A Door in the River Read Online Free PDF Page B

[
Wednesday, August 10, late morning
    The following morning, Howard Spere showed up with a boyishly excited look on his face. He’d been dispatched as the intermediary between her office and the coroner’s, and now he was here with the papers. The label from a packet of grape jelly was stuck to the side of his suit jacket – Welch’s. She imagined him furtively trying to flick it from his fingertips to the floor in whatever diner he’d had breakfast in this morning, eyes out for the waitress. He was hanging on her doorknob, dangling a sheet of paper pinched between thumb and forefinger. “Did someone order a body?”
    “You find this a cheerful business, Howard? I thought you knew Henry Wiest.”
    “I did. In fact, I knew him well. He would have been pleased to know we were being thorough.”
    “That’s what I thought. But would he have been pleased to know we now doubt the cause of his death?”
    “Do we?” he asked.
    “That’s why you’re bringing me those papers this morning.” She held her hand out for them. He passed them to her and she found the line her name had to go on and signed it there.
    “What I meant –”
    “I know what you mean, Howard. He deserves the truth.”
    Spere left with the papers and she settled down to go through Tuesday’s reports. Maybe something unrelated would catch her eye and lead to a brilliant deduction, like it did in the movies. Kojak chomping on almonds and realizing the murderer had used cyanide. There were only three reports and there wasn’t a single interesting thing in any of them. A keyed car in Port Dundas, a stolen bike in Kehoe Glenn, a fight over a girl in a bar in Hoxley. Maybe Henry was murdered by a jealous husband who happened to have a thing for bikes. And hated Buicks.
    She signed off on the files and closed them up. She’d seen a lot of dead people in her years. She’d seen things she would never be able to forget, including things she never wanted to talk about again. You had to have the talent to depersonalize when dealing with all the awful things that could happen or be done to a human body. But you could never separate yourself enough. Your body still responded,still felt a refractory pain. You could not witness the kind of dead she saw in her work and not want to help them if you could.
    She went down to the funeral home in Kehoe Glenn with Spere and stood away from the drawers as they got Henry off of his metal bed and onto a gurney. She stared at a calendar on the wall of the cold room while she listened to the sound of plastic and zippers. There were three boys jumping off a dock in the picture. An innocent summer scene.
    The body went to Mayfair. She got the call to come down in the early evening. Spere met her by the staff door beside Emergency, where they waited for ten minutes, watching a man sleeping on a gurney. He wore an oxygen mask. It looked soothing to have oxygen pumped into you, but that man did not look like he was having a pleasant experience. At least Henry was already dead. A secretary they’d never seen before led them down into the autopsy room. “What happened to Marianne?” Hazel asked.
    “She went back to school.”
    The new girl didn’t look like she could be older than twenty. She sashayed down the hall in front of them, and Hazel traded a look with Spere. “We didn’t come here to end up in the cardiac wing, Howard.”
    The girl left them at the door to Autopsy and the two of them went in. Deacon was still in his scrubs. Theycould see Henry Wiest lying on his back on the metal table. Deacon pulled his mask down. “I think you’ll find this interesting,” he said, offering a hand that neither of them shook. He led them back to the table.
    Hazel tried not to look at Henry’s face, but she couldn’t ignore the Y-shaped incision in his chest, which Deacon had reopened. The top of the man’s head was missing.
    “So,” said Deacon, “they left everything in the cavity –”
    “Like when you buy a