The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2) Page 4

  She had embraced their escape to Winchester, but it was Jeff’s home, not hers. She felt safe with Jeff, but this place had often seemed alien and impenetrable to her. They visited Chicago often, but leaving seemed harder every time. She had few friends in Winchester who stirred her mind, mostly just the happily unemployed and equally understimulated mothers of other pre-schoolers who never knew — and so never missed — the choices Claire now missed.

  Colter clambered into his mother’s lap, a worm dangling from his fingers.

  “He was eating the flowers,” he explained.

  “No, baby, he helps the flowers grow,” Claire said.

  Colter held the earthworm close and examined it.

  “Bad breath,” he said, tossing it into the nearest flower bed.

  Cowper laughed as Colter wiped dirt and worm slime from his curious fingers onto his little polo shirt.

  “I sometimes play with worms myself, Colter,” he said. “Did you know worms don’t have ears?”

  Colter grabbed his own ears, and his eyes grew wide.

  “How can they talk to each other?”

  “They don’t. They can only feel the ground move. That’s how they hear. They don’t have eyes, either.”

  Colter was clearly fascinated by these worm facts. He closed his eyes tightly and covered them with his dirty hands.

  “But here’s something very interesting, Colter,” Cowper said, tousling the boy’s wheat-blond hair, nearly the color of his mother’s. “Worms have hair!”

  “No way!”

  “Yes way! That’s why robins have a hard time getting them out of the ground!”

  Inspired, Colter suddenly slid off his mother’s lap and ran off down a garden path in search of a hairy worm.

  “Gee, Doc, Arthurian legend, outlaw history, country music, forensic medicine, old bones, and now worms …” Morgan said. He flipped the steaks over, careful not to pierce their seared, apple-infused surfaces and allow their juices to drain away. “Remind me not to challenge you to a game of Trivial Pursuit.”

  Cowper smiled abashedly.

  “Oh, I suck at the sports and movie questions,” he said, sipping his tea. “I don’t get out much.”

  Over dinner, they talked about all manner of trivia, except the cases of Laddie Granbouche and her intimate squatter, John Doe. Headless corpses, murder and human tissue sampling weren’t exactly appetizing topics, even for a hardened veteran cop reporter and his anthropologist dinner guest. But as soon as the dishes were cleared and Claire had taken Colter upstairs for his Sunday bath, the talk came naturally around to the mystery that intrigued them both.

  “Your sheriff,” Cowper said, sipping a jelly glass of Bailey’s Irish Cream, “he hasn’t led many murder investigations, has he?”

  Morgan smiled. He had little regard for Goldsmith, and not just because he was elected only after the real sheriff, his childhood friend Trey Kerrigan, had flamed out on the politics of the job. Goldsmith was, plain and simple, a tinhorn poser. Trey Kerrigan ends up selling insurance, and Goldsmith gets a real-life, honest-to-God mystery dropped in his lap.

  “Doc, he hasn’t even led many felony investigations,” Morgan said, his lack of respect barely checked. “His biggest case so far was a rape.”

  “That’s no small thing.”

  “No, a rape is a rape,” Morgan said. “In this case, a young Mormon missionary came to a woman’s door and …”

  “And forced his way in?”

  “Not exactly. She was an oilfield roughneck. She allowed him inside, subdued him, and then tied him to her bed, where she had her way with him … for several hours. Let’s just say she didn’t spare the rod.”

  “Oh my.”

  “The worst part is, Hi Goldsmith got cold feet. He couldn’t see how it was rape if the Mormon kid got a stiffy.”

  “Well, his feet aren’t just cold this time,” Cowper said. “They are Size 9E popsicles, frozen solid.”

  “That chickenshit geek. What now?”

  “He called the state police this morning. They’re coming up to take over the case.”

  “Dammit.”

  “Not good?”

  “Definitely not good,” Morgan said gravely. “Those guys are just politicians with badges. They answer only to the governor, and I’m sure even he doesn’t get all the answers.”

  Of all the government agencies Morgan had the pleasure of mistrusting — from the simply fatuous to the supremely imperious — the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation was the worst. Its mission wasn’t entirely clear to him, and that’s the way DCI liked it. It investigated high-level government misdeeds and political crimes, and occasionally loaned its considerable resources to local lawmen who found themselves in over their heads, or who were trying to avoid a nasty political debacle. It accumulated favors, skulked around freely in any jurisdiction, observed only the laws it liked, rebuffed any outside examination, and enforced a strict code of silence — like some government-sanctioned crime family. To Morgan, they were simply the “secret police.”

  “A little stingy with information, are they?” Cowper asked.

  “A little stingy? By comparison, the KGB is downright chatty. Once DCI gloms onto this case, we’ll never hear another word about it … until they put out a press release announcing they have solved the crime of the century with their usual brilliance.”

  “Good cops?”

  “How would we know?”

  “Good point.”

  “So what else can you tell me?”

  “State investigators will be here in the morning. The sheriff has asked me to give them a tour of John Doe, from missing-head to toe. They want all my photos and videotapes, notes from the examination, statements from my team, even John Doe himself. The whole nine yards.”

  “Can they just grab it like that?”

  “Jesus, Jeff, it’s a murder. You know the drill. I can fight them off while they get a court order, but I might as well save myself the trouble and give them what they want now.”

  “And it will all disappear forever into the black hole of DCI, goddammit.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “What have you got in mind?”

  “We’ve got all night to make copies of everything. You got a couple VCRs?”

  Morgan nodded.

  “Darkroom?”

  Again, Morgan nodded.

  “Copy machine?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Excellent,” Cowper said as he rose to leave. “Meet me at the funeral home in thirty minutes. You won’t believe this, but he leaves the back door unlocked.”

  Morgan smiled.

  “It’s a small town,” he said. “The only time we lock our cars around here is zucchini season. If you don’t, somebody will stick a box of squash in your front seat.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. You up for this?”

  “I was born up,” Morgan said.

  “Good. Maybe Claire could help?” Cowper suggested, patting his pockets for the keys to the USF van he drove to Mount Eden.

  “I’m not sure she’s up to seeing …”

  “No, no, no, I mean with the copying at the office. We have several dozen documents already, and she could transcribe some tapes, if she has time. If not, we’ll just dub them on your stereo.”

  “Okay. Anything else you’ll need?”

  “Yeah. Coffee. Hot and black.”

  In his shroud of clear plastic, John Doe was packaged like anonymous meat in a supermarket cooler. Cowper untaped it under the fierce light that illuminated Carter McWayne’s embalming table. Aside from the astringent odor of mortuary chemicals and the lingering pong of urine, ammonia or both, Morgan caught only a faint whiff of stale leather as the old corpse was exposed.

  John Doe’s torso was split from crotch to collarbone with a Y-incision, but it looked more like a cardboard cutout than a surgical slit. His vital organs, which merely looked like various dark cuts of beef jerky, had been examined and placed in evidence bags, then stuffed ba
ck into his body cavity.

  Looking close, Morgan saw the ragged black gashes in John Doe’s hands and feet where he’d been spiked by his likely killers, but without blood or even viable flesh, they were no more gruesome than torn leather.

  Morgan had seen worse. In twenty years on the Chicago police beat, he’d seen infants whose heads had been splashed against cinder-block walls, naked women fished from Lake Michigan after months on the bottom, homeless men whose entrails had fed rats and stray dogs. The Des Plaines, Illinois, police allowed him to watch the post-mortem examination of John Wayne Gacy’s young victims, some still rotting after they were scraped out of his Summerdale Avenue crawl space. And he couldn’t erase the dead face of Sandra Tarrant from his mind. A human animal named P.D. Comeaux had strangled the former homecoming queen, eaten her sexual parts raw and left her in a South Dakota dumpster.

  Death saddened Morgan, but it didn’t sicken him. When he first started on the beat, he vomited once, he stopped eating for a few days. The corpses haunted him, but he got past it. He awoke one morning in those days and smelled a dead woman’s perfume on his jacket, so he stuffed it in the building’s incinerator and went to breakfast. He got no thrill from visiting the dead. It was just his job.

  John Doe looked pitifully withered on the stainless steel embalming table. Minus sixty or eighty pounds of fat, muscle, blood and the other effluvium of life, he was little more than a leather-upholstered skeleton.

  Minus his head, he was hardly even human, for the substance of a face was incorporeal. Minus a soul, he was just an empty husk labeled John Doe for the convenience of the living.

  But he was missing something else: his fingertips. Or, more specifically, the skin that covered the last carpal on each of his fingers.

  “Back in 1921, somebody developed a solution to rehydrate an Egyptian mummy’s tissues, but formaldehyde or Photoflo work just as well,” Cowper said. He gently swirled a small jar labeled “left index” and held it up to the light. A fat brown nubbin circled and tumbled in it. “It’s not the most reliable technique, sort of a last resort thing. But in a very few cases, we can saturate a desiccated corpse’s fingers and get some identifiable prints.”

  “So we’re here to fingerprint John Doe?” Morgan asked.

  “That’s one thing, yes. When these tips are rehydrated, I’ll just slip them over my own and make a set of prints, just like they do down at the cop shop. Then I’ll ship them off to a buddy of mine in the FBI’s IAFIS unit and see if they have any matches in their magic computer.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No. We’re also going to harvest some tissue samples. Your state investigators will never miss them. You don’t trust your state cops, and I don’t trust Sheriff Heckle and Coroner Jeckle. This way, John Doe won’t disappear down the black hole.”

  “But this isn’t your case. You can just hand it over and move on to some other unsolved historical puzzle. Why get involved?”

  “Did you ever feel like you were the only one who could make a difference?” Cowper asked him, without seeming immodest.

  Morgan knew the feeling well. He nodded.

  “It’s arrogant and maybe even a little stupid,” the anthropologist continued, “but I can’t just walk away. We can’t always choose our obsessions. Sometimes they choose us.”

  Shawn Cowper watched John Doe’s fingertip eddy around the jar, like some macabre snow-globe.

  “So we make our own case file?” Morgan asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “Isn’t that withholding evidence?”

  “Not at all. We’ll keep nothing from the investigation except a few superfluous snips from John Doe. We’ll want a copy of everything, but they’ll get the originals. So we’d best get moving. We’ve only got a few hours.”

  Later, back at The Bullet, Colter slept on a Spongebob Squarepants slumber bag he dragged under a reporter’s desk, his fortress against imaginary shadow warriors and spiky-haired skater boys. Claire fed page after page into the Xerox machine, creating two photocopies from each original. Intensely and naturally curious, she read each one.

  Fueled by coffee and a brown bag of assorted candy bars from the MotorTown Truck Stop’s all-night convenience store, Morgan scanned the pathology team’s photographic negatives one by one into the computer, burning them at high resolution onto writable compact discs, while Cowper duplicated videotapes and transcribed his tape-recorded autopsy narrative.

  His incidental “snips” of John Doe sat in evidence bags among the fast-food condiments and forgotten lunches in the kitchenette refrigerator. And three reasonably clear sets of fingerprints were sheathed separately in plastic liners in Cowper’s briefcase. Everything else would be surrendered to the DCI investigators when they arrived … everything but the copies.

  Sometime after two-thirty in the morning, Claire lugged Colter out to the car and drove him home. An hour later, when the coffee ran out, Morgan and Cowper drove the USF van down to MotorTown for refills.

  The night was windless and moonless. Three hours before dawn, the yellow-blue halide light in the truck stop’s parking lot provided both false daylight and false security to sleeping truckers in their idling rigs. Ranks of them sat side by side across the blacktop, droning like snoring steel beasts.

  Nobody was moving around, but a bad bulb guttered in a Winnebago on the edge of the lot. As Morgan and Cowper got out of the van, a frowzy man in greasy cargo pants and a wool jacket slammed the Winnebago’s thin aluminum door and walked toward them, steam purling from a Styrofoam coffee cup in his hand. When he came within hailing distance, his thin lips curled into a smile.

  “The Lord give us another day, amen,” he said, his eyes brighter than the morning that hadn’t yet broken.

  “Yes, He did,” Morgan replied.

  The man, in his fifties, seemed far too perky — and holy — for the hour. His graying hair sprouted like weeds beneath his Cubs ball cap. An admirer of underdogs, Morgan thought. The fellow with a slight Texas twang extended a smudged hand to them and just kept smiling.

  “Pridrick Leighton,” he introduced himself. “On the road for Jesus. Takin’ to the highway for the high way. Get it? Savin’ souls and wastin’ gas!”

  The Reverend Leighton was a truck-stop evangelist, one of those pavement preachers who prayed and proselytized without the overhead and boredom of an immobile sanctuary, just a holy Winnebago and a plastic Jesus on the dashboard, baptismal water from a radiator and communion wafers from a café cracker basket.

  The preacher reached into the inner breast pocket of his jacket and handed Morgan his business card:

  REV. PRIDRICK LEIGHTON

  Tabernacle of the Transaxle

  Sunday School and

  Strong Coffee for the Soul

  www.crossroads.com

  Endless hours on endless roads made the Reverend Leighton long on conviviality but short on small talk.

  “Do you know your personal Savior?” he asked Cowper, who must have seemed more in need of a savior at this moment than Morgan. After three in the morning, in a truck stop parking lot, beneath the counterfeit light of man-made moons, Pridrick Leighton was a missionary with a mission and a transmission, high on Jesus, caffeine and probably some whites dropped in his collection plate by grateful drivers.

  “Right now, Reverend, my personal Savior is the guy who invented the mattress,” Cowper joked.

  “There’s plenty of time to sleep after we die, my friend,” the preacher said, “but if you’d like to unload some of that mental freight you’re haulin’, maybe you’d like to hear my testimony …”

  Cowper raised his hands, not in a hallelujah, but in defense.

  “Sorry, Rev,” he said. “Just coffee.”

  “Peace be with you, my son,” Reverend Leighton said, backing off. He shook both Morgan and Cowper’s hands again and disappeared into the men’s room for his morning constitutional.

  Unsaved for the moment, Morgan and Cowper lingered in front of the pre-split a
nd shrink-wrapped fire logs and newspaper stands in front of the convenience store.

  “Not a religious fella, huh?” Morgan asked.

  “Nope, I got plenty of religion as a kid,” Cowper said. “Did you ever wonder why all of man’s problems started when Adam and Eve found the Tree of Knowledge? God says the fruit is forbidden, but Eve eats it anyway and all Hell breaks loose. Seems like God intended that we keep our mouths shut and not ask any questions. So I became a godless scientist.”

  Morgan couldn’t argue, and wouldn’t. It was too early and too logical.

  Inside, the little store smelled like sweat, spilled gasoline, overboiled coffee, toilet disinfectant and stale doughnuts.

  The clerk, a local girl who never saw the point of college if she could get a good-paying truck-stop job without a degree, was reading “The Delta of Venus” by Anaïs Nin and absently toying with the tiny gold ring in her eyebrow. With her face buried in her book, Morgan saw only her short, dark mane of tousled hair and the swale of her smooth shoulder where the scoop of her loose, gray sweater pulled away.

  Her name, according to the tag dangling from her tight blouse, was Robin. Her delicate nose and sleek jaw contained a few hundred years of Tolbert genes, and Morgan knew she must have been born into the old family that homesteaded the badlands west of town. Out there, where the Earth’s crust was thicker and more stubborn, the oil wasn’t as easy to drill, the coal not as easy to dig, so for decades the Tolberts had only enjoyed meager, fluctuating earnings produced by sunshine, spring snows and grass. And out there, every muddy county lane was named for one of the historic Tolbert women, all dead and gone now: Arabella, Frances, Virginia, Evangeline and so on, as if each led her man from the main road of life to an inevitable dead end. Maybe someday, one of the rutted gravel sideroads would be named Robin.