Dying For Revenge (The Lady Doc Murders Book 1) Read online

“Just as long as it’s not Mitch Houston, we’ll be fine.”

  Houston, Hollywood’s current favorite leading man and a very hot commodity, had moved to town several months before, buying both a trophy home in Mountain Village and a remote cabin on a thousand acres in one of the basins in the Wilson Peaks, in a display of conspicuous consumption excessive even for Telluride, Colorado, my adopted home on the western slope of the Rockies. The silence at the other end of the phone did not bode well for my career on the comedy circuit. I sat upright, awake, my mind suddenly clear and feeling dismayed.

  “Are you kidding me?” I asked.

  Any murder is a tragedy, but this one was going to be a pain in the ass to boot.

  “Nope.”

  I heard him take a swig from his ever-present water bottle. I had been trying to train him not to take it into crime scenes and hoped he was calling from somewhere other than the immediate vicinity of the corpse.

  “Damndest thing. A woman coming down on the last gondola saw Houston through the bedroom window.”

  I could believe that. It never made sense to me why someone would buy a multi-million dollar home that complete strangers had a bird’s-eye view into, but they did.

  “It took her a couple of hours of her boyfriend trying to convince her she was crazy for her to work up the courage to call but she did. Otherwise we probably wouldn’t have found out until tomorrow, and Houston’s cute little girlfriend would have been long gone. She plugged him right between the eyes,” he added.

  “Allegedly.”

  “Allegedly. However, when the deputy arrived, she discovered the alleged perp standing by the alleged but very dead victim, calm as can be. She was packing her bags. We found a literally, if alleged, smoking gun. Well, recently fired, anyway. It was in her underwear drawer. She’s lawyering up and won’t say anything, but it seems pretty clear what happened. Not much mystery to this murder, but we still need you up here.” Tom paused for another swig of water. “I’ll send someone around.”

  “Never mind. I’ll drive myself.”

  Patterson gave me the address on Double Bogey Lane. I scribbled hurriedly on one of the pads I habitually keep scattered all over the house. I recognized this particular street as the main one in the priciest section in what amounted to a wildly pricey subdivision. The guy who laid out the place had a sense of humor, at least.

  Half an hour later, I was standing in the over-lit bedroom of one of the most ostentatious log homes in Mountain Village, a place where overstated log and rock palaces grow like weeds in a garden. I was outfitted in the latest in crime scene investigator chic: blue booties, gloves, and jumpsuit. Tom Patterson — temporarily minus his water bottle — was there, along with short, blonde, plump, and efficient Maggie Gleason, the deputy Tom had offered to dispatch to get me.

  The master suite was bigger than my first two apartments combined, with an expanse of glass that looked out onto a porch and through an aspen grove that opened up on one side to reveal mountain peaks washed in moonlight. A corner door, ajar, led into a bathroom with pale green towels dropped carelessly onto a pink marble floor. A massive, open, stone fireplace complete with bearskin rug dominated one end of the room and an entertainment center, bar, and leather couch the other. The furniture was heavy log stuff, interior-decorator tasteless. The bed, unmade, was in the center of the room, to take best advantage of the view. An open, brown leather suitcase was half full of clothes. The gas fireplace was full of ashes, and the walls were scarred from the impact of a variety of knick-knacks that were lying around the room, including an Oscar surrounded by bits of broken mirror.

  Across the undoubtedly expensive Navajo rug on the floor, Mitch Houston was sprawled, face up, feet nearest the doors that were open to the porch and what would be a dynamite view of the mountains. His vacant blue eyes were staring up at the hand-painted floral chandelier above him, the blood pooling beneath his head enough to ruin the rug's Two Gray Hills design. Sure enough, there was a neat little hole in his forehead. I knelt and bent over him to take a closer look.

  “It’s not a close shot, and it sure could be a .22. Is this girl good or unlucky?” The edges of the wound were clean and sharp, a dead-on hit with no powder marks. I felt the hand of the corpse. It was not as warm as it should have been, with stiffness starting in the joints. His face and hands were smooth and free of scratches. The room was a mess but, except for the hole in his head, Mitch Houston wasn’t.

  “Unlucky is my guess. When we got here, she was standing there, looking kind of dazed at the body. Like she couldn’t believe she’d done it. We found the gun in the dresser. It’s what my grandma would have called a lady’s gun, small, even with a pearl handle, so help me God. Recently fired and a .22.” Tom Patterson paused.

  “Unlucky as hell,” I agreed.

  I’ve known .22 rounds to bounce off the front of the skull, where it’s thick and when it’s not a close shot, just tunneling under the skin and causing no serious damage. This one had gone straight through the front of Houston’s skull just above the eyes. I lifted his head and felt, then looked, at the back of it. No exit wound, which was typical. The low velocity round had just enough energy to get inside the skull, then spent its time ricocheting around the brain case.

  “Probably won’t be much left of the bullet,” I remarked, then stood up. “He’s been dead a little while, Tom. Three, four, maybe five hours max, I would guess. It’s not a recent kill.”

  I retrieved a thermometer, a scalpel and a syringe from my case and knelt beside the body. I pushed aside the Bluegrass Festival shirt, unzipped the worn jeans to expose his abdomen, and made a small incision in the skin, then the underlying liver. I tucked the probe of the thermometer inside, waited for it to come to temperature, and recorded it. Body temperature isn’t much help in determining time of death, especially in this day and age of air conditioning, but a lot of lawyers still ask about it, so I do it just to shut them up when I am on the stand. Most of the time, when you get right down to it, the cops establish the time better than I ever could, by old-fashioned legwork and being downright nosy. Like this time. The last gondola ran at midnight, and it seems Houston was dead by then.

  “Anybody hear the shot?”

  “Not sure yet. Nobody called one in, anyway,” Maggie offered. “It’s not like I can interview the neighbors in the middle of the night. Give me a time of death, and we can ask some intelligent questions tomorrow.”

  Patterson glanced at his deputy, then squatted down on his heels by the body, the better to see what I was doing. I shrugged and got back to business. The real scientific data comes from testing the fluid in the eyeball. I wiped off the thermometer, laid it on the case, and uncapped the needle on the syringe. When I leaned forward to slide the needle into Houston’s right eye, I noticed out of the corner of my own that Patterson cringed, turned his face away and quickly stood up again. It never ceases to amaze me what makes people squeamish.

  I finished, satisfied with the sample I had been able to get, and stood, still looking down at America’s heartthrob. He was handsome enough, but thinner than a man ought to be and shorter than he appeared on the big screen. His features were a little coarse-looking in death, and there were dark circles under his eyes.

  “I’ll have something for you later in the day.” I swore under my breath as I realized the sharps container I needed was next to my forensic kit. I debated recapping the needle, then decided against it. Rules are rules. “Hand me that red box, will you, Tom?”

  By that time Patterson had recovered. He handed the water bottle he had managed to grab when I wasn’t looking to Maggie and retrieved the red plastic container we use to dispose of needles. He handled it gingerly and placed it carefully next to the body, as though it might bite him. Tom has an unhealthy respect for germs. I deposited the needle into it and disengaged the test tube with the sample from Houston’s eye.

  “Thanks. I’ll give you a call as soon as I know something.”

  Patterson shrugged. “
It is what it is. Not much doubt about this one.” His homely face wrinkled in thought. “Damn shame, she seems like a nice kid,” he added.

  I refrained from comment. I’ve never had a lot of sympathy for murderers, and since my husband’s death at the hands of a colleague, my supply had run out. Houston might have been a world-class jerk, but no one had the right to take his life. I just grunted and started processing the scene.

  Ordinarily, one of my techs would have handled the grunt work and in record time, but I make it a point to handle call duties solo one week out of the month, just to keep in practice. It keeps me competent but not fast. Dawn was beginning to spill over the peaks when I finished, zipping Houston into a black body bag with the help of Patterson. I called down to the Western Slope Forensic Center to ask Jasper Quick, my right-hand man, to pick up the body.

  There wasn’t much reason to go back home to bed. “How long until the press gets wind of this?” I asked Patterson as we stepped out onto the front porch.

  “Not long. Marla Kincaid — the girlfriend — told the maid to call her agent,” Patterson said. Maggie, standing by his side with her customary patience, rolled her eyes, a smile playing around her lips but she said nothing. “These Hollywood types never cease to amaze me. I presume the agent will have the sense to call a lawyer but probably not before he calls the Associated Press.”

  “Great.” I drew in a breath of mountain air, clean and fresh and smelling of pine and aspen in the June morning. “Guess I’d better get right at this, then. Life’s going to get real complicated real fast.”

  I glanced across the lawn, suddenly washed by the lights of an oncoming car. I recognized it as belonging to a reporter from one of Telluride's two competing papers. Watching the vintage Jeep pull up the long drive, I slapped the sheriff on the shoulder.

  “Best of luck,” I said as I pulled open the door of my green 4Runner.

  As I pulled out of the drive, I heard Patterson’s distinctive voice in reply.

  “Sh….”

  It didn’t take me long to finish the autopsy on America’s heartthrob. It was a single shot to the head, and as I suspected, it had rattled around inside Houston’s head long enough to completely deform the bullet. I had dutifully retrieved and bagged it. It wasn’t much more than a lump of lead, but it was bigger than I expected. It struck me as a little odd for a round out of the pistol Patterson had showed me.

  More interesting than that were the enlarged lymph nodes and spleen, the raised bumps on the skin of his back and chest, and the white coating on Houston's tongue. Mitch Houston may have been America's leading man, and was, according to the papers, a health fanatic of major proportions, but it looked to me like he'd fallen prey to a major weakness of the flesh. I'd drawn a couple of extra tubes of blood to run a few confirmatory tests, but if my suspicions were correct, this autopsy was going to be a major tabloid bombshell.

  I peeled the gloves off and dropped them in the waste. One stuck on the side of the bin, and I kicked the metal side—harder than I intended—to dislodge it. I washed off, up to the elbows, three full minutes, two separate lathers with antimicrobial soap, then dried my hands on one of the soft terry-cloth towels I kept by the sink. I tossed it in the laundry bin where it landed on the bloodstained gown I had worn. I kicked off my morgue clogs, pulled on my boots, and headed up the back stairs to my office. My steps reverberated as I took them two at a time, rolling down the sleeves of my shirt as I went.

  When I reached the final landing I was out of breath. It’s hard for me to admit that I’m getting older, facing my own mortality, but running up stairs tends to do it. I chastised myself for forgetting my phone again; my pounding heart reminded me that if I had my first, last and only heart attack in the stairwell one of these days, it might be weeks before anyone found me. Most of my staff was young, fit, entirely unaware of the ravages of time, and invariably took the elevator, leaving the stairs for me.

  Once in my office breathing normally again, I flipped the switch on the coffee pot, booted up my computer and started editing the autopsy report the dictating system had entered as I worked two floors below. The system is a good one, the best on the market, but it still occasionally garbles my words beyond recognition. I was scowling at the screen, coffee in hand, trying to decipher a particularly obtuse statement when Quick stuck his head in the door.

  Jasper Quick is my diener, a fancy German word for morgue assistant. Jasper spent his first career as a medic in the Army, serving three tours in Vietnam and then anywhere else Uncle Sam decided to send him over the next thirty years. He’s seen more blood and gore than I have and left undisturbed can finish a post-mortem in less than an hour, skin to skin. Quick had followed me to Telluride from Florida. He was there when I got the news about John, and his arms were the ones into which I collapsed in the middle of an autopsy. He held me, walked me to the Emergency Room, then finished the case for me. We never spoke of it again, but sometimes he reaches out just to pat my hand in the middle of a case, and then we move on. He kept me tethered to my calling when all I wanted to do was run. He still does.

  “You got a visitor,” he said.

  He’d been frolicking with hair dye in the morgue sink again. The scattered silver hairs that had been there only yesterday were now shoe-polish black.

  “Who is it—and what does he want?” I finally realized what I had meant to say, and I pecked at the keyboard, then looked up again.

  “Says his name is Monaghan. Won’t say what he wants, just says he needs to see you.”

  Quick ran a self-conscious hand over his tight, close-cropped curls. He’s always a little embarrassed when he dyes his hair, but he’s too vain to stop.

  “Lawyer, cop or funeral director?” I asked.

  We get few visitors of any other sort.

  “Shoes are too good to be a cop and not shiny enough for a mortician.” Quick grinned. “Got to be a suit. I expect it has something to do with that murder up in Mountain Village.”

  I looked at my watch. It was a little before noon, too fast, I thought for anyone to surface yet in the Houston case. We'd surely have peace and quiet for at least another few hours. It takes a little while to get to our little box canyon, even with a private jet. I was about to tell Quick to bring the fellow up when a tall, blond man elbowed his way into my office. Quick was right: his shoes, ostrich-leather cowboy boots, were far too fancy to be those of a cop, and no self-respecting funeral director would be caught dead in them. Or in the shiny black designer jeans he wore, either, for that matter. He adjusted the collar of his orange silk shirt, huffed his way to my desk and stood glaring at me. I tapped away at my keyboard in unconcerned silence. I’ve played enough lawyer games to know that the first one to speak loses ground. I had the advantage. This pushy mouthpiece wanted something from me. He cleared his throat. I struck a few more keys. Finally, he spoke up.

  “Steven P. Monaghan. Monaghan and Cutler. L.A, New York, London. I’m here to see you about the Houston autopsy.”

  Either Kincaid's agent did a lot of calling or Monaghan had already been in Telluride. Probably the latter. I vaguely recalled an article in one of the local rags about Houston being deep in negotiations for a new movie, one to be filmed in the area. I looked at the computer screen, moused a correction, tapped the keyboard once more, and answered him without looking up.

  “What about it?”

  “You can’t do it.”

  Now he had my interest, in spite of myself. Unless he’d figured out how to do a little time travel and stop me retroactively, this discussion was moot, but I thought I would play along.

  “And why ever not?”

  I glanced at him and smiled my most ingratiating Southern Belle smile. My Alabama-born momma would have been proud.

  Monaghan shifted a bit and leaned in, taking body-language advantage of what he thought was a tip of the verbal scales in his favor. He shoved a neatly folded paper toward me.

  “Because Judge Lotham says you can’t. It’s a viol
ation of my client’s religious rights.”

  He'd been a busy little lawyer this morning, and I was impressed in spite of myself that he'd managed to get in touch with a local magistrate in such short order.

  “And what would those religious beliefs be?”

  I was curious, not concerned.

  “My client believed that the human body is sacred. That on death, it should be returned unharmed to Mother Earth. Not abused and torn apart.”

  So Houston thought the human body sacred and not to be abused, I thought. Too bad he didn’t show that respect to his body before it became a corpse. He might not see drugs and wanton sex as bodily harm, but I sure did. Still, I refrained from commenting on the absurdity of this preening little man’s position.

  My smile broadened a bit and lost its charm.

  “Paul Lotham is a family court judge whose knowledge about the medical examiner office might—just might—fill a gnome’s thimble. State law not only gives me the right to autopsy your client, it compels me to do so.”

  I stood up and leaned right toward him. I had an inch or two on him, even without my boot heels.

  We stood there for an uneasy minute, like two cats staring each other down, until a commotion from the hallway diverted our attention to the door. A thin, scruffy man, who looked to be in his late twenties, with stringy blond hair and a mangy excuse for a beard burst into the room. He wore a roughly woven, gray tunic over a long, brown robe, and his bare feet were dirty, with overgrown nails and the little toe on the right foot missing. When you’re a medical examiner, you tend to notice things like that.

  He shook himself to collect his dignity and glanced in my direction before addressing the lawyer.

  “Did you tell her? Did you stop it? You have to stop it!”

  His voice was a surprise: a deep, rich bass, controlled in spite of his obvious anxiety. Although I’d seen this particular nomad wandering Telluride’s streets, I’d never actually heard him talk. He had a reputation as an eccentric, even among the oddballs that made up Telluride’s general population, and he spent a good deal of his time passing out flyers about his own version of pop-culture New Age religion on street corners and in Town Park. It had earned him the desultory nickname of Reverend Bedsheet. I usually gave him a wide berth.