They finished the helicopter story in time for the Sunday night deadline at the printer. As soon as that part of the extra edition was printed and on its way to subscribers new and old, Alice went to work on the Frank Navarro/Clarence Simpson story, scheduled to be included in the regular Thursday edition in town, and sent out of town as the second half of the Extra.
She was polishing the last few paragraphs on Wednesday morning when Mort hustled out of his office to announce, ‘Heads up, kids. That was the sheriff. He says the coroner just called him to say the autopsy report will come out on Friday morning. I’ll need to get to work on that right away, so you two will be running the newsroom all day.’
‘Get to work on it how?’ Alice asked him. ‘Adjust the font, you mean? That won’t take long.’
Mort waved his arms vaguely and said, ‘Oh, I’ll probably need to do a little interpretation for our subscribers. I’m no expert, but I expect there’ll be some technical language that will have to be explained. Don’t you suppose, Stuart?’
‘Beats me,’ Stuart said. ‘This is my first autopsy report.’
Tasker ordered his copies from the Guardian’s print shop in the same call. Mort’s deal with the sheriff, he told his staff, was for twenty free copies plus digital distribution to two sheriff’s offices, three county attorneys and the headmen of a dozen firefighting crews, provided he got exclusive access to the document until Monday noon. ‘But I thought it was going to be two or three weeks from now.’
‘So did we, right?’ Alice said. ‘We did all this work to fill a blank spot, and now the autopsy report’s coming out right on top of the helicopter story.’
‘I know. But give Mort his due,’ Stuart said, ‘he’s good at cutting a deal.’
Mort read the autopsy as it came out of the printer Friday morning, standing by the BizHub as the warm copies piled up in the tray. When he finished, he went back to the beginning and read it again. After a second reading, he told Sven to run off two extra copies. Mid-afternoon, he called Stuart and Alice into his office and handed them each a copy, sealed in a manila envelope.
‘Keep these to yourselves, understand? This is valuable stuff.’ He asked them to come in the next morning, Saturday, after they’d read it. ‘But don’t let these pages out of your sight in the meantime. I’ve set us up with a chance for a beautiful scoop here, but we have to keep it under wraps until …’
He stared out the window while he drummed a little march with his marking pencil, dum-diddy-ump-ump. When the march ended, he said, ‘Until we’ve published it in the second Guardian Extra. Understand?’
They understood all right. They were troubled by issues about freedom of information, but they both nodded. It was his little paper ‘that could,’ and they knew he was not asking for their opinions about ethics.
He split a brief smile between them and added, ‘I really appreciate your help with this story, and I’ll make it worth your while.’
‘How?’ Alice said, surprising herself with a surge of righteous indignation.
‘What?’
‘How will you make it worth my while?’ Her face felt hot.
Mort was holding a phone and two pencils in his right hand; he shrugged, made a chicken-shooing gesture with his left hand and said, ‘I don’t— What do you want?’
‘A raise in pay.’
‘Right now?’ He tried to make it sound like a joke. Alice stared back at him, unsmiling. When she nodded, he rolled his eyes up to heaven.
‘Your timing is damned inconvenient, Alice. But OK, I guess I can bump you up a buck an hour. Why are you shaking your head?’
‘I need a five-dollar raise from what I’ve been getting.’
‘Five dollars?’ Mort blinked. ‘Come on, now, Alice, that’s ridiculous.’
‘Not really. It only seems that way because my current wage is ridiculously low. That was OK when I was just helping out Stuart with a little editing, but we’re way past that now. Now I write stories and sell ads and work all the time and change my schedule whenever you say to. So I need to get paid like a grownup.’
‘A grownup? Golly Moses.’ The silly phrase was meant to take them back to their childhood relationship of games, tricks, nudges and winks.
Alice stared at him solemnly. ‘OK, maybe five is a little stiff all at once. Make it four.’
‘Really, Alice’ – he puffed up and got pink – ‘I know you’re not accustomed to the business world yet – I’ve been making allowances for that. But usually these things are thrashed out in private.’
‘Stuart’s my nephew. This is private enough.’
‘Well, this feels kind of like blackmail, taking advantage of the situation when you know I’m faced with all this work—’
‘We’re all faced with a lot of work. And pressed for time. So let’s make this deal and get back to work.’
Mort scratched his neck and shrugged, sighed and studied the ceiling light for a bit, shrugged again and finally said, ‘Alice, four dollars is out of the question. But you are doing nice work; I’ll go for two.’
‘I can’t think about less than three-fifty, and we need to talk about weekends.’
‘No, now, that’s just what we’re not going to talk about. I’ll consider a three-dollar increase if you’ll agree to go on salary.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You get bumped up three dollars an hour, times forty hours a week, but that’s it. If crazy things come up, like this fire, we all work as long as it takes and there’s no overtime.’
It was Alice’s turn to study the ceiling light. She counted to ten while she studied. When she stopped counting, she said, ‘OK, you win the second round.’
‘Funny thing is it felt more like losing to me,’ Mort said. ‘Where were we before this rumble started?’
‘Autopsy report,’ Stuart said quickly. ‘What time tomorrow morning?’
‘What do you know,’ Mort said, ‘a grownup who wants to talk about the work. Let’s make it nine o’clock.’ He looked into the corner of the room while he added, ‘You, too, Alice.’
Stuart was not being kept at arm’s length any more. In a blink, he was back in favor and Alice was out. Not all the way out, though – Mort still expected her help in the morning.
‘Well, he’s mad but I got my raise,’ Alice said, walking home.
‘With a little twist at the end, remember? You’ll probably end up doing his laundry on weekends.’
‘I won’t. And you’re back in his good graces, aren’t you? All warm and friendly. Like maybe he’s decided to quit begrudging your share of the fire story.’
‘Not sure of that yet,’ Stuart said. ‘I’ll know more about how much his favor costs when I’ve read this report.’ He had his copy wrapped in a plastic garbage bag tucked under his arm, because summer had ended again, the sky was threatening rain, sleet, snow – who knew in Montana at the tail end of October? She had her copy in the many-zippered canvas satchel, almost as big as saddlebags, in which she’d carried eighth-grade test papers safely through Montana weather for nearly thirty years.
‘Call me when you’ve read it, will you?’ she said as she turned in at her gate.
But after she’d read the first five pages, she got too worried to wait. She called him and said, ‘They don’t make it easy, do they? All these long medical terms!’
‘Yeah. Now you see,’ Stuart said, ‘why he likes me again.’
‘Sure. He read it twice and still had no idea what it said. I’m pretty vague about a couple of places myself, and I’m still in the first half. And if it’s hard for me, think how much worse it is for him.’
‘Exactly. So he’s counting on us to figure it out.’
‘Little does he know, huh? What in hell is carboxyhemoglobin? I can’t even say it without hurting my tongue.’
‘Google it. But not yet! First, talk to me about how we’re going to do this, Alice. Because I think he’s going to be mad if we tell him what it means, and even madder if we can’t. He must be very angry already, whether he knows it or not.’
‘Oh, dear. Psychology 101.’
‘Make fun of it if you must, but what’s your answer? When we figure out what this report says, how do we tell Mort without sounding condescending?’
‘If I promise to think about that, will you please help me figure out what killed our victim? I haven’t read it all yet, but so far it seems to be all about what didn’t. Why should I care that he didn’t have a heart attack, he wasn’t diabetic, he showed no signs of Hepatitis or TB? Why do they test for all those things, anyway? The guy died in a fire.’
‘I don’t know. I’m going to read it through to the end, see what I can find in my anatomy textbooks and then probably just Google the hell out of it.’
‘Call me back about carboxyhemoglobin, will you?’
‘OK.’
‘And mucosal necrosis. I’m sure I’ve read that before but it’s not in my dictionary and I need to be sure …’
‘Everything’s on the Internet. I’ll find it.’
‘I can find it there too but the explanations are just as complicated as the question.’
‘Whining doesn’t help, Alice.’
‘But you’ll call me back tonight?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because I won’t be able to sleep until—’
‘Alice, I promise I’ll call you back tonight.’
‘Good. Is your mom nearby?’
‘Very close. Dishing up dinner, in fact.’
‘Ask her to call me when she’s done feeding all you brutes.’
‘Ask her yourself – she’s walking over here with her hand out and she—’
After a scuffle, her sister’s voice said, at a little distance, ‘Go on, now, eat it while it’s hot. I’ll take care of this hussy.’ Then Betsy said, into the phone, ‘Alice? If you want dinner I’ve got plenty, but you need to come right now.’
‘I don’t need your food, I need your brain. When you’re done stuffing that mob, will you come down here and talk to me? I’ll feed you half a steak, a pasta salad and a nice glass of Shiraz.’
‘Alice, what have you done?’
‘Something not so smart, maybe. Will you come?’
‘Would I miss hearing this? Pour the wine.’
Twenty minutes later, the putt-putt of Betsy’s old Pontiac sounded in the drive. She came in smelling like the pork chops and potatoes she’d left behind, and sank into a dining-room chair. On the table in front of her, late sunlight gleamed through two stemmed glasses of red wine.
‘Is this the good stuff?’ She took a hearty sip. ‘Ah, lovely. Come on, now, that’s enough cashews. Sit down here and confess so we’ll have an excuse to get pie-eyed.’
Alice sipped her wine, sighed and told her sister how she’d responded to Mort’s request for a Saturday morning meeting with a demand for a hefty raise.
‘Was anybody else around?’
‘Yeah, Stuart was there.’ She looked at her sister and sighed again. ‘Dumb, huh?’
‘Alice, what came over you?’
‘Well, I just – all of a sudden I got so sick and tired of getting called “Teach,” and being treated like an elderly joke all the time – I’m six months younger than he is! But then, when he needs something, he gets all collegial till I promise to work crazy hours. Damn it, I felt as if I’d earned—’
‘Oh, please. Of course you’ve earned it, times over. That’s not the point, is it?’
‘No, not with Mort. What you’ve earned is never what you get. Why is he such a putz, Bets? Is it still the father thing, you think?’
‘I’m afraid so. You remember what Charlie Weatherby was like.’
‘So tall and handsome,’ Alice remembered. ‘And mean as a snake.’
‘He so enjoyed making his son look stupid in front of people, didn’t he?’
‘I wonder why Mort didn’t leave, after school?’
‘Well, Charlie dished out money and treats along with ridicule,’ Betsy said. ‘Gave him a job on the paper and didn’t make him go to college to earn it. Mort hated the punishment but he couldn’t resist the rewards.’
‘Uh-huh. I did a dumb thing when I insisted on a raise in front of Stuart, didn’t I?’
‘I’m surprised he let you have it.’
‘For a minute, after he gave in he looked as if he’d like to kill me. He’ll probably find a reason to fire me next week.’
‘But he’s put off doing that because you have this important job tomorrow morning that Stuart won’t talk about …’
‘He can’t. We’re not allowed to.’
‘Uh-huh. So my suggestion is for a couple of days make it look as if all the good ideas come from Mort Weatherby.’
‘That’s going to be pretty hard—’
‘Do it anyway. Do you want to get fired or do you want to keep working there where you’re having fun and helping Stuart with his promising career?’
‘You know the answer to that.’
‘Then be shameless and devious. Butter him up.’
‘You think he’ll believe me if I say he’s a smart cookie—’
‘Yes.’
‘Even though he knows perfectly well—’
‘Alice, you know yourself the man is a bottomless pit of the need to be on top.’
‘That’s true. OK, I’ll do it.’ She touched her sister’s arm. ‘Thanks, Bets.’
‘You’re welcome. Now you cook the steak and potatoes and I’ll toss the salad, because I have to eat something before I can have another glass of this wonderful wine.’
Stuart called a couple of times that evening. Luckily, he had taken more science courses than she had, and more recently. After he shared his insights into the language of autopsies, she told him about the approach she wanted to try on Mort Weatherby. When Alice was pretty sure they were on the same page about everything, she said goodnight. She would have liked to go over it all again, but she sensed he was about ready to start calling her ‘Teach,’ so she let him go.
Clark’s Fort got its first hard freeze of the season Friday night. Stuart and Alice crunched through a brilliant clutter of new-fallen leaves on their way downtown Saturday morning, and came into the newsroom looking rosy-cheeked and jolly.
Mort was sitting at his desk, with a copy of the report in front of him. As they took seats in front of his desk, he said, without looking up, ‘Alice, you think you could rustle up a cup of coffee?’
Stuart started to get up – fresh pots of coffee had been one of his regular chores his whole first year at the Guardian; he knew where all the supplies were. Alice waved him silently back into his seat as she said, ‘Of course.’
You won a round, Betsy had warned. He has to make you pay.
While she worked at the coffee console, she heard Mort say to Stuart, ‘They sure like the nine-dollar words, don’t they? It seems like the more I read this thing the less I know.’
‘Well, the ID is going to be incredibly hard,’ Stuart said, ‘because there are no printable surfaces. Almost everybody has a print record on file somewhere these days. But this corpse – wow, not only no fingers, he doesn’t even have palms, or footprints.’
‘But it says they found enough blood and usable tissue to be pretty sure of a good DNA test,’ Mort said. ‘And apparently they can also test teeth for DNA. Did you know that?’
‘Not until now,’ Stuart said. ‘And I see they put a rush on the test and are starting to circulate the search requests.’
‘But DNA testing is only going to establish identity if the subject had DNA tests before,’ Alice said, bringing three steaming mugs to the desk. ‘Which he wouldn’t have had unless he was a criminal, would he? And they haven’t found a match at any state institution so far, or that national one, CODIS.’
‘Well, they can still try law enforcement,’ Stuart said, ‘and armed forces.’
‘Would a cop be taking an information walk-along, though? Not likely,’ Mort said.
‘Oh, good point,’ Alice said. ‘I never thought about that.’
‘He was alone when the fire caught him,’ Stuart said.
‘Yeah, about that,’ Mort said. ‘I asked that Judy, the one you said was your guide up there? She insisted they never let anybody wander around unescorted. Typical government response – we’re always right. Yet here he is, found alone.’
‘Right. And under a log which, by the way, the autopsy docs don’t think is what killed him either – did you see that?’
‘Is that what they meant about contours not matching?’ Mort shook his head. ‘Why in hell should anything match?’
‘Well, see, that fallen tree he was under was a pretty good size,’ Stuart said. ‘Almost a foot around. Canny old Sheriff Tasker had his crew cut out the section that was on top of the body, mark the spot that was on top of the victim’s head and bring it along. The doctors say the front of the skull shows a small bump that might be a contusion, but nothing big enough to cause death, and it certainly doesn’t match that section of log we sent along.’
‘OK, so the tree fell on him but it didn’t kill him. What did?’
‘Well, let’s keep working our way through this report of what they tested,’ Stuart said, ‘because that’s what people will want to know, isn’t it? What do you make of the blood evidence?’
Mort grew one of his trademarked sneaky looks. ‘That part with all the multi-syllable words? I haven’t quite deciphered that yet.’
‘Alice has some insight into that,’ Stuart said. He had pushed her to try this gambit, saying, ‘Let’s give him a reason to keep you on the team.’ Now, as Mort fixed resentful eyes on her left shoulder, she thought, This had better be a world-class lie.
‘My neighbor teaches the Advanced Placement classes at the high school,’ she said. ‘I asked her to explain, and she sent me this.’ She took a deep breath and read, ‘“Carboxyhemoglobin (COHb) is a stable complex of carbon monoxide that forms in red blood cells when carbon monoxide is inhaled.”’ Alice had said ‘carboxyhemoglobin’ aloud ten times before she went to bed, and ten more times this morning. It slid out of her mouth now without a hitch.
‘So all that long fancy word means is that he was breathing in a fire zone,’ Mort said.
‘Except he wasn’t,’ Alice said, ‘apparently. What the report says is, “We were curious to know why we found no traces of carboxyhemoglobin in the victim’s red blood cells. This seems consistent, however, with the absence of soot within the airways, which should be present if he was breathing when the fire caught him. It also dovetails with the fact that microscopic tests on the day of autopsy found no inflammatory reaction to extreme heat.”’
Alice stopped reading and looked up. Mort was still watching her shoulder. He looked puzzled and angry.
Careful to keep her voice level and pleasant, Alice said, ‘So I don’t know how you reached it, but it looks like your hunch about this body must be right.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ Mort sat back in his big chair and squinted out the window. ‘Tell me which part you agree with.’
‘Well, I remember how closely you questioned Judy at the headquarters office about whether she’s ever lost anybody she was guiding at a fire. Like you had a feeling there was something hinky about those reports.’
‘Yes,’ Mort said, pushing papers around on his desk, ‘and she just sort of blew me off. But now—’
‘Now,’ Alice said, ‘just as you suspected, it appears this victim did not die in the Meredith Mountain fire.’