From Potter's Field (22 page)

'Let's get back to the man rolling the body inside the refrigerator and your locking up,' Marino said. 'Then what?'

'I figured he'd leave after he finished his paperwork,' Evans said. 'I went back to the other side of the building.'

'Before he'd left the morgue.'

Evans hung his head again.

'Do you have any idea at all when he finally left?' Marino then asked.

'No, sir,' the security guard quietly said. 'I guess I can't swear he ever did.'

Everyone was silent, as if Gault might this minute walk in. Marino pushed his chair back and looked at the empty doorway.

It was Evans who next spoke. 'If that was his van, I guess he shut the bay door himself. I know it was shut at five because I walked around the building.'

'Well, it don't exactly require a rocket scientist to do that,' Marino said unkindly. 'You just drive out, go back inside and hit the damn button. Then you walk out through the side door.'

'The van certainly isn't in there now,' I said. 'Someone drove it out.'

'Are both vans outside?' Marino asked.

'They were when I got here,' I said.

Marino asked Evans, 'If you saw him in a lineup, could you pick him out?'

He looked up, terrified. 'What did he do?'

'Could you pick him out?' Marino said again.

'I think I could. Yes, sir. I sure would try.'

I got up and quickly walked down the hall. At my office I stopped in the doorway and looked around the same way I had last night when I had walked inside my house. I tried to sense the slightest shift in the environment - a rug disturbed, an object out of place, a lamp on that shouldn't be.

My desk was neatly stacked with paperwork waiting for my review, and the computer screen on the return told me I had mail waiting. The in basket was full, the out basket empty, and my microscope was shrouded in plastic because when I had last looked at slides I was about to fly to Miami for a week.

That seemed incredibly long ago, and it shocked me to think Sheriff Santa had been arrested Christmas Eve, and since then the world had changed. Gault had savaged a woman named Jane. He had murdered a young police officer. He had killed Sheriff Santa and broken into my morgue. In four days he had done all that. I moved closer to my desk, scanning, and as I got near my computer terminal I could almost smell a presence, or feel it, like an electrical field.

I did not have to touch my keyboard to know he had. I watched the mail-waiting message quietly flash green. I hit several keys to go into a menu that would show me my messages. But the menu did not come up, a screen saver did. It was a black background with CAIN in bright red letters that dripped as if they were bleeding. I walked back down the hall.

'Marino,' I said. 'Please come here.'

He left Evans and followed me to my office. I pointed to my computer. Marino stared stonily at it. There were wet rings under the arms of his white uniform shirt, and I could smell his sweat. Stiff black leather creaked when he moved. He was constantly rearranging the fully loaded belt beneath his full belly as if everything he'd amounted to in life was in his way.

'How hard would that be to do?' he asked, mopping his face with a soiled handkerchief.

'Not hard if you have a program ready to load.'

'Where the hell did he get the program?'

'That's what worries me,' I said, thinking of a question we didn't ask.

We returned to the conference room. Evans was standing, numbly looking at photographs on the wall.

'Mr. Evans,' I said. 'Did the man from the funeral home speak to you?'

He turned around, startled. 'No, ma'am. Not much.'

'Not much?' I puzzled.

'No, ma'am.'

'Then how did he convey what he wanted?'

'He said what he had to say.' He paused. 'He was a real quiet type. He spoke in a real quiet voice.' Evans was rubbing his face. 'The more I think about it, the stranger it is. He was wearing tinted glasses. And to tell you the truth' - he stopped - 'well, I had my impressions.'

'What impressions?' I asked.

Evans said, after a pause, 'I thought he might be homosexual.'

'Marino,' I said. 'Let's take a walk.'

We escorted Evans out of the building and waited until he'd rounded a corner because I did not want him to see what we did next. Both vans were parked in their usual spaces not far from my Mercedes. Without touching door or glass, I looked through the driver's window of the one nearest the bay and could plainly see the plastic on the steering column was gone, wires exposed.

'It's been hot-wired,' I said.

Marino snapped up his portable radio and held it close to his mouth.

'Unit eight hundred.'

'Eight hundred,' the dispatcher came back.

'Ten-five 711.'

The radio called the detective inside my building whose unit number was 711, and then Marino was saying, 'Ten-twenty-five me out back.'

'Ten-four.'

Marino next radioed for a tow truck. The van was to be processed for prints on the door handles. It was to be impounded and carefully processed inside and out after that. Unit 711 had yet to walk out the back door fifteen minutes later.

'He's dumb as a bag of hammers,' Marino complained, walking around the van, radio in hand. 'Lazy son of a bitch. That's why they called him Detective 711. Because he's so quick. Shit.' He glanced irritably at his watch. 'What'd he do? Get lost in the men's room?'

I waited on the tarmac, getting unbearably cold, for I had not changed out of my greens and was without a coat. I walked around the van several times, too, desperate to look in the back of it. Five more minutes passed and Marino got the dispatcher to call the other officers inside my building. Their response was immediate.

'Where's Jakes?' Marino growled at them the instant they came out the door.

'He said he was going to look around,' one of the officers replied.

'I raised him twenty damn minutes ago and told him to ten-twenty-five me out here. I thought he was with one of you.'

'No, sir. Not for the past half hour, at least.'

Marino again tried 711 on the radio and got no answer. Fear shone in his eyes.

'Maybe he's in some part of the building where he can't copy,' an officer suggested, looking up at windows. His partner had his hand near his gun and was looking around, too.

Marino radioed for backups. People had begun pulling into the parking lot and letting themselves into the building. Many of the scientists with their topcoats and briefcases were braced against the raw, cold day and paid no attention to us. After all, police cars and those who drove them were a common sight. Marino tried to raise Detective Jakes on the air. Still he did not answer.

'Where did you see him last?' Marino asked the officers.

'He got on the elevator.'

'Where?'

'On the second floor.'

Marino turned to me. 'He couldn't have gone up, could he?'

'No,' I said. 'The elevator requires a security key for any floor above two.'

'Did he go down to the morgue again?' Marino was getting increasingly agitated.

'I went down there a few minutes later and didn't see him,' an officer said.

'The crematorium,' I suggested. 'He could have gone down to that level.'

'All right. You check the morgue,' Marino said to the officers. 'And I want you staying together. The doc and I will look around the crematorium.'

Inside the bay, left of the loading dock, was an old elevator that serviced a lower level where at one time bodies donated to science were embalmed and stored and cremated after medical students were through with them. It was possible Jakes might have gone there to look. I pushed the down button. The elevator slowly rose with much clanking and complaining. I pulled a handle and shoved open heavy, paint-chipped doors. We ducked inside.

'Damn, I don't like this already,' Marino said, releasing the thumb snap on his holster as we descended.

He slipped out his pistol as the elevator bumped to a halt and doors opened onto my least favorite area of the building. I did not like this dimly lit windowless space even though I appreciated its importance. After I moved the Anatomical Division to MCV, we began using the oven to dispose of biological hazardous waste. I got out my revolver.

'Stay behind me,' Marino said, intensely looking around.

The large room was silent save for the roar of the oven behind a shut door midway along the wall. We stood silently scanning abandoned gurneys draped with empty body bags, and hollow blue drums that once contained the formalin used to fill vats in floors where bodies were stored. I saw Marino's eyes fix on tracks in the ceiling, on heavy chains and hooks that in a former time had lifted the vats' massive lids and the people stored beneath them.

He was breathing hard and sweating profusely as he moved closer to an embalming room and ducked inside. I stayed nearby as he checked abandoned offices. He looked at me and wiped his face on his sleeve.

'It must be ninety degrees,' he muttered, detaching his radio from his belt.

Startled, I stared at him.

'What?' he said.

'The oven's not supposed to be on,' I said, looking at the crematorium room's shut door.

I started walking toward it.

'There's no waste to be disposed of that I know of, and it's strictly against policy for the oven to run unattended,' I said.

Outside that door, we could hear the inferno on the other side. I placed my hand on the knob. It was very hot.

Marino stepped in front of me, turned the knob and shoved the door open with his foot. His pistol was combat ready in both hands as if the oven were a brute he might have to shoot.

'Jesus,' he said.

Flames showed in spaces around the monstrous old iron door, and the floor was littered with bits and chunks of chalky burned bone. A gurney was parked nearby. I picked up a long iron tool with a crook at one end and hooked it through a ring on the oven door.

'Stand back,' I said.

We were hit with a blast of enormous heat, and the roar sounded like a hateful wind. Hell was through that square mouth, and the body burning on the tray inside had not been there long. The clothes had incinerated, but not the leather cowboy boots. They smoked on Detective Jakes's feet as flames licked the skin off his bones and inhaled his hair. I shoved the door shut.

I ran out and found towels in the embalming room while Marino got sick near a pile of metal drums. Wrapping my hands, I held my breath and went past the oven, throwing the switch that turned off the gas. Flames died immediately, and I ran back out of the room. I grabbed Marino's radio as he gagged.

'Mayday!' I yelled to the dispatcher. 'Mayday!'

13

I spent the rest of the morning working on two homicide cases I had not counted on while a SWAT team swarmed my building. Police were on the lookout for the hot-wired blue van. It had vanished while everyone was looking for Detective Jakes.

X-rays revealed he had received a crushing blow to the chest prior to death. Ribs and sternum were fractured, his aorta torn, and a STAT carbon monoxide showed he was no longer breathing when he was set on fire.

It seemed Gault had delivered one of his karate blows, but we did not know where the assault had occurred. Nor could we come up with a reasonable scenario that might explain how one person could have lifted the body onto a gurney. Jakes weighed 185 pounds and was five foot eleven, and Temple Brooks Gault was not a big man.

'I don't see how he could do it,' Marino said.

'I don't either,' I agreed.

'Maybe he forced him at gunpoint to lie down on the gurney.'

'If he was lying down, Gault could not have kicked him like that.'

'Maybe he gave him a chop.'

'It was a very powerful blow.'

Marino paused. 'Well, it's more likely he wasn't alone.'

'I'm afraid so,' I said.

It was almost noon, and we were driving to the house of Lamont Brown, also known as Sheriff Santa, in the quiet neighborhood of Hampton Hills. It was across Gary Street from the Country Club of Virginia, which would not have wanted Mr. Brown for a member.

'I guess sheriffs get paid a whole lot more than I do,' Marino said ironically as he parked his police car.

'This is the first time you've seen his house?' I asked.

'I've been by it when I've been back here on patrol. But I've never been inside.'

Hampton Hills was a mixture of mansions and modest homes tucked in woods. Sheriff Brown's brick house was two stories with a slate roof, a garage and a swimming pool. His Cadillac and Porsche 911 were still parked in the drive, as were a number of police vehicles. I stared at the Porsche. It was dark green, old, but well maintained.

'Do you think it's possible?' I started to say to Marino.

'That's bizarre,' he said.

'Do you remember the tag?'