Pious Deception (18 page)

“You worked for the coroner, huh?” he said, leaning back against the desk. “What’d you do?”

“Only one thing a doctor does there. And I’ll tell you, in my line of work we didn’t have a problem with recidivism.” She laughed. It was a line that had worked before.

“Cut up stiffs, eh?” he said, smiling uncomfortably.

“Right,” she put on another smile.

He shifted in his chair, started to speak, then changed his mind. He glanced toward the door, as if expecting someone to step in and make his decision for him. Then he drew his hand slowly back from the booking form. “Well,” he said, “listen, I’ll let Sheriff Grimm know you’re here. He can decide …”

Sheriff
Grimm?
Not a good sign. She waited as the deputy hurried down the hall.

In less than a minute he was back. “Last door on the left,” he said with obvious relief.

“Thanks.” She stepped into the hall. Now that she was in control of the situation, the hallway looked less grimy, the wainscoting less scuffed.

The sheriff’s door was open. His office was the size of the first room, furnished in the same style: one scarred wooden desk holding a blotter stained with rings from coffee cups or beer cans and smaller rings that could have been made by a shot glass. To the right of the desk was a metal bookcase, to the left a brace of file cabinets, and in front, one wooden chair. There was a smell to the room that was hard to name—a mixture of sweat, beer, dust, but mostly just the smell of staleness.

Kiernan looked at the man behind the desk and restrained a sigh. He could not have been more aptly named. Sheriff Grimm looked like a mummy: dark, dry, all sharp edges. He looked about fifty but might not be that old. The dry heat and wind, or the boredom of being a country sheriff, had carved lines around his eyes, beside his mouth, and vertically down his cheeks. His wiry dark hair was well mixed with gray. She glanced around the room, trying to get a hint of what he had expected from this job, but there was no picture of Grimm arm-in-arm with Bruce Babbitt or Barry Goldwater, no framed citations or yellowed news stories lauding his triumphs. Whatever Grimm might have hoped the job would bring, it was clear from his expression and the weary slump of his shoulders, that he had settled for what he had got. It was also clear that in a hot, dull summer, she was a welcome diversion.

“Sit down, Dr. O’Shaughnessy. We’re not often called upon to make charges like this. Very unusual.” His lips parted again, showing long chalky teeth with spaces between them at the gumline. It was hard to tell whether he was smiling or baring his teeth.

“Sheriff, ‘unusual’ sounds like a doctor saying, ‘This is a very interesting case.’ The patient knows right off he’s a goner.” She sat down and leaned against the slat back of the chair. “What is the charge against me?”

“Surely you’re prepared for it? You seem to have been quite well prepared to handle my deputy.”

So that was it. “If you mean am I prepared to insist on my rights, I am. You’ve dragged me out of my room in the middle of the night. And for all the answers your deputy gave, he might have been a deaf-mute. Now what is the charge?”

“Now,
Dr.
O’Shaughnessy, I know that my deputy did tell you the charge.”

“What he said was forgery and falsification of public records, and I know that can’t be right. I’ve only been in Arizona two days and haven’t been near a public office. Even if I wanted to, I haven’t been in a position to forge so much as a mail-forwarding card.”

Grimm nodded. “All the more amazing.”

“Sheriff?”

“You’re not licensed to practice medicine in this state. I’m right?”

“You are right. Now about the charge?”

Grimm’s elbow rested on the desk. Moving only his forearm, he tapped the top sheet on a pile. “We’ve got a death certificate here. It’s signed by you.”

Kiernan’s breath caught. Vanderhooven’s death certificate! It had to be that. But Elias Necri had admitted to signing it. What was going on? “I did not sign any death certificate, and certainly did not forge anything.”

Grimm nodded again, noncommittally. “According to Arizona revised statute thirteen dash two-oh-oh-two-A: ‘A person commits forgery if, with intent to defraud, such person, one, falsely makes, completes, or alters a written instrument.’ That’s a felony, Dr. O’Shaughnessy.”

Forcing back her rage, Kiernan said, “Be that as it may, Sheriff, I haven’t seen Austin Vanderhooven’s death certificate. It is Vanderhooven we’re talking about?”

“It is.”

“But I do know that Dr. Elias Necri signed that death certificate.”

Grimm nodded once more, removed the top sheet from his pile, and passed Kiernan the next one. “This is a copy, of course.”

She scanned the death certificate. The date was correct. The cause of death, heart failure. And the signature, her own! She moved the sheet closer. From the sharp curls of the K to the tail of the Y, it was
her
signature. She held it up to the light, looking for signs of erased pencil tracing. There were none. And no marks of hesitancy. It was
her
signature. What had she signed since she arrived? Nothing but the contract with Bishop Dowd, and that she had read. There was no way he could have switched sheets. She remembered all too well telling Dowd the penalty for falsifying a death certificate: a fine of $150,000, and four years in jail. Then it had been Elias Necri she had been thinking of, with Dowd as an accessory. She had given Dowd the figures simply to frighten him, although she was sure that the State of Arizona would not throw the book at one of their own bishops. But for an out-of-state detective there was no such assurance. A splashy case like this, with a sheriff who had bare walls to fill, with a district attorney on the make … It would call for a lot more than Stu Wiggins to get her off.

She took another breath. The heat of the closed room pressed on her skin. This whole thing had to be stopped before it came to trial, before the D.A. had an established interest, before Sheriff Grimm had invested more than an hour’s time. She had to stop it here. “Sheriff,” she said, sounding considerably calmer than she felt, “I can see why you were misled by this document. It’s an excellent forgery. A work of art.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you did not sign this form?”

“Exactly. Sheriff, I am a detective. I have a license to keep up. I also have a medical license. No way would I endanger them to come to Arizona and sign a death certificate for a man I never saw alive.”

Grimm nodded, a mummy’s nod.

Her armpits were sticky. “And, Sheriff, it says right here”—she pointed to the form—“ ‘Date of last medical observation.’ How recently must an attending physician have seen the patient in order to sign the D.C.? A month, six weeks? There’s nothing written in that space at all. This form would be invalid just on that basis alone. Only a fool would expect that to escape your notice.”

Grimm nodded twice, then leaned back in his chair. “Very kind of you to say so, Dr. O’Shaughnessy. But a bit after the fact.” The man even spoke like a mummy: no inflection, no emotion.

“Check Vanderhooven’s body. I’m sure you
have
checked the body. You know damned well the man didn’t die of heart failure without contributing causes.”

“We can’t say that, Dr. O’Shaughnessy.”

“What do you mean, you can’t say?”

“Body’s gone.”

“Gone!”

“Been cremated.”

“But how?” she asked, amazed. “Don’t you require a interment permit for disposal of remains?”

“We do.”

“Who has to sign the interment permit?” she demanded.

Grimm’s finger tapped the pile of papers. His face remained stiff, the upper lip retracted slightly, showing those chalky teeth. “The sheriff.”

Kiernan leaned forward. “And you looked at that death certificate, with the name of an out-of-state doctor and nothing to indicate that doctor had ever seen the patient before … You saw a D.C. with the most common, most meaningless cause of death, heart failure … They all die of heart failure—the heart fails; they die. You saw all that and you signed the permit for them to cremate a Roman Catholic priest!”

He pressed his finger down on the papers. The knuckle went white. “Dr. O’Shaughnessy, we’re not discussing—”

“But we are. Either you signed that form and you’re trying to cover your ass—”

His fingers closed around the top sheet. “Are you accusing—”

“Damned right! Either you are too incompetent to sweep streets much less be sheriff, or there’s another answer. The other possibility is that you did not sign that permit and whoever forged my name on the death certificate forged yours on the interment permit too.”

Grimm didn’t move. No nod, no nothing.

Her heart thumped against her ribs; her face was tight with rage. She took a breath to calm herself. “It’d be an easy thing to do, Sheriff: forge the form, stick it in your out box. How many forms do you sign in a week? More than enough so that you might forget a specific one. If for some reason you were going through your out box and came across that form and found your signature already on it, there would be no reason for you to go back and read it over. The probability is that you would never see the form at all. It would just be picked up, and one copy would go on to the mortician and the others to wherever they’re filed.”

He stared at her, yet appeared not to see her at all. The mummy stare. She leaned back against the slats of the chair, forcing herself to breathe more slowly. Sweat dribbled down her sides. From the front desk came the sound of a phone ringing. A low groaning sound came from the rear of the building. A prisoner? A dog outside? An echo of her own fear? Through the small high windows on either side of Grimm she could see no clouds, no stars, only darkness.

“Sheriff,” she said, more evenly, “there is only one copy of my signature in Arizona, and that is on a contract I signed with Bishop Raymond Dowd of Mission San Leo.”

“Bishop!” he exploded. “Well, lady, I can’t speak for California, but here in Arizona bishops of the Church don’t go around forging papers.”

“Bishop Dowd has the only copy of my signature,” she repeated, her voice controlled now.

“And a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church certainly could not steal into this office unnoticed and file away his forged form.”

Kiernan restrained a sigh of frustration. “You’re entirely right. Bishop Dowd couldn’t have filed them. That, Sheriff, had to be done by one of your own people.”

Grimm drew a long, angry breath. Kiernan waited. A minute passed, and another. She stood up. “I’m sure you’ll be contacting me when you—”

“Sit down!”

She moved behind the chair and leaned on the back. “Sheriff. You can book me. You can hassle me. But my boss here is a lawyer in Phoenix. And when I call and tell him—”

“You’ll get your call. Call your lawyer friend.”

“I will. And you can bet that he’ll be in contact with every local newscaster, and every reporter in the Valley of the Sun. They’ll all be mentioning you. And they’ll all be calling you incompetent. And, Sheriff, I know for a fact that you were notified about Father Vanderhooven’s body. You were told that it was in Haley’s Funeral home. Told that Vanderhooven had been murdered. The call was made today. Surely your incoming calls are taped.”

Grimm’s face turned red; his breathing was faster. “Lady, you have gone too damned far! You’ve just caught yourself in your own web. Now I’m going to check the tapes, every minute of every call we taped all day. And if I don’t find this call you’re talking about, I’m going to take extreme pleasure in adding obstruction of justice to the charges against you, and in making a complaint to the California licensing board.”

“You’ll find the call.”

He yelled, “Harris! Get in here.”

Kiernan turned as the door burst open. The deputy said, “Yes sir?”

“Put her in number one.”

Harris reached for her arm.

“Hey,” Kiernan insisted, “what about my phone call?”

For the first time Sheriff Grimm smiled. “I thought you said it was already on the tape.”

T
WO A.M., FINALLY.
P
ATSY
Luca had been sitting on the storeroom cot for four hours. Two hundred forty minutes. Some humongous number of seconds. Three times she’d multiplied two forty by sixty and come up with three different answers. Math was one thing she wasn’t going to win any award for. Meditation was another. Some weirdos would have come out of four hours of silence all refreshed and calm. Patsy Luca was hard-assed bored. Her back was stiff, her shoulders ached. The cot springs squeaked like a basement full of mice. The windowpane rattled in the night wind, and grains of dirt splattered against the glass. Nothing to cut the wind out there. She sat, nose to glass, hoping for a glimpse of Beth Landau’s prowler. Even without her gun, she was ready for the pervert. Her biceps tingled at the prospect of him, face in the dirt, hands yanked up behind him. Had he really broken in, or was Beth just freaked? What was he after? She’d get the truth out of him. And the next time Stu Wiggins called her it wouldn’t be just to
assist
another detective.

Patsy glared out into the empty desert night. The sky was dotted with bright stars. The moon looked like a big spotlight. But there was no prowler out there. Where the hell was he? Probably soggy with beer in front of the some boob tube.

But now—finally—the time had come to make her move. She could feel her heart beating. The desert air had cooled, as if someone had switched off the burner. Shivering in her white pants and flowered blouse, she slung her backpack over one shoulder, eased open the door, and listened. The wind was playing the old house like a washboard. Every window rattled.

She peered into the hallway. It was black as a ’47 Packard. Patsy half-smiled, remembering her triumph when she’d tracked down that stolen Packard to an alfalfa barn halfway to Tucson. That case had been a high-stakes job. She’d been, well, not scared, but worried about a couple of bouncers bouncing
her
against the sidewalk. Here the problem wasn’t people she couldn’t handle. Still, she couldn’t let herself be caught, not before she got into the office. She couldn’t come up empty.