“I can never tell when you are serious,” Laurie said. She detected a certain amount of Jack’s typical sarcasm in his reply.
“It’s the best news I’ve heard in days,” Jack added. “Maybe weeks.”
“All right, let’s not overdo it,” Laurie said. She turned off the TV and the VCR. “Enough of the surprise, let’s eat.”
Over dinner the conversation turned to why no one even considered that the floater might be Franconi.
“For me it was the shotgun wound,” Laurie said. “Which I knew Franconi didn’t have. Also I was thrown off by the body’s being found way out off Coney Island. Now, if it had been fished out of the East River, it might have been a different story.”
“I suppose I was thrown off for the same reasons,” Jack said. “And then, when I realized the shotgun wound was postmortem, I was already engrossed in the issue about the liver. By the way, Lou, did Franconi have a liver transplant?”
“Not that I know of,” Lou said. “He’d been sick for a number of years, but I never knew the diagnosis. I hadn’t heard anything about a liver transplant.”
“If he didn’t have a liver transplant, then the floater isn’t Franconi,” Jack said. “Even though the DNA lab is having a hard time confirming it, I’m personally convinced the floater has a donated liver.”
“What else can you people do to confirm that the floater and Franconi are the same person?” Lou asked.
“We can request a blood sample from the mother,” Laurie said. “Comparing the mitochondrial DNA which all of us inherit only from our mothers, we could tell right away if the floater is Franconi. I’m sure the mother will be agreeable, since she’d been the one to come to identify the body initially.”
“Too bad an X ray wasn’t taken when Franconi came in,” Jack said. “That would have done it.”
“But there was an X ray!” Laurie said with excitement. “I just found out this evening. Marvin had taken one.”
“Where the hell did it go?” Jack asked.
“Marvin said that Bingham took it,” Laurie said. “It must be in his office.”
“Then I suggest we make a little foray to the morgue,” Jack said. “I’d like to settle this issue.”
“Bingham’s office will be locked,” Laurie said.
“I think this situation calls for some creative action,” Jack said.
“Amen,” Lou said. “This might be that break I’ve been hoping for.”
As soon as they had finished eating and cleaning up the kitchen, which Jack and Lou had insisted on doing, the three took a cab down to the morgue. They entered through the receiving dock and went directly into the mortuary office.
“My God!” Marvin commented when he saw both Jack and Laurie. It was rare for two medical examiners to show up at the same time during the evening. “Has there been a natural disaster?”
“Where are the janitors?” Jack asked.
“In the pit last time I looked,” Marvin asked. “Seriously, what’s up?”
“An identity crisis,” Jack quipped.
Jack led the others to the autopsy room and cracked the door. Marvin had been right. Both janitors were busy mopping the expansive terrazzo floor.
“I assume you guys have keys to the chiefs office,” Jack said.
“Yeah, sure,” Daryl Foster said. Daryl had been working for the medical examiner’s office for almost thirty years. His partner, Jim O’Donnel, was a relatively new employee.
“We’ve got to get in there,” Jack said. “Would you mind opening it?”
Daryl hesitated. “The chiefs kind’a sensitive about people being in his office,” he said.
“I’ll take responsibility,” Jack said. “This is an emergency. Besides we have Lieutenant Detective Soldano with us from the police department, who will keep our thievery to a minimum.”
“I don’t know,” Daryl said. He was obviously uncomfortable, as well as unimpressed, with Jack’s humor.
“Then give me the key,” Jack said. He stuck out his hand. “That way you won’t be involved.”
With obvious reluctance, Daryl removed two keys from his key chain and handed them to Jack. “One’s for the outer office, and one is for Dr. Bingham’s inner office.”
“I’ll have them back for you in five minutes,” Jack said.
Daryl didn’t respond.
“I think the poor guy was intimidated,” Lou commented as the three rose up to the first floor in the elevator.
“Once Jack is on a mission, look out!” Laurie said.
“Bureaucracy irks me,” Jack said. “There’s no excuse for the X ray to be squirreled away in the chiefs office in the first place.”
Jack opened the front office’s outer door and then Dr. Bingham’s inner door. He turned on the lights.
The office was large, with a big desk beneath high windows to the left and a large library table to the right. Teaching paraphernalia, including a blackboard and an X-ray view box, were at the head of the table.
“Where should we look?” Laurie asked.
“I was hoping they’d just be on that view box,” Jack said. “But I don’t see them. I tell you what, I’ll take the desk and the file cabinet, you look around the view box.”
“Fine,” Laurie said.
“What do you want me to do?” Lou asked.
“You just stand there and make sure we don’t steal anything,” Jack scoffed.
Jack pulled out several of the file drawers, but closed them quickly. The full-body X rays that were taken by the morgue came in large folders. It wasn’t something easily hidden.
“This looks promising,” Laurie called out. She’d found a stash of X rays in the cabinet directly under the view box. Lifting the folders out onto the library table, she scanned the names. She found Franconi’s and pulled them free of the others.
Returning to the basement level, Jack got the X rays of the floater and took both folders back to the autopsy room. He gave Bingham’s office keys to Daryl and thanked him. Daryl merely nodded.
“Okay, everybody!” Jack said walking over to the view box. “The critical moment has arrived.” First he slipped up Franconi’s X rays and then the headless floater’s.
“What do you know,” Jack said after only a second’s inspection. “I owe Laurie five dollars!”
Laurie gave a cry of triumph, as Jack gave her the money. Lou scratched his head and leaned closer to the light box to stare at the films. “How can you guys tell so quickly?” he asked.
Jack pointed out the lumpy shadows of the bullets almost obscured by the mass of shotgun pellets in the floater’s X rays and showed how they corresponded to the bullets on the Franconi films. Then he pointed to identical healed clavicular fractures that appeared on the X rays of the two bodies.
“This is great,” Lou said, rubbing his hands together with enthusiasm that almost matched Laurie’s. “Now that we have a corpus delicti, we might be able to make some headway in this case.”
“And I’ll be able to figure out what the hell’s going on concerning this guy’s liver,” Jack said.
“And maybe I’ll go on a shopping spree with my money,” Laurie said, giving the five-dollar bill a kiss. “But not until I figure out the how and the why this body left here in the first place.”
Unable to sleep despite having taken two sleeping pills, Raymond slipped out of bed so as not to disturb Darlene. Not that he was terribly worried. Darlene was such a sound sleeper that the ceiling could fall in without her so much as moving.
Raymond padded into the kitchen and turned on the light. He wasn’t hungry but he thought that perhaps a little warm milk might help to settle his roiling stomach. Ever since the shock of having been forced to view the terrible sight in the trunk of the Ford, he’d been suffering with heartburn. He’d tried Maalox, Pepcid AC, and finally Pepto-Bismol. Nothing had helped.
Raymond was not handy in the kitchen, mainly because he didn’t know where anything was located. Consequently, it took him some time to heat the milk and find an appropriate glass. When it was ready, he carried it into his study and sat at his desk.