He peeled off the sheet and folded it neatly, revealing a white-haired, oddly angry-looking man dressed in a pair of pajamas.
“Whoa,” Lester said, drawing near. “Not a man to piss off, even now. Want me to poke him with a stick first?”
Joe shook his head, but with a slight smile. “Who wound you up this morning?”
Lester didn’t answer, bending over to better scrutinize Marshall’s face. “He doesn’t look all that different from how he did in the old newspaper photo. Just older.”
Joe agreed. He reached for a convenient dispenser of latex gloves and sheathed his hands in electric blue rubber. Lester did likewise, in case Joe needed help.
“What’re we looking for?” he asked, positioning himself on the other side of the gurney.
Joe barely murmured, “Don’t know yet,” as he unbuttoned the pajama jacket.
It was cold in the room, but the body had obviously begun cooling before being moved here. The limbs and jaw were stiff, the anterior part of the body pale and its posterior mottled with pooled and congealed blood. Joe pressed his thumb firmly into a section of dark red skin and saw no blanching, indicating that livor mortis had already set in. On TV, fictional pathologists were always setting the time of death as if it were stamped on the body’s forehead. Joe and Lester knew better. Time of death was an elusive standard, camouflaged by the whims of temperature and circumstance, among others, and best established by someone reliable having seen the person die. Nevertheless, estimates could be reasonably assumed, as Joe demonstrated by saying, “Well, he didn’t die ten minutes ago.”
Lester glanced at his watch, taking a more serious stab at it. “Last night sometime? The pj’s suggest after he went to bed. If we find his sheets messed up when we check his apartment, that would support it.”
“He could’ve been a Hugh Hefner fan,” Joe said distractedly, his face inches above the body and his hands running along the man’s arms, checking for defects or abnormalities. He studied the fingernails for any signs of a struggle. Lester started doing the same thing from his side.
Slowly, they proceeded from scalp to toes, sometimes comparing notes, scrutinizing the body’s anatomy inch by inch and then flipping it over carefully to do the same along the discolored dorsal side.
Finally, not having found anything out of place, they returned Marshall to his original position, and Joe moved to his face. There, he delicately lifted up an eyelid.
“Any petechial hemorrhaging?” Lester asked, inquiring after the tiny blood bursts that often accompanied strangulation or asphyxia.
Joe shook his head. “Nope. It’s not always there, though.”
His fingers felt at the lips, barely working to pry them open. But they were frozen shut, by rigor and the bonding effect of dried saliva, and he desisted immediately, muttering, “I’ll let the ME mess with that.”
“We’re definitely going for an autopsy?”
Joe looked up. “The guy dies just as we’re about to interview him? I don’t care if he was diagnosed with triple cancer. That’s a coincidence I want looked at. Besides, after what it took to convince Roger Carbine, I’m not about to back down now. He was already wary of messing with a famous ex-politician, complete with a doc standing by, ready to sign a death certificate.”
There was a knock at the door, and a uniformed police officer with sergeant’s stripes walked in, looking irritated. “There you are. We heard you hit the premises an hour ago.”
Joe walked up to him, stripping off his gloves and extending a hand in greeting, which the other man had to accept.
“I am so sorry, Sergeant-” Joe quickly checked the man’s name tag. “-Carrier. That was unprofessional and uncalled for. Got carried away when I heard the body was still here.” He stepped aside to introduce Lester. “This is Lester Spinney. I get like a dog with a bone. The apartment okay, by the way?”
Carrier was unimpressed by the apology. His mouth curled as he said, “Wouldn’t know. Your colleague on the phone made it pretty clear there was no search warrant yet and we were to bar the door and not mess up the playground. You might tell her to brush up on her manners if you expect any help in the future.”
Joe could feel Spinney tensing beside him. For all Lester’s joking around, he was a loyalist, and perfectly ready to defend the unit’s honor.
“We’re flying on instinct here,” Joe tried mollifying Carrier. “Not on hard evidence. But consider the odds: We’re running an interview on the far side of the state, this guy’s name comes up-out of the blue-and I immediately get notified that he’s dead. I don’t know about you, but I had to check it out. We’re all working on so little sleep by now-just like you guys-that we’re getting a little punchy. No offense intended.”
Joe paused for half a breath and asked, “How bad did Irene hammer you?”
Carrier paused, caught off guard. “Bad enough-like everybody, I guess.”
“Yeah. We’re based out of the Brattleboro-Wilmington area,” Joe said.
The reference to Wilmington softened the sergeant’s demeanor, even though Joe hadn’t actually been to the town.
“Shit,” Carrier said sympathetically. “What’s left of it?”
“Not much,” Joe stated vaguely. “They pretty much got clocked. The whole downtown.”
“Yeah. I saw the footage on YouTube. Amazing.”
Joe took advantage to pat Carrier’s upper arm lightly, as a peace gesture. “Anyhow, I do apologize. None of us needed a death investigation, and you sure as hell didn’t need us getting under your skin.”
Carrier took the hint and moved on, casting a glance at the exposed body. “You find anything?”
Joe raised an eyebrow. “Wish I knew. We’ll send him up for a closer look, but nothing obvious so far. You want to help me with the apartment? I’ll get a team up here later, but I’d love to take a quick look-see. We got permission from the next of kin.”
Carrier hardly jumped with joy, but he did give a grudging nod. “I suppose. Sure.”
CHAPTER TEN
Gail Zigman lived in a condominium overlooking Montpelier. It was a nice place, modern, with two floors, three bedrooms, and two full baths-part of a complex stretching out to either side. All the units had views of the capitol building’s shimmering gold dome, the crooked Winooski River-now looking benign despite its savagery earlier-and the town’s scattering of lights, cradled in the valley’s lowlands, as if delivered by an avalanche of lightbulbs from the surrounding hills.
Of course, there was security-plainclothed state troopers placed inconspicuously about. The neighbors only appreciated the extra protection and enjoyed the fact that their governor lived among them.
Gail did live alone, however, as she had ever since winning one of the more bitter gubernatorial contests in recent history. She’d had a lawyer companion before then, complete with a BMW, who’d looked good on her arm and performed adequately in bed. But he’d become a casualty of practical thinking and her career, along with a rueful, late-blooming realization that she was less sentimental than she’d previously believed.
She could admit that now, much as she might have denied it earlier. And as she sat alone in the darkness of her spare and immaculate home, sipping wine in the comfort of a Marcel Breuer Wassily armchair and facing the darkened panorama through a wall-to-ceiling picture window, she could also admit that it wasn’t the rape that was to blame, or her breakup with Joe. More fundamentally, despite occasionally expressing a degree of self-pity, she’d come to accept that she alone had abandoned her early communal life, not ever wanted a child, avoided settling down with Joe, and grown tired of being a local municipal politician. She had a hardness within her, she’d realized, mixed with a drive that the rape might have laid bare, but which had been hard-wired within her all along.