Riverwatch

Chapter Nine: Explanations?

Edward Strickland, Medical Examiner for Porter County, stepped into the chill confines of the morgue and switched on the lights. Though it was late in the evening, Strickland was preparing to perform one last task for the night, a task he had saved until the end, so that other duties would not prevent him from giving it his complete attention.

Strickland was an agreeable man in his early sixties, and had been M.E. for the last sixteen years. Despite his constant joking that the only reason he’d been able to retain his post was due to the fact that nobody else wanted it, he was a competent professional who got the job done and got it done right the first time. He was nearing retirement, but was in no way ready for it.

His work was a constant intrigue to him, and he pursued it with an almost fanatic devotion. To find him working far into the night, as he planned on this occasion, was not an unusual occurrence. The silence in the morgue after-hours was deep and peaceful, soothing, vastly different from the hectic pace that enveloped the facility during regular hours.

Brilliant fluorescent lights illuminated the room in which he was working, washing across the institutional green walls and slick linoleum floor. A body lay on the mortician’s table before him, its flesh a sickly shade of gray, the color of death. A wide white tag was tied to the big toe on the corpse’s left foot, giving the deceased’s name, age, and proximate cause of death. Strickland gave the tag a quick glance.

"Halloran, Kyle, Caucasian male, age 26, probable overdose," he read to himself, humming aloud to the strains of Mozart that wafted through the room from the speakers set in the ceiling above, just loud enough to be heard.

His rubber-soled shoes made barely a sound as he circled the body before him, carefully looking it over for any obvious telltale injuries, dictating his findings aloud so the microphone above the table could pick them up for transcription.

When he thought he’d seen all there was to see, he moved to the tray of instruments that was set up alongside, and picked up a scalpel. The cool metal of the blade glinted sharply in the light.

"Now, my dead, young friend, " he said to the corpse as he reached out and made the first incision in the slightly rubbery flesh, "let’s see what secrets you’re hiding."

Three hours later he was finished. When he’d first read the tag, Strickland had expected the post-mortem to be a rather straightforward piece of work. But now that he was finished, he realized that this was anything but a straightforward case. He discovered a number of things that just didn’t make any sense, and while they bothered him, they also sparked his professional curiosity; something that didn’t happen all that often anymore. In over thirty years of forensic medicine, he thought he’d seen it all. The body on the table before him proved him wrong. Determined to get to the bottom of things, he dialed Detective Wilson’s office extension.

"Hello?"

"Damon, its Ed. Figured I’d find you there. Don’t you ever go home?"

Wilson laughed. "Sure, right around the same time you do." The two men had known each other for years, from before Damon had gone off to Chicago. They’d gone to the same high school together, had even dated some of the same women. Their friendship had picked up again once Damon had returned home.

"What’s up?" Damon asked.

"I just finished that autopsy on the young fellow you pulled out of that crypt over on the Blake family plot."

"Halloran. Kyle Halloran."

Ed grunted. "Yeah, that’s the one. Thought you should know that it wasn’t your everyday, run of the mill experience. Some of the results I got are pretty strange."

"Strange funny or strange weird?"

"Strange weird."

"Like what?" Damon asked. Hell, it was an open and shut case. Witnesses said the guy had been drinking and snorting enough cocaine earlier in the night to flatten an elephant. Too much physical exertion after all that and you ended up in cardiac arrest.

"Well, for one thing, it wasn’t an overdose that killed him."

Damon laughed. "Yeah, right. Try telling that to his heart and respiratory system. They’re still trying to figure out what hit them."

"That’s just it, Damon. The toxicology tests showed high traces of benzoylecganine, so the guy had been doing cocaine earlier that night, enough to send most people straight to the moon. Combine that with a blood alcohol level of 1.8, and you can be damn sure he was as high as a kite when he went. Probably didn’t feel a thing. But it wasn’t the drugs or the booze that killed him." Ed paused, and then said, "He bled to death."

"What?" Damon asked, shocked.

"You heard me," Strickland replied. "He bled to death."

"But that’s not possible, Ed. There were no wounds on the body, and we certainly didn’t find anything to indicate that at the scene. For a guy that size to lose enough blood to kill him, we should have found a lake of the stuff. We didn’t; the place was as dry as a bone."

"Didn’t you tell me the floor of that tomb was just dirt? Could it have simply seeped into the ground and whoever was at the scene just missed it?"

"C’mon Ed. My men are better than that. Besides, I’m the one who answered the call. There wasn’t any blood. Nada, nothing, zippo. Catch my drift?"

Ed sighed. "Yeah, I hear you. It’s been bothering me, too. But it gets worse. I can’t figure out how it happened. There weren’t any wounds on the body, nothing but a fairly shallow cut on the palm of one hand. It probably hurt like hell, and bled a bit, but certainly not enough to kill someone."

"Shit, Ed, this is not good." Damon shook his head in bewilderment. It sounded like this was going to be one bitch of a headache, and he just didn’t need that right now.

Then Ed said something else, and it was so weird that Damon thought he hadn’t heard him correctly.

"Run that one by me again?"

"I said, this guy didn’t just lose enough blood to kill him, he lost all of it."

Damon felt goose bumps suddenly rise on his arms. "What do you mean ALL of it?"

"Just what I said. All of it. You know how it works. Once the heart stops, the blood will normally pool in the lowest portion of the corpse, giving the flesh there a dark purplish coloration. Except, in this case, that didn’t happen. I couldn’t find any evidence of post-mortem lividity anywhere on the body. If you hadn’t told me the position he had been found in, I wouldn’t have been able to figure it out. And when I cut him open, I didn’t even have to drain him. I could have done the whole procedure on my kitchen table and eaten off of it afterwards, he was that clean."

While listening, Damon had involuntarily stiffened in his seat. Something wasn’t right here; that much was obvious. On some deeper, more primal level, Damon was suddenly certain that things were going to get a lot worse.

"Hey, Wilson, you there?"

"Yeah, yeah. I’m here. Got anything else, Ed?"

"Sorry. That’s it, I’m afraid."

"Okay, thanks for the call. I appreciate it. And listen, keep this one from the press for awhile, will ya?"

"Sure thing, Damon. Talk to you soon."

For the first time in his long career, Edward Strickland found that he didn’t want to be alone with a corpse.

Damon hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair, his gaze resting on the far wall but not really seeing it. His thoughts were elsewhere.

Bled to death?

How?

The whole thing was absurd. The pickaxe they found was several yards away from the corpse. There was no way he could have hurt himself. Even if he had, how do you bleed to death from a cut on the palm of the hand? It just wasn’t possible.

He thought back to the events of that morning, picturing the scene in his mind. The corpse had been sprawled in that dark, little room at the base of that ugly statue with little evidence anywhere that there had been any kind of confrontation or struggle, no wounds on the body. That was why he’d been so positive that it had been an overdose or a heart attack. All his years of police work had pointed him in that direction.

Did I miss something?

He didn’t think he had. The uniforms had used their usual diligence going over the scene once he’d called them in, and he had even stayed behind to supervise. He was positive the job had been done thoroughly and professionally.

He now had a nagging feeling that he hadn’t seen everything he should have, that he had overlooked something important.

Damon was a cop who believed in hunches. More than once during the course of a past investigation he’d gotten a feeling about a certain aspect of the case. Nothing more than that, just an impression, a blind, gut reaction completely unfounded in anything he could put into logical facts. He learned to pay attention to them, more often than not discovering that he was right. He knew this was simply his unconscious mind tying things together in a way that his conscious mind had overlooked, and his ‘hunches’ were just its way of telling him to perk up and pay attention.

Something about the mental image of the crime scene was bothering him; something he couldn’t put his finger on, and so, instead of going home as he’d been about to do before Ed had phoned, he went to his filing cabinets and pulled out the case file. He pulled out the photographs of the crime scene. He stared at each of them slowly in turn, scrutinizing them for something he might have missed.

The pictures looked the same now as they had then. The cemetery, the tomb, the corpse. Nothing more.

He picked up the few photos that were solely of the statue itself, staring at the face carved into the stone with a strange mixture of admiration and revulsion. He had to admit it really was a marvelous piece of work, if you happened to like that sort of thing, which he didn’t.

Every little detail was rendered precisely, from the scales that covered the face to the curved claws that extended from the feet. All in all, it was a stunning piece of work.

Damon just didn’t like it. Remembering how he’d felt beneath its stony gaze made him uncomfortable even now. If he hadn’t know better, he would have sworn the damn thing had been watching him the whole time he was down there. Looking into its eyes in the photographs, that feeling returned. The beast seemed to gaze back at him, the glint of an evil intelligence in its stony orbs.

Something was there in the pictures, something important that he was overlooking. He just wasn’t seeing it.

But what?

Tired and more than a bit frustrated now, he returned the photos to the file and put them away in his drawer. He’d had enough for one day; staring at the photographs for another couple of hours wasn’t going to get him anywhere tonight. It was time to call it quits.

As he crossed the parking lot to his car, Damon had the uneasy feeling he wasn’t alone.

He glanced around.

Beneath the dirty yellow light of the sodium-vapor lamps, nothing stirred.

The lot was empty.

He shrugged, dismissing the feeling. Too much work and an overactive imagination, that’s all it was.

Yet in the back of his mind an image lingered.

A pair of stone eyes, watching…