Page 47 of Two Kinds of Stranger (Eddie Flynn #9)

Eddie

I can’t stand those calls.

When your phone rings in the middle of the night, it’s never good news.

Those two calls, just hours ago, were bad. They could’ve been so much worse.

It had been a long, sleepless night.

I got up from my desk and stretched my back. The sun was bleeding the night into morning. Amy was finally asleep in a makeshift bed of blankets and cushions on the floor of my office conference room, Clarence curled up beside her.

Harry had fallen asleep in the chair opposite mine. He was snoring softly.

I left my office and set off for the kitchen. I needed at least two pots of coffee this morning to fire up my brain. Before I got there, I heard footsteps on the stairs: the familiar trudge of Bloch’s boots, slower, more halting this morning. And, behind them, the soft shuffle of Lake’s shoes.

They came in the main door of the office, spotted me and stopped.

‘Jesus, you scared the shit out of me. Both of you,’ I said. ‘You two should still be in the hospital.’

Lake’s left arm was in a sling. He wore a hospital robe under his suit jacket. The robe tucked into his pants. They must’ve cut his shirt off to deal with the bullet wound.

Bloch was a mess. Her face was swollen on the left side. Her eye, now half shut with the swelling, was turning green and purple. Her arms were a circuit board of Band-Aids and bandages.

‘Did you get a CT scan?’ I asked, looking at her.

‘Mild concussion. Three broken ribs, cuts and bruises,’ said Bloch. ‘Nothing that would stop me finding Bruno Mont.’

‘Leave Mont for now. I know you want him. I would too. But there’s a time and a place.

You’re still breathing, which means he messed up last night.

He’s gonna lay low for a while. He knows you’re going to be on your guard.

He’ll wait. Some months at least. Enough time for you to become complacent. We’ll get him before that.’

‘He’s going to wish he died fast, like Cross,’ said Bloch.

‘Did Kate update you all?’

They nodded.

Bloch turned to look at Lake, said, ‘You’re still wearing a hospital shirt. You went back to your apartment and you didn’t put on a fresh shirt?’

‘Didn’t have a clean one. Don’t judge me. I got a lot going on,’ said Lake.

‘You both sure you’re okay to be here?’ I asked.

They just stared at me.

‘Okay, let me grab some coffee and you both go and take a look at the video on Harry’s laptop. I’ve watched it three times. Something’s bugging me. See if you can figure it out.’

They went into my office quietly, so as not to startle Harry. Gently, Bloch put a hand on his shoulder and he opened his eyes. He stood and embraced her. Bloch wasn’t comfortable with human contact. Not really. There were few exceptions. Her childhood friend Kate, and Harry.

Bloch tried to smile, not wanting to worry the old guy.

It didn’t work. Harry watched her grimace as she sat down in one of the chairs arranged around my desk.

Lake waved away Harry’s concern. I didn’t need to be in the room to know what Lake was saying.

It was a flesh wound and he’d had much worse.

Just before he left the FBI he stumbled into a drug dealers cash house while working a different case.

A lot of heavily armed men died that night at Lake’s hand.

Part of Lake died in that house too. He had walked in an FBI agent, and had been carried out by paramedics as a killer.

He’d been set up by someone in the Bureau, and had never found out who exactly was responsible.

It was on my list to find out who some day.

I put four mugs on the counter. Poured black coffee for Bloch and I. Another for Harry, with a little shot from a bottle of Kentucky bourbon I kept in the kitchen. For Lake, I made hot water with lemon. I don’t know how he drinks it.

Once I’d carried the drinks into my office, I saw Harry was starting the video.

‘In cases of exhumation,’ began Harry, ‘the key concern for police officers is establishing the chain of evidence for the body. Every second that corpse is out of the ground has to be accounted for. Otherwise, it’s Christmas time for the defense.’

‘How so?’ asked Lake.

‘Think about it. They want the body to be examined in the hope of finding evidence of foul play. If a smartass defense lawyer can say that between the time of the body being exhumed and the time the body is examined or tested, there was an opportunity for someone to interfere with the state of the corpse then it renders the test results shaky. They need an unbroken chain of evidence to prove that their examination is accurate, and that no one could have had access to the body to distort their investigation results. Look . . . ’ said Harry, and hit play on the laptop.

The screen showed a team of police and forensics officers, together with cemetery workers, breaking ground in a cemetery with a small backhoe.

Harry speeded up the video. The gravestone was that of Stewart Yorke, Elly’s father.

The grave beside it belonged to her mother.

Once the hole was big enough, two grave diggers jumped down into the grave carrying long straps.

It looked from the video like a peaceful place to be laid to rest for eternity.

Beyond the graveyard, the river and the Manhattan skyline were visible.

The canopy of a large tree sat above both graves, providing some shelter for the workers, and for mourners, I guessed.

Once the straps were in place, a telehandler appeared in shot and the straps were attached.

It hauled the casket out of the grave and into a black steel case, which sat on a flatbed truck.

The case’s sole purpose was for transporting exhumed bodies.

The lid of the case was closed, locked and for the first time Detective Bill Sacks appeared in shot.

He peeled off a police evidence seal sticker from its backing and stuck it over the lid of the steel transport box. Close-ups of the seals were recorded.

The video went blank and started again in a different location with a close-up of the same evidence seals on the steel box, to demonstrate that they had not been broken and were in exactly the same place, but this time the flatbed was at the loading bay of the medical examiner’s office in Manhattan.

We saw the seals being broken and mortuary workers in white forensics overalls lift the casket from the transport box, onto a trolley and wheel it inside.

The camera followed it to an examination room where Dr. Sharpling, the medical examiner, was waiting.

He wore a full forensic suit and was only recognizable because of a tuft of white hair sticking out from his hood.

The mortuary assistants opened the casket, and the camera swept over the body of Elly’s father, from his shoes to his head.

But the camera stopped at his knees.

‘What’s this,’ said a voice in the video that sounded like Sharpling. He appeared in frame with a pair of long steel tongs. He called for a baggie. Sacks appeared at his side with a transparent plastic evidence bag.

Sharpling reached inside the casket and when his arm came out there was a moth in the teeth of the prongs. The moth was dead, unmoving. As he placed it in the evidence bag, he offered an explanation.

‘Probably came from the funeral parlor. Most of them have a room of old, spare clothes to dress the customers who don’t have anything formal. This little guy was probably in a suit hanging up in the funeral home and next thing he gets buried with a corpse . . . ’

Sacks sealed the bag, then handed it to someone else.

‘I’ve never seen that before,’ I said. ‘Anything out of the ordinary, it bugs me. The rest of the video shows the autopsy and Sharpling taking samples of tissue.’

‘Rewind that back to when the doc holds up the moth,’ said Lake.

Harry used the keyboard on the laptop to find the section of video.

‘There,’ said Lake, ‘freeze it.’

Lake and Bloch leaned forward, looked at the screen. The moth was large enough, I guessed, with brown forewings dotted with black spots. The same spots appeared on its scarlet hind wings.

Lake and Bloch looked at each other. They smiled.

‘Rewind it further, to the cemetery,’ said Bloch.

Harry started the video again from the beginning, showing the backhoe starting to dig up the remains.

‘That’s it,’ said Bloch.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘What did you see?’

Lake smiled and said, ‘We just saw heaven.’

‘What does that mean?’ said Harry.

Bloch stood, said, ‘It means we just found a defense.’