Killer Instinct Page 11

  TEN

  They were delayed at the airstrip, a messenger telling them that she and J.T. would both be “accompanied” by pathologists from the AFIP, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington.

  Both Jessica and J.T. were upset not only with the delay but by the obvious intrusion of the AFIP in the case. For the better part of his life, her father had been with the AFIP, carting his family all over the globe with him, going wherever he was needed. This was necessary because he was the only medical examiner in the AFIP. And things hadn't improved much since then. It was a given, and it was quite well known, that Oswald Coran was the exception to the rule, that most medical men with the AFIP were relatively helpless during an autopsy. It was like sending a boy who had learned his first finger exercises into Carnegie Hall to play a Mozart concerto.

  Military pathologists knew less than hospital pathologists, and they hadn't the wide range of experience or education that she and J.T. had, and yet, here they were, coming on like a pair of “watchdogs” to oversee her work! It had been the AFIP that had so badly bungled two Kennedy assassination autopsies. Their uniforms looked a lot better than their credentials.

  She tried desperately to reach Otto, to determine what this was all about, but Otto's secretary told her that Otto had been called away to Bethesda Naval Hospital to attend to his wife.

  When the two AFIP men arrived, one clearly believed himself to have been placed in charge of the exhumations, directing the other to go with J.T. Captain Lyle Kaseem introduced himself to them, and then he introduced Lieutenant James Forsythe, both military pathologists. Kaseem was a thin black man, while Forsythe was white and lumpy.

  “We were not briefed about your joining us,” she told them flatly. “In fact, I am in charge of these exhumations, Dr. Kaseem.”

  “Your C.O. spoke to my C O.,” he replied. “And here we are.”

  The plane was idling on the strip. They wanted to arrive early enough to get some rest before the grueling work that lay ahead of them, and there were financial constraints to consider. The gravediggers would be at the cemeteries in Iowa City and Paris, Illinois, at 7:30 A.M., the normal time to dig up bodies, for if the body could be autopsied and returned to the grave the same day, the costs could be kept to a minimum. Storage space was the big expense, along with the gravedigger's labor. But it was also less harrowing on an emotional level for the families if an exhumation took no more than a single day out of their lives.

  Exhuming a body, whether ten years in the earth or ten days, was a highly dramatic, supercharged situation. Most exhumations occurred a few weeks after death, during a period of time when questions about the cause of death lingered. They were proposing not only to open a grave that had been months ago sealed, but opening old hurts and wounds. They wouldn't be welcomed. The order to disturb the dead was hoisted upon the families by the powerful FBI working through the justice system. Jessica and J.T. would have a great deal to contend with, and now they would have Kaseem and Forsythe looking over their shoulders.

  “We have our orders, too,” shouted Captain Kaseem over the noise of the transport plane.

  “You are, after all, using military equipment,” shouted Forsythe, whom she chose to ignore.

  “All right,” she said to Kaseem, making herself heard over the noise, “but you and Dr. Forsythe will not forget who is in charge here, understood?”

  She huddled a moment with J.T. before sending him off, telling him not to be intimidated by Forsythe, that it was an FBI matter and that he was in charge. “Christ,” she moaned, “we'll have enough to do tap dancing around the local path guys, and now these clowns? Why'd Otto do this to us?”

  “Doesn't trust us to do the job?” asked J.T., equally upset.

  “Many hands do not make light work at an exhumation.”

  She left him with that thought, rushing to her transport, waving goodbye. Once settled inside, she met Kaseem's dark, brooding eyes. He had dark skin, a rogue's mustache, keen black eyes. He might be handsome if she were not so mad at him.

  “What is so terribly wrong with having some assistance, Dr. Coran?” he asked.

  “I don't need any more assistance. In Iowa, do you have any idea of the number of people who're going to want to be on hand to assist? No, I certainly will not need another assistant.”

  “How many exhumations have you done?”

  “I've been involved in a few.”

  He nodded. “Ahh, yes, under Dr. Holecraft at Bethesda, and your father.”

  “That's right. And how many exhumations have you attended?” She wondered about his knowledge of her past.

  “This will be my second.”

  “Your second? And what about Forsythe?”

  “His first.”

  “His first!”

  He shrugged. “The idea here is to get experience, and I have no intention of attempting to take over. I am here as the student.”

  “Then you may be terribly disappointed. There'll be no time to hold your hand during an investigation of murder, no time to stop to instruct—”

  “Just the opportunity to watch you work, Dr. Coran, will be instruction enough, I assure you.”

  The gluey flattery was a bit too thick to be believed. She said, “You may be disappointed, Doctor.”

  He looked in her direction as the transport lifted from the tarmac. “Meaning?”

  “We're likely to have fifteen, maybe twenty minutes tops with the corpse. That's all it will take for me to make the determination I'm going to Iowa for.”

  “But I thought it would be a full autopsy.”

  “Obviously, you were misinformed.”

  She fell silent, and he did likewise.

  It was going to be a long flight to Iowa.

  # # #

  The Iowa night was complete, as if the world had fallen into a black hole, and that was how Jessica felt about being alone here. Kaseem had invited her to dine with him, but she had declined, begging off with a headache and paperwork. She'd eaten via room service, a rather dull and cold meal, and her room had begun to feel like a prison. She knew no one here. She knew nothing about the city surrounded by cornfields as far as the eye could see.

  She understood that Janel McDonell, although buried here by her parents, having been reared in Iowa City, was actually found dead in a little homestead south of the city called Marshall. Her body was in the trailer house she lived in on an isolated highway, hung from the ceiling, her throat slashed. The autopsy report, signed by three men, one an M.E., said that she had died of the brutal slash to the throat and that she had died at another location and had then been placed in the trailer, since very little blood was in evidence. From her reading of the case and her knowledge of the Copeland murder, Jessica believed she'd been killed in her trailer.

  She knew that the Iowa doctors would not take kindly to her overt questioning of their findings. An exhumation on an unsolved murder case was tantamount to throwing a glove in the face. She'd have them to contend with along with Kaseem in the morning, and she needed her sleep, so she fought for it, struggling with her own troubled mind.

  Before turning in she had wanted to know why the AFIP guys had been sicced on her and J.T. She'd tried Otto at his private number, but only his answering machine was replying.

  She'd also tried to reach J.T. in Illinois through the authorities there, but had had no luck. A bad connection and shattering static had caused an argument with a police dispatcher in Paris, Illinois. She'd gone to bed worrying about J.T.'s situation.

  Still, she had much to be thankful for. After all, she had managed to get what she wanted; she'd set up the exhumation for the early morning. It would be a difficult chore, but not impossible. Everyone who was in a need-to-know position in the city, county and state had been contacted by Boutine earlier. The local police had been polite, if stiff, and had seen to her transportation and the room. Boutine had paved the way for her. She just needed to step in, go through the motions, get what she came for and return to Qu
antico.

  She wondered about Kaseem's motivations, and his orders. She brooded about Otto's disappearance. Then she went back to fretting about J.T. and the owl-eyed Forsythe in southern Illinois.

  Even in her sleep she wondered.

  # # #

  In rural Paris, Illinois, John Thorpe was ready to strangle someone to death. Absolutely nothing had gone right. Boutine had not smoothed the way for him, and in fact, had somehow been misunderstood. The exhumation was in progress when he arrived, and he was whisked to the cemetery in the middle of the night. Boutine had either so frightened the locals or so angered them that they had decided to either cooperate too much or to cooperate not at all. Either way, the result was about the same.

  And Forsythe was no bloody help, getting in the way at every turn.

  At the grave site, lights were flashing, sending up crazy, dancing shadows against the tombstones everywhere as the noise of a backhoe was only offset by the occasional roar of thunder and an accompanying lightning bolt. A simpering, misty rain became a downpour. No one had bothered to check the weather report. And into all this came the casket with the remains of Melanie Trent encased within. Thus far, the only stroke of luck was that the casket was intact, but this luck was suddenly exploded when the vault top, held overhead by an arm of the backhoe, suddenly groaned, sending everyone racing, moments before it collapsed atop the casket.

  “Son of a bitch!” shouted J.T. at the backhoe operator. “How long've you been digging graves, for Christ's sake!”

  Forsythe tried to cool him down, pulling him away from the backhoe man, who had jumped from his cab, preparing to take J.T. on. Forsythe's uniform, along with the intervention of the local sheriff, brought order back to the chaos in the cemetery. J.T. shouted over Forsythe and the sheriff, “Goddamned stupid way to do a disinterment, people! Christ, if we crush the body, that'll do us a hell of a lot of good.”

  Men worked to remove the concrete blocks over the casket, the damaged wood coming up in large, spiked splinters, the body within soaking up the rain now seeping into a casket that had remained dry since December.

  “Get her into the hearse!” the mortician shouted to his men, once the pieces of cement were cleared off.

  “Wait, whoa, up there, Lem! Stanley!” shouted the sheriff. “Good God Almighty.”

  J.T., hearing this, rushed to the sheriff and pleaded, “What? What's wrong now? What?”

  “That's not her.”

  “What?”

  “That's not the Trent girl in that coffin.”

  “Oh, Christ... no,” moaned J.T. “You people've dug up the wrong grave?''

  “No, no! It's the right grave, the right marker,” said the sheriff. “Just that this ain't the right body.”

  J.T. rushed the mortician. “Who's responsible for this? Where's the Trent girl buried, dammit?”

  Again Forsythe stepped in and tried to cool J.T. down. “We'll find it. We'll look through the cemetery records. How many people could've been buried here the same day as the Trent girl? We just go to that grave and—”

  The rain was pelting them so hard now that Forsythe had to talk over it, shouting.

  “In the morning, Sheriff, in the light of day, dammit! No more of this blind shit. Get me the right body, and get it to the hospital morgue by nine A.M.”

  “I'll see what can be done,” he said as calmly as if taking a breakfast order in a diner.

  He had had to contend with the relatives and the local police, and no one was cooperating. J.T. had met the local coroner as well, a hospital pathologist who seemed as bitter and angry as the family at what he called the “heaping on of inhuman and awful sufferin' to the family.”

  John had been made to feel like the villain here, and Forsythe, jumping on this attitude of the locals, had cajoled them into believing he was here, in his capacity, to uphold all decorum in the indecorous matter. All that J.T. now wanted was to get what he came for as quickly as possible and get the hell out of Paris, Illinois.

  The following day, not trusting anyone at this point, J.T. rose early after a fitful sleep, caught a cab to the cemetery, leaving Forsythe abed, to see to it that the right casket was found and lifted from the earth. He was mildly surprised to find men working. In fact, they were just then lifting out a second casket from a second enormous hole created by the monster backhoe. As the casket was lifted, there was a murmur and an unsettling undercurrent that went through the handful of people who insisted on being present. No one had telephoned to send for him, but everyone else in Paris knew what was going on at the cemetery, except now Forsythe.

  The parents and other relatives had turned out in mass. They hadn't been here in the night. But now they were like a small army surrounding the scene. It was highly irregular, but it was a very small town. If any place on Earth might be called xenophobic, it was Paris, Illinois. They didn't cotton to strangers, and they spoke like they were all from Kentucky.

  The casket was taken to a waiting hearse amid people shouting, “This ain't right! Ain't human!”

  “God, man, don't you have chil-un, mister? Do you?”

  John didn't have children, but he imagined that the loss of a child was assuredly the worst suffering anyone could endure... and then to have the remains of a buried child disturbed, the casket opened and a “piece” of the remains taken out. Little wonder they thought him a ghoul and a grave robber.

  But J.T. would get what he came a thousand miles for. He'd get it for Jess and Boutine; he'd get it because their case depended upon it.

  ELEVEN

  There were scattered patches of lingering snow on the ground at the graveyard where Janel McDonell had rested since November of the year before below the solid Iowa earth. The snow seemed to cling about the bottoms of the headstones for cold life. Janel's headstone, ornamented with flowers and cherubs, had been removed so as not to be unintentionally hit by the giant, crablike arms of the backhoe that now sank its teeth into the grave, hefted out great mounds of rock and stone, lowered this over a growing mound and then repeated the process.

  It was 9 A.M. and there was a bright Iowa sun that sent cascading shadows across the cemetery, and the trees were alive with the music of birds, some darting about the solemn group of people at the grave site. The digging had taken almost two hours, but Jessica knew she was lucky. The girl's family had not spared any expense on her in death, from the headstone to the cement vault which kept water out. Janel's parents, a well-dressed black couple who both insisted on being here, had also purchased a metal casket for her.

  A silence of extreme depth blanketed the cemetery when the backhoe had finished its work and the gravediggers then had to climb in over the sealed vault and go to the laborious task of breaking the seal. This was done with hand tools, and the clinking was like that of stonecutters. It echoed about the cemetery.

  When the seal was broken and the backhoe put back into 115 operation, to lift aside the enormously heavy lid, the casket was found in excellent condition, looking as it had the day it was lowered: untouched, without a crack, still very much sealed tight.

  Cast-iron caskets used in the Civil War that had been opened a century later displayed remarkable preservative powers. The soldiers interred so many years before were in surprisingly good condition. Some had recognizable features, and internal organs were intact. Many of the uniforms were in such a good state of preservation that these were removed to places like the Smithsonian Institution.

  Using huge, looping lengths of cloth that they stitched below and around the coffin, Janel McDonell's gravediggers tugged and pulled up her casket, and brought it to the level of the cemetery grounds, depositing it at their feet. Mrs. McDonell had long since begun an uncontrollable crying. Her husband gave her support. Old wounds ripped open wide, Jessica thought.

  Jessica looked past Kaseem and asked Dr. Kevin Lewis, a pathologist at the local hospital, “Will you please direct these men to the decomposed room at the hospital?” She had been delighted to learn that Iowa City's larg
est university hospital had provisions for the necessary work.

  The McDonells were accompanied by their lawyer, a man who kept whispering in Mr. McDonell's ear. She sensed that the lawyer was keeping close scrutiny for a future lawsuit for his clients, for the mental anguish they had been put through, despite the fact they need not be on hand. There were two policemen in uniform standing at the periphery. Along with Dr. Lewis there were two other medical men from the hospital, and there was Kaseem.

  Everything now depended on Janel inside her coffin. Would the specimen she must take be in a state of preservation which might tell them what they needed? Or would decay and time have destroyed the evidence? She had been told by the local mortician that Janel had been embalmed, so there was a good chance that Jessica and Janel had something to share about her killer. Was it the same man who had killed Copeland?

  It was another half hour before the casket was transported to the University of Iowa General Hospital, the coffin coming to rest in the hospital's decomposed room, which was very like room C back at Quantico, if not quite as large or up-to-date. She knew how very fortunate she was to have such facilities, and she wondered again about J.T.'s chances of finding such niceties in Paris, Illinois. She rather doubted his chances.

  The only problem with the room was that it was overcrowded—unreasonably so.

  There was a toxicologist to take specimens, a stenographer, two mortuary assistants who did such work as lifting and transporting and sewing up the body after the autopsy was finished, a photographer, the county D.A., Lewis, the hospital's chief pathologist and his assistant, and of course Kaseem.

  Just as the two mortuary assistants began to uncrank the lid of the coffin and slowly lift it up, a collective gasp going up with it, a last-minute arrival pushed through the door. It was the state medical examiner, an ancient fellow, who was as amazed as Jessica at the interest in the case. He blustered about the room, elbowing his way closer to the table where the men had placed Janel's body now. The old M.E. repeatedly said, “Stand back, stand back,” to the others whom he deemed unnecessary. His ice-blue eyes could cut glass, she thought, if they weren't smoldering with some old venomous resentment.