Forgotten Place (25 page)

By the time I got out of the shower, Amy was
setting up her portable equipment in the recreation room
upstairs.  Crevan had a bowl of fresh fruit and yogurt waiting
for me in the kitchen.  I hadn't seen so much dietary variety
in my kitchen in months.  Since I was too hungry to argue, I
focused on emptying the bowl of energy into my stomach.

"Want some toast?"

"Sure, why not," I grumbled.

He buttered two slices and chopped them in
half after cutting off the crusts.  I arched one eyebrow.

"Johnny says you never eat the crusts."

"Does he," I
muttered.  Correction to my earlier epithet. 
Observant
bastard. 
I itched to ask when said nemesis planned to make an appearance
again, but the arrival of a mussed and groggy Devlin Mackenzie
distracted me.  Spikes of ebony rose like the spines of a
stegosaurus from his scalp.  He rubbed sleepy eyes and grinned
at me.

"Mornin' Eriksson.  You gotta tell me
what kind of mattress you've got on the bed I slept in last
night.  My God, I feel like a new man."  His hand draped
over my right shoulder and massaged lightly.  "How do you feel
this morning?"

"All right," I muttered.

"You look fuckin' gorgeous, like a different
girl than the one I met on Monday."  He accepted the coffee
Crevan handed him with soft thanks and sipped the bitter brew
before glancing down at me.

"What?  Did I say something wrong?"

"I'm no longer on the pathetic side of a
Hindu cow, I take it."

Color rose to his cheeks.  "He
shouldn't have told you that, Helen.  I didn't mean it in a
derogatory way.  It was simply an expression of frailty, which
is clearly a thing of the past."

"I could show my tits and revise your
opinion of that."

Crevan choked on his coffee.

Devlin smirked.  "I'm sure your tits
are just fine, ma'am," he drawled.  "I'd accept the offer if I
didn't think doing so would get me shot."

"Free country, Dev, and I'm a single woman,"
I grinned and nudged his side with my shoulder.  "I'll save a
spot on my dance card for you Saturday night."

"Your therapist made enough racket upstairs
to rouse the dead.  You should probably head up there before
she wakes Snow White," Devlin said.  "We've got a female
officer coming over today to do the bedside gig so I can get back
on the case."

He raised his arms over his head and
stretched mightily, revealing the rock hard abs that drew my eyes
immediately.  I licked my lips and noticed Crevan's frown.

"Did she consent to the search?"

Devlin nodded.

"What search?"

"Johnny will want us on that right away,"
Crevan ignored my question.

Devlin perched on the stool beside me and
propped his chin on his fist.  "We're gonna go over every inch
of the Ireland home looking for whatever this Southerby guy
might've been searching for in the office.  Journey said that
other than the drop cloths over the furniture, everything is pretty
much as it was when he died.  Wanna come along?"

"I'd love to."

"I think Johnny wants you here with Ned
going over David's paperwork."

"Johnny isn't here, so I don't think I have
to do what he says," my words were for Crevan, but my eyes hadn't
left Devlin's face.  "Will you be ready to go when I'm done
with the torture session?"

"I'll wait for you," he winked.

Crevan cleared his throat.  "Johnny
might have something else to say about –"

"Show a little respect for the lady," Devlin
interrupted.  "If she wants to go, she can go.  This is
our case after all.  Who died and made Orion God?"

"Helen isn't cleared for active duty
yet."

"And we all know how many perps are gonna
pop out of the closets in a house that hasn't been lived in for
three years," I said.  "Wait for me, Devlin.  Don't
listen to Johnny's mouthpiece.  It would do me some good to
get out of here for a few hours."

"Great," he murmured.  "We can hit the
morgue first and see if Dr. Winslow has more answers about
McNamara's death than she did last night."

I hustled off for rehab with Crevan shooting
daggers at both of us.

The way I saw it, if Orion could move on so
easily, maybe I should too.

Chapter 22

Maya gave a curt nod to Devlin and launched
into what she learned from the autopsy to me.  "It's the
damnedest thing, Helen."  Disgust dripped from her
words.  "When I have the final toxicology reports back on the
tissue samples, I'll have a better idea of what we're really
looking at here."

"Meaning what exactly?"

"There is no test per se for what I suspect
happened to McNamara based on what the autopsy shows," she
said.  "But the tissue samples we were able to test so far
show off the charts potassium, which could've been the cause of
death."

"So someone injected him with potassium
chloride and induced a fatal heart attack.  Maybe Storm didn't
lie about the cause of death, that fatal arrhythmia thing," I
said.

"Oh, Helen, if only," she rolled her
eyes.  "One of the ways we can presumptively ascertain the
presence of succinylcholine postmortem is that it is metabolized as
yes, you guessed it, potassium levels in the soft tissues.  I
don't have blood on this guy.  What I do have, is a shit load
of potassium in his tissues."

"Wait a minute," I started
pacing.  "What are the odds that the guy who Jerry Lowe
replaced died from a drug Jerry Lowe used to incapacitate his
victims and it's
not
related?"

"My point precisely," she said.  "Then
again, there is only a presumption here, because the half-life of
succinylcholine is about ten minutes.  Which means unless
another drug doesn't quickly sedate someone, it wears off
fast."

I clasped my hands together and pressed them
to my lips.

"Helen, did you hear what I just said?"

"Yeah, and the picture it conjured isn't a
good one."

"Talk to me," Maya said.  She perched
her hands on her hips.  "Tell me what you're thinking."

"It has come to my attention that nobody
seems to bat an eye in this city when paramedics pronounce death
and deliver bodies to the morgue."

"Since when?" Maya
scoffed.  "I've been here an hour shy of a year, and I can
tell you right now, no ambulance has ever pulled up and delivered a
body, Helen.  They might pronounce at the scene of an accident
or in the event that a body is discovered before some moron
realizes that it's decomposed, but at no time would they be charged
with delivery to my world. My office
always
retrieves the bodies, no
matter where they die in Bay County."

"And you're certain that this isn't
something that happens?  Anywhere?  Ever?"

"Darkwater Bay is its own corrupt corner of
a very bad alternate reality.  I can promise you it will not
happen here now.  Please tell me that it didn't happen to poor
Harry McNamara."

"If I said that's exactly what Orion told me
happened, what would you say?"

Maya's posture
wilted.  "Oh my God. 
Oh. 
My.  God.
"

"Please talk to me," I reached for her hand
and squeezed.  "How bad is it?"

"What has had me stumped for the better part
of twenty four hours is how this state of embalming took place,
Helen.  It made no sense.  Upon further examination, I
found several other injection sites into major vessels that were
used to pump in chemicals and remove blood.  I couldn't
imagine why someone would... Jesus."

"It makes more sense now?"

She nodded and dragged one hand over her
face.  "The horror of what this man must've suffered."

"Explain it to me.  Let's start with
why multiple injection sites would've been used."

"I could think of only one reason," Maya
said.  "Someone wanted to rapidly infuse his body with
Formalin, which is unusual, because it's something we'd use here,
or in medical examiner's offices to preserve samples, and not the
same compound you'd find in a funeral home. Formalin is
thirty-seven percent formaldehyde, Helen, professional grade stuff
used by pathologists to preserve histologic or biologic samples,
you see. 

"But Crevan told me that there was a
somewhat sensible reason for the fast funeral.  Everything was
planned in advance, so there was no grieving widow being indecisive
about what coffin to choose and whatnot.  It didn't make sense
to me on the other hand because why rush it when it meant not
properly preparing the remains?  Then I started cutting."

"And?" Devlin spoke from across the
room.

"The reason this guy is so well preserved
without the usual process of removing the internal organs that
shall we say, make decomposition a messy process, is because his
internal organs were flooded with Formalin.  So I thought,
maybe this is some technique I'm not familiar with, you know? 
Some way to offer preservation to people who would ordinarily
refuse based on religious grounds or being creeped out by the
notion that even though there would be no autopsy, that the
postmortem butchery is part of a ritual anyway."

"You searched for such a procedure."

Maya nodded at me.  "There isn't one,
Helen.  So when Crevan let me know the name of the funeral
home yesterday, I thought I'd give them a call and ask what the
hell they were doing over there."

"And they said?" Devlin asked.

She glanced over at him.  "The verbatim
or the paraphrased version?"

"Give me the gist, Maya," I said.

"Unless I had a badge and a warrant, I could
go fuck myself."

I chuckled.  "And did you give us the
paraphrase or verbatim version?"

"Pretty much verbatim."

Devlin grinned.  "I have a badge. 
Let me see if I can get a little more cooperation from them."

"Did you reference the specific case?" I
asked her.

"No, we didn't get that far."

"Details on Harry McNamara's funeral, got
it," Devlin said and slipped out of the room.

Maya's voice dipped low despite the fact
that we were in a deserted autopsy bay with only the remains of a
long dead man.  "Helen, I'm horrified, because I think I know
exactly what happened to McNamara."

"What was it?"

"He was alive when he came to the medical
examiner's office.  Think about it.  Lowe was the guy who
allegedly found him, who resuscitated him until EMS arrived. 
He's delivered here instead of a hospital.  We know Lowe had
access to a drug that would've made it look like McNamara was dead
to the untrained eye."

"But paramedics aren't untrained. 
Neither was Riley Storm."

"How do we know they were really
paramedics?  What if these were guys just like Lowe? 
Like Riley Storm?  What if, for the right price, they broke
all the rules and declared a living man dead?"

"So how did he die after he got here? 
Have you found something definitive?"

She swallowed hard.  "I didn't realize
it until you started talking about paramedics bringing him here
instead of a hospital, Helen, but yeah, it makes sense, in some
nightmarish kind of way."

"So what killed him?"

"Technically?  I suppose it's a toss-up
between poisoning and exsanguination."

"You're not saying... Maya, please tell me
you're not saying what I think you are."

"I believe that Harry McNamara was embalmed
antemortem."

The cry was muffled by the hand that clapped
over my mouth. 

"Yeah, pretty fucking sick, huh?"

"Was he conscious?  Would he have
realized what was happening to him?"

"Not for more than a few minutes, but yeah,
I believe he would've known initially that he was being murdered,
frozen in a paralyzed body and unable to stop what was happening to
him."

"Jerry goddamned Lowe," I groaned. Would we
ever stop uncovering the extent of his crimes? He had warned me
that some secrets aren't meant to remain buried. Was this what he
meant?  "It had to be what they did to Mitch Southerby too,
Maya.  And Johnny screwed everything up when he went to court
to force Riley into doing more tests."

"Hence the incredible disappearing body and
tissue samples.  Just like McNamara here, Dr. Storm didn't
bother collecting any.  Why document evidence when the scene
of the crime was his autopsy table?"

"Lowe was at Downey Division when Southerby
collapsed."

"Do you think Datello owned Jerry Lowe?"

"He was determined to get the position of
chief of detectives.  Datello had to recognize that kind of
raw ambition when he saw it.  What he didn't realize, couldn't
have known, was that in tapping Lowe to be his man inside Central
Division and wielding authority over all of Darkwater Bay's
detectives, he had chosen a cold blooded killer who certainly had
the means to take out Datello's enemies."

"That doesn't explain why
Riley Storm would be part of this, Helen.  You're talking
about a man, a
physician
no less, who literally murdered people in this
building.  What could possibly lure someone down that
path?  I told you.  Prior to McNamara's autopsy, Storm
was not only competent, he was meticulous."

I pinched the bridge of my nose and started
pacing.  "Did you happen to hear the local news
yesterday?"

"The thing with Chief Weber?  I didn't
hear it personally, but Ken and I talked about it when he showed up
with dinner last night."

"Good men can be compromised, Maya.  It
might behoove us to have a conversation with Dr. Storm, or at the
very least, do a little bit of digging into his history and see
what points of vulnerability might've existed.  He could've
been forced to be... morally flexible."