A Hard Death (19 page)

W
ith the entire mortuary staff standing in the sheriff's office parking lot, the emergency evacuation had turned into a party. Someone opened a case of cold Coke, and Calvin had the door of his PT Cruiser open, pumping dancehall reggae loud into the lot. A splinter group gathered near the loading bay to smoke, until the safety officer, a thin, angry-looking woman who drove a Volvo station wagon the color of a freshly stubbed toe, chased them away, warning of the exposure risk.

She monitored their sheepish departure, then returned to Jenner.

Reason didn't seem to be working with her. Jenner said, “Look, the fumes only developed because I heated the shirt with really hot photo lights—I'd had it out all day, and nothing happened! The lights are off now, I bagged and sealed the shirt, I turned on the room exhaust, the autopsy room air has been exchanged many times. There was no need to evacuate the entire building—or even just the autopsy wing!”

She wouldn't budge.

“Doctor, this constitutes an airborne toxic exposure, and until the Hazmat team says it's okay, the Forensic Sciences wing will stay shut. On your say-so, I've let staff law enforcement personnel return to the main municipal building, but the forensic labs, including the morgue, are closed…”

Jenner shrugged irritably. “Well, whatever. Your call. But it's a complete waste of time. And I need to get back in there as soon as possible so I can test my samples and find out exactly what we're dealing with.”

She shook her head decisively. “Out of the question. The morgue stays shut. The lab stays shut. Those specimens will keep until Hazmat gives the all-clear.”

“No they won't! If I want meaningful test results, I need to centrifuge the blood as soon as possible!” Jenner ran a hand through his hair. “When the hell will Hazmat get here?”

“They're coming down from Fort Myers. I'd say we'll be up and running again in about three hours.” She scribbled something on her clipboard, then peered at him over her glasses.

She said, “Do we need to worry about the body? Is that contaminated?”

Jenner thought for a second, then grudgingly decided the question was fair. “It's okay; he's been sutured closed, and is in a body bag now. Actually, I remember feeling a bit light-headed a couple of times during the autopsy; I just chalked it up to not getting enough sleep last night. In fact, I felt a bit woozy when I collected the stomach contents, which makes complete sense now.”

Her eyes were sharp. She said, “So, doctor, tell me again: in your opinion, what are we dealing with?”

“I think someone fed him an organophosphate poison. You'll find organophosphates on every damn farm in Douglas County—insecticides, mostly. But they also exist in weaponized form—sarin, tabun…”

Too late, Jenner realized it was the wrong time to showboat; she was now leaning forward intently, pen hovering over God only knew what disastrous checkbox. Terrorist threats were porn for safety officers—they lived for the stuff. If Jenner didn't talk her down, she'd shut down the whole county and call in Homeland Security.

He said, “This is pretty clearly an insecticide poisoning. Someone spiked his wine with some kind of bug juice.”

She seemed disappointed they'd moved on from poison gas. “But if it was insecticide, wouldn't he…wouldn't he be able to taste it in the wine?”

“Yes, I think so, taste it
and
smell it. They probably held him down and poured the stuff into his mouth—the splash pattern on his shirt looks more like, well, splashes, than if he'd puked it up.”

She put a hand to her throat. “So you think…”

“He was murdered.” He paused, then looked at her intently. “They got
him drunk, poisoned him with insecticide, then somehow he escaped and made it onto the road where he was hit. Or maybe they pushed him in front of the car. The accident is just a distraction—he'd have died sooner rather than later.”

She said, “Oh my gosh! How horrible!”

She jotted on the clipboard, then said, “Now, coming back to the poison gas for a second…”

He watched her write. “The sooner we get into the lab and run those specimens the sooner I can tell you if there's anything more serious going on…”

She pulled out her cell phone, hit the walkie-talkie button, and asked where the hell the biohazard-containment team was.

T
hree hours: enough time to get up to Bel Arbre and see the accident site. In his gut, Jenner was sure this killing was linked to the hanged men in the Glades—and to Marty.

But where was the scene? The EMS report, all the records, were in the cordoned-off autopsy room. But the EMS dispatch log wasn't—Rudge could dig up the ambulance call location.

As Jenner walked down the hall toward Major Crimes, he saw the sheriff moving in his direction, half-hidden by a TV news crew. And walking alongside the sheriff…

Jenner stopped.

Amanda Tucker.

He was instantly back in his loft, Ana crying, kissing him, pressing her hands against his chest like a treadling cat. “Why are they doing this, Jenner? All you've done is be kind to me. Why can't they leave us alone?”

And then, the next day, waking to find her by the bed with her little bag, whispering that she couldn't stay anymore, couldn't watch what they were doing to him, she couldn't take it anymore, she had to leave him, and it was better for him, and it was better for her…

He stared at Amanda Tucker, watched her smiling approach, her cameraman scooting around to get the two of them in frame together, the soundman swinging the boom mic his way.

She nodded, almost did a little curtsy. “Dr. Jenner!”

Anders stormed into the shot, blustering. “What the hell, Dr. Jenner? You shut my entire facility down?” The camera swung toward Anders.

Jenner spoke in a low mutter, through gritted teeth, too quiet for the sound recording. “I did nothing of the sort. I was the only person
exposed, the only person at risk. I contained the hazard, then informed your safety officer. She closed you down—take it up with her.”

He gestured at Amanda Tucker, and said to Anders, “Be careful, sheriff—this bitch would sell her own mother for a ratings bump.” Jenner slapped the boom out of his face, then shoved past the soundman and the producer, to head back to the mortuary area.

There was a peal of delighted laughter from behind him, and Amanda Tucker called out, “Dr. Jenner! How did you get the black eye?”

As he pushed through the door to the breezeway, Jenner heard Amanda Tucker saying, “Gene darling, tell me you got him saying ‘bitch'!”

R
udge found Jenner in the loading dock, standing over a folding table onto which he'd spilled the cleaned ribs of the hanging victims. From a distance of ten paces, he watched Jenner arrange the ribs by size and by side of the body, smallest at the top, recreating the chest wall with the now-spotless bones.

Jenner bent close to the table, scanned each rib with a moving finger, as if he were reading Braille, pausing every couple of seconds to adjust the bone positioning. Finally satisfied, he straightened and scrawled notes on a diagram on his clipboard.

Rudge said, “We can rebuild him…Steve Austin, right, doc?
The Six Million Dollar Man
?”

Jenner looked up, nodded. “Hey, Rudge.”

“They said you were looking for me.”

“Yes. Thanks for coming down.”

“I hear you had a close encounter with Amanda Tucker.”

Ignoring the comment, Jenner gestured to the sealed mortuary access. “I'm still locked out of the morgue. Thank God I'd put this stockpot out here.”

“Oh, you know it! When I'm praying to the Lord tonight, I'll be thanking sweet baby Jesus that Dr. Jenner put his corpse soup out to cook in the garage today…”

“Well, don't mock the soup, detective—it's given us answers…” Jenner beckoned Rudge over and gestured to the bones. “It's what I was expecting—there are bilateral fine score marks down the anterior aspects of the ribs in the midclavicular line.”

“And again in English?”

“These are from the big guy. They carved him up on the front of his
chest, both sides, deep enough to cut the ribs.” Jenner paused. “They did the same thing to Marty.”

Rudge nodded. “I see.”

“I think that kid from Bel Arbre is connected to all this. Obviously, the cause of death is completely different, but…”

“Any drugs on him?”

“Nothing in his pockets. Tox'll take a few weeks.”

Rudge stepped back. “I like him for a connection. And I like him for a homicide, too. Look, we're a two-homicides-a-year county, so when you get two messed-up murders, then another four even more messed-up murders, and then another really,
really
fucked-up death, the dots pretty much connect themselves.”

“Good.” Jenner smiled with satisfaction. “So, I don't suppose you want to talk to Cooper and Martin in Highway Patrol…”

“Nope—I start talking to them, I want to hit something.” Rudge's voice sunk to a mutter. “That something ideally being Gordie Cooper…”

“They want it to be a simple accident; I'm worried they're going to shit-can the investigation. You want to take a little road trip?”

“Where to?”

“Bel Arbre, see where they found the kid.”

“Can we stop at the Arby's out by Mitre Road?”

Jenner slung his scene kit over his shoulder. “Sure.”

The detective gestured grandly out beyond the open garage shutters to the parking lot. “The adventure begins!”

T
hey drove north on I-55 into a darkening sky. Rudge had pulled the highway mile marker location from the call sheet, but the precise accident site was harder to identify. The SUV driver had been traveling northbound, so they parked the car a tenth of a mile before the marker and walked up the highway. They rounded a slight turn and then the road dipped downward.

The shoulders of the road were well-tended; Jenner had seen convict labor from the county jail mowing the roadsides, mostly black and Hispanic men in cartoonish black-and-white striped uniforms watched over by equally cartoonish mirror shades–wearing guards with pump-action shotguns. Beyond the grass road border was a continuous fence, overgrown by bushes and shrubs, which separated the highway from the fields a couple feet below.

Jenner peered over the fence. An irrigation ditch ran between the fields and the highway. Long rows of pale green bushes stretched off into the distance, those to his left hidden by covers. Shimmering in the heat before his eyes, a dozen or so workers were scattered across the field, dark clumps of cloth with heads covered to protect them from the sun. They were pulling up metal hoops and plastic sheeting, leaving the plants open to the sky. He squinted: strawberry plants.

Jenner checked his cell phone; still no call from Maggie.

Rudge, about twenty feet ahead of him, called out, “Doc, got some EMS stuff here…”

He was pointing to a purple glove discarded on the roadside.

A few feet further on, there were more gloves and detritus from the resuscitation; the wrapper from a disposable defibrillator electrode flapped listlessly against the fence.

“This looks like it.” Jenner glanced back down the road. “They'd have been coming this way, hit him, shunted him maybe twenty feet up toward us as they ran him over. And look over there—tire marks from the skid.”

They walked toward the fence, scanning the grass, reaching it without finding anything.

Jenner looked out over the field. There was nothing out that way, just the strawberry fields stretching out under the gloomy sky. An access road ran along the far side of the field, after which the grid of orange groves resumed, continuing all the way out to the Everglades.

He glanced back at the road. They were thirty miles north of Port Fontaine, and a good ten south of Bel Arbre; it was more likely the victim had come from the fields than walked along the road.

Unless he'd hitchhiked.

“So, what do you think, Jenner?”

“I don't know. I doubt he was walking along the highway—maybe he comes from the fields. But why would he be out here late at night?”

His eyes searched the field, the road beyond it. “Doesn't look like he's left a vehicle behind.”

Jenner leaned over the fence.

“We should have a look on the other side.”

Rudge tugged uneasily on the wire at the top of the fence, then turned to Jenner. “Doc, you get on over and have a look around, I'll see what I can find up on the shoulder here, on this side of the wire.”

Jenner found a stretch relatively free of shrubs, pressed the fence down, straddled it, and climbed over.

He looked up and down the bank, felt himself starting to slip, and took a couple of quick steps down, his foot sinking into the soggy mud of the drainage ditch before he hastily stepped up onto the field.

Cursing, he shook the water off his foot, then straightened and walked on the edge of the field, adjusting to the squelch of water in his shoe. He looked back up at the fence and stopped: the area where he'd climbed over was bordered on both sides by pretty dense shrubs and grass, but the greenery toward the right of where he'd crossed had been trampled and crushed.

Someone had been there, had stood there.

Jenner moved along the field until he was level with the flattened area.

There was no question, this was the area where…where what? Where the victim had been…forced to drink insecticide-laced wine? The whole idea seemed like a stretch—who would do that in an attempt to kill?

Maybe this was not some big mystery after all. Maybe this was just a suicide: some poor bastard, drinking by the fence, finds the insecticide, decides to pull the trigger, can't face the taste straight so he mixes it with the wine, chugs it down, staggers out onto the road, passes out, bang, that's all she wrote. Maybe Jenner was overreaching with the blood spatter. Maybe Cooper and Martin were right.

So where's the bottle? Organophosphates can kill within minutes: if the man had drunk it himself, the bottle should be nearby.

Jenner looked up the slope. Nothing up there.

Maybe the bottle was out here in the field. He looked over to the workers—perhaps one of them had found it. After all, they'd been stripping up the row covers and had already processed this part of the field, so if there was a bottle, they'd have come across it.

Unless he'd drunk it out in his car, out on the road.

But again, no car.

Chances were that he'd have originally come from the feeder road, walked across the field and up onto the highway.

Jenner scowled—any footprint evidence would've been tamped into the ground during the day as the workers had worked their way along the rows.

He turned to look at the slope again, and froze.

Not three feet in front of him, he could see visible blood spatter on the crushed leaves and vines at the bottom of the rise up to the highway.

“Rudge!” Jenner took out his camera and bent forward. There was a single clot of dark purple-brown blood, perhaps an inch across, gumming several leaves together. As he stared at it, his eyes gradually resolved a halo pattern of sparse, irregular droplet spatter on the stems and leaves around the clot.

He knew that, reduced to two dimensions in a photograph, the pattern would be too spread out and uneven to be visible, but he was sure it was real.

And at the very least, the DNA analysts would have a field day with that little puddled clot.

A raindrop hit his cheek, and he looked up in surprise.

Within seconds, the rain was pelting down from a suddenly black sky, thick, cool drops spraying down, spattering and ricocheting off the leaves and the grass; Jenner felt he could almost hear the strike of each separate raindrop as it crashed down and destroyed his evidence.

Before he could even react, the central blood droplet was soaked, the matted leaves springing apart, the blood dissolved and cast off.

Out in the field, the workers looked up at the sky, then back down to the earth, and went on with their work, pulling up the row cover hoops and bundling the plastic.