When Secrets Die (9 page)

His presence made everyone stand up straighter and watch their language, but it also gave them the lift of spirit and sense of relief one feels when the cavalry arrives. He inspired confidence, if not affection. Marcus knew it and accepted the responsibility, and it rode him hard, like all the other responsibilities that kept his chin close to his chest and his shoulders slightly hunched.

The sheriff had told him that an ambulance had tried to beat a train, a tragic decision that had cost the life of the patient they were trying to save, as well as the entire crew. That's how it looked, in the beginning. Later they would learn that the crossing arm had been torn away and the signal lights had not flashed, though the bell had rung. The train was part of the coal line, running without lights and no scream of the horn as it crisscrossed the countryside, so as not to disturb the handfuls of houses and farms in the area. Near the interstate it was another story, with lights and noise and as much commotion as possible. But the trains ran constantly out in the rural areas, and the locals did not appreciate listening to the horn day in and day out. The ambulance driver had never known the train was there. Not until impact, when the roof of the ambulance was ripped off, the driver decapitated. The attending tech and nurse in the back of the ambulance, bent over the woman whose heart was refusing to start, were thrown sideways and crushed. The conductor applied the brakes as soon as he saw the first flash of light, but the train had been going in excess of forty-five miles per hour, and he didn't see the ambulance until the train was upon it. The metal apron of the engine caught the edge of the metal gurney where the patient lay and dragged her three hundred feet down the track. When the train finally stopped, her head and upper torso were still wedged into the side of the train, the gurney had shattered, and Marcus Franklin had to insist that the track and the ground around it be gone over again and again until every mutilated piece was found.

The woman was named Karen Calhoun Mattingly, she had been fifty-seven years old, a widow, and the grown daughter of Jodina Calhoun. She had suffered a massive heart attack forty minutes before the ambulance crew arrived to try and revive her. The nurse and tech were both intent on bringing her around to the best of their ability, and were aware of nothing but their patient when the ambulance collided with the train. Three seconds after impact the tech was dead. The nurse, infused with a stubborn life force, lingered four and a half minutes before her brain bowed to the impossibility of keeping the body alive. There would be no open caskets at these funerals.

As Marcus made his way along the track, he noticed a slender woman standing near the engine. She had been swallowed whole by a big green barn coat, the kind you might buy at a feed store, and she had her back turned to the wreckage. As he got closer he realized that she was watching him. The glare of working lights set up by the deputies made her eyes look black, her face worn and seamed. She was, in fact, seventy-three years old, the night of the accident, and she was Karen Calhoun Mattingly's mother. She had been following the ambulance in her Chevrolet Impala because there had not been room in the back of the ambulance truck for her to ride along. She had not seen the train until it knocked the ambulance sideways and had slammed on her brakes, looking away as the top of the ambulance was sheared off and the driver decapitated. When she looked back up, she had seen the metal flash of her daughter's gurney as it was caught up on the apron of the engine, had seen the white sheet that covered Karen blown backward. It happened so quickly that by the time her mind processed what she saw, it was over. But that thing wrapped around the right side of the engine had been Karen—there was no mistaking that quick glimpse of her daughter as she was caught midsection and lifted, her head tilted sideways, the hair streaming in the violent thrust of the wind.

It wasn't the first time Marcus Franklin had been called to a death scene only to deal with the living before he could get to the dead. Jodina Calhoun had been ice cold and blue with shock by the time he made it to her side. It had taken him three days before he'd been able to call and reassure her that Karen had unequivocally been dead before impact, that she had not been aware, that she had not suffered when the train caught her body and mutilated her so badly that even her mother could find nothing that was familiar in what was left.

Before the scene had been cleared and the bodies buried, the battle between the families of the dead and the bureaucracy began. The initial blame that landed on the driver shifted to the chasm created by questionable accountability. The signal arm had been torn away before the accident, and the driver had no warning that a train running the coal line at speed and without lights was headed straight for him. The state was responsible for the roads and road safety, the railroad company partially responsible for the upkeep of train signals, and the county responsible for communication between the two. The battle had splashed through the state newspapers with numerous follow-ups for the first two years, and by that time the families of the nurse and the emergency tech had each reached a settlement with the insurance companies. The nurse, who had two children, was in her early thirties, and was well on her way through the training required to become a surgical nurse. She was valued at a figure over seven million. The emergency tech, unmarried, had a price tag of five.

Three more years passed while the ambulance driver's valuation was complicated by the discovery of an out-of-wedlock child he had fathered before he'd joined the army after high school, and the mothers of his children, one high school sweetheart with a ten-year-old boy and one wife of four years with stair-step babies, one and three, a boy and a girl, had battled furiously and settled separately, the former for two million, the latter for six. At this point the only newspapers reporting the remaining threads of the story were the local publications in eastern Kentucky.

Seven years after the accident, the only one who had not settled was Jodina Calhoun. She was not holding out for more money. Just the opposite. She wanted nothing to do with the process of cashing in on the horror of seeing her only child torn to pieces before her very eyes. The insurance companies were frustrated. In spite of being provided with documentation by Dr. Franklin that Karen Mattingly Calhoun had been dead before the accident, it was their opinion that Jodina Calhoun had a strong lawsuit, and their stockholders agreed. The decision was made that she had to be paid something, and though she protested, wrote her congressman, and appealed to Dr. Franklin himself, they issued her a check for one half million dollars.

And just as Jodina Calhoun predicted, the local papers put her picture on the front page with the story of the settlement, and she knew it was only a matter of time before she was murdered in her bed, or wherever she happened to be, by some local cretin who would want to search through her house on the chance that she had some of that money lying around. As far as Jodina Calhoun was concerned, the insurance company had refused to let her mourn her daughter in peace for the last seven years, and then tidied up their books and consciences by sentencing her to a violent death. She had always been nervous, alone in her house. She lived remotely, on her son-in-law's farm, and she'd slept up at the big house ever since the story came out.

More than anything she wanted to go home and sleep in her own bed, because no matter how nice Craig was, no matter how much she loved those grandbabies, you're just more comfortable in your own home. The insurance company had taken her home, her peace of mind, and sooner or later her life, and she still didn't understand how someone could make you take money if you didn't want to.

Marcus became slowly aware that there was silence on the other end of the phone. “How are you doing, Mrs. Calhoun?”

“Nobody has killed me yet, but I figure it's just a matter of time. My son-in-law run two men off the farm last Monday night, and I figure they was after me. Don't forget your promise.”

“If you get murdered, Mrs. Calhoun, I'll do the autopsy personally.”

“And you'll hound the state police till they track down the son of a bitch that snuffed me out?”

“I'll make it my personal crusade.”

“Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

“But that's not why I called.”

Marcus rubbed the ball of his thumb on the edge of the desk. “What's on your mind, Mrs. Calhoun?”

“It's pretty delicate. Hard to explain on the phone. Plus who knows who might be listening?”

Franklin heard a rustling noise, and he pictured the woman looking over her shoulder. He heard the murmur of female voices in the background. He closed his eyes. He was hungry, and he was tired, and there was nothing worth eating at home in his house. He was too shy to eat at a restaurant by himself.

“Dr. Franklin, have you had your supper yet?”

“Oh, I'm okay.”

“Now, look here. I just fried some chicken, and I'm getting ready to put in some buttermilk biscuits. You ever had biscuits cooked in an iron skillet?”

“No, ma'am.” Would an iron skillet matter unless you were anemic? He'd acquired a taste for biscuits since he'd moved south.

“Why don't you come on by for a bite of supper? I got a blackberry cobbler cooling on the stovetop, and corn pudding in the oven.”

“Mrs. Calhoun, I don't have the time to drive three hours even for a dinner as good as that.”

Jodina Calhoun made a hissing noise. “Well, I'm not at home, am I?”

“I don't know, are you?”

“No, sir, I'm staying here in Lexington with my little grandniece, and you could get here in forty minutes driving slow. I need your help, and I got somebody I want you to meet.”

He was tempted. But he would lose his appetite in a room full of strangers, plus he had to get up early for court. And he was too tired to drive that far.

“I'm a pathologist, Mrs. Calhoun, and unless you need my help in the capacity of my job as a—”

“I
know
who you are, and it involves body parts and organ stealing, and the safety of little children, so who else am I going to call?”

Franklin puzzled over the question. “The Marsden case?”

“You know about it?”

“I've been following it. How are you involved?”

“Emmet's my little grandniece, isn't she?”

“Emmet?”

“Emma Marsden, sir.”

He hated it when she called him sir. It was like she was putting herself in her place on his behalf. Like she was saying he was more important and his time was more important, and he'd been raised well enough to flinch when a woman very much his senior in age called him sir. He could see his mother folding her arms and shaking her head at him ever so slightly.

“Now, if you don't want to drive over for dinner, we can come to your office, if you don't mind us showing up there sometime. You just say when.”

Marcus scratched his chin, looked at the stack of files in the chair by the door, the papers in the in-tray. The ashtray was grimy with ashes and cigar butts and the fluorescent light over his head had been going from dim to bright at regular intervals since early that afternoon, driving him crazy. He needed to get out. He needed something to eat other than the heel of potato bread, black bananas, and questionable salami he had in the kitchen at home.

“Give me your address,” Marcus said.

“Hot damn, he's coming.” Jodina's voice came through muffled, like she was holding her hand over the receiver. “Do you drive slow or fast?”

“Why?”

“I'm trying to time the biscuits, ain't I?”

He closed his eyes for one moment, striving for patience. If she hadn't been his elder, he might ask her why the hell she thought he had any idea what was in her mind. “How long does it take to cook them?”

“A good twenty minutes, if the oven's hot.”

“I'll call you on my cell when I'm twenty minutes out.”

“Huh. If they'd had cell phones when I was a young woman, it would have saved my husband a lot of burnt biscuits.”

Franklin had a change of heart as quickly as he'd made the decision to take the invitation, but the phone clicked in his ear. Apparently when Jodina quit talking, that was the end of the conversation. Franklin's mind wasn't on biscuits: It was on body parts, organ stealing, and the safety of little children. He wondered why in hell he'd said yes and how he was going to get out of it. He checked the caller ID, but the Calhoun number did not show up as anything but anonymous. That was one thing he did remember now, how paranoid the woman was. Maybe she'd gone over the edge and planned to poison him with those biscuits.

But in his mind's eye he saw a frail old woman who wanted nothing more than to bury what was left of her daughter in peace and anonymity, and he knew that she might joke but she was genuinely afraid and it was a hell of a world where an insurance company can force a settlement whether the victim wanted it or not. The suits ruled, and although they'd only wanted to clear Jodina Calhoun from the books, and the businessman in him sympathized, the human in him did not.

Either way, he couldn't not show up unless he called, and he didn't have her number. He'd drive out there and listen a little, but he wouldn't eat. It embarrassed him to eat with strangers, and he knew it was shyness and stupidity, but that didn't take the discomfort away. He wanted only to go home and be still.

The worst of it was knowing he'd brought it on himself.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

It took Franklin a half hour more than he'd figured to find the house because it wasn't actually in Lexington, as Jodina Calhoun had told him, but in Athens, which was a tiny sprout of a place right off the Richmond Road exit. The locals called it “A-Thins” instead of Athens, as in Greece, as in how any outsider might pronounce it, but every place has its eccentricities, and Franklin preferred cities with flavor rather than bland strips of everything the same. Still, he was annoyed because he'd had to wander around figuring out where the hell he was, and he was the type to map out his route before he grabbed the keys to the car. The crunch of leaves beneath his feet sounded angry. He punched the lock button on his keyless opener, and the loud squeal that alerted everyone within fifty feet that the car was now
locked
and
alarm-ready
made the woman in the porch swing look his way. She didn't look any happier to see him than he was to be there, and he paused, shy and embarrassed.