“Whoa, slow down, would you?”
“I can’t slow down, Mattie. People around me are turning up dead with frightening frequency lately and it’s making me a tad anxious.”
“Understandable,” I say slowly.
Hurley lets forth with a weighty sigh. “You’re not starting to have doubts about me, are you? Because I’m counting on you, and if you’re withholding information from me, I’m thinking we’ve got a problem.”
“Minniver was more than just your neighbor, wasn’t he?”
He doesn’t answer right away and while I’m waiting, I reach over and turn off the shower.
“We had some disagreements recently,” Hurley says finally. “He didn’t like where I put my fence, claiming it encroached on his property. He has . . . had some old survey map from twenty years ago that shows a different property line than what my survey shows. So he’s suing me.”
“Not anymore,” I toss out.
Hurley groans. “What did he die of?”
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “My first thought was that he had a heart attack but after reviewing his medical record I think that’s unlikely. Right now I have no idea what killed him. We’re going to post him this morning.”
“Do you suspect something other than natural causes?”
“Not necessarily. While it’s unlikely that his heart was the cause, he could have had a stroke, or thrown a blood clot, or blown an aneurysm. There are a ton of natural causes in a man his age that are plausible. Hopefully we’ll be able to narrow it down once we’ve done the autopsy.”
“I want to be there when you do it.”
My heart skips a beat. There is nothing I like more than having Hurley around, even when it occurs over a dead body. But . . .
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I say. “Clearly you’ve got some connections to this man other than the typical neighborly one. Given the other . . . situation, I think it might be wiser if you distanced yourself from the investigation.”
“But that just makes me look guilty.”
“Are you?”
This time the silence stretches out for what seems like a full minute or more, long enough that I start to wonder if he’s disconnected the call. I’m about to call his name to see if he’s still on the line when he says, “What do you think, Mattie? Do you think I went off the deep end and killed both my ex-girlfriend and my neighbor?”
The term “ex-girlfriend” rankles me, particularly when I realize I’m still naked. It just feels wrong to be nude and discussing an ex-lover with someone I have a current interest in. Plus, I’m reminded of how lovely and tiny and petite she was, and as I survey my own body in the mirror, I’m reminded of my many faults, not the least of which are the bingo wings I can see developing on my upper arms. Fortunately I’m spared visualizing anything below the waist since the mirror is mounted too high.
“I don’t think you killed anyone, Hurley, but I want to hear you tell me,” I say finally. “I need to hear it, from your lips to my ears.”
“I didn’t kill them, Mattie. I swear it. But I’m starting to get a very bad feeling about all of this.”
Well, that makes two of us. “I’ll call you after the autopsy is done, okay?” I say, hedging for now. I’m hoping that once I have a definitive cause of death for Harold Minniver, things will be clearer in my mind. “But there’s no way you should be there. It’s just too . . . too . . . dicey. I think you should continue with your case of the blue flu.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Hurley admits, and while I’m tempted to breathe a sigh of relief, his quick capitulation leaves me suspicious. It doesn’t help that he hangs up before I can utter another word. I stare at my phone a minute, wondering what to do.
Once I’m showered, dressed, and blown dry, I gather up the hair I collected from Hurley’s bathroom, hop into my hearse, and head out. When I arrive at the office, I find it empty of any living souls, though there are now two dead ones in our morgue fridge. I check the fax machine and find a reply from a hospital in Chicago verifying that the numbers on the breast implants we sent them were surgically implanted in a patient named Callie Dunkirk, confirming our presumptive identity.
As I’m walking the fax report to Izzy’s desk, I hear the door to the garage area open. A minute later Arnie, our lab tech and resident conspiracy theorist, appears. Despite his casual dress, John Lennon glasses, and ponytailed hair, all of which make him look more like a Woodstock survivor than a scientist, he’s a whip-smart and very talented evidence tech.
“You’re here early,” he says when he sees me.
“I had my first solo last night and thought I’d come in to prep the body.”
“Wow,” he says, looking suitably impressed. “Izzy let you out on your own already?” The way he says it you’d think I was a serial murderer who’d just been paroled.
“He did,” I say, “though it appeared at first blush to be a pretty basic case. It was a PNB the EMTs brought into the hospital. The guy had a cardiac history so it was assumed that was the cause of death.”
“And you found something to make you think otherwise?” Arnie looks intrigued. He loves unraveling mysteries and he’s suspicious by nature. Both qualities, combined with his faith in science, make him excellent at his job.
“I did, though it might have been some other natural cause.” Arnie looks crestfallen. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
“How much prep did you do last night?”
“Just the weight and the basic intake paperwork. I didn’t do the vitreous samples . . . I hate those.” Obtaining vitreous samples requires sticking a needle into the dead person’s eye and withdrawing a sample of fluid. It gives me the heebie-jeebies. When I worked as an OR nurse, I never did the eye cases if I could help it. Eyes creep me out.
“No problem,” Arnie says with a shrug. “How about we do the X-rays together and then I’ll collect the vitreous samples while you develop the film.”
“That would be great. Thanks.”
I get the X-ray processor turned on and warmed up while Arnie fetches Harold Minniver’s body from the fridge. After hoisting Minniver, still inside his body bag, onto the X-ray table, we shoot head-to-toe pictures of him. Then we put him back on the stretcher and wheel him into the autopsy room, where Arnie does the eye thing while I retreat to the dark room.
When I’m finished and carry the X-rays into the autopsy room, I see that Arnie has opened Minniver’s body bag but has only started with the vitreous samples. “Have you gone over any of the evidence from Callie Dunkirk yet?” I ask him, turning my back and hanging the films on a wall-mounted viewer.
“I typed the blood from her wound,” Arnie says. I shudder as I hear the faint squishy squeak of a needle entering an eyeball. “I also looked for fingerprints on the knife that killed her but the carved surface of the handle isn’t very conducive to retaining them. I found a very small partial and sent it to Madison but I don’t know if it will be enough. And those metal fragments we found in her hair? Turned out those are lead bits, most likely from soldering.”
I’d forgotten about the metal bits and as soon as Arnie says this, I recall Hurley’s workshop, where I saw both an acetylene torch and a soldering iron. I hadn’t made the connection when I was there last night; I was too distracted by Hurley’s presence. But I’m making it now and it seems a little too coincidental. The earrings Hurley gave me are still in my ears and my lobes feel hot all of a sudden.
“I also examined that hair we found in the congealed blood of the wound,” Arnie says.
This is the direction I wanted the discussion to go so I shake off my sense of dread and try to focus on my original plan.
“What, exactly, do you look for when you examine hair evidence?” I ask, trying to sound only mildly curious. Arnie loves talking about his work and he takes great pride in what he does. So I’m hoping for a basic rundown of hair as trace evidence to give me some idea of what to look for if I compare Hurley’s hair to the one found on Callie, assuming I can do so on the sly. But I forgot how extreme and varied Arnie’s interests are, and he gives me a whole lot more than the basics.