The Deadly Embrace (16 page)

“What is that?” asked the old man.

“One of our national pastimes,” said Taggart, placing the flashlight on the floor.

Using his fingers, he began applying modest pressure to the first tile. When nothing happened, he moved to the second one. Employing the same pressure, he felt the tile spring back toward his hand.

“Pressure switch,” he said, removing his hand and allowing the little access panel to swing open.

The hole in the wall was about eight by four inches.

“She obviously had the tile joiner install this for her,” said Taggart, reaching into the space behind the tile-covered door. His hand came out of the darkness holding a small felt-covered jewelry box. He handed it to Drummond and reached in again.

“Well, it wasn’t robbery, Sam,” said Drummond, sifting through the pieces.

Taggart held up another object. It was a U.S. Army overseas cap, prewar issue, sweat-stained and obviously well traveled. Stenciled inside the band was the name “BARNES, LLOYD, 2LT.”

“The husband?” asked Drummond.

Taggart nodded before his fingers found one more object in the hiding place.

The book was the size of a small business ledger, the bindings made of cheap red fabric. He opened it to the first page. The handwriting was in large capital letters.

“MY DIARY,” it read. Under that was written the words, “JANET PATRICIA RITTENHOUSE.”

“Still a bingo?” asked Drummond.

“Yeah,” said Taggart.

CHAPTER 13

T
aggart got up from his desk, shut his office door, and then sat down again. He took a sip of the fresh hot coffee and opened the diary back to the first page. It was dated June 4, 1939. The words were written in a girlish hand, with little curlicues punctuating the letters.

I guess it’s hard to believe that a farm girl from Kinderhook is going to be the wife of the most handsome cadet at West Point, but that is the God’s honest truth. I’ve decided to put all my new experiences down in this book to be saved for when I am old and looking back at our life together and want to remind myself of everything that happened along the way.
It all started when Lindsay asked me to go with her to the cotillion. I almost fell over when she told me. Lindsay had been working behind the counter in her dad’s store when a young man had come in to ask for directions. The next thing she knew, he said he thought she was real pretty and could she go to the movies with him sometime. Lindsay’s dad came right over to put an end to it, but when he found out the young man was a cadet at West Point, he became all smiles. One thing led to another, and after he invited her down to the Point for the winter cotillion, it turned out he had a friend who needed a date, too. I told her I didn’t have one good dress to my name. Lindsay said her mother would sew one for each of us, and she did. Lindsay’s was red chiffon and mine was white organdy. All the girls at school were green I can tell you. When our train pulled in at West Point, there were about thirty cadets waiting there on the platform for their dates. My eyes found Lloyd right away. I think I fell in love with him before I even knew he was my date.

Taggart skimmed through the rest of the early entries, which recounted her falling in love with Lloyd Barnes during that snowy weekend in February 1939, followed by his ardent courtship. Each page reflected the gushing enthusiasm of an eighteen-year-old high-school girl in the throes of first love. The last page in the first section culminated in the words:

We are married!

Wearing a green surgical gown, Liza stood at a stainless-steel counter in the SHAEF hospital operating suite, setting up a row of test tubes and specimen jars, as she waited for the autopsy to begin. After arriving with J.P.’s body in the ambulance, Liza had been excited to discover that the pathologist assigned to do the postmortem was none other than Dr. John Forbes Channing, one of the most renowned forensic pathologists of the early twentieth century.

Liza heard movement in the corridor, and turned as the double entrance doors swung open and an elderly little man in a blood-spattered white lab coat shuffled into the operating room. He was hunched over like a land crab and carrying a leather satchel in each hand. The man has to be almost ninety, Liza thought as he glanced briefly in her direction before going straight to J.P.’s sheet-covered body in the center of the well-lit room. He dropped the bags down on the gurney next to the operating table and turned back to her.

“Are you assisting me?” he squawked in a high-pitched voice.

“Yes, Doctor,” she replied in an awestruck tone.

Pulling away the sheet, he looked down at J.P.’s body.

“She’s in full rigor,” he said without touching her.

“Yes, Doctor,” agreed Liza. Staring at his back, she said, “Dr. Channing, I read your treatise on poisons and horology when I was a student at New York Medical College. It was absolutely brilliant.”

When he didn’t respond, she assumed he hadn’t heard her.

Stepping around to face him, she said, “Sir, I read your treatise on horology and...”

“I may look decrepit to you, young lady,” said the old man as he ran hot water into a pan, “but I am not deaf.”

His body was actually skeletal, reduced to sinew and bone. However, his keen brown eyes were still young and vital in the ancient, craggy face. The large bald head was crowned with one tuft of white hair.

“And that was a long time ago,” he said, not altogether unkindly, as his hands and fingers moved nimbly to clean the area around the entry wound in J.P.’s ear.

After wiping his hands with a clean towel, he went over to one of the cracked leather satchels and removed a brass-framed lamp connected to ten feet of coiled electrical cord. When he inserted the plug into the wall receptacle behind the operating table, a powerful cone of light lit up his path back to the examination table.

“Hold this for me,” he demanded, handing her the powerful spotlight.

His tone reminded her of all the times at medical college when a male counterpart treated her with thinly veiled disdain. In those early days, it had occasionally caused her to cry. Not any longer.

Taking a probe in one hand and a small mirror-headed instrument in the other, Dr. Channing began to carefully examine the skin around the entry wound, as well as the subcutaneous membranes just inside the bullet track, where it entered the brain.

“What do you make of this?” he said, waving her closer.

Following his bloody index finger in the glare of the spotlight, her eyes focused on the mutilated tissue just inside J.P.’s right ear.

“Ancillary damage from the bullet track?” she said, after picking up a magnifying glass with her free hand and examining the tissue more closely.

“Could be,” he said, “but it doesn’t entirely comport…. Do you see how the periphery of this membrane is subluxated here… and the rupture of these blood vessels in the impact area? This reddened tissue appears to be just outside the path of the bullet. Of course, I could be wrong. That did happen before, you know—I was wrong once in 1923.”

Grinning impishly, he paused to wipe his hands on the towel again, then went back to his satchel and returned with a thin, straight copper rod. It was etched with tiny engraved measurements along its entire length.

“Created this myself,” he said as he attempted to determine the exact trajectory of the bullet’s flight through her right ear by carefully probing along its track. Next he used a probe and forceps to extract the small lead slug from deep inside her brain, and dropped it into a metal tray.

“I requested that the pistol this woman was holding be test-fired into a cadaver’s brain. We’ll see if the bullets match later.”

Taking the spotlight from her, he began a thorough external examination, spending almost five minutes on the fingers and palm of her right hand before scrutinizing the scratches on her upper thigh, and the chafing near the ventral and anterior areas of the pelvis. With almost limitless patience, he explored every inch of her body in the glare of the lamp. When he was finished, Liza wisely refrained from asking him for his preliminary conclusions.

“Well, let us begin our work inside the divine mystery, young lady,” he said, moving to part J.P.’s hair at the back of her head.

He picked up a scalpel in his left hand and made a long incision across the neck, using his fingers to pull the scalp upward to expose her skull. He took a large bone-saw from the rack on the edge of the table and tested its sharpness with his thumb.

“You might be interested to know that I also wrote a monograph for the Livestock Association on how much more tender their beef would be if they waited to butcher the animals until there was full leakage of the lysosomal intracellular digestive enzymes,” he said, putting the bone saw back on its peg.

“I never read that one,” she said.

“Pity,” he replied.

Frowning, he went back to his leather satchel and removed a small sharp-toothed butcher’s saw. Coming back to J.P., he placed the edge of the blade next to the dome of her skull and began to saw.

Lloyd and I are headed for the Philippines. Now that my mom is all alone, I’m a little worried about being so far from home. But she is selling the farm and moving up to Albany, where Aunt Viv lives.

Her handwriting had subtly changed since the early diary entries. She was a young wife now, and the pages dealt with her life in Manila after Lloyd Barnes had become commissioned as a second lieutenant.

For two weeks in July, I was sure that I was pregnant, but it didn’t turn out be true. I so much want a baby, and Lloyd does, too. I hope we have a boy first, although he says he wants a girl. We’ll see. For now, he is doing infantry training and exercises with the Philippine soldiers under the overall command of General MacArthur. We have a little cottage on Lieutenant’s Row, and I’ve done my best to make it seem like home.

He flipped through a dozen pages until he came to an entry in big letters.

I’m pregnant! It is the most incredible thing that has ever happened to me, and I pledge to you that I will be the best mother I can possibly be.

There was a black-trimmed mass card stuck between the next two pages.

Lloyd knows the accident wasn’t my fault, but it doesn’t make it any easier to see his face each morning when he passes by the room we had fixed up as the nursery. Maybe I didn’t tell you this before, but she was a girl. A beautiful little blue-eyed girl. I’m going to see the doctor tomorrow. Say a prayer that I’m going to have another chance to give Lloyd his daughter.

Taggart put down the diary and rubbed his weary eyes. Reading the new entries, he realized that the diary had become a kind of talisman for her, an animate object to share her thoughts with, to consult with, and to log in her prayers, an amulet with the power to affect her life.

Using his scalpel again, Dr. Channing made a quick “Y” incision in the torso, cutting J.P. open from her shoulders down to the sternum.

“Yes… quite possibly a suicide,” he squawked as he began to expose her organs. “There is ample powder residue on her fingers. Based on where the bullet ultimately lodged inside the brain, it was probably fired at a distance of no more than three centimeters. Although the vast majority of self-inflicted gunshot wounds are through the temple, a fair proportion of them are fired through the ear. This bullet’s trajectory is certainly consistent with that possibility.”

The Japanese have invaded the Philippines. They could be in Manila in a few weeks, and all the married dependents have been ordered to leave. Lloyd says that the army has arranged for many of the wives to be quartered at Fort Sill in Oklahoma until the men return. They already have some kind of job lined up for us working at the base.

As Dr. Channing was about to examine her vital organs, the door to the autopsy suite swung open. Dr. Cabot, the red-haired Philadelphia plastic surgeon whom Liza had met on her last visit to the hospital, slouched into the theater, carrying a folder in his hands. He was still wearing the long-billed fishing cap over his fatigues. When he saw Liza, his face broke into a convivial smile.

“Well, if it isn’t the lovely Lieutenant Marantz,” he said, chomping his ever-present gum like a healthy calf.

Dr. Channing looked up and glared at him.

“Do you have a function in this hospital?” he demanded, testily.

“Unfortunately, I’m still assigned to the laboratory,” said Dr. Cabot, observing the ancient, crablike pathologist with distaste. “Someone said they wanted this blood workup immediately.”

“And?” came back Channing, holding up J.P.’s heart between his hands.

“Completely normal,” said the former plastic surgeon. “And the oxygen level was fine—no suggestion of hypoxemia.”

“Why would we care about hypoxemia, pray tell?” growled Channing.

“I told him to check for it,” said Liza, as the old man stared at her, perplexed.

I am working for the base commander. His name is General Everett Kilgore. I know from the way he stares at me through the connecting door to his office that he likes me that way. I also know it could be dangerous. This morning he said that I had a way of looking into his eyes that felt like a sock in the jaw. As far as I can tell, that’s exactly what he needs—a good sock in the jaw. But he has also become my only source of information about Lloyd. Since my beloved surrendered with the others at Corregidor, I haven’t heard a thing from him
—
even whether he is alive. General Kilgore was the one to finally break the news to me about the Bataan death march. But he says he will do everything he can to help me find out if Lloyd survived it. Pray that my darling is all right.