Cruel & Unusual

  “We need to talk about this afternoon, Lucy. If you hadn't come home when you did, the police would have been looking for you.”

  “I worked out for an hour and a half, then took a shower.”

  “You were gone four and a haft hours.”

  “I had groceries to buy and a few other errands.”

  “Why didn't you answer the car phone?”

  “I assumed it was someone trying to reach you. Plus, I've never used a car phone. I'm not twelve years old, Aunt Kay.”

  “I know you're not. But you don't live here and have never driven here before: was worried.”

  “I'm sorry,” she said.

  We ate by firelight, both of us sitting on the floor around the butler's table. I had turned off lamps. Flames jumped and shadows danced as ft celebrating a magic moment in the lives of my niece and me.

  “What do you want for Christmas?” I asked, reaching for my wine.

  “Shooting lessons,” she said.

  5

  Lucy stayed up very late working with the computer and I did not hear her stir when I woke up to the alarm early Monday morning. Parting the curtains in my bedroom window, I looked out at powdery flakes swirling in lights burning on the patio. The snow was deep and nothing was moving in my neighborhood. After coffee and a quick scan of the paper, I got dressed and was almost to the door when I turned around. No matter that Lucy was no longer twelve years old, I could not leave without checking on her.

  Slipping inside her bedroom, I found her sleeping on her side in a tangle of sheets, the duvet half on the floor. It touched me that she was wearing a sweat suit that she had gotten out of one of my drawers. I had never had another human being wish to sleep in anything of mine, and I straightened the covers, careful not to wake her.

  The drive downtown was awful, and I envied workers whose offices were closed because of the snow. Those of us who had not been granted an unexpected holiday crept slowly along the interstate, skating with the slightest tap on the brakes as we peered through streaked windshields that the wipers could not keep clean. I wondered how I would explain to Margaret that my teenage niece thought our computer system was insecure. Who had gotten into my directory, and why had Jennifer Deighton been calling my number and hanging up? I did not get to the office until half past eight, and when I walked into the morgue, I stopped midway in the corridor, puzzled. Parked at a haphazard angle near the stainless steel refrigerator door was a gurney, bearing a body, covered by a sheet. Checking the toe tag, I read Jennifer Deighton's name, and I looked around. There was no one inside the office or X-ray room. I opened the door to the autopsy suite and found Susan dressed in scrubs and dialing a number on the phone. She quickly hung up and greeted me with a nervous “Good morning.”

  “Glad you made it in.” I unbuttoned my coat, regarding her curiously.

  “Ben gave me a lift,” she said, referring to my administrator, who owned a Jeep with four-wheel drive. “So far, we're the only three here.”

  “No sign of Fielding?”

  “He called a few minutes ago and said he couldn't get out of his driveway. I told him we only have one case so far, but if more come in Ben can pick him up.”

  “Are you aware that our case is parked in the hall?” She hesitated, blushing. “I was taking her over to X ray when the phone rang. Sorry.”

  “Have you weighed and measured her yet?”

  “No.”

  “Let's do that first.”

  She hurried out of the autopsy suite before I could comment further. Secretaries and scientists who worked in the labs upstairs often entered and left the building through the morgue because it was convenient to the parking lot. Maintenance workers were in and out, too. Leaving a body unattended in the middle of a corridor was very poor form and could even jeopardize the case should chain of evidence be questioned in court.

  Susan returned pushing the gurney, and we went to work, the stench of decomposing flesh nauseating. I fetched gloves and a plastic apron from a shelf, and clamped various forms in a clipboard. Susan was quiet and tense. When she reached up to the control panel to reset the computerized floor scale, I noticed her hands were shaking. Maybe she was suffering from morning sickness.

  “Everything okay?” I asked her.

  “Just a little tired.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive. She weighs one-eighty exactly.”

  I changed into my greens and Susan and I moved the body into the X-ray room across the hall, transferring it from the gurney to the table. Opening the sheet, I wedged a block under the neck to keep the head from lolling. The flesh of her throat was clean, spared from soot and burns because her chin had been tucked dose to her chest while she was inside the car with the engine running. I did not see any obvious injuries, no bruises or broken fingernails. Her nose wasn't fractured. There were no cuts inside her lips and she hadn't bitten her tongue.

  Susan took X rays and slipped them through the processor while I went over the front of the body with a lens. I collected a number of barely visible whitish fibers, quite possibly from the sheet or her bed covers, and found others similar to the ones on the bottoms of her socks. She wore no jewelry and was naked beneath her gown. I remembered the rumpled covers on her bed, the pillows propped against the headboard and glass of water on the table. The night of her death she had put curlers in her hair, gotten undressed, and at some point, perhaps, had been reading in bed.

  Susan emerged from the developer room and leaned against the wall, supporting the small of her back with her hands.

  “What's the story on this lady?” she asked. “Was she married?”

  “It appears she lived alone.”

  “Did she work?”

  “She ran a business out of her home.”

  Something caught my eye.

  “What sort of business?”

  “Possibly fortune-telling of sorts.”

  The feather was very small and sooty, clinging to Jennifer Deighton's gown in the area of her left hip. Reaching for a small plastic bag, I tried to recall if I'd noticed any feathers around her house. Perhaps the pillows on herbed were filled with feathers.

  “Did you find any evidence she was into the occult?”

  “Some of her neighbors seemed to think she was a witch,” I said.

  “Based on what?”

  “There's a church near her house. Allegedly, the lights in the steeple starting going on and off after she moved in some months ago.”

  “You're kidding.”

  “I saw them go on myself when I was leaving the scene. The steeple was dark. Then suddenly it was lit up.”

  “Weird.”

  “It was weird.”

  “Maybe it's on a timer.”

  “Unlikely. Lights going on and off all night would not conserve electricity. If it's true they go on and off all night. I saw it happen only once.”

  Susan did not say anything.

  “Possibly there's a short in the wiring.”

  In fact, I thought as I continued to work, I would call the church. They might be unaware of the problem.

  “Any strange stuff inside her house?”

  “Crystals. Some unusual books.”

  Silence.

  Then Susan said, “I wish you'd told me earlier.”

  “Pardon?”

  I glanced up. She was staring uneasily at the body. She looked pale.

  “Are you sure you're feeling all right?”

  I asked.

  “I don't like stuff like this.”

  “Stuff like what?”

  “It's like someone having AIDS or something. It ought to be told up front. Especially now.”

  “It's unlikely this woman has AIDS or -”

  “I should have been told. Before I touched her.”

  “Susan -”

  “I went to school with a girl who was a witch.”

  I stopped what I was doing. Susan was rigid against the wall, hands pressed against her belly.

  “Her na
me was Doreen. She belonged to a coven and our senior year she put a curse on my twin sister, Judy. Judy was killed in a car wreck two weeks before graduation.”

  Bewildered, I stared at her.

  “You know how occult stuff creeps me out! Like that cow's tongue with needles stuck in it that the cops brought in a couple of months ago. The one wrapped up in a list of dead people's names. It was left on a grave.”

  “It was a prank,” I reminded her calmly.”

  The tongue came from a grocery store, and the names were meaningless, copied from headstones in the cemetery.”

  “You shouldn't tamper with the satanic, prank or not.” Her voice trembled. “I take evil just as seriously as God.”

  Susan was the daughter of a minister and had abandoned religion long ago. I'd never heard her so much as allude to Satan or mention God unless it was profanely. I'd never known her to be the least bit superstitious or unnerved by anything. She was about to cry.

  “Tell you what,” I said quietly. “Since it appears I'm going to be short-staffed today, if you'll answer the phones upstairs, I'll take care of things down here.”

  Her eyes filled with tears, and I immediately went to her.

  “It's okay.”

  Putting my arm around her, I walked her out of the room. “Come on,” I said gently as she leaned against me, sobbing. “You want Ben to take you home?”

  She nodded, whispering, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

  “All you need is a little rest.”

  I sat her in a chair inside the morgue office and reached for the phone.

  Jennifer Deighton had inhaled no carbon monoxide or soot because by the time she had been placed inside her car she was no longer breathing. Her death was a homicide, an obvious one, and throughout the afternoon I impatiently left messages for Marino to call me. Several times I tried to check on Susan but her phone just rang and rang.

  “I'm concerned,” I said to Ben Stevens. “Susan's not answering her phone. When you drove her home, did she mention that she was planning to go somewhere?”

  “She told me she was going to bed.”

  He was sitting at his desk, going through reams of computer printouts. Rock and roll played quietly from the radio on a bookcase, and he was drinking tangerine flavored mineral water. Stevens was young, smart, and boyishly good looking. He worked hard, and played hard in singles bars, so I had been UK. I was quite certain his job as my administrator would prove to be a short step on his way to someplace better.

  “Maybe she unplugged her phone so she could sleep,” he said, turning on his adding machine.

  “Maybe that's it.”

  He launched into an update on our budget woes.

  Late afternoon when it was beginning to get dark out, Stevens buzzed my line.

  “Susan called. She ill she won't be in tomorrow. And I've got a John Deighton on hold. Says he's Jennifer Deighton's brother.” Stevens transferred the call.

  “Hello. They said you did my sister's autopsy,” a man mumbled. “Uh, Jennifer Deighton's my sister.”

  “Your name, please?”

  “John Deighton. I live in Columbia, South Carolina.”

  I glanced up as Marino appeared in my office doorway, and motioned forhim to take a chair.

  “They said she hooked up a hose to her car and killed herself.”

  “Who said that” I asked. “And could you speak up, please?”

  He hesitated. “I don't remember the name, should've wrote it down but I was too shocked.”

  The man didn't sound shocked. His voice was so muffled I barely could hear what he was saying.

  “Mr. Deighton, I'm very sorry,” I said. “But you will have to request any information regarding her death in writing. I will also need, included with your written request, some verification that you are next of kin.”

  He did not respond.

  “Hello?”

  I asked. “Hello?”

  I was answered by a dial tone.

  “That's strange, “I said to Marino. “Are you familiar with a John Deighton who claims to be Jennifer Deighton's brother?”

  “That's who that was? Shit. We're trying to reach him.

  “He said someone's already notified him about her death.”

  “You know where he was calling from?”

  “Columbia, South Carolina, supposedly. He hung up on me.”

  Marino didn't seem interested. “I just came from Vander's office,” he said, referring to Neils Vander, the chief fingerprints examiner. “He checked out Jennifer Deighton's car, plus the books that were beside her bed and a poem that was stuck inside one of 'em. As for the sheet of blank paper that was on her bed, he hasn't gotten to that yet.”

  “Anything so far?”

  “He lifted a few. Will run them through the computer if there's a need. Probably most of the prints are hers. Here.”

  He placed a small paper bag on my desk. “Happy reading.”

  “I think you're going to want those prints run without delay,” I said grimly.

  A shadow passed over Marino's eyes. He massaged his temples.

  “Jennifer Deighton definitely did not commit suicide,” I informed him. “Her CO was less than seven percent. She had no soot in her airway. The bright pink tint of her skin was due to exposure to cold, not CO poisoning.”

  “Christ,” he said.

  Shuffling through the paperwork in front of me, I handed him a body diagram, then opened an envelope and withdrew Polaroid photographs of Jennifer Deighton's neck.

  “As you can see,” I went on, “there are no injuries externally.”

  “What about the blood on the car seat?”

  “A postmortem artifact due to purging. She was beginning to decompose. I found no abrasions or contusions, no fingertip bruises. But here” - I showed him a photograph of her neck at autopsy - “she's got irregular hemorrhages in the sternocleidomastoid muscles bilaterally. She's also got a fracture of the right cornua of the hyoid. Her death was caused by asphyxia, due to pressure applied to the neck “

  Marino interrupted loudly. “You suggesting she got yoked?”

  I showed him another photograph. “She's also got some facial perechia, or pinpoint hemorrhages. These findings are consistent with yoking, yes. She's a homicide, and I might suggest that we keep this out of the newspapers as long as possible.”

  “You know, I didn't need this.”

  He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes. “I got eight un-cleared homicides sitting on my desk even as we speak. Henrico don't got shit on Eddie Heath, and the kid's old man calls me almost every day. Not to mention, they're having a damn drug war-in Mosby Court. Merry friggin' Christmas. I didn't need this.”

  “Jennifer Deighton didn't need this either, Marino.”

  “Keep going. What else did you find?”

  “She did have high blood pressure, as her neighbor Mrs. Clary suggested.”

  “Huh,” he said, shifting his eyes away from me. “How could you tell?”

  “She had left ventricular hypertophy, or thickening of the left side of the heart.”

  “High blood pressure does that?”

  “It does. I should find fibrinoid changes in the renal microvasculature or early nephrosclerosis. I suspect the brain will show hypertensive changes, too, in the cerebral arterioles, but I won't be able to say with certainty until I can take a look under the scope.”

  “You're saying kidney and brain cells get killed off when you got high blood pressure?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Nothing significant.”

  “What about gastric contents?” Marino asked.

  “Meat, some vegetables, partially digested.”

  “Alcohol or drugs?”

  “No alcohol. Drug screens are under way.”

  “No sign of rape?”

  “No injuries or other evidence of sexual assault. I swabbed her for seminal fluid but won't get those reports for a while. Even then, yo
u can't always be sure.”

  Marino's face was unreadable.

  “What are you after?” I finally asked.