J. Konrath - Bloody Mary

“What if you didn’t have to testify? What if you just made a statement?”

That flipped the switch in Rushlo. “I won’t testify! You can’t make me testify!”

“Easy, Derrick. Calm down.”

“I won’t do it!”

“But you wouldn’t have to go to court. You could just…”

“I love him.”

Pludenza chose that moment to return with the coffee. He handed me a cup and saucer, a wince etched into his face.

“Derrick” – I tried to sound soothing – “Barry wants to kill you.”

“I can’t betray him like that. He understands me. He’s the only one that understands me. But I don’t need to make a statement. You can prove Barry killed those women.”

“How?”

“He likes to bite. All of the girls I buried had bite marks on them.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m positive.”

That would be enough. If we exhumed Hernandez and found Stephanopoulos in the casket, with Fuller’s teeth marks on the corpse, he’d have to stand trial in Carbondale. And since this was years ago, he wouldn’t be able to use the tumor insanity defense.

I set down the coffee without taking a sip, and dug out my cell. Derrick grabbed my pants leg.

“You have to help me.”

“I’ll send some guards over to watch the house.”

“How about the witness program? Where they give people new names?”

I punched in Libby’s number. “If Fuller gets out, that’s a possibility.”

“Can they set me up at another funeral home?”

“We dropped charges against you, Derrick, but I really don’t think the FTC, IDPR, or OSHA is going to let you practice again.”

He began to cry. I thanked Pludenza and left Libby a voice mail on the way to my car. Then I called Herb.

“What?”

“Look, Herb, we can deal with our squabble later. I’m driving down to Carbondale and I need you to run interference for me.”

“Tell me.”

I filled him in, and he agreed to set the wheels in motion.

Southern Illinois University was a five-hour drive.

I hopped back on the expressway, my car pointed south.

I was sixty miles away from Carbondale when Libby called.

“The jury’s out.”

“How was your closing?”

“Not as good as Garcia’s.” I could picture Libby frowning. “If I were on that jury, I’d vote not guilty.”

“If that happens, we need to keep tabs on Fuller until we can get an arrest warrant from Carbondale.”

“What’re the chances of that?”

“If Rushlo wasn’t lying, chances are good.”

“Keep me posted.”

“You too.”

I met the Carbondale chief of police, Shelby Duncan, at Greenville Cemetery forty minutes later. With him were a woman from the Health Department, the county coroner, the assistant director of the cemetery, and several workers.

Herb had made good on his word; the permits were in order, and everyone who needed to be there was there.

The day was cold and miserable, befitting a disinterment. We huddled together, hands in pockets and shoulders scrunched, while the guy operating the backhoe repeatedly dipped the big yellow shovel into the Hernandez plot.

After an hour, he struck concrete. The vault. Illinois cemeteries required all coffins to be placed in a burial vault or grave box. That prevented the earth from collapsing the casket, which would leave the cemetery pockmarked with hundreds of obvious indentations.

Two men in overalls went down the hole to widen the edges, and large spikes with eyeholes were driven into the vault cover. They secured ropes, and the backhoe lifted the section of concrete out of the grave. Straps were then attached to the coffin, and it was brought to the surface and gently placed next to the vault top.

The coroner, a thin reed of a man named Russell Thompkins, brushed off some dirt at the foot of the casket, then fit a special hex key into a small opening. He cranked it, counterclockwise, and the rubber seal broke, releasing a powerful hiss of putrid air that I could smell from ten feet away.

The casket unlocked, Thompkins lifted open the head and squinted inside.

“Two bodies.” He pinched the nostrils of his pointy nose with long, slender fingers. “A man and a woman.”

“Is that enough?” I asked Chief Duncan. Duncan looked like a stouter version of John Wayne, and must have known it, hence the plaid flannel shirt and cowboy boots.

“It’s a damn good start. We need to establish that it’s Melody Stephanopoulos, and that your Barry Fuller was involved in her death.”

“Did you bring her dental records?”

“Yeah.”

“How about the faxes of the bite marks?”

“I’ve got it all in the car.”

I accompanied him to his vehicle, and took what I needed up to the casket.

“We need to find bite marks, ones that match these.” I showed Thompkins the papers. He nodded, slipped on some latex gloves, and got to work.

I took out a pair of my own, from the deep pockets of my blazer, and looked into the casket for the first time.

Julio Hernandez occupied the left-hand side. He was skeletal-thin, swimming in the oversized brown suit he wore. His facial features were sunken, recessed, and he had no lower jaw – cancer, Rushlo had mentioned. His mouth and throat were packed with rotten cotton batting.

The smell was so bad I had to take breaths from over my shoulder. Even the best embalming job couldn’t prevent decay, and the bacteria had eaten well for years before they too ran out of nourishment and rotted away.

Melody proved to be in much worse shape than Hernandez. She wore no clothing, and her flesh had a light gray cast. The atrocities committed upon her stood out in bas-relief black: a jagged tear across her throat, slits forming X-marks over each breast, a deep gash running from her pubis to her belly button. And dozens of dark, round sores, covering her head to toe like polka dots.

Bites.

The major wounds had been sewn up, the stitches expertly done, though hardly cosmetic. Rushlo’s postmortem work.

The coroner snapped pictures, and I borrowed his scalpel and forced it between Melody’s cold, dry lips, cutting the mortician’s glue that sealed them shut. The blade clicked against teeth. I pried her lips apart and found the suture, looping under her lower gums and up through her septum. I severed the ligature, and attempted to open the mouth.

The mouth didn’t comply.

Using the scalpel’s handle as a lever, I pried open her mouth until I could get two fingers inside. It took considerable force, and felt like I was being bitten, but I managed to stretch her jaws wide enough to get a penlight inside.

There was a gold crown on her back molar, on the upper left side.

The crown matched the one on Melody’s dental records.

The records also showed a filling on the upper right canine, and I easily found that with the light.

“It’s Melody.”

“Russell?” the chief asked the coroner.

“Too hard to tell. There’s a lot of decay.”

“I’ll settle for your best guess.”

“It’s possible they’re from the same man. I’d need more time, proper equipment, to know for sure.”

My cell rang. Libby. I picked up.

“Verdict came in. They didn’t take long to free the bastard.”

“Hold on a second, Libby.” I turned to the coroner. “Is there anything you notice that can prove our guy did this?”

Russell took out a handkerchief and blew his nose.

“Actually, there is something pretty incriminating. See these two bites here, on her inner thighs? There are bite marks in the pictures you gave me, in the exact same places.”

Chief Shelby unhooked the radio from his belt. “That’s enough for me. I’m calling Judge Dorchester.”