Peter Clement - Mortal Remains

“Hey, I’ve been busy. After you showed me all the press clippings your daddy kept on the maternity center and the home for unwed mothers, I got to thinking.”

“Yeah?”

“I wondered if he’d had a similar interest as coroner, so I spent this morning going through all the crates of records we got stored in the White House beneath the jail. Sure enough, he saved a couple of boxes of stuff in there about those two places. Considered it important enough to mark Do Not Discard on the side, and nobody did. Looks like death certificates and birth records.”

Mark felt his heart quicken. Death certificates from the home for unwed mothers would have come to him routinely because the place fell under his jurisdiction. But the birth records, and anything at all from the maternity center, he would have had to send for specifically.

“Now I can’t make head nor tail of them,” Dan continued, “but I figure you might be able to tell what he was after.”

“I’ll swing by the White House and pick them up on my way home.”

“There’s more. I spent all yesterday looking through the copy of the NYPD file you left me. Their investigation back in ‘seventy-four was pretty complete. They even pulled Kelly’s phone records from her Manhattan apartment. That’s where I found something else interesting.”

Dan had to get a life, he thought. This twenty-four/seven stuff might be good for law and order in Hampton Junction, but not for his mental health.

“She made three long-distance calls the morning of her disappearance. The first was to the Braden estate. One of the maids told the police she remembered Kelly asking for Dr. Braden. The maid told her he wasn’t in and that Chaz had already left for New York.

“Kelly placed her next call to the home for unwed mothers. No one there remembered it. Maybe she didn’t identify herself, the police figured, and was still trying to reach Chaz. He occasionally dropped in at either place on his way to the train and did consults on newborns with heart murmurs. Except that morning he went directly to the station, by his own account. The police checked. The time lapse between the time he and the house staff said he left and how long he had to catch the morning express to Manhattan allowed no detours. So if she did call looking for him, she would have been told he wasn’t there either. At least that’s what the police report figured.”

“Okay.”

“Kelly made a third call, this one to the maternity center, presumably still looking for Chaz. Again, no one remembered her phoning, but the police once more didn’t make anything of that.”

“Where’s this going, Dan?”

“That last call cost her four-fifty. The two previous ones less than a dollar. I didn’t think anything of the difference at first. Hell, a long-distance minute on hold would have eaten up a buck easy those days, before the breakup of AT &T. But I took a closer look at the record, and found she spent ten minutes on the line. She might have reached him there.”

“You mean Chaz Braden lied about going straight to the station?”

“Not only that. If he stopped by the clinic, he would have had to have left the house earlier than he said to make the train at all.”

“And the household staff and people at the clinic went along with the lie?”

“Probably because they’d no choice but to protect their boss’s son or lose their jobs.”

It didn’t make any sense. “Why would Chaz risk so many people being able to expose him?”

“The key lie would be his insistence that he hadn’t spoken with her since she left the estate bound for New York the day before.”

“Any theory about why he wouldn’t want the police to know something so mundane?”

“You tell me. But if she talked to him, at last we’d have a chink in that prick’s story.”

2:30 P.M.

LaGuardia Airport,

New York City

“Hope you don’t have stinky feet,” Earl said to Janet, watching the security officers make a lineup of passengers take off their shoes. The roar of a departing plane blistered the air, making him raise his voice.

“Smart-ass!” She stepped in close to him, took his face between her hands, and gave him a long soft kiss on the lips. “You be careful,” she whispered in his ear.

“I love you, and give Brendan a hug for me.”

“You bet. And you call to give me an update every night.”

He grinned at her. “Sure.”

“It’s not funny, Earl. You make your poking around too obvious, and I’ll end up reading your name in the Herald . Mystery Lover Found. ”

“Come on.”

“Come on, yourself. Chaz Braden looked like a big vulture, hanging around at the memorial, eavesdropping on everyone. He’d love to find out whom she met in that taxi and shift suspicion from himself. And from the angry expression on his face whenever he glanced in your direction, I’d be afraid he already suspects that you were having an affair with his wife.”

“If you asked me, he looked pissed off at all Kelly’s old friends. He probably thinks it could be any of them. Otherwise, he would have served me up to the cops by now.”

“My, aren’t you reassuring?”

He grinned down at her, tightening his embrace. “You look beautiful.”

“What I am is frustrated. There are leads Mark Roper should be following that have nothing to do with her old friends and needn’t put you in danger.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve been thinking about Kelly, and there’s a piece missing. The first thing a woman in her predicament would do is arrange a divorce. Back then, God knows where she’d have had to go. Reno, maybe? Mexico? The Dominican Republic? Did you try that angle when you looked for her?”

“No, I never thought of it.”

“A man wouldn’t. You tell that Mark Roper he should see if she got that far. It might help him piece together her movements before she died. He has to do that, at least, if he hopes to find new evidence to prove hubby or mommy or whoever killed her.”

“I’ll tell Mark.”

The boarding call for her plane came over the PA.

“Good-bye, love,” she said, giving him a second kiss even softer than the first. “And don’t forget. Call me every night, be careful of Chaz Braden, and talk to Mark about what I said.”

He pressed her to him, savoring how slight and yielding she felt beneath her coat. “Yes! Now go.”

She stepped into the inspection area, slipped off her shoes, and stood with her arms wide, ready to be electronically frisked. On the outside she looked remarkably calm. But he knew otherwise. Whenever she felt really scared, she started giving him instructions.

4:00 P.M.

Hampton Junction

Mark knew someone had been in his house the minute he stepped in the door.

Little things were out of place.

The separation between coats and jackets in the front hall closet had changed. A week ago he’d moved the summer ones to the back and the winter gear to the front, so the positions of those items remained fresh in his mind.

Someone also appeared to have gone though the pockets, the material of a few being pulled almost inside out.

In the former living room, where he’d set up his waiting area, the phone and clock on an end table weren’t in their usual positions. He kept the face of the latter at an angle so everyone could see the time from any chair in the room, the phone placed off to one side so as not to obstruct the view. Instead they were placed one in front of the other.

Growing increasingly alarmed, he rushed into his office, which had once been the dining room.

All his computer equipment remained in place. The usual stack of unopened mail alongside a pile of unsent billings and recent test results that needed to be put in their proper files – he was weeks behind in his paperwork – were where he’d left them. Turning to the steel cabinets in which he kept patient records, he found them locked. No marks on the metal casings suggested an attempt to force them open.