Dr. Death by Jonathan Kellerman

Milo said, “What are you saying? A body switch?

The corpse was never examined closely—we’re talking french fry. It wasn’t till years later, when I matched Rushton’s navy prints to those of Michael Burke, that I came across the switch. By that time, it was too late to learn anything about who really got burned. The owner was an accountant from Tucson, driving to Vegas with his wife. The car was hot-wired while they sat at a truck-stop eating burgers.”

“Any idea who got burned?” said Milo. Fusco shook his head and looked over his shoulder again. “No sign of Rushton for a year and a half. I figure he copped one or more false identities and traveled around for a while. The next time I can tag him he was living in Denver and going by the name of Mitchell Lee Sartin, a student at Rocky Mountain Community College, majoring in biology. The print backtrack verifies Sartin as Rushton. He applied for a job as a security guard, got his fingers inked. The Sartin I.D. was one of those graveyard switcheroos—the real Mitchell was buried twenty-two years before, in Boulder. Sudden infant death, three months old.”

“And no reason for the security firm to cross-reference with the navy,” said Milo.

“Not hardly. Those guys have been known to hire schizophrenics. The prints were checked with local felony files, where, of course, they didn’t show up. Sartin got a job patrolling a pharmaceutical company at night. By day, he attended classes. He lasted one semester— straight A’s. Life sciences and a course in human figure drawing.”

“Drawing,” I said. “Is that what you meant by talented?”

Fusco nodded. “A couple of his former schoolmates remember him as a great doodler—cartoons, mostly. Obscene stuff, making fun of teachers, other authority figures. He never worked for the school paper. Never chose to affiliate.”

He took a long drink of cola. “During Sartin’s enrollment at Rocky Mountain CC, two female students went missing. One was eventually found up in the mountains, dead, sexually abused and mutilated. The other girl’s whereabouts remain unknown. This was the first time Grant Rushton/Mitchell Sartin attracted any attention from law enforcement. He was among several individuals questioned by the Denver police because he’d been seen talking to one of the girls in the college cafeteria the day before she disappeared. But it was just a routine interview, no reason to check further. Sartin didn’t reenroll, left town. Disappeared.”

“All this within two years of high-school graduation?” I said. “He was only twenty?”

“Correct,” said Fusco. “Precocious lad. The next few years are another cloudy area. I can’t prove it, but I know he returned to Syracuse to visit Grandma a year later. Though no one remembers seeing him.”

“Something happened to Grandma,” said Milo.

Fusco’s lips curled inward. He ran a hand over the white bush atop his head. “One of those Syracuse winters, late at night, Grandma drove her car into a tree on a rural road and went through the windshield. Her blood alcohol was just over the limit and an empty brandy bottle was found on the front seat. By the time they found her body, it was frozen stiff. No reason to think it was anything other than a single-driver DUI thing, except for the fact that Grandma was a stay-at-home drinker, never went out at night. Rarely drove, period. No one could explain why she’d taken the car out in a freezing storm or why she was out in the sticks, a good fifteen miles from her house. No one also thought to question why, with that kind of impact, the bottle would be right there on the seat. Irma Huie didn’t leave much of an estate—her place was rented, she kept no bank accounts. The police didn’t find any money, not a penny in the cookie jar. Which I find curious because she’d lived on pension money from her husband and Social Security income, and her landlord said she kept cash around, he’d seen wads of bills bound by rubber bands. A year later, Mitchell Sartin surfaced as Michael Ferris Burke and enrolled in City University of New York as a sophomore pre-med major. He presented a transcript—later shown to be forged—from Michigan State University, claiming a year of courses, GPA of 3.8. CUNY bought it. Burke gave his age as twenty-six—to match the stats on another I.D. he’d cribbed, this time from a dead baby in Connecticut. But he was only twenty-two.”

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