High Fall (32 page)

Wind swept down the hill like a cloaked skier. It flicked branches against one another and rustled leaves—funereally, Kiernan thought. She wished she had remembered to bring a jacket. She wished Greg—no, no names now, just “the deceased.” The corpse. The body.

She hunched her shoulders against the wind, which would get colder as the light failed, and the gusts of air, which would grow stronger, and she thanked the powers that be for it. Not even standing upwind of the corpse would protect her from the overwhelming smell of putrefaction. Like meat left out on the counter for a month, or a year, according to the first pathologist she had studied under. There should be virtually no meat on the body, not after ten years in the ground in a cheap and hasty grave. Would he be in a steel-lined coffin that would preserve properly embalmed remains? Not likely. She glanced at the ground under the tent. It was not sunken, and that surprised her. It suggested an extra that she hadn’t expected from this interment. Perhaps the cemetery had insisted. Whatever the reason, the smooth ground meant the coffin probably was in a concrete liner, to protect the casket from being collapsed by the heavy ground above, and not incidentally to keep the cemetery free of unsightly (and in grassy graveyards, difficult to mow) potholes.

Taking a breath of cool evening air, she pushed aside thoughts of interment procedures and concentrated only on the corpse. What should she expect from a body that had been steamed inside a fire-resistant suit? How much had remained of that suit at burial? What was left would have been stuck to the skin, buried with the corpse. And how much would that suit have kept the flesh, and the water sloughed off, in place? Some flesh would have been charred where the fire burned through the suit, and the bones would be brownish. The fire would have given decomposition a speedy takeoff.

Kiernan shook her head. The body would be bad. No need to predict how bad; she’d know soon enough.

As she watched the younger men digging, she found herself breathing through her mouth, as she had automatically in the autopsy room. She had assisted at one autopsy on an exhumed body when she was a resident in the medical examiner’s office. The other residents, all men, had stood outside the door, watching her, one of them holding the fifty dollar pot for their bet on how long she would last. Then, even with exhaust fans strong enough to pull the air out of the autopsy room before it could cause contamination, the smell had been sickening. Later, she wondered if she would have taken breaks in the corridor had she not been aware of the bet. But then, she hadn’t left the room at all. Instead, she’d damped down the nausea, breathed so shallowly through her clenched teeth that she wondered how oxygen had made it to her brain, and at the end forced herself to smile as she walked through the metal door into the hallway, extended her palm to the gaggle of residents, and demanded every dollar in the pot.

Then it had been a struggle to work through the adipocere, the yellow waxy mass to which damp had solidified the fat of the corpse. Now she’d be lucky to get that close. If the casket held, it would be moved unopened into the funeral home autopsy room to await reburial; she wouldn’t even see the body.

What was her backup for that? Getting Pedora down here to insist that his representative see the body that was being transferred? That could take days, and there was always the possibility of another job offer in Creative to halt his willingness. Her shoulders tensed; despite the breeze, she was too warm.

The group stood silently as the light faded and the lamp under the tent shone brighter. Simultaneously, Kiernan wished she’d eaten dinner and was glad she hadn’t. It seemed hours before one of the diggers called out, “That’s it. We’re down to the liner.” And another aeon before they hauled up chunks of concrete. And a third before they had cleared sufficient space on all sides and were ready to shift the straps under the casket.

Kiernan eyeballed the cemetery crew—three bejeaned guys in their midtwenties muttering to each other and smothering nervous laughter as they moved around the casket. They’d protected themselves from the reality of the event as effectively as if they’d sealed their own bodies in freezer wrap. Give them one surprise, and they’d fall apart—and compromise the evidence. Kiernan eased beside Halsey and asked, “Has this crew worked with a casket like this?”

“Not likely. We run a quiet cemetery here. A
final
resting place. We haven’t exhumed a body in twenty years. That long ago, the only bones these kids were pulling were wishbones.”

Before Halsey could launch a full-force display of undertaker’s humor, Kiernan said, “Maybe we should warn them not to get rattled.”

Halsey stared a moment—trying to decide whether she’d attempted a mortician-worthy play on words, she suspected—then moved next to the blond ponytailed guy in charge of the winch.

The blond listened, then nodded, effectively discounting Halsey’s warning. He stood, his face frozen in an expression of blasé disinterest that advertised how recent had been his adolescence, his bare-muscled arms folded across his chest. The rough edges of the sleeve-holes on his gray sweat shirt flapped in the cold wind.

Halsey stepped to the edge of the hole, eyed the straps, turned to the blond, and said, “Okay, lift her up—easy.”

Halsey took a step back, as did the sheriff. Only Kiernan took a deep breath of clear air and moved closer. The blond flicked on the winch. The metallic whir of the motor cut through the rustle of the leaves like a hacksaw. The loops of the belts tightened from circles to ovals to triangles. The whir grew faster, higher pitched. But the coffin didn’t move. The engine strained; the belts pressed in against the wooden coffin sides. Kiernan held her breath.

And then the coffin jerked inches up. The wood had doubtless been lacquered once, maybe stained deep brown. But now it looked as unfinished as a deck chair left in the snow all winter. Inch by slow inch, the coffin lifted. Halsey sighed. Kiernan took a quick breath, her eyes never leaving the coffin. The blond at the winch grinned, eyed his fellow diggers, and turned up the winch speed.

The engine strained. Halsey whirled toward the blond; “Hey—”

The coffin jerked like a fish on a line; the old wood bowed inward.

“Turn that thing down, you asshole!” Halsey yelled, just as the side of the coffin gave way.

The lid banged down on the side, cracking the flooring.

“Lower it! Lower it, you moron!”

But the blond was staring transfixed as the coffin lid slid down what remained of the sides and into the grave, exposing to the wind pink ash that had once been the coffin’s silk or satin liner.

The coffin floor cracked in the middle. The belts went slack, then tightened. Both ends of the floor rose in a V. And the gray-white skeleton sat half up.

M
ORE THAN AN HOUR
had passed, during which Halsey alternately shouted at and calmed the cemetery crew, directed them to lower a pallet and shift it under the failing coffin floor, and transferred the ensemble to the holding room in the mortuary basement. Shards of the coffin clung tenuously to the pallet; a tarp covered the corpse. A ceiling fan groaned ineffectually. The cemetery crew, green and shaking, made for the door. Even breathing through her mouth as shallowly as she could, Kiernan fought to keep from gagging at the putrid odor.

“Save the remains of the coffin,” she said to Halsey.

“Why?”

“We may need to run some tests.”

“Tests? Tests, when you’re just moving remains to another site? Just what’s going on here?”

“I don’t know. But what I can tell you is that this is not the remains of a man who died with his head inside a fire-resistant suit.”

Steeling herself so that her chest was barely moving, she walked to the pallet and lifted the tarp off the body.

Bones. No flesh on the feet, nothing visible in the joints between the metacarpals and carpal phalanges of the hands.

She choked back a gasp. The skull still showed signs of being singed. And the teeth were blackened and chipped. Chipped from the heat. Blackened from contact with the flames. How had Greg’s face burned? What had happened to him? He was a professional—how could he have gotten himself burned like this?

She turned away, shut her eyes.
The remains, just the remains. No names.

Turning back, she looked more closely at the metacarpals and up the arms along the radius and ulna of the forearm to the humerus of the upper arm. The body was lying supine. Still sifting the air between her teeth, Kiernan pulled a magnifying glass from her bag and leaned forward, moving her gaze from the acetabulum of the shoulder slowly across the clavicle to the sternum and up over the mandible and maxilla of the jaw to the frontal plate of the skull. The thick bones of the skull were intact; only the smaller ones were broken. Deeper cracks showed in the ribs and the sternum, stress lines marked both iliac crests. From the intense heat of the fire? The breaks were not new, not caused by the exhumation. No section of the anatomy had taken disproportionate insult. But there was no indication of bones broken and healed.

Why was the breakage most prevalent in the head?

Why no signs of bones broken and healed? Greg Gaige had been a stunt man. He’d done high falls from buildings, horse falls from saddles, stair falls down flight after flight, not to mention the myriad of falls so ordinary in stunt work as to be unworthy of mention. Kiernan shook her head. There was no way Greg Gaige could have spent fifteen or more years of his life as a stunt man and never broken a bone.

“You satisfied?” Halsey demanded from a spot by the door.

“No.” She moved to the foot of the table and, magnifying glass in hand, moved from the tarsal phalanges up across the small knobby bones of the ankle to the tibia and fibula, across the patella to the femur.

No breaks there, either. And no metal rod in the femur.

She stood up straight, walked to the door, took a deep breath of hallway air, and said to Halsey, “This body was not entirely in a fire suit. The head was unprotected in a fire. It’s singed directly from the flames.”

Halsey nodded without interest.

“And it’s not Greg Gaige.”

N
OT
G
REG
G
AIGE.

Whose remains were lying in the cemetery’s holding room? How had they gotten into the grave with Greg’s name on it? The sheriff asked her those questions, but she had no solutions—at least, none she was willing to pass on to him. Her speculation she kept to herself. She answered his questions in the mortuary, again at the Sheriffs Department, and went over them a third time for her official statement. When she got free, it was after ten
P.M.,
and she hadn’t had a moment to ponder the revelation that had stood at the edge of her mind all evening, its blinding golden light casting all lesser thoughts into darkness. Greg Gaige was alive! Or at least, she cautioned herself, he had been alive a decade ago,
after
the fire gag. Was he still alive? If so, where was he? How was he?
Who
was he, now that he could no longer be Greg Gaige?

A chill shot through her. A man had died in Greg’s place; could Greg have been responsible? She couldn’t bring herself to believe it, but she knew the sheriff wouldn’t hesitate. If he found Greg before she did, it would be too late.

She pulled up on a hill outside of town and tried her phone. The quick call to Tchernak was the easy part. Then she dialed Dolly Uberhazy at home. She waited through the answering-machine spiel with relief. The answering machine, the electronic means to say: I tried. “This is Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. We’ve exhumed the body in the Conroy cemetery. The body is not, repeat
not
Greg Gaige’s. The sheriff will be—”

“What?” Dolly yelled.

Kiernan repeated the message.

“You had them dig it up?”

“You’re getting distracted, Dolly. The point is the body isn’t Greg Gaige.”

“Oh, shit!”

“The body is someone else.”

“Why the hell—”

“And that means that someone else did the fire gag.”

“I can’t believe this is all coming up again.
Bad Companions
—God, was that aptly named! The companion from hell. I thought I’d finally gotten clear of that film. I might as well have been Bleeker, for all the years it shadowed me.”

“Because of the fire gag?”

“Because the damned film was so over budget, and because I was an easy scapegoat.”

“An
easy
scapegoat? You were the producer. Weren’t you
supposed
to be keeping costs in line?”

“Yeah, and I did. It wasn’t that far over budget. It wasn’t
Bonfire of the Vanities
, for chrissake.”

“You used the footage from the fire. It’s not like you had to stay and reshoot that scene. So what threw the film over budget?”

“Look sweetie, the script didn’t call for the hero to burn up three-quarters through the story. We had the fire on film, but we didn’t have him getting out of it. So we had to rebuild the whole damned house and shoot some makeup scenes with it. And that was the small part. Then there was the funeral, and there was a holiday weekend, and we couldn’t get the lumber for the house for a couple of days, and by the end of it all, we were looking at a ten-day delay, with the whole damned payroll sitting around on location. You know what that costs, sweetie? Close to a hundred thousand dollars each and every day. All the leases needed to be renegotiated. The release date had to be postponed, which meant the distribution contracts had to be adjusted—not in our favor, I’ll tell you. It was a nightmare.”

“Did they blame you for Greg’s—or whoever’s—death?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why were you the scapegoat? Just because you were the producer?”

“Because, dammit—and don’t you repeat this—I was a woman.”

Dolly was the last person to cloak her failings in accusations of sexism. It was a moment before Kiernan said, “Ah, the affair you had on the set!”

“You got it, sweetie. A guy screws around, it’s normal extracurricular activity. Doesn’t affect anything—not his marriage, certainly not his work. No reason why it should, it’s not like he’s dealing with anything above the short hairs. But a woman has a fling, a fling so minor I couldn’t have told you the stud’s name a month later, and everyone in the business is saying: ‘Oh, yeah, Dolly was so head over heels, she let the set go to hell.’ My whole career could have gone down the tubes. It took me five years of the tightest-budgeted shoots to live down a reputation for negotiating every contract on the casting couch. And now, you—
you
dredge it all up again. Jesus, why didn’t I let the San Diego cops lock you up when I had the chance?”