Back in the fall, as soon as it dawned on Mr. Webber that Ashleigh was the only girl taking precalculus, he’d got off some virulently sexist remarks about how the female brain isn’t capable of handling higher mathematics and how he wasn’t going to hold up the progress of the rest of the class for one straggler. And a week later, when he had her up at the chalkboard for a grilling session, he’d remarked that, although there was a book called Calculus for Dummies, he’d never seen one called Calculus for Girls.
Of course he would feel that way. Probably no girl had ever looked at him twice in his whole life, with his round shoulders and google eyes. And Ashleigh was sure he lisped on purpose.
On and on he droned, an infinitesimal operator in Euclidean space, as oblivious of his audience as an elephant in a circus. Meanwhile she suppressed yawn after yawn as her classmates, each with a nimble hand thrust into a backpack, texted boorish drivel back and forth across the room.
A squeal of air brakes in the street caught her attention and she glanced out the window to see a familiar sight.
When the phone rang during breakfast next morning at Ashleigh’s house, it was her mother who answered, because her father preferred, like all the other attorneys in town over thirty, to remain inaccessible on weekends. From Mary Deventer’s half of the conversation, Ashleigh and her father deduced that Lieutenant Doyle of the Department of Public Safety was informing her, in her capacity as county coroner, of a homicide.
Mary made notes on a scratchpad and agreed to meet Doyle in a half-hour at the scene.
“Archer Smythe?” mumbled Calvin Deventer, gradually emerging from his matutinal coma under the influence of coffee as thick and dark as molasses. “A sinister name if I ever heard one. Sounds like the villain in an old melodrama.”
Mary swept her breakfast dishes into the sink. “He’s not the villain,” she said. “He’s the victim. Truck driver from Canada. Gunshot wounds to the chest.”
Ashleigh likewise hastened to clear away her things. “Can I come?”
“No, sweet. You have Greek, remember?”
In response to Ashleigh’s repeated appeals, her parents had enrolled her in Saturday classes in modem Greek at the local Orthodox Church. At her age, that seemed to be as close as she could get to classroom instruction in the classical language.
They arranged that Mary would deliver Ashleigh to her lesson on the way to the crime scene. If the investigation dragged on past noon, her dad would pick her up and bring her home.
After dropping Ashleigh at St. Gregory’s, Mary drove to a strip mall on the wrong side of the interstate. There, despite a harsh winter wind and a dusting of snow on the ground, she found the inevitable crowd of onlookers bellying up to yellow tape festooned around a trash enclosure at the rear of a hardware store. Lieutenant Doyle lifted a section of tape while she ducked under it.
A scavenger looking for marketable refuse before dawn that morning had found a dead body tumbled into one of the bins, a white male in his forties wearing a steel gray coverall with two bullet holes in the region of the heart.
Doyle handed Mary a wallet. “This was on the ground. All the cash is gone, but everything else seems to be there.”
“Everything else” included a trucker’s license issued to Archer Smythe of Winnipeg.
“Morning, Mary.” Roger Tredwyn, the evidence technician, emerged from between two trash receptacles. “Thought I sensed a hint of spring in the air. This is what he had in his pockets.” He held up a clear plastic bag containing pens, keys, and a fistful of U.S. and Canadian coins, including three Sacagawea dollars. “I got good pictures before we moved him.”
Mary put on rubber gloves and, standing on her toes, reached into the refuse bin to grip the dead man’s forearm, which she found cold and stiff. The blood around the holes in his coverall was tarry black and barely tacky to the touch. “Dead since late yesterday,” she said. “Probably right after the mall shut down for the night. Have you talked to the people at the hardware store?”
“Briefly. They say they don’t know him. You’ll probably want to see the manager.”
Mary finished examining the dead man’s wallet. “Nothing here about family.” She gazed beyond the crowd of onlookers to scan the mall parking lot. “Is his truck here?”
“If it is, we haven’t found it yet,” said Tredwyn. “Nothing here with Canadian plates.”
Mary stripped off her gloves and deposited them in a hazardous waste container in her field kit instead of tossing them into the bin next to the body. “What about shells?”
“Nothing so far, but digging through this mess could take hours.” The bins were crammed to their brims with cardboard cartons, empty cans and bottles, scraps of lumber, pipe, wire, and glass, and nondescript plastic and metal oddments. The ground around them was littered with enough bolts, nuts, and washers to assemble a golf cart.
“Well,” said Mary, “not to venture too far onto police turf, it looks to me like armed robbery.”
“And maybe grand theft, auto,” agreed Doyle, “if some of these keys aren’t the ones to his rig. Not to mention the homicidal ramifications.”
The manager of the hardware store was a big man with a mane like a lion and a nose that seemed determined to outrun all his other features in a race to the finish. He said his name was John Vangerow.
“But right now, I couldn’t swear to that. I think every weekend handyman in the county picked this morning to tackle that overdue project. If we run out of number sixteen nails I’m going home.”
“About the body—”
“We know nothing.” He spread his hands in an expansive gesture of absolute denial. “The cops were already all over this place when we opened up this morning. Never saw the guy before, never heard his name. To me it’s just another case of people tossing their trash into the nearest bin, no matter who has to pay to have it hauled away.”
At least Vangerow wouldn’t have to pay for the disposal of this particular item. The county had a contract with a local funeral director to transport murder, suicide, and accident victims to the morgue at the hospital where a forensic pathologist, also under contract, performed the autopsies.
Mary arranged for the removal of Smythe’s remains and took official possession of his personal effects, except for keys and identification, which she left with Doyle. After that she had just enough time left for coffee with Doyle and Tredwyn before going back to the church to pick up Ashleigh.
“Was Roger there?” was Ashleigh’s first question after flinging her backpack on the floor of the car like a sack of potatoes. The dimpled and disreputable Tredwyn exerted a spellbinding attraction for Ashleigh and, if the truth be told, for her mother as well.
By a curious quirk of the law, death abolishes all the privileges of privacy and confidentiality enjoyed by the living. In consequence, a coroner’s findings are in the public domain unless, by chance, their revelation might aid a killer still at large. Mary gave her a brief summary of the case and was still answering questions when they arrived home and sat down to lunch.
Calvin Deventer laid aside one of his many Lincoln biographies to join them, and asked a few questions of his own. Then he left to attend a meeting of the Forensic Club, where representatives of the local bar and bench sat around sipping things from the bar and watching basketball on a plasma screen as if they were right down there on the bench.
Early that afternoon Lieutenant Doyle, having phoned ahead to make sure Mary was home, arrived to discuss some further developments in the Smythe murder. A police patrol had spotted an empty nine-car automobile carrier with Canadian plates parked off the street about a mile from the strip mall where Smythe’s body had been found. Evidence in the cab confirmed that it was Smythe’s rig.