Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (55 page)

“You two better take it easy,” said another. “We can’t have the stiffs thawing out in here.”

Riley’s face felt flushed and hot—something she hadn’t experienced in a long, long time. She felt like a schoolgirl who had been caught behind the lockers with her boyfriend. She despised their adolescent snickering, and even more her temporary loss of hard-earned status—but there was nothing to do now but play her part out to the end.

“We’ll be through here in a minute,” she said.

“Doesn’t look like it to me,” someone whispered.

“Do you mind? Close the door on your way out.”

The door closed firmly, abruptly cutting off the sound of rising laughter.

Riley glanced at Nick, peeled off her glove, and wiped her index finger across her lips.

“Well,” Nick said. “I’d say this was very productive time.”

Riley stepped through her apartment door, pausing to wrestle her keys from the deadbolt. Nick stepped into the doorway behind her and stopped, his eyes taking in the room in broad strokes.

“Nice place,” he said. “It’s a little Spartan.”

“That’s because I don’t live with my mother.”

“Ouch.”

As Nick stepped into the room, he shoved his hands deep into his pockets, like a little boy cautioned not to break anything. He stood in the center of the room, turning and looking.

“You almost lost me on the way over here,” he said. “You drive pretty fast. Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“I couldn’t lose sight of
you,
” Riley said. “There was a big blue cloud of smoke behind you. What in the world are you driving?”

“A car,” he said.

“What
kind
of car?”

Nick frowned. “I really don’t know.”

Riley flopped onto the sofa and folded her legs underneath her. She straightened stiffly and grimaced, massaging her lower back with her thumbs.

“Back trouble?” Nick said, taking a seat across from her.

“Too many hours on my feet,” she said. “What about that dorsal wound? I barely got a look at it.”

“Very strange. You said Lassiter listed a gunshot wound as the primary cause of death. On the autopsy tape, there was no mention of any other major wounds?”

“None at all.”

“Would a pathologist neglect to mention a wound just because he thought it had nothing to do with the cause of death?”

“Of course not. For a pathologist, the issue isn’t simply the
cause
of death, but all the circumstances
surrounding
death. The very presence of a secondary wound makes it important. It would take the world’s worst pathologist to make that kind of omission.”

“Do you know what they call the guy who graduates last in his class in medical school?
Doctor.
”

Riley shook her head. “I don’t suspect Dr. Lassiter of incompetence.”

Nick leaned forward. “What do you suspect him of?”

Riley said nothing.

“I know,” Nick said. “You’re ‘not ready to answer that question.’ ”

She smiled slightly.

“There are three things that are significant about that wound,” Nick said. “First of all, it was more of an incision than a wound—the edges of the tissue were too smooth to have been caused by any street weapon. Second, the wound was sutured closed—not surgically, like in a hospital, but the way your people do after an autopsy—just enough to hold it shut. Finally—and most important of all—Dr. Lassiter didn’t make that incision.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because there were larvae in the wound—we dislodged one of them, remember? I found two more still intact. If Dr. Lassiter made the incision during the autopsy, there would be no maggots present.”

“Could the maggots have moved there from some other part of the body?”

“Not a chance. The only other infestation was still in the egg stage, and even if there were other larvae, maggots stay very close to where they’re deposited—they don’t go wandering around the body.”

“Then the incision must have been made earlier—before our office picked up the body—and before dark, because you said flies cease activity at night. But, Nick, that pushes the incision all the way back to the time of death.”

Nick nodded.

“Could it have been made even earlier? Say, the day before?”

“It’s possible, but highly unlikely. For the wound to be infested, it had to be exposed. Don’t forget, when flies approach a body they have a choice of egg-laying locations. All they need is warm, dark, and moist—that’s why they like the mouth so much. But the only maggots on this body were on a wound near the center of the back. At some time after death, that wound was as open and available as the eyes, ears, or mouth.”

“Then I have some questions,” Riley said. “What role did this wound play in the overall death scenario? Why would anyone bother to suture a wound on a dead man? And most of all, why would Dr. Lassiter choose to overlook it?”

“Good questions,” Nick said.

Riley slumped back against the sofa. “Then we’re right back where we started from—we’ve got a bunch of questions and no answers.”

“We’ve got a
different
set of questions,” Nick said. “Now you have a second anomaly—an actual, physical anomaly—and now it looks much more certain that Lassiter’s apparent negligence is intentional. I call that progress.”

“So what do we do next?”

“It’s a question of access. We can’t go back to the crime scene, and we can’t re-examine the body, so we go with Lassiter. Let’s see what we can dig up about his possible motives.”

“And the way we do that is?”

“I’ve got a couple of ideas.”

Riley shook her head. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

Neither one said anything for a minute.

“You kissed me,” Riley said suddenly.

“What?”

“In the cooler. You kissed me.”

“Are you just noticing this now? I’ve got to work on my technique.”

Riley squinted at him. “The way I see it, Nick, there are only two options: either you’re incredibly quick and able to think on your feet, or you’re a big, fat coward.”

Nick stared at the ceiling for several seconds, then slowly began to nod his head. “Yes,” he said, “those would be the options.”

Nathan Lassiter stepped out his front door and tiptoed barefoot down the herringbone brick sidewalk that led to his driveway and the morning
PostGazette
. He wore a fading Penn T-shirt tucked into the powder blue surgical scrubs he always used as pajamas. The shirt did nothing to conceal his sizable paunch. His shoulders were narrowing and rounded, and his once-prized pecs—no longer able to be sustained by a dozen monthly bench presses—were fast becoming nothing but nipples. He was unshaven, uncombed, and thanks to Dr. Atkins, his breath reeked of ketones.

He stopped abruptly. In the center of his driveway was a bright orange pickup truck with a generic black insect on top, smiling and doffing its hat to passersby. The truck was empty, and the windows were rolled down. Lassiter looked around and noticed that the gate to his backyard hung open.

Halfway down the side of the house, Nick Polchak knelt beside the open door to the crawlspace that ran underneath the house. He wore blue coveralls with an embroidered logo representing a company called “Bug Off,” and he was busy making notations on a silver metal clip box.

“Hey, you,” Lassiter said, picking his way across the dewy grass. “What do you mean by just walking in here and—”

“You want the damage report?” Nick said. “You paid for it.”

“What? I didn’t pay for anything.”

“Are you Nathan Lassiter? You got a five-year service contract with our company.” Nick waved the paperwork in the air and then tossed it facedown on the grass. “Once a year we check under the house for termites, whole house wood bores, the whole shebang.”

“I’ve never seen you here before.”

Nick shrugged. “You never had a problem before. You think we’d knock on your door just to say, ‘Everything’s peachy’? If you got no problem, we’re invisible—just like your termites.”

“I never paid for any service contract.”

“Is there a Mrs. Lassiter?”

Lassiter closed his eyes.

“Well, there you go,” Nick said. “A smart woman, Mrs. Lassiter.”

Lassiter glared at him. “What’s this about termites?”

“Not just termites. You got carpenter ants—those are really tough to get rid of. I found powderpost beetles—with beetles you got to kill the eggs too, ’cause baby beetles can raise themselves, not like kids these days, huh, Nate? And then you got brown recluse spiders—I never seen so many of ’em. You ever seen someone bit by a brown recluse? I heard about a guy up in Blawnox, he crawled under to check his furnace, took a bite right here on his thumb. They say it looked like a gunshot wound, the whole hand practically rotted away—”

“Look, do I really need to deal with this right now?”

“Not if you don’t mind your house being eaten out from under you. Hey, you got a floor joist down there that looks like a twenty-foot loofah.”

Lassiter muttered a colorful phrase to no one in particular. Nick
watched him. His toes were hanging over the edge; all he needed was one more push.

“If it makes you feel any better, you already paid for it.”

“What? When?”

“It’s part of your service contract. You know how it works, sort of like a homeowner’s warranty. You pay the cash up front; we cover the service if you need it. Some people win, some people lose—you’re about to win big time.”

“OK then,” Lassiter shrugged. “Go ahead and spray.”

Nick threw back his head and let out a laugh.

“Go ahead and
spray
? You look like a smart guy—what are you, a nurse? Let me explain something to you. A termite queen can lay thirty thousand eggs a
day.
Down along the Gulf Coast, Formosan termites can consume an entire house in just eighteen months. You have an
infestation,
my friend. You can only spray the ones you can see. The only way to kill them all is to fumigate.”

“Fumigate? How does that work?”

“We tent the house. We wrap it up top to bottom with big yellow tarps—you should see it, Nate, it’s really something—then we tape all the seams and lay sand snakes around the bottom to seal it up tight. Then we fill the whole thing up with
Vikane
—sulfuryl fluoride gas.”

Lassiter groaned. “How long does all this take?”

“Not as long as you’d think. We can wrap a little place like this in, say, half a day. We blow in the gas—that doesn’t take long—and then the whole thing sits for maybe a day. We pull off the tarps, open all the windows to air it out—that’s it, you’re done. A day and a half total. And there’s hardly any prep work for you to do. Just be sure to remove the plants and the pets—’cause that Vikane will kill every living thing under the tent. A couple years ago in Tampa, a woman committed suicide that way. Do you have a cat? You look like a cat person to me.”

“I can’t do this now,” Lassiter said. “Maybe in a month or two.”

“It’s your call,” Nick said. “I can fit you in late December.”

“That’s six months away!”

“The whole thing works on a big computer schedule. You know how it is. When we set up the service contract, we schedule the
inspections and the repairs together. If you want to reschedule, you got to take what’s available. I’ll put you down for the weekend after Christmas.”

Lassiter hesitated.

“Or I can do it tomorrow,” Nick said. “A day and a half, the whole thing’s out of your hair by the end of the week. Whaddya say? You head off to work tomorrow morning, but you get a hotel room tomorrow night. Or you could just find an empty bed at the hospital—hey, who’s gonna know?”

“I’m a
pathologist,
you idiot!”

“It’s OK,” Nick said softly. “Hey, my wife’s on Zoloft.”

Lassiter turned and stormed off toward the driveway. “Do it tomorrow,” he shouted back, “but I don’t want to see any sign of your crew by the following afternoon!”

“Trust me,” Nick called after him, “you’ll never know we were here.”

Nick and Riley sat at a corner table at the Common Plea, just a short walk from the coroner’s office at Fourth and Ross. The eatery was first-rate, one of Pittsburgh’s finest, an authentically Italian establishment without a trace of checkered vinyl tablecloths or wax-rimed Chianti bottles. The pecan-stained walls were trimmed in ornate moldings and lined with elegant candelabra sconces and glossy oil paintings framed in gold. Riley looked at Nick, dressed just as casually as ever, looking as out of place as a fly on a china platter. He busied himself with a plate of veal Veneziana while Riley looked on.