My mind raced through all the possibilities of what might happen if I dropped everything and left with her. For one thing, I was unnerved by the thought of the two of us alone for five hours inside a car.
'It's residential,' she went on. 'It started early yesterday morning, and a body has been recovered. A woman. In the master bathroom.'
'Oh no,' I said.
'It's clear the fire was intended to conceal that she had been murdered,' she said, and then went on to explain why it was possible the case was related to the one in Warrenton.
When the body was discovered, Pennsylvania state police had immediately requested assistance from ATF. Then ATF fire investigators at the scene had entered data on their laptops, and ESA got a hit almost instantly. By last night the Lehigh case had begun to take on huge significance, and the FBI offered agents and Benton, and the state police had accepted.
'The house was built on a slab,' McGovern was explaining as we got on I-95 North. 'So no basement to worry about, thank God. Our guys have been there since three o'clock this morning, and what's curious is in this case, the fire didn't do the job well at all. The areas of the master suite, a guest room right above it on the second floor, and the living room downstairs are pretty badly burned, with extensive ceiling damage in the bathroom, and spalling of the concrete floor in the garage.'
Spalling occurs when rapid, intense heat causes moisture trapped in concrete to boil, fragmenting the surface.
'The garage was located where?' I asked as I tried to envision what she was describing.
'On the same side of the house as the master suite. Again, a fast, hot fire. But the burning wasn't complete, a lot of alligatoring, a lot of surface charring. As for the rest of the house, we're talking mostly smoke and water damage. Which isn't consistent with the work of the individual who torched the Sparkes farm. Except for one important thing. So far, it doesn't appear that any type of accelerant was used, and there wasn't a sufficient fuel load in the bathroom to account for the height of the flames.'
'Was the body in the tub?' I asked.
'Yes. Makes my hair stand on end.'
'It should. What kind of shape is she in?' I asked the most important question as McGovern held our speed ten miles over the limit in her government Ford Explorer.
'Not so burned that the medical examiner couldn't tell her throat was cut.'
'Then she's already been autopsied,' I assumed.
'To be honest, I really don't know how much has been done. But she's not going anywhere. That's your turf. Mine's to see what the hell else we can find at the fire scene.'
'So you're not going to use me to shovel out debris?' I asked.
McGovern laughed and turned on the CD player. I was not expecting Amadeus.
'You can dig all you want,' she said with a smile that relieved a lot of tension. 'You're not bad at it, by the way, for someone who probably doesn't run unless she's being chased. Or work out anything except intellectual problems.'
'You do enough autopsies and move enough bodies, and you don't need to lift weights,' I distorted the truth, badly.
'Hold out your hands.'
I did, and she glanced over at them, changing lanes at the same time.
'Damn. I guess it didn't occur to me what saws and scalpels and hedge pruners will do for muscle tone,' she commented.
'Hedge pruners?'
'You know, what you use to open the chest.'
'Rib shears, please.'
'Well, I've seen hedge pruners in some morgues, and knitting needles used to track bullet wounds.'
'Not in my morgue. At least not in the one I have now. Although I will admit that in the early days one learned to improvise,' I felt compelled to say as Mozart played.
'One of those little trade secrets you don't want to ever come out in court,' McGovern confessed. 'Sort of like stashing the best jar of confiscated moonshine in a secret desk drawer. Or cops keeping souvenirs from scenes, like marijuana pipes and whacko weapons. Or medical examiners hanging on to artificial hips and parts of fractured skulls that in truth should be buried with the bodies.'
'I won't deny that some of my colleagues aren't always appropriate,' I said. 'But keeping body parts without permission is not in the same category as pinching a jar of moonshine, if you ask me.'
'You're awfully straight and narrow, aren't you, Kay?' McGovern stated. 'Unlike the rest of us, you never seem to use poor judgment or do anything wrong. You probably never overeat or get drunk. And to be honest, it makes the rest of us schleps afraid to be around you, afraid you'll look at us and disapprove.'
'Good Lord, what an awful image,' I exclaimed. 'I hope that's not how I'm perceived.'
She said nothing.
'Certainly I don't see myself that way,' I said. 'Quite to the contrary, Teun. Maybe I'm just more reserved because I have to be. Maybe I'm more self-contained because I always have been, and no, it's not my tendency to publicly confess my sins. But I don't look around and judge. And I can promise I'm much harder on myself than I'd ever be on you.'
'That's not been my impression. I think you size me up and down and inside out to make sure I'm suitable to train Lucy and won't be a pernicious influence.'
I could not answer that charge, because it was true.
'I don't even know where she is,' I suddenly realized.
'Well, I can tell you. She's in Philly. Bouncing back and forth between the field office and her new apartment.'
For a while, music was our only conversation, and as the beltway carried us around Baltimore, I could not help but think of a medical student who also had died in a suspicious fire.
'Teun,' I said. 'How many children do you have?'
'One. A son.'
I could tell this was not a happy subject.
'How old is he?' I asked.
'Joe is twenty-six.'
'He lives nearby?'
I stared out the window at reflective signs flowing by, announcing exits to Baltimore streets I used to know very well when I studied medicine at Johns Hopkins.
'I don't know where he lives, to tell you the truth,' she said. 'We were never close. I'm not sure anyone has ever been close to Joe. I'm not sure anyone would want to be.'
I did not pry, but she wanted to talk.
'I knew something was wrong with him when he started sneaking into the liquor cabinet at the tender age of ten, drinking gin, vodka, and putting water in the bottles, thinking he would fool us. By sixteen, he was a raging alcoholic, in and out of treatment, DUIs, drunk and disorderlies, stealing, one thing after another. He left home at nineteen, skipping around here and there and eventually cut off all contact. To be honest, he's probably a street person somewhere.'
'You've had a hard life,' I said.
14
THE ATLANTA BRAVES were staying at the Sheraton Hotel on Society Hill when McGovern dropped me off at almost seven P.M. Groupies, old and young, were dressed in baseball jackets and caps, prowling hallways and bars with huge photographs in hand to be signed by their heroes. Security had been called, and a desperate man stopped me as I was coming through the revolving door.
'Have you seen them?' he asked me, his eyes wildly darting around.
'Seen who?' I said.
'The Braves!'
'What do they look like?' I asked.
I waited in line to check in, not interested in anything but a long soak in the tub. We had been held up two hours in traffic just south of Philadelphia, where five cars and a van had smashed into each other, sending broken glass and twisted metal across six lanes. It was too late to drive another hour to the Lehigh County morgue. That would have to wait until morning, and I took the elevator to the fourth floor and slid in my plastic card to open the electronic lock. I opened curtains and looked out at the Delaware River, and masts of the Moshulu moored at Penn's Landing. Suddenly, I was in Philadelphia with a turn-out bag, my aluminum case, and my purse.