“What have you found?”
he asked immediately.
“Deborah Harvey was shot in the back.”
“Morrell told me. Said the bullet was unusual. Hydra-Shok, nine millimeter.”
“That’s correct.”
“What about her boyfriend?”
“I don’t know what killed him. I’m waiting on tox results, and 1 need to confer with Vessey at the Smithsonian. I’m pending both cases for now.”
“The longer you pend them, the better.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m saying that I’d like you to pend the cases for as long as possible, Kay. I don’t want reports going out to anyone, not even to the parents, and especially not to Pat Harvey. I don’t want anyone knowing that Deborah was shot – ” “Are you telling me that the Harvey’s don’t know?”
“When Morrell informed me, I made him promise to keep the information under wraps. So, too, the Harvey’s haven’t been told. Uh, the police haven’t told them. They know only that their daughter and Cheney are dead.”
He paused, adding, “Unless you’ve released something that I don’t know about.”
“Mrs. Harvey has tried to get hold of me a number of times, but I haven’t talked to her or hardly anybody else during the past few days.”
“Keep it that way,” Wesley said firmly. “I’m asking you to release information only to me.”
“There will come a point, Benton,” I said just as firmly, “when I will have to release cause and manner of death. Fred’s family, Deborah’s family, are entitled to that by Code.”
“Hold off as long as possible.”
“Would you be so kind as to tell me why?”
Silence.
“Benton?”
I was about to wonder if he was still on the line.
“Just don’t do anything without conferring with me first.”
He hesitated again. Then, “I presume you’re aware of this book Abby Turnbull is under contract to write.”
“I saw something about it in the paper,” I answered, getting angry.
“Has she contacted you again? Uh, recently?”
Again! How did Wesley know Abby had come to see me last fall? Damn you, Mark, I thought. When he had telephoned me, I had mentioned that Abby was with me that night.
“I haven’t heard from her,” I replied curtly.
6
Monday morning the road in front of my house was blanketed in deep snow, the sky gray and threatening more bad weather to come. I fixed a cup of coffee and debated the wisdom of my driving to Washington. On the verge of scrapping my plans, I called the state police and learned that 1-95 North was clear, the snow tapering off to less than an inch by Fredericksburg. Deciding that my state car wasn’t likely to make it out of my driveway, I loaded the cardboard box in my Mercedes.
As I turned off on the Interstate, I realized that if I had a wreck or were pulled over by the police, it wasn’t going to be easy explaining why I was heading north in an unofficial car with human skeletons in the trunk. Sometimes flashing my medical examiner shield wasn’t enough. I never would forget flying to California carrying a large briefcase packed with sadomasochistic sexual paraphernalia. The briefcase got as far as the X-ray scanner, and the next thing I knew airport security was squiring me away for what was nothing less than an interrogation. No matter what I said, they couldn’t seem to get it through their heads that I was a forensic pathologist en route to the National Association of Medical Examiners’ annual meeting, where I was to give a presentation on autoerotic asphyxiation. The handcuffs, studded collars, leather bindings, and other unseemly odds and ends were evidence from old cases and did not belong to me.
By ten-thirty I was in D.C. and had managed to find a parking place within a block of Constitution Avenue and Twelfth. I had not been to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History since attending a forensic anthropology course there several years before. When I carried the cardboard box inside a lobby fragrant with potted orchids and noisy with the voices of tourists, if wished I could leisurely peruse dinosaurs and diamonds, mummy cases and mastodons, and never know the bleaker treasures housed within these walls.