Authors: Andrew Mayne
H
OW THE HELL
do you prove a murder took place twenty years ago when all the witnesses are either dead or missing, and the victim has been erased off the surface of the earth?
The one person we know was involved in the cover-up, if not the actual murder, was the coroner who signed the death certificate, Dr. Kinder. But, as Ailes discovered, he died several years ago.
The county medical examiner's office was only able to provide me with the slimmest of files for Marty Rodriguez. Inside is the death certificate, stating Marty Rodriguez died of asphyxiation, and the standard black-and-white photocopy of an outline of a human body.
The attached photo of Marty is a slightly faded Polaroid. It looks like it was taken in some government office. Probably Child Services. He's got a light brown complexion, dark hair, and the uncertain look of a child who has no idea what life holds for him. Hopefully a future better than what came before.
I take a picture of the photo with my phone. I want to remember this face whenever I have my doubts about carrying on.
Dr. Kinder's notes are sparse. They don't identify a first responder by name, only that the sheriff's office was called. This is peculiar on the surface, but according to the map, the nearest emergency room was ten miles away at the time.
The first responder, presumably Jessup, stated the boy was found unresponsive under the mattresses and collapsed bunk bed. The Alsops had been in the other room watching television when the accident allegedly took place. No other witnesses are cited.
The medical examiner reported that the cause of death was consistent with asphyxiation. Trapped under his blankets, unable to get enough air into his lungs with the heavy mattresses on top of him, Marty couldn't breathe.
There is no mention of any other injuries. This is a red flag to me. What hyperactive ten-year-old boy doesn't have a skinned knee or a bruise somewhere? The omission makes me suspicious, as does the absence of x-rays or photographs accompanying the report. Marty's body was delivered, the medical examiner signed off and then Marty was sent to the crematorium.
Why would Dr. Kinder sign off on this, unless he was somehow involved?
Could he be the other man in the room we haven't identified?
Without any hospital records to confirm he was on call at the time, the only person who might be able to give me some insight is his widow.
She greets me at the door of her small house, which is set back behind a well-kept garden in a town fifteen minutes away from Hawkton. As orderly and composed as her yard, she's exactly what you'd expect a retired rural doctor's wife to be.
She offers me coffee as we have a seat in her living room. Photographs of children and grandchildren adorn the walls, their smiles less forced than the ones in Groom's office. And I'm about to imply the man they love, who is no longer around to defend himself, was an accomplice to murder. I'm not sure how to begin.
“I assume you've been following the events.” I know it's a stupid question.
She gives me a curt nod. “I'm not sure what to think. The people in Hawkton are nice folks. A bit rural, but sweet.”
“You're not from here?”
“No. I was raised in Northern California. I met George when he was going to Virginia State. We married when he got the job out here.”
“I need to ask you something about his job. I'm trying to track down some information about a case that happened a long time ago.”
She shakes her head. “I probably wouldn't know anything about his work. He kept it to himself. Have you called the office?”
“Yes. But they don't keep call schedules going back that far. I just want to know if you can tell me whether your husband was working a specific night.” Finding out if he could have been in the room when the death occurred is the first step in understanding his involvement. “This would be Sunday, October 20, back in 1985.”
I'm surprised when, without hesitation, she replies, “Oh. George was working that night.”
“You remember?”
“I know that because he had weekend shifts during that time. Our night out was Monday.”
I make a note on my pad. At least he probably wasn't there when it happened, which makes me feel slightly less hostile toward him. Though that still leaves the question of why he'd help conceal a murder. “What was his relationship with Sheriff Jessup?”
Mrs. Kinder sets her coffee cup down a little forcefully. “Not good.”
“What do you mean?”
“I'll be honest. My husband had his flaws. Jessup liked to . . . exploit them.”
“Oh? How so?”
“George battled with alcohol. He was a really sweet man, but his job was very stressful. The sheriff pulled him over more than
a few times. At first Jessup was doing him a favor, but then he started expecting something in return.”
“Like what?” This is an angle to Jessup I hadn't heard about.
She shrugs. “Having a county medical examiner in your pocket makes certain things easier. Abuse could be ignored. Injuries could be exaggerated. This tore my husband up.” The words just flow, as if she's made this speech in her head a thousand times. She's been waiting to tell someone. “It's why he drank himself to death. It was having to lie in court that got him the most. He didn't have much choice.”
“That must have been difficult for the two of you.” I've seen this pattern before, of one small thing cascading into a nightmare.
“He tried to never let it affect us or the kids. He was good that way. But you could see he was suffering.”
“What do you remember about that Sunday night?”
She shakes her head. “Nothing in particular.”
I could swear she was on the verge of revealing something. The admission about Jessup confirms everything I'd suspected, that the sheriff had to have something on Kinder to get him to go along with faking a death certificate.
Mrs. Kinder picks up her cup, takes a sip and places it back on the saucer. “What you meant to ask me was what happened on that Monday.”
“Monday?” I sit up. She knows something after all.
“Yes. That's when Jessup asked my husband to go in and do a medical examination, even though it was his day off. I wasn't too happy about that.”
“What happened?”
“He came home a wreck. I'd never seen him like that before. Sullen, but never . . . furious, I guess is the word.” She points to a threadbare easy chair in the corner. “He sat there and drank until the sun came up.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“Not specifically. But I knew what it involved. The Alsops' foster child who died. That's it. George took what happened with him to his death.”
“You never asked?” I try to restrain my anger at her apathy.
“I couldn't. I wasn't sure if I would have been able to forgive him.”
“I understand.” I have to see it from her point of view. She has her family on one side, and the sheriff on the other. “Did he by any chance keep a diary?”
“No,” she replies.
“I was afraid of that. All the records are gone. There's nothing left,” I admit out of frustration.
“What about the body?” she asks.
“Cremated. They didn't leave anything behind.”
Mrs. Kinder looks straight at me and shakes her head. “No. It wasn't.”
“What?” There's yet to be one shred of physical evidence in this entire case that ties the explosion to Rodriguez's death.
“George was very drunk, and he kept saying something that didn't make sense at the time. Later on, I understood.”
“What?”
“He substituted the child's body for that of an indigent who was to be buried at the county lot. He lied to the sheriff. He couldn't bring himself to destroy all trace of the boy . . . Marty's still out there.”
I almost spill my coffee when I put my cup down on the edge of the saucer.
M
Y OLD FRIEND,
Special Agent Danielle Barnes, greets me in the parking lot next to the graveyard well after midnight. “We have to stop meeting like this,” she says, giving me a hug. We first met on our way to another crime scene in a cemetery. This time, she drove all night to come help me on a whim. Sweet-natured, with a spunky personality that matches her red hair, I like her a lot. Outside Ailes's group and Knoll, she's one of the few I truly get along with.
She understands my quirks, and how to deal with all the bureaucracy around her without losing her cool. I've seen her treat senior agents like one of her out-of-line teenagers, and watched as they sheepishly apologized.
It's not she's
motherly
, per se. She's more like a coach everyone respects and loves.
Ailes put in the request to exhume the body, but we got immediate pushback from the county. They're already stretched thin with the current lines of investigation into Hawkton. Trying to start another one was met with unsympathetic ears. They were going to make us jump through all the hoops. Dr. Kinder had done us a favor by making sure that Marty's body wasn't destroyed. The problem was that burying him in someone else's grave made exhumation a legal nightmare.
All I have is hearsay from Kinder's wife. The evidence is flimsy
and only tangentially related to the current investigation, so no amount of string-pulling will work. That's why I asked Danielle to help me.
The thing about FBI departments is that they like new toys, and also justifying the expenditure on said toys. As the head of computational field analysis, Danielle gets the newest and shiniest ones. She's also a great forensic expert. After I gave her the rundown, she agreed to help me because this will be an interesting field test for some new equipment she has. But she met me in the middle of the night because she's a saint.
“Are you sure this won't get you into any trouble?” I ask. I don't want any blowback to hit her.
“If this boy is buried here, and what you think happened happened, then they can kiss my butt for all I care.”
I lead her over to the grave where Kinder's widow said Marty was buried. Honer Jackson was the transient found dead of heart failure under a railroad trestle the day before Marty was killed. His unfortunate demise gave Kinder a place to hide Marty's body out of sight, unbeknownst to the sheriff.
Danielle stops at the marker and looks warily into the shadows of the trees surrounding the graveyard. “How long you been out here, hon?”
“Not that long,” I lie. I'd actually spent the last few hours waiting near Marty's grave. I can't imagine anyone has ever visited. The thought of a forgotten child lying there, alone, for thirty years nearly brought me to tears. I'm getting soft.
I raise my flashlight over my shoulder as Danielle starts unpacking equipment. “I'd be scared to death to be out here alone.”
We haven't really talked since what happened in Mexico. To be honest, I haven't spent much time dwelling on it. It's something I'd rather not think about. “This place is fine,” I reply. “It's the living that give me the most problems.”
She sets four round black discs the size of DVDs at the corners
of the grave, then sticks a metal rod about a foot long into the soil. “The transponders will give us the image. The spike tells us the soil density.” She takes a seat on one of the cases and puts her laptop on her knees.
Lights blink on the transponders, but I don't feel the low pulsing I expected after seeing the transducers she used in the Michigan cemetery on the Warlock case. “Is this a different system?”
“Sonar is so passé.” She gives me a grin. “Microwaves. This takes a bit longer. The antennas have to calibrate. They reinforce each other and create a kind of virtual waveform. The tricky part is establishing a baseline. Fortunately we have one here with the coffin. If it knows there's a flat plane down there, it can interpolate the return signals that much faster.”
“Obviously . . .”
She smiles. “You have your tricks, I have mine. It's kind of like trying to make sense of a blurry photograph. Calculating all those photons is next to impossible. But if I tell you the image is supposed to be a face, a computer can figure a lot of it out.” She presses a button, then changes the topic rather suddenly. “So, how's your love life?”
“Nonexistent.”
“I don't mean to pry.”
My face flushes. “Oh, no. I mean there isn't one at the moment.”
Danielle is easy to open up to. It's obvious that she cares. As she sits there waiting for her machine to tell her what's down there, life goes on.
I envy her ability to multitask. Or is it multi-emotion?
“What about the pediatrician?” she persists.
“It didn't really go anywhere.”
“I'm sorry. He seemed like a nice guy. You didn't steal his watch at the dinner table?”
“No . . .” Regrettably, I had told her how that led more than once to a disaster. “I just . . . didn't really follow up on things.”
“Oh. Well, you've got options. Your looks aren't going anywhere,” she replies, as she fiddles with her controls.
“Thanks. I was hoping to find someone who loves me for my mind.”
“Oh, that's adorable. That's not the way it works, darlin'. Men have to fall in love with you despite all that. Here we go.”
I move to watch her laptop screen as the image develops. It's just a big fuzzy block. “What's that?”
“Everything. Hold on. Let me subtract the dirt using the density formulas.”
The blocks begin to disappear, cube by cube, from the top to the bottom as if we were down there digging away the soil. A rectangular-shaped object is what's left behind. I assume it's the coffin. To be honest, the image isn't as clear as ones I'd seen on the older system.
“Not impressed?” Danielle has a sly smile on her face. She presses a button and the rectangle instantly resolves into a coffin. The detail is sharp. The handles, and even the wood inlays, are visible.
“Wow.” I look at the ground beneath our feet, trying to understand how we got all that information. “This is real magic.”
“It helps that we know what we're looking for. Now, let's erase the coffin.”
It vanishes, revealing the outline of a small body inside. Too small to be Honer Jackson.
It's Marty.
Mrs. Kinder wasn't lying to me.
His clothing a pixelated jumble, he looks like a mummy wrapped in plastic.
“All we'll really get a good look at is the bones and the major organs. Until we get one of those positron imagers . . .”
“What?”
“Wishful thinking. We'd need a truck just to carry the antimatter containment system.”
“Good lord. What can you show me now?”
She taps her keyboard and the chest area and his clothing fades away. Bones begin to emerge. His lungs are two large black voids.
“Can you zoom into the chest area?”
“Sure.”
The image reloads and expands to show the rib cage. Two of the ribs are at an odd angle. One of them appears to dissolve into the black lung area.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“Yes. This boy has a ruptured lung. The rib snapped and poked right into it. Probably filled with fluid right there. Poor thing.”
“Oh, lord.” My nails claw into my palm. All this primal anger and nowhere to direct it.
“Did they report any of this?” Danielle asks. Her voice is flat, all the cheer gone.
I'd only been able to give her the broad strokes beforehand. “The death certificate says he suffocated under a mattress.”
“A mattress wouldn't do this.” She shakes her head. “The medical examiner would have seen the broken ribs.” She points to them on the screen. “Even without an x-ray, it'd be obvious he died from a blunt force trauma. There would be blood in the lungs as well. There's no way he could miss this.” Shaking her head again. “No way.”
“The coroner covered it up.”
“Bastards. I'll make a copy of this data for you.”
“Thank you.” I lean against a large memorial and send Ailes a text to let him know what we've found.
There's a message from him in my inbox, saying that they've definitively isolated another male voice on the audiotape that doesn't belong to any of the Hawkton explosion victims. He thinks enough of it has been captured for us to start looking for an identity.
The break offers a little relief. But it doesn't make up for finding out what happened to Marty.
This last man could be the only other person who knows exactly what happened and, just as important, what's going on right now.
I help Danielle load the equipment back into her truck. “Have time for coffee?”
“I got to head home and see to it my boys get off to school,” she replies.
“When do you sleep?”
“Sundays.” She smiles.