ColdScheme Read online

  The 7-Eleven was well lit. So was the gas station. The victim’s sweatshirt was dark but I saw the blooming brown splotch when my stacked hands pressed down. The Malibu was light metallic gray. There were blood smears and rivulets streaming from the body. They beaded on the hard-shine waxed surface. I couldn’t see an obvious point of bullet entry. His entire chest felt ragged, spongy.

  It had to be a large caliber projectile. When discharged, it should have awakened the whole neighborhood. We didn’t hear anything while inside the 7-Eleven. The clerk had been playing somber, classical music, a dirge. The bullet that had left the man’s chest feeling like a freshly ploughed field had to have been accompanied by a sonic boom. The 7-Eleven should be a windowless shack by now.

  Why didn’t we hear anything, I wondered? The victim could not have walked here without a rib cage. That’s what it felt like under my hands.

  “His chest is caving in. I have no place to compress,” I said and raised my hands, dripping with blood.

  “Keep trying.” Ken puffed and pinched the victim’s nose.

  “Compressing his thighs is not going to do it. That’s the only part of him that feels reasonably solid.”

  “Find something!”

  “There’s nothing more we can do here, Ken,” I sighed and sat back.

  I climbed down, picked up my purse and it stuck to my hands. I shook it off, dropped it and looked around. There was nothing to use to wipe my hands. I went for emergency measures—my suit pants—then picked up the purse again.

  Ken straightened up and backed away.

  I found my phone. “I’m calling it in.”

  “Hold on. His pockets look full.” He reached around the bloody mess to search the man’s pockets. “Wallet.” He held out a fat black square.

  “Nothing else? No car keys?” I hefted the cell phone. We had to call it in.

  “Just a stuffed wallet.” He looked through the bulging portfolio.

  I glanced at the gas station again. “Maybe that’s his car.” I pointed at the vehicle standing at the gas pump.

  “Meg!” his voice rang sharply. “Take a look at this.”

  I went over. “Are all those his…” We could have made a couple of fans with the amount of plastic the victim carried in his wallet.

  “Six driver’s license IDs, five credit cards, four plasticized birth certificates, seven social security cards. Meg?”

  I looked at the dead man. The fatal brown rose had spread and started to soak into his jeans. His face was rigid, like a monument. His cold stare looked up toward heaven. I hoped he would not get stuck in the waiting line.

  “A con artist, Ken?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe—but look at this and tell me I’m not crazy?” He plucked two plastic squares from the wallet.

  One was a plasticized social security card. It wasn’t legal to cover documents in plastic but people did it for convenience and protection. The other was a Maryland driver’s license.

  “Jonathan Anderson Brick,” I said, dryly. The mountain of paperwork on my desk sculpted in my head.

  “He disappeared four years ago from a convenience store in Dundalk,” Ken murmured.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw him smoothing out the papers, closing the folder and stacking it neatly between the metal partitions on my desk.

  “His was the third cold case file we worked on this morning.”

  Ken turned to look at the convenience store. “You don’t think that…”

  “No, Ken. Don’t you dare to even whisper it! He disappeared from a 7-Eleven in Dundalk. We’re in Baltimore.”

  “We’re in front of a 7-Eleven.”

  “Ken! No one would spend four years, browsing through snack aisles in a 7-Eleven. The selection is just not that great. I’m calling it in.”

  * * * * *

  I phoned Mrs. Tavalho. She knew what my job was.

  My daughter and her friends were asleep—in a tent they’d pitched in the living room. I thanked her and closed the cell. I dared not imagine the mess of bedclothes and sheeting I would find in the morning.

  Joe Smeddin had finished fencing with his tools above the victim’s body. He stood aside, fingering his chin, steeped in thought. I knew that forensic pathologists must not be disturbed when ruminating—lest they feel threatened and draw their gun. Joe did it to me in the morgue, when I crept closer to peek over his shoulder. I settled for evaluating the Malibu’s hood ornament from the concrete sidewalk.

  As a medical examiner, Joe abhorred educated guessing. When he said something, it was gospel. He was over forty, tall, athletically wiry and unpredictable. He could be as cranky as an eighty-year-old, or as spritely as an elf. When he slouched, his humor was napping and caution was advised. Squared shoulders and forward thrust head meant he was ready for a challenge. The forensic staff was dusting the car for prints. It was a routine procedure, calming like all steps that defined the infrastructure of police work. It gave us an illusion of control. I doubted they would find any other smudges, besides ours and the victim’s.

  A couple of our colleagues were inside the 7-Eleven, placating the owner with clichés. They urged him to play more classical music.

  We’d already checked the gas station and come back. The night attendant was a college kid. He liked his school crest so much that he had the colorful Maryland globe tattooed above his wrist. He was morbidly delighted with the flashing police lights. Then again, his job probably didn’t stimulate anything but his bank account.

  The black Grand Prix, sitting by the pumps, belonged to the victim. According to the attendant, the customer never came in.

  “Well, he got out of the car, reached for the pump and then sort of looked up my way—surprised,” the attendant told us.

  “Was there anything happening around here that might have caused his reaction?” I asked.

  “Nah.” His eyes skipped over my bloodstained pants. “He was shot, wasn’t he?”

  “Did you hear any unusual loud noises?”

  “Nah. It’s been pretty quiet since I came on shift at six o’clock. Gas prices shot up this morning.”

  “So there was nothing unusual going on?”

  He shrugged. “I guess he was surprised because his gas tank lid was on the other side. You know, he pulled up the wrong way. A lot of people do that, especially when driving someone else’s car.”

  We had already searched the Grand Prix—and would do so again. We just wanted to get the attendant’s first impressions, before the incident became influenced by anyone’s imagination.

  We had found three more IDs in the car—ownership and insurance papers for Jonathan Anderson Brick and a business card for Mr. Jonathan Anderson Twain, Assistant Sales Manager, Guilford Fine Cars, Import and Domestic, Roosevelt Park, the Jamieson Car Market.

  The car belonged to the victim. Whether anything else was true, would be confronted later when we checked the car’s registration and the insurance. Brick’s strange reaction had to be on account of something else.

  “Did he look happily surprised or shocked?” I asked.

  He blinked. “Well, no, I mean like he looked startled…worried.”

  “But you didn’t hear any loud noise?” I thought he might have been shot as he got out of his car. Ken looked at me and I knew what he thought. With a caved-in chest, Brick couldn’t have walked fifty feet to collapse on top of the Malibu. Besides, if he were shot as he got out of his own car, there would be blood and fragments all over the gas pump.

  “I think I’ve seen him around here before, gassing up. He was probably scoping out this place. Do you think he wanted to rob me and decided to check out the convenience store first, you know, make sure there were no witnesses around?” The kid was shopping for a story to spin for his buddies.

  “Do you have a habit of leaving this place unattended?” I asked crisply.

  “Of course not. I never leave my station when I’m on duty, never. You have nothing on me…”

  “Then if he had scoped out
the place before and was coming back to rob your station, he would know that you never leave your post. He wouldn’t have looked surprised when he saw you.”

  The kid grimaced. “He might have pulled up, thinking the place would be empty, you know, an attendant takes a washroom break.”

  “So you do leave your station after all.”

  “Never!” he replied indignantly.

  “Then you have a good bladder.” I left him with that compliment.

  We went outside. The Grand Prix had been already packaged in yellow tape, to make sure it would not be disturbed. The tow trucks should be coming. I didn’t think we’d find anything revealing in Brick’s car. We already had a ton of IDs, for Maryland, New York, Virginia and DC. We didn’t need more false identities. We were going to be busy checking out those we already had.

  “No sound, no chest, no clue,” I murmured.

  “No luck,” Ken sighed. He looked to where his car sat, also covered with police tape. The victim’s body still lay on the hood because the photographer hadn’t finished. The vehicle would be taken for detailed analysis. Its hard-wax shine probably wouldn’t survive. I could tell that Ken was worried.

  It was a beautiful night. The air felt soft, caressing. I wanted to go home, sit on my porch with a cup of coffee and wonder whether Fate had scribbled the words 7-Eleven on Brick’s birth certificate.

  I hoped that Joe would not invite us to visit the city morgue. He’d done it often enough, asking us to bring lunch, dinner or a midnight snack. I didn’t mind dining in the morgue, as Joe skipped around, flagrantly ignoring most basic laboratory procedures. He always liked to show off with a saw in one hand and a piece of pizza or a drumstick in the other. What I did mind was that Joe never paid his share for our group meals.

  We stopped on the sidewalk and waited with stoical acceptance of the pathological procedures in motion at the scene.

  Finally, Joe finished his evaluation. He straightened up. His shoulders settled into a perfect “T.” He thrust his neck forward. It was a sign that we now had a permission to speak. He was in good humor but I was aware that I still had to be careful about what I said.

  “Approximate cause of death?” I smiled at the pathologist who claimed he spent half his life studying to become an expert on death, just so he could live twice as long as the rest of us.

  “His chest exploded,” Joe said and folded his hands on his chest.

  “Immediate cause of death?” I had to get through protocol.

  “His chest exploded.”

  “Mechanism of death.”

  “Blew the hell out of his chest and everything that was in it.”

  “Manner of death.”

  I saw Joe’s evil smile even in the smoky shadow of the store’s lights. “Natural causes.”

  “I have ten bucks left, Joe. You can have a bucket of chicken wings or whatever else ten bucks will get you. That’s it.”

  “Nando’s Chicken is just a block up from the city morgue.” His smile twisted even more.

  “We have no car, Joe.” My eyes went to the Malibu, still draped with its large human ornament.

  Joe fished out his car keys and tossed them to me. “Take mine. I’ll ride in the ambulance.”

  “Joe…” I said slowly.

  A shadow slid over his face, erasing the levity. His shoulders sagged and he sighed.

  “I think he had a pacemaker but I can’t be sure. I don’t want to go burrowing through his chest out here.”

  “Pacemakers don’t explode inside a patient’s chest.” I was taken aback.

  He shook his head. “This one did. Or at least I think that’s what happened.”

  “A silent explosion?” Ken asked.

  “Revolutionary,” Joe said, giving him a troubled nod.

  “Pacemakers aren’t installed into a patient’s chest under a great deal of pressure. Not the kind that would do this,” I said.

  “Like I said, revolutionary. It not only exploded inside his chest but also damn well liquefied his internal organs. It had to be filled with something powerful, corrosive, though I can’t think of anything that would do that to a man’s organs so quickly.”

  We had enough reasons to follow Joe and the ambulance to the city morgue. A pacemaker that would result in the kind of damage he had suggested was highly suspicious. I wondered whether any patient would voluntarily let a doctor insert such a deadly device into his chest.

  We were frequent visitors at Nando’s Chicken. We got quick service but for once, I didn’t appreciate haste. It only got us to the morgue that much faster.

  “Whatever it was, it had to be filled with a powerful toxin,” Joe said, as he rummaged through the food bags.

  “Standard precautions?” I asked, already resigned to a short life.

  “No need. Whatever it was had burned out seconds after it made a mess of him. It was that quick and potent.” He took a drumstick and circled the table with Brick’s body.

  Most forensic pathologists shied away from lifting human bulk. That’s why they had dieners.

  Joe was an exception. He had a hobby—popular mechanics. Under his rule, the morgue was a cybernetic heaven. He had installed electronic gadgets to move the bodies. Everything in the morgue was mechanically controlled and operated. He liked to push buttons, move levers and twist knobs. He delighted in turning screws and poking plates. All such motion produced results—rotation, tilt, slide, angle, roll and slither. He could spare one hand on food while doing his job with the other.

  I heard a whispering noise. The table with Brick’s body rotated so Joe could examine the chest. We moved to the other side.

  I wondered what I had compressed when I’d straddled Brick’s body because I saw only remnants of tissue and bone, swimming in red mud, drying up.

  This was not dissolution of nondurable parts of the body. It was just as Joe said, instant liquefaction.

  “Could he have walked fifty feet after his chest exploded?” Ken asked.

  Joe gave him a “You from Mars?” look and said, “One second and his mind registers that there’s something amiss. Two seconds and whatever’s happening in his chest is powerful enough to lift him of the ground and three seconds later, he is lying like roadkill on the hood of your car.”

  “So he must have changed his mind when he got out at the gas station and headed for the convenience store,” Ken speculated.

  Joe nodded. “He made it to your passenger side fender when it hit.”

  “Would he be able to run and could he have been running?” Ken wanted to know.

  “Sure—run, swim, climb—he probably lived a normal life. Well, as normal as any man who has that kind of nasty shit planted in his chest. It may have been a pacemaker but it wasn’t for medical reasons.”

  “How could you tell that he had a pacemaker?” I asked.

  His finger hovered above the chest, in the vicinity of the victim’s heart. “This is the focus of trauma. It started from here and spread quickly, whatever it was that consumed tissue and bone. I’d say thirty seconds post activation the toxic agent was no longer the strength that would pose harm to the living. I don’t think it was an aerial agent. It didn’t linger or mix with blood. Your hands are all right and you did the CPR on him. It was flat by then. What I saw happening was just the tail end of a chain reaction, the kind you can’t stop once it starts. The substance reacted in a flash. It became inert in an incredibly short span of time. I don’t know anything, medical or experimental, that can do that.”

  “But why a pacemaker?” I insisted. Mysterious substances were Joe’s territory. “Why not a bullet, or some other projectile?”

  “Too small. From the amount of damage, it would have to be a very hefty bullet. I’m sticking with an implant device, explosive and filled with unknown poison. No projectile.”

  “You just don’t want to be dragged into another argument about walking ghosts,” Ken murmured. He had often argued with Joe about people who lived for years with imbedded projectiles ins
ide their body.

  “He could have been a walking ghost.” Joe tilted his head, holding the drumstick. “That’s what it had to be. He had to walk with that shit in him for some time.”

  I wondered whether I should spoil his midnight snack and tell him that the victim had been missing for four years. I looked at Ken. He blinked. I understood.

  “Have you read any good medical research journals lately, Joe?” Ken asked. Keeping abreast of the latest bizarre medical inventions was another one of Joe’s hobbies.

  Joe tossed the drumstick behind him. It landed on a gurney. “Whatever that shit was, it didn’t come from Johns Hopkins, not legally that’s for sure. I’m going to biop the tissues and send the blood samples over but I don’t think there’s anything there to find anymore. You go and work on his employment, hobbies, friends, family—a name might be nice to have too.”

  “Jonathan Anderson Brick, age thirty-five,” Ken said. “His wallet was in his jeans. The car ownership, registration and insurance were in his car.”

  “There you go,” Joe exclaimed happily. “You’ve got more than enough to start pounding the pavement, looking for the nasty person who executed him.”

  “Executed?” we echoed.

  Joe smirked. “What he had implanted into his chest wouldn’t be cheap. It shouldn’t malfunction. Hell, our military would be rattled to know that someone can do that sort of thing—you know, long-distance and on command. He probably knew it was stuck in there but didn’t know how to get rid of it. Even a crooked veterinarian would be tempted to report that kind of strange device to the police. He must have known and couldn’t tell anyone.” He looked down at Brick’s sharp profile, eyes now closed.

  “Kidnapped, tortured—and executed,” I murmured.

  “Four years between kidnap and execution,” Ken whispered back. Joe heard him.

  “What do you mean four years?” His head reared and his features stiffened.

  I nodded at the body. “Mr. Jonathan Anderson Brick is a cold case in the truest sense of the word. Four years ago, he went out for popcorn and pop to a 7-Eleven and never returned to his fiancé, waiting for him on a couch in front of a TV.”