“I don’t know why,” I reply. “But if I were new to the town and to the characters involved, I’d want to see who cared enough about Bray to show up. I’d also want to see who didn’t.” I try to be logical. “She didn’t tell you she was going? What about when you met with her last night?” I am out with it. I want to know what went on in that meeting.
“Didn’t say nothing about it,” he replies. “She had other things on her mind.”
“Such as? Or are we keeping secrets?” I add pointedly.
He is silent for a long moment. “Look, Doc,” he finally says, “this ain’t my case. It’s New York’s case and I’m just doing what I’m told. You want to know stuff, ask her, ’cause that’s the way she fucking wants it.” Resentment hardens his tone. “And I’m in the middle of lovely Mosby Court and have other things to do besides jump every time she snaps her fancy big-city fingers.”
Mosby Court is not the princely residential neighborhood the name suggests, but one of seven low-rent housing projects in the city. All are called courts, and four are named for outstanding Virginians: an actor, an educator, a prosperous tobacconist, a Civil War hero. I hope Marino isn’t in Mosby Court because there has been another shooting. “You’re not bringing me more business, are you?” I ask him.
“Another misdemeanor murder.”
I don’t laugh at this bigoted code—this cynical label for a young, black male shot multiple times, probably on the street, probably over drugs, probably dressed in expensive athletic clothes and basketball shoes, and nobody saw a thing.
“Meet you in the bay,” Marino sullenly says. “Five, ten minutes.”
The snow has completely stopped and the temperature remains warm enough to keep the city from locking up with freezing slush again. Downtown is dressed for the holidays, the skyline bordered in white lights, some of them burned out. In front of the James Center, people have pulled over to explore a blaze of reindeer sculpted of light, and on 9th Street, the capitol glows like an egg through the bare branches of ancient trees, the pale yellow mansion next to it elegant with candles in every window. I catch a glimpse of couples in evening clothes getting out of cars in the parking lot and remember with panic that tonight is the governor’s Christmas party for top state officials. I sent in my RSVP more than a month ago, confirming I would attend. Oh God. It will not be lost on Governor Mike Mitchell and his wife, Edith, that I am a no-show, and the impulse to swerve onto the capitol grounds is so strong that I flip on my turn signal. I just as quickly flip it off. I can’t possibly go, not even for fifteen minutes. What would I do with Jaime Berger? Take her along? Introduce her to everyone? I smile ruefully and shake my head inside my dark cockpit as I imagine the looks I would get, as I fantasize about what would happen if the press found out.
Having worked for government my entire career, I never underestimate the potential for the mundane. The telephone number for the governor’s mansion is listed, and directory assistance can automatically dial it for an additional fifty cents. Momentarily, I have an executive protection unit officer on the line, and before I can explain that I simply want to pass on a message, the trooper puts me on hold. A tone sounds at measured intervals, as if my call is being timed, and I wonder if calls to the mansion are taped. Across Broad Street, an older, drearier part of town gives way to the new brick and glass empire of Biotech, where my office is the anchor. I check the rearview mirror for Berger’s SUV. She doggedly follows, her lips moving in my rearview mirror. She is on the phone, and it gives me an uneasy feeling as I watch her say words I can’t hear.
“Kay?” Governor Mitchell’s voice suddenly sounds over Anna’s hands-free car phone.
My own voice catches in surprise as I rush to tell him I wasn’t expecting to disturb him, that I am terribly sorry to miss his party tonight. He doesn’t answer right away, his hesitation his way of saying I am making a mistake by not coming to his party. Mitchell is a man who understands opportunity and knows how to appropriate it. In his way of thinking, for me to pass up a chance for even a moment with him and other powerful leaders of the commonwealth is foolish, especially now. Yes, now of all times.
“The New York prosecutor’s in town.” I don’t have to say for which cases. “I’m on my way to meet her right now, Governor. I hope you understand.”
“I think it would be a good idea for you and me to meet, too.” He is firm. “I was going to take you aside at the party.”
I have the sensation of stepping on broken glass, afraid to look because I might find I am bleeding. “Whenever it’s convenient for you, Governor Mitchell,” I respectfully answer.
“Why don’t you stop by the mansion on your way home?”
“I can probably be free in about two hours,” I tell him.
“I’ll see you then, Kay. Say hello to Ms. Berger,” he goes on. “When I was attorney general, we had a case that involved her office. I’ll tell you about it sometime.”
Off 4th Street, the enclosed bay where bodies are received looks like a square, gray igloo appended to the side of my building. I drive up the ramp and stop at the massive garage door, realizing with intense frustration that I have no way to get in. The remote opener is in my car, which is inside my garage at the house I have been banished from. I dial the number for the after-hours morgue attendant. “Arnold?” I say when he answers on the sixth ring. “Could you please open the bay door?”
“Oh, yes ma’am.” He sounds groggy and confused, as if I just woke him up. “Doing it right now, ma’am. Your opener not working?”
I try to be patient with him. Arnold is one of those people who is overwhelmed by inertia. He battles gravity. Gravity wins. I am constantly having to remind myself that there is no point in getting angry with him. Highly motivated people aren’t fighting for his job. Berger has pulled up behind me and Marino is behind her, all of us waiting for the door to rise, granting us entrance into the kingdom of the dead. My portable phone rings.
“Well, ain’t this cozy,” Marino says in my ear.
“Apparently she and the governor are acquainted.” I watch a dark van turn into the ramp behind Marino’s midnight blue Crown Victoria. The bay door begins to lurch up with screeching complaints.
“Well, well. You don’t think he has something to do with Wolfman leaving us for the Big Apple, do you?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore,” I confess. The bay is large enough to hold all of us, and we get out at the same time, the rumbling of engines and shutting of doors amplified by concrete. Cold, raw air jars my fractured elbow again, and I am baffled to see Marino in a suit and tie. “You look nice,” I dryly comment. He lights a cigarette, his eyes fastened to Berger’s mink-draped figure as she leans inside her Mercedes to collect belongings from the backseat. Two men in long, dark coats open the tailgate of the van, revealing the stretcher inside and its ominous, shrouded cargo.
“Believe it or not,” Marino says to me, “I was going to stop by the memorial service for the hell of it, then he decides to get whacked.” He indicates the dead body in the back of the van. “It’s turning out to be a little more complicated than we thought at first. Maybe more than a case of urban renewal.” Berger heads toward us, loaded down with books, accordion files and a sturdy leather briefcase. “You came prepared.” Marino stares at her with a flat expression on his face. Aluminum clacks as stretcher legs open. The tailgate slams shut.
“I really appreciate both of you seeing me on such short notice,” Berger says.
In the glare of the lighted bay, I note the fine lines on her face and neck, the faint hollows in her cheeks that tattle on her age. At a glance, or when she’s made up for the camera, she could pass for thirty-five. I suspect she is a few years older than I am, closer to fifty. Her angular features, short dark hair and perfect teeth coalesce into a portrait of the familiar, and I connect her with the expert I have seen on Court TV. She begins to resemble the photographs I pulled up on the Internet when I released search engines to find her in cyberspace so I
could prepare myself for this invasion from what seems an alien galaxy.
Marino doesn’t offer to help her carry anything. He ignores her the same way he does me when he is stung or resentful or jealous. I unlock the door leading inside as the attendants wheel the stretcher in our direction, and I recognize the two men but can’t recall their names. One of them stares at Berger with starstruck eyes. “You’re the lady on TV,” he pipes up. “Holy smoke. That lady judge.”
“ ’Fraid not. I’m no judge.” Berger looks them in the eye and smiles.
“You ain’t the lady judge? You swear?” The stretcher clatters through the doorway. “I guess you want him in the cooler,” one of the men says to me.
“Yes,” I reply. “You know where to sign him in. Arnold’s around here somewhere.”
“Yes ma’am, I know what to do.” Neither attendant makes any indication that I might have ended up in their van last weekend as another delivery had my destiny turned out differently. It is my observation that people who work for funeral homes and removal services aren’t shocked or even moved by much. It is not lost on me that these two guys are more impressed with Berger’s celebrity than with the fact that their local chief medical examiner is lucky to be alive and is faring rather poorly in the public eye these days. “You ready for Christmas?” one of them asks me.
“Never am,” I reply. “You gentlemen have a happy one.”
“Lot happier than he’s gonna have.” Indicating the pouched body, they roll off in the direction of the morgue office, where they will fill out a toe tag and sign in the newest patient. I push buttons to open several sets of stainless steel doors as we walk over disinfected floors, passing coolers and the rooms where autopsies are done. Industrial-strength deodorizers are heavy-handed in their presence, and Marino talks about the case from Mosby Court. Berger asks him nothing about it, but he seems to think she wants to know. Or maybe he is showing off now.
“First, it looked like a drive-by since he was in the street and his head was bloody. But I gotta tell you, now I’m wondering if maybe he got hit by a car,” he informs us. I open doors leading into the dim silence of the administrative wing while he goes on to tell Berger every detail of a case he hasn’t even discussed with me yet. I show them into my private conference room and we take off our coats. Berger is dressed in dark wool slacks and a heavy black sweater that does not accentuate but certainly can’t hide her ample bosom. She has the slender, firm build of an athlete, and her scuffed Vibram boots hint that she will go anywhere and do anything if work requires it. She pulls out a chair and begins arranging briefcase, files and books on the round wooden table.
“See, he’s got burns here and here.” Marino points to his left cheek and neck and pulls out Polaroid photographs from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He makes the smart choice of handing them to me first.
“Why would a hit-and-run have burns?” My question is a rebuttal, and I am getting an uneasy feeling.
“If he was pushed out while the car was moving, or if he got toasted by the exhaust pipe,” Marino suggests, not sure, not really caring. He has other matters on his mind.
“Not likely,” I reply in an ominous tone.
“Shit,” Marino says, and it begins to dawn on him as he meets my eyes. “I never looked at him, was already in a bag by the time I got there. Goddamn, I just went by what I was told by the guys at the scene. Shit,” he says again, glancing at Berger, his face darkening with gathering embarrassment and irritation. “They’d already bagged the body by the time I got there. Dumb as a bag of hammers, all of ’em.”
The man in the Polaroids is light-skinned with handsome features and short, tightly curled hair dyed egg-yolk yellow. A small gold loop pierces his left ear. I know instantly that his burns were not made by an exhaust pipe, which would leave elliptical burns and not these, which are perfectly round and the size of silver dollars and blistered. He was alive when he got them. I give Marino a long look. He makes the connection and blows out, shaking his head. “We have an ID?” I say to him.
“We don’t got a clue.” He smooths back hair that at this stage in his life is nothing more than gray fringe gelled to the top of his broad bald pate. He would look much better if he would just shave his head. “Nobody in the area says they’ve ever seen him before, either, and none of my guys think he looks like anybody we’re used to seeing out there on the street.”
“I need to look at the body now.” I get up from the table.
Marino pushes back his chair. Berger watches me with penetrating blue eyes. She has stopped spreading out her paperwork. “Do you mind if I come along?” she asks.
I do, but she is here. She is a professional. It would be unthinkably rude for me to imply she might not act like one or to suggest I don’t trust her. I step next door to fetch my lab coat from my office. “I guess you’ve got no way of knowing whether it’s possible this guy might have been gay. I guess it’s not an area where gays might cruise or hang out.” I quiz Marino as we head out of the conference room. “What about male prostitutes in Mosby Court?”
“He has that look, now that you mention it,” Marino replies. “One of the cops said he was sort of a pretty boy, that buffed kind of workout build. He was wearing an earring. Like I said, though, I ain’t seen the body.”
“I do believe you win the prize for stereotypes,” Berger comments to him. “And I thought my guys were bad.”
“Oh yeah? What guys?” Marino is a millimeter from being snide to her.
“At my office,” she says in a blasé way. “The investigative squad.”
“Oh yeah? You got your own personal NYPD cops? Ain’t that sweet. How big?”
“About fifty.”
“They work in your building?” I can hear it in his tone. Berger threatens the hell out of him.
“Yes.” She does not relay this with any sort of condescension or arrogance, but simply reports the facts.
Marino walks ahead of her and tosses back, “Well, ain’t that something.”
The removal service attendants are in the office chatting with Arnold. He looks stricken when I appear, as if I have caught him in the middle of something he shouldn’t be doing, but then, this is simply Arnold. He is a timid, quiet man. Like a moth that has begun to turn the color of his environment, he is wan with an unhealthy gray tint to his skin, and chronic allergies keep his eyes red-rimmed and runny. The second John Doe of the day is in the middle of the hallway, zipped up inside a burgundy, deep-pile pouch that is embroidered with the name of the removal service, Whitkin Brothers. I suddenly remember the names of the attendants. Of course, they are the Whitkin brothers. “I’ll take care of him.” I let the brothers know they don’t have to roll the body into the cooler or transfer him onto a gurney.
“We don’t mind,” they are quick to nervously offer, as if I am implying they are lollygagging.
“That’s all right. I need to spend a little time with him first,” I say, and I push the stretcher through double steel doors and hand out shoe covers and gloves. It takes a few moments for me to do the necessary housekeeping of signing John Doe into the autopsy log, assigning him a number and photographing him. I smell urine.
THE AUTOPSY SUITE gleams bright and clean, devoid of the usual sights and sounds. The quiet is a relief. After all these years, the constant clamor of water running into steel sinks, of Stryker saws, of steel clacking against steel still makes me tense and tired. The morgue can be surprisingly noisy. The dead are loud in their demands and gory colors, and this new patient is going to resist me. I can already tell. He is completely rigorous and not about to allow me to undress him or open his jaws to look at his tongue or teeth, not without a struggle. I unzip the pouch and smell urine. I pull a surgical lamp close and palpate his head, feeling no fractures. Blood smeared on his jaw and drops on the front of his jacket indicate he was upright when he was bleeding. I direct the light up his nostrils. “He’s had a nosebleed,” I report to Marino and Berger. “So far, I’m not seeing any i
njuries to his head.”
I begin examining the burns through a lens while Berger moves near me to observe. I note fibers and dirt adhering to blistered skin, and I find abrasions at the corners of his mouth and on the inside of his cheeks. I push up the sleeves of his red warm-up jacket and look at his wrists. Sharply angled ligature marks have left pronounced indentations in the skin, and when I unzip his jacket, I find two burns directly centered on the navel and left nipple. Berger is leaning so close, her gown brushes me. “Rather cold to be out with just a warm-up suit and no T-shirt or anything beneath it,” I point out to Marino. “Were his pockets checked at the scene?”
“Better to wait and do it here where you can see worth a damn,” he answers.
I slide my hands into the pockets of the warm-up pants and jacket, finding nothing. I pull the pants down and blue running shorts underneath are soaked with urine, and the ammonia smell sends an alert through my psyche, and tiny hairs all over my flesh stand up like sentries. The dead rarely frighten me. This man does. I check the pocket inside the waistband and pull out a steel key etched with Do Not Duplicate, and written on it in permanent Magic Marker is the number 233. “A hotel or house, maybe?” I wonder out loud as I place the key inside a transparent plastic bag and am pricked by more paranoid feelings. “Maybe a locker.” Two-thirty-three was my family’s post office box number when I was a child in Miami. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that 233 is my lucky number, but it is one I have frequently used for pass codes and lock combinations, because the number isn’t obvious and I can remember it.
“Anything so far that might suggest what killed him?” Berger asks me.
“Not so far. I don’t guess we’ve had any luck with AFIS or Interpol yet?” I say to Marino.