“Was there a lot of blood?” Floyd asked.
Mike shook his head. “There wasn’t any blood or even a chair out of place. It was like Aaron had fallen asleep.”
“There wasn’t any sign of a struggle?”
“No, there wasn’t anything out of place. Like I said, it was eerie. Everything was just as we’d left it, except that Aaron was still at the table with the bottle of pain pills Betsy had given him.”
“Okay, so tell me what happened next.”
“All of a sudden, Betsy pulls up to the house and comes in screaming that Kenny’s dead. Someone called her house and told her that Ken had been killed in a car accident in Iowa. At that point, Melissa goes totally berserk. She’s crying and swearing, and Betsy freaks when she sees Aaron.”
“You left him sitting in a chair?” Pam asked.
“Yeah, I guess so. No one would touch him, so he just sat there. We went to Melissa’s house and talked about what to do. She was adamant that Ken’s mom would be totally berserk if she found out Ken had killed Aaron…well, she was sure it would kill Ken’s mom. We finally decided to do nothing. It was a secret, and we split up until someone came up with a plan.”
“What made you think that Kenny had killed Aaron?” Pam asked.
“Well, they’d been arguing and then the next time we saw Aaron he was dead. I guess we just assumed…”
“Didn’t you wonder how Kenny had killed him if there was no blood or evidence of a struggle?” Floyd asked.
“Not really,” Mike replied. “Kenny had been bragging about how he’d been trained to kill with his bare hands. I just assumed that Kenny had somehow…somehow killed him in a way that I couldn’t see. Maybe he broke his neck or strangled him, or something.” Mike gripped the table edge and drew a deep breath.
“The next day we wrapped Aaron in a blanket and loaded him into my parent’s minivan. Melissa opened the back door of the funeral home at like five in the morning. She and I carried him in through the back door and she used some sort of fancy Allen wrench to unlatch Kenny’s coffin. That was the worst part; Kenny was in there and he was a mess. They’d put a uniform on him but his head was wrapped up in gauze like a mummy.”
“So,” Floyd summarized, “you loaded Aaron on top of Ken and locked the casket again. When they had the memorial service the next day both Ken and Aaron were in the casket.”
Mike nodded and looked sheepish.
“You said Aaron was still alive when you and Betsy left,” Pam said. “So there’s really no witness to Aaron’s death.”
“I guess not,” Mike said, “but who other than Ken would’ve killed him?”
CHAPTER 51
Floyd was part of a small crowd watching the backhoe drive across the baked gravel driveway leading through the Birchwood Cemetery. Bradshaw’s hearse was near Ken Solstad’s grave, and the groundskeeper was busily arranging a tarp to protect the grass from the dirt that would be removed.
“What’s a corpse that’s not embalmed going to look like after years in a coffin?” Floyd asked Tony Oresek, the St. Louis County Medical Examiner. Oresek had a dark complexion and hair consistent with his eastern European heritage. He was a few inches taller than Floyd and was known for being totally wrapped up in his job to the point of forgetting meals or dealing with his personal appearance. Although his office was in Duluth and he was an employee of St. Louis County, he served as the medical examiner for many northern Minnesota counties.
Oresek’s assistant, Eddie Paulson, stood next to the medical examiner in his blue smock. He was a Viet Nam vet who chose to wear his graying hair in a ponytail. His weathered face watched the activity without emotion.
“Depends,” Eddie Paulson replied. “If the casket was watertight and in a vault, it may be pretty well decomposed, but still articulated at the joints. Sometimes we get a collapsed casket and there are crushed bones with no tissue left at all.”
“Will having another embalmed body with it have an effect on the other body?” Floyd asked.
“Not much.” Oresek was a man of few words.
“This isn’t going to be pretty,” Pam said from behind Floyd.
“Depends,” Eddie replied. “You’ll probably find it less offensive than a postmortem on a fresh corpse. It’ll be less…odiferous.”
“Like I can smell anything with all the cotton jammed up my nose,” Pam said.
“What happened to your nose?” Eddie asked.
“A bungled arrest. I ended up on the bottom of the pile when everyone jumped on the bad guy.”
“You should try some green eye shadow,” Floyd suggested. “It’ll go nicely with the fading bruises under your eyes.”
Eddie chuckled. “I think she should go with black and try for the Goth look.”
“Shh,” Sepanen said, nodding toward the Solstads and Sue Roberts, who were standing side by side on the opposite side of the excavation.
It only took five minutes for the backhoe to dig down to the concrete lid of the burial vault. The cemetery groundskeeper jumped into the hole with a spade and chain, and a few moments later the shovel on the backhoe raised the lid. Ten minutes later a copper-colored casket, dusty, but looking unscathed from its two decades in the vault, emerged from the ground. Three men moved quickly to align it on a cart sitting on the driveway before detaching the chain and rolling it into the hearse.
“Showtime,” Oresek said.
Karen Solstad was standing on the edge of the driveway hugging Sue Roberts as the hearse rolled by.
The short procession of the hearse, the medical examiner’s Suburban, and several sheriff’s cars stopped at the mortuary’s rear entrance. Floyd, Pam, and John Sepanen were at the end of the procession of people following the casket into the workroom.
Paul Bradshaw cranked the latch mechanism and then stepped back. “Do you want me to open it?”
“I’ll do it,” Eddie, the medical examiner’s assistant, said as he pulled on a pair of latex gloves and donned a surgical mask. Paul Bradshaw moved a bank of adjustable overhead lights over the casket and turned them on, brightening the area like daylight.
“Here,” Oresek said as he handed out surgical masks to the others in the room. “At a minimum there will be lots of mold spores you don’t want to breathe.”
Eddie slid his fingers under the edge of the lid and lifted the smaller lid segment with apparent ease. He took a brief look inside and then opened the larger section. “It appears we have two sets of remains,” he said.
Pam let out her breath, not realizing that she’d been holding it. “Thank God,” she whispered.
They watched Tony Oresek step beside Eddie and engage in a muted conversation. “Mister Bradshaw, can you help us?” Oresek asked.
“If we had a sheet or blanket,” Oresek said, “I think we could roll the corpse back and forth to get fabric under it. Then, we could remove it intact.”
Paul moved quickly to a cabinet and returned with a white sheet. The three men worked in concert and after a few moments they carefully lifted the top set of remains free of the casket.
“Let’s set him on the stainless steel table,” Paul said.
Oresek took out a small tape recorder. “The remains have been resting on top of a second set of remains in a single casket.
“The upper set of remains is arranged head-to-toe with the lower remains. The upper corpse has not been embalmed and the tissue is decomposed. The resulting decomposition has stained the clothing beneath the body. The upper corpse is dressed in a blue and white plaid flannel shirt and denim bib overalls. The lower set of remains have been embalmed and the tissue is intact, although desiccated. The lower corpse is clothed in a military uniform and much of the material is badly stained.”