“He may have anticipated that you’ll do this,” I said quietly.
“That I’d relegate myself to being the lightning rod? Step into the ring instead of letting an assistant handle it?”
I nodded.
“Well, perhaps so,” he answered.
I was sure of it. I wasn’t Sparacino’s intended quarry. His old nemesis was. Sparacino couldn’t pick on the attorney general directly. He would never get past the watchdogs, the aides, the secretaries.
So Sparacino picked on me instead and was being rewarded with the desired result. The idea of being used this way only made me angrier, and Mark suddenly came to mind. What was his role in this?
“You’re annoyed and I don’t blame you,” Ethridge said. “And you’re just going to have to swallow your pride, your emotions, Kay. I need your help.”
I just listened.
“The ticket that will get us out of Sparacino’s amusement park, I strongly suspect, is this manuscript everyone’s so interested in. Any possibility you might be able to track it down?”
I felt my face getting hot. “It never came through my office, Tom–”
“Kay,” he said firmly, “that’s not my question. A lot of things never come through your office and the medical examiner manages to track them down. Prescription drugs, a complaint of chest pain overheard at some point before the decedent suddenly dropped dead, suicidal ideations you somehow manage to get a family member to divulge. You have no power of enforcement, but you can investigate. And sometimes you’re going to find out details no one is ever going to tell the police.”
“I don’t want to be an ordinary witness, Tom.”
“You’re an expert witness. Of course you don’t want to be ordinary. It’s a waste,” he said.
“And the cops are usually better interrogators,” I added. “They don’t expect people to tell the truth.”
“Do you expect it?” he asked.
“Your local friendly doctor usually expects it, expects people to tell the truth as they perceive it.
They do the best they can. Most docs don’t expect the patient to lie.”
“Kay, you’re speaking in generalities,” he said.
“I don’t want to be in the position–”
“Kay, the Code reads that the medical examiner shall make an investigation into the cause and manner of death and reduce his findings to writing. This is very broad. It gives you full investigative powers. The only thing you can’t do is actually arrest somebody. You know that. The police are never going to find that manuscript. You’re the only person who can find it.”
He looked levelly at me. “It’s more important to you, to your good name, than it is to them.”
There was nothing I could do. Ethridge had declared war on Sparacino, and I had been drafted.
“Find that manuscript, Kay.”
The attorney general glanced at his watch. “I know you. You put your mindto it, you’ll find it or at least discover what’s become of it. Three people are dead. One of them A Pulitzer Prizewinner whose book happens to be a favorite of mine. We need to get to the bottom of this. In addition, everything you turn up that relates to Sparacino you report back to me. You’ll try, won’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied. “Of course I’ll try.”
I began by badgering the scientists.
Documents examination is one of very few scientific procedures that can supply answers right before your eyes. It is as concrete as paper and as tangible as ink. By late Wednesday afternoon the section chief, whose name was Will, and Marino and I had been at it for hours. What we were discovering was a vivid reminder that not one of us is above being driven to drink.
I wasn’t sure what I was hoping. Maybe it would have been a simple solution had we determined right off that what Miss Harper had burned in her fireplace was Beryl’s missing manuscript. Then we might conclude that Beryl had relegated it to the safekeeping of her friend. We might assume that the work contained indiscretions that Miss Harper chose not to share with the world. Most important, we could conclude that the manuscript really had not, after all, disappeared from the crime scene.