The Associate (8 page)

Kate walked over to another computer. “I can get directions and a map on the Internet.”

While she worked Daniel took a closer look at Kaidanov’s study. The more he looked the more depressed he felt. Five minutes later Kate showed Daniel a map with directions to the lab from her town house.

“I dug up something else,” Kate said. “After I got the map I found the assessment and taxation information on the property. The land is owned by Geller Pharmaceuticals.”

Twenty minutes later Daniel was driving in the country on a narrow road with Kate beside him. The sun was setting and they had been quiet since leaving the highway. Kate was staring ahead and Daniel chanced an occasional glance at the investigator. Daniel had consulted with Kate at work a few times and she’d impressed him with her intelligence, but he had not been attracted to her. Now he noticed that she was good-looking in a rugged sort of way. Not model beautiful like Susan Webster, but interesting to look at. And she was certainly intriguing. He didn’t know any other woman who wrote voodoo software programs and had been a cop.

“This is it,” Kate said.

Daniel turned onto a logging road ignoring a “No Trespassing” sign. The shock absorbers on his secondhand Ford were not in the best of shape and Kate swore a lot after they left the pavement. She was registering another complaint when the road curved and a one-story building appeared. Just as they got out of the car the wind shifted and a strange odor made Kate’s nostrils flare.

“What’s that smell?” Daniel asked.

“It’s a little like barbecue,” Kate answered.

Pieces of glass covered the ground under a window that had blown out and the front door was charred and had buckled. Daniel peeked through the window cautiously, then jerked his head back. His face was drained of color.

“What is it?” Kate asked.

“There’s a body on the floor. There’s no skin. It’s like a skeleton.”

Kate extended a hand toward the door tentatively, worried that it might be hot. She touched her fingers to the metal. It was cold. Kate pushed and the door swung inward. She looked for a light switch and found one, but it didn’t work.

“Do you have a flashlight?” Kate asked. Daniel got one from the car and Kate started inside. He tried to follow, but she stopped him.

“This is a crime scene. Just stay here and keep the door open so I can have a little more light.”

Daniel propped open the door but did not go any farther. He was secretly grateful not to have to view the body.

Kate walked slowly toward the room she had seen through the window and stood in the doorway. Part of the roof had collapsed and a ray of fading sunlight illuminated a section of the room. Charred wooden beams had crushed a table and what had once been a video monitor. Near the monitor was a rack of plastic test tubes that had been melted by intense heat.

Kate edged around a burn-scarred desk that was tipped on its side. She noticed another roof beam resting on the top of two filing cabinets whose drawers had all been pulled out. The paint on the cabinets had blistered off. The metal was charred and scarred but intact. A breeze gusted through the broken window and drifted down through the gaps in the roof. It blew blackened scraps of paper around the room. The source of the paper was a pile of ashes in the center of the floor that Kate guessed had once been the contents of the filing cabinets.

Kate’s eyes stayed on the pile for a moment more before being drawn, almost against her will, to the two bodies sprawled in the center of the room. One was human, its skull charred and its clothes seared to ash. Kate’s stomach heaved, but she closed her eyes for a second and kept it together. When she opened her eyes they shifted to the second corpse. For a moment Kate was confused. The body was too small even for a child, unless it was an extremely young one. She braced herself and stepped closer. That’s when she saw the tail. Kate backed out of the room.

“What’s in there?” Daniel asked when she stepped outside.

“A human corpse and a dead monkey. I’m going to look down the hall.”

“We should get out of here,” Daniel said nervously.

“In a minute.”

“No one’s alive. We would have heard them.”

“Just give me a second.”

The light from the doorway barely reached the end of the hall, so Kate had to use the flashlight. She spotted two open doors but had no idea what was inside. The smell of burned flesh grew more intense as she neared the rooms. Kate held her breath and cast the beam inside. The first room was filled with cages, each containing a monkey, and every monkey was pressing against the wire mesh as if it had been trying to claw through the wire when it died.

A uniformed officer was taking Kate and Daniel’s statements when an unmarked car parked behind the van from the medical examiner’s office. Homicide detective Billie Brewster, a slender black woman in a navy-blue windbreaker and jeans, got out of the car. Her partner, Zeke Forbus, a heavyset white man with thinning brown hair, spotted Kate at the same time she spotted him.

“What’s Annie Oakley doing here?” Forbus asked Brewster.

“Shut the fuck up,” the black woman snapped angrily at her partner. Then she walked up to Kate and gave her a hug.

“How you doing, Kate?” Brewster asked with genuine concern.

“I’m doing fine, Billie,” Kate answered without conviction. “How about you?”

The black woman shot her thumb over her shoulder toward her partner.

“I was doing great until they partnered me up with this redneck.”

“Zeke,” Kate said with a nod.

“Long time, Kate,” Zeke Forbus answered without warmth. Then he turned his back to her and addressed the uniformed officer.

“What have we got here, Ron?”

“Crispy critters,” the officer answered with a sly smile. “If you ain’t had dinner, I’ll get you a bucket of KFM.”

“KFM?”

“Kentucky Fried Monkey,” the cop answered, cackling at his joke. “We’ve got a passel of ’em inside.”

“Why am I investigating monkey murders?” Forbus asked. “Don’t we have animal control for that?”

“One of the crispy critters ain’t a monkey, that’s why,” the uniform answered.

“I understand you called this in,” Billie said to Kate. “Why were you out here at night in the middle of nowhere?”

“This is Daniel Ames, an associate at Reed, Briggs, the firm I work for. One of our clients, Geller Pharmaceuticals, is in the middle of a lawsuit over one of its products. Up until last week all of the tests of the product came out favorable to Geller, but a scientist named Sergey Kaidanov reported negative results in a study of rhesus monkeys.”

“The same type of monkeys we’ve got in there?” Billie asked with a nod toward the lab.

“Exactly. Everyone wants to talk to Kaidanov because the study could have a huge impact on the lawsuit, but he disappeared about a week ago.”

“Anyone fixed the time of this fire?” Billie asked the uniform.

“Not yet, but it’s not recent.”

“Go on,” Billie told Kate.

“Dan and I went to Kaidanov’s house to interview him. He wasn’t there, but someone had taken the house apart.”

“What’s that mean?” Forbus asked.

“Someone searched it and left a mess. We did a little investigating and found an address for the lab. We came out here hoping that we’d find Kaidanov and it looks like we have.”

“You think the dead guy is your scientist?”

“I think there’s a good chance he is.”

“Let’s take a look,” Billie said to Forbus as she started inside. Kate took a step toward the door, but Forbus held out an arm and barred her way.

“No civilians allowed in the crime scene.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Billie responded, glaring at her partner.

“Forget it. He’s right. I’m not a cop anymore,” Kate said, trying to sound unconcerned, but Daniel saw her shoulders slump.

“What was all that about?” Daniel asked as soon as the detectives were out of earshot.

“Old business.”

“Thanks for covering for me.”

Kate looked puzzled.

“You know, about my breaking into Kaidanov’s house.”

Kate shrugged. “You didn’t think I’d burn you, did you?”

A deputy medical examiner was videotaping the office while a tech from the crime lab snapped 35mm photographs, then digital shots that could be fed into a computer and E-mailed if necessary. Billie took in the scene from the doorway. A corpse lay on its stomach near the center of the room. The flesh on its side and back had been burned off and the heat from the fire had turned the bones grayish blue in color.

“Any ID?” Billie asked the medical examiner.

“Can’t even tell the sex,” he answered.

“Is it a murder?”

“Best guess, yes. Deutsch says it’s definitely arson,” he replied, referring to the arson investigator. “And look at the skull.”

The detective took a few steps into the room so she could get a better look at the corpse. The back of the skull had shattered. An exiting bullet or a blunt instrument could have caused the damage. She would leave that determination to the ME.

Billie moved nearer to the corpse and squatted. The floor was concrete, so they might get lucky. From other arson murders she had investigated, Billie knew that fragments of clothing and flesh on the front of the body might have escaped the blaze. Where the body pressed against the floor there would be less oxygen for the fire to feed on and some protection for flesh and fibers.

Billie turned her attention to a tiny corpse a few feet from the human. All of its hair and flesh was gone. Its skull had also been shattered. She stared dispassionately at the monkey for a few minutes then stood up.

“If you want to see more monkeys, there are two rooms filled with them down the hall,” the medical examiner said.

“I’ll pass,” Forbus said, stifling a yawn.

Billie wasn’t surprised that the bizarre crime scene bored her partner. He was a good old boy hanging on long enough to collect his pension so he could fish 365 days a year. The only time she’d seen him show any interest in a case was last week when they’d investigated a murder at a strip joint. Billie, on the other hand, was fascinated by anything out of the ordinary, and this crime scene was the most unusual she’d encountered in some time.

Billie wandered down the hall. The doors to the monkey rooms were open and Billie stood quietly, surveying the scene. The monkeys had died hard and she pitied the poor bastards. Death by fire was the worst way to go. She shivered and turned away.

The offices of the Oregon State Medical Examiner were on Knott Street in a two-story, red-brick building that had once been a Scandinavian funeral home. Arbor vitae, split-leaf maples, and a variety of other shrubs partially hid a front porch whose overhang was supported by white pillars. Kate parked in the adjacent lot and walked up the front steps to the porch. Billie Brewster was waiting for her in the reception area.

“Thanks for letting me come,” Kate said.

“You’re lucky Zeke is still in court. There’s no way I could swing this if he was here.”

“Like I said, thanks.”

Kate followed Billie toward the back of the building. When they entered the autopsy room they found Dr. Sally Grace, an assistant ME, and Dr. Jack Forester, a forensic anthropologist, standing on either side of a gurney that had been wheeled between the two stainless-steel autopsy tables that stood on either side of the room. The body from the primate lab lay on top of the gurney. Just before Billie had left the crime scene, the deputy medical examiner and several firefighters wearing latex gloves had used the few scraps of clothing that had escaped destruction to lift up the corpse and place it in a body bag. The area around the body had been searched for skull fragments and they had been taken to the ME’s office along with the body. The corpse of the monkey found in the room with the human remains had also been brought to the ME’s office, along with skull fragments found near it. The monkey’s corpse was lying on a second gurney.

“Hi, Billie,” Dr. Grace said. “You’re a little late. We’re almost done.”

“Sorry, I was tied up in court.”

“Who’s your friend?” the coroner asked.

Billie made the introductions. “Kate’s ex-PPB and an investigator with the Reed, Briggs law firm. The dead man may have been an important witness in a civil case her firm is defending. She’s been very helpful.”

“Well, the more the merrier,” Dr. Grace said cheerfully as she turned back to the corpse.

Forester and Grace were wearing blue, water-impermeable gowns, masks, goggles, and heavy, black rubber aprons. Kate and Brewster donned similar outfits before joining them at the gurney.

“We found out some interesting stuff,” Forester said. “The monkey is a rhesus. Most research labs use them. We found some blood and flesh on its teeth and we’re going to do a DNA match with the other corpse to see if that’s where it came from. The surprise is the way the monkey died.”

“Which was?”

“Gunshot,” Dr. Grace answered. “We found a shell for a forty-five at the crime scene and the skull reconstruction shows an exit wound.”

“Is that how this one got it?” Billie asked, motioning toward the remains on the gurney.

“That was my first thought, what with the skull blown out and all,” Dr. Grace answered, “but we have a different cause of death with John Doe.”

“Then it’s a man?” Kate asked.

“We doped that out pretty easily,” Dr. Grace said.

“Men’s bones are larger because of the greater muscle attachment,” Forester said, “so we either had an average- to below-average size male or a woman who pumped iron.”

Forester pointed at the skeleton’s crotch. All of the flesh had been burned from the bones in this area.

“The human pelvis provides the most reliable means of determining the sex of skeletal remains. The female pelvis is designed to offer optimal space for the birth canal and has a notch in it. A male pelvis is curved. This is definitely the pelvis of a male.”