The Devil's Labyrinth

CHAPTER 21

DETECTIVE PATRICK NORTH strode down the long, sterile hallway, looking neither to the right nor to the left. He’d spent plenty of time in both the morgue and the medical examiner’s office over the years, but he’d never quite become inured to the aura of death — unnatural death — that hung over the place.

Today, though, he had a mystery on his hands, and if he was going to solve it, he had to start here.

He stopped in front of a nondescript door with an engraved brown Formica plaque with lettering every bit as nondescript as the material upon which it was printed:

BENJAMIN BREEN, M.D.

DISTRICT MEDICAL EXAMINER

The door was ajar, and North heard a low monologue from inside. He tapped lightly on the door, then pushed the door all the way open and walked in.

Ben Breen’s office barely contained the man, not to mention the stacks of paper, the overfull bookcase, the boxes filled with evidence envelopes, and all the detritus that littered the desk, and had spilled over onto the floor. Even the two plastic chairs that were ostensibly there for visitors had been pressed into service to help support the Medical Examiner’s vast collection of cases, reference material, coffee mugs, snack wrappers, and just plain junk. Breen also had a penchant for medical oddities and dark jokes: a skull served as his penholder and a dusty skeleton hung in one corner with a small teddy bear inside its chest. North had never asked the significance of the teddy bear, and never would.

Breen clicked off his recorder and frowned as he tried to place the face before him, but his mind was on the report he’d been dictating.

“Patrick North,” the detective sighed, resigning himself to having to introduce himself to Breen yet again. You’d think after ten years the man could at least remember his name. “Detective?” Breen still looked faintly puzzled, so North offered him another piece. “The Kip Adamson case?”

Breen brightened. “Ah, yes,” he said, pulling himself up to his full six-foot-five-inch height, and then beginning a search through a file box on top of the file cabinet. “Thanks for coming down.”

“No problem,” North said, wondering if the M.E. was even going to be able to find the report. “Thanks for calling.”

“Here it is,” Breen said triumphantly, looking almost as surprised as North by how quickly he’d found what he was looking for. He opened the folder and sat back down at his desk. “Just move that crap onto the floor,” he said, waving vaguely at one of the chairs. “Sit yourself down.”

North set a stack of papers by the door, making a mental note to return them to the chair when he left. Apparently Breen was one of those people who lived amid chaos but knew exactly where to look for any given thing.

Breen flipped through several pages of typewritten notes and lab reports, then found the page he wanted. “Here it is,” he said. “Tox screen was negative.” He peered up at North. “No drugs, no alcohol. Death by close-range gunshot to the head.” He handed North a sheet of paper.

“No drugs?” North pressed. It hardly seemed possible. He glanced at the copy of the official coroner’s report, but didn’t take the time to try to sort out all the technical language. “Did you test for all the new designer drugs? Is there something you could have missed?” Breen’s left eyebrow rose a fraction of an inch, a sure sign that he was not pleased at having his judgment questioned. “I mean, the thing is that this kid’s behavior was just so totally out of character. He’d gotten in trouble a couple of times, but as far as I can tell he was never violent. So unless he’d started using drugs, nothing makes sense at all. Can you run those tests again?”

Breen dropped the file to the desktop, folded his hands on top of it, and looked directly at Detective North. “We’ve run the screens three times. We test for every known substance. The kid hadn’t eaten in probably twelve hours, but that’s all. Whatever was going on inside his mind, his body was squeaky clean when he attacked that woman.”

North leaned forward slightly. “Then what the hell happened?”

“Well, some people get a bit cranky when they’re hungry,” Breen observed. Then his tone changed, and he spread his hands helplessly. “Okay, I doubt it was the low blood sugar. Frankly, it looks to me like he just flipped out. It happens. Have you checked with his family doctor? Did he have a shrink?” He opened the file again to the front page. “He was at St. Isaac’s. Have you talked to his priest?”

“No prior history, no shrink, priests won’t say much,” North said.

Breen returned the file to the stack on his desk and leaned back in his chair, a sure sign that the interview was coming to an end. “Whatever happened to this boy stemmed from a disease of the mind, not the body,” Breen said. “Sorry I can’t be of more help.”

North rose to his feet and shook hands with Breen across the desk, then left the office. He could hear the Medical Examiner resume dictating even before he’d closed the door, and remembered too late that he’d forgotten to replace the stack of papers on the chair. He paused for a moment, then continued down the hall, unwilling to have to reintroduce himself to Breen twice within ten minutes. Let him find his own damn files.

As soon as he was back in his car, North called Kevin Peterson. “Well, so much for that,” he said when his partner came on the line. “No drugs — nothing. Which means we’re back to square one.”

North hated square one.