Chopping Spree Page 25

  At quarter to four, I pulled off the interstate at the Aspen Meadow exit. I had to pick up my own son plus four other boys, drive back down the mountain, and endure an anatomy class. I was going to pass out if I didn’t have something to eat.

  To my surprise, there was no line at our little burg’s drive-through espresso place. Through the thickening swirl of snowflakes, I ordered a hot croissant ham-and-Swiss sandwich for myself, plus six biscotti and six large hot chocolates. Yes, extra-hot for the cocoa, and yes, with whipped cream. Extra whipped cream. I accepted the treats gratefully. Times of trauma, I reflected as I bit into the delicious sandwich—flaky pastry surrounding hot, thinly sliced Danish ham, just-melted Jarlsberg, and a hint of Dijon mustard—demand comfort food. I gunned the van toward Arch’s school, secure in the knowledge that when I’d finished wolfing down the sandwich, I had a cup of steaming, cream-topped cocoa waiting. Is there any better comfort food than chocolate? I think not.

  Outside the Upper School, I pulled the van behind a line of Mercedes, Jags, Audis, four-wheel-drive Lexuses, and late-model BMW’s. In the prep school big-spender environment, I knew that my van, with its emblazoned logo Goldilocks’ Catering, Where Everything Is Just Right! gave Arch no end of anguish. The parents who did not know my son attended EPP undoubtedly thought I was there to serve gourmet hot dogs, maybe at that day’s volleyball game.

  Arch and a group of boys, their jackets unzipped and their wool hats askew, tumbled out of the school doors. Steam issued from their mouths as they hollered and flung quickly scooped snowballs at each other. To avoid enemy missiles, they ran and slid expertly across the snowy ice. Seeing them free and happy made me think of Julian, trapped in jail. I shuddered.

  “Please say you brought us something to eat!” Arch exclaimed as he and his pals heaved their Sherpa-worthy backpacks into the van’s rear. “We’re starving! And freezing!”

  “Hot chocolate and biscotti!” I called and received a deafening but grateful chorus of Oh, yeah!

  “Mom, thanks,” Arch murmured uncharacteristically, as he balanced his treat and surreptitiously leaned forward from the backseat, so his friends couldn’t hear. Well, maybe my request for a little courtesy had hit its mark. That was two nice things he’d said to me in twenty-four hours. I glowed.

  “This is how a cadaver’s bone breaks,” called one of the boys, as he snapped his biscotto in two.

  “Oh, yeah?” my son replied. “This cocoa? It’s the color of the inside of the liver.”

  I placed my hot chocolate firmly in the cup holder and turned my attention to the road.

  During the drive, the boys joked mercilessly about the dissection and who was going to puke first. I clenched my teeth and decided not to accompany the boys inside. I had calls to make and a stomach to calm. But once in the hospital parking lot, the anatomy teacher hailed the van and said she was hoping all the moms could accompany the class, at least for the first ten minutes. I gulped the rest of my cocoa (for strength), hopped out carefully onto the ice, and told myself to buck up. After all, I’d seen corpses before, hadn’t I?

  As we filed into the small, windowless room, the odor of formaldehyde hit me like a slap. Undoubtedly kept as a sterile environment, the hospital classroom reminded me of the Furman County Morgue. A sheet draped the body, which lay on a metal table. Rows of gleaming medical instruments sat at the ready on a nearby wheeled shelf. I took a deep breath—not a smart idea, as the horrid odor flooded my lungs—and did a yoga centering exercise.

  No matter how you tell yourself to detach from your feelings, it’s impossible not to be apprehensive and sad when faced with a dead body. Once, the chilled flesh under this sheet had been a child, had played, and loved, and been loved. I shivered. When the teacher pulled back the sheet from the dead man’s face, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried the yoga exercise again. When I reopened my eyes, the corpse’s gray face and dark head of hair came into view. I slid my eyes around the group of students. Their bravado had evaporated. Instead, looks of fear, horror, and shock registered on the kids’ faces. A boy and a girl bolted from the room simultaneously. When the boy threw up on the linoleum floor outside the dissection room, the girl, who was racing to the ladies’, noisily followed suit.

  After ten minutes of cleaning up, settling down, and comforting from the nurses and the teacher, the red-faced pair rejoined the class. Quite uncharacteristically, their classmates made no fun, but patted their peers on the back and murmured that they’d almost blown lunch, too.

  Once things had calmed down, the teacher explained to the sickly-looking-but-attentive class that the subject was a middle-aged male, a diabetic with heart disease who’d died in his sleep in a small-town motel at the southwestern edge of Colorado. No family had claimed the body. The county coroner had determined the cause and manner of death, that is, that the man had died of a heart attack. There were no signs of a struggle, no foul play was suspected, et cetera. Since the unclaimed body was of a relatively young man who hadn’t been too fat, too thin, or a drug user, the Pueblo County Coroner, instead of doing an autopsy, had contacted the state anatomical board to offer the corpse as a donation for study. The board had accepted the specimen.

  I steeled myself as the teacher gently peeled back the sheet. The kids gripped one another’s arms and turned even more pale, but managed to keep their equilibrium. I was proud of them. After a moment, they began to study the specimen, thank God. It took courage to pull out their notebooks, turn academic attention toward the corpse, and start acting as if this really was a lab, and not hell.

  The dead man had been short and stocky, with a flat abdomen and wide shoulders. Well-developed muscles had strained under skin that was now as gray as the trunk of a dead tree. Long, thin black hair curled over the cadaver’s ears. An unremarkable face was distinguished by a nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. The teacher droned on, explaining that at one point this man, an insulin-dependent diabetic, had suffered from gangrene. The effects of that disease were still visible. The class nodded, took notes, and donned surgical gloves while my eyes traveled the length of the body.

  And then I gasped.

  To distract the students from my gaffe, the teacher hastily murmured about how they needed to check their notebooks carefully, that they needed to follow the procedure they had been taught. I pressed my lips together and forced myself to look again at the cadaver’s right foot.

  Yes, this man had once been someone’s son, had loved and played. He’d also once worked as a construction manager at Westside Mall. Unless I was very much mistaken, the deceased was Lucas No-toe Holden.

  CHAPTER 16

  I made a hand sign to the teacher, mouthing that I’d be right back. The poor woman nodded at me distractedly as I tore out of the classroom, no doubt certain I, too, was about to be sick. In my distress, I nevertheless remembered that cell phones were prohibited in hospitals. A phone, I thought desperately, I need a pay phone. Tom will know what to do.

  I raced at a clippety-clop down a linoleum-floored hall with echoing pastel-painted walls. The phone booth, however, boasted walls, a floor, and ceiling completely covered with carpet. It was so quiet I felt paranoid as I whispered my frantic discovery to Tom.

  “Goldy, the sheriff’s department can’t touch that body,” Tom replied calmly when I’d finished. “The only person who can deal with it is the county coroner.”

  “But… what about the hospital? Can’t they at least confirm this guy’s identity? I mean, if it is Holden, that has to mean something. Maybe someone murdered him. Maybe the person who murdered Barry killed No-toe—”

  “Hold on a sec.” Tom called across to an associate, asking him to call the coroner’s office and check if the cadaver now in the Lutheran Hospital teaching lab was Lucas Holden. In the distance, someone promised to get right on it. Tom returned to me.

  “Miss G., the hospital’s not going to know the name of the donor.” He was tapping computer keys. I rubbed my forehead. Maybe I was overrea
cting. Maybe there were a lot of corpses with missing toes, and I was going overboard. “Yeah,” Tom said, “we’re still looking for Lucas Holden since it’s an open case of a missing person. The coroner will talk to the anatomical board first, I can guarantee you that. He’ll find out exactly how and where they got this body, then send a staff member over to the hospital. OK? But if this guy with the missing toe died of natural causes in a remote area, that really doesn’t tell us much. Well, except why we haven’t been able to find him.”

  “If it is Holden, he was a diabetic. If Holden had to inject insulin, he could have been given a shot of something else, something to precipitate a heart attack. Heroin, say. They didn’t do an autopsy, remember.”

  “Miss G., please. The anatomical board won’t accept a cadaver where there’s any suspicion of foul play. And you also have to ask yourself why someone would want to kill this Holden. If he was an insulin-dependent diabetic with heart disease, any doctor is going to say you’d expect him to drop dead at the first opportunity. I’m not trying to be negative here. It’s just the truth.”

  “Maybe Holden saw something,” I insisted stubbornly. “Maybe he knew something. There must be a link. And you are being negative.” My fingers drummed the vertical carpet. “Did you get anything back on the Page Stockham shoe situation? I just found out Page separated from Marla and Ellie in the parking lot that night.”

  He inhaled, an attempt to be patient. “The three women did tell us they were at the shoe sale, Goldy. They all agree they left just before nine. If they hadn’t bought shoes, I’d be suspicious. But I’ll mention to the guys that I think Page Stockham should be questioned again. If she doesn’t have an alibi for the time Barry was killed, and if she was a bona fide enemy of his, they’ll be interested. And before you ask, the Teddy Fury failed car-stealing incident involved a VW bug.”

  “But Kim Fury said—”

  “You yourself told me that Kim the sister and Teddy the brother had an argument about one of Liz’s cars on Monday. Nobody here has any idea where Teddy Fury is at the moment. My guess would be he’s getting as far from that sister as possible.”

  I felt derailed. But I persisted. “I saw Hulsey at the jail. Any idea why they don’t consider me a suspect anymore?”

  “Maybe they believe you. Your story doesn’t have holes. Only the guitar has holes. Should I be out looking for another present for Arch, by the way?”

  Guilt thudded against my chest. “Sure,” I said, and gulped. “Great. Thanks.”

  “No sweat. So, what about Hulsey?”

  “He’s representing Julian now, and says the charge at the arraignment will be second-degree murder. Bail is set at a million. Julian passed the second polygraph, by the way.”

  “I heard.”

  I thought of the seconds ticking by while the kids dissected Lucas Holden, maybe destroying valuable evidence that might free Julian. Had Tom’s deputy reached the coroner? Or was I, like Julian, becoming both manic and desperate?

  My thoughts whirled. Ellie’s stolen Lexus had been rammed into Barry’s Mercedes. That seemed like too much of a coincidence to attribute the burglary to a garden-variety car thief. Plus, somebody had tried to get rid of Ellie last night. That had not been an accident. Plus, somebody had been driving that dump truck on Monday. Somebody had definitely tried to kill Barry in the West-side Mall parking lot. And, hours later, somebody had succeeded in killing him.

  “Tom, getting back to Ellie’s purse. Suppose Barry’s new wannabe girlfriend, Pam Disharoon, had been watching Ellie. Pam’s incredibly competitive. Say she saw her opportunity to nab the purse Teddy dumped. Could Pam have crashed Ellie’s car into Barry’s, picked up the cuff links, and later driven the runaway truck? All to make Ellie look bad in Barry’s eyes? Then when Barry said he was sticking with Ellie, Pam stabbed him.”

  “Mm, I’d probably believe anything of Pam Disharoon. That woman has been difficult.”

  Visions of the cadaver abruptly intruded. “Tom, can you stay on top of this cadaver question? To help Julian? Please?”

  Tom made his tone kind. “I promise. Don’t worry, we can handle this. But I do have one thing that might interest you.” I heard him shuffle papers. “A lawyer called us this morning, guy from a firm in Denver. Says his client is offering us evidence about the Barry Dean case, but only in exchange for immunity from prosecution by another governmental agency.”

  “You mean, immunity from a federal agency? As in, Make the IRS leave me alone?” My heart started to thump.

  “Probably. Happens all the time. Only the IRS and other federal agencies don’t prosecute. Not technically, anyway. They turn all their stuff over to a government attorney, who makes or doesn’t make a case.”

  I exhaled. “What kind of evidence was this guy offering?”

  “The attorney says his client will tell us why Dean had headaches.”

  “You mean, the client knows who pushed Barry down?”

  “Probably. And it looks as if the guys are going to take the deal.”

  While he mused aloud on the immunity question, I debated about confessing to my pill-bottle-in-the-apron discovery. It was finding the Vicodin that had spurred me to get the medical records faxed to me. But I hadn’t actually told Tom about the Vicodin yet. If I showed Tom the pills, was there any way I’d be able to avoid being charged with evidence-tampering? If the cops knew about Barry’s headaches and their cause, would they really care so much about the painkillers themselves? I tried to remember if I’d ever seen Tom use my clarified butter, where I’d stashed the pills. I didn’t think so.

  “Uh, well,” I stammered. “Just let me know about the coroner, will you?”

  Tom paused. “You, uh, you don’t know anything more about this headache deal, do you? I mean, I know you’ve… reviewed Dean’s records.”

  I gnawed the inside of my cheek, remembering my forging exercise to get Barry’s medical records. “Sorry. Listen, are you going to be home for dinner? I… have a couple of new theories about… this and that.”

  “I wish I didn’t have to say ‘I knew it.’”

  “I’ll explain it all later, promise. See you at six.” I bade him good-bye and hung up. Sometime in the next few hours, I had to figure out how I was going to present to Tom all the stuff I’d kept from him. My own head began to hurt.

  When I showed up at the classroom door, the teacher slipped out and asked if I was all right. I nodded. She informed me that the students had just started on the cadaver’s spleen.

  “Is there any way,” I asked, “that you could wait? There could be a question from the coroner’s office—”

  “Wait? Wait for what? The class has waited for this trip the entire semester. If we don’t proceed, we won’t finish. We can’t wait.”

  “Well, it’s just that I… thought I might have recognized the cadaver.”

  The teacher’s face turned as ashen as the corpse’s. “Oh, dear! Mrs. Schulz, please! I really have to get back to my class. What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll just…go to my van,” I faltered. And hope for whoever Tom’s deputy could muster to put an end to this, before more evidence was destroyed. I knew I couldn’t go back into the lab. Say the coroner did appear and demanded, “Which mom called about this cadaver?” Arch would never speak to me again.

  Instead, I sat in my van and tried to raise Pam Disharoon on the cell. No answer. I gave up when the anatomy class rushed out the hospital doors. The five boys I’d brought squeezed into the van in high spirits. All were eager for a gross-out competition. The snow had turned to slush on the interstate, so I concentrated on my driving. It was better than listening to merrily delivered descriptions of each organ, and how it was not as bad as the dead bat they’d found on a Scouts expedition or the dead elk their dad had scraped off the Rover bumper.

  To my great surprise, Tom was already home when Arch and I got there, putting the finishing touches on a cake with shiny chocolate icing. Comforted by his presence in the kitchen, I ga
ve him a big hug, washed my hands, and got to work myself. While I defrosted stock and sautéed mushrooms, he told me he hadn’t heard anything back yet on any of my inquiries. I tried to put the case out of my head as I energetically chopped vegetables for the salad I’d intended to serve at the Stockhams’ lunch before changing the menu.

  Because salads of chopped ingredients were all the rage among the Shop-Till-You-Drop set these days, I’d dubbed the creation Chopping Spree Salad. First I placed some hearts of palm into water to remove the brine, then assembled the rest of the ingredients. Since I was a great fan of limes for tanginess, I’d decided to feature lime in both the grilled chicken and the dressing itself. I sliced several of the bright green citrus globes and juiced them, then pounded fresh chicken breasts between layers of plastic wrap. After I’d whisked together a marinade of lime juice and olive oil, I carefully placed the breasts into it. Then I rewashed my hands and set about slicing and dicing a mountain of crisp romaine lettuce, flavorful vine-grown tomatoes, crunchy, barely sweet jicama, and fat scallions. Yum. While I preheated the indoor grill, I pulverized fresh and ground herbs in my mini food processor and whisked them with more lime juice, a bit of mayonnaise, and a touch of cream. Tasting the spicy mélange, I decided to add a bit more tang by grating in some aged Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. The result was a rich, sharp ranch-style dressing that would have sent Escoffier spinning in his grave. So what, I thought smugly, as I toasted pine nuts for a finishing touch. Soon the luscious scent of the grilling chicken brought Tom and Arch clomping back into the kitchen.

  At six, Arch, Tom, and I sat down to a meal of steaming cream of mushroom soup, heated cornmeal rolls, and dressing-topped slices of hot grilled chicken over an enormous bed of crisp, fresh, sliced, and diced vegetables. Arch and Tom could not have cared less what the dish was named, nor did they give a hoot about it being the fad among mall-crawlers. They dug into the salad as if they hadn’t eaten for days. (Come to think of it, Arch and Tom didn’t care much about Escoffier, either.)