A Hard Death (23 page)

I
n the embalming room, Smith watched Reggie Jones open Mrs. Rosenblum. He thought it was hilarious that Tony refused to watch them pack the bodies with meth; Tony was a stone-cold bastard when it came to cutting on a live man, but he quailed like a bitch when it came to fucking with the dead.

Reggie popped the staples the doctors had used to close the woman's chest after the bypass, then extended the incision down to her pelvis; he would staple it back up later, and the few who saw her naked body would assume it was the handiwork of the surgeons.

He placed a sternal retractor into the chest incision, and cranked it wide-open, then quickly and methodically removed the lungs, the heart, and opened the flat sheet of muscle that separated chest cavity from abdomen. Then Smith held the abdominal retractor while Reggie cleared out the liver, intestines, and other abdominal organs, tossing them into a heavy-duty leaf bag; they'd end up in the crematorium oven.

Reggie looked at the clock; in less than fifteen minutes, he had hollowed out her carcass. He rinsed the cavities with a sprayer, then turned the valve and sucked all the water back up. He pressed absorbent material into the empty thorax and abdomen to dry it out.

He looked over to the table, where Smith and Tony had stacked a dozen bricks of methamphetamine, each a kilo in weight. “You bring the leg tubes?”

Smith nodded. He spread open his gym bag and showed Reggie the blue PVC pipes, roughly the diameter of a baseball bat, cut down to twelve-inch segments. This had been Reggie's master stroke: with a scalpel and bone saw, he would remove the femurs and lower leg bones, along with their muscle. Then he'd wedge the tubes back in, each packed
with a kilo of meth, and sew the tissue and skin shut over them. This increased the payload of each transported body by six kilos—they could usually jam two into each thigh, and a kilo into each calf.

They couldn't pack the legs on every case, but when Mrs. Rosenblum had surgery, the surgeons had cut into the thighs to harvest veins for her bypass; it was a piece of cake for Reggie to enlarge the incisions, tear out the flabby muscle and soft tissue, and refill her before closing her up.

Reggie surveyed her hollowed-out body. With a bit of effort, he'd cram fifteen keys of methamphetamine into it; by the time she hit Chicago, the old bitch would have a street value of half a million dollars.

W
hen he was safely out of Port Fontaine and onto I-55, Jenner stomped on the gas pedal. The engine hummed, and the needle crept past the 80 mark, the road underneath hard and flat as an airport runway.

Jenner floored the accelerator, pushing it down until his calf ached from the pressure. The engine pitched up to a high whine as the air blasted in and shuffled the junk on the backseat. And though it killed the sound, and warmed the car, and sent paper skidding into the front compartment, it wasn't enough to get rid of the image of Marty, lying dead on the shroud beside the drowned car, arms uplifted, so badly decomposed that even his close friend couldn't recognize him.

Jenner had failed. He'd failed and he knew why he'd failed: because of his attitude. He'd failed because he wouldn't kiss Tom Anders's butt. Even before Port Fontaine, he'd always been failing. He'd lost his license and blown his reputation because he hadn't been smart enough to make nice with Amanda Tucker, or to play ball with fucking Steve Whittaker, now the chief ME in New York City.

It was Jenner's own fault, his own fucking fault.

And now they were cutting him out of the investigation, riding him out of town while Rudge and Halvorsen and Bartley hunted the people who'd killed Marty and Bobbie. And Jenner knew that, because of his work, in a week or two, Tommy Anders would be appearing via satellite on
Amanda Tucker's American Crime Prime Time
, explaining to the nation how he'd tracked down and caught the killers.

And it should be Jenner. Jenner should be moving the investigation forward. Jenner should be keeping his promise to Marty.

It should be Jenner, and he'd fucked it up.

The electric throb of his cell phone at his hip snapped him out of his thoughts. He slowed the car.

He pulled over to the shoulder and called back. The office needed a signature on an out-of-state transport approval for Mrs. Rosenblum. She'd already been removed by the funeral home—if Jenner could stop by and sign the form, Mr. Jones, the funeral director, would pick it up later.

Jenner asked for the funeral parlor address, then said, “If you fax the form over to Mr. Jones, I'll head back into town and sign it there, save him some trouble.”

A
t lunchtime, her mom still wasn't back from the memorial, so Lucy Craine took her sandwich up to her bedroom. Rosa was supposed to watch her eat all of her food, but Rosa had been fighting with her boyfriend lately, and spending a lot of time on the phone crying to her sister in Ocala; Lucy's eating had been good recently, so after she'd taken a couple of bites, Rosa let her finish it in her room.

Lucy hooked her iPod into the speaker system and put on Miley Cyrus, turning the music up loud enough that Rosa wouldn't hear her. Then she went into her bathroom and tore up her sandwich, and tossed the pieces into the toilet. Then she made herself bring up the half sandwich she'd eaten, and flushed.

It felt good. It hurt, and sometimes when she was sick, she'd wipe her mouth and see a little blood, but the ache of her empty stomach grinding away on nothing felt good.

In her closet, she found her old Blue's Clues sleeping bag, and slipped the scale out of it.

She placed it carefully on the wooden floor so that it was even, and climbed on. She watched the red needle bounce and sway, then dip below 95.
Yes!

She put the scale away, opened her MacBook, and read her affirmations in her husky whisper:

A
steady stream of mourners filed in and out of the viewing of the late James Prescott, a much-admired school principal. The funeral home lot was overflowing, so Jenner parked behind the Dairy Queen next door. He slipped through a gap in the ragged hedge that separated the two establishments, and found himself across from the access bay in back.

Rather than barging into the viewing, he took the shortcut; there'd be someone in the embalming room or preparation area who'd help him. As he made his way past the attendant vehicles—two white Cadillac funeral coaches and a white Lincoln hearse—Jenner wished he'd worn his new jacket.

It was quiet in the lower level. Reggie Jones ran a tight ship—a prosperous one, too, apparently. The two hearses in the garage were also late-model Cadillacs, one white, one black. The walls were a pristine white, the air had only the faintest whiff of formaldehyde.

Jenner rapped on the door frame. “Hello?”

Silence.

He walked inside, and around the corner found a large embalming room. The body of an older black man was on one of the two tables, formalin pumping into the body through a metal cannula in the right side of the neck, waste fluid draining from the left thigh. The embalmer, a young black woman, was massaging the fluid into the left arm, bending it at the elbow, straightening it again, and squeezing the fluid down toward the hand.

Jenner said, “Hi there.”

Holding the arm lifted in front of her, she looked over to him, surprised. “I'm sorry, sir, but I'm afraid no one's allowed down here.”

Jenner said, “I'm the medical examiner—I'm here to sign an out-of-state transport permit letter for Mrs. Rosenblum.”

“Oh, sorry, doctor—I thought you'd wandered down from the viewing.” She smiled, and laid the arm back down. “I don't know anything about the permit, but Mrs. Rosenblum's in the prep room across the hall. I just finished making up her face; Mr. Jones embalmed her this morning.”

She led Jenner to the second prep room, but the door was locked. “Huh. This should be open.” She shrugged. “Anyway, that's her.”

Jenner peered through the viewing window. Mrs. Rosenblum lay on the nearer table, her limbs wrapped in thick plastic bags, her trunk covered in translucent plastic sheeting.

There was something odd about her; Jenner was trying to figure out just what when Reggie Jones appeared. He wore black dress slacks and a white shirt and black tie. He came toward Jenner hastily, rolling his shirtsleeves down; Jenner caught a glimpse of his arms, which had scattered amateur-appearing tattoos. Jailhouse tattoos.

“Doctor! I was expecting you upstairs. Thanks for stopping by.” He shook Jenner's hand warmly and tugged him toward the hallway. “I have the permit letter just around the corner, in the office.”

The hallway was wide and well-lit, and the basement office bordered on sumptuous, with two large computers and a big plasma TV mounted on the wall. A grid of six black-and-white monitors sat in the corner, CCTV cameras showing views of the funeral home entrances and the embalming and prep areas.

Jenner gestured to the security array. “Problems with body snatchers, Reggie?”

Jones grinned and said, “Ever hear of ‘Wet,' doc? It's pot mixed with PCP, but some kids think you can get the same effect with formaldehyde, so they break in to steal it. Some even try to huff the stuff, if you can believe it.”

Jenner made a face. “God, I can't imagine that.”

Reggie beamed. “So what do you think of my place? How you like my hearses? Brand-new!”

“Impressive. I'll have to give more thought to Jenner & Rudge.” He glanced over the letter, than scrawled his signature. “There. Where's she heading—Chicago, was it?”

“Yes. She'll go out tonight—the viewing's this afternoon, then she'll be on her way.”

“And you transport her all the way there?”

“Yes. She'll be received by a funeral home up there; they'll take care of the interment.”

Jenner said, “I'm surprised they let you embalm her—was that because of the long journey?”

Jones shook his head. “She's not embalmed, doc, just wrapped. By the time she reaches Illinois, she won't be looking quite so fresh. Still, she'll be fine for her friends and family down in Port Fontaine this afternoon, and that's what matters.”

“You do a lot of transporting?”

“Plenty. There are so many folks from the Northeast and the Midwest who winter down here with us, not to mention all the retirees. Lots of them have plots up there—last year, we shipped over two hundred. We work very closely with the JBFS.”

“The JBFS?”

“The Jewish Benevolent Funeral Service. It's a local organization that helps out getting the bodies of Jews back up north. And not just Jews, nowadays.”

“I see.” Jenner felt ill at ease, but couldn't say why. “Okay, Reggie. Good seeing you—you see Rudge, say hi.”

Reggie gestured to the stairs, but Jenner said, “I'll just cut through the parking lot here.”

Reggie followed him back down the hall. Jenner stopped by the door of the second embalming room, and peered in at Mrs. Rosenblum.

“What is it, doc?”

“I don't know. She looks…different.”

“Different light,” Jones mused. “And Tonya's done her makeup, could be that's it.”

What
was
it that was different? Reggie was probably right—the cosme
ticians had all kinds of tricks, like using brown eye shadow to add extra depth to the eyes when they were viewed in the casket from above. It was probably something like that.

He turned. Reggie was looking at him—no, not looking at him, watching him. Smiling.

Jenner shook it off. “See you, Reggie.”

“Doc.”

Jenner stepped outside under the awning. The sweltering humidity had melted into a steady drizzle. He ran through the lot and, as he was about to step through the hedge into the Dairy Queen, glanced back at the lower-level entrance; he was surprised to see Reggie standing under the overhang, watching him, unsmiling now, talking into his mobile.

T
he medical examiner's office was still deserted. Bucky and Calvin were in the break room, sharing a big bottle of Pibb and a party-size bag of Cheetos. They nodded at Jenner.

“Memorial finished, doc?”

Jenner shook his head. “Don't know—something came up, so I couldn't go.”

He left before Bucky could ask any questions.

In his office, Jenner sat at his computer and opened the VeriPic photo storage software. He sifted through the cases until he found the external shots of Mrs. Rosenblum.

There were just four. He pulled them all up onto the screen and pored over them, cursing that they hadn't photographed her back, too.

They were unremarkable. An elderly woman with a stapled incision over her breastbone, a couple of sutured incisions on her torso for the drains and the pacing wires to fix her heartbeat. Small incisions in her thighs where they'd harvested leg veins for the bypass.

And that was it.

So what had he seen?

Jesus,
had
he seen anything? They'd taken her to the funeral home, worked on her, touched her up to get her ready for viewing that afternoon. Jones was probably right—just a trick of the eye, a little blush, a little eye shadow.

The cosmetician had said the body had been embalmed, and Jones said it hadn't. But if he hadn't embalmed her, why did he wrap the body? Usually they wrap the body to keep fluid from leaking—but why would she leak? Her sternotomy incision was tightly sutured, as were the chest tube and drain sites. A small amount of gauze packing would've kept her dry.

And then it came to him: the abdominal incision.

At the funeral home, blurred by layers of plastic, there had been an abdominal incision, a dark line under the plastic, stretching down to the pubis. It wasn't there when Jenner had examined her.

As he thought about it, she seemed larger now, too, her belly almost bloated. That made no sense at all—she shouldn't be decomposing. Why would she swell?

He checked the photos again: the chest incision stopped just below the breastbone, and her belly was intact.

Perhaps there'd been a screw-up, and the embalmer had started to work on her before Jones stopped him. Embalming an observant Jew would mean a huge knock to the reputation and a major lawsuit, a big enough risk for Jones to lie about.

But embalmers don't open the belly. Jenner had once watched a funeral director use a trochar, a tool like a thick knitting needle, to prepare the abdomen: she pushed the trochar through the skin into the belly and then violently jammed it around inside in all directions to puncture the organs. Then she pulled out the trochar and instilled embalming fluid into the cavity, finally sealing the trochar hole with a button-like plug and stitches.

No, the embalmer wouldn't do an abdominal incision.

What
had
they done?