sign of the cross, and bowed his head. Tears fell over the reddened rims of his lids, and with his thick fingers he wiped them off his cheeks. I closed my eyes and thought of the sister he had lost so long ago.
After a minute or so, he stood up, glared at me with whatever energy he had left, and headed across to his car. The patrol car was blocking his way, so he backed up into the intersection and gassed the Toyota as he drove away from us.
Again, Mike waved the workmen on to begin opening the Hassett grave. He talked to the cops and convinced them to stay at the site to make sure no other unexpected visitors interfered with our grim task.
Then he told me to follow him and we walked back to his car. “There’s nothing to see, Coop. Might as well wait over here. Let them do what they gotta do.”
Just as we leaned against the car, another Crown Vic approached. The two men got out and smiled at me, then introduced themselves to Mike.
“Heads or tails?” I heard one of them say. “Heads we get to keep her, tails she goes downtown with you.”
“You’re too late, guys,” Mike said. “We just got permission from the family.”
“What? Who’re you kidding?” The detectives looked at each other before the one in charge spoke. “Jefferson said they ain’t cooperating. He wants the body, Chapman.”
“Bobby Hassett just left us, isn’t that right, Ms. Cooper? All you had to do yesterday was talk nice to him, guys. Guess you couldn’t even get that right. We reached an understanding with him, didn’t we? Like gentlemen.”
“We did, actually. I suggest you find him before you embarrass yourselves,” I said, returning their smiles and thinking of Battaglia’s directive to me. “Mike seemed to have gotten to him this morning. Maybe his technique was a little different than whatever you and your prosecutors told him.”
It had taken less than a quarter of an hour for one of the men to strike his shovel against the lid of Rebecca Hassett’s coffin. I heard the metal edge crack against the wood and turned to look.
The detectives went over to the guys from the morgue to see what story could be coaxed from them, but since the duo were from Manhattan-not the Bronx satellite office of the medical examiner-they weren’t planning to return to First Avenue without the body either.
Another half hour and the diggers were waist-deep in the hole they had made, wedging the wooden box up as they secured it with straps in order to raise it onto the ground. It appeared to be made of simple pine, intact but showing obvious signs of rot on each of the corners.
Mike had gone back over to the grave. He crouched beside the coffin-probably offering a prayer, much as Bobby Hassett had done minutes earlier-then brushed some of the dirt off the worn lid before directing the men to load it into the van for the ride to the morgue.
The driver stood next to the rear door. “Don’t you want them to open it here? Take a peek? Make sure it’s who you’re looking for? That’s how we usually do it.”
“Nothing’s been going according to plan with this. I want her out of here before anybody else shows up, okay? Let’s just get her downtown,” Mike said. “I’ll be right behind you.”
We drove slowly up to the corner of the next plot and followed the van as it made a U-turn to retrace its route to Woodlawn’s entrance. As we passed the Hassett grave again, the men were filling the hole with the dirt that had been displaced.
Mike paused at the intersection, and my eyes were drawn by the movement of something dark off to my right. The ornate headstone that marked the border of the Primrose section of the cemetery had a large relief carving on its face-a weeping mother mourning the effigy of her curly-haired child, a sculpted robe covering her arched back.
The wind gusted again. It caught and lifted a piece of the black-sleeved coat of the person hiding behind the tomb-the same motion that must have gotten my attention originally.
“Mike, look over here. I think it’s the guy you were chasing. He’s come back.”
He made the turn and threw the car into park, opening the door as though to give chase.
“Don’t do it,” I said. “Your leg-it’s not worth it. You’ll make it worse.”
He waved me off and started to lope across the road.
A head appeared around the side of the old granite marker.
“It’s not a guy at all,” Mike said, stopping in place as I caught up to him. “It’s Trish Quillian.”
The figure in black ducked under a tree branch and ran headlong into the maze of shrubs and grave sites beyond the roadway. We’d lost her.
“Crazy as a loon that girl is,” Mike said. “I bet she’s been waiting with Bex-waiting at her friend’s grave for something to happen. I sure as hell would like to know why.”
34
I smelled the musty odor as I entered the autopsy room at the morgue. I had been to crime scenes where bodies had been discovered in closets or locked rooms after several days, and the stench was unbearable. This was just stale and unpleasant.
Jerry Genco was standing beside the photographer, who was bending over the coffin with his camera, talking to Mike.
“Stop wriggling your nose, Alex. There’s nothing much to smell,” Jerry said.
As with most forensic pathologists, years on the job had burned out his olfactory nerves.
“You ready for this?” Mike asked.
I didn’t like anything about being present during an autopsy-not the sights nor the sounds nor my inevitable musings about how the deceased would, when alive, have felt about this kind of investigation. I had enormous respect for the work of the doctors who performed the critical task and never ceased to be amazed at how they interpreted the stories that dead bodies revealed to them. I was comfortable knowing Mike would remain in the room for the entire procedure, but it was actually better if I did not make myself a witness to the reexamination.
“I’m not staying,” I said, holding up my hand like a stop sign.
At times it was critical to understand the process that would occur. I had never participated in an exhumation, and I knew that Battaglia would have questions that I would have to answer. Perhaps one day, if we were lucky enough to name Bex’s killer, a jury would need to know exactly what had transpired, too. So I would stay close by in the event there were developments that would direct the course of our work.
The photographer took a few more shots and walked out of the room. Genco made space for me beside him.
“Aspergillus fungus. That’s all it is, Alex,” Genco said, offering me a Tic Tac. “The body is pretty well preserved-a combination of the embalming process and luck. What you see is a bit of mold on the surface of the skin. I’d expect it to be there. That’s what the odor is.”
I looked down at the lifeless remains of Rebecca Hassett. Her skin looked rubbery and discolored against the white satin lining of the coffin, which had been stained by fluids that had seeped into it over the years. The black hair, so lustrous and thick in photographs, was clumped around both sides of her face, which itself had taken on a greenish hue. The once vibrant eyes were closed, probably sewn in place in the funeral home that had prepared her young body for the wake.
I was both horrified and transfixed. I wanted to look away but was drawn to stare at the petite body while images of a life that should have been flashed through my mind.
Her clothing had fared no better. The black cotton sweater and the pleated skirt that draped the thin figure had holes.
Around her neck was a silver crucifix on a chain, and cradled beside the teenager-a reminder of how childlike she still was at the time of her death, despite her defiant independence-was a worn stuffed animal, a brown- and-white bulldog that a family member, I presumed, had placed beside her.
“What happens next?” I asked, reluctantly turning my back to Rebecca.
“We’ll lift her out onto the table. Undress her, clean her up. I’ll examine the body first, of course. Then the vital organs.”
