The Good Cop (12 page)

I drove—yet another stupid decision, but by that point I was actually the least drunk of the three of us. We were laughing the whole way, though for the life of me I can’t remember about what. Though I do seem to recall Kira making an off-hand comment about how she always wanted to have sex in a morgue, and I had to resist the urge to drive faster.

I managed to get us in one piece to the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office, a brick building at the corner of Norfolk Street and South Orange Avenue.

Paul/Powell instructed me to park in the employee lot, which I balked at. Then he explained that’s how he always did it, and I suppose illegal parking was chump change compared with the variety of crimes I was about to commit.

I felt incredibly conspicuous as we spilled out of the Malibu: three stumbling, giggling white kids in a Newark parking lot late at night. We went around to an unlit back door, where Paul/Powell seemed to know what he was doing. He slipped his key in the door in a practiced manner and turned it easily.

“I think if you tried the front one, the alarm would go off,” our tour guide explained. “This one isn’t wired, for whatever reason.”

With Paul/Powell in the lead, we went through a series of antiseptic corridors and then down some stairs until we reached the morgue, which was, appropriately enough, in the basement. He went through the door into a room that felt colder than the others. When he flipped on a light, I saw the bank of large, stainless steel drawers on the far side. They must have been refrigerated. Did each of them have a body inside? Or was there still room at the inn? I didn’t see any neon “No Vacancy” signs.

There were three stations in the middle—did you call them examining tables? chopping blocks? what?—all of which were, of course, empty at this time of day. But I could imagine that in a county like Essex—home to roughly a million people, at least a few of whom died each day under circumstances that required an autopsy—they could get fairly busy.

Paul/Powell had stopped at a clipboard that was hanging from the wall by a chain and he was flipping pages.

“You said his name was Kipps, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, still trying to take everything in.

Kira had hooked her arm in mine and was pressed against me, perhaps to get warm, perhaps because this whole thing was starting to get more than a little spooky. Maybe it was the cold or the brightness of the lights—or, you know, all the dead people—but I was definitely feeling much more sober than I had been just moments earlier. No one was giggling or talking about sex anymore.

Paul/Powell let the clipboard drop and walked calmly over to one of the drawers. Kira and I shuffled after him, both of us acting like we were trying not to touch anything. I’ve heard dead bodies are, in some ways, much more hygienic than live ones—it’s not like they can sneeze on you. But still, I didn’t feel like going around licking stuff.

“You ready?” Paul/Powell asked, his “D-E-A-T-H” fingers on one of the handles.

I nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Here goes.”

*   *   *

A photographer buddy of mine who did a lot of work in war zones once gave me some valuable advice when it came to the dead: look at their bodies all you want; just don’t look at the faces. The bodies you can forget. The faces, he said, stay with you forever.

So I tried to keep my eyes fixed on the drawer as the long tray containing Darius Kipps slid toward me. Only when it was fully extended did I let myself glance at him, and even then I looked only at his chest. It had a long, slightly uneven scar running up the middle of it. He had obviously already been autopsied, and whoever stapled him back together hadn’t been tremendously concerned about aesthetics.

Paul/Powell must have noticed me averting my gaze because he began lecturing.

“Death is very natural, you know,” he intoned, again going Vincent Price on us. “In some ways, it’s the most natural thing that can happen to an animal. Yet there remains an irrational fear of death. You can touch him if you want. I really believe the dead like to be touched.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw he was running his hand along the corpse’s jawbone. I wouldn’t have stroked Darius Kipps’s cheek when it was part of a warm, pliant human being. Why the hell would I want to do it now that it was cold and stiff?

“The transformation to death—I call it the change from lucidity to morbidity—is one of the better understood biological processes, something that has been a subject of fascination for humankind throughout recorded history,” Paul/Powell continued. “Still, with fascination has always come fear. A study by Wickstrom and Zhuang out of Berkeley found that—”

It was Kira, who had been silent ever since we entered the building, who interrupted: “Powell, would you shut the hell up?”

“Fine, fine,” he said, returning to his normal voice. “Geez, I’m just talking.”

“I know,” she said. “But you’re freaking me out. This is weird enough. Stop it.”

I guess Kira was starting to come to her senses, too. And I was relieved she did. Paul/Powell was freaking me out, too. Plus, I wanted to get us back on track.

“So why don’t you tell me what you see here?” I said. “I really don’t know how much I want to look. This death thing is your business.”

“Yeah, although this particular part of the death industry isn’t really my area of expertise,” he said. “The people who do these autopsies are full-on MDs. They spend years studying this stuff. I just come to observe. They only called it an internship because my dad is a pretty big donor to the Democratic Party and, of course, the Democrats rule Essex County. So he, uh, you know, made a phone call…”

Ah, yes, politics in New Jersey—the money always comes attached with strings.

“Just do your best,” I instructed.

“Well, okay, you saw somebody already cut this guy open, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So that means they’ve already removed his internal organs. That’s part of the autopsy. They weigh all the organs and then study them to see if they had anything to do with the death. In this guy’s case, the cause of death was pretty obvious, right? But you learn all kinds of interesting things. I observed this one autopsy the other day where the guy died of cirrhosis, but he also had a major blockage in one of the arteries leading to the heart. Basically, if he hadn’t drunk himself to death, he would have—”

“Powell!” Kira interrupted again.

“Sorry, sorry. I’m just into this stuff, you know?”

“Let’s just try to stay focused,” I said.

“Well, okay. He, uh … I’m not sure the perfect phraseology, but the back of his head is a big, bloody mess. You need me to get graphic?”

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “It’s an exit wound. I get the point.”

So Kipps had, in fact, been shot in the head. The only question now was whether it was self-inflicted. But how would I know? I guess if he fired the gun himself, there would be gunshot residue. But was that visible?

“Do you see any powder burns on his hands?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said.

Then again, the story—and no one had contradicted it—was that Kipps was found in a shower stall, with the water running. That might have washed off any powder. I was beginning to run out of ideas when Paul/Powell piped up.

“Well, this is sort of interesting,” he said.

“What?”

“There are ligature marks on both of his wrists,” he said. “Don’t worry. You can take a look. It won’t kill you.”

Paul/Powell held up the arm on the far side of Kipps’s body, and sure enough, the wrist had dark marks on it that were vivid even against his coffee-brown skin. The wrist on my side had similar wounds.

“These look like rope burns to me,” Paul/Powell said. “It’s almost like someone tied him to a post or a chair or something. It’s obviously premortal. That’s always a big distinction with these guys—pre- versus postmortal—because sometimes a body can get roughed up, especially if someone found it in a Dumpster or something. But these definitely happened while your guy was still alive. There was some bleeding and clotting on the parts that got rubbed really raw.”

“Yeah, I see that.”

“They’re fresh, though. This is just a guess, but this looks like something that happened shortly before death. Within six hours, for sure.”

Paul/Powell was on the move, heading down to the end of the tray. There was a sheet around the body’s lower half—someone thought the dead cop should have some modesty—but Paul/Powell was lifting it out of the way and studying Kipps’s feet.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Check out the ankles. He was tied to a chair for a while. And he didn’t like it much.”

I went down and inspected. There were bruises just above the ankle bone that looked like they could have come from a rope. These didn’t break the skin. Maybe Kipps had been wearing pants or socks that cushioned the abrasiveness of the rope.

Whatever it was, something very strange had obviously happened to Darius Kipps in the hours before death, and it was now officially beyond making sense to me. As a reporter, I’m always telling stories. And I could tell a story where the detective, having decided to permanently lower his body temperature, got plastered on bourbon and then blew his head off. I had a harder time telling a version of the story where he also spent some time tied to a chair, struggling against his bonds so hard they made him bleed.

It introduced another actor—or, rather, several of them—into the equation. There had to be one person to do the tying and at least one other person to convince Kipps not to move while the tying was being done, presumably by aiming a weapon at him.

And in any reasonable person’s mind, it had to throw the Newark Police Department’s press release about a self-inflicted gun-shot wound into doubt. Serious doubt.

What’s more, it opened up another gaping, open question in my mind: If Darius Kipps didn’t kill himself, who did? And why?

*   *   *

I could tell Paul/Powell was of a mind to linger for a while, maybe visit with some of his other perished pals, but I have very strict rules about how many human remains I want to disturb in a day, and one is my limit.

Plus, Kira—now most assuredly out of the mood for love—was off in a corner by herself, taking occasional glances at a big biohazard container like maybe she wanted to make a deposit. I didn’t know if she was squeamish around the dead or around the 120-proof spirits we had just been imbibing. Either way, it was time to start bringing the illegal portion of my day to a close.

“You see anything else interesting?” I asked.

Paul/Powell spent a little more time looking under the sheet (better him than me), then went back up to inspect the head wound some more (
definitely
better him than me), before finally announcing, “That’s all I got for you.”

“Would you have any way of knowing whether this guy was drunk when he was killed?”

“Well, they’ll test for that as part of the tox screen.”

“No, I mean right now.”

Paul/Powell rested his hand on Kipps’s shoulder—no, it hadn’t gotten any less creepy—and pondered this for a moment. “Well, maybe if we compressed his chest and forced some air out of him, you could smell his breath.”

“Ah, that’s okay. I’ll pass. It would be reported in the autopsy, right? The booze. The marks on the wrists and ankles. That would all be in there?”

“Yeah, definitely. Any kind of wound or scar, premortal, postmortal, it’s all in there. And of course the toxicology reports would be there, too.”

I knew that, of course. I was already thinking about ways to get what I had just learned on the record and in the newspaper. In this case, merely having observed it wasn’t good enough—it would raise the question of how the reporter had been in a position to see it. Journalism Ethics 101: you can’t commit a crime to get information.

The autopsy report was no good to me, either. Autopsies were not automatically public record. You could get them unsealed, but that involved making an argument to a judge that there was a compelling public need to view the information—a need that outweighed an individual family’s right to privacy. And you could bet Essex County, the Newark Police Department, and probably even the Fraternal Order of Police would have lawyers fighting like mad to keep it sealed. It would take forever, cost a fortune, and we might not even win in the end.

No, I had to find another way.

I looked at Paul/Powell, who was drumming his “D-E-A-T-H” hand on the metal tray.

“Your phone have a camera by any chance?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Mind doing me a favor and taking a picture of his wrists and ankles and then texting them to me?”

“They’ll take pictures as part of the autopsy. They’ll be better quality than my cell phone.”

“Yeah, but the nosy reporter won’t be able to access them,” I said.

“Ohhhh,” he said, grinning.

As he set about his task, I congratulated myself on my small stroke of genius. My phone had a camera, too, but again that would have bumped into the problem of how I had gotten to the body in the first place. But that wasn’t an issue if Paul/Powell, a sort-of employee of the county, sent me the photos as a kind of whistleblower. With Brodie’s blessing, I could use them to anchor an explosive story about a police cover-up, with my angry family—and publicity-hungry minister—providing me all the needed outrage.

He sent the pictures one at a time, which meant the first was buzzing into my phone even as he was still taking the subsequent ones. They weren’t great quality, but they didn’t need to be. It’s not like we were going to run photos of a dead cop’s wrists in a family newspaper. We just needed to have them for verification.

Much to Paul/Powell’s dismay and Kira’s relief, I announced it was time to close up this little shop of horrors and head on home. We followed the same path out as we had going in, making a quick—and, hopefully, unobserved—dash across the parking lot toward the Malibu.

We rode back in silence, each of us with his own thoughts, and by the time I dropped off Paul/Powell at his loft/lair, Kira had fallen asleep in the front seat. Waking her and making her drive—still somewhat tipsy—back to Jersey City, where she lived, was out of the question. Then again, driving her there myself didn’t seem like much of an option, either.