A Hard Death (18 page)

J
enner shook his head. Something was definitely not right here.

The Highway Patrol lieutenant had said the victim was probably a migrant worker, but Jenner doubted he was from Bel Arbre.

He stepped back to look at the body again. A young white man, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. Black hair shaggy but cut fashionably, like some British pop star. Clean-shaven. Good general hygiene. Circumcised.

A migrant worker? The arms were faintly tan, but the hands were soft, no calluses, no scars—they'd never held anything more serious than a pen. Most migrants were Latin American, Catholic, and uncircumcised.

In recent years, though, marginalized young people who called themselves “travelers” had joined the migrant workers, following the harvests from state to state with the shifting seasons. But travelers wore their alienation like a uniform—hair in matted dreadlocks, skin tanned deep brown, facial piercings, anarchist tattoos. Their bodies were lean and hardened, often detailed with wrist scars and needle tracks.

This kid was pale, a little doughy, and his teeth were perfect.

Well, almost. Lifting the upper lip, Jenner noticed a slight color difference between two of the premolars, one tooth subtly paler than the others.

He had Bunny wheel over the X-ray machine and do a full-mouth X-ray; he was pretty sure that was an implant. All the fillings were care fully tone-matched ceramic, high-end work, not mercury amalgam packed in on some side-street butcher shop in Juarez or wherever. This was Park Avenue dentistry—no way was this kid a field hand.

They cleared the room for Bunny to zap the film, then Jenner waited by the viewing box.

“Hey, Jenner! What's up?”

Rudge was at the entry to the main body cooler. Next to him was a middle-aged black man in a dark suit, standing next to a collapsible gurney topped with a maroon velour cover. A funeral director.

“Morning, Detective Rudge. How's it going?” Judging from Rudge's breath, it had been going pretty well the night before.

“Doc, I want you to meet my cousin, Reggie Jones.”

Jenner shook hands. “Good to meet you.” Reggie had the same next-day booze smell.

“Doc! Check out his shoes—handmade!”

Reggie proudly raised his knee and hiked up his pant leg so Jenner could admire his shoe—a gray, pointy-toed Cuban-heeled ankle boot in what looked like armadillo skin.

Jenner said, “Nice!” with all the sincerity he could muster.

Rudge clapped his hands on Reggie's shoulders and said, “You see, Jenner? This is what we should be doing! There's money in dead folk! Reggie's building a house near the golf course, acre of land, partial canal-view, three-car garage…”

“Four, now,” Jones said, nodding solemnly. “Four-car garage.”

“Hear that? That's what I'm talking about! A
four
-car garage! And his brother Jimmy's a funeral director in Atlanta—his house is even bigger!” He clapped Reggie on the shoulder again, and said, “I tell you what we do, Jenner: we get the hell out of law enforcement, we go to funeral-home school, we rent ourselves a place.

“Because I'm naturally good-looking and have a winning way, I put on a suit, run the front of the house, take care of the customers, all that. Because you're a naturally tall-ass white dude who'd terrify grieving relatives, we'll stick you in the basement, give you your own slab and some formaldehyde, let you loose on the bodies…We work a few years, then we franchise the shit out of the operation, and retire young, good-looking, and rich…”

Jenner thought for a second. “Whose name first?”

“Say what?”

“Mine or yours? Rudge & Jenner or Jenner & Rudge? It makes a difference.”

“The idea man always goes first.”

Bunny poked her head into the hallway. “Doc, I'm done.”

She slapped the film up onto the viewing box, and Rudge, his cousin, and Jenner gathered in front of it.

Jenner tapped the upper premolar; the tight white shadow of a small screw spiked into the bone of the jaw. “There we go.”

“What you got, Jenner?”

“This pedestrian from up near Bel Arbre.”

“So what's his mouth saying?”

“He's telling us he's not just any pedestrian from Bel Arbre. And that his dental work is much too good for a migrant worker.”

Rudge said, “Highway's going to love that!”

Reggie said, “So he's not ID'd yet, doc?”

Jenner shook his head. “No. He will be, though—this is the kind of kid people look for…”

B
unny was suturing the body closed when Highway Patrol showed up. She led the two troopers to the back area, where Jenner was laying out the decedent's clothes to be photographed. He recognized Cooper and Martin from the hallways; Cooper was the stocky fireplug, Martin blond and etiolated. Neither looked delighted to be summoned to the morgue.

Jenner said, “Thanks for coming down—I have a couple of questions about the investigation, and there's something you need to see.”

Cooper looked at Jenner with a concerned expression and said, “You okay, doc? You look kind of tired.”

Jenner shook his head, slightly confused. “No, I feel fine.”

“Late night? Because you look kind of pale.”

“Not really.”

Jenner walked toward the body; behind his back, Cooper winked at Martin. “Oh, okay, good. So what do you think? Intox'd? Unlucky? Both?”

“There's a few strange things. First off, this guy is no migrant worker. High-quality dental work, hands that have never seen a day's work, no tan, no foreskin—I don't think he's from around here.”

Martin looked up from his notebook and said, “Any tattoos or identifying marks?”

Jenner shook his head. “His head's in good shape, so once we have a tentative it'll be an easy photo ID. There's a scalp laceration, but the skull isn't fractured, and there's no brain trauma or intracranial bleeding. In fact, the rest of him isn't too bad either. The impact busted his arm and leg, but from his injuries I'd say he wasn't so much hit as run over…”

Cooper said, “Well, the kid driving the SUV swears he didn't see
him—says they felt a bump then the car suddenly skids out. I guess that makes sense.”

“Did the driver touch the victim? Approach him, stand over him or anything? Was the driver injured?”

“He says he didn't. He went over to the body, but says he didn't touch it. And nope, no injuries on the driver—they basically just skidded to a stop, they didn't hit anything else.” He glanced at Martin writing away. “Why do you ask?”

“Did the victim say anything? Was he moving?”

Cooper shook his head. “Nope. Didn't say anything, wasn't really moving. He was making noise, moaning, though.”

“Well, if he was alive after the impact, he was alive before it.” Jenner shook his head.

He looked at the body on the table again. “Did they notice anything else while they were waiting for EMS?”

Cooper said, “Not really. Just moaning. And drooling—they said he was just laying there moaning and drooling.”

“Drooling?” Jenner shrugged. “I don't know what that's about.” Probably some weird effect of the head injury.

He glanced over at the X-ray again, at the immaculate fillings and the perfectly executed implant.

“This isn't adding up, sergeant. You've got a guy who's lying on the road, alive, hit by a car. His injuries are bad enough to eventually kill him, I guess, but I can't understand why he died so quickly—according to EMS, he died in the ambulance minutes after being hit. I've seen people die from shock and pain from tissue damage, but he's young and healthy, so…It's just…weird.”

He looked at the clothing on the table in front of him. The shirt, cut open by the paramedics during resuscitation, lay roughly reassembled, the cut margins held together with adhesive tape.

“Okay.” Jenner shrugged. “There's something important I want to show you.”

He lifted the shirt and turned it to the cops. “The front of his shirt is soaked in what looks and smells a lot like red wine. And that's fine—
maybe he
is
just some poor bastard who has too much to drink and passes out on the road. But…”

He turned the shirt around to show them the back, holding the arms wide-open, as if the boy had been flying.

“You've got smeared blood here at the top of the left shoulder; this stain lines up pretty nicely with the cut in his scalp. Big deal.

“Now look all the way down here…” He gestured to the back of the shirt. “Down here in the low back, near the tail of the shirt, you have droplet spatter, little droplets of blood, some of which are quite fine.”

Martin said, “So, what does that mean?”

“The blood pattern doesn't fit with his wounds.” Jenner laid the shirt carefully down onto the photo stand and plugged in the cord to the stand lamps.

He turned to face the officers.

“Basically, I don't think this is his blood down here.”

He smoothed away the ridges of the shirt on the photo stand, picked up the camera, and turned on the tungsten lights. “And we know it's not the driver's blood. It looks like it was dripped onto him, with these tiny droplets here maybe coughed onto him.”

He paused, then looked them in the eye.

“Let me spell it out for you: there's someone else out there you need to find. Another victim, possibly. But also, maybe an assailant…”

J
enner watched the two troopers walk back down the hall, muttering about him. He shut the autopsy room door with relief.

Martin and Cooper had quickly turned surly: Jenner was spoiling an open-and-shut case with forensic straw-clutching. No way could Jenner know how the body had rolled when the SUV hit it; maybe blood from the scalp wound landed on the body as it turned, or maybe it spattered off the vehicle undercarriage onto the victim's back.

Jenner had listened, nodded patiently, and stuck calmly to his position—the pattern was what the pattern was, and he couldn't explain it by the victim being simply run over.

If anything, Jenner's calm had irritated them more than his insistence that something was wrong. He sighed; it was hardly the first time he'd been second-guessed.

The shirt now lay face-down on the photo stand, floodlit by four tungsten lamps. Jenner took a wide photograph, then shot close-ups of the blood spatter on the shirt. He tore open a package of sterile scissors and cut a two-inch square of bloodstain from the shirttail. He placed the stained fabric in a coin envelope and labeled the envelope with the case number and the location on the shirt. Then he cut another square of fabric from high on the shirt, from an area where he thought the blood-staining was from the victim's head wound, and then finally a square of unstained fabric for comparison.

Jenner turned on the radio; mellow soft rock—Air Supply or Toto, he couldn't tell, didn't care—oozed out of the speakers into the quiet of the autopsy room. He spun the radio dial—anything but that. Down at the bottom end, there was religious broadcasting and country, then Latin music floating over the Glades from Miami. As he moved up the dial,
a popping bass line filled the air, quickly plastered over with vamping eighties synthesizers—Ready for the World's “Oh, Sheila!”

He turned it up with a grin, and went back to work.

He flipped the shirt over. The maroon blotches on the front were definitely wine—Jenner could smell it rising from the shirt as the stand lights heated the cloth.

Oh, baby, love me right

Let me love you till I get it right, unh

He adjusted the shirt, pressing it flat so the spill pattern was unruffled. He was now sweating under the bright light; in the heat of the bulbs, he felt a little dizzy. He wiped his forehead, took a hand lens, and bent close to the fabric, searching for droplet spatter.

Oh oh Sheila!

Let me love you till…

The cloth swam before his eyes, and then his face was flushing, tears streaming down his cheeks, watery fluid pouring from his nose as his mouth filled with spit. He staggered back retching, his stomach writhing and grinding.

He pulled himself unsteadily to the wall, dragged over a stool, and slumped down, easing back until his shoulders and head pressed the cool tile. The saliva in his mouth was acrid and thin, and he let it dribble out. He wiped his eyes, but the tears came faster; he began to wheeze.

Jenner's breathing was harder now, his breath jerking out in rasping gasps. He pulled himself to his feet. Time to go, time to go
quick
.

He could barely see through the tears. He leaned into the sink, rinsed his face, splashed water on his scrub top until it was soaked, then pulled it up to cover his nose and mouth. Gasping and heaving, he stumbled back near the photo stand, hugging the wall as he made his way to the lighting power cord; he yanked the cord out of the wall socket, sending the expensive stand crashing to the floor in an explosion of sparks and popping bulbs.

The shirt was on the floor now, half-covered by the wrecked photo stand. He tossed a disposable plastic shroud over the shirt and stand,
then moved back to the far wall. He could barely see now; he felt along the wall until he found the high-powered accessory ventilation switch and flipped it on; there was a low hum, and then the feel of cooled air moving against his skin.

He pushed through the swing doors into the corridor, fell out into the breezeway and slumped onto a bench, gasping in the warm, humid air.

The wheezing eased, but he was still breathless. It took a minute or so for the heaving to stop; he was spitting less but tears still poured from his eyes.

It took another five minutes before he felt normal. He walked back into the morgue wing, and peered through the autopsy room viewing window, staring at the red-stained shirt, still visible under the splintered stand plinth.

Jenner breathed out raggedly. Now he knew exactly what had happened.