“Will do. And . . . um . . . Mattie?” There’s a short pause before she adds, “There’s one other thing Izzy wanted me to tell you.”
Based on her hesitation, I suspect it won’t be good news. “Go ahead.”
“The car was pretty well hidden in the trees so these bodies have been out there a while, most likely for the whole two weeks they’ve been missing.”
“Oh.” I swallow hard. “I see.”
Bodies that are weeks old mean serious decay, and I haven’t yet done a bad decomp. But Izzy, who has referred to such bodies as “bloaters” and “slippers,” has talked about them enough that I know I’m in for a challenge. Rotting bodies don’t look or smell very good, and while I feel pretty comfortable dealing with blood, guts, and ghastly wounds, I’ve never seen or smelled a rotting corpse. This is virgin territory for me.
“Hold on a sec,” Cass says. “Izzy wanted me to call him on his cell and conference with you.”
I wait nervously, wondering just how awful this is going to be. A minute or so goes by and then I hear Izzy’s voice on my phone.
“Mattie, you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Cass filled you in on the situation?”
“She did.”
I am about to elaborate when I hear a male voice in the background speaking to Izzy. “Do you want to bend over now or should I wait until you’re done on the phone?” Izzy tells me to hold on a second and I hear his muffled voice as he answers, though I can’t make out any of the words.
“Mattie?” he says, returning to the phone. “I should only be here another half hour or so. You and Arnie snap some photos, get what info you can from the cops, and do your basic scene sketches. But wait until I get there to do anything with the bodies.”
“Okay.”
“This will be your first experience with serious decomp. Are you okay with that?”
“I’ll be fine,” I tell him with far more conviction than I feel.
“All right then. Go ahead, but take it slow.” I’m about to ask him another question when I hear him suck in his breath and yelp, “Damn it, Adam! I was talking to her, not you,” followed by the doctor’s hasty apology.
I can’t help but giggle and when Izzy hears me he says, “Knock it off or I’ll start revealing your real name to everyone.”
“My lips are sealed,” I say, suddenly serious. Other than Izzy, no one outside of my family knows my real name. I’ve always assumed my mother was on some really good drugs when she gave it to me. Fortunately, the only place it can be found is on my birth certificate. Mother apparently took pity on me afterward and nicknamed me Mattie. It’s the only name anyone has ever used since.
“See you out there, Izzy,” I say, and then I disconnect before I can hear anything else.
Five minutes later I’m at the office, changed into a pair of scrubs, and on my way upstairs to Arnie’s lab. I’m still trying to shake off the mental image of Izzy bent over an exam table getting his where-the-sun-don’t-shine probe, and I’m almost looking forward to the distraction of badly decomposed bodies.
Arnie spends most of his time entrenched in his second-floor lab. Our facilities are well equipped and larger than one might expect to find in a town of this size because the ME’s office covers not just Sorenson, but the entire county, even overlapping into adjacent counties at times. When Izzy took the ME’s position seven years ago, he was pretty aggressive in securing some of the very best and latest equipment for the office. As a result, we now process some of our own evidence whereas in years past it was all sent to Madison, a practice that led to increased expenses and considerable delays. But our machinery capabilities are far greater than our manpower. As our only lab tech, Arnie does on-call time twenty-four-seven and typically puts in sixty-plus hours a week, a situation that is beginning to wear on him. Izzy has hinted that he would like me to take some classes and become certified to work as Arnie’s assistant but he hasn’t pushed it too hard yet, given that I’m still learning what I need to know to function as Izzy’s assistant.
In the meantime, Arnie manages what he can and ships the rest off to the Madison lab. He hates sending anything out and would prefer to keep it all in-house, but as a one-man department, his abilities are limited.
Before coming to work with Izzy, Arnie was as an evidence technician for the L.A. Coroner’s office. I’m not sure why he left there or how he ended up in Podunk, Wisconsin, and when I’ve tried to ask him or Izzy about it, they always skirt around the issue. I suspect it might have something to do with Arnie’s fixation on conspiracy theories. He believes there are eyes in the sky watching our every move, spies circulating among us disguised as homeless people, and that the moon landing was faked but aliens really did crash in Roswell. Despite his paranoia and my suspicion that most of his friends wear aluminum foil hats, I like Arnie.
I find him in his lab, his head bent over a microscope, and he hails me by name without looking up, before I can say a word.
“It creeps me out the way you do that,” I tell him.
He shrugs, switches the magnification on his microscope, and says, “I can tell from the scents and the way people walk. It’s a talent you hone after a while.” He finally looks up at me, squinting as his eyes adjust focus. “What can I do for you?”
“There are a couple of bodies in a car wreck in the woods off Crawford Road, and Izzy wants the two of us to go out and start the preliminaries.”
“Without him?”
“For now. He’ll meet us there as soon as he’s done getting his alien anal probe.”
Arnie’s eyebrows shoot up with interest.
“He’s getting his annual physical,” I explain.
“Ah,” Arnie says. He grimaces and squirms a bit in his seat before pushing back from the table, shrugging off his lab coat, and gathering up his scene kit. “Tell me what you know,” he says.
“The cops think it’s a couple from Illinois who went missing two weeks ago. Apparently the bodies are in an advanced state of decomp.”
Arnie looks intrigued. “I wonder if it’s the Heinrichs.”
“Who?”
“Gerald and Bitsy Heinrich?” he says, looking at me like he can’t believe I don’t know them. “The oil magnate and his trophy wife?”
I shrug and he shakes his head, clearly disappointed. Then he enlightens me.
“Gerald Heinrich is the only child and sole heir of 1940s Chicago oil baron Dietmar Heinrich. Estimates list Gerald’s wealth in the billions. His first wife, Maggie, died from some type of cancer and he remarried a few years ago to a woman named Elizabeth, or Bitsy, Conklin. Bitsy used to be a . . . hmm, how should I say it . . . a specialty dancer.”
“You mean a stripper?”
“That, yes. But rumor had it she went a little farther than that in her heyday, providing private lap dances to certain clients, if you get my drift.”
I did.
“Come ride in the evidence van with me and I’ll fill you in on the rest,” Arnie says, rubbing his hands together gleefully. “This promises to be an interesting day.”
Chapter 14
I follow Arnie down to the garage where our one evidence van is stored. We stash our equipment inside and, as soon as we are underway, Arnie continues the Heinrich saga.
“Gerald Heinrich became quite smitten with Bitsy after a private lap dance or two and then paid her to quit dancing for anyone but him. It was assumed he’d keep her on the side as a mistress but he surprised everyone, especially his kids, when he married her.”
“How many kids does he have?”
“Four: two daughters and two sons by his first wife—a bunch of spoiled brats, if you ask me. They’re in their late twenties and early thirties and not a one of them has ever worked for a living. They sponge off their father’s money and spend their time partying, jet-setting, and trying to avoid the tabloids. As you might imagine, they marked Bitsy as a greedy gold digger right from the get-go and immediately declared her the enemy. Bitsy has a son and daughter of her own: father or fathers unknown, and about the same age as the Heinrich kids. And trust me, there is no love lost between the two camps.”