The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [47]
She led him down the hall to a metal door marked with a number and showed him a room reminiscent of a high-end bank vault. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “Be right back.”
The room was an exaggerated closet in size and decorated solely with a table and chair. The walls were bare and the ceiling lined with fluorescent strip lighting. He felt like a human subject about to undergo an uncomfortable experiment.
His connection to the outside world reappeared some ten minutes later, bearing an inch-thick folder.
“Here you go,” she said brightly. “Everything we’ve got about Judith Morgenthau. Any questions or problems, just push the button by the door.”
With that, she was gone, softly closing the door behind her—he hoped not hermetically.
He stared at the closed file for a moment. It was old, slightly yellowed, and soiled along the edges, indicating considerable use a long time ago.
Taking a small breath, he flipped back the cover.
Such dossiers have a system, usually a chronology and a department sectioning, combined. The police have their piece of it, the ME’s office theirs, then the hospital, and on down the line, depending on the case and how far it extends. This one, despite the cost it had exacted from Hillstrom, had still been pretty straightforward—a body found on the road, autopsied and identified, had been ascribed a cause of death in coordination with the police investigation that had eventually located the initial offending car.
That was merely the nutshell. The trick was going to be in finding and analyzing the nut.
He began, out of habit, with the photographs—first those of the scene, showing an initially unrecognizable lump, until details like a hand or foot eventually became discernible. Then the autopsy shots—here the body, or what was left of it, was washed and carefully laid out. The damage was horrendous. Body parts had been pulled apart and scattered over several hundred feet, and only placed in their proper position at the morgue. The prior mess at the scene now looked like a female body made up of bits and pieces. He certainly understood why it had been difficult initially to tell the difference between this poor woman and a dead dog.
He skipped the rest of the ME’s findings for the moment, knowing that was where he would have to be most thorough, and opted instead for the police reports.
These, too, had a comforting feel to them, even though the paperwork was both ancient and different from what he knew in Vermont. He traced the investigation from the initial call to the summoning of an investigative team to the arrival and findings of the forensic techs. Reports and narratives followed, detailing how, once the deceased’s name was made clear, her lifestyle and habits were painstakingly reconstructed through a blossoming of interviews.
Here Joe paid close attention, cross-referencing with some of the ME’s reports, concentrating on statements made by those who might have known she was pregnant, watching for the classic what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it smoking gun of lore, hoping to pin Medwed to a precise spot on a timeline of knowledge. Hillstrom had said that she’d only been brought in after the actual autopsy, once the workload and media buzz had started building. Joe wasn’t expecting a signed memo from her boss asking her to take the blame for covering up the woman’s pregnancy, but some proof that Medwed had known of the condition before she did would have been nice. Nice but not likely, as it turned out, since all signs of his even being near the autopsy had been obliterated to protect him. Typically, Hillstrom’s loyalty had been matched by her thoroughness.
Progress was slow and frustrating. Joe located a copy of Morgenthau’s medical records from her doctor’s office, entered the day before the accident, detailing