The Second Mouse (12 page)

Nancy looked at his profile, already weather-beaten in his late thirties, a mix of maturity and childishness. His was like the heart of a boy beating inside a tired bear of a man, and she felt, then and there, that maybe she could be the one to help influence which extreme won out.

Taking her along in the process.

Chapter 9

S
everal days following his visit to his mother, Ellis woke up and turned his head. Nancy was sleeping beside him, her breathing deep and regular. The blond hair across her forehead was still damp from the sweat of their lovemaking. Slowly, he propped himself up to look at her, flat on her back, naked. This was the fifth time they’d been able to do this, sneaking away and grabbing anything from a few minutes to just over an hour, and he still couldn’t decide if it was the best thing ever to happen to him, or the makings of the worst mistake of his life.

It wasn’t just fear of discovery that gnawed at him, or the inevitable pain, loss, and probable damage that would result. He’d suffered all three so often they’d acquired a natural taste. It was more the uncertainty of when they’d smack him in the head. Ellis didn’t consider himself a born loser, as Mel so often insisted, but more a man unusually prone to poor luck. It was the constant haplessness of his state that dogged him. He was forever feeling like a vole in the middle of a busy highway, unsure which way to turn and all but certain to end up under someone’s wheels.

He continued to admire Nancy’s sleeping form, recognizing also that perhaps his tendency to self-destruct wasn’t always quite as random as he liked to think. He’d made choices along the way, often loaded with risk, of which this was a perfect example.

This time, however, he felt pretty good about the result, and used that to all but disable his natural wariness.

He leaned over and whispered in her ear. “Rise and shine, Nance.”

She stirred slightly, bending one tanned leg.

“Gotta get going.”

She rolled his way and snuggled up against him, murmuring something into his chest that he couldn’t hear. He stroked her back, running his hand down over her hip. She responded instinctively, reaching down between his legs.

He was sorely tempted, not to mention encouraged by his own quick response, but the lingerings of his uneasiness held sway. He followed her hand down and moved it away, kissing her at the same time. “Gotta go,” he repeated. “We don’t need him hunting you down. He thinks you’re out shopping, right?”

She sighed and rolled away to the edge of the bed, dropping her feet over and sitting up, her back to him. He watched her with regret as she rose and quickly replaced her clothes, her movements reflecting both her natural energy and a touch of anger.

She finally turned as he too began dressing. “Why’re we so worried about him all the time?”

Ellis pulled up his jeans and paused, saddened that the inevitable had finally been broached. It wasn’t that the subject had never occurred to him, or even that it seemed a problem without solution, which it did. It was more the familiarity of that dreaded, oft-encountered moment when a decision was called for and he felt himself quailing.

“Don’t you think we should be?” he asked, as if ducking a small thrown object. He reached for his T-shirt.

Curiously, this actually seemed to stump her for a moment. “Other people break up all the time,” she said quietly. “Mel and me don’t even have kids, and it’s not like we own much. He could keep the trailer.”

Ellis said nothing, sitting back down to put on his socks and boots.

“You’d like that to happen, wouldn’t you?” she asked, her voice almost timid. “For you and me to work out?”

He looked over his shoulder at her, one boot in hand. “Jeez, Nance. What d’ya think? Sure I would.”

But Mel might as well have been standing in the room for all the strength of their conviction. Such was his hold over them.

Nancy appeared to collapse in the face of an argument that hadn’t even begun. “It’s so unfair,” she said miserably.

He rose and circled the bed to put his arms around her, an awkward bear hugging a child. “It’ll work out.”

But he hadn’t the slightest idea how.

Far to the south, in Hartford, Connecticut, Joe Gunther was ushered into a basement office with a picture window overlooking not the outdoors but a vast, low-ceilinged room lined with metal filing cabinets. Sitting behind a desk decorated with an incongruously colorful vase of cut flowers and a carved wooden nameplate was a tall, middle-aged woman with suspiciously uniform black hair. The nameplate spelled out “Jennifer Joyce.”

“Special Agent Gunther?” she asked, extending her hand.

He shook hands but moved to the window rather than sit opposite her. “Holy smokes, this is impressive.”

Joyce laughed with embarrassment. “Looks are deceiving. It’s just a huge graveyard, really.”

He turned toward her. “But where exhumations are as steady as burials, I bet. What amazes me is that most people think facilities like this don’t exist anymore—that everything’s on computers.”

“Don’t I wish,” she said. “It would sure make my life easier.” Her face brightened. “The index is computerized, at least. That’s something. We used to have to walk up and down the rows, hunting for what we were after.”

Joe smiled back agreeably, although in truth he had a preference for just that kind of digging. It appealed to the hunter in him and satisfied his need to see things as they really were rather than as shimmering characters on a screen, as seemingly evanescent as the electricity giving them life.

But he didn’t need to fear any debate on the subject. His hostess had already returned to the task that had brought them together.

“Dr. Hillstrom’s fax seems perfectly in order, and the director just e-mailed me his approval allowing you access to the case, so I guess there’s no more to it than to give you a cubby and let you have at it.” Joyce finally rose from her desk and crossed to the door, revealing a combination of tight skirt, black fishnet stockings, and stiletto heels that Joe hadn’t seen in more decades than he cared to remember. Retro was alive, at least for one enthusiastic participant.

She led him down the hall to a metal door marked with a number and showed him a room reminiscent of a high-end bank vault. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “Be right back.”

The room was an exaggerated closet in size and decorated solely with a table and chair. The walls were bare and the ceiling lined with fluorescent strip lighting. He felt like a human subject about to undergo an uncomfortable experiment.

His connection to the outside world reappeared some ten minutes later, bearing an inch-thick folder.

“Here you go,” she said brightly. “Everything we’ve got about Judith Morgenthau. Any questions or problems, just push the button by the door.”

With that, she was gone, softly closing the door behind her—he hoped not hermetically.

He stared at the closed file for a moment. It was old, slightly yellowed, and soiled along the edges, indicating considerable use a long time ago.

Taking a small breath, he flipped back the cover.

Such dossiers have a system, usually a chronology and a department sectioning, combined. The police have their piece of it, the ME’s office theirs, then the hospital, and on down the line, depending on the case and how far it extends. This one, despite the cost it had exacted from Hillstrom, had still been pretty straightforward—a body found on the road, autopsied and identified, had been ascribed a cause of death in coordination with the police investigation that had eventually located the initial offending car.

That was merely the nutshell. The trick was going to be in finding and analyzing the nut.

He began, out of habit, with the photographs—first those of the scene, showing an initially unrecognizable lump, until details like a hand or foot eventually became discernible. Then the autopsy shots—here the body, or what was left of it, was washed and carefully laid out. The damage was horrendous. Body parts had been pulled apart and scattered over several hundred feet, and only placed in their proper position at the morgue. The prior mess at the scene now looked like a female body made up of bits and pieces. He certainly understood why it had been difficult initially to tell the difference between this poor woman and a dead dog.

He skipped the rest of the ME’s findings for the moment, knowing that was where he would have to be most thorough, and opted instead for the police reports.

These, too, had a comforting feel to them, even though the paperwork was both ancient and different from what he knew in Vermont. He traced the investigation from the initial call to the summoning of an investigative team to the arrival and findings of the forensic techs. Reports and narratives followed, detailing how, once the deceased’s name was made clear, her lifestyle and habits were painstakingly reconstructed through a blossoming of interviews.

Here Joe paid close attention, cross-referencing with some of the ME’s reports, concentrating on statements made by those who might have known she was pregnant, watching for the classic what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it smoking gun of lore, hoping to pin Medwed to a precise spot on a timeline of knowledge. Hillstrom had said that she’d only been brought in after the actual autopsy, once the workload and media buzz had started building. Joe wasn’t expecting a signed memo from her boss asking her to take the blame for covering up the woman’s pregnancy, but some proof that Medwed had known of the condition before she did would have been nice. Nice but not likely, as it turned out, since all signs of his even being near the autopsy had been obliterated to protect him. Typically, Hillstrom’s loyalty had been matched by her thoroughness.

Progress was slow and frustrating. Joe located a copy of Morgenthau’s medical records from her doctor’s office, entered the day before the accident, detailing what looked at first to be a routine visit. He took several tries at deciphering a notation in nearly illegible script at the bottom of a page labeled “to be transcribed,” before figuring out that the doc had in fact ordered a pregnancy test. Intrigued and suddenly hopeful, Joe dug deeper, expecting to find the results, but concluded that they must have arrived after her death and thus were never added to the file. He cross-checked with the police narratives concerning the woman’s medical history. The test didn’t surface there, either, which all but eliminated the police from being inside the loop.

Because of a general backlog—along with the body’s condition—the autopsy was delayed for two days, creating the possibility that the pregnancy’s existence could have reached Medwed’s ear before she’d been opened up. The victim and her husband, after all, had been political allies of the medical examiner. A discreet phone call might have been made.

But Joe could find no record of any contact between widower and chief.

He extracted the autopsy report and pushed the rest of the file off to a far corner of the desk. It was typed and anointed with arcane language he could only just follow. He tried his best to accompany the narrator on this specialized tour of a human body, but when he finally did come upon the mention of a fetus in the first stage of development, he felt no particular elation. For while there was no allusion to Hillstrom’s connection with this case until a day later, the fact remained that her signature adorned the bottom of the autopsy report.

On paper, regardless of where he looked, it seemed that his friend Beverly had been the first to know of Judy Morgenthau’s impending motherhood.

Joe sat back in his chair to rub the bridge of his nose, letting his hands drop into his lap afterward. He stared sightlessly at what he couldn’t prove was a forged document.

And then he leaned forward, his eyes narrowing, not only seeing something he’d been staring at all along, but recalling, too, his own experiences visiting the Vermont ME’s office. Almost always in those situations, there had been at least one other person in the room with the doctor and the body, and sometimes more. In his myopic efforts to distinguish Medwed from Hillstrom, Joe had completely overlooked the documented presence of a third person: Susan Bedell, here listed as “lab assistant.”

Joe rose to his feet and pushed the button by the door. Barely two minutes later his exotic handler appeared, her eyebrows raised inquiringly. “You all set?”

“Almost. I need a favor. There’s someone mentioned as a lab assistant in the medical examiner’s office, named Susan Bedell. Is there any chance you could make your computer cough up anything on her? Like where she might be now?”

Jennifer Joyce looked thoughtful for a couple of seconds, and then conspiratorial. Her voice dropped as she said, “Come with me. We’ll make it happen.”

He followed her back to her special fishbowl and joined her as she dragged her guest chair around so that it nestled next to hers before the computer screen.

“Okay,” she said, settling down and wiggling her fingers as if preparing to play the piano. “Let’s see what we can find out. What’s this person’s name?”

“Susan Bedell.” He spelled it out.

“No birth date, I guess?”

“Sorry.”

Joyce was already typing. “Not to worry. It’s an unusual name and you know where she worked. What date, by the way?”

He gave it to her.

She straightened slightly in her chair, looking pleased. “Okay, got her. Now I copy down her PID, since names don’t count for diddly in this system, and . . .” She paused dramatically as they both waited for a new screen image to appear. “There you go. She retired four years ago.”

Joe squinted at the document before them. “Any idea where she might be now? I’d sure love to talk to her.”

The fingers resumed their skittering across the keyboard. Once again Joyce allowed for a triumphant smile, even adding, “Darn, too easy. I thought I’d be able to show off a little more than this.” She tapped the screen with a remarkably long crimson fingernail. “This is where they mail her checks. Suffield. Nice town.”

Suffield, Connecticut, is a curious mix of a town, a spread-out collection of odds and ends that forms only fragments of a suburb, some farmland, a small shopping center, the tiniest of business districts, and a couple of rows of huge old mansions, all floating around a private school campus of pristine perfection. It’s picturesque, fashionable, and has several signs attesting to its antiquity. But for all the colonial and Victorian architecture, ancient trees, and several churches boasting graveyards filled with black-clad, austere people fond of wool and buckle shoes, the entire town has a scrubbed, fresh-out-of-the-box feel. Joe wasn’t sure whether it was his own background or the general condition of his home state, but he found he preferred a little grittiness in his surroundings. From what he could see of it, this place was so clean, he felt he might bounce off it.