Shadow Image (15 page)

Brenna closed her eyes now. “The horse had nowhere to go,” she said.

“He couldn't turn, couldn't go forward. He tried to back up, but Ford and Chip were standing on the trail right behind him.” Underhill rubbed his elegant hands across his eyes, pointed to his left temple. “The kick—just one—caught Chippy square, knocked him back maybe twenty feet.”

Brenna felt her stomach clench, imagining the sound, the unreal sensation of seeing your child tossed like a rag doll, the one sickening moment when Ford must have understood that it was bad. She didn't need to hear the rest of the story. She was sure from Underhill's deep sigh that he didn't want to tell it. He seemed to force himself to continue.

“Thank God, he probably never even knew what happened. It was that quick. When Ford picked him up—he was limp, lying in a patch of wildflowers at the base of a tree—he looked like he was sleeping. Eyes closed, no expression whatever. Just a little boy taking a nap. But Ford knew.”

Brenna covered her mouth with her hand, a reflex triggered by the urge to cry. She cleared her throat instead. Underhill was gazing at the ceiling, a single tear spilling from one eye and rolling down his patrician cheek.

“It was a mile, at least, up and out of the bottoms and back to the house. A steep climb, too. Ford doesn't even remember running back, but as soon as I saw him coming toward the house, my grandson so slack in his arms—” Underhill's voice caught. He drew a ragged breath. “Chippy never woke up.”

“There was nothing they could do?” Brenna managed.

“He died in the ambulance. The paramedics knew, because they usually won't let parents ride along.” Underhill couldn't stop the tremor in his lower jaw. “They let Ford and Leigh stay with him.”

Why had she forced the conversation again? What was her point in asking this man to relive the pain of that tragedy? Brenna couldn't recall, and suddenly felt as coarse and insensitive as one of those TV reporters who shove their microphones into the faces of a victim's grieving family and asks how they feel.

“Even before we got the news back here, I'd loaded my shotgun and was headed out to find the horse. Believe me, Ms. Kennedy, he'd have died that day, too, if Floss hadn't stopped me. Half a million dollars on the hoof—at least that's what we paid for him when he was a colt—but I'd have done it without a second thought.”

“It wouldn't have brought your grandson back.”

Underhill nodded. “Of course it was irrational. But a certain closure would have been of some comfort at that point.”

“So you still have the horse?”

“Not here. Like I said, call it irrational. But we just couldn't keep him here, seeing him every day, this 1,200-pound reminder of our grandchild's death. Gray was Floss's favorite, even more than the ones she used to ride, and she couldn't bear to sell him.”

“You sent him away.”

“We have a horse property down in Westmoreland County, so he's there. It was best.”

Brenna wanted to say something appropriate, but managed only a tired cliché: “Out of sight, out of mind.”

“The horse, yes,” Underhill said. “Our grandson?” He shook his head. “Never.”

“I still think we're on to something significant here,” Christensen said. “We know she's reacted with strong emotion to two memories: the disappearance of the gray horse, and Warren Doti. We know she loved the horse; she may have loved Doti. And you can bet the death of her grandson was another powerful memory.”

Pearson checked her hair in the rearview mirror. “But what's the connection? Doti and the horse, maybe.”

“The kid died while he was riding the horse.” He folded his notebook and slid it into the briefcase at his feet. “I'm not saying they're connected, necessarily. They just all happened about the same time.”

“That's assuming her memory can be trusted,” Pearson said. “Never A-S-S-ume.”

She was right. He needed more information. “I think I'll focus on that time frame for now, see what turns up. If nothing else, I can nail down a chronology of things that happened to her during that period. I can always broaden it later.”

Pearson checked her watch. “I need to get in for the afternoon class. The aides can get them started, but I should be there. You must have a guess at this point. What do you pinheads call it?”

“A hypothesis.”

“That.”

He hoisted the briefcase, rested it across his thighs. “I can't help but think this whole thing gets back to the idea of loss. She lost the horse. She lost Doti. She lost the grandson. And it all happened about the same time. There's a reason those three things are all somehow represented in this very weird, very dark image she paints over and over.”

Pearson pulled the polished chrome driver's-door handle. The car rocked as the weighty thing swung open. “House of cards,” she said.

“I know. It's just a start, but it feels significant to me.” And dangerous, he thought, though he still couldn't say why. He opened his door and stepped out. Ripples of heat rose from the Special's roof as he and Pearson faced one another across its metal expanse.

“You sitting in this afternoon?” she said.

“Don't think so.” He turned and unlocked the Explorer's door, tossed the briefcase onto the front passenger seat. It crushed Annie's rendition of Earth's geologic layering, rendered in Play-Doh across sturdy cardboard for an Earth Sciences project at her old school a few months back. Her teacher had returned it the day before Annie transferred to Westminster-Stanton, crisp and fractured, and he hadn't yet moved it from car to house. His daughter hadn't seemed particularly fond of it, actually wanted to throw it away, but when he asked if he could put it in the special box where he kept her momentous accomplishments, she'd flushed with pride. Now, this.

“Aw, hell,” he said.

Pearson looked up, startled, from her side of the Special. “What?”

“Nothing. Just … nothing.” He turned back toward her. “Never mind.”

“So, you just goofing off this afternoon, or what?” she said.

Christensen shook his head. “I've got some paper-chasing to do.”

Christensen passed Oxford Centre, wondering if Brenna was in her office, then turned off sunwashed, red-brick Grant Street and into the urban canyon of Fourth. He cruised slowly through the deep shadows, between the Grant and City-County buildings, past the jail annex, looking for the squat Gothic masterpiece that housed the Allegheny County morgue.

These few blocks, home to the Pittsburgh police department's old Public Safety Building, the county courthouse, the county jail, and the morgue, were the center of Brenna's professional universe. She knew the plots and players on the grand stage of justice in western Pennsylvania in a way he never would. To him, these blocks were unfamiliar territory, far removed from his professional landscape at the University of Pittsburgh. Truth be told, he was awestruck by Brenna's command of her world of cops and criminals and judges.

He had seen the morgue before, marveled at its turn-of-the-century architecture, but the place struck him each time as something a film director might create for a scene requiring profound gloom. Shoehorned onto a concrete lot behind the courthouse and jail complex, its granite walls were a hopeless gray deepened by layers of soot and grime. Beneath the half-dozen window air conditioners on this side of the building, condensation dripped onto the granite blocks and left dark stains that created the impression that something gory was seeping out. Though a grand example of period architecture, here was a building that would never rise above its purpose.

Christensen circled the block, finally finding a parking spot along the curb near the morgue's rear entrance. A driveway extended from the street into an open garage door, where he could hear voices and clattering metal and the sound of a closing car door. A sign posted beside the garage door seemed morbidly cold: Delivery Entrance.

What struck him first as he passed was an overpowering and noxious smell, worse than anything he could recall. It hit him like a fetid fist, knocking him back with a force he wouldn't have thought possible. He covered his nose and mouth, his eyes beginning to tear, and forced himself to peer into the dark garage. Two men in dark-blue jumpsuits and surgical masks were moving around a white coroner's van, behind which stood two gunmetal gray gurneys, each carrying the ominous black lump of a body bag.

“Get the freezer door, just hold it open,” one of the men said. “Whew, baby!”

“Who'd we piss off, anyway?”

“Fucking floaters.”

Christensen recognized the term. Floaters were an inevitable consequence of living in a river town where the number of reported bridge suicides always seemed to spike each year in the late stages of Pittsburgh's relentless gray winter. He also knew that the local mob used the city's three rivers as a convenient repository for unwanted union bosses, disloyal employees, and debtors who fell too far behind in their payments. But surely two floaters at one time was unusual; he'd have to check tomorrow's
Press.

Christensen paused near the morgue's front entrance to catch his breath, which he'd held since that first putrid whiff of death. He sniffed tentatively at first, testing to make sure the odor hadn't followed him around the building, then took a dozen deep breaths, one after another, purging his lungs as best he could.

The morgue's front doors opened into a lobby of what could have been an overdecorated house trailer. The off-white marble extended four feet up the walls like a giant splash guard, and the room was trimmed in varying shades of cheerless gray paint. Only touches of the building's once-grand architecture peeked through its sad redecoration. The lobby was dominated by a large, half-moon-shaped reception desk that all but blocked passage to the lobby's three exits. Empty, the desk seemed ridiculously out of scale. Just behind it was an unmarked door leading toward the rear of the building. On the wall just outside the stairway hung two large black-and-white photographs showing the entire morgue building being moved nearly three hundred feet from its previous location along Forbes Avenue, photographs he recognized from a historical documentary about Pittsburgh's colorful past.

Though he'd never been inside the morgue before, it seemed vaguely familiar from that documentary and from Brenna's descriptions. Decades earlier, the morgue had had a macabre feature on the first floor—angled viewing windows that allowed even casual visitors to peer through the floor into the basement room where unidentified bodies in all states of disrepair were displayed like prone department-store mannequins. With a predictable supply of indigents and other nameless unfortunates, the windows had been the county coroner's first crude attempt at victim identification. But because the lobby was open twenty-four hours a day, the viewing windows also became a favorite stop for death freaks, practical jokers, and blindfolded prom dates.

Christensen sniffed tentatively. The place smelled stale, but nothing like what had just cleared his sinuses. The air was almost fresh, artificially fresh, no doubt the product of some heroic odor-masking products retrofitted to the building's ancient ventilation system. Robust and cheery spider plants hung at random intervals around the lobby, but their placement seemed uncoordinated.

To Christensen's right were the low modular walls of what looked like a small corral. This, he knew, was the modern replacement for those old viewing windows, where the coroner's staff allowed a victim's grieving family or friends to review the basement inventory by closed-circuit television without having to confront the chilling realities of death. The fiber-covered cubicle walls apparently were the budget-minded county commission's laughable way of giving them privacy.

Where was the receptionist? He read the stenciled letters on the glass panels of the heavy wooden doors that branched off from the lobby—Histology Lab, Investigator's Office, Photo Lab. An elevator stood open and ready to his left, but a hand-painted sign on the wall of a nearby stairway seemed more promising: Records. He followed the arrow to the second floor, emerging into a nightmare of bureaucratic design. An impossibly thin black man sat behind a counter among what seemed like a disorganized collection of computer terminals, file cabinets, and institutional desks. He looked up from the keyboard of his computer as Christensen set his briefcase on the counter and pulled a business card from his wallet.

“Help you?” he said.

“Thanks.” Christensen handed the card across the counter. “This where I'd find death certificates?”

The man stood up and took the card. He was maybe 6-foot-5, head shaved, with thick black Malcolm X specs whose lenses magnified his eyes to an almost comical size. They looked like Grade AA extra-large eggs, hard-boiled, muted only by his heavy, dark eyelids. He smiled suddenly, revealing a prominent overbite that gave his face yet another unfortunate dimension. The name tag on his maroon shirt read Bragg.

“You didn't look like a lawyer or a reporter,” he said.

Christensen nodded. “Is that good?”

“Neither way with me. It's just lawyers and the news people that come in, mostly. I can tell you ain't either of them.” He looked at Christensen's card again, put out his hand. “I'm Lemonjello,” he said, pronouncing it
le-MON-jello.

“Jim Christensen.” The man's hand felt smooth as talc, his handshake firm. “This is my first time trying to do this, actually, digging out records. Any help you can give me would be great.”

“Death certificate's what you're looking for?”

“One. And any other paperwork you might have on the same case. I assume all that's public record.”

Bragg slid a form across the counter. “Fill this out, just the top five lines. Name, address, records you want. We got certificates, autopsy reports, all that. What's the name so I can start?”

Christensen tipped his briefcase on its side and snaked a hand in to retrieve a pen and the yellow legal pad he'd been using to take research notes. “Underhill.”

Bragg waited. “I'll need the first name.”

“Vincent. The third, I think.”

Bragg smiled again, less natural than the first time. He put Christensen's card into his shirt pocket. “The Carrie Crusade,” he said. “You people sure keeping us busy over here. That one, seems like I copied it already.”

Christensen cocked his head. “Sorry, I don't follow.”

“You're with Carrie Haygood, right?”

“Who?”

“CDRT?”

Christensen shook his head.

“No?” Bragg squinted through his thick lenses. “What you want that file for?”

“Sorry, you've lost me here. I'm just doing some independent research, looking for information about this one particular case.”

“What for?”

Christensen offered a defensive smile. “Research,” he said, adding: “They're public records, right?”

Bragg nodded stiffly, gesturing to the records-release form. “Just fill all this out. Don't forget the address and phone.”

When Bragg disappeared through a door labeled “Indexing,” Christensen began filling in the requested information, stopping only to scribble “Kerry or Carrie Haygood?” and the acronym “CDRT” on the second page of his notebook. He also added Bragg's name, spelling the first name phonetically. Within a minute, the records clerk was back with a file as thin as the man himself.

“That's it?”

“Everything we've got,” Bragg said.

Christensen opened the manila file. He flipped through four documents inside and read the title of each one: Certificate of Death, Autopsy Protocol, Toxicology Report, and Coroner's Investigative Report. None was more than two pages long. He'd expected the bureaucracy of death to be more substantial.