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“What can I do for you, Angie?”
“It’s my sister, Dr. Brockton. She… um… she’s dead.” Silence. I waited. “That call I got yesterday morning — the call that made me leave — it was from my husband, Ned, telling me.”
“I figured you’d gotten some really bad news. I gather it was unexpected. I’m so sorry.” I hesitated, reluctant to pry. Still, she’d called me. “Was it an accident?”
“No,” she said with sudden vehemence, and then she laughed — a short, bitter bark of a laugh that startled me. “It was definitely not an accident. That’s the one thing we can all agree on.” I resisted the urge to fire off questions. “She died from a shotgun blast to the head.” The air in my office suddenly turned electric. “The local coroner says it was suicide. I say it was murder.”
I couldn’t resist any longer. “Tell me about it. Why does the coroner think it was suicide?”
“Because her fingerprints were on the gun. And because her jerk of a husband says it was suicide. He, Don — Don Nicely, how’s that for an ironic name? — says she’d been depressed for months, which I believe, and that she’d threatened to kill herself twice before, which I don’t believe.”
“Why don’t you believe it? And why do you think it was murder?”
“Lots of reasons. For one thing, I think — I hope—she’d have told me if she felt suicidal. For another, women don’t shoot themselves. A woman takes pills or cuts her wrists. She doesn’t put a shotgun in her mouth and blow her head off. Only men are stupid enough to do that.”
She had a point there. Sixty percent of men who commit suicide use a gun — I knew this because I’d done a lot of reading about suicide — but only 30 percent of women. And a shotgun? Rare for a woman, I was sure, and difficult. Ernest Hemingway had turned a shotgun on himself — he’d fired both barrels of a twelve-gauge, in fact, a feat that required not just long arms but also quite a lot of desperation and determination and coordination — but Hemingway was a six-footer. I tried to recall Angie’s height, but without much success. “Was your sister tall? Did the coroner measure her arms to see if she could’ve reached the trigger?”
Angie sighed. “She was only five three. But it was a short-barreled shotgun. Eighteen inches. She could have done it, but she didn’t. He did.”
The conversation was difficult for me. Clearly Angie was devastated by her sister’s death, and I wanted to help her, but I doubted I could corroborate her theory. “Why do you think her husband killed her?”
“Because he’s an asshole. Because he’s controlling and manipulative and aggressive. Because he fits the profile of an abusive domestic partner. Because they had a fight the night she died.”
“An argument fight, or a physical fight?”
“Borderline,” she answered. “They were out at a nightclub, and he got mad because she was talking to some other guy. He dragged her out of the bar and shoved her into the truck and laid down a bunch of rubber in the parking lot. There are witnesses to that part. Next morning, he claims, he found her body on the sofa.”
“He didn’t hear the shotgun go off in the night?”
“He says he dropped her at the house and went back out. ‘To think,’ he says. Yeah, right. And supposedly, when he came home a couple hours later, he walked straight through the living room without seeing the bloody mess on the sofa, and went to bed. Thought she’d gone somewhere, he says. Thought maybe she’d come down to see me. Didn’t find her in the living room till he got up a few hours later. So he says. Bullshit, I say.”
“His story sounds weak,” I admitted. “But the fingerprints on the gun — hard to argue with those, unless you’ve got some evidence to refute them. Some way to show that he put her hands on the gun.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s driving me crazy that I didn’t have a chance to work the scene.”
“Is that because it would have been a conflict of interest for you?”
“It’s because she lived a half hour north of Tallahassee, in Georgia. The Cheatham County Sheriff’s Office worked the scene, if you could call it ‘working.’ The investigator didn’t exactly go over things with a fine-tooth comb — I’ve talked to him, and trust me, he’s no Sherlock Holmes. And the coroner swallowed her husband’s story hook, line, and sinker. So they released the scene only a few hours after the 911 call. There are photos, but only a few, and they’re not great. I’d’ve taken dozens, but the guy who worked it took seven. Seven pictures of my sister’s death.” She sighed again.
“Was there an autopsy?”
“No. Apparently the coroner took one look at her body and ruled it suicide.”
“Any chance you can persuade him to let a good Florida M.E. take a look?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve got a better shot at winning the Florida lottery… and I don’t even buy tickets. You think a Georgia coroner would take a chance on a Tallahassee M.E. coming into his county and revealing him to be an incompetent idiot? Not bloody likely. Besides, it’s too late. The body’s already at the funeral home. She’s being buried tomorrow.”
My mind was racing — a condition I found pleasing, fascinating, and slightly — very, very slightly — worrisome. Before Angie had phoned, I’d felt sluggish and depressed. I was behind schedule in grading the Human Origins exams, not because I’d been stupendously busy, but because I knew that once the grades were posted, I’d be finished until fall, and things would get quiet — unbearably quiet — on campus. I’d told myself that I would use the summer lull to begin writing a journal article recounting an experiment I’d conducted, using sonar to find submerged bodies. But the truth was, I was having difficulty generating any enthusiasm for the task; in fact, so far, all I had to show for hours at the computer keyboard was a blank screen. I’d written a hundred or more opening sentences, but I’d deleted each one after rereading it. In my mind’s eye, I saw the summer opening up before me, and frankly, the opening looked a lot like a yawn. I’d probably end up spending most of the summer pretending to write, all the while casting guilty glances at the phone — the damnably silent phone.
Now, though, the phone had rung, bringing me a forensic case, and I felt like a new man: energetic, engaged, and alive with a sense of purpose. I was sorry that the case was the death of Angie’s sister. But I was glad that there was a case.
“Angie, I have an idea,” I said. “Do you know any good lawyers in Georgia?”
“No, but I know a lot of bad ones in Florida,” she answered. “Does that help any?”
“Probably not. Let me call somebody who might be better connected. Maybe he could help us get a court order authorizing a forensic examination.”
One phone call and ten minutes later, I bundled up the exam booklets and dashed the hundred yards to Peggy’s office, clutching the bundle against my rib cage like a football. As I crossed the goal line of her doorway, I imagined a hundred thousand people leaping to their feet and cheering wildly.
Peggy glanced briefly and balefully over the lenses of her reading glasses. “It’s about time,” she said, and turned her attention back to her computer screen. The chorus of congratulatory cheers in my head evaporated, replaced by the solo buzz of a weed trimmer outside the Anthropology Department’s grimy windows on the world.
But. But: two hours after that, the buzz of the weed trimmer gave way to the song of jet engines, spooling up to take me to Tallahassee.
Later, as the plane descended toward the pines of the Florida panhandle, I looked out the window and saw dozens of plumes of smoke. Florida was on fire.
Chapter 3
Angie St. Claire was waiting for me at the security checkpoint when I got off the plane at the Tallahassee airport — an airport that made Knoxville’s modest terminal look vast and sleek by comparison. I knew Tallahassee was smaller than Knoxville, but I’d assumed that as Florida’s capital, Tallahassee would bustle with air traffic. Apparently I’d assumed wrong.
Angie shook my hand as I emerged, squeezing so hard I nearly winced. “
Wow,” she said, “when you pull a string, you don’t mess around. Who’d you call, the governor?”
“Better.” I grinned. “I’m friends with a lawyer who’s in league with the devil. Well, sort of.”
“Sort of in league with the devil? How does that work?” She started toward the terminal’s main exit.
“Actually, I meant that I’m sort of friends with him. But come to think of it, maybe he is sort of in league with the devil.” I smiled. “Seems to be a good partnership, too, judging by his millions. The guy’s name is Burt DeVriess — the police call him ‘Grease’—and he’s a slick, smart attorney. He’s flayed me alive on the witness stand a few times, but lately we’ve worked together on a couple of things.” I didn’t mention that one of the “things” was a case in which I’d been framed for a murder, and that Burt had saved my hide; that, I figured, was a story for another, distant day, perhaps — or perhaps not. “I called Grease right after I talked to you. He got in touch with a colleague in Atlanta whose law partner or wife or sister — hell, in Georgia, she could be his partner and his wife and his sister — anyhow, somebody who has connections in that neck of Georgia. So there should be a couple of pieces of paperwork waiting for us at the Cheatham County courthouse. One’s an injunction to delay your sister’s burial by twenty-four hours. The other’s a court order authorizing us to examine the body in the meantime.” The glass door slid open, and we stepped out into sunshine and steam.
