Fire and Ice

“What’s the matter?”Margie interrupted before Ernie had a chance to answer. “Who’s stuck?”

“The medical examiner,”Joanna said. “He’s bogged down in the sand somewhere between here and the gate.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,”Margie Savage said. “Why don’t I just go get him? I’ve been driving these dunes most of my life. I’ve got a tow chain right here on my jeep, and I know how to use it.”

“You wouldn’t mind?”Joanna asked.

“Hell, no,”Margie said. “Why would I mind?”

With that, she headed for her jeep. Ernie moved as if to stop her, but Joanna held up her hand.

“Let her go,”she said. “There’s nothing Dr. Machett will hate more than being rescued by an old lady.”

And nothing I’ll like better.

FIVE (#ulink_0ebc19f1-3bb7-5f94-9bd0-55fe78231688)

BY THE TIME I got back to the Kittitas County complex, I had no intention of going another few rounds with the receptionist. Instead, I prowled the parking lot. You’ve heard the old adage: Rank hath its privilege? In the world of bureaucrats, no privilege counts for quite as much as having your very own reserved parking place. It didn’t take long to find the spot that was marked: RESERVED MEDICAL EXAMINER.

I kept circling the parking lot until someone finally left a parking place that gave me a clear view of the M.E.’s precious spot. That way, when she finally showed up, I’d be the first to know. I put the seat all the way back, opened my computer, logged on, and indulged myself. For a long time, I had resisted doing online crossword puzzles. Doing them on a computer rather than in a banged-up folded newspaper had seemed sacrilegious somehow.

But I’m over it. That was another change Mel had instituted in my life. Despite her love of fast, powerful cars—she adores the Porsche Cayman I gave her as a wedding present—she’s a greenie at heart. She has managed to convince me to give up on newsprint altogether, including crosswords, which were the only thing I thought papers were good for to begin with.

Just because it was raining in Seattle and snowing in Snoqualmie Pass didn’t mean it was raining or snowing here. Ellensburg is right at the edge of Washington State’s unexpected stretch of desert. So I sat in the clear cold sunlight, squinting at my dim computer screen, and worked the New York Times puzzle. In a little over five minutes. That’s the problem with Monday and Tuesday puzzles these days. Most of the time they’re way too easy.

A few minutes later and an hour and a half after the receptionist had given me the brush-off, a bright red Prius pulled into the M.E.’s reserved spot. A young woman with long dark hair and wearing an enormous pair of sunglasses got out of the car and then turned to retrieve a briefcase. I put down the computer and scrambled to intercept her.

“Dr. Hopewell?”I asked tentatively.

Peeling off the glasses, she swung around and faced me. I was surprised to see a pair of almond-shaped dark eyes, angry dark eyes, staring back at me. “Yes,”she said. “I’m Dr. Hopewell. That was certainly quick. Where is it?”

Excuse me? She seemed to be in the middle of a conversation I hadn’t yet started.

“Where’s what?”I asked.

“My suitcase. The airline called while I was still in the pass. They said they had found the missing luggage and they were dispatching someone to deliver it to me. I thought maybe the airline finally got around to doing something right for a change.”

That seemed unlikely, but rather than telling her so, I managed to fumble my ID out of my pocket and hand it over. “Sorry,”I said. “Special Investigator J. P. Beaumont. I’m here for the autopsy.”

“Oh,”she said. She glanced at my ID and handed it back. “Sorry about that,”she said. “As you can see, there’s been a slight delay. Come on in. I’ve been out of town. I’ve heard about the case, but so far I haven’t seen anything about it. As soon as I get suited up, we can start. You can wait in my office if you like.”

She led me through the lobby. I waltzed past the evil-eyed receptionist without being hit by any incoming missiles and hurried on into the relative safety of the morgue’s nonpublic areas. The first office beyond the swinging doors was labeled DR. HOPEWELL. She ushered me into that and offered me one of two visitors’ chairs. Then she set the briefcase down behind a suspiciously clean and orderly desk.

“Wait here,”she instructed. “I’ll be right back.”

I find that women in positions of authority have a tendency to be at one extreme or the other. Either they’re comfortable with themselves and easy to get along with—like Mel, for instance—or they can be a royal pain in the butt. I had no idea where Dr. Hopewell would stand on the particular dividing line. To be on the safe side, I did exactly as I’d been told and sat where she’d left me.

While I waited, I examined her small but exceptionally neat office in some detail. Eventually my eyes were drawn to a framed photo on the wall—a graduation photo with a smiling cap-and-gown-clad Laura Hopewell standing between a very non-Asian middle-aged couple, a man and a woman. I was still studying the photo when Dr. Hopewell returned.

“Those are my parents,”she said. “They adopted me from China when I was three.”

“They look like nice people,”I said.

She nodded. “They are.”

“And you must make them very proud.”

She shrugged and sighed. “Maybe not so much,”she said. “My mother would rather I was curing cancer or delivering babies instead of solving murders.”

That made me laugh. “Some things never change,”I said. “When I told my mother I was going to be a cop, she felt the same way.”

That broke the ice. “Come on,”Dr. Hopewell said. “Let’s go get this done.”

Which we did.

Standing in on autopsies is tough, but it’s part of my job. Bereaved family members go to funerals. They remember the dearly departed in eulogies and they start the process of saying good-bye. For homicide cops, autopsies are a way of saying hello. What the M.E. uncovers in an autopsy is usually a starting point. By learning everything we can about the victims at the moment of death, we begin trying to find out what happened to them and why. And with unidentified victims, it’s even more basic than that. Before we can find out who killed them, we have to know who they are. And in this case, once we established the victim’s identity, we needed to ascertain if her death was related to the others we were investigating.

“All right, Mr. Craft,”she called to her assistant. “Let’s get started.”

The assistant rolled out a gurney. Rather than a sheet-draped body, the gurney held a sheet-draped box. Inside was what looked like a haphazard collection of bones. This would be an autopsy with some assembly required. One by one, Dr. Hopewell began removing bones from the box, examining the charred and chewed remains as she brought them out, and then laying them out in a rough approximation of a human form.

As I watched this painstaking process I was reminded of something I hadn’t thought about in years. As a high school sophomore, I had used my own hard-earned cash to buy myself a motorcycle at a garage sale. I had dragged it home in pieces, with the frame and tires in one section and with all the smaller parts stashed in an old wooden laundry basket. I had used all the mechanical skill my high school auto-shop teacher had been able to instill in me into trying to put the pieces back together.

My father died in a motorcycle accident months before I was born. Taking that part of my history into consideration, you could say that my mother wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of my having a motorcycle of my own. She didn’t come right out and actually forbid me to do it, but she watched the piece-by-piece reconstruction process with an undisguised lack of enthusiasm.

I’m a lot older now than I was then, and I also have a far greater understanding of what women will and won’t do in order to get their way. Standing in the Kittitas County morgue and watching the bones being laid out on the examining table, I wondered if it was possible that my mother had sabotaged the whole process. Once I finally got the bike back together, I never did make it work. Had my mother somehow managed to remove the one critical part that made it so I couldn’t get the engine to turn over? However it happened, I never managed a single ride.

Something similar seemed to be going on here. Dr. Hopewell could put the pieces back in some semblance of the right order, but no one was going to be able to breathe life back into that body. Whoever was dead was going to stay that way.

“Our victim is a female,”Dr. Hopewell intoned early in the process. “Late twenties to early thirties.”

“Wait a minute,”I objected. “I thought we already knew that. Isn’t that why I’m here?”

Dr. Hopewell gave me what my son-in-law calls “the stink eye”over the top of her surgical mask. “I believe the CSI people made their initial assessment regarding the victim’s gender based on other evidence found at the scene,”she said. “There was an engagement ring, a woman’s boot, and some odd fragments of clothing. But just because someone dresses like a woman doesn’t make her a woman. The bones do.”

I homed in on the engagement ring. That was strikingly different from our other victims, where no identifiable jewelry or clothing had been found.

“No robbery then?”I asked.

Dr. Hopewell shrugged, reached into the box, and removed the skull. As soon as she did so, I saw the other huge difference Ross Connors had already mentioned. This skull still had teeth. The teeth of all the other victims had been removed, if not prior to death, then at least prior to the time the corpse had been set on fire.

Dr. Hopewell examined the skull for a long time before she spoke again. “Lots of signs of blunt trauma here,”she said. “It looks like any number of them could have been fatal.”

“What about strangulation?”I asked. “Any sign of that?”

Dr. Hopewell shook her head. “None,”she said.

That was a point this victim had in common with the others. They hadn’t been strangled, either.