On my way to the B and B to shower, I dropped my travel-worn clothes at a dry cleaners. Going through the pockets to make sure I wasn’t also leaving keys or earrings, I found the torn corner of an envelope.
Francis Roque, M.
Forensic Pathol
5026 Sunset
Kansas Cit
I stared at it. Dr. Roque was the pathologist who’d died—was it two days ago?—of flu. Why was an envelope with his name in my— And then I remembered: I’d removed it from Doris McKinnon’s hand yesterday afternoon. An oddity I definitely was not going to mention to the three musketeers.
“When do you want these back, honey?”
The “honey” was laced with impatience; it was the third time the woman at the counter had asked me that question. In the hope things might wind up quickly enough for me to leave Lawrence soon, I chose second-day service.
Back in my car, I continued to look at the envelope fragment while I ate my sandwich. Dr. Roque had written to Doris McKinnon. Why? That was easy: because she’d written him. Maybe her last cow had died and she wanted an autopsy, but I was betting she had soil samples she wanted tested.
I started to pull out my computer to look up Dr. Roque but remembered in time that nothing I did online was private right now, not until the Cheviot lab could confidently say they’d removed all the spyware from my devices. I drove over to the library to use their computers.
Francis Roque, M.D., had been the chief medical examiner at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation in Topeka, but he also taught pathology at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Kansas City. He’d lived in Kansas City, close to the medical school, not in Topeka where the KBI offices were. A widower, he lived alone, his two grown children in Texas and Florida.
He’d been twenty years younger than Doris McKinnon, so they hadn’t gone to school together, but she must have had some kind of personal connection to him: she was worried about what was happening on her land; she wouldn’t have just pulled a name out of a phone book.
After thinking over my meager contacts in the area, I called Barbara Rutledge again, using one of my burner phones. Before I could ask about Roque, Rutledge thanked me for letting her know about Nell Albritten’s collapse: it was a help to building bridges in Lawrence for Barbara and other Riverdale members to bring her casseroles as they would if someone at Riverside took sick.
Ms. Albritten had seemed in good spirits when Barbara visited. Albritten’s son and daughter-in-law were staying with her until she was fully recovered. Her pastor, Reverend Clements, came regularly to sit with her, as did other members of the St. Silas family, along with Reverend Weld, Riverside’s chief pastor.
I felt guilty—I’d forgotten Albritten in the rush of other activities, like going to jail—but when Rutledge came to a halt, I asked her if she knew of any connection between Doris McKinnon and Dr. Roque.
“Roque? Oh. The pathologist who died while he was doing Doris’s autopsy. I didn’t know Doris well, but I could make a few calls.”
I started to ask her to keep my query to herself but realized it was hopeless—everyone talked to everyone here, and I was a high-profile stranger. Of course she wouldn’t keep it to herself. I gave Barbara the number of one of the burner phones and used another to call Dr. Roque’s office in Kansas City. He’d written McKinnon from his home address, not the KBI, so I was guessing his KC staff would be more likely than the state people to know why he’d written her.
Although it was Saturday, Roque’s secretary was in the office. Her voice was thick with weeping.
Dr. Roque had been a great man, a great doctor, charitable, witty but never cruel. She didn’t know how they would go on without him. She recognized McKinnon’s name—Dr. Roque had been about to start the autopsy when he was suddenly taken sick—but she didn’t remember handling any correspondence with McKinnon. When I said all I had was an envelope addressed to McKinnon with his home address on it, she couldn’t help me, but she was struck by the coincidence.
“That’s so strange, him writing to her and then getting her body to work on. That’s just bizarre, but he didn’t say word one to me. Talk to his lab tech—if it was some weird question, he might have mentioned it to Aanya when they were in the lab together.”
Like the secretary, Aanya Malik was grief-stricken. “I owe everything to Dr. Roque. He helped me get my green card, my education, everything. When my sister ran away from a forced marriage, he helped me bring her to Kansas City so she would not be shot by my uncles. I know we will go on, but I don’t know how.” Malik spoke idiomatic English, overlaid with a South Asian accent that was sometimes hard to understand.
I murmured those phrases we always use, even though they seem empty in the face of great loss. After a few minutes, Malik tried to pull herself together.
“You said you were a detective. I know the police have come from Lawrence and gone through Dr. Roque’s files. Even someone from the army has come. Is that why you are calling? If you think he did anything wrong, I will tell you personally that—”
“No, no. I’m not with the police, I’m private.” I repeated my story, which seemed to be getting as long as the Odyssey. I tried to keep it concise but included my conflicts with the sheriff and my fears about the colonel in the hopes that would make her feel she could trust me.
When she decided to risk talking to me, we had to do it through Skype, so she could see my face; she needed to be sure I was who I said I was, not someone in a government office with a soothing voice tricking her into talking about Dr. Roque.
I set up a temporary Skype account on the library server and let Malik see me against the background of the library’s computer room. “Someone, either the sheriff or the army, has planted malware on my own computer, so I have to use public ones.”
Malik herself was in her home, sitting on a couch in what I judged was her living room. She was young, perhaps thirty, hair cut short around a narrow face, dark eyes rimmed red from weeping.
“Of course I remember Doris McKinnon. That was the woman Dr. Roque was starting to work on when he collapsed. He dictated his preliminary notes, which came to me: the budget cuts in the state have left him—had left him,” she corrected herself mournfully, “short-staffed at the KBI lab, so I often typed his autopsy notes for him.”
“Were you there when the body disappeared?”
“Not with him: I am not—was not—allowed in the Topeka lab because I do not work for the state: my salary is paid by the doctor’s research grants. However, his dictation came to me through a conferencing app, so I know exactly what he said.
“He was puzzled indeed by what he was seeing. He did not believe that the body could belong to Ms. McKinnon, because she was old, perhaps ninety. The woman he was examining was also old, but she was closer to his own age, around seventy. He also was puzzled by her teeth, so he sent me the X-rays—he took those before he started the actual autopsy, that and he took scrapings from the fingernails.”
Malik fiddled with her computer and sent me a copy of the jaw X-rays. “He had to take those himself because there was no lab tech available in Topeka that day. The state budget cuts mean the techs can only work twenty hours a week. The dead woman’s teeth were bad—she had not seen a dentist probably for many years. Another thing also was strange: some of the dental work Dr. Roque thought had been done in Eastern Europe or possibly Greece. When he sent me the X-rays, he asked if I could do some deeper research on them.”
I looked at the X-rays, but they told me nothing, except that there were teeth involved. “What did you find?”
“I did not look,” she said. “I heard Dr. Roque gasping for air, I heard his body fall. I was sixty-five miles away and terrified; I called the guard at the state lab and finally he looked at his monitor and saw the doctor on the floor. If only he had been more alert—! But in any event, Dr. Roque was hospitalized, the dead woman’s body disappeared, I did not know if there was any point. However, I see she had two old gold teeth with a great deal of decay underneath.” Malik pointed at two of the teeth, an upper molar and a bottom front tooth.
“These weren’t American crowns, which are usually porcelain with gold inlays. They were gold that you see flashing when the person smiles. Dr. Roque said that was typically Eastern European.”
My stomach twisted: I’ve seen gold teeth in Chicago—some South Side dentists used to make them. And someone closer to Roque’s age than to McKinnon’s—that description fit Emerald Ferring.
“The dead woman,” I said, my throat tight. “Did Dr. Roque say what he thought her race was?”
“No, no. Dr. Roque was only starting the autopsy, and of course everything was going to take twice as long since he had to do all the tech support himself. Oh, why did I not say to hell with state regulations and go with him? I could have gotten him to a hospital as soon as he felt ill. By himself he would never leave the morgue if he felt unwell. His sense of duty was very keen. By the time he fainted, it was too late for medical help.”
She started to weep again.
I let her cry into the computer a bit longer but finally asked if she’d told the sheriff’s deputies anything about the dental X-rays.
“No. They were so rude. They wanted to take apart his office, look at his mail. Rhoda was crying, I was trying not to cry: I would not tell them anything.”
“Splendid,” I said. “Let’s not tell them yet. They’re being rather annoying, and I don’t feel like helping them. I know you’re tired, but I have one last question. Dr. Roque wrote a letter to McKinnon—at least I think he might have. All I have is the fragment of the envelope with his name on it.”
I held up the torn scrap for her inspection. “Dr. Roque’s secretary didn’t know anything about it. Do you?”
Malik frowned in puzzlement for a moment, then said, “Oh, she must have written one of the mold letters!”
“Mold letters?” I echoed, bewildered.
She laughed slightly. “I know it sounds crazy. He was in the news about five years ago because one of his autopsies showed a man had killed his mother using toxic black mold. It was in Luray, a tiny town in the middle of the state . . . well, never mind all those details. The lady’s death was called an accident, but a neighbor insisted the son had murdered his mother—he was in financial trouble, and he would inherit the farm when she died.
“The local sheriff decided to ask the state to perform an autopsy. It was like an episode out of CSI or NCIS—Dr. Roque discovered that the dead woman’s lungs were filled with black mold. He sent KBI investigators to the home, and they discovered that the son had been coating her mattress with it. All the TV stations covered the story. Dr. Roque even was on 60 Minutes.
“After that, people wrote him from all over the world. They wanted him to prove that this or that person had been poisoned. Sometimes they sent him horrible things, pieces of skin or jars with blood or sputum in them. Rhoda would return everything with a cover letter saying the doctor was a state employee who did not do private work. After a while the letters and things stopped coming.”
“Doris McKinnon had collected soil samples, I think from land that had been declared contaminated by radiation. I don’t know what happened to the samples, but I wonder if she thought Dr. Roque’s mold experience would qualify him to test soil for radiation.”
“Yes,” Malik agreed, “but I do not know why she wrote him at home, which she must have done, since Rhoda did not see the letter. Or she e-mailed him. I suppose she could have done that—I can look at his e-mail account.”
“Do you have a key to Dr. Roque’s house?” I asked. “Could we go there, do you think, and see if we can find anything from McKinnon, maybe even her soil samples?”
Malik had a key—when the doctor traveled, as he often had, she looked after his houseplants and his cat. She said she’d go over and search. “It will give me something to do, something concrete. Otherwise I will sit here playing what Dr. Roque always said was a loser’s game: ‘should have, would have, could have, did not.’”