Authors: Nicholas Wolff
“Prescott? Now?”
Jimmy shrugged. “That’s what the man said.”
Elizabeth pushed past him, bunching up her cardigan sweater as if she were cold. She pulled out a locker, and there was the body of Walter Prescott, still in the clothes he’d been brought in with. Jimmy brought one of the rolling metal stretchers over and positioned it next to the locker.
“Can you grab his feet?”
“Sure thing,” Jimmy said.
Jimmy took hold of the bare ankles, lifting the man and setting him on the table. He could feel the rigor mortis getting ahold of the bones. The knees were beginning to lock. Made Jimmy’s job easier, but he still couldn’t get used to it. Some nights he woke up in his apartment in the Shan, and for that first second of consciousness, he’d be convinced his knees and elbows were frozen in place and he started to inhale for a good bloodcurdling scream before his elbows released and out came a big yelp of relief instead. But one of these days, he was convinced, his limbs would stay locked and he’d have a coronary right in his own damn bed.
They hefted the body over to the stretcher, then rolled it to
the first examination table and lifted again. Jimmy moved the stretcher away, and Elizabeth began to strip the body down. As Jimmy steered the stretcher to the far corner, he saw Dr. Hobart come through the door, all brisk and businesslike. He marched right over to the examining table and looked down at the body of Walter Prescott.
“The police want this one quick.”
Elizabeth blushed. “I’ll have him ready in five minutes,” she said.
Jimmy watched. He was beginning to suspect Elizabeth had a secret crush on fat old Dr. Hobart. She acted like a Waltham undergrad whenever he was around. Anything he wanted, he got, and lickety-split, too.
“Why they want him so fast, Doc?” Jimmy said, leaning against the metal stretcher.
Dr. Hobart looked over. “I’m sorry?”
“I saw them cut him down from the tree the other night. Suicide, clear as day. But you said they want the report quick. They think someone strung the old boy up?”
“Now why would you say that?” Elizabeth, now carrying a pair of dissecting scissors in her hand, was glaring at him.
Dr. Hobart reached out a gloved hand and touched her shoulder. “That’s all right, Elizabeth.”
Jimmy looked down. “It’s just that people talk, Doc, you know that. After the Margaret Post thing, I got strangers coming up to me, talking about things they heard, weird things happening around town.”
“Mm-hmm,” Dr. Hobart said, nodding.
“All I’m saying is that hangers and jumpers don’t usually get special treatment. Wondering if there’s something else going on.”
Dr. Hobart smiled. “Nothing whatsoever. The Prescotts are an old family. They are—or they were—an important one.”
“Until Chase, you mean,” Jimmy said, but without malice.
“Well, that’s neither here nor there. But there’s nothing unusual about the case. At least not yet.”
Jimmy frowned.
Dr. Hobart bent over the body, the light catching the gold frames of his glasses as he examined the corpse. Elizabeth began to cut the man’s clothes away with the autopsy scissors.
“And Mr. Stearns?” Hobart remarked.
“Yeah?”
“Please don’t go out on the streets broadcasting any . . .
theories
. We don’t want to get people riled up over nothing.”
“Just like you say.”
“Bag these up, please?” Elizabeth said. She’d finished undressing the body and was holding Prescott’s clothes up between her thumb and index finger. Jimmy walked over and took the collar of the jacket and held it firm between his index finger and thumb, then went toward the left corner where they kept the clear evidence bags.
Dr. Hobart was murmuring something to Elizabeth. Jimmy heard the words “Margaret Post,” he was almost sure.
Jimmy snatched up the bag quick and stuffed the clothes in, pretending to be absorbed in his work. He wandered back toward the examination table.
“. . . the knife marks.”
He passed Elizabeth and headed toward the little evidence locker where they kept personal articles for the next of kin. So the police
did
have some suspicions about old Prescott. He’d seen the little cuts in the back of Prescott’s shirt, the ones that looked like someone had been poking him hard with a knife. Maybe someone had put Walter up on that cooler and made him put his head into that noose.
Was the old man’s death related to Margaret Post’s somehow? Were they going to compare the bodies?
Jimmy got out a white label with adhesive on the back, peeled
off the sticking paper, and stuck the label on the plastic bag holding Prescott’s clothes. He searched his pocket for a pen. He saw Elizabeth move toward the body lockers while Dr. Hobart was scrubbing up at the sink, getting ready for the autopsy, his sport coat laid across the back of one of the office chairs.
Jimmy swore and bent down to see if there was a pen in one of the desk drawers. He heard Dr. Hobart run the water, which made a loud thrumming sound on the metal floor of the sink. Jimmy was rooting through the top drawer, which was filled with papers and spare boxes of staples, when he heard Elizabeth make a sound. An odd little scream.
Jimmy swiveled around. She was now standing on the other side of a locker she’d pulled out.
“What is it?” Hobart said, and the water stopped.
“Sh-sh-sh-she’s . . .”
Jimmy felt uneasy. He’d never heard her stutter before.
“Yes?” Hobart said.
Elizabeth bent her head. “She’s gone.”
“
Gone?
”
Dr. Hobart hurried over. Jimmy stared, his mouth agape.
“What do you mean, gone? Her family still hasn’t claimed the body.”
Dr. Hobart came up to the locker, 12B, pulled it out another six inches. Even from where he was standing, Jimmy could see it was empty. Elizabeth looked at the doctor in confusion, wringing her hands.
“Check the other lockers. Mr. Stearns, lend her a hand.”
Jimmy dropped the bag on the floor. “Sure thing.”
He walked to the end and began pulling open lockers. There were only two other corpses in them that he knew about: a drunk driver and a heart attack victim, both older women. He found the heart attack on the second pull, the drunk driver—God, what the dashboard had done to her face—in the fourth.
Elizabeth was at the other end, working almost frantically. The lockers went
hooooosh
and then
chunk
as they pulled out and pushed back.
Hooosssh, chunk
, like a piston that needed oil.
He pulled a bottom-row locker and stepped back as Margaret Post came rolling into view, the black thread around her throat where Dr. Hobart had sewn her up.
He coughed. “Hey, here she is,” he said.
Elizabeth came running over. She checked the locker number: 6C. Her mouth worked like a fish out of the water, and the back of her neck was as pale as alabaster.
Her face tilted up toward him. “That bastard. Has Claude been having fun with me?” she said.
Jimmy looked at her, startled. “Claude? What are you talking about?”
Elizabeth Dyer’s right eye was twitching, and she looked like she was ready to scream. “I think he’s a low-down, terrible,
terrible
man.”
“Ma’am, Claude never—”
“Elizabeth!” Dr. Hobart touched Elizabeth on the arm, and Jimmy saw her color change just a bit.
“Somebody moved her. I heard them. Just before Jimmy came in. Playing tricks on me.”
“I don’t think Claude would do that. I really don’t,” said Jimmy.
Dr. Hobart gave him a nod. He took Elizabeth gently by the arm and led her back toward the office.
Jimmy watched them go. It worried him to see Elizabeth all roused up. Elizabeth’s door opened and closed, and he heard murmuring from behind the frosted glass.
Jimmy then gazed down at the corpse laid out on the gurney.
His left eyelid spasmed. There was something wrong with Margaret’s face. The skin had a luster that other bodies didn’t have. He was an amateur expert on the skin tones of dead people,
and this one didn’t look like quite right. Her face looked . . . moist, like waxed fruit. Not dry and gray, like it should have been after two days. She honestly appeared to have just taken her dying breath the second before he’d pulled the locker.
Margaret’s face was eggshell blue above the light blue plastic “modesty sheet” that covered her body, the eyes closed, the hair greasy. Her plump arms lay by her side, the red scratches that traced across the inner flesh near the elbow turned to black lines. He couldn’t smell anything off her, not even a whiff of decomposition.
Jimmy came around the front of the locker and moved his head slowly so that his face was lined up with Margaret’s.
People were saying she’d been cut up like a Christmas ham. He had to see. He had to tell Sam and them over at the coffee shop what the real deal was.
He pulled down the thin coat of plastic.
Jimmy’s face turned from boyish mischief to a look of retching horror. He said “Oh” once and looked away. Finally, he forced his eyes back and they drifted down. His eyes caught a glimpse of fresh scars—stitched with black thread—across her stomach.
Jimmy whipped his head to the left. He let the plastic fall back. He felt like throwing up now. Like this morning’s breakfast was coming back up the sides of his throat, changed to acid.
He took deep breaths of the cool, disinfected air that burned his throat.
“Jesus Christ,” he said to himself. “Jesus H. Christ.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
J
ohn Bailey followed Nat into his apartment. It was Tuesday night and they were both dog-tired. Nat was gray-skinned, his usual ironic smile replaced by a tight frown across his lips. His hazel eyes looked haunted.
They’d spent the last two days together investigating the suicide of Walter Prescott, if it was a suicide. Nat had traded some shifts at the hospital, and the two of them had been at it like a pair of longshoremen. Sunday night, after his conversation with Becca, Nat had given John a condensed version: the chopped-up door, Becca’s dreams of a French-speaking man. John had gone up to her room after Nat and asked to speak to her alone, but she’d gone practically mute as soon as Nat had left the room. Bent over at the waist, gripping her arms across her chest, she would only shake her head yes or no. She seemed drained, almost lifeless.
John had studied the gouges on the door, photographed them, and then they’d searched the house for something that could have made those marks in the wood. Nothing.
Monday, they’d checked on the old man’s medical history and knocked on neighbors’ doors to try and come up with a chronology or a motive. Today, they’d gone back for the people who hadn’t been home the day before. Nobody had seen or heard anything, and their only conclusion was that Walter Prescott had not been a very popular man in his neighborhood. Nat had gone in to the hospital for a few hours, and John had gone through his
notes and made a number of calls that had produced precisely nothing.
They stood around debating the relevant questions: Who had been trying to break down Becca’s door? Was it Walter Prescott or someone else? Had Walter been abusing Becca? Or did Walter discover someone trying to get into Becca’s room? Was he then murdered by the mystery assailant?
They were no closer to any answers. In fact, the very idea that answers existed to the death of Walter Prescott seemed to be retreating from the realms of possibility.
“I’m going to have to find you a tin badge,” John said as he sat heavily on Nat’s streamlined leather couch.
Nat looked up in surprise. “What do you mean?”
John slumped back. He took the remote from the arm and absently snapped on the TV.
“Five minutes ago, I got a text from Dr. Hobart.”
“Saying what?”
“They found stab marks on Prescott’s back. And it looks like the same type of weapon was used in both . . . situations. Margaret and Walter.”
Nat came over and sat next to him. “I didn’t see any stab marks.”
“His arms were blocking the wounds. I didn’t want to untie his wrists, so we didn’t see them. Hobart confirmed it.”
Nat rubbed his eyes with his thumb and index finger. “Same kind of knife?”
John shook his head. “Not a knife. Bayonet.”
“How does he know that?”
“Something about ‘evidence of a blood gutter,’ whatever the hell that is. And get this. The stabbing wounds to Margaret Post—as opposed to the cutting ones, I guess—showed the same thing: the weapon had a deep indent in the side of the blade. On Margaret, the killer also pressed the blade against her skin, and
the impression showed this blood gutter. Knives typically don’t have them. Bayonets do.”
“There was a security camera that recorded some footage on the night Margaret was murdered, right?”
John sighed. “Yeah.”
“I’m guessing no maniac carrying a big-ass bayonet is visible on the tape?”
“Correct.”
“So what
could
you see on it?”
John frowned. “A shadow.”
“A shadow?”
“Yeah. It just swallowed her up.”
Nat rubbed his forehead. “Swallowed her up. Jesus, John.”
“It swallowed her up, Nat! It got larger and then . . .”
“She wasn’t killed by a damn shadow.”
“I know.”
“She was killed by someone with a knife or a bayonet and four feet of good rope.”
John said nothing. But he knew what was coming.
Tell me about the crime scene. Tell me about the body.
He really didn’t want to think about it.
It was the second reel in the double feature of Margaret Post’s death. The first one was his first look at the body hanging on the ash tree. The second one was the surveillance film, and that one ran in his brain whenever he lay down on his bed at night.
Nat was playing amateur investigator. People got into that.
“The crime scene and the video told us nothing, okay?” John said. “The papers have been clamoring for a look at it, but are their readers going to identify a shadow and tell us who the killer is? No. So we denied their request. Nothing in that tape will lead us to the killer. Nothing
on
that tape made any goddamned sense. So let’s focus on Prescott.”