Mortal Remains (4 page)

“What?” His voice sounded overly loud.

The clerk frowned at him. “They found the body of a teenage boy in a crack house on the east side. It’s a DOA, but they want to know if we can make it official and do the paperwork. It’s our district.”

He felt the band around his stomach release a few notches. “Better we don’t do a slough,” he said. “I’ll handle it myself.”

Getting lost in an hour’s worth of forms and someone else’s heartbreak was just the diversion he needed.

“But I could tell them to bother another hospital-”

“I said I’d do it!”

The young woman’s jaw dropped.

Immediately he regretted having snapped at her. “Sorry,” he muttered, retreating into the hallway.

Keep hold of yourself, Garnet.
Or when the police did come for him, his entire staff would say, “Well, he has been acting on edge lately.”

That same day, Tuesday, November 6, 1:00 P.M.

Hampton Junction

R
unning was a drug to Mark.

Miss a day, he felt lousy.

Two, downright depressed.

Three, and he was convinced he had cancer.

He always followed the same route, turning left onto the road at the foot of his driveway, following it downhill a few miles toward town to loosen up, then going west on Route 4, a winding uphill grind that led farther into the mountains. How far he took it depended on the time he had and the caliber of tension he was trying to work off. Practicing medicine in a small town had different pressures than those of urban centers, but they were every bit as weighty.

This afternoon a heavy fog had settled into the valley. The tiny droplets it left on his face as he ran felt pleasantly cool, but it rendered the road, the forest, and anything else more than thirty feet away invisible, isolating him in a gray sphere of vague shapes. Yet as he passed through a corridor of towering maples and white birches, their foliage formed a canopy of iridescent orange and gold that floated above him like a gaily woven tapestry of silk. The effect became hallucinatory, and he inhaled deeply while he ran, as if to breathe in the color. The moist air filled his nostrils with the fresh smell of wet leaves, an aroma he found every bit as welcoming as the familiar scent of polished wood that greeted him whenever he entered the house he had grown up in.

Hampton Junction, Saratoga County, in the southern Adirondacks, was his home. An odd little town, its houses, businesses, and two churches stood scattered in a disorganized pattern as if the founders had thrown a handful of jacks into the hills, and wherever one landed, somebody built something. It continued to grow in an equally haphazard fashion. The official population of 2,985 – the number according to the sign on the highway – hadn’t changed since he was a kid. “No one ever seems to die in Hampton Junction without someone being born,” went the joke among locals. In truth, nobody could keep track of the population anymore. With the surrounding countryside so full of chalets, the count for the whole area could swell to twenty thousand on a weekend, then shrink back to the core group on Monday.

He grew up here. His love of the outdoor life was one of the reasons he’d returned after med school. He avidly hiked, kayaked, or skied whenever possible, thriving on the endless sweep of mountain wilderness that surrounded him. The hills and peaks, having engraved themselves on his psyche, looked as right to his eye as their rocky surfaces felt to the palms of his hands when he climbed them. Thick deciduous forests in summer. Massive, blue-green conifers rich with growth the year round. The panoply broken only by tumbling mountain streams, surging rivers, and cold lakes. He found it a place of powerful beauty and awe-inspiring solace.

Yet these mountains weren’t for everybody. Too much of them for too long at the wrong time, and a person with a troubled mind could end up so dwarfed by the vastness, so engulfed by the silence, and so hemmed in by the press of the forests that he panicked. That was the reason he’d forced Dan to take the diving course in Hawaii when they did three and a half years ago, just about six months after Dan’s wife had left him. Heartbroken though not showing it, no kids, and working twenty-four/seven, but still, to Mark’s eyes at least, a lost soul, Dan started to keep a wary eye on the surrounding hills. Mark knew he desperately needed the break. Sensory deprivation, isolation psychosis, fractured self-image – the terminology for it in textbooks was endless. “Bushed,” the locals called it.

Mark took pride in never having had to wrestle this demon. His secret – conquer and reconquer the wilderness – put the curve of his Telemark turn or the imprint of his boots on it before it ever got to him. He also got out regularly, choosing medical conferences in places that allowed him to feast on theater, dive in warm blue water with limitless visibility, or climb above the tree line where nothing surrounded him but open space.

The pitch of the road steepened, and his legs started to burn. Normally he welcomed the challenge and usually increased his pace at this point, wanting to push himself to the maximum. Today he glanced at his watch and started back. He and Dan were to meet with a cold-case specialist from the NYPD in less than an hour. But with the ease of his descent, the melancholy that he’d been trying to work off returned.

As a boy he’d understood only that Kelly had left for her own unexplained reasons. The possibility of her being dead never once entered his mind. As a result he unquestioningly carried this version of events forward over the years, continuing to see her disappearance through the optimistic gaze of youth, determined to protect at least that piece of childhood from the harsher scrutiny of his adult eye.

Even now a particle of hope, a relic from his days with her – the part of life before his father died when it seemed easy to keep dark terrors at bay – insisted she couldn’t have been murdered. But his clinical self, trained to stare at the worst possible truths and not flinch, knew differently.

Only in his memory did Kelly still gleefully win at Monopoly, stride through wildlife parks, and send sizzlers across strike zones.

Flashbacks of her crowded in… she arrived to baby-sit him wearing overalls… they made some fudge… he put chocolate freckles all over her face, and they tied her blond hair in two ponytails with red ribbon, like Daisy Mae’s from his comic books…

He started to sprint.

“Feels like I’m stepping on dog shit,” the man who walked between him and Dan complained. His leather soles kept slipping on the wet mush of fallen leaves that coated the sidewalk. “Is it always so soggy up here?” His breath hung white in the mist, and his frizzy gray hair glistened from the moisture it picked up from the air.

“Pretty much, this time of year,” Dan said. “We’ve already had a few dumps of snow, but the rain washed it away. Still, good shoes are a must.”

Mark’s own hiking boots had no such traction problems.

Their visitor, Detective William Everett, a cold-case specialist from the NYPD, shivered and dug his hands deeper into the pockets of a light tan raincoat. Short in stature, his craggy face had the pasty gray complexion of a smoker, and he chewed gum about sixty times a second.

Reformed, Mark figured, recognizing a chiclet that the man had popped in his mouth as a common nicotine substitute. But he’d quit too late. A mewing wheeze accompanied every word he said, and his chest heaved from walking up the gentle incline.

“Must be nice when you can see everything, though,” the detective added, peering into a fog so thick it made the houses along the road appear to be little more than looming gray cubes. “Or is this as good as it gets around here? Christ, you need a fuckin’ foghorn just to take a hike.”

A hike? Not with him along, or they’d end up carrying him. “You caught us on a bad day,” Mark said, slowing his step so as not to set too fast a pace for their visitor. The man looked fifty going on seventy, and the loose semicircles sagging from under his eyes suggested a lifetime of being tired.

“Still, even like this the air’s a whole lot cleaner than in New York,” Everett continued. As if to prove the point, he inhaled deeply, only his effort ended in a paroxysm of coughing that doubled him over. He spit on the pavement, then, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, added, “So tell me about your town. This is the playground for the horsey set, isn’t it?”

“Not really,” Mark replied. “We’re above the money belt.”

“The what?”

“The wealth. It’s more down around Saratoga.”

“So the woman was dumped far away from where she lived?”

“Not too far. The Braden estate is only nine miles south.”

“But you said the money-”

“Every town along the railroad took a flyer on being great someday,” Dan cut in. “Saratoga Springs made it. Hampton Junction ended up a leftover water stop from the heyday of steam locomotives. Our roots are blue-collar, not blue-blood, but we’re proud of it.” He had a way of sounding defensive when dealing with outside officials, whatever their stripe. His speech would unwittingly elongate into a bit of a drawl, and, with his portly frame stuffed into a fleece-lined bomber jacket that strained at the zipper, he’d come off like a cross between Rod Steiger and a Rotary Club booster.

Mark figured the awkwardness stemmed from Dan being an outsider himself. As far as the locals saw such matters, a person could move to Hampton Junction, live and work in the place for twenty years, yet still not be “from here.” Since Dan had arrived from Syracuse a mere decade ago, the townspeople considered him a newcomer, and, as he confided to anyone who would listen, it bugged the hell out of him.

“We tend to be more a lunch bucket crowd, our inhabitants mostly descended from train people,” he continued, proprietary as any native son. “The crystal-and-silver bunch generally drew the line at building their big estates twenty miles south of this area. If it weren’t for the fog, you’d see clapboard houses are the preferred style. As for all our vacationers and weekenders, they can’t afford luxury addresses close to the horse race set either. You’ll find them squirreled away in cottages and cabins all through the woods. Of course, there are exceptions, places where people have gone all out-”

“The Bradens were among those,” Mark said, wanting to rein in the conversation closer to the business at hand.

“Really?” The New York detective briefly pondered the fact. “Now why would a family that powerful want to be away from their own kind and off by themselves?”

Mark shrugged.

“I don’t know their reasons for sure,” Dan said, “I suppose it’s because they’re what I’d call quiet money. They like to enjoy it with their friends, not show it off.” Dan’s voice had become normal again, the drawl gone and his manner casual, as if nothing had happened. But authority had been established and boundaries marked – Dan’s way of trying to make himself appear an insider, at least to the eyes of a visitor.

“What about here?” Everett said, nodding to a massive shape that emerged from the gloom at the end of the street. “Is this more quiet money?”

“The quietest there is,” said Dan. “Welcome to Blair’s Funeral Home.”

Even in the mist the structure appeared substantially bigger than anything they’d passed. Stepping through an elaborate wrought-iron gate guarding the entrance, they followed a well-raked path that meandered up a sloping lawn. What little foliage remained on the surrounding trees glowed a muted orange, like a bed of coals smothered in ash. As they drew closer the three-story mansion took on a warm yellow hue, and white railings of a long wraparound porch became easily visible. Capping the structure, a cupola with a black-shingled roof pointed upward like a witch’s hat.

Mark grimaced at the thought of what awaited them inside.

Everett gave a soft whistle, “Christ, it’s bigger than Gracie Mansion, where our mayor lives. Same paint job, though, except this one isn’t peeling… his is. Death must pay good here.”

Dan chuckled. “Not from us locals. We live forever. But the part-timers, the outsiders, after ruining their health with big-city stress and pollution, they all want plots where they spent their summers, sort of the ultimate vacation. Mr. Blair can hardly keep up.”

They passed a gleaming Cadillac hearse parked at the head of a curved driveway. A haphazard cluster of lesser vehicles reached all the way out to the street. Mark had suggested they walk the block from Dan’s office so as not to add a police car to the mix. He shipped most of the local dead here, and in exchange for the business got to keep his coroner cases in the refrigerator locker alongside the corpses slated to be embalmed. But, as old man Blair always reminded him, he had to keep his comings and goings out of sight and not disturb the viewings upstairs.

Mark led the way around to the back door, to which he had the key. They went down a wooden staircase and passed through a dimly lit hallway stacked with empty caskets. Some had sticker prices on them. There was a cloying sweetness in the air, offset by a hint of something sour.

Everett looked around and curled up his nose. “You do most of your autopsies in a mortuary? This place looks like it’s owned by the Addams family.”

“They let me use a slab in their refrigerator now and then. Autopsies we do at the hospital in Saratoga, or in Albany,” Mark said.

With a second key he unlocked a large metal door at the end of the corridor and ushered them into a gleaming tiled room that was markedly colder than the temperature outdoors. A stainless-steel table with a drain at its center and a bucket underneath occupied the middle of the floor. Suspended from the ceiling was a large OR lamp, and around the walls stood big yellow vats connected by beige tubing to shiny silver probes that looked like giant needles. Glass jars containing various colored fluids lined the counters, and two metal cabinets filled with stainless-steel instruments were against the walls. The aroma of formaldehyde picked at the back of his nostrils like a swarm of ants. “Better breathe through your mouth, gentlemen,” he warned, crossing over to what looked like a built-in filing cabinet with half a dozen giant drawers. He reached for the third handle down, and pulled out what was left of Kelly McShane.

Her bones had mostly come apart during the retrieval operation, and trying to lay them out in the correct anatomical order had taken Mark an entire weekend. He wasn’t sure he got all the small phalanges of the fingers exactly right, and everything was still discolored brown. The forensics pathologist he’d talked to in New York had told him to do the best he could and not clean the specimen until their own cold-case specialist could view the remains. Consequently, the piecemeal skeleton and remaining strands of tissue had the appearance of something dug up from antiquity.

“Race you to the raft, Mark!”

A flash of golden skin parted the water, and the splash sparkled white in the sun. He plunged after her, laughing with delight as he frantically swam through her wake, then drew alongside, managing to touch the bobbing platform first.