Pious Deception (22 page)

The autopsies had taken hours. Because organs had been ripped open, some of the contents of stomachs and intestines had splashed into the abdominal cavities, mixed in with lung and heart tissue. The smell had been nearly overwhelming. She had cleaned away the splashings, keeping them separate from the fluids still inside the organs, and bagged samples of both for the lab. She’d held severed flesh against bones, checking the fit, assuring herself that this flesh belonged to this body. She’d searched through the mangled bodies for signs of alcohol, drugs, aneurysm, heart disease, pressure behind the eyes, pressure in the Eustachian tubes.

She had taken the boy first. As she’d suspected, he was the least difficult. Then she did the man, a long, tedious procedure. There were signs of alcohol in his stomach, but owing to the condition of the body, it was impossible to guess how much was in his system.

Finally, there was the girl, Kimberly Everett. The force of the crash had snapped her neck. The engine had smashed back into the cab, sending the steering column through her right shoulder and crushing the arm to a red pulp.

Kiernan had drunk a cup of coffee outside in the fresh air, cleared her mind from the last postmortem, then gone back in. She scrubbed and began her description of the body: “Decedent is a well-nourished Caucasian female, eighteen years old …” There had been no abnormal occlusion of the arteries, no old petechial hemorrhages on what she could find of the epicardium. The liver, gallbladder, spleen, pancreas, gastrointestinal tract, adrenals, kidneys, and bladder showed no sign of disease or insult prior to the fatal injuries. She did find the lung tissue discolored, the odor of alcohol coming from the stomach, and signs of both pregnancy and gonorrhea.

Suddenly it all got to her. For the first time in an autopsy she ripped off her gloves, raced from the room, and leaned against the wall outside, shaking. She had seen bodies more mutilated, more decayed, handled smells much worse. But as she had looked down at the exposed corpse, she had a clear vision of what would become of Kimberly Everett’s memory.

For the first time Kiernan considered omitting her findings from an autopsy report. Kimberly Everett had been driving, but neither her pregnancy nor her gonorrhea had caused the crash. Nonetheless, they would create a sensation when the insurance companies battled to assign guilt. In a court hearing these findings would overshadow the issue of alcohol. Kimberly Everett, like Moira, would be labeled a girl who had it coming.

Standing there, leaning against the wall, she told herself this case was not like Moira’s, where competent forensic work might have shown evidence of LSD, a little-known substance in those days, or of some other little-known drug that could have led to her death. A decent autopsy might have moved the police to investigate Moira’s death, instead of assuming, along with everyone else, that Moira had been turning tricks in the Sunset Hotel, had been distraught, and had thrown herself out the hotel window, as a girl of her character deserved to do. She told herself that in this case it would be all right to leave the findings about the pregnancy and gonorrhea unmentioned.

But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She went in, turned the microphone back on, and finished the autopsy, moving from the organs of the pelvis and the thorax outward to the legs, the arms, the shoulders, neck, and head.

Later the newspapers would say she had been too anxious to get it over with, that she should have taken more time. At the hearing, county supervisors would say that she should have spaced the autopsies better. They would say she could have done Kimberly Everett’s body the next day; the early stages of decomposition would have been setting in, but they wouldn’t have compromised her findings too much.

She told herself the same things for the next two years. But at the time she had simply finished the Everett autopsy, gone home, had three stiff drinks, and slept for twelve hours.

It wasn’t till months later—during which time the Everett family swore that their daughter indulged in neither sex nor alcohol, and the insurance companies hedged, and every facet of Kimberly Everett’s life was hashed over in print and by word of mouth—that one of the insurance investigators turned up a neurologist who swore that the girl had had no feeling in her right hand. The nerves at the point where her neck had broken had been damaged in an accident three years earlier, during the time she had been away at school. Nerve damage, he had explained, was individual. A patient can lose control but still have feeling, or vice versa. In this case, there was some control, but no feeling. In other words, the neurologist had explained to the reporters, instead of moving with precision in response to the danger, Kimberly’s hand had reacted clumsily. By then she was dead. She had, the neurologist concluded, no business driving. Certainly none drinking and driving.

The scars from Kimberly’s earlier surgery were small, but a competent forensic pathologist should have spotted them, the insurance companies said as they altered their settlements. Faced with the threat of lawsuit, the county supervisors concurred. Pathologists from surrounding counties disagreed. In view of the greatly compromised condition of the body, and particularly of the arm and neck, overlooking the scar tissue was a mistake anyone could have made, they insisted. The families of the victims called for Kiernan’s resignation. Her supporters urged her to fight.

But there was nothing to fight for. She had been wrong. Because of her error the scandal she had so desperately wanted to avoid had had time to blossom and flourish. The thought of Kimberly Everett filled her with grief. Over and over, she pictured the life that Kimberly would never have, the child she’d never bear. It was a grief she’d been too young to feel for Moira. And seeing the agony of the Everetts pictured on the local newscast, alluded to in the paper, bemoaned in the supermarket, she felt anguish for them, and for her own parents, who had been too intimidated by the notoriety of Moira’s death, too shocked, too humiliated, to grieve at all.

But even more devastating than that was the undeniable fact that the science of forensic pathology had failed. If it had been merely her own failure, she might have handled it. She could have researched more, worked harder and longer; she could have given up friends, given up her lover, spent her free hours with medical journals, police journals, forensic journals, pharmaceutical journals, gone over every facet of every postmortem twice. She could have clambered on till she grasped the truth.

But forensic pathology, she learned, was just another tool. Her life had been a joke. Even if she had spotted the scar tissue and discovered the nerve damage in question, there was no way she could have known how greatly it had affected Kimberly’s hand, whether it caused her death or not. If a competent forensic pathologist had found evidence of LSD in Moira’s body, who could have said that LSD had
made
Moira jump? No drug residue would have explained whether Moira had braved the Sunset Hotel to find her sister, or had abandoned that search, met a friend with the drug, and later wandered into the hotel whose name stuck in her jangled mind. Sophisticated scientific analysis would have changed nothing. It had always been impossible to pronounce with certainty. Moira O’Shaughnessy was not a tramp. Or Kiernan O’Shaughnessy was not guilty.

Immobilized by despair, Kiernan did nothing; she didn’t go to work; she didn’t wash clothes; she didn’t shop for food. She stopped answering the phone or opening the door to the friends who brought food.

The board of supervisors fired her.

When the dismissal notice came, she felt a surge of relief, as if all the energy she had been suppressing for the past months had erupted. She called Goodwill to pick up her furniture, gave away her car, and bought a ticket for Bangkok.

It wasn’t till after her return from Asia, when her father died, that she came across a box of Moira’s possessions. In it was a bank book with more money than Moira had had reason to possess, and a small notebook with the names of twenty-two men. On a separate paper Moira had written “Red” and a phone number. Red was the pimp.

Kiernan had sat, staring at the battered box, till her back ached, mourning her sister anew. She saw the Sunset Hotel as it had been on the day Moira had taken her by. What had gone on in Moira’s mind that day, and all the other days she must have been there? What had Moira thought, what had she felt, feared, or savored before she stood in the window of room 609 and fell forward? Clearly she, Kiernan, had never really known her adored sister, her fellow “alien” on Rohan Street. Suddenly Kiernan had laughed at the ludicrousness of it all, laughed hysterically, her body shaking violently with each new wave. She’d laughed until her throat burned and her ribs ached and tears poured down her cheeks. One afternoon of detective work had told her more than all those years of forensic pathology. And still there were things she would never know.

K
IERNAN SHOOK HER HEAD
sharply, forcing her attention back to the Arizona road. She was already well into the mountains. How long had she been enveloped in the illusion of her memories? She laughed mirthlessly. She was, after all, a champion of illusion, having clung for all those years to her sophomoric ideas of forensic pathology and its truth. No wonder Sam Chase had seen a similarity between her and Austin Vanderhooven—a likeness flattering to neither one.

She looked out at the dry red dirt beside the two-lane hardtop. It felt like monsoon season up here. For the desert, the air was muggy. The rains would be coming, hard and sudden, everyone said. But now the land looked as if it hadn’t been wet since the turn of the century. Gaping cracks separated one section of dead desert grass from another. Only the cacti survived, huddled small and pale next to the earth, as if to escape the searing sun. No cars passed coming in from the mountains, No houses suggested life. Not even an animal was in sight. The White Bone Mountains had been aptly named.

Joe Zekk, what kind of man was he? Had he been thankful for this place to live, for whatever connection he had to the projected retreat? Or had he spent his hot lonely days brooding over his exile in the barren sands till he was eager to take revenge in as vicious a manner as possible?

The road crested the mountain and headed onto a plateau. She came to the metal Z, turned right, leaving the main road, and headed slowly down. The carpet of pale green snakeweed and paloverde gave way to creosote bushes and clusters of chollas; the teddy-bear chollas and the staghorn she recognized, but some of the others she could only assume belonged to that group of low cacti.

The narrow road cut back sharply, winding down the surprisingly steep hillside. There was barely room for a creosote bush beside the road before the hillside fell away. She squinted against the glare of the sunlight bouncing off the Jeep’s hood, then turned the steering wheel hard right till the wheels squeaked against the axles. The descent became gentler, the cutbacks wider and less frequent. The creosote and cacti became sparser, till the sandy soil was virtually unscarred by vegetation. The barrenness was frightening, like a life sentence of solitary confinement.

She made a hard left at a cutback. Before her, on a narrow mesa that jutted out over a green strip of valley below, was a castle.

At second glance she could see that the house had neither the size nor most of the other features one expects of a true castle. It was the setting that gave it its dramatic impact. The mesa was only about two hundred yards long, less than fifty yards wide. The house perched on a corner of the mesa as if about to float up into the turquoise sky. Mottled stones of caramel and gray and pink sparkled in its sandstone walls, echoing the rocky rise on the far side of the valley behind it. Despite the starkness of the desert background, the small castle looked like something out of a romantic Hudson Valley School painting. The west side sloped up sharply to a tower, at the base of which was a round room with long narrow windows. From that room Zekk would be able to survey the hillside above and the narrow green valley below. If this house had been built on a mesa jutting out from Camelback Mountain in Scottsdale, it would have sold for a million, even small as it was. “Jewel box” was the term a realtor would use. Kiernan noted the way the house blended with its surroundings, and indeed, surprisingly, enhanced the vista. A jewel box in the tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright?

What marred the picture was a high circular adobe enclosure at the far end of the mesa, which had the look of servants’ quarters, set as far from the main house as possible. Just beyond it, jutting out over the valley below, was what looked like a giant rocky forearm that ended in an upturned fist of red stone.

There was no vehicle in sight. No place to hide one. She pulled the Jeep up near the house and from habit turned it to face the road. She jumped down, suddenly aware of how stiff she had become in the two-hour drive. What was the altitude here? At one point a sign had said five thousand feet, but the road had descended sharply since then. Now she guessed she was no more than two thousand feet above Phoenix. The air still carried the faintly pungent odor of morning in the desert, but that creosoty scent must have wafted in from the plants closer to the main road. Here there was no creosote, in fact no landscaping at all to inhibit the flow of the dry reddish-tan ground up to the building; from there the eye was drawn up to the peak of the turret and the single incongruous element: a wrought-iron Z on the turret, which transformed the house into one of those miniature-golf castles that bellied up to the freeways around Phoenix.

The ring of the doorbell reverberated in the house. The door did not open. She waited, rang again, but still there was no response. To her right was the round room with the tall tinted windows. She circled it, checking each window for a crack in the tinting, but there was no spot through which she could peer in. A porch ran along the back side of the house. A few feet farther on was the edge of the cliff. She moved to the edge—no wall or fence—and looked down at the valley a quarter of a mile below, almost straight down.