Secrets of Eden (21 page)

I
t’s not easy to weird out a pathologist, but Heather Laurent succeeded. I already had a meeting with the crime lab on another case, and so I drove up to David Dennison’s office the day after he called so he could tell me precisely what Heather had said and, apparently, done. By then we had checked out the basics of Heather’s history—though we hadn’t interviewed her yet—and pretty much all that she had written in her books about her parents’ deaths was true: Her father had indeed shot her mother and then hanged himself in the family attic, leaving behind two teenage daughters. Nice. What a guy.

David’s office was a first-floor corner just off the mortuary (and he always preferred that we call it a mortuary instead of a morgue, since the word
mortuary
, he believed, conveyed a greater respect for the dead), and the mortuary was a sprawling series of rooms you entered via the ER at the hospital in Burlington. Convenient, no? If you wound up in the ER and made it, you went upstairs to the hospital; if not, they wheeled you on a gurney through the double doors marked AUTOPSY SERVICES.

The resources were impressive for a state as small as Vermont, because for over a decade we had a governor who’d been a physician. Eventually he was able to secure the funds for a first-rate facility, the sort of place where you really can treat the dead with the honor they deserve. When the legislature was debating the funds for the new space, David testified famously (famously in Montpelier, anyway) that he wanted a kinder and gentler mortuary. We only have a dozen or so homicides a year here, but for one reason or another—usually what we call an untimely death—David and his staff still autopsy about 10 percent of the people who die. And since we usually lose about five thousand people, the pathologists autopsy close to five hundred Vermonters annually. And then there are the corpses with organs and tissue to harvest. David is adamant in his belief that the tissue donation room has the best air in the state.

And the day before, Heather Laurent had showed up out of the blue at Autopsy Services about four o’clock in the afternoon. David had had me paged, but I was in court, and Emmet was in Haverill interviewing Ginny O’Brien and Tina Cousino.

“I have to assume that Heather Laurent is a suspect,” David said when I arrived.

“She may be involved somehow, but I wouldn’t say she’s the lead horse. Not by a long shot. Why would she be at the top of your list?”

“Because she’s insane.”

“You think?”

“Well, not literally. But she is a kook. And I’m not saying she should be the lead candidate, either.”

“She’s loaded, you know.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“She comes from buckets of money and has made a boatload more with her books. Why did she come here? And what did you do when she did?”

We were sitting in his office, and he motioned at the chair in which I was sitting. “Mostly we talked.”

“Here. In your office.”

“I went out to reception when Vivian said Heather Laurent was here to see me. I told the woman it was inappropriate for us to speak.”

“But you did anyway.”

“She wanted a tour.”

“Why?”

“Because she had never seen the inside of a mortuary. She asked to see the bodies.”

“Bodies…generally. Right? She had to know that the Haywards have been in the ground in New York and New Hampshire for a good long time.”

“Yes. Bodies generally. She told me about her parents, which I already knew. But it seems she never got to see their bodies after they had died. The last she saw of them, they were alive. It had been over Christmas. Next thing she knew, they were in caskets. She wanted to know what had probably happened to them in between.”

“Other than being shot in the one case and hanged in the other.”

“Yes. Other than that.”

“I didn’t even know she was in Vermont.”

The shelf on the wall behind his desk was awash in Beanie Babies, small plush animals filled with plastic pellets instead of traditional stuffing. His two daughters, when they had been little girls, insisted on giving him the creatures because they had a vague idea that the office of a man who spent his life taking cadavers apart and putting them back together could use a little cheer. For the first time I noticed that two of them—a zebra and a lavender dachshund—were each wearing a doctor’s white coat. The dachshund even had a stethoscope, which struck me as ironic only because I didn’t imagine that David listened to a lot of beating hearts most days. I wanted to pick one up and throw it at him.

“Don’t worry: The tour I gave her was seriously abridged.”

“I can’t effing believe you gave her any tour at all. You’re the one who’s the lunatic—not her. Are you embarrassed? I sure as shit hope you are.”

His face was a little square and usually rather regal—especially given how early he’d grayed. But now he looked like a scolded child, and his eyes, always a bit drawn, grew small. “I think you’re making too much of this,” he said defensively.

“Emmet hasn’t even interviewed her yet! We didn’t even know she was here!”

“Well, now we know.”

“Where is she?”

He paused. “She went home. To Manhattan.”

“Lovely. Did she say why she was here?”

“I told you, she wanted to learn what had probably happened to her parents’ bodies.”

“I mean in Vermont: Why was she in Vermont?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“We were too busy talking about why she had dropped by my office—though she did say she had just come from seeing Katie Hayward at the high school.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“I know—”

“Did she say what she and Katie had talked about?”

“No.”

I was irked and felt a little flushed. I took a deep breath. “So: How extensive was this tour you gave her?”

“Not extensive at all. It’s not like I was going to walk her through the chain of custody for the Haywards—for any of the bodies that arrive here. I showed her my office, an autopsy room, and the
tissue donation room. Since it was the reason she’d come here, I told her what I presumed had been done with her parents.”

“And then she left.”

“That’s right.”

“What did she say about the Haywards?”

“She was saddened.”

“Oh, please.”

“And she wanted to know about the nightgown Alice Hayward had been wearing when she’d been killed.”

“Did she say why?”

“She said she was curious and caught me off guard. So I told her.”

“You told her?”

“I did, I’m sorry. I was walking her to the door and it just slipped out. Later it crossed my mind that she wanted an alibi: You know, a moment when someone—i.e., yours truly—could testify that she had asked him what color it was. But I’m being paranoid, right?”

“One can hope.”

“I really am sorry.”

“Her buddy, Pastor Drew? Did she say anything about him?”

“Not her buddy any longer.”

I sat forward in my chair. “Really?”

He shook his head. “No. You didn’t know?”

“We’re not exactly girls in the hood, David. No. I did not know. What did she say?”

“I was talking to her about her own parents and what sorts of things the medical examiner—and, I added, the mortician—had probably done with them. I was being very vague.”

“Sensitive,” I said sarcastically. “That’s you.”

“Thank you. I really was telling her only the basics, but she kept wanting to know things about how her own parents had died. The physiological specifics. It was, in her opinion, the exact reverse of
the Haywards. In the Haywards’ case, it was the male who was shot and the female who was strangled; in the case of her own mom and dad, it was the female who was shot and the male who was strangled.”

I nodded, simultaneously interested and a little disappointed in myself that I hadn’t made this association on my own. I wasn’t sure if it mattered, but it was a connection of some sort. “Go on.”

“So I was explaining to her the differences between ligature strangulation—you know, with a scarf or a rope—and manual strangulation. I was babbling on about strap-muscle hemorrhages and the likely calcification of bone in her father’s neck—”

“All things she needed to know.”

He raised an eyebrow but otherwise ignored me and continued, “—and Heather interrupted me. ‘Manual strangulation is much more personal,’ she said. ‘You’re staring into your victim’s eyes. You have to be very angry.’ I thought that was a wee bit of an understatement. Very angry? You have to be a fuel tank that just exploded! But I was polite and agreed. And that’s when she said, ‘I just don’t see how Stephen Drew could have missed the rage that must have been consuming George Hayward.’”

“And you said?”

He shrugged. “I was evasive. I said people are human. They miss things. And that’s when she let on that she and the minister weren’t real tight. Her response? ‘And some people only see what they want to see. Some people’s hearts are harder and more selfish than others’. They resist the more virtuous angels among us.’”

“Wow. Does that mean there are angels that aren’t virtuous?”

“Possibly.”

“Did you press her on what she meant?”

“I asked her if she meant Pastor Drew, and she said she did. Then she looked away. Right out that window. And she looked totally
disgusted—which wasn’t a look I had seen on her face until that very second.”

“But she didn’t say anything more. She didn’t elaborate.”

“Nope. Maybe just as well. Most of the things she said were pretty loopy. At one point when I was showing her the autopsy room, one of the lab techs happened to come in with a Tupperware container full of hearts for the medical school. The lid was off. They were old and had bleached out over time, and so they looked more like headless chickens than human hearts. Heather didn’t recognize what they were and asked. I told her. And her response? ‘Why is it we always want the heart of a lion—and not the heart of an angel? An angel’s heart is as strong as a lion’s but has the benefits of acumen and history.’ I didn’t tell her that the only history in most of the hearts I see is too little exercise and too many Quarter Pounders with cheese. Then, a few minutes later, she noticed the bags of bones.” Reflexively he glanced down at his shoes when he said that. No one wants to talk about the bags of bones: They are the human remains—the femurs like clubs and the mandibles that remind one of scoops, the occasional pelvic girdle—that have been unearthed at construction sites or excavations around the state. Most of them, we presume, are Abenaki remains from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and we will never attach a name to any one of them. But we have no precedent about how or where to reinter them, and the last thing we want to do is dispose of them with the hazardous waste that is part and parcel of any mortuary (or morgue). And so they sit in massive, Ziploc plastic bags on a couple of shelves in a far corner of one of the autopsy rooms.

“And what did she have to say about the bones?” I asked.

“They’re why humans can’t fly.”

“Because we have bones.”

“Yes. We need bones more like birds’.”

“Or angels’?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Really?”

“Yup. We need bones like the angels’. She said we’d fear dying so much less if we allowed ourselves to feel the presence of the angels among us.”

“And you said?”

“I said absolutely nothing. It was a straight line with far too many responses. And she was so completely sincere. But you know what expression did cross my mind after she left?”

I waited.

And he said, his voice at once troubled and bemused,
“Angel of death. I’m telling you: That woman is as stable as a three-legged chair.”

THE TEST FIRE
of George Hayward’s handgun would show that it had been discharged at about two and a half feet from his skull: in all likelihood too far for a self-inflicted head wound. The lab used a bullet with a full metal jacket, as had Hayward, rather than one with a hollow point that is designed to remain inside the body and—not incidentally—expand as it penetrates its target, causing considerably more internal damage. Certainly we were aware of suicides where the victim had held the gun at arm’s length, aimed the barrel back at his head, and used his thumb to pull the trigger. But it was rare. After all, if you’re trying to kill yourself, why risk missing? And given how drunk George Hayward had been that night, it didn’t seem likely to anyone in my office that he would have had the cognitive capabilities to figure out that he could hold the gun so far away and use his thumb to fire the weapon.

WE SEARCHED THE
parsonage in Haverill, but we found nothing that was going to link the Reverend Drew to the Haywards’ murders. I’m not sure any of us actually expected to find a flannel shirt with George Hayward’s brains on the pocket, but we had to check. Alice Hayward’s prints were on the kitchen table and on one of the ladderback chairs beside it, but that was the only trace of her we found in the house. Nothing in the bedroom, nothing in the bathroom. And there was nothing on the reverend’s computer that indicated definitively either that he was having an affair with the woman or, later, that he had murdered one or both of the Haywards—though there was plenty that suggested an interest in the crime that he and his lawyer had to know could be made to look incriminating as hell if we ever presented it to a jury. In the days after the bodies were discovered, he was Googling sites with general forensic information about murder by strangulation and murder by a gunshot to the head. He had spent hours clicking through sites on crime-scene investigations and how a suspect might try to eliminate evidence of his presence at a homicide. He was also searching for anything he could unearth about Alice. High-school photos. College-yearbook appearances. There was little there, but he had seemed to have found what there was. What we discovered also corroborated a part of his story: On the Sunday night that the Haywards had been killed, he had frequently visited the website for Major League Baseball and followed the progress of a ball game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. And in the following days, he had indeed written e-mails to friends, as he had told us, some of which he had sent but most of which were sitting in the drafts folder in his mail program. All of them suggested he was merely a minister enduring a profound crisis of faith; none of them intimated that he just might have gone postal and shot George Hayward in the head.