Board Stiff (Mattie Winston Mysteries) (9 page)

“I’m not stupid,” Emily says, casting me an impatient look. “I know that TV and real life aren’t the same. I’m really interested in that kind of stuff, that’s all. If you guys think I’m too naïve, or too young to see hard realities, let me tell you about the weeks that my mother and I spent living on the streets of Chicago after we lost our house.”

If she’s trying to make me feel guilty, it’s working. Judging from the pained expression on Hurley’s face, it’s working on him, too. We share a look and a silent communication.

Hurley says, “Are you sure you don’t mind taking her?”

Emily shoots me a hopeful look and I smile back at her. I like the kid. There’s something about her that appeals to me. “Not at all,” I say honestly. “I think it will be fun.”

“Thank you!” Emily says, dancing in her seat. “I promise you I’ll be fine.”

While I do think showing Emily around the office will be fun, I also have an ulterior motive. If Emily is like most teenagers she’ll want to talk. And I have a particular topic in mind.

I want to know exactly what’s been going on at Hurley’s house since she and her mom arrived.

H
urley drives us to the ME’s office and despite Emily’s assurances about her ability to handle the rough stuff—something I’m inclined to believe based on what I’ve seen and heard from her so far—we take her to the library, where I figure there are enough books filled with gory pictures and the grim details of death and dismemberment to keep her occupied for a good while. If she truly has an interest in this stuff, there will be plenty of time to expose her to the real thing later on, assuming her mom is okay with it. Hurley buys Emily a soda from the vending machine and we leave her at the library table with a stack of books to keep her busy. Then Hurley and I head for the autopsy suite.

The door to the autopsy suite is closed, but we can see inside through the window in the top half. Bernie Chase is laid out on the autopsy table, naked from head to toe, his chest and abdominal cavity already flayed open with the standard Y-incision. Izzy is up by Chase’s head, his back to us, doing something we can’t see, though sewing up Chase’s scalp is a definite likelihood since I can see an already dissected brain sitting on a side tray. Arnie is there, too, assisting from the other side of the table, currently engrossed in whatever Izzy is doing.

Hurley grabs my arm and stops me just as I’m about to open the door, making my back muscles yelp again, though the day’s earlier activities seem to have loosened me up a little. “See what an effect you have on men?” he whispers in my ear.

I have no idea what he’s talking about and my expression shows it. He nods toward the autopsy table and I turn to look, momentarily confused. Then I see the tumescence in Bernard Chase’s penis.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Hurley,” I whisper back. “You’ve seen enough autopsies to know that a lot of men develop an engorged penis when they die.” While this is true, I have to admit that Bernie’s is impressive.

“I have one in life,” Hurley whispers, wiggling his eyebrows at me.

His breath on my ear is making me feel hot all over. I push him off to one side, out of view of the autopsy room. “Really, Hurley?” I hiss at him. “You’re going to do that here? It’s bad enough you’re doing it at all, but here?”

“I can’t help myself. You make me crazy, Mattie Winston.”

“You were crazy long before I met you. Now get yourself together and start acting like a professional. I don’t want to give Izzy any reason to suspect there is anything between us.”

“Is there?”

“No! Maybe. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. We can’t act on it, Hurley. Now stop it and behave. I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose my job again.”

I turn away, open the door, and enter the autopsy room before Hurley can mess with my mind—or body—anymore.

“Hey Mattie, Hurley,” Arnie says. “I hope you don’t mind me offering to jump in on what would have been your first case since you came back, Mattie. I’ve been assisting a lot since Jonas took your job. Every time the poor guy came in here he swelled up like a puffer fish and started wheezing.”

“So I heard. I don’t mind at all. I’ve cut open enough people in my time, both dead and alive, that I don’t mind sharing the fun. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of other opportunities.”

“Have I mentioned how glad we are to have you back here?” Arnie says.

“You have,” I say with a smile. “But it never hurts to hear it. Thanks, again. I’m glad to be back.”

I’m flattered by Arnie’s enthusiasm and realize just how much I missed him during my hiatus even if he is a bit of a nutcase. I think
nutcase
might be too strong a term. After my session with Dr. Maggie, I’m more sensitive to labels like that, so I mentally correct myself and label Arnie as a conspiracy theorist with a very active imagination. The last time I spoke with him he tried to convince me that the electronic eyes built into the sinks and paper towel dispensers in public washrooms are really cameras put in there by the government to monitor the activities of people who use the washrooms. Apparently, Arnie thinks the elimination and hygiene habits of the public contain secret information that might someday save the world. Arnie also informed me that the reason some species of animals are either in danger of becoming extinct, or already are extinct, is because a secret group of people who believe the apocalypse is nigh are running a Noah’s Ark–type zoo where they are protecting and breeding certain animals who will repopulate the earth after Armageddon. The dodo isn’t gone, according to Arnie. The last of its kind are stashed away in the Ark zoo, waiting for some post-apocalyptic rebirth. When I asked him why these remaining dodos couldn’t be used to repopulate their species now, Arnie babbled a bunch of stuff about changing ecosystems and maintaining a plant-animal balance.

Even though I suspect Arnie wears a tinfoil hat during some of his off hours, I can’t help but like the guy. He’s whip smart and a definite asset to the ME’s office, though just how he came to be here is a bit of a mystery to me. I know that he worked for the LA coroner’s office for several years, but left it and somehow ended up in Sorensen, Wisconsin. Izzy has always been vague and mostly mum on the topic, and Arnie cleverly changes the subject whenever I’ve tried to bring it up. I suspect his conspiracy theories might have been a bit too much for a coroner’s office that tends to get a lot of PR attention, but for us here in Wisconsin, where wearing a giant cheese wedge on your head is considered normal, tinfoil hats barely raise an eyebrow.

Hurley walks over and peers inside Bernie’s body cavity from a polite distance. “Got anything for me yet?”

“I do and I don’t,” Izzy says cryptically. “It turns out the isolyser powder wasn’t a contributing cause of death after all. The powder got into his mouth, but he was essentially dead when it happened. He didn’t swallow any of it and while there was a small amount mixed in with saliva and mucus in his airway, it wasn’t enough to block it entirely. There was no trace of the stuff deeper in his lungs, so it appears he stopped breathing before the stuff made it into his mouth.”

“That’s good news for Bjorn,” I say.

“So what killed him?” Hurley asks. “Did he have a heart attack?”

Izzy shakes his head. “No, he didn’t. There’s the rub. I haven’t been able to find any cause of death. So for now, I’m listing the cause as undetermined, but I feel pretty certain that the manner is homicide. His heart muscle is in perfect health. In fact, his arteries are some of the best I’ve seen. There’s no evidence of heart disease or a heart attack. I haven’t found any blood clots or hemorrhages, and when I examined his brain, there was no evidence of a stroke. The only findings of any significance are his lungs, which are quite congested, and some cell death I found in some of his tissues. He was in shock for some reason and his body wasn’t getting enough oxygen, but I can’t tell you why. I don’t see any evidence of a severe allergic reaction with anaphylaxis, so at this point I’m leaning toward a poison of some sort. What I can tell you is something we already know from Bjorn—Bernie didn’t die easily. I did find skin and blood under his fingernails and I can’t find any evidence that he scratched himself, so we should have some DNA, but we already know whose it will be.”

Hurley, Izzy, and I all say the same thing at once. “Bjorn.”

Arnie looks around the room at each of us, his brows drawn down with curiosity. “You guys know something I don’t?”

We fill Arnie in on what we know about Bjorn and Bernie in the bathroom.

“It’s ridiculous to suspect Bjorn anyway,” Arnie says. “What possible motive would he have?”

Hurley says, “There’s a rumor afoot at the Twilight Home that Chase was killing off the patients who became more expensive to care for. A number of the patients there seem to think there’s some legitimacy to the idea.”

“Do you?” Arnie asks, sounding excited at the prospect of a real, live conspiracy.

“It would be difficult for him to do,” I say. “But not impossible. Patients in nursing homes are expected to die, particularly the ones who experience health setbacks. Of course, those are the very patients the others think Chase was getting rid of. But even if it’s true, I don’t see Bjorn as the great avenger here. Hell, half the time he can’t remember where he is or what day it is, much less some wild conspiracy. His senility has worsened rapidly over the past few months.”

“Not only that,” Hurley says, “Bjorn is in his eighties. Physically, he manages for the most part, but I don’t think he has the strength or the agility to overpower a man of Bernard’s age.”

“I don’t know,” Arnie says. “My cousin’s mother had Alzheimer’s and most of the time she was weak and pliable as a baby. But occasionally she had these fits of intense rage and anger, and when that happened the woman was strong as an ox.”

“Of course, none of this is relevant given our findings so far,” Izzy says. “It doesn’t take brute strength to poison someone.”

“That’s true,” Hurley says. “If any of the patients at the Twilight Home believe the conspiracy about Chase killing patients, we have a lot of potential suspects, including Bjorn.” There is a moment of silence and then he adds, “Especially Bjorn, since he was probably the last person to see Bernie alive. He already told us there was something wrong with Bernie when he entered that bathroom, so if we’re looking at who had access to Bernie, Bjorn is it.”

“But Bjorn’s proximity was accidental,” I say. “If Bernie was in the building, anyone else who was there could have had access to him. Depending on how fast-acting whatever he was poisoned with is, he might not have even been in the nursing home when the poison was delivered. That means his wife could be a suspect, too, at least until we can narrow down the time line a little better. Do you have any idea what the poison might have been, Izzy?”

“I have lots of ideas, too many, in fact. We’ll run a tox screen to see if anything shows up. If it doesn’t, at least we can rule out some things.”

“Do you think he might have been sedated somehow ?” Hurley asks.

“It’s possible,” Izzy says. “An overdose is one scenario, though his behavior in the bathroom doesn’t really fit with that. Until I get the tox screen results back and look at some more tissue samples on a microscopic level, I’m just guessing.”

“How long?” Hurley asks.

Arnie says, “I can do some preliminary tests for the more common drugs—basic prescription drugs like opiates, benzos, and tricyclics, and the more common street drugs like marijuana, meth, and cocaine. Anything more exotic than that, like GHB or fancier prescription drug levels, will have to get sent to Madison’s lab. Those results will likely take anywhere from a day or two, to a week, depending on what we’re looking for. It would help if we knew what we were looking for. There are hundreds of tests we have the capability of doing, but obviously it doesn’t make sense to do them all. We need to narrow the focus.”

Hurley scrunches his face up in thought. “If a prescription drug was involved, that would imply a staff member rather than a patient, wouldn’t it?”

“Not necessarily,” I say. “Most nursing home patients are on long lists of medications that include any number of potential suspects. While it’s true that the nursing staff generally doles out the drugs, it wouldn’t be that hard for a patient to build up a stash, or even obtain a prescription from a doctor that they then fill elsewhere without the nursing staff knowing about it. That would tend to implicate one of the more independent patients, but I think the nature of this crime leans that way, anyhow.”

“What sort of time frame are we looking at for the onset of action for the majority of the causative poisons?” Hurley asks.

Izzy thinks about it for a moment. “I’d say you’re looking at a two to three hour window at the most. There are some poisons that are much faster-acting than that, but anything slower-acting that had to build up over time, like arsenic or thallium, would have caused long-term disability and illness prior to death. I think we can safely rule those out since we have no indications that Bernie was sick at all prior to today. The delivery method of whatever killed him might impact the time, too. Something injected would act faster than something ingested. I found no evidence of any injection sites on his skin anywhere, but I’ll take another look just to be sure.”

“Can you give me a time of death?”

“I can,” Izzy says. “Based on lividity, rigor, and body temp, he died somewhere between ten and eleven this morning.”

“So maybe we can narrow down our suspects by figuring out who had access to Bernie between the hours of seven and eleven this morning,” I say.

Hurley scoffs. “Yeah, that narrows it down to all of the nursing home patients, Irene, Bjorn, Chase’s wife, and all of the nursing home staff who were on duty.”

“We should search all of the patient rooms,” I say. “Maybe we can find a stash of pills somewhere. And we should talk to the patients, too. They all love to gossip and someone might know if someone else has a little stash of something they keep on the side.”

“I’ll have to get a search warrant,” Hurley says. “There are sixty rooms in that place, plus the ancillary areas like the cafeteria, the administrative offices, the therapy rooms. . . .” He shakes his head and sighs, then takes out his cell phone and punches in some numbers. “I’m going to have to call in some extra manpower. Between the patients, the room searches, and the staff at that place, we have a lot of interviews and territory to cover.”

He steps outside into the hallway and I can hear the murmur of his voice as he talks into the phone. A minute or so later, he reenters the autopsy room and looks directly at me.

“I’ve got extra people coming in to assist with the search and the interviews, but I still have to call to get a warrant. I’m hoping that won’t take more than an hour. Mattie, I want you to be involved with this. Your nursing experience will come in handy if we do come across any pills, and I think you can help us with the interviews, too.”