A Samantha Owens Novel

Chapter

13

Lynchburg, Virginia

SAM LOVED THE SOUTH.

The Hoyle Funeral Home and Crematorium was housed in an antebellum mansion worthy of its own sound stage in Hollywood as a depiction of Tara. Huge Corinthian columns soared in front of three stories of pristine white clapboard, black shutters, a wraparound porch and a red double front door, its true purpose masked by the picture-perfect facade of a luxurious bed-and-breakfast. The main doors opened into a magnificent foyer with a small, awkwardly placed reception stand, currently empty. The counter had a small bell, like in a hotel, and Sam smacked it lightly with her palm. Moments later, a small man scurried into the foyer.

Roy Hoyle of the eponymously named crematorium was a mouse of a man with a mop of unnaturally black hair that was slightly crooked on his scalp, and thin, pale hands that hardly seemed capable of the duties they were called upon to perform on a daily basis. He shook Sam’s hand and she could barely feel his fingers in hers. She saw Fletcher flinch when the action was repeated, and cautiously wipe his hand on his trousers.

While the man himself might have been a mouse, his setup roared like a lion. When Davidson told him why they were there, he quickly gave them a tour of the facilities. His embalming suite was tidy and boasted the latest materials, all polished to a high shine, and the attached crematorium was immaculate. He even had a small but separate autopsy suite, designed specifically for independent pathologists who were called in to perform private and secondary autopsies for families.

Sam felt bad for her earlier uncharitable assessment—a mouse he might be, but a professional, cautious and meticulous one. Exactly what she needed to get to the truth about Timothy Savage.

After a bit of small talk, Hoyle led her to Savage’s body, which had been prepared for cremation. When Davidson had said all stop, Hoyle took him seriously—everything was as it had been a few minutes prior, but the heat to the retort had been turned off. Savage was ensconced in a cardboard box, waiting on the automated belt. It seemed he wasn’t the only customer of the day; there were a few other boxes lined up behind his.

Hoyle showed her the environs shyly. He had a soft voice she strained to hear, and didn’t make much eye contact. “Dr. Owens, if you need an assistant, I can provide that service for you. My sister, Regina, has been well trained, she worked for a time in Richmond at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.”

“Why not you, Mr. Hoyle?”

He blushed. “It’s not my forte, ma’am. I’m in charge of the crematorium, and I do the final work for the funerals. Everyone wants their loved one to look pretty, and I’m a good hand with the makeup and hairstyling. My grandmother taught me. Regina does the embalming and autopsy work. Shall I call her? She can be here in a few minutes.”

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Hoyle. And if we can move Mr. Savage to the autopsy suite, I can get started with the external exam.”

Fletcher said, “I’ll help.”

Hoyle shook his head. “Thank you, but I’ve got it. We have a pulley system that moves the bodies around. Let me just call Regina, and I’ll get the body moved for you.”

Regina promised to come straightaway, and Hoyle got Sam situated.

A few minutes later, an automated cart on wheels arrived in the autopsy suite with the cardboard coffin.

“Handy contraption,” Sam said.

He smiled shyly. “It is. We have the only crematory outside of the big cities that can handle bodies over three hundred pounds. My grandfather designed the pulleys. My father added the automation. They practically move the bodies themselves.”

Davidson called to Fletcher, “Hey, you need to see this.” He gestured to an outer room.

Fletcher looked at Sam. “You okay?”

“Sure thing. Go ahead. I’m not going anywhere.”

He left, and a pretty young woman with the same slight build as her brother appeared in the door to the suite. Roy’s face lit up. “Ah, here’s Regina.”

“Hi, Roy.” His sister came and gave his arm a squeeze, then turned to Sam with a sense of awe. “You’re Dr. Owens. I’ve heard so much about you. I’ve read all your papers. It’s a real honor to have a chance to work with you, ma’am.”

Goodness. She felt her face getting red; she wasn’t used to this kind of adulation.

“Hi, Regina. Call me Sam. You ready to get to work?”

“I am. Are you strong? Savage isn’t a little guy.”

“I can handle myself if you can.”

“Let’s do it, then.”

Roy excused himself, and the two women wrestled the body from the cardboard coffin.

Savage definitely wasn’t little. Sam’s measurements said seventy-two inches, and the scale showed him at two hundred pounds. He was fully dressed in a black turtleneck and jeans.

“Is this how he came in?” Sam asked.

“This is how we got him,” Regina said. “We did the usual radiographs to make sure he didn’t have any devices or replacement joints, but the orders were to cremate him clothed.”

“Is that usual?”

“Sure. Put Grandma in her favorite blue dress before the cremation, that sort of thing.”

“Who dressed him, do you know?”

“No idea.”

“Okay. You have the radiographs?”

“I do.” She put them up on the light board, and Sam looked them over. She saw nothing of great significance, only a previous tibia fracture, well healed.

“Let’s get his clothes off. I can’t believe they redressed him after they examined him,” she said.

“From what I’ve been told, there was no real examination at all. You have a clean slate.”

Sam looked at Regina. “What? I knew there wasn’t an internal exam, but nothing external, either?”

“Not that I know of. It was a clear case of suicide, they told us, and warned us to be careful with the body because of the hydrogen sulfide. It’s the only reason we haven’t sent him through the retort yet—we wanted to give the chemicals time to dissipate.”

Sam shook her head, partly annoyed and partly glad. When they said no post, she’d assumed they were talking about an internal exam. What sort of fool wouldn’t do any external exam on a dead body? Someone was trying to get Timothy Savage out of the way, and fast.

Once his clothes were off, Sam started on a cursory check of the body. She stopped at the neck. There were bruises around his throat. Her first instinct was strangulation, but she thought about the method of his suicide, the hydrogen sulfide, and the reaction he might have had to suddenly being unable to breathe. People sometimes brought their own hands to their throat as if they could claw an airway open from the outside. It was suspicious, but not entirely unheard of. Sam looked closely at his eyes and under the edge of his upper lip, saw the red pinpricks of petechial hemorrhage. That was to be expected in the case of asphyxiation.

He’d also bitten his tongue, a deep black wound caused by his incisors. The injury would have bled profusely, and she had seen no evidence of blood on his clothes or his body. She tucked that fact away, but felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. Someone had cleaned up Mr. Savage, after all. The police? Or someone else?

“Take a vitreous fluid, would you, Regina?”

“Sure.” She expertly drew the fluid from his eye with a syringe as Sam finished the rest of the external exam. “Let’s flip him.”

They manhandled the body so it was facedown, and Sam gasped. The upper part of Savage’s back was covered in tattoos. Spirals and triangles and stars, what seemed to be a type of Celtic love knot. No faces, no names, just strange symbols, arranged in what looked to be a repeating pattern.

“Take a photograph please, Regina.”

The girl hopped up on the autopsy table and motioned for Sam to hand her the camera. She snapped off a few shots. “Pretty.”

“You think?”

“Absolutely. Here, look at the shot from above. They’re arranged in a triskele. Do you know what that is?”

“Never heard of it.” She looked at the photos and could see now what Regina was talking about—the multiple symbols formed a clear pattern of three interlocked spirals.

“A triskele is Celtic, and it’s ancient. It was a pagan symbol, the power of three—maid, mother, crone or land, sea, sky. Any triad, really, but once Christianity came into the land, it morphed into a trinity symbol. Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

“How do you know this?”

She smiled, and Sam was reminded of a pixie. “I studied Comparative Religion and the Classics at Randolph College. I was considering entering a convent for a while, then decided I could be of better service to my Lord by helping discover what causes death. I’m considering pathology, but med school is so very expensive.”

It was a strange way to phrase it, what causes death, instead of the more common forensic phrase, cause of death. But Sam didn’t pursue it. She looked at Savage’s back again.

“It must have taken years to get all of these tattoos,” she said. “Did you know Savage, Regina? Or his son, Henry? Where he went to church, or anything else about him?”

“No, I didn’t. Then again, Lynchburg’s a bigger town than you might think.”

“I was told Henry went to Randolph College, too.”

“Really? Must have been after I left. I graduated the last year it was all women. I’m still stunned they went coed on us.”

“Too much to hope for, I guess, leaving the school single-sex. Let’s flip him and get moving.”

Sam put her hands on his shoulders. As they maneuvered the body onto its back, she felt something hard and crusty under her fingers.

She carefully brushed back his hair and saw a trail of something silvery by the man’s ear. “Hold up a sec, I want to collect this. Can you hand me a DNA swab?”

“What is it?”

“Tears. I think. It makes sense. His eyes would be burning from the chemicals. Just want to be sure we catch everything.”

She collected the sample, then they washed the body and got down to the internal exam. Sam added a second set of gloves, pleased Regina had the Marigolds she preferred, put on an eye shield and double-masked herself in case of any leftover gases from Savage’s lungs. She wasn’t too concerned, though. It had been long enough that most of the gas would have dissipated, and they were in a well-ventilated room. Just in case, she made sure Regina had taken the same precautions, then hefted the scalpel in her right hand and glanced at the girl. “Would you like to do the cut?”

“Oh, no, Dr. Owens. I’d like to watch you do it, if you don’t mind. I can probably learn a thing or two from your technique.”

Sam laughed to herself a little—her technique was rusty as hell, considering—but placed the tip of the scalpel into the flesh just below the clavicle and swept the knife downward decisively. The tough skin parted, the yellow subcutaneous fat along the edges thicker than she would have anticipated for a man in such good shape. She sliced down the other side, meeting the cut just above his groin, and stepped back to allow any gases to escape. After a few moments, she set to the task of autopsy. The rib shears made quick work of the breastplate, making little crunching noises that echoed in the quiet space, and when Regina lifted it out of place, Sam’s first view of the lungs brought her to a halt again.

They were perfect.

She was looking at the lungs of a healthy man, in his prime, who’d clearly never smoked or lived in an industrial, polluted area. Nor did they show any sign of irritation, or inflammation. No frothy blood, no edema.

“Son of a bitch.” The words were muffled behind her mask.

“What is it?”

Sam looked up at Regina. “Timothy Savage did not die from hydrogen sulfide poisoning.”

Chapter

14

SAM TOOK HER time going through the rest of the post. Savage’s body had a tale to tell, and she was listening.

His heart was normal size for a man of his age, with a nominal buildup of cholesterol plaque. The lungs: both upper and lower lobes, when dissected, proved to be clear of any indication of a chemical irritant. Liver, kidneys, stomach, intestinal tract, all were normal. He hadn’t had a recent meal before his death, though she found traces of blood he must have swallowed antemortem, and he was in decent shape.

In the examination of his throat, she found what she was looking for. Timothy Savage’s trachea had clearly been crushed. He’d been strangled, just as the bruising foretold, but by the very strong hands of another, with a towel or something soft to minimize the surface bruising. Sam had seen this sort of neck injury often, in accidental autoerotic deaths, but this was clearly murder—in those cases, the padded ropes or other devices were left in place. And in this case, the killer had been facing his victim.

With that knowledge in mind, she stepped back, looked at the body from a slightly different perspective. There was some slight internal bruising just below Savage’s lower ribs. Someone had put a knee on the man’s chest to hold him down. They’d very purposefully strangled the man, then set about making his death appear to be suicide.

Sam felt both vindicated and frightened. Savage had been correct. He had been murdered. And now she was into his case up to her eyeballs, and there was no going back.

She went through the final steps of the post. His brain was the last piece of the puzzle, and when they got his skull open, even that showed nothing irregular, just the typical undulating coils of gray matter, perhaps slightly looser than they would have been if he were younger.

Two things were bothering her. First, that Savage himself had known he was in mortal danger and had written to her directly instead of going to the police. It made her distrust June Davidson, someone she needed on her side. And two, that the law firm representing Savage’s estate had ordered him cremated without a proper autopsy. Three things, if she counted Benedict’s murder.

As she washed up and watched Regina craft beautiful stitches to close the Y-incision, Sam decided there and then to bring all the blood and tissue samples she’d taken back to D.C. for analysis. She didn’t trust anyone in Lynchburg, not now.

Used to sending samples out for analysis, Regina produced a small cooler that housed everything perfectly. She didn’t raise an eyebrow when Sam said, “I’ll drop these directly at the lab so you don’t have to make a special trip.”

“Should we go ahead with the cremation now?”

“If you have the room, why don’t you hold on to him for another day? I’ll call you tomorrow and release the body.”

“Sure thing, Dr. Owens. Thank you, so much, for allowing me to assist. It was fascinating watching you work.”

“You have a great touch. Remember the trick I showed you about how to cut the lung tissue so you can always identify it if you need to revisit your samples.”

“Triangles for upper, squares for lower. Got it.”

“If you do decide to go to med school for pathology, let me know. I’d be delighted to write a recommendation. I’m teaching at Georgetown now, so if you need a hand, don’t hesitate.”

Regina smiled widely. “Thank you so much. Do you have a card? So I can keep in touch?”

Sam gave her one of her new Georgetown University cards, then excused herself, went back upstairs into the grand foyer and called Fletcher. He answered, sounding slightly out of breath.

“Where are you? I’m finished, and waiting for you on the porch. We need to talk.”

“We had a looky-loo hanging around. Davidson and I chased him. Guy got away, he’s fast as a greyhound, but I got a good look at him. Five-eight, Caucasian, blondish hair, red-and-white baseball cap. Lock the doors and I’ll be back in five minutes.”

Sam didn’t hesitate. She wasn’t in the mood to take chances. She went inside, threw the bolt and realized how ridiculous her actions were. The place was huge, with multiple entrances. She rang the bell, and after a few moments, Regina appeared.

“Dr. Owens, you’re still here. Is everything okay?”

“Is this the only entrance?”

“No, there are the back doors to the veranda and the garages downstairs, of course, where we do intake. Why?”

“Detective Fletcher and Detective Davidson are chasing a suspect. They want us safely inside with all the doors locked.”

Regina responded immediately. “Follow me. The veranda doors are kept bolted, but the garage door is always open during business hours.”

They hustled down the stairs. Sam’s hand was beginning to go numb from carrying the weight of the cooler. She wasn’t about to let it go, though. They passed the autopsy suite and the embalming room, and entered a long hallway that led to darkness. Sam followed Regina closely lest she get lost in the labyrinth. After a minute, they stepped into a cavernous space Sam recognized from her own facility in Nashville. There were two industrial garage doors side by side, and a decent-sized body cooler.

As they entered the room, the lights went on with a hum. Sam relaxed a bit. The overheads were on motion sensors. No one was in here.

Regina slapped the button and the large doors began to drop. There was an entrance door between the two; she hurried over to it and threw the dead bolt.

“There,” she said with a grim smile. “We’re all secure.”

Sam patted her on the back. “You seem like you’ve done this before.”

“Oh, we have to run drills all the time. And up in Richmond, well, they don’t mess around. We’re expected to know the emergency precautions for any situation. Now, since you’re stuck here for a bit, would you like a cup of tea or coffee? Or something stronger?”

“Tea would be fabulous.”

They started back toward the stairs, down the long, dark hallway. As they turned the corner, Sam saw the door to the autopsy suite was open. Regina noticed it at the same time, and flattened back against the wall, an arm held out in front of Sam in protection. They stared at each other, both listening. Sam could have sworn she heard a noise coming from the autopsy suite.

She pointed to the suite and Regina shook her head, admonishing her to stay put. But Sam knew they had to check, see what was happening. She edged forward, slowly, one step at a time. There, she heard the noise again. It was quiet, barely audible keening. Grief. A breathy little sob.

What in the world?

She stepped firmer now, and miscalculated a corner. The cooler clanged against the wall, and there was a flash of movement. Someone burst from the room, ran into them both. Sam was shoved against the wall and knocked down, Regina collapsed beside her. Footsteps rang out as the person rushed away. Sam recovered quickly, ran down the hall after him. She turned the corner into the garage just in time to see a red-and-white baseball cap disappear out the door.