then grew louder as the police car came closer. It sounded like a
single siren, a single car. But that was enough.
Stay or go?
They own half the cops, Peter had said.
He ran down the hall, turned sharply to the right, then saw a small
painted wooden door. He flung it open: wooden shelves piled with
linens.
The siren grew louder, now accompanied by the crunch of a car’s wheels
on gravel. The police were arriving at the front of the building.
Ben ran toward another wooden doorway at the end of the hall. A small
louvered window next to it told him the door led to the outside. He
turned the knob and pulled at the door. It stuck; he pulled again,
harder, and this time it yielded and the door came open.
The area outside had to be safe by now: the police sirens would have
scared the gunmen away. No one would be lurking in the dense woods back
here for fear of getting caught. He leaped forward into the underbrush,
his foot snagging on a vine, knocking him painfully to the ground.
Christ! he thought. Must hurry. The police had to be avoided at all
costs. They own half the cops. He scrambled to his feet, lunged
forward into the pitch-black.
The siren had gone silent, but now there were shouts, both female and
male, the crunch of feet on the gravel. Running forward, he pushed
branches away from his face, but still one scraped him, just missing an
eye. He kept going, not slowing for a second, turning this way, juking
that, through the close vegetation, the narrow tunnels, under canopies
formed by interlaced branches. Something tore at his pants. His hands
were scraped and bloodied. But he kept plowing through the trees,
machinelike, unthinking, until he came to the hidden clearing where
Peter’s truck was still parked.
He opened the driver’s side door–unlocked, thank God–and of course
there was no key in the ignition. He felt under the floor mat. Nothing.
Under the seat. Nothing.
Panic overcame him. He inhaled sharply several times to try to calm
himself. Of course, he thought. I’ve forgotten what I know.
He reached into the mess of wires beneath the dash, pulled them out to
inspect the tangle by the weak overhead light. Hot-wiring, their
beloved family groundskeeper, Arnie, had told him and Peter one summer
morning. This is a skill you may never have a use for. But if you do,
you’ll sure be glad you got it.
In a few moments he’d paired the two wires, and the ignition turned
over, roared to life. Slamming the gearshift into reverse, he backed
out of the clearing onto the dark road. No headlights in either
direction. He shifted into drive; the old truck balked, but then
lurched ahead, surging down the deserted highway.
CHAPTER NINE.
Halifax, Nova Scotia
The next morning was cold and dreary. Fog had settled gloomily over the
port, visibility no more than ten feet ahead.
Robert Mailhot lay on a steel examination table, clothed in a blue suit,
his face and hands rosy with the funeral home’s garish makeup. The face
was bronze-tinted but heavily lined, angry, the thin mouth sunken, the
nose a prominent beak. He looked to be five foot ten or eleven, which
meant he’d probably been six feet tall as a young man.
The medical examiner was a corpulent, ruddy-faced man in his late
fifties named Higgins: a thatch of white hair, small suspicious gray
eyes. He was perfectly cordial, while at the same time guarded,
neutral. He wore a green surgical gown. “So you’ve got reason to
believe this was a homicide?” he said jovially, his eyes watchful. He
was dubious and made no attempt to mask it.
Anna nodded.
Sergeant Arsenault, in a bright red sweater and jeans, was subdued. Both
of them were rattled by their long and difficult interview with the
widow. In the end, of course, she had given permission for the autopsy,
saving them the headache of having to ask for a court order.
The hospital morgue reeked of formalin, which always made Anna uneasy.
Classical music played tinnily from a portable radio on the
stainless-steel counter.
“You’re not expecting to find any trace evidence on the body, I hope,”
Higgins said.
“I assume the body was pretty thoroughly washed at the funeral home,”
she said. Did he think she was an idiot?
“What are we looking for, then?”
“I don’t know. Puncture marks, bruises, wounds, cuts, scratches.”
“Poison?”
“Could be.”
She and Higgins and Arsenault together removed Mailhot’s clothing, and
then Higgins swabbed the body’s hands and face clean of makeup, which
could hide marks. The eyes had been sutured shut at the funeral home;
Higgins cut the stitches and inspected for petechial hemorrhages-tiny
pinpoints of blood under the skin–that might indicate strangulation.
“Any bruising inside the lips?” Anna asked.
The mouth, too, had been sutured closed. The medical examiner quickly
sliced through the twine with a scalpel, then poked around inside the
mouth with a latex-gloved finger. When someone is smothered with a
pillow with enough pressure to stop the flow of air, Anna knew, you
usually find bruises where the lips were forced against the teeth.
“Uh-uh,” he said. “None that I can see.”
All three began inspecting the shriveled body with magnifying glasses,
inch by inch. With an old person this is difficult work: the skin is
covered with dings and bruises, moles and broken capillaries, the marks
and accretions of age.
They looked for needle marks in all the usual places: the back of the
neck, between fingers and toes, the backs of the hands, the ankles,
behind the ears. Around the nose and cheeks. Injection marks could be
disguised with a scratch, but nothing turned up. Higgins even checked
the scrotum, which was large and loose, the penis a tiny stub nestled on
top. Pathologists rarely checked the scrotum. The guy was thorough.
They spent over an hour at it, then turned Mailhot over and did the
same. Higgins took photographs of the body. For a long time no one
spoke; there was just the stat icky crackle of a clarinet, the lush
swell of strings, the hum of refrigerators and other machinery. The
formalin smell was unpleasant, but at least there was no smell of decay,
for which Anna was thankful. Higgins checked the fingernails for tears
or rips–did the deceased fight an assailant?–and scraped under the
nails, putting the scrapings into small white envelopes.
“Nothing on the epidermis out of the ordinary, far as I can see,”
Higgins declared at last.
She was disappointed but not surprised. “Poison could have been
ingested,” she suggested.
“Well, it’ll turn up in the tox,” Higgins said.
“Maybe not,” she said. “There’s no blood.”
“May be some,” Higgins said. If they were lucky. Usually, when the
funeral home prepared the body, the blood was completely removed except
for small residual pockets, and replaced with embalming fluid. Methanol,
ethanol, formaldehyde, dyes. It broke down certain compounds, poisons,
rendering them untraceable. Maybe there’d be some urine remaining in
the bladder.
He cut the usual Y-shaped incision from the shoulder down to the pelvis,
then reached inside the thoracic cavity to remove the organs and weigh
them. This was one of the aspects of an autopsy Anna found particularly
repellent. She worked with death regularly, but there was a reason she
hadn’t become a pathologist.
Arsenault, looking pale, excused himself to get a cup of coffee.
“Can you take some samples of brain, some bile, kidney, heart, and so
on?” she said.
Higgins smiled tartly: don’t tell me my business.
“Sorry,” she said.
“I’d wager we’ll find arteriosclerosis,” Higgins said.
“No doubt,” she said. “The man was old. Is there a phone around here I
can use?”
The pay phone was down the hall next to a vending machine that dispensed
coffee, tea, and hot chocolate. The front of the machine was a large
oversaturated color photograph of cups of hot chocolate and coffee,
intended to look appetizing, but actually greenish and awful. As she
dialed she could hear the buzz of the Stryker saw as Higgins cut through
the rib cage.
Arthur Hammond, she knew, normally got to work early. He ran a poison
control center in Virginia and taught toxicology courses at a
university. They’d met on a case and liked each other instantly. He
was shy, spoke with an intermittent hesitation that hid an old slammer,
rarely looked you in the eyes. Yet he had a wicked sense of humor. He
was a scholar of poisons and poisonings back to the Dark Ages. Hammond
was far better than anyone in the federal labs, better than any forensic
pathologist, and certainly far more willing to help. He was not only
brilliant but intuitive. From time to time she had brought him in as a
paid consultant.
She caught him at home, on his way out the door, and explained.
“Where are you?” he asked.