Vitti squeezed my chin, patted my cheek, and lumbered away, announcing as he went that rosters had to be in no later than five tomorrow, for five thirty kickoff.
Shupfer cast her eyes heavenward: Have mercy.
I watched Vitti disappear into his office, then reopened CME.
According to our system, Nicholas Linstad was a divorced white male, age forty-two.
His next of kin was his father, Herman Linstad, residing in Gottenborg, Sweden.
He had died on December 2, 2005, of an acute cerebral hemorrhage resulting from blunt trauma to the head.
The manner of death was accidental.
The coroner’s investigator was M. Ming.
I knew Ming in passing. One of the last civilian CIs, he’d retired long ago but was known to drop by the office every now and again. He and Shupfer were close. The M stood for Marlborough.
I emailed document storage.
Twenty-four hours later, a box arrived containing Linstad’s file, along with several dozen others. His was comparatively thick, containing the full autopsy protocol, a handful of photos, and portions of the Berkeley police report.
Paging through, I noted a number of superficial similarities to the Rennert case.
Linstad lived north of campus, on the upper floor of a duplex, the bottom half of which served as his office. An exterior staircase offered direct access to the living quarters. It was at the foot of these stairs that the body had been found, by the mail carrier, circa nine thirty a.m. In his narrative, Ming recorded intermittent rain on the preceding day, increasing throughout the night. Linstad’s hair and clothing were soaked. The wooden banister on the second-floor landing was rickety, and the door to the upstairs unit was slightly ajar. The interior showed some disorder but no definitive sign of a struggle. There were few furnishings and almost no clutter, which made it hard to tell. A single wineglass on the coffee table; another in the sink; a half-empty wine bottle sat on the counter, a second empty in the trash.
If you wanted to see similarities, you had to see differences, too.
Whereas Rennert’s body showed no cuts or abrasions, Linstad’s bore the hallmarks of a fall. Attempting to arrest his descent, he’d made a desperate grab at the duplex’s wooden siding, leaving deep gouges in the shingles, collecting splinters under his fingernails; tearing the right middle fingernail halfway off. Bruises ran down his spine; a long thin bruise marred his right flank, the likely result of slamming against the edge of a stair tread. Scrapes covered his knuckles, and there was blood on and around the bottommost steps, in enough quantity that it hadn’t washed away overnight. The pathologist concluded that the major trauma came from Linstad’s head hitting the pavement, rather than from an object. Toxicology gave a blood alcohol level of.11.
The parallels I did see were better explained as coincidental. Linstad and Rennert both drank. So what? Booze is a versatile killer — death’s utility player. Some people drink enough to weaken their aortas. Others drink and fall down the stairs.
Look for connections and you can find them anywhere.
Linstad lived in a duplex. Aha! So did Tatiana.
See? Hot garbage.
A statement taken by Berkeley PD heightened my interest somewhat. A rear neighbor claimed he’d heard the sound of an argument, followed by a loud bang — possibly a gunshot — around midnight.
Canvass failed to corroborate him, however, and when pressed, the guy admitted he couldn’t be sure the noise hadn’t been a thunderclap or that it hadn’t come from a television. There was, it appeared, no follow-up.
Nobody — not us, not police — mentioned the offender from the Donna Zhao murder. Either they hadn’t known about him or they regarded his involvement as so unlikely as to not merit a phone call.
Yet despite all this, Coroner’s Investigator Ming, in his initial finding, had mannered the death undetermined.
I could sense his discomfort radiating off the page. Undetermineds don’t sit well with anyone, especially next of kin. We make every effort to avoid them, convening monthly to hash them out in a group session, along with Vitti and our lieutenant. Most of the time we can arrive at a determination, just as Ming and Co. eventually had.
The death of Nicholas Linstad became an accident.
What had made Ming doubt?
I asked Shupfer if she had his phone number handy.
“I got an old case of his,” I said.
She gave me her stare-down, then scribbled on a Post-it. “Here you go, princess.”
Before I could dial, my desk phone rang.
“Coroner’s Bureau, Deputy Edison.”
“Ahhh, yes, hello there.”
“How’s it going, Mr. Afton.”
“It’s going all right, thank you, yeah. Listen, I wanted to tell you that I am ready to go ahead with the arrangements for the burial that we discussed earlier.”
“County indigent,” I said.
“Hahhhuhh...? No sir, I did not mean that, I don’t mean that.”
“You found a relative?”
“Yes sir. Well no, not that, but I spoke to the man at the place where they got him at, and originally they said it was going to cost eleven hundred dollars but the man said he can do it for five.”
The mortuary getting rid of the body, even at a loss. Chalk one up for pigheadedness. Though by Afton’s own account, five hundred was still more than he could afford.
He beat me to it: “As a matter of fact and to tell you the truth I do not have that amount in my possession currently, but I am expecting to have it sometime next week.”
“Right.”
“So what I would like from you, sir, is to inform you of that fact, so that we can keep the situation in a holding pattern, okay, a little while longer until this other situation comes through and I can get me paid.”
“Next week?”
“Yes sir.”
“Okay. You’re sure about this?”
“Ahhha, yes, yes I am.”
“All right.”
“All right all right. So I’ll talk to you next week, then.”
“No need. You can just handle it with the folks at the mortuary.”
“Yes sir. I will do that. You take care now.”
“You, too, Mr. Afton.”
I replaced the phone. Studied the Post-it with Ming’s number, unsure whether to call.
Moffett decided for me. “Yo, Coach. Ten fifty-five Alameda, we’re up.”
I stuck the Post-it to the bottom of my screen and reached for my vest.
Chapter 11
Two weeks later, I hadn’t heard from Afton or the mortuary, which I took as a good sign. I also hadn’t heard from Tatiana, which I chose to regard as not a sign of anything. I still had the Post-it stuck to my screen, but it had drifted to the margins of my awareness.
On a slow Saturday morning, I opened my queue to begin closing out cases.
Click a name, confirm everything’s square, send it sailing into history.
I came to RENNERT, WALTER J.
The autopsy protocol had come in the previous day.
I didn’t need to read it. I knew what it said. Everything was square.
I moved my cursor to SUBMIT.
The Post-it seemed to light up.
I pulled it loose. Stared at it. Called Ming.
Got voicemail.
I hung up without leaving a message and put the Post-it in the trash.
The cursor sat, ready and willing to flush Rennert Walter J. and Rennert-Delavigne Tatiana Middle-initial-something from my system.
I couldn’t tell her the story she wanted to hear, but I might yet convince her I’d kept an open mind.
I clicked the supplementary tab and opened Rennert’s cellphone data dump.
In the week leading up to Walter Rennert’s aortic dissection, he’d used his browser sparingly. He read CNN and BBC. He searched Southwest flights from Oakland to Reno. He shopped for a new showerhead, probably to replace the leaky one in his attic quarters. He visited the homepage for the California Psychological Association, following many of the links. He’d abandoned his position but not his passion.