Authors: Lisa Black
She had, landing as senior counsel to a small firm of personal injury lawyers. Small enough that she answered the phone herself and assured Shephard that she had not been beaten or killed or even contacted by James Allman. In fact, she hadn’t heard from him in years and did not know that he had been released on parole. If he had wanted to find her it wouldn’t prove difficult – she had married but retained her own name for professional reasons, and the PD routinely gave her contact information to former clients and other attorneys who might want to reach her about past cases.
Shephard gave her a vague update on the situation, but enough to impress upon her the importance of caution in the next few days to weeks. Just because Allman hadn’t contacted her yet didn’t guarantee she wasn’t on his list. He might be getting around to it. The presence of a husband in her home might be the only reason she had been spared – so far.
‘Though he seems to be focused on the medical examiner’s office, for some reason,’ Shephard said to no one in particular after he hung up. ‘Strange.’
‘Very strange,’ Theresa said. For all the people she had helped put in jail, she never seriously worried that one might come back at her. After a criminal had been arrested by the cops, testified against by witnesses, friends and sometimes family, prosecuted by lawyers, judged by a jury and sentenced by a judge, they were not likely to have any ire left for a lab tech or pathologist. Theresa had certainly never worried about it and truthfully didn’t feel she had reason to worry now. Her name appeared only once in the medical examiner’s report – where it stated that the tapings from the clothing had been submitted to her for fiber analysis. She had never done it – by the time she could face looking at them, the husband had been caught and a plea seemed certain. ‘You’re in the file more than I am,’ Theresa said to Don. ‘You’re in the actual autopsy report.’
‘Just the fingernail scrapings.’
Which normally would have been her job, but on that day he had told her, gently but firmly, that he would take care of all the trace evidence tasks relating to Diana and she should go home. And she had. She had not seen her friend’s body, not that day, not at the funeral. The strangulation had made an open casket too difficult, and it would have been a further crime to see a woman as beautiful as Diana looking less than stellar at her final appearance. ‘And you got DNA off the jump rope.’
Don switched his attention to the trace evidence report. ‘But we never received James Allman’s buccal swab to compare it to. He entered his plea, and that was that. I also never tested the swabs of the coffee cups. No point in wasting reagents on a closed case.’
She picked up the toxicology report. ‘I wonder if his attorney would have seen a copy of Dr Cooper’s report.’
‘Doubt it. He doesn’t finish those for weeks after the death. Sounds like James had already pled and been sentenced by then. Anything in it?’
‘
N, N
-dimethylimidodicarbonimidic diamide hydrochloride. Doxylamine succinate. Oh, and three, four-pyridinedimethanol, five-hydroxy-six-methyl-hydrochloride.’
‘You’re not helping,’ Shephard complained. ‘Summarize it.’
‘Nothing illegal, nothing mood-altering, nothing that would have contributed to her death.’
‘See how easy that was?’
Don said, ‘Basically, we reported nothing from this office that either sunk or exonerated James Allman.’
Theresa said, ‘So why is he killing men who work at the medical examiner’s office?’
‘Don’t get comfortable with the “men” part. He could expand his parameters to any name in that file at any moment. Face it – we need to go into defensive mode. From now on it’s the buddy system. You don’t leave my sight until he’s caught.’
‘And you don’t leave mine.’ She tamped down her smile but couldn’t erase it completely. ‘We can make popcorn and build a fort out of the sofa cushions.’
‘I’m serious, Theresa.’
‘So am I. Believe me, I’m serious.’ But also delighted.
‘I’m fairly serious myself,’ Shephard intoned from across the table. Then he made some more phone calls – to the arresting officers, then to the prosecutor, who he told to warn the judge.
Allman was out and might be looking for revenge.
Or something.
Theresa steeled herself again and slid the autopsy photos out of their assigned envelope. She knew what she would see, but still the sight of her friend’s naked body lying flat on a cold steel table took her breath away. The slender arms, full breasts and dark hair all seemed as graceful as they had in life, but the swollen, mottled face did not belong to the Diana she had known.
She passed to the next photo. Close-ups of the limbs, the slender but unremarkable feet and legs, arms, the nails of her right hand, chipped.
‘Reese did the autopsy,’ Theresa said aloud. ‘But who acted as diener? It probably would have been another pathologist.’
Don flipped to the front of the autopsy report. ‘It’s not filled in.’
Theresa flipped to the next photo. ‘What about Reese’s notes?’
‘Yeah – here. It’s … crap, can you read that?’
She glanced over. The ink scrawl next to the printed title
Diener
appeared, like so much of Dr Reese’s handwriting, to be illegible. ‘No idea,’ she said. ‘But I can make a guess.’
‘Really? How?’
She held up a photo of Diana’s left hand, showing the damaged nails and a slight smear of blood under one of them. The limp hand had been held open by someone who wore blue latex gloves and, beyond all these sets of fingers, a silver John Cena belt buckle.
‘Causer,’ Don said.
FOURTEEN
O
nly a few autopsies had been completed by late afternoon. The rest – including the cooling body of pathologist Reese – waited in the walk-in refrigerator, anonymous in their zipped-up bags. The office had toughed it through Darryl Johnson’s autopsy, but Dr Reese’s murder added up to too many shocks in too short a time, so despite the Police Department agitating for a report, the procedure had simply been shelved. At last it had been decided that the medical examiner himself would come in early the next day and complete the autopsy before the rest of the staff arrived. This would avoid any more taxpayer-funded hours off for county personnel. Dr Banachek, voted Least Likely to Complain, would function as diener. Everyone knew what a report would say, anyway: death due to cerebral trauma. Homicide.
And so Theresa found Mitchell Causer alone in the autopsy suite, mopping the floor. The dieners were responsible for clean-up, as well as making the Y-incision and snipping the ribs with garden shears. They could not leave until every bit of blood had been washed away and the stainless steel gleamed. If this occurred as early as one in the afternoon, they still got paid eight hours – if it occurred at four thirty, not so much, but still it was a perk of the job as well as the most effective incentive for workplace efficiency ever.
For everyone except Causer. He either disliked the drudgery too much to force speediness or he had no home to go to, because while everyone else had cleared out he had swabbed only half the floor and had a sink full of trays, forceps and knives to clean. The tiny specimen room still had a stack of jars to be labeled and dispersed through the building. Causer pushed the mop up and back, missing the corners and humming tunelessly to himself. He had thin black hair, swept back with gelled flair, thin clothes, a thin frame and nicotine-stained fingers. No official wrestling belt buckle today, but a silver number embossed with a gold skull. The pot belly had faded over the years, but he still seemed to own more belt buckles than he owned shirts.
‘Ms MacLean,’ he said the moment her foot hit the threshold. He leaned, quite literally, on the mop and swept her from head to toe in one unblinking gaze, pausing slightly at chest level. ‘What can I do for you? And please feel free to say what you can do for me.’
‘Do you remember Diana Allman?’ She didn’t waste time with pleasantries or small talk or to ask how he fared in the wake of two co-worker deaths in the space of one morning. He would not pretend to care about any of that, which, in a way, made this easier. She didn’t feel up to any sentimental reminiscing about Diana, Darryl, Dr Reese or anyone else right now. Emotions were bubbling too close to the surface for comfort.
‘How could I forget?’ he said. ‘A figure sharp enough to pop a balloon and lips that I bet could— Yeah, I remember.’
‘Did you act as diener for her autopsy?’
‘Me? No.’
That threw her off her stride for a moment. ‘Are you sure? There’s a picture of you from the autopsy, holding her hand for the camera.’
‘Oh, I was
there
.’ He resumed mopping, thought better of it, and rested the handle against the tiled wall to give her his full, reptilian attention. ‘But I wasn’t diener.’
‘Dr Reese did the autopsy—’
‘Yes.’
‘Then who acted as—’
‘Stone.’
She goggled, which amused the man. ‘Oh, yes. He might be the lord and master now, but ten years ago he was just another rookie pathologist straight from passing his boards, turning green from sectioning the bowel and sneaking a smoke in the specimen room to keep himself from puking. Kind of surprising that he’s risen so far so fast, eh? Makes you wonder if he’s got a picture of the mayor with a goat or something like that.’
Theresa thought back to the autopsy report. The scrawled name
could
have spelled ‘Stone’. ‘If you weren’t diener, then why were you there?’
‘Miss a chance to see Diana D-cups naked? Not on your life.’
After so many years working around the dead and violent and depraved, there were very few statements that could shock Theresa MacLean, but this very nearly did. And despite how long she had known Mitchell Causer, she still had to fight the urge to throttle him on the spot. ‘She was
dead
.’
‘And still a D cup. Impressive girl.’
Theresa bit back what she wanted to say. ‘What do you remember about that day?
Besides
the D-cups?’
Of course, Causer could not answer a simple question. That would have been out of character. ‘Why do you want to know?’
She couldn’t think of a lie and thought the truth might stimulate him to search his memory more stringently than a vague inquiry anyway. ‘We think the murders of Darryl and Dr Reese might be somehow connected to Diana’s murder.’
‘Her husband killed her,’ Causer said immediately.
‘I know. We can’t figure it out either. So, what do you remember?’
‘Got a cigarette?’
‘No.’
She watched him try to think of some other appropriate bribe … They weren’t in a bar, so she couldn’t buy him a drink. They weren’t in a restaurant, so she couldn’t pick up his tab. He glanced her over as if considering what would happen if he requested a sexual favor; his conclusion must have involved bloodshed because he apparently thought better of it and leaned against the steel table, the mop forgotten. ‘Well, let’s see. They found her at night, but of course the county wouldn’t pay overtime so she stayed in the cooler with the rest until the next morning. They let everyone come in and then sent them home. Like they did today – they wait until you’re already up and then they call and tell you to go back to bed. Kind of pointless, but that’s the county.’
‘But you did go back to bed,’ Theresa couldn’t resist pointing out. ‘This time, you didn’t come in when you didn’t have to.’
‘Like I want to see Darryl Johnson naked?’ Causer gave a derisive snort that could be heard on the third floor. ‘So yeah, I sidled in here that morning anyway. I was married at the time and would have gone to the sewer plant if it got me out the house. And there she was, naked as a jaybird. Not even those diamond studs she used to wear in her ears. Her face didn’t look so good – Diana’s. Mottled, swelled up.’
Theresa swallowed, hard.
‘But the rest of her looked okay – yeah, not just her breasts. No bruises or cuts, if that’s what you’re wondering. Nobody raped her, the doc said. No injuries to her goody bag, nothing gooey hanging around, you know. I thought that was strange – what was the point of throttling her until she went limp if you weren’t going to—?’
For once, he exercised the extremely small amount of discretion of which he were capable, and stopped there.
‘But you were photographing the—’
‘I’m helpful that way.’ And he probably wanted to be able to say that he had put a hand on Diana Allman’s flesh. Even if that flesh had been cold and unmoving. ‘Anyway, once Stone cracked the ribs I sort of lost interest. But I remember that her lungs were clear – didn’t smoke. Nothing much in the stomach, what looked like pretzels or crackers or something. Probably how she kept that figure.’
‘What did you guys talk about?’
‘Other than—’
‘Other than the breasts, yes.’
He frowned, apparently thinking hard. ‘Don’t remember. Nothing comes to mind. Reese was tut-tutting and glaring at me because I dared to breathe in his presence without letters after my name. Oh, and his college had named a reading room after him or something like that – he must have given them a boatload of money – and he had to write a speech for the ceremony that night. He probably didn’t even notice the D-cups if you ask me, the old pansy. Then Stone bitched about having to be diener ’cause he had some issue at home that needed tending to – read, missus giving him hell. You think Harris whines, you should have heard Stone back then.’
‘Did they discuss any theories on her murder?’
He gave a surprised look. ‘We knew who killed her – her husband. Not much to discuss, other than wonder which of the myriad ways a woman has of making her guy feel particularly murderous had finally done it.’
Theresa kept her face blank. ‘But James hadn’t been arrested yet. What made you so sure?’
‘I dunno. I just remember talking about the husband.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Who, the husband? I don’t know. I never met him.’
‘Mmm. Anything else?’
He frowned again, started to say something, then stopped. ‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yep.’
‘You looked like you thought of something.’