Michael Baden - Remains Silent

“Hear me out. If he was murdered, don’t you want whoever did it to be punished? Doesn’t he deserve justice?”

“What if it turns out he poisoned himself? I don’t want to know that. Suicide’s a sin against God. Besides, I have enough justice to deal with here in my job. Please, Jake. Dad’s buried. He died of cancer. Let it be.”

Manny didn’t see it that way. She came to Jake’s office around eight, looking haggard-and beautiful. His impulse was to put his arms around her, but instead he just listened as she went through the events at Turner.

“I want you off the case,” he said when she’d finished.

“And you’ll carry on alone?”

“Until I get enough to call in the police.”

“Enough as in ‘I don’t have the bones, I don’t have Mrs. A’s body, Pete is six feet under, and if I keep investigating I’ll probably be killed’?”

He laughed. “That’s about it.”

“Well, with all that good stuff going for you, I stay on the case.” She saw indecision in his eyes. “We once compared lists of things we hate. Threats and intimidation have just taken first and second place on mine. I’ve seen you look at me- you think I am a frail and helpless female. That is so male. But I’m a monster when I’m mad, and whoever it was who breathed on me last night has gotten me pissed off. We work together. That’s final.”

Now he did hug her. Got up, walked around the desk, stood by her side, and hugged her. His heart, he realized, was dancing.

Back behind his desk, he told her about his conversation with Elizabeth.

And then, because Manny simply had to do some of her own work, they agreed to meet the next night at Jake’s house.

IT WAS AN unseasonably cold morning in Queens. Like so many other things that belonged to the city, the heater in Jake’s official car wasn’t working, and he stood at the gravesite, wishing the sun would rise faster. Armed with the exhumation order, Jake had awakened the cemetery director at midnight to fax a copy to him and arrange for a 6 a.m. start.

He was dressed in jeans, old sneakers, a polo shirt, and a light jacket, inadequate insulation for a chilly morning but perfect for a dig.

He looked at his watch: 6:32. The grounds crew hadn’t arrived yet.

At this hour, the cemetery was peaceful- even, he had to admit, beautiful. The rising sun glinted off the stained-glass windows of the mausoleums, elaborate monuments to the wealthy and powerful of a bygone era, painting the simpler stones with fantastic hues. The cemetery, he knew, had plots dating back to the late eighteenth century. It had expanded in every direction, not slowing down until the 1990s when the Catholic Church had begun to allow cremation. When Jake had started at the ME’s office, almost all bodies were buried; now nearly a third were reduced to ashes.

Jake had just taken out his cell phone to call the grounds crew when he heard them coming. It had been only a week since Pete’s burial, so their job would be simple. Jake took photographs of the plot and the flat temporary marker identifying it: PETER JOSEPH HARRIGAN, 1933-2005.

The backhoe appeared, crawling toward him down the cemetery road, doing no more than five miles an hour. Jake waved as two workers got down from the rig. They wore jeans and work boots. One was tall and thin with shoulder-length blond hair and a mustache; the other was thick around the middle, with thinning black hair. They introduced themselves as Boris and Ned.

“Not the sort of thing we do very often,” the tall man, Boris, said. “Not for criminal justice purposes, anyway.”

“Sometimes when someone wants to transfer a loved one to a different site, we move ’im,” Ned added. He sipped Starbucks coffee.

“I have a friend who works in Jersey,” Boris said, leaning against the backhoe tire. “Once he dug up a casket, there were two bodies in it-two.”

Ned shrugged. “Joe Bonnano, the mob boss who owned a funeral home, hid his victims by burying their bodies in caskets with a rightful inhabitant- one on top of the other.”

“In my friend’s case,” Ned said, “the funeral home was ripping off the families.”

“Fascinating,” Jake said. “But don’t you have a job to do?”

The backhoe scraped at the earth, stripping off the neat layer of sod that had been laid a week ago. In less than ten minutes, the top of the cement liner that contained the casket was exposed. Boris scrambled into the hole, clipped chains to four metal loops on the liner top, and inserted a pry bar to loosen the epoxy that sealed it shut. He climbed back out and gave Ned a thumbs-up. With the shift of a lever, the backhoe’s arm lifted, chains straining against the cement. Boris pried at the seal again; the cover came off and was set down on the nearby lawn of an underground neighbor. This was the reason, Jake knew, that exhumations were done early; no relative of a buried body was likely to turn up.

Boris connected a sling to the backhoe, which lifted the casket out of the cement liner and placed it by the hole. Jake stepped forward.

“No water got in,” he said. “Good.” He hopped into the grave and scooped soil into small plastic containers.

Ned stared at him. “What are you doing?”

“Getting some soil samples. Six containers: four sides, top, and bottom. Standard procedure. You want to make sure the body hasn’t picked up anything from the groundwater.”

“Like what?”

“Arsenic, for one thing. People have been wrongly accused of murder because an ME made that mistake. Two Englishmen in the early nineteen hundreds were hanged for poisoning their wives; turned out later that rainwater had washed arsenic from the soil into the coffins.”

“Shouldn’t that cement box keep everything out?”

Jake climbed back up. “Depends on how much groundwater there is and how well the seal holds. Best to be careful.”

He examined the casket. Save for adherent soil, the wood was shiny and clean, as though it had just been lowered into the ground. The court order had mandated he perform the autopsy in situ. He had brought his implements from the car.

Ned unscrewed the lid and Jake gently pushed it open. His heart lunged. Pete’s face, ruddy in life, was pale in death. Jake knew it was because of the removal of blood during the embalming. But otherwise it was Pete as he had been in life- dressed in his favorite brown tweed suit, white shirt open at the neck- and the sight of his friend, free from pain, filled Jake with an unexpected poignancy. Maybe the killer had done Pete a favor, but shouldn’t that have been Pete’s decision? Shouldn’t this beloved man have been allowed to live to the last moment, savoring what little time he had left?

Sentimental. You don’t know if he was even poisoned or if he killed himself, unlikely as that is. Get to work.

Jake needed to examine Pete’s heart to determine whether the death certificate was right in stating natural causes; his liver, for evidence of poisoning; and his pancreas, to see if the cancer had spread. He removed Harrigan’s jacket and shirt, easy because the mortician had already cut them up the back to make them easier to put on, then his pants, underwear, and socks; Pete wore no shoes. Jake could dissect the organs and remove small pieces for microscopic examination, but the court order forbade his taking any organs from the body.

He made the Y-incision. Pete’s heart was in good condition for a heavy-drinking, seventy-two-year-old man. It was not enlarged, and there were few signs of coronary disease. It wasn’t his heart that killed him. The pancreas was hard and gray, almost completely replaced by the cancer, but there was no evidence it had spread to other organs. And the liver? From the outside, he could see that the capsule was wrinkled, and on section he found the lobules were necrotic. Significant but not definitive. I’ll do a frozen section right away.