Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [73]
“Are you coming back to Woodland Dunes any time soon?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know.” I surprised myself with a coy tone to my voice. “I’m not sure if there’s anything there for me.”
“Well, there are about three kegs at the bar that you didn’t drink last time.”
“That’s a low blow.” We both laughed. “I am coming to Chicago this week. For a case.”
“Call me when you get here, and if you can’t come over to our side of the lake, I’ll come to you.”
“You’d do that?”
“Definitely.”
Before I read the police records, I tried Maddy once again. The number of beeps on her answering machine told me that she hadn’t checked her messages in a while. Must be staying at Grant’s place. Or maybe they had gone out of town. I felt a little pang of envy. I’d gotten messages from Maddy, but they were quicker than usual. She was always running out the door to meet Grant. I hadn’t even met him, and yet she always seemed to be with him these days. I tried her cell phone, but got no answer there, either.
I unpacked my small bag, which took only a few minutes, and made some pasta with sauce from a jar. Once I’d eaten and watched an hour of mindless TV, there was nothing keeping me from reading the police records. I was anxious to get to them, and yet fearful of what I might find.
I could hear an increase in the volume outside, car horns and stereos and voices, signaling that the city was priming up for another long Saturday night. But I had no plans. Maddy was nowhere to be found. I didn’t want to call my father, despite the number of messages he had left on my machine, so I was holed up in my apartment with a stack of old records calling to me from my coffee table. Finally, I settled on the couch with a mug of cinnamon tea, a far cry from the martinis and scotches that were being drunk around the city.
I picked up the face sheet of the police records. Its lines and boxes contained typed factual information. “Assistant Chief Manning” was listed as the investigation officer. The cause of death was there—“severe brain stem injury/hemorrhage”—as well the date of death, “May 20, 1982.” I felt that date like a thud to my chest. The anniversary of my mother’s death was only a few days away.
I made myself continue through the rest of the information. The time of death was stated as “Approx. 1:20 a.m.” How had they determined that, exactly?
I flipped through the stack until I found the coroner’s report. Authored by Dr. Charles Winnaker, the autopsy was a clinical description of every organ of my mother’s body, every limb and nail bed. There was a rush of sickness in my stomach, the pasta I’d eaten seeming to slosh and churn. I was vaguely familiar with autopsies from the one or two medical-malpractice cases I’d worked on as a summer associate. I knew that they involved a literal carving of the body, the skin split from pelvis to neck, the ribs cut with a saw, the heart and liver weighed and documented like a butcher slaughtering livestock. This was all necessary, I knew, for the physician to determine exactly what had happened to the body, what had caused the eventual shut down, but the thought of my mother’s body undergoing that was grueling.
I put the records down for a moment. Just read it all quickly, I thought. Skip the morbidly detailed inventory of body parts and get to the conclusion.
I lifted the autopsy report again and scanned it, trying to pretend this was just another case I was working on at the firm, that this wasn’t about someone I knew. Finally, I reached the end. There, Dr. Winnaker stated that a massive hemorrhage in the brain stem had caused the death of Leah Sutter, and, based on the decomposition of the body, he believed she had expired at approximately 1:20 a.m. He did not conclude what had caused the bleed but stated that it was consistent with either a blow to the back of the head or a fall.
A blow to the head, I thought. That could mean physical abuse, just as