Working Stiff (21 page)

I look carefully, using the magnifying glass Izzy used, then I shake my head. I feel a tiny chill snake its way down my spine.

“Okay. That's not definitive, but highly suggestive. We'll have to do a test on his hand when we get him back to the lab to see if there might be microscopic particles of residue. Now, let's try something else. This finger”—he wiggles the man's index finger—“was curled inside the trigger guard when you found him, right?”

I nod. He sets the man's hand back on the floor, then forms his own hand into the shape of a gun, his index finger serving as the muzzle, his thumb folding the other three fingers back. “Pretend this is a gun and you're going to shoot yourself with it in the head like this man did.” He held his “gun” near my right temple, about six inches away. “Now I want you to hold this gun and pull the trigger. Pretend my thumb is the trigger.”

I reach up, take a hold of his “gun” in my right hand, and try to fire it, but I have to contort my hand so much, I can barely get my index finger to touch the trigger, much less pull it. I try holding the gun with my left hand instead and then triggering it with my right index finger, but it's still almost impossible. “It would be easier if I could use my thumb to pull the trigger,” I say finally.

“Exactly!” Izzy says.

I put it all together and feel my blood run cold.

“What are you saying, Izzy?” asks a voice behind me. I've been so caught up in what Izzy and I are doing that I failed to notice Hurley hovering in the doorway, eavesdropping on our every word.

“I'm saying that someone tried very hard to make it look like this man committed suicide,” Izzy says gravely. “But he didn't. He was murdered.”

A
s the meaning of Izzy's declaration sinks in, my body begins to tremble.

Murdered.
While I was standing out front in the showroom area, someone in the back of the store murdered a man in cold blood and then set the scene to make it look like a suicide. Had the killer known I was in the store? Was I left alive intentionally or merely as an oversight? Could I have done anything to prevent this poor man's murder?

Upon hearing Izzy's verdict, Hurley's attitude changes dramatically. He perks up like a hunting dog on point, rigid and attentive. Then he starts barking out commands. Several other police officers have arrived on the scene and they are scouring through the place, searching the file cabinets, sorting through stacks of papers, rifling through desk drawers, and brushing surfaces for fingerprints.

Izzy and I continue our examination of the man's body, wrapping him in the requisite white sheet when we are done and zipping him into a body bag. From paperwork the cops find in the office, we assume that the man's name is Mike Halverson, though we will have to find something far more conclusive before officially establishing his ID. Other documents the cops find suggest that Halverson owned the business as a sole proprietor, with no obvious partners or corporation to share in the proceeds. But I have my doubts as to the authenticity of those papers and want desperately to get a peek at some of the financial statements.

Izzy says he wants to autopsy Halverson as soon as the body reaches the morgue since he has to leave town that evening for a medical conference. Hurley asks if he can observe and leaves another detective in charge of the scene so he can accompany us to the morgue.

We strip off our protective gear and bag it, then follow the body outside. We are watching the ambulance crew load it inside their vehicle when a red Toyota pulls up beside us and screeches to a halt. Alison Miller climbs out, her camera slung around her neck, her eyes wide with curiosity. She grabs the camera and tries to sneak a shot of the body bag inside the ambulance, but the techs are too fast for her and have the doors closed before she can focus.

She frowns briefly, then sidles up to Hurley with a big smile on her face. “Hello, Steve. Something going on?” she asks in a sexy, seductive voice I find utterly inappropriate.

“Hello, Alison,” Hurley says, smiling much broader than I like. “I can't give you anything yet. You'll just have to wait.”

Alison pouts and moves in a little closer, stroking her hand along Hurley's upper arm. “Oh, come on, Stevie. Just a hint? Please?”

Stevie?
I roll my eyes, half expecting Alison to rub up against him next, or start humping his leg.

“I can't, Alison.” Hurley repeats.

Her pout deepens and she looks around, her gaze settling on me. With a smug little smile, she says, “Okay, Stevie. If you insist. But promise me you'll tell me as soon as you can. Otherwise, I may not be in a very good mood for our date on Friday.”

Hurley casts a quick glance my way, then blushes six different shades of red as he pries Alison's hand off his arm. Without another word he hurries off to his car and peels out of the parking lot.

I give Alison a smug smile of my own and saunter off to my own car. Thirty seconds later, I leave her behind in a cloud of parking lot dust.
Bitch.

 

Izzy and I start suiting up again as soon as we get to the morgue: gown, gloves, booties, and face shields. The ambulance crew has already unloaded Halverson's body, switching it from their stretcher to one of ours. Hurley is there already, too, and after donning gloves and a gown himself, he stands against the wall, watching.

As soon as I am suited up, I push the stretcher that holds Halverson's body onto a giant scale built into the floor. The scale is calibrated and computerized so that it will take the total weight of the stretcher and the body combined, subtract the known weight of the stretcher, and then display the remainder, which is the body weight. After noting the result, which is a rather pathetic 135 pounds, Izzy and I wheel Halverson into an X-ray room where we shoot several films of his head and upper torso through the body bag. We then wheel the stretcher into the main autopsy room, positioning it beside one of the tables. Hurley is waiting for us there, and as I wheel the stretcher past him I can't resist saying, “Excuse me,
Stevie.
”

I unzip the body bag and Izzy runs a small vacuum device along the inside of it to collect any trace evidence that might have come along with the body. We then unwrap the sheet and Izzy vacuums it as well, while I use needles and syringes to collect blood, urine, and vitreous samples from the body the way Izzy taught me.

Izzy carefully examines the front of Halverson's body using a fiber optic light and special goggles that make it easier to detect hairs, threads, and other near-microscopic bits of evidence. Then we turn Halverson up on one side and do the same thing on his back. There is a wallet in his back pants pocket, which Izzy removes and hands to Hurley. Inside the wallet is a driver's license with the name Mike Halverson on it and a picture that bears a vague resemblance to the man on the table—more evidence but still not conclusive enough for establishing an identification.

We carefully remove Halverson's blood-soaked clothing, laying the individual pieces out flat so they can dry. Once the body is naked, we position it on a pad of rollers and move it from the stretcher onto the autopsy table. After photographing and swabbing both of the hands, we use ink and a card to record all ten fingerprints.

Using the light again to scan Halverson's skin, we hose the body off and Izzy makes the usual Y-incision in the man's torso. I am aware of Hurley standing off to the side, watching us and scowling as he chews at the inside of his cheek. I sense something is bothering him but figure it will be a waste of my time to ask him what it is. Hurley is definitely one of those close-to-the-vest, reticent types, a trait I find frustrating but, oddly enough, wildly attractive.

I soon forget about Hurley as I become engrossed in what Izzy and I are doing. We dissect the neck and chest cavity first, finding nothing of interest other than some minor lung scarring that is most likely the result of past bouts with pneumonia. We are about to start on the abdominal cavity when a woman with red, frizzy hair, pop-bottle-bottom glasses, and a face full of freckles appears in the doorway.

“Hey, Izzy,” she says.

“Hey, Cass. What's up?”

Cass?
I stare at the woman, then look over at Izzy, my eyes questioning. He smiles back at me over the top of his mask.

“Dom called,” the woman says, “He wants to know if you'll have time for supper before you leave for Chicago tonight, or if he should fix you something to go.”

I gape at the woman in the doorway, unable to believe it is the same one I saw yesterday. Not only does she look completely different, her voice doesn't sound the same. This woman speaks with a pronounced Southern accent.

“Tell him I'll be home for dinner,” Izzy says. “Thanks, Cass.”

“You're welcome.”

As soon as the woman is gone, I say, “No way is that the same woman I saw yesterday.”

“It is.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I don't get it.”

Izzy chuckles. “Cass belongs to a local theater group—the same one Dom's in, in fact. That's how I met her. As part of her actor's training, she likes to try on a different persona each day. So she makes up characters, gets into the proper clothing, wig, and makeup, and then adopts whatever personality she thinks the character should have. The only thing that doesn't change is her name. No matter what character she is, her name is always Cass. Even when she's a man for a day.”

“She does men, too?”

“Yep, and quite convincingly, I might add.”

Hurley, who is standing off to the side listening to our exchange, says, “It sounds like one of those multiple-personality things to me.”

Izzy shakes his head. “Trust me, Cass is as sane as you and I and maybe saner than Mattie here.” He pauses and looks over at Hurley. “You have heard about the nipple incident, haven't you?”

“Hey!” I grumble.

“Hey is right,” Izzy echoes. “Look at this.” He has just cut through the fibrous layer of tissue covering the abdominal cavity, thereby exposing the organs. “What do you see, Mattie?”

My eyes are immediately drawn to the liver, which is grossly misshapen, its surface covered with rounded bumps that look like fluid-filled blisters. “Bad liver,” I say. “Cysts?”

“That's exactly what they are.” Izzy severs the necessary connections and hands me the organ so I can weigh it. While I do, he pushes aside the man's intestines to expose a kidney. “Aha,” he says with an unmistakable grin, even though it is hidden behind his mask. “More of the same.”

I look at the kidney, and something clicks in my brain. My mind instantly makes the connection but then discards it almost as quickly. Surely it can't be. But I remember my discussion with Arnie about Karen Owenby and her polycystic kidney disease. Her
congenital
polycystic kidney disease. What are the odds of these two people having the same rare inherited disease?

And then I remember how Mike Halverson seemed vaguely familiar to me when I first saw him. Now I know why. It isn't because I'd met him before, it's because I'd met a relative of his: Karen Owenby.

“We can't know for sure,” Izzy cautions, sensing my excitement. “Not until we do a DNA test or find some other evidence to link the two.”

Hurley, who doesn't catch the significance of the liver and kidney at all, looks at us with a puzzled expression. “What are you two talking about?” he asks. “Link
who
two?”

“Karen Owenby and Mr. Halverson here,” Izzy says. “They both have the same rare congenital disorder. There's a possibility they may be related.”

“There's a physical resemblance,” I tell them. “I noticed it when I first met Halverson. He seemed familiar to me yet I couldn't place him. Now I realize that the reason he seemed familiar was because he looks so much like Karen.”

“Okay,” Hurley says. “So we're talking possibilities here, right? What kind of possibilities? Likely? Remote? What?”

“Hard to say with any certainty,” Izzy offers. “A rare congenital disorder like this
could
occur in two random, non-related people who just happen to live in a town the size of Sorenson, but I'd have to say that the odds are overwhelmingly against it. Statistically speaking, you'd stand a better chance of winning the lottery. And while I can't vouch for the physical resemblance that Mattie noted, I'm inclined to trust her judgment on the matter. So I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that the two are brother and sister, given the closeness in their ages.”

“And both were killed with a .357,” Hurley muses. “Want to bet ballistics proves that both bullets came from the same gun? What a nice little package, eh?”

I have no idea what Hurley means and hesitate to ask since I don't want to look stupid. For a brief second, vanity struggles with curiosity, my inherent nosiness emerging a clear winner seconds later. “What do you mean by ‘a nice little package'?” I ask.

Hurley's baby blues take on the cold depth of glacial ice. “It means that someone wants us to think that Halverson here first killed Owenby and then killed himself, supposedly out of guilt or some need for self-punishment. The gun was left at the scene with the assumption that we'd make the connection.”

“Well, it does seem like a good motive for suicide,” I say. “A murder on the conscience plus a full-blown case of AIDS.”

“How do you know he had AIDS?” Hurley asks.

“We don't,” Izzy says, giving me a cautioning look. “We're running a test to be sure. But given that he has some of the classic physical signs of the disease, my—” He pauses, looks at me and smiles before continuing. “
Our
educated guess is that the test will be positive.”

“Okay,” Hurley says thoughtfully. “So how did he contract the disease? Blood transfusion? Dirty needle?” He pauses and looks at his shoes. “High-risk sex?”

Izzy chuckles. “It's okay, Steve. You can say ‘gay' in front of me. As a gay man, I'm keenly aware of the high prevalence of AIDS among gay men. All of us are, though unfortunately not all of us are careful enough to avoid high-risk activities.”

“Is there any way for you to know how this guy got it?” Hurley asks.

Izzy shakes his head. “Not with any certainty. But I
can
tell you that he doesn't have any tracks or needle marks that would indicate either a past or a current drug problem. I can requisition his medical records to see if he's had any blood transfusions in the past. He has no scars of any sort to indicate surgery or trauma, but those aren't the only circumstances that might call for a transfusion. As for determining his lifestyle, you probably know best how to go about that.”

Hurley nods, a thoughtful look on his face.

The rest of the autopsy proves uneventful, the examination of the head wound providing nothing new. When we examine the contents of the vacuum bag, we find two hairs that—given Halverson's baldness—are likely from someone else. But given where Halverson was lying—on a bathroom floor where stray hairs of all kinds are likely to be found—their significance as evidence is questionable. We have Arnie look at them anyway and he comes back with his report just as we are placing Halverson into a fresh body bag.

“We've got a match,” he announces. “Those hairs are identical to the ones that were taken from David Winston's hairbrush a few days ago as well as one of the ones we found on Karen Owenby.”

I feel the stares of all three men in the room but avoid them and keep my eyes focused on Halverson's body bag. My heart sinks as I realize this latest revelation further seals David's fate. It isn't definitive evidence, but it certainly strengthens the case against him.