Robert Walker - Killer Instinct

“ Hell, I know that. Dr. Coran. I didn't mean anything by… by…”

She said, “Log my time and targets, will you, Jim? And just so the rumor mill has something to grind, I've gotten another field assignment in Iowa. Going tonight-solo!”

“ That's great. Dr. Coran. I always said you were wasted, like me, here, doing this!” He gestured to the small wooden office where he worked, overseeing the range.

“ I know you mean that, Jim.” She calmed. “Thanks.”

“ I do… I always say you're wasted in the lab.”

She imagined what Jim meant to say, a pretty woman like her was wasted locked away in a lab.

“ Thanks, Jim. And you might tell anyone who's even remotely interested that-”she paused-”that I'll be traveling alone.”

“ None of my business, Dr. Coran.”

“ Just… just log these in.” She pushed the targets at him once more. As she walked off, she wondered if maybe Otto was right. Maybe Iowa City was the best place for her to be for now. Maybe there was more talk going about than she had realized.?

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.