Dr. Willem Rough entered the examination room, and Arn was reluctant to shake hands with the proctologist. Especially one named Rough. But he needed information, and this was the only way to corral the doctor’s time. Rough pointed to the examination table with a finger as big as a Polish sausage. When Arn seated himself on the table, the doctor scanned his information in a laptop on a counter. “My receptionist said you needed to talk about some cases I had when I was with the Coroner’s Office.”
“I do.” Arn eyed Dr. Rough snapping on examination gloves and taking the cap off a tube of KY Jelly. “I had the finger wave when I retired two years ago,” he said.
The doctor smiled. “Then it’s high time you had another. Drop your knickers.”
“But all I need is to talk.”
“You’ll drop them if you want information.” Rough put the tiniest drop of KY on the end of his gloved finger. “Time is money for me. Besides covering your ass, it covers mine. Now drop your socks or we don’t talk.”
Arn turned around and dropped his pants along with his whitey tighties. He gritted his teeth as he thought of the doctor’s bulging knuckles.
“Say ‘ah.’” Rough laughed, and Arn grimaced when he realized the doctor hadn’t taken his wedding ring off. He withdrew his glove with a snap and deposited it into a specimen container before motioning for Arn to sit.
“Do I get a cigarette with that?”
“No,” Rough said. “Even if you felt pretty good.” He laughed again. “But don’t take that personal. All I found was your prostate’s as big as a bagel.”
“I keep it in check with medication.”
“Take this slip to the checkout desk.” Rough handed Arn a piece of paper and typed on his computer. “Now what cases do you want to talk about?” he said without looking up.
“The Five Point killings.”
Rough stopped typing. He swiveled his stool toward the wall, his breath quickening. When he turned back around and faced Arn, he’d composed himself. “Now I recognize you. You’re that retired cop looking for Butch Spangler’s killer.”
“The TV station hired me as a consultant.”
“Then forget the Five Point cases,” Rough said. He snatched his paperwork and headed for the door.
“You haven’t given me a chance to ask.”
“You got questions, check with the police.” As Rough opened the door, Arn grabbed his arm. Rough jerked away. “What right do you have—”
Arn nodded to the specimen jar. “Having some guy shove his finger up my keister gives me the right.”
Rough paused.
“We had an agreement.”
The doctor sighed and shut the door. “I don’t talk about those cases.” He walked back to the counter and set the jar down while using the edge of the counter to ease himself onto a stool. “Junior detectives used to come around for years and grill me like I was withholding information. I stopped talking with them years ago when I got out of the Coroner’s Office.”
“If you didn’t want justice, why’d you get into forensics in the first place?”
“I was fresh out of med school and I didn’t know what I wanted. I watched the old TV show Quincy, M.E., and documentaries with Michael Baden. Henry Lee. They fascinated the hell out of me. I inhaled that stuff.” He took out a pocket knife. He opened a blade and started cleaning under his nails. “So, when the ME’s office offered me a position, I thought I’d died and went to heaven. I thought I’d be catching bad guys or finding hidden diseases that killed a loved one. Offering closure to survivors.”
Rough turned away, and Arn was quick to point out, “I’m sure you helped a lot of families find solace.”
“A couple.” Rough’s eyes lit up. “One was a twenty-seven-year-old runner who died at the finish line of the Casper marathon. I found she had near arterial blockage. Hereditary.”
Arn kept silent, feeling more like a priest than an investigator needing answers.
“And a drowning at Glendo Reservoir they brought to me that same summer.” He shook his head. “The family thought a fishing buddy had killed their son before pushing him out of the boat. But he’d experienced a cadaveric spasm: his hands were still clutching the reeds from the bottom of the lake when they snagged him and brought him up. When I told the family I thought his death wasn’t a homicide, you should have heard the relief in their voices.”
“An involuntary clenching of the muscles,” Arn said. “I had a case in Denver years ago that had me scratching my head. Two brothers had been drinking at home when one got the call of the wild and went after the other one with a knife. Bad move. That brother shot the one with a knife. The dead brother still clutched the knife when they brought him into the autopsy room.”
“And the ME had to break the victim’s fingers to get the knife loose?”
Arn nodded.
Rough snapped his fingers and smiled. “It was things like that that made the job so fascinating. Figuring things out.” He looked at the floor, his smile gone. “Then came the Five Point cases, and I thought I’d fallen into hell. That’s when I knew I couldn’t live with a job where you brought nightmares home at the end of the day.” He stood and straightened a Pfizer calendar leaning to starboard on the wall. “Those cases caused me to get out of forensics and into something that didn’t stink as bad.”
“Anyone can become affected seeing homicides,” Arn said.
Rough stuck his hands in his lab coat. “The Five Point cases weren’t my first rodeo, Mr. Anderson. I’d been to shootings and knifings. One call where a son crushed his dad’s windpipe with a rake handle. Another guy who killed his sister and propped her in a chair and went about his life like she still made breakfast for him every morning. But those were cases of spontaneity. Those I could understand. But the Five Point cases were so brutal. So … well planned.”
“How so, Doctor?”
Rough paced the small examination room. “Butch Spangler and I went over those cases until I was sick of looking at him. The victims were either selected at random, or the killer met with each to have sex with them.”
“Man or woman?”
Rough shrugged. “We had no read. Could have been either. But that was the only motive we could come up with.”
“I’ve read Butch’s reports. He almost seemed to admire the killer.”
“Maybe because he—or she—was so thorough,” Rough said. “We concluded with such a lack of physical evidence, the killer must have planned them to the tiniest detail. The total lack of evidence baffled us. Except … ” Rough looked away.
“Anything you might remember could help.”
“Okay then.” The doctor faced Arn. “Think about this: we had partial shoe prints in blood on both crime scenes. We were convinced the killer put them there on purpose, because we found no other prints at the scene or leading away.” He started for the door. “Now I got nothing else to say. I just want to forget.”
Arn moved to block the door. He’d bared his butt and allowed himself to be violated, but he wasn’t finished with the doctor yet. “Think: Is there anything at all you might remember … ”
Rough nodded to Arn’s notebook. “I’ll bet you have every one of my reports in there. That should tell you everything I knew at the time.”
“You assisted with Butch Spangler’s homicide.”
Rough rubbed his forehead. “That was perhaps the hardest of all. Other officers told me he was an egotist, but I liked him.”
“There was a scribbled note in Bobbie Madden’s report that you felt Butch knew his attacker.”
“It was just an opinion,” Rough said. “Would never have made it to court.”
Arn waited for an explanation.
“I thought he knew his killer. Butch was killed with contact shots to the chest. I could imagine him spotting the gun the killer drew on him and grabbing it. Trying to wrestle it away, when the gun discharged. We did a GSR on his hands, of course, and he had gunshot residue on one. But Madden admitted he botched it bagging Butch’s hands, so I couldn’t even note it.”
“And Pieter and Georgia’s hands had a GSR test run also?”
Rough nodded. “The detectives tested them before I got there. Now if there’s nothing else, Mr. Anderson, I got other poop chutes to look at today.”
The doctor was out the door when Arn hit him with a final question. “You drew Butch’s vitreous fluids in his eyes for a second test. Why?”
Rough stopped and dropped his head, taking a deep breath before answering. “Bobbie Madden asked me to,” he answered without turning around. “He felt Butch had taken an undue amount of Xanax, by the near-empty prescription bottle he found in the bathroom. Madden thought Butch may have been sedated at the time he was shot.”
“Did the second test pick up anything missed on the first?” Arn asked.
Rough slapped the door with his hand. “Nothing. But then, Xanax has a short half-life. If Butch took enough to knock himself out—or if someone gave Butch the medication without his knowledge—it wouldn’t have shown up on the second test anyway.”
Rough started down the hallway, then stopped. “My office will call you if anything comes back on your specimen.” He forced a smile. “And maybe we’ll talk again over an ice cold colonoscopy.”