Humphries nodded, and the movement of his head made my focus blur slightly. Then I was aware of him speaking. “Ms. Quinn, are you all right?”
I felt as if I had zoned out for maybe a second. “Of course.”
“I’m sorry, but you seemed to have … gone away, for a little bit.”
I ignored him. “No, I’m fine. What was time of death?”
He looked at me funny. “Around seven, seven thirty
P.M.
”
“What about before that? Was it a school day? A weekend?”
“This was a Monday, September, Labor Day. Joseph had the day off from school. He was in the house from the afternoon on. His parents left around the same time, separately.”
“What about friends? Was he with friends that day?”
“He didn’t have friends. He wasn’t what you’d call liked.”
My brain suddenly rebooted. “How do you know that?”
Humphries stuttered. He was covering, and he slipped. This was what I was here for, but I wouldn’t get anywhere pressing it now. I let him go and he went on quickly, but repeating himself. “Father at a sports bar with a friend, one of the other doctors in his office. Mother at her book club. Deceased alone at home. Like I said, father gets home first, finds boy’s body floating facedown in the pool.”
“Did you see the boy’s mother that night?”
“The stepfather tried to call her, but her cell wasn’t on. The body was removed to the morgue. He was glad she didn’t have to see it that way. Kept saying thank God he was the one to come home first. I hung around until she came home, questioned her, but she was a mess. Understandably, I mean,” he added, trying to be sensitive. “She kept saying to the stepfather ‘What have you done?’ but as far as I could see he hadn’t done anything wrong. It was just grief talking.”
“How long before she came home?”
“I was there till about eleven. She came home around ten.”
“Did the father say all the doors were locked when he got home?”
“I asked that, too.” Once I hadn’t followed up on his slip about Joe not being liked, Sam was back to the guy who was acing his oral exams. He wasn’t minding my questioning at all. His whole demeanor seemed to say
Bring it on.
“Except for the patio door they were all bolted from the inside. Father came in through the garage.”
I remembered Gemma-Kate asking about other people knowing the garage door passcode. I asked the same thing. “Not that he knew,” Sam answered, but his eyes shifted. One point lost.
“And you don’t think there’s any way it could have been suicide.”
“I talked with the paramedics and the medical examiner. If it was going to be suicide he would have done something to keep himself from coming to the surface, some weight around himself, cuff his wrists, something. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to commit suicide enough to stay underwater until you stop breathing.”
“Or homicide, staged to look like accidental.”
A man appeared at the open door of the office, on cue to save Humphries from having to push an answer out of his slightly slack mouth. The man was big in the chest, suited and tied, and looked authoritative. Didn’t ask who I was. Didn’t look at the folder in my lap as anyone would have done, out of curiosity. Just focused on Humphries. “I need to talk to you,” he said. Then he walked away.
“Yes, sir,” Humphries said as the man disappeared.
“The sarge?” I asked.
Humphries nodded. He stepped out of the office, which left me to go through the folder and skim the rest of the report. This being his first death investigation, Humphries was indeed as thorough as you could get. Besides taking photographs of all the rooms in the house, and several angles of the pool area, he had also done meticulous sketches showing the path Tim had taken through the house, and where the CPR had been performed. It was so cute I wanted to pin it to a refrigerator.
In a few minutes Humphries came back, apologizing that his boss had some work for him. He held out his hand for the file. Though he didn’t say anything, it was impossible for us both to ignore the fact that I had bled on it a little. I looked down to see I’d been worrying my cuticles again without realizing it.
I said, “You should get a new folder. There’s blood on this one.”
I considered shaking his hand in a heartfelt way and then figured he probably wouldn’t want to. So I just stuck my hand in my pocket, where I could wipe the blood from my thumb, and pulled out a business card, which I placed on his desk. Would he please call me if he thought of anything else?
He said he would. I was sure that was the last I’d hear from him if I didn’t initiate a meeting myself.
I left the police station and sat in my car a bit, clenching my jaws so my teeth wouldn’t chatter. Definitely I was off coffee from now on. For at least a while. The rest of the day, anyway. The brain farts were a bit more problematic, and they were coming more often. But just now the temporary dementia was at bay as my brain clicked on all cylinders.
Stepfather comes home. While processing his stepson’s drowning in the swimming pool, attempting resuscitation, and calling emergency services, is careful to note and report all the doors bolted.
Sam could not be certain that no one else had the passcode for the garage door.
Jacquie hadn’t mentioned Tim had tried to phone her but her cell phone was off. Did he? Was it?
Had Joe Joseph Joey really been there and alone all evening as the report said? Were any interviews conducted with associates to corroborate that? And where was he the rest of the day?
And how had Humphries arrived at the conclusion that Joe was not well liked? Was it enough to walk away from a kid in distress and let him drown?
Those were just my initial tidbits of interest, little questions that had never been asked by this responsible but rookie investigator who had never processed a death scene before, let alone the more challenging scene that a drowning entails. Sure, it was all probably simple, just what they decided it was, accidental asphyxiation with possible autoeroticism. No known motive or opportunity for anything more dramatic or sinister. But I was beginning to understand Jacquie’s suspicions along with her guilt. It was all just a little too simple, the investigation having a few holes. The extreme care taken to preserve her from the horror. I wondered who that really benefited.
I called her. “Jacquie, I just talked with Sam Humphries.”
“Who?”
“That’s the detective who did the death investigation for Joseph,” I reminded her. “There may be a few holes to fill in, but it wasn’t bad. He was more thorough than you remembered.”
“What holes?”
“Did Joseph have friends? At school? Who were the boys you mentioned that night we met?”
Skipping past the question about school friends, Jacquie went straight to my second question. “They were in his youth group when we attended St. Martin’s. Ken was all right, Joey said he was nice to him. Peter used to tease him. Do you think there’s something to that?”
“I’m trying not to lock on any suspicions just yet. I’m still fact-finding. How much do you know about those kids?”
She told me not much, that Joey didn’t spend a lot of time with the youth group, he was more of a quiet, stay-at-home kind of kid. Daydreamy, imaginative, creative. Maybe a little introverted.
I told her I’d get back to her when I had some news, and she thanked me. In her thanks I felt her isolation, as if I was the only person left in her world. One world, two kinds of crazy women. That was the kind of odds that attracted me.
Because the police department was close to the medical examiner’s office, I stopped in to see if George Manriquez had been able to find any results of a tox test on Joseph Neilsen’s blood sample. As I’ve said, Manriquez was one of my favorite people, sensitive to relatives of victims, and more sensitive to his patients when he really didn’t need to be. If I was dead I’d want him to do my autopsy. As it was I’d had to drag myself to get to his office, though I was feeling just a tad more like myself.
“Hello, George,” I said. “Thanks for seeing me.”
“For a retired gal you sure do show up here a lot.” He peered into my face. “You don’t look well. Are you doing okay?”
I ignored his question, but it made me realize I was biting the inside of my mouth, which caused my face to look like I’d had a stroke. I released my mouth and said, “It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Last August.”
He had met me in the lobby and taken me to his office rather than the autopsy room, where I had spent more time with him. I remembered the office from another time, when I’d been under more stress but in better health. I explained to him that I wanted to go over his findings about Joseph Neilsen again now that I’d had a chance to talk with the death investigator. “Like I said, it wasn’t extra special or strange. I was just asked to take a look at the body of the deceased. A young man in good physical condition.”
“And you said there was no internal autopsy.”
“That’s right.”
“Why not?”
“Why are you asking me this again? We went over it, didn’t we?”
“Humor me. I’m old and forgetful.”
George gave me that dry look. “Don’t play the old lady card with me, we both know the truth. A better question than why not do an autopsy would be why. I already do at least one a day, so I’m not exactly looking for work. You know how it is, Brigid. In the movies they do an autopsy for every single death that doesn’t occur in a hospital bed with a preexisting condition. You know how many decomposed bodies are brought in every year after lying around in their house for several days? Most of them are heart attacks, and we don’t need to open them up to find out.”
He sounded a little defensive, but I didn’t back down. I said, “I get that, but this one was under twenty-one. You sure his stepfather being a prominent physician didn’t have anything to do with it?”
“No. But like I said, the body had been transported to the hospital and I didn’t get called to the scene. I looked over the body, questioned the investigator and looked at his photos and description of the house. I called it, Brigid. And I remember the father wanted the whole thing to be over with without some big production. He seemed ashamed, I think.”
“That was the stepfather. Shame. Does that seem like an odd response to a death?”
“Shame, guilt, anger, laughter … I’ve seen so many responses nothing seems odd to me anymore.”
“What about the mother?”
“I only dealt with Tim Neilsen. The mother wasn’t involved. I heard she was hysterical and sedated. I did an external examination and didn’t find any defense marks or signs of struggle. So I took a little blood—”
“You told me. You said you’d check with the lab.”
“I did call the lab. Let me see if they had anything.” He turned to his computer and booted it up. “We’re going paperless, which I guess is nice, except the computer they gave me is so old it takes forever … here we go.” It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for once the Neilsen file was opened. “Here, they entered the report but didn’t tell me. Typical.”
“So they did test?”
“Yep.”
“What was the delay?”
“Same reason as I was saying. They’re backed up over there. Plus they’ve been moving into new facilities. Funded with a government grant. State of the art.” He had kept his eyes on the computer screen while he was talking, scanning the report. “Hm,” he said.
“Anything interesting?”
“Nothing suspicious, none of the usual toxins, no opiates, stimulants, or antidepressants—they check for those routinely now. Got some ethanol. Is that what you were looking for?”
“Could be. How much?”
“Well over the limit for an adult. Any amount is too much for a fourteen-year-old.”
“Why are you only hearing about it now?”
“Like I said, backed up, files moving. I lost track. Besides, alcohol in his system makes the accidental call even more definite. But it says here the report was even given to the parents upon request.”
“What? You’re shitting me. I’ve been dealing with a hysterical mother who says she never heard.”
“She’s lying. It says here the results were given to Dr. Timothy Neilsen about three weeks after the death. The lab didn’t send me a copy but the tox test was done. Like I said, alcohol but still nothing that indicated suicide or homicide. It corroborates the finding of accidental death. Kid robbed his parents’ liquor cabinet while they were out, took a swim, died. Crying shame.”
I knew he wasn’t being sarcastic. “Wait a sec. Order to forgo autopsy: Timothy Neilsen. Tox report made and given to … Timothy Neilsen. Mother’s questions blocked. Are you picking up a pattern here?”
“Interesting, but I don’t see anything to prosecute in someone who’s looking for information. Want me to print this?” Without waiting for my answer he ran off the reports from the printer on his credenza. They included the death certificate.
“I wonder who this Lari Paunchese is?” I asked, reading the form.
“I don’t know. A physician. I remember talking to him the next morning, along with Tim Neilsen. I don’t know how he got involved.”
“George, I know there’s no better ME than you. But are you smelling anything at all sloppy about this case?”
George did not take offense. He’d been pushed around between detectives, families, and attorneys for too long to let my mild doubts ruffle him. “Brigid. You can’t look for conspiracies around every corner. It was all pretty plain. And like I said, the investigator and the family—”
“The stepfather—”
“Okay, fine. But all respectable and aboveboard. I would stand by the accidental ruling again if anyone reexamined this case.”
Something tickled at the edges of my brain, some memory that I couldn’t quite get a grasp on. It was like when you can’t remember the name of the actor who played a character with a limp in
Gunsmoke.
I hate when that happens.
Then even the lack of the memory was gone as the room lurched suddenly. I said good-bye, stopped in the ladies’ room off the lobby, threw up, and soldiered on.
Throwing up made me think of the Pug, so on the way home I stopped at the veterinary hospital. It had been two days since we first brought the little guy in, and he was still kind of listless, though the vet assistant said he was taking some nourishment. She said she thought I could take him home if I kept an eye on him and brought him back if he started throwing up again and did I want her to go about checking him out? I thought of our situation at home and thought he was safer right where he was until he could fully take care of himself. I asked if they could keep him a few more days, just until I had things figured out.