Everett looked around and curled up his nose. “You do most of your autopsies in a mortuary? This place looks like it’s owned by the Addams family.”
“They let me use a slab in their refrigerator now and then. Autopsies we do at the hospital in Saratoga, or in Albany,” Mark said.
With a second key he unlocked a large metal door at the end of the corridor and ushered them into a gleaming tiled room that was markedly colder than the temperature outdoors. A stainless-steel table with a drain at its center and a bucket underneath occupied the middle of the floor. Suspended from the ceiling was a large OR lamp, and around the walls stood big yellow vats connected by beige tubing to shiny silver probes that looked like giant needles. Glass jars containing various colored fluids lined the counters, and two metal cabinets filled with stainless-steel instruments were against the walls. The aroma of formaldehyde picked at the back of his nostrils like a swarm of ants. “Better breathe through your mouth, gentlemen,” he warned, crossing over to what looked like a built-in filing cabinet with half a dozen giant drawers. He reached for the third handle down, and pulled out what was left of Kelly McShane.
Her bones had mostly come apart during the retrieval operation, and trying to lay them out in the correct anatomical order had taken Mark an entire weekend. He wasn’t sure he got all the small phalanges of the fingers exactly right, and everything was still discolored brown. The forensics pathologist he’d talked to in New York had told him to do the best he could and not clean the specimen until their own cold-case specialist could view the remains. Consequently, the piecemeal skeleton and remaining strands of tissue had the appearance of something dug up from antiquity.
“Race you to the raft, Mark!”
A flash of golden skin parted the water, and the splash sparkled white in the sun. He plunged after her, laughing with delight as he frantically swam through her wake, then drew alongside, managing to touch the bobbing platform first.
Only now did he realize she had let him win.
“So what do you have?” Everett asked, quickly removing his overcoat and snapping on a pair of latex gloves he took from a box on the counter.
“First, what we didn’t find. No jewelry, no buttons, no belt buckle, and not so much as a shred of clothing, some of which we figure should have survived in all that cold mud, so we assume she was stripped before going in the water…”
As he spoke, Mark envisioned her plunging through the murk, sleek and white as a taper, her strawberry blond hair streaming out behind her.
“… nor were there any distinctive marks on the anchor and chain used to weight her down. What we do have are the remains you see before you, the obvious feature being the skull fracture.” Mark retrieved a pen from his jacket pocket and used it to indicate a three-inch crack that cut across her right temple. Filled with debris, it stood out like a leech on the subtler corrugated markings where the various bony plates in the cranium joined together. “Whoever hit her knew exactly the spot,” he continued. “The point of impact measured two finger widths above the zygomatic arch and a thumb width behind the frontal process of the zygomatic bone itself. That’s directly over the middle meningeal artery.” He picked up the skull, turned it over, and held it so the detective could look inside the cranial vault through the foramen magnum, the large opening through which the spine had been connected to the brain.
The interior emitted a whiff of rot.
Everett screwed up his nose and jerked his head away.
“See how there are bony splinters pressed inward,” Mark continued, shoving the specimen back in front of his eyes. He’d be damned if he’d let this worn-out little man evade a single detail of what had been done to Kelly. The trick to getting the best out of cops was the same as with doctors – make them care. “They probably tore the vessel, setting off a massive hemorrhage. Pray to God she was still unconscious going in the water.”
“Still?”
“Trauma that tears the meningeal artery causes a bleed between the lining of the brain and the skull. Sometimes victims stay unconscious until they die. Sometimes they wake up and are lucid for a while. There’s a chance she was sent to the bottom awake and aware.”
“My God,” Dan said.
Even Everett looked taken aback. He rotated his neck as if it needed loosening up. “That’s it?”
“There’s nothing else to look at.”
“So it’s still a cold case.” The detective pulled off his gloves.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’d love to spend a couple of weeks up here and work the evidence with you. Hell, I’m in love with your town, even though I can’t see it. It’s everything New York’s not, quiet, clean, and slow. Bet the fishing’s great. Trouble is, you don’t have any new evidence to work, and I got recent caseloads up the wazoo back home that do.”
“But it’s murder.”
Everett’s thin shoulders slumped, and he let out a rattling sigh. “It’s a body, what’s left of it, with a skull fracture. That anchor, chain, and padlock your retrieval team pulled up? We checked them out already. Virtually untraceable, they’re so common. Otherwise, there’s not a thing to point us where we haven’t already been. NYPD investigated the hell out of her disappearance twenty-seven years ago, the same as if she’d been a murder case. Not only did every lead come up empty – especially anything having to do with our prime suspect back then, her husband – but the PIs hired by the girl’s parents couldn’t find anything either. Factor in all the clout old man Braden still has in New York City, no one’s willing to put his son through a first-degree shit-ride again without a damn solid reason.”
To this point, Mark had considered the detective’s visit as simply the necessary first step in the NYPD resuming the hunt for Kelly’s murderer. That they’d try to dump it never occurred to him. “That sucks!”
“You bet.”
“And what would it take to reopen the case? I can’t just let it go.”
Everett shrugged and began pulling on his overcoat. “Well, say, you find a lead on the mystery man she met up with. We’d be on him in a New York minute.”
“I find a lead?”
“You want more done, do it yourself, Doc. You and the sheriff here.” He picked up his briefcase, snapped it open, and took out a pair of files, each the size of the Manhattan phone book. “I made copies of our records on the case, the basic stuff. Your body, your jurisdiction, guys. Sorry, but it’s the best I can offer.” He jammed the two tomes of paper into Mark’s chest and walked out the door.
“Jesus, what an asshole,” muttered Dan, and hurried after him.
Mark remained where he was, too astonished by the kiss-off to say anything. A slam echoed down the corridor, and once again he found himself alone with Kelly.
A half hour later he looked up from leafing through the material Everett had left, startled to see Dan standing at the door watching him. “Christ, I didn’t hear you return.”
“You were pretty engrossed in your reading. Find anything?”
“No. It’ll take forever to go through this stuff.” Mark slammed the files closed. “Can you believe that guy, laying the whole thing on us?”
Dan walked over and flipped one of the dossiers open again. Scanning the front page, he said, “Actually, it kind of makes sense.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know what cracks cold cases?”
“What?”
He nudged the folder he’d been looking at back toward Mark. “One guy who can’t get it out of his head. I’d say that’s you, buddy.”
5:00 P.M.
Geriatrics Wing,