he might have missed. I don’t know the answer to that. And for the moment we won’t discuss the ethics of euthanasia. A lot of people don’t see mercy killing as murder, but the state of Colorado disagrees, and it’s my responsibility to investigate, and Ray’s to prosecute. Aside from the fact that it’s your in-laws involved, you got any reason to tell me my thinking is cockeyed?”