Thrice Told Tales Read online

  “There are rules – protocol,” Jessica said, her hands braced on her ample hips.

  “Rules?” Katherine Helspenny asked.

  “This office’s policy book says we don’t autopsy a body unless there’s clear evidence of an unnatural death. The detective told me on the phone, before the three of you came here, that when he examined the deceased at the cemetery, there were no gunshots, no knife wounds, no signs of a struggle, nothing but a body slumped over a grave stone.”

  Roth pushed into Jessica’s personal space, his face inches from her. “Mrs. H found her husband dead in Arlington cemetery. She’s convinced this Dooley character lured Jake there to kill him. That’s premeditation!”

  “All right, the body’s here somewhere. I’m willing to do a preliminary, but if I don’t see any obvious indications of murder . . .” Jessica turned palms up, as if to say ‘that’s it.’

  Roth’s face hardened. “We don’t want a preliminary, we want a complete autopsy, down to examining the man’s last whisker.” Roth tried a mock softening of his voice, adding, “Look, we were told you’re the best, and that you deal in unusual cases. This is an unusual case, doctor. The man was killed in the most famous cemetery on the planet.”

  Which explains your interest in the case—potentially high profile, she thought but said, “Be that as it may, counselor, the Commonwealth doesn’t just start cutting on a corpse without some probable cause, some indication of foul play.”

  Roth, angry, took to pacing like an Irish setter in heat, his long, flowing gray mane whipping about.

  Jessica thought she’d won the argument, but then Mrs. Helspenny shouted, “You government types’re all alike! Took us forever to get the VA to deal with Jake’s depression, his panic attacks, the living pain in his stump, all of it. Maybe if you’d stepped in earlier – maybe he’d never’ve felt compelled to…to go out there to find Dooley.”

  Roth placed an arm about the distressed wife and helped her into a seat. Jensen offered her a stack of napkins, and she began blowing her nose. The wife looked up at Jessica. “Took us even longer to get my Jake’s pension, and they give it out like it was some kinda fund he had no right to, like he didn’t have it comin’.”

  Jessica held up both hands as if under attack. “Please, Mr. Roth, Mrs. Helspenny, let me put this as simply as I can. Until I’m satisfied that Mr. Helspenny died a questionable death, he stays on ice. I did take a quick look at him, and I’ didn’t find a mark on him to suggest murder.”

  “But you have my word,” Mrs. Helspenny said.

  “Alone that’s not enough, ma’am.”

  “Rules is rules, huh?” The woman’s glare cut wounds in Jessica.

  “To you, the rules may seem a bit absurd, but they are in place for a reason.”

  “It’s protocol first,” Roth offered up, “before the wishes of the surviving spouse?”

  “Procedure, yes.”

  “So what you really need to do a full autopsy is a go-ahead.”

  Jessica didn’t respond, and her silence only fueled Roth’s ego and tongue. “Well, by damn,” he said, his nostrils flaring wide, “I’ll get you your go-ahead. I know your superior.”

  “Bully for you, counselor, so why don’t you just do that?”

  “Good Lord, hasn’t anyone ever been murdered in a National Park before?” Mrs. Helspenny asked.

  Jessica shrugged. “Many times. The most egregious are the young women and girls who go missing, their bodies are found in shallow graves.”

  “Never happened in Arlington – ever,” Jensen said. “Hey, I looked it up on Google. No one in the history of the cemetery has ever mugged, raped, or murdered within its confines.”

  “If Google says so, it must be true,” Jessica said. Google. She didn’t know whether to laugh at that one or cry.

  Jensen went on, an enthusiasm building in the detective. “You see, I belong to a Confederate reenactment group. Relieves tension.”

  “Playing soldier, no real consequences.”

  “If by that you mean no one gets hurt – ”

  “That’s what I mean,” Jessica said. “All the battlefield dead get up after it’s over and walk off to the nearest bar for lite Bud.”

  “Well, it’s fun. How about you join me some weekend? You’d look great in the uniform.”

  Ooo, was that a pass? A bit obvious. She frowned rather than smiled. “My interest is in the genuinely sincere dead, detective.”

  “Ahhh…the authentic murder.”

  “Besides, if I went to one of those things, I’d stand with the North.”

  “You’d look just as good in a blue uniform.”

  “OK, I’ll make myself clearer. I’m not interested in those who feign death. I’m too busy with the real thing, detective.”

  # # #

  The next day, Roth and Mrs. Helspenny stood in Jessica’s office, a court order in hand. She read the paper and the attachments from the agency holding jurisdiction over Arlington National Cemetery, the National Park Service. Everyone had signed off. Including Dr. Sven Rouric, her new boss who’d promised to maintain a hands-off approach along with a great budget, if she left FBI work for the State of Virginia. The twirp had reneged.

  The order cited Helspenny’s war service as the basis for directing this case to the head of the line. “We take care of our men in uniform and those who were in uniform, even in death.”

  Protocol upended.

  Jessica pointed her unwelcome guests to the waiting room, then got into her scrubs and went into the autopsy room.

  So it had come to this. Smoke’s chest cavity open before her, the internal organs removed, weighed, examined, commented upon for the record. Jessica next sawed away the top of Helspenny’s skull, exposing the brain, and she reached in to lift the lesion-ridden gray matter from its cradle. She then weighed the body’s most important mass of tissue which once held electro-chemical sparks transporting hopes, dreams, aspirations, imaginings, language, reasoning, rationalizations, mores, ethics, cultural biases, notions of goodness, evil, love, anger, sentimentalities, prejudices, lessons learned, knowledge gleaned, experiences at negative and positive poles, passions overflowing, small and large hatreds, and final betrayals. All silenced now. Dull and unresponsive, the organ of sentience dead to the touch.

  She probed the occipital lobe, and a strange, nearly imperceptible yet filmy fog rose from the tissue, as if the room’s bright incandescent lights had somehow vaporized some portion of the brain fluid. Absolutely strange and mystifying, something Jessica had never seen in all her years in an autopsy room. But something tickled at her own brain – a memory. She had read about this in the literature, no, in the textbook written by her mentor, Dr. Asa Holecraft, at the University of Tennessee.

  Holecraft had called it rare, a phenomena of undetermined origin, never captured save in anecdotal fashion. When asked in class one day to explain it, he could not. Holecraft summed it up as illogical and out of the ordinary, but said he has seen it twice in his 40 years as a medical examiner.

  Jessica was alone in the room with Helspenny’s body, and the bodies of six others waiting for her attention, so there was no one to verify what she’d seen. She glanced up at the video camera, wondering if the ghostly wisp of fog had been caught by the rolling tape.

  Jessica clicked on the intercom connecting the autopsy room with a waiting room. “I’m finding absolutely no wounds to the body,” she said to the microphone.

  No answer.

  “Mr. Roth, Mrs. Helspenny, are you there?”

  Roth’s voice came back. “Look closer,” he said. “Mrs. Helspenny suggests you look at the base of the brain.”

  “Why? Is Detective Jensen out there? Is he with you?”

  “Jensen’s indisposed.”

  “Indisposed?”

  “I called his office before we came in, talked to his lieutenant. Said Jensen hadn’t come in…mentioned something about the blue flu going around.”

  “Curious.”

 
; “Yes . . . Now where’s that coming from?”

  Roth seemed to be speaking to Mrs. Helspenny, whose voice she heard in the background – indistinct. She and Roth were going on about something, and Roth hadn’t cut off the intercom.

  “Just yesterday,” Roth said, “you two were insanely in love, the deepest most – ”

  “Please! I don’t wanna hear it.” Mrs. Helspenny’s voice came through clearly now.

  Jessica listened as she examined more closely the brain of the dead ex-marine, fascinated by the “Desperate Housewives” dialogue.

  “Perhaps we should take a walk, get some air, get some perspective on things,” Roth went on. “You seem in a fog.”

  “Fog? What fog? I’m fine.”

  And there it was, a small, near invisible hole at the base of the brain, the hole no larger than as ice pick, so filled in with ice crystals that she hadn’t noticed.

  A scream came over the intercom, causing Jessica to drop the brain. She rushed from the autopsy room to the waiting room and found Roth splayed out on the institutional gray-green carpet, blood leaking from the back of his skull. Over him, an ice pick in her hand, stood a grinning Mrs. Helspenny.

  “Dooley did it,” she said, “Dooley! I tol’ ya, tol’ ya all. Tol’ Jensen! And I tol’ this fool Dooley’d strike again if nobody stopped him.”

  “What do you mean, stop Dooley?” Jessica asked.

  Mrs.Helspenny dropped the ice pick and went to her knees. “Can’tcha look? Can’tcha see? Don’t you all see now it’s happened? Spider Dooley killed my Jake! Killed him at the grave.”

  Jessica realized she’d held tight to her scalpel. Keeping the ice pick in sight, Jessica knelt beside Roth. She checked his pulse. Nothing. He was gone. She clenched the scalpel more tightly, chilled by a feeling that there were three people in the waiting room yet alive – she, Mrs. Helspenny, and a third who had no corporeal body.

  “Killed Jake at his grave,” Mrs. Helspenny keened.

  “What grave?” Jessica asked as calmly as she could muster. “Who’s grave?”

  “Dooley’s, damn it! Dooley’s grave.”

  “Dooley’s dead? Buried in Arlington?”

  “God, you people! Of course, he’s under Arlington’s sod. Killed in action, same action Jake got hurt in.”

  “What, the incident in Iraq?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you said Jake met Dooley in the cemetery. You said Dooley was angry with Jake because he survived—”

  “When all the others died, yes!”

  “Then if…how did—”

  “Dooley came in the fog.”

  “Forgive me for asking, but who is Dooley to you?”

  “The father to my child.”

  Jessica sat back on her heels. She meant to keep Mrs. Helspenny and herself calm, just as she’d been taught by the FBI.

  “Even in death,” Mrs. Helspenny said, “he blames Jake to this day. And when Jake came home from the war, and he took me to his bed – made me his wife – he tried to take Dooley’s place – looking after his dead friend’s wife, he said – he never could, no matter how he tried.”

  “Mrs. Helspenny – Katherine, why are you so sure it was Dooley?”

  “He whispered to me from the fog. Told me to come to him.”

  “Haunted you, you mean?”

  “Me, and Jake.”

  A shared haunting. Rare, but it happened, Jessica thought. “Is that why Jake was at Dooley’s grave?”

  “Jake came angry. Knew I’d be there.”

  “Jake followed you into the cemetery?”

  “He knew I’d be in the fog at the grave.”

  “And he found you at Dooley’s grave?” The headstone Jensen had failed to read. Some detective.

  “I was kneeling at the grave when – when Dooley came.”

  “Came how? He’s dead, Mrs. Helspenny.”

  “Came like he’s made of fog.”

  This left Jessica fishing for words. In the silence Jessica heard the soft whirring of the electric motor in the ceiling fan stirring the air overhead. Finally, Jessica asked, “Did Dooley possess you, take you over?”

  Mrs. Helspenny nodded once deeply. “An’ it did his dead heart so much good,” she whispered.

  “Killing Jake?”

  “Yes, with the ice pick, yes.”

  “That pick?” Jessica asked, glancing toward the bloody pick on the carpet beside Roth’s body. She had a taped confession thanks to the intercom being open, thanks to this entire conversation being piped into the autopsy room where her recorder drew every sound that reached its microphone to the tape, to be preserved. Jessica wondered, would the confession hang the woman or send her to an asylum?

  “Dooley did it,” Mrs. Helspenny said, her voice rising above a whisper, above the sound of the ceiling fan.

  Jessica held firm to the scalpel in her hand as she studied the woman. “You loved him very much, didn’t you?”

  “Was a helluva thick fog,” Mrs. Helspenny said, shivering at the memory.

  And then it came to Jessica, the week that Jake ‘Smoke’ Helspenny had been killed – murdered – there had been a weather system stalled along the eastern seaboard, every morning fog so thick you could shovel it, from Baltimore through Washington, down to Richmond, and as far as 120 miles inland. She remembered it well. The fog had made her drive in from the farm hell. But by 11AM, it was gone, except for wisps in the valleys and hollows closer to the mountains.

  “You ever take time to truly stare into fog,” Mrs. Helspenny asked, “I mean really watch it? Just sit and watch it, watch it move inside itself?”

  Jessica hadn’t, yet she said, “Yes, I have.”

  “There’s a strange life in it, like the life of a breathing, invisible angel, like the way a gas lamp appears to breathe.”

  “I’ve noticed that.”

  “I think there’s an energy, a force that’s gotta obey its own rules – ”

  “Rules?”

  “– like natural things all have rules, like gravity and such, yet fog has supernatural rules maybe – maybe makes ’em up as it goes – and that morning I run off from Jake, I watched the fog too long, I think.”

  “Mrs. Helspenny – Katherine, do you mind if I call Detective Jensen?”

  Had she heard the question. Jessica doubted she had because Mrs. Helspenny said, “I saw Dooley come riding inside that fog when it rose from the earth over his grave.”

  “Katherine, your child, a son or a daughter? Where is your child?”

  “Little Dooley?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, he’s gone.”

  “Gone where, Katherine?”

  “Gone in the fog.”

  “Is he lost in the cemetery?”

  “He’s the reason I went to Dooley.”

  “Katherine, what happened to Little Dooley?”

  Her face twisted in anguish. “That bastard, Jake, he’ll never hurt no child ever again.”

  Where is this going? Jessica wondered. “What did Jake do to Little Dooley, Katherine?”

  “He broke his neck.” Tears rolled down the woman’s cheeks, streaking her makeup.

  And tears rose in Jessica’s eyes, too. “Katherine . . . Katherine, I have to ask. Why did Dooley attack Roth?”