Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [502]
“Was it public knowledge?” she asked Watermeier.
He looked at her, knew she was addressing him, but his eyes drew a blank. “What’s that?”
“Did Mr. Earlman tell people about the tumor? Friends, family, acquaintances?”
“Oh, yeah. He didn’t hide it,” Watermeier said. “But he didn’t complain about it, either.”
“Was there any public mention of it? Was it listed as COD in the obituary?”
Watermeier scratched his head, reaching under his hat. “I don’t remember about the obituary, but almost everyone knew Steve. He owned the butcher shop in downtown Wallingford. Bought it from old Ralph Shelby years ago but still kept the name. Figured everybody already knew it as Ralph’s. That was Steve. He was a pretty humble guy. And a good guy, fair and honest. Even after he got sick he was going in to work every day. Still did the custom cuts himself. After Steve died, the store closed. Someone bought all the equipment but didn’t want to run the shop. It’s some kind of knickknack shop now.”
Dr. Stolz looked up at Maggie from his perch. “What exactly are you thinking, Agent O’Dell?”
“If it’s not a surgery cut, it had to have been made postmortem, right?”
“Yes.”
“Was his funeral an open casket?” she asked Watermeier, who now only nodded. “So it had to be after the funeral.”
“Someone dug up his grave?” Henry asked, but from the look on his face, Maggie could tell he didn’t really want to think about it.
“When and how would they able to do that?” Stolz said. “A sealed vault isn’t the easiest thing to break into.”
“Not all caskets are put into vaults,” Bonzado offered. “Depends on whether or not the family wants to add that extra expense. If I remember correctly it’s about $700 to $1,000.”
“There’s another possibility,” Maggie said. “The body could have been taken before the casket was buried.”
“You mean someone may have snatched the body right from the funeral home?” Bonzado said as he stood, brushing his knees clean.
His sartorial get-up was an odd uniform for a forensic anthropologist, even for a professor. Maybe not for an eccentric professor with muscular, tanned legs. As Maggie caught herself admiring Bonzado’s legs, she also noticed his knees were covered with the rust-colored dust from the rocks and a green weed had latched onto the tops of his socks. It reminded Maggie to take a closer look at the dead man’s clothes for any similar debris.
“If someone had access they could have made a switch,” Maggie answered as she examined the suit, a lightweight wool, damp and sticky with what she guessed to be embalming fluid.
The skull cut had definitely been made after the body had been embalmed and prepared for its casket. There would be no way to hide leaking embalming fluid for an open-casket viewing without repairing the gaping hole, and the cutter hadn’t felt the urgency to make any such repairs. Now that she got a closer look at the blue suit, she could tell there were no signs of green weed, no brown rock dust on the wool. The cut hadn’t been made out here. In fact, other than the sticky embalming fluid, the suit looked clean.
“I helped carry his casket,” Watermeier said, sounding quiet and far away. “It was heavy. He had to be in there.”
Maggie glanced up at the sheriff. He rubbed his temple, not like a man puzzled in thought, but pressing hard—hard enough to wince—as if he wanted the image before him to disappear.
“I’m just saying we need to consider all the possibilities,