The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2) Read online

  Cowper filled his Big Swig cup with Mountain Dew while Morgan emptied the coffee urn and snatched some pink sugar packets from the basket by the microwave pastries. On the bakery shelf, a few packages of chocolate-covered donut-gems sat forlornly until the next delivery truck arrived. Morgan picked one up.

  Cowper leaned casually against the counter, but the clerk kept reading.

  “‘I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life,’” he said in a smooth romantic voice.

  The young woman looked up, her big, dark eyes tired and cynical, though she was no more than twenty-five. Even from the donut rack, Morgan could see she was uncommonly pretty for a truck-stop girl, her lips full and bare, turned down a little at the corners. And she wasn’t soft under the chin, like most of the small-town girls who never left.

  Her hair was the color of French roast coffee, and on her tiny island amid cigarettes, breath mints and jackalope keychains, she likely must have appeared as an enchanting Calypso to every lonely, long-haul trucker who drifted in on the asphalt current.

  That she read Anaïs Nin and not Danielle Steel made her even more attractive to Morgan, who found a smart woman as sexy as a beautiful one.

  “Excuse me?” she asked.

  “Anaïs Nin,” the doctor said, pointing to her book. “She said that.”

  The young clerk suspiciously scanned the back of the book to see if the quote had been printed there.

  “Yeah? Lucky guess,” she said wearily.

  Cowper turned briefly to Morgan and smiled confidently, then leaned closer to her.

  “‘And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom,’” he quoted Nin once more, almost in a whisper.

  The clerk’s eyes widened.

  “Wow,” she said, clearly aroused. She inclined her head close enough that Cowper must have smelled her warm, wintergreen breath. “That’s really amazing.”

  “Well,” he said, suavely peeling the paper sheath from his straw, “I happen to be very familiar with the erotica of Anaïs Nin.”

  “No, it’s really amazing that yet another allegedly grown man has no life,” she murmured in a good imitation of a sultry-sexy sigh. “That’ll be a dollar ninety-six on the Big Swig.”

  Morgan laughed out loud. He couldn’t help himself. He was sure Shawn Cowper didn’t strike out very often, much less go down in flames. After he paid for his coffee and donuts, the two men slumped in the van outside.

  “I dunno about her, Doc,” Morgan said, dumping four packets of fake sugar in his hot-and-cold Big Swig, “but you were making me horny.”

  Cowper, a middle-aged professor at a distant college, smiled his frat-boy smile.

  “Just trying to sow my wild oats,” he said.

  As impressed as a married man can be with a bachelor’s romantic menu, Morgan shook his head.

  “Yeah, Doc, but you’re supposed to do it before you look like the guy on the box.”

  Cowper turned the key and the road-worn university van growled under the hum of incandescent parking-lot lights. He watched an eighteen-wheeler ease into the dark highway’s westbound lane, its running lights as luminous as the skyline of a small city. Cowper turned the opposite direction on the state road, toward the dim glow of the sleeping town. He didn’t look at Morgan, but spoke into the vacant, lukewarm pre-dawn as he flicked on his bright lights.

  “Anybody ever tell you that pink stuff will petrify your pancreas?”

  The two DCI agents glided into the Perry County Courthouse parking lot a little after ten in the morning in their unmarked, government-issue Crown Victoria. They pulled into the space beside Morgan’s cranky, insecure Ford Escort, where he and Cowper sipped coffee and hoped the caffeine would soon kick in.

  Unlike their brethren in the FBI, the DCI agents affected a casual-cop flair, crime and punishment Calvin Klein-style: razor cuts, aviator sunglasses, sporty polo shirts, jeweled watches, khaki chinos and twill trousers, dun walking shoes and urban hikers, accessorized with gleaming badges, leatherette cell-phone cases and holsters on stylish canvas belts they probably laundered regularly. They were among the new wave of frat-boy fuzz: hip, cocky and well-groomed, more “Jump Street” than J. Edgar Hoover.

  As the two thirty-something agents stepped out of their polished ride, Morgan caught a stiff whiff of air-conditioned after-shave and checked his six-dollar Kmart sports watch.

  Cowper got out of the Escort to meet them.

  “Shawn Cowper,” he said, extending his hand to the agent on the driver’s side. “I found the body.”

  The DCI agent shook his hand perfunctorily. He was all business.

  “Eric Halstead, DCI. This is my partner, Scott Pickard.”

  Though he wasn’t tall, Halstead bent gracefully at his trim waist to peek inside the puny hatchback where Morgan still sat in the driver’s seat, feeling woefully under-dressed for a police action.

  “Sheriff’s waiting inside for us,” Cowper continued. “My team has gathered everything related to this case, and I assume you’ve made some arrangements to take possession of our friend, John Doe?”

  “What kind of a doctor are you?” Halstead asked, making a note on a palm organizer that magically appeared from one of his fashionable pockets.

  “Anthropologist, forensic style.”

  “In Wyoming?”

  “No, Florida. But I …”

  “Okay, that’s fine. We’ll get all the particulars later. Right now, we need to talk to Sheriff Goldsmith privately. Where can you be reached?”

  “I’m not invited to this meeting?”

  “No. You’re a witness.”

  “But I performed the post-mortem on your victim.”

  “Yes, Mr. Cooper, I know …”

  “Doctor Cowper. And wouldn’t it be easier to let me work with you on this?”

  “We can handle it from here.”

  Cowper took a breath to quell his rising anger.

  “So you will take all my data and recordings without so much as a thank-you?”

  “It’s not yours anymore, Mr. Cooper. It’s evidence. And any evidence in this case is ours. In fact, I think it’d be wise to have Agent Pickard go with you right now to make the transfer, just to ensure nothing gets … lost.”

  Pickard, a tall, blond agent who might have been a golf pro in another life, was talking quietly on his cell phone on the other side of the Crown Vic, but snapped it shut when he heard his name.

  “I don’t understand,” Cowper confessed. “You’ve got the expense-paid help of a top-flight forensic anthropologist and you’re blowing me off. Is that it?”

  Agent Halstead took off his sunglasses and hung them from the open collar of his saffron polo shirt, making it easier to look directly into Cowper’s eyes with the commanding presence he likely learned by watching Ricky Schroder on “NYPD Blue.”

  “Fact is, you aren’t a duly sworn law enforcement official in the State of Wyoming and regardless of your work in Florida, you were allowed improper access to evidence in a criminal case. That’s just one of the many issues we have with the sheriff’s handling of this investigation so far.”

  “Agent Halstead, I assure you I am eminently qualified in forensic pathology, and I have been involved in hundreds of death cases in an official scientific capacity. This is just asinine.”

  “Yeah, well, right now you’re just an overqualified witness. And unless you want to have a little chat about the consequences of tampering with evidence, I’d suggest you cool your jets, all right?”

  “Are you shitting me?”

  “Mr. Cooper, I don’t shit.”

  Doctor Cowper bit his tongue.

  “No,” he said with remarkable restraint, “I don’t suppose you do.”

  Morgan leaned across the passenger seat of his Escort and spoke through the open window.

  “So is DCI taking over this investigation?”

  “Who are
you?”

  “Jeff Morgan, editor of The Bullet.”

  Halstead made another memo in his PDA.

  “We can’t comment on that,” he said without looking up.

  “Can’t … or won’t?”

  “Morgan. Common spelling?” Halstead asked, stylus ready.

  “Sorry,” Morgan said. “I can’t comment on that.”

  Halstead glared. Morgan just grinned as the agent turned to Cowper.

  “Mr. Cooper, given the delicacy of your situation as a witness in a presumptive murder case, it’d be wise not to talk to the media. Are we singing from the same sheet of music here?”

  Cowper smirked as he poured the cold dregs of his convenience-store coffee on the parking-lot pavement, splattering Halstead’s newish Rockports.

  “Loud and clear, maestro.”

  DCI Agent Scott Pickard followed them back to the Arrowhead Motel, a dowdy motor-lodge out by the highway where Cowper’s team shared four queen-size rooms. Most of them had spent Sunday watching bugs-and-bones shows on The Learning Channel, recovering from a honky-tonk Saturday night at the Buck Snort, or both. By the time Cowper arrived with Morgan and Pickard, they had meticulously stowed all their scientific gear in the vans for the long trip home to Florida and were sitting on the Arrowhead’s mostly ceremonial lawn awaiting checkout time, more than ready to be gone.

  Cowper stood over three cardboard boxes left on the cracked sidewalk in front of Room Nine.

  “Here you go, Agent Pickard,” he said. “This is John Doe.”

  Pickard suddenly looked like he might be sick.

  “Well, not John Doe himself,” Cowper said. “Just everything we know about John Doe. Reports, video and voice tapes, photos, preliminary analysis, turn-ons, turn-offs …”

  Pickard apparently didn’t catch the joke, and if he did, he decided it wasn’t officially funny. The DCI’s official handbook discouraged humor. He opened the boxes, inventoried the contents and wrote out an official receipt for Cowper. Then he loaded them in the Crown Vic’s official trunk and left, slurring his official tires in the Arrowhead’s crushed gravel lot, like Steve McGarrett.

  “You’ll never see him or those boxes again,” Morgan said.

  Cowper winked.

  “One can only hope,” he said.

  Matt, a lanky grad student in a “Don’t Bug Me” sweatshirt, flicked his cigarette into the gravel. He was the team’s photographer, and when he was developing film at The Bullet’s darkroom, Morgan learned Matt had a grim but passionate fascination with forensic entomology — the relatively new medico-legal study of the insects that attend human mortality and how they can help pinpoint the time and place of death.

  “We’re all mounted up, Shawn,” he said. “Any time you’re ready to split, we’re outta here. If we get moving now, we can make Sioux Falls before dark. I already signed us out.”

  Cowper tossed him the extra set of van keys.

  “Take my stuff out of the back, would you?” he asked. “And leave me one of the laptops. I’m gonna stick around here for a while.”

  Matt asked the question on Morgan’s mind: “Why?”

  “A few loose ends,” he said. “I’ll fly back to Tampa when I get them all tied up. I’ll e-mail. And do me a favor: When you get back, call Gettysburg College about that field-hospital excavation. Tell them we had a little delay up here, but we’ll be there by the end of September, long before the ground freezes.”

  “What’ll we do in the meantime?”

  “It’s summer vacation, for god sakes. Take the week off and go see what normal people do for fun. It might surprise you, but it almost never involves flesh-eating bugs.”

  Matt shrugged and shook Cowper’s hand as the rest of the team loaded up.

  “You’re the boss,” he said. “I’ll just tell Gettysburg we encountered grave problems.”

  The anthropologist’s blue eyes sparkled with mischief.

  “No, Matt,” he said, clapping his helper’s bony shoulder, “tell them I’m just trying to get a head.”

  The team never got as far as Sioux Falls.

  But they got to the western bank of the Missouri River, which bisects South Dakota, dividing the western badlands from the agrarian east, the dark frontier from the refulgence of civilization. At twilight, before they’d even crossed the Big Muddy, they were flagged down by a frantic woman carrying a baby. Fumes belched from the open hood of her broken-down Chevy Impala.

  Both vans pulled off the highway just beyond the smoking car, in a turn-out that overlooked the Missouri below. Very soon, another Samaritan in a white Suburban came to the rescue, too, quickly pulling off the highway just in front of Matt’s lead van.

  But the small group of eight young scientists and grad students was in far greater danger than the woman and her child, which was in fact a gas mask swaddled in a white towel.

  Within a few seconds, three men from the white Suburban and the woman surrounded them. Their faces were hidden by gas masks. The women in the vans screamed.

  It was finished within two minutes.

  Into each closed van, the attackers dropped a canister of tabun gas, a deadly nerve agent. The bitter gas paralyzed their lungs in the first few seconds. Within thirty seconds, the eight people trapped in the vans had lost control of their bodily functions entirely, vomiting through blue lips, defecating and urinating all over themselves. In sixty seconds, the convulsions began. By the time the twitching and jerking ended, the hijackers had emptied the vans of their medical and scientific gear, as well as some of the team’s luggage, purses and backpacks, which were all loaded into the white Suburban.

  One of the men, his face still protected by a gas mask, shoved Matt’s shit-stained body aside and started the first van. Shifting it into drive, he steered it around the guardrail and stepped away as it rolled down the embankment into the muddy river. The second van soon followed, also sinking beneath the water.

  As that last van hit the water, a minivan with Minnesota plates passed the killing spot. The bored children inside waved at the three nice men who had stopped to help a young mother whose radiator had overheated.

  Four minutes, forty-three seconds.

  Dying was fast.

  Being dead took longer.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A tart rain fell before dawn on Tuesday, obscuring the sunrise.

  The narrow trail meandering up the steep side of Saddlestring Mountain circumscribed secret, unvisited places where lupine and wild mountain strawberries flourished, and no man ever saw. Up higher, where the air was thinned of civilization’s heavy stink, the virgin woodlands had known only the touch of wind, snow, rain and hawks, never an axe.

  Morgan kept to the path because he seldom ran in the morning, or in the rain, or up Saddlestring. His breath was hot and his legs heavy, but he scrambled farther up the foggy hogback through the mist-scent of pine and banking fog. His lungs ached for oxygen, his ankles whined with every rugged step, and sweaty rain trickled down his back, but he was alone.

  Except for the thought of two sons. Morgan had kissed Colter in the dark that morning, as light as the dust on a butterfly’s wing. The boy didn’t stir from his dreams, but his tiny hand rose to his father’s cheek. So Morgan kissed his moist little palm and tucked it beneath the blanket.

  Back in the trees, a red-daubed flicker laughed its wick-wick giggle, then swooped across Morgan’s path. He stopped, hands on his knees, grateful for a bit of color in the slate morning. The trail ahead dropped over the crest into a cloud-filled ravine. Morgan wondered if he might just descend into the vapor and find all the lost ones gathered where no man could see, as if Heaven might be no more than a deep, cloudy cleft beyond where the trail just ends. He imagined Laddie Granbouche puzzling over life, death and country music with the attentive but disembodied head of John Doe, or the Sundance Kid sharing a cigar with King Arthur.

  And Bridger. His memory would never fade, any more than a morning could be bereft of light.

  The drizzl
e continued, but Morgan did not. He sat on a rain-slick boulder and thought about his two sons, so close now. He wished they could meet, right here, right at this rock, and go play in the secret woods, where they’d roll in grass that had never known a little boy’s laughter, or chase butterflies where no trail had ever gone. He wished they could challenge each other to climb the highest tree, or throw the farthest stone, or make the loudest echo. They were brothers, after all.

  And his mother was alive, but her mind functioned only beyond some invisible boundary, deep inside her distance. Rachel Morgan was a silhouette of herself. Every time he saw her, three or four times a week when he walked through the ammonia-scented hallways at Laurel Gardens, she was meeting him for the first time.

  He was a new friend she met every day, not the baby she bore nearly fifty years before, raised through Cub Scouts, Little League and high school graduation. She’d held Bridger before he died and Colter in the minutes after he was born. The memories, Morgan had to believe, were still in there someplace, caged in brain cells to which the key had been lost.

  He missed her. For all the reminders of what had passed away, he had her and he could hold her, even if he couldn’t be sure that she understood when he told her he loved her. When he would come home from the nursing home and Claire would ask how he was doing, he’d just say he was fine, and sometimes he’d take a shower. Nobody could hear him cry there.

  On the mountain, Morgan studied his own two hands. The same but different. Each carried its own scars, its own stains. They were starting to look like his father’s hands, he thought. Creased, tired, practiced and patient. His fingers felt thick and cold, but alive, each with its own memories.

  He knew he was working too hard, and too much. He had trouble sleeping most nights, skimming just below the surface of waking. Too many things to think about. Maybe they’d take a weekend soon, drive someplace, maybe Montana. He’d always enjoyed being in the car with Claire. They talked, and they saw things together at the same time.

  He started back when he knew the sun wouldn’t show. He looked back, just once, at the gully of Heaven and followed the trail away from it. On the mountain, in this diffuse light, it was nearly impossible to tell the difference between sweat, rain or tears.