“Or you?”
“Incompetent and blames everything on everybody else, including Toby. Two guys talking? Between you and me, Geronimo? She’s going down,” Huber says. “It’s really sad.”
9
The forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy on the train fatality died one week later during a Sunday afternoon of skydiving when his parachute didn’t open.
If Sykes didn’t have the original case file in front of her, she might not believe it. Bad karma, she thinks uncomfortably. As a kid, she loved archaeology. It was one of the few subjects that interested her, maybe because it wasn’t taught in school. She lost interest when she read about King Tut’s tomb, about curses and people mysteriously dying.
“Twenty years ago, Mrs. Finlay’s death,” she is saying to Win over the phone. “Two years before that a train death, then the ME’s death. I’m getting a little freaked out.”
“Possibly coincidence,” he says.
“Then why was the picture stapled to Mrs. Finlay’s personal-effects inventory?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this right now,” says Win, who doesn’t like cell phones and certainly doesn’t assume that any conversation on them is secure.
Sykes is alone in the small morgue office on the eleventh floor of a tall, beige building behind the UNC–Chapel Hill medical school’s hospitals. She is bewildered, seems the more she looks into Vivian Finlay’s violent death, the more mysterious it gets. First, her case file has disappeared except for an inventory of clothing she supposedly had on when she was murdered, tennis clothes that would appear to be the wrong size. Second, a train fatality may somehow be connected to her case, and now the ME and his skydiving accident.
“Just a few things,” Win adds. “Keep the details to a minimum. How?”
“Chute didn’t open.”
“There should have been an autopsy on the chute.”
“How about I e-mail all this to you,” Sykes says. “How about you read it yourself. When you getting back this way?”
She’s feeling very isolated, abandoned. He’s up there with that DA, the two of them headline news. As far as Sykes is concerned, he was involved in a shooting, should get out of town and be down here to help her out. It’s his case. Well, that’s not how it’s feeling anymore. But the fact is, it’s his case. Typically, now that something sensational has happened, an old lady murdered twenty years ago is a throwaway. Who cares.
“As soon as I can,” is all Win has to say about it.
“I know you got some real problems up there,” she replies as reasonably as possible. “But this is your case, Win. And if I don’t get back to the Academy, the TBI will be all over me like white on rice.”
“Whatever happens, I’ll fix it,” he says.
He always promises that and so far he hasn’t fixed a damn thing. She spends all her time talking to him, doesn’t study or hang out with the other students discussing what they just learned that day in class, then gets behind and doesn’t fully comprehend the newest forensic technology and investigative techniques or have friends. She complains and he says, Don’t worry. You got me and I’m a great tutor. She says maybe she shouldn’t devote so much of herself to a man almost young enough to be her son, and he says he doesn’t care about age, then pays attention to some younger woman or obsesses about that DA, Lamont, who’s smart and beautiful, well, maybe damaged goods now. Not nice to think it, but a lot of men don’t want a woman after she’s been raped.
Sykes goes through the medical examiner’s case. His name was Dr. Hurt. That figures, might be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Fell from an estimated five thousand feet, she reads, suffered massive trauma to his head, part of his brain avulsed, femurs driven up into his hips, crushed and fractured this, ruptured that. The only mention of the parachute is a brief description by a police officer who responded to the scene. He stated it appeared the chute was improperly packed. Witnesses claimed Dr. Hurt packed it himself. The possibility was raised that he might have committed suicide.
Colleagues and family acknowledged he was deeply in debt and getting divorced but claimed he wasn’t depressed or acting oddly at all — in fact, seemed to be in good spirits. Sykes has heard that tall tale before, people didn’t notice a thing. Well guess why. If they admit there was even the slightest reason for concern, they might feel guilty about being so caught up in their own lives that they couldn’t take a moment to worry about somebody else. She looks up as a knock sounds and the door opens. The chief medical examiner walks in, a mousy kind of pinched-looking woman somewhere in her fifties, granny glasses, a loose lab coat, a stethoscope around her neck.
“Now that’s something,” Sykes says, looking pointedly at the stethoscope. “You making sure everybody’s dead before you start cutting and sawing?”
The chief smiles, says, “My secretary asked me to check her lungs. She’s getting bronchitis. Just making sure you don’t need anything.”
It’s more than that.
“I don’t guess you were around here when Dr. Hurt died,” Sykes says.
“I succeeded him. What’s this about, exactly? Why all the interest?” She glances at the two case files on the table.
Sykes isn’t going to tell her, says, “Several seemingly unrelated deaths may have something in common. You know how it is, you have to look at everything.”
“I think it was pretty clear he was a suicide. Why’s the TBI involved?”
“It’s not, exactly.”
“Then you’re not working the case?” she interrupts.
“I’m helping. It’s not my case.” As if Sykes needs to be reminded of that one more time. “Like I said, I’m just checking out a few things.”
“Well, I see. I guess it’s all right. I’ll be in the morgue if you need me,” the chief says, and she shuts the door behind her.
Guess it’s all right. As if Sykes is a Girl Scout.
Then she thinks about Dr. Hurt, wonders about his state of mind, his level of professional competence, the effort he put forth if he was anxious and depressed and no longer valued his life. She imagines herself in a similar situation and is fairly certain she would miss important details, might not try very hard, maybe wouldn’t care. She keeps that in mind as she reviews the train fatality, a terribly mutilating death that occurred at a rail crossing on a two-lane rural highway, the freight train’s engineer stating that when he rounded a sharp curve at approximately eight fifteen that morning, he saw the decedent lying facedown across the tracks and couldn’t stop the train in time to avoid running over him. The victim’s name was Mark Holland, a thirty-nine-year-old detective with the Asheville Police Department.
His widow, Kimberly, was quoted in the newspaper as saying that her husband left their Asheville home early the previous evening en route to Charlotte, where he was to meet with someone, she didn’t know who, but “it was related to work.” He was not depressed and she could think of no reason whatsoever to account for his alleged suicide, that she was extremely upset and adamant that he would not have done such a thing, especially since “he just got promoted and we were excited about starting a family.”
The autopsy revealed a laceration to Mark Holland’s head and an underlying fracture (Well, no friggin’ wonder) that was consistent with a fall.
Dr. Hurt wasn’t just depressed, Sykes thinks, he was lights on, nobody home, bought into the Charlotte cop’s suggestion that Holland was crossing the railroad tracks on foot, perhaps on his way to have a secret meeting with a witness, tripped, fell, knocked himself unconscious. Dr. Hurt signed out the case as an accident.