Lucky Stiff

Book 4: Mattie Winston Mystery

by Annelise Ryan

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Cozy Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

It's Christmas Day in the sleepy town of Sorenson, Wisconsin, but instead of unwrapping presents, deputy coroner Mattie Winston is at the burnt remains of a house, where a charred body has been found. The victim is none other than Jack Allen—a paraplegic who recently won a huge casino jackpot. Upon closer inspection, Mattie and detective Steve Hurley are convinced Jack was murdered to steal his winnings, giving the phrase Black Jack a whole new meaning . . .



But as Mattie investigates, even her cutting-edge forensic skills keep coming up short in a case with as many suspects as twists. After her odds-on-favorite turns up dead, Mattie and Hurley must race to find a killer before another victim cashes in his chips.

Release date: March 1, 2012

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

There are few things in life that smell as bad as a burnt human body. You’d think with all that flesh, which is really just another form of meat, it might smell like a pig roasting on a spit. But you’d be wrong. Your average roasting pig doesn’t have hair, intact organs, and vessels filled with blood. Unfortunately, the person whose death I now have to investigate comes with all those things, and the stench is nauseating.

Adding to the biological odors are the various household items that have burned: plastics, Styrofoam, building materials, and a variety of fabrics. This is a smell I know well, because I’ve been living next to another burnt-down building for the past couple of weeks: the house I used to share with my ex-husband, David Winston. The only person who was in my old house when the fire struck was my ex. Despite the fact that I’ve imagined him being tortured or dying in hideous ways many times over the past few months, he escaped from the fire unharmed. Unlike the person before me, who is burned so badly I can’t tell if the body is that of a man or a women, David is alive and healthy. And if his recent behavior is any indication, he’s also well into “manopause.”

My ex is a surgeon. He cuts people open in an effort to better or save their lives. My name is Mattie Winston. I’m a nurse, and I used to do the same thing, working side by side with David in our local hospital’s OR. But after catching David using his pocket rocket as a tongue depressor on one of my coworkers, I left my job, my home, and my marriage rather abruptly. Fortunately, my best friend and neighbor, Izzy, threw me a lifesaver by offering me both a job and the mother-in-law cottage behind his house. Since Izzy is the county medical examiner, my new job as a death investigator still involves cutting people open, but with two significant differences: all of my patients are a certain distance past their freshness dates, and rather than trying to save their lives, I’m trying to figure out how they lost them.

The ME’s office is located in the small Wisconsin town of Sorenson, where we cover deaths for a countywide area. I grew up in Sorenson, and that makes my job very difficult at times, since I know most of the people I have to autopsy. Today the death I’m investigating is right here in town—a body discovered in a home that is now little more than a burnt-out shell. As a result, I’m not sure yet if our victim is someone I know. Adding to the tragedy is the fact that it’s Christmas Day, as evidenced by the empty tree stand and a dozen or so broken glass ornaments in one corner.

Very little in the room I’m standing in is recognizable. Heat from the flames melted the foot or so of snow that was on the roof. The melt-off, combined with the fire damage and all the water from the fire hoses, brought down most of the modest ranch’s upper structure, leaving the scene a soggy, exposed, piled-up mess. An early-afternoon sun is shining down on us, and the outside temperature is already 48 degrees—very atypical for December here in Wisconsin. Fortunately, there was plenty of snow on the ground before today, allowing us some semblance of a white Christmas.

Izzy is beside me as we carefully pick our way through the charred remains, which are still smoking in places, despite the heroic efforts of the fire department. It’s a bit easier for me to maneuver than it is for Izzy, because I’m six feet tall and have very long legs. Izzy, on the other hand, stands right around five feet tall; his legs aren’t much longer in their entirety than my shinbones.

Several of the firefighters are still working on-site, spot-quenching little flare-ups and guiding us through the debris field. They were the ones who called us when they found the body. Also here are several cops, including Steve Hurley, the tall, dark-haired, blissfully blue-eyed homicide detective I lust after, but can’t have.

“Are you guys sure this is arson?” Hurley asks a woman firefighter standing nearby.

“Positive,” she says. She is a cute blonde, with a large, fluorescent name label across the back of her fire coat that says: KANE. Her cheeks are flushed and there are smudges of ash on her face, but they’re not enough to hide her prettiness. If anything, they enhance it, giving her an impish, pixie look. Even with all her fire gear on, it’s easy to tell she has a trim, petite figure. I want to hate her on sight, especially when I see Hurley give her the once-over . . . twice. My figure has never been petite, not even in the womb. My mother once described giving birth to me as akin to crapping out bowling balls for twenty hours straight. I have what Izzy’s life partner, Dom, calls a Rubenesque figure—a comment that makes me both want to hate Dom and ask him to make me a Reuben sandwich. Dom is a killer cook.

Speaking of cooking, Kane points over toward the couch and says, “There’s a pour pattern over there. If you look at the alligator pattern on the wall above it, you can tell that’s where the fire started, even though someone tried to make it look like it started here by our victim. There’s this other, smaller pour pattern next to the body leading from this overturned drink glass. Judging from the empty vodka bottles we found in the trash, and the ashtray beside this glass, I’m guessing someone wanted us to think the victim caused the fire by reaching for a drink, spilling it, and tipping over in the wheelchair while holding a cigarette.”

“Any idea who our victim is?” Hurley asks.

“For now, we’re assuming it’s the man who lives here, a thirty-eight-year-old paraplegic by the name of Jack Allen.”

“Oh, no,” I mutter, looking aghast at the blackened mass.

“You know him?” Izzy asks.

“I do. I’ve taken care of him at the hospital several times. In fact, I took care of him when he had the car accident that paralyzed him. It was back when I was working in the ER, about seven, maybe eight years ago. I also saw him when we took his gallbladder out last year, and again more recently when he came in to have a bedsore debrided.”

Kane cocks her head to one side. “I’m sorry, I thought you were with the ME’s office,” she says, eyeing me with a puzzled expression.

“I am. I’ve only had this job for a few months. Before that, I worked at Mercy Hospital as an RN.”

“Ah,” Kane says, and I see a glimmer of recognition on her face. “You’re that gal who was married to the surgeon—the doctor who was doing it with that OR nurse who ended up murdered.”

“Yep, that’s me.”

“And you also worked in the OR?”

I nod.

“Now I know why you look so familiar.” I’m thinking she’s going to mention some surgical procedure she had recently, but no such luck. “You were the one who was pictured on the front page of that tabloid, standing by the Heinrich car crash in your underwear.”

My face grows hot. “Yes, that was also me,” I say, my smile tight. Izzy and Hurley snort with laughter; I give them a threatening look as I silently curse my recent claim to fame. There are many perks to living in a small town like Sorenson. Unfortunately, anonymity isn’t one of them. Infamy comes cheap and lasts a long, long time.

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name,” Kane says.

“I’m Mattie Winston. Nice to meet you,” I lie.

“I’m Candy Kane. Today is my birthday and my parents had a warped sense of humor.”

“Happy birthday,” Hurley says with a smile that makes me want to step between him and Candy to block his view.

“Thanks,” Candy says, smiling back. “After I’m done here, I get to go home and open all those lovely happy-merry-birthday-Christmas presents. We holiday kids tend to get the short end of the stick when it comes to gifts.”

This seems only fair to me, since she clearly didn’t get the short end of the genetic stick.

I look back at the floor and try to make sense of the fact that the burnt corpse lying there might be Jack Allen. The body is lying on its side in a fetal position; the blackened arms are bent up like a boxer’s trying to block a punch. I know from my recent studies that this pugilistic positioning is characteristic of severe burn victims, caused by shortening of the muscles and tendons as they heat up. I can’t see the victim’s face because the head and shoulders are covered with a pile of debris—ceiling tiles and old vermiculite-type insulation. The only thing about the body that fits our tentative ID is the wheelchair that’s tipped on its side and positioned behind the body.

Candy says, “The neighbors say he was a smoker, as well as a drinker, though they fell short of describing him as an out-and-out drunk. One other interesting tidbit mentioned by the neighbors is the fact that our victim apparently won a very large jackpot at the North Woods Casino a few months ago.”

“How large is very large?” Hurley asks.

“Five hundred thousand and change,” Kane says.

Izzy lets out a low whistle.

“Sounds like motive to me,” Hurley says. “And it might help us narrow down the list of suspects. All we have to do is follow the money.”

“First we need to verify that this is Jack Allen,” Izzy says. He steps forward, reaches down, and lifts one corner of a ceiling tile that’s covering the victim’s head, exposing the face. I can only see one half of it, as the other half is against the floor, but the entire head is relatively untouched by the ravages of the fire. Izzy turns and gives me a questioning look.

“That’s Jack, all right.”

Izzy stares down at him. “Interesting how the debris protected his face from the flames.”

“It would,” Candy says. “That vermiculite insulation contains asbestos.”

“Asbestos?” I echo, looking concerned.

“Don’t worry,” Candy says. “Right now, everything is so saturated it would be nearly impossible for any fibers to become airborne. But it will require a special crew with the proper equipment to clean up the place.”

Izzy nods solemnly. “Well, at least we have a tentative ID. We can verify things later with his dental records.” He cocks his head to one side and stares at the body with a puzzled expression.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Look at the position of his head. His chin is tucked in close to his chest. If the head had been exposed to the fire, I might think it was because of tendon shrinkage from the heat. But the head was protected from the fire, and that makes me think it was forced into that position. The presence of the glass and the ashtray suggest there was a table of some sort here, like a coffee table.”

“There probably was,” Candy says. She points to several burnt pieces of wood that look like long, skinny cinders from a fireplace. “These look like the legs on a wooden structure of some sort.”

“If so,” Izzy says, “it’s possible Jack died from positional asphyxiation. If he fell out of his chair and his head became wedged between it and a table, it could have blocked off his airway. I’ll get a better idea of how feasible that theory is when I open him up.”

Candy looks at Hurley and says, “There’s one more thing I think you should see.” We follow her through the debris into what appears to be the dining room. She stops in front of a charred piece of furniture and points to the melted, twisted remains of a stereo on top of it. As I look closer at the burnt mess, I see what looks like a large stereo speaker, relatively intact despite evidence of intense heat and flames.

“There’s only one speaker,” Hurley says.

“And it didn’t burn,” I add.

“Good eye, both of you,” Candy says, though she directs her smile at Hurley. She points to some melted plastic and wires. “It looks like there was another speaker here, but it was destroyed in the fire. There’s a reason this one survived.” She reaches over and flicks her finger against the front of the intact speaker, eliciting a metallic ping. “This is a false front. It’s constructed out of metal and made to look like a speaker, but it’s actually a safe.” She pulls on the speaker front and it opens, revealing an empty metal box. “There’s a key lock on the back that operates a little spring device to open it.”

“Was there anything in there?” Hurley asks.

“Nope, it was unlocked and empty when we got to it, and no sign of the key. But we did find this.” Candy points down at the floor near the corner of the buffet and I see the edges of a hundred-dollar bill poking out from beneath some debris.

After snapping a picture, Hurley reaches down with his gloved hand and pulls the bill loose. Though its edges are singed, the main body of the bill is intact.

Candy says, “A lot of people don’t know that paper money isn’t really made out of paper. It’s made out of cloth—linen and cotton, to be precise. And that means it doesn’t burn so easily, especially if it’s wet.”

“You’re thinking there was more of this in there,” Hurley says, gesturing toward the safe.

Candy shrugs, but she gives us a knowing smile, which makes it clear she does think that.

Hurley sighs. “Well, if our casino winner was stashing wads of cash in his house, our list of suspects is going to be a hell of a lot bigger than I thought.”

“Sorry to make things more complicated for you,” Candy says with a cutesy little grin.

Hurley holds her gaze a bit longer than I like. “No need to apologize. You did some great investigative work here. I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome. And if there’s anything else you need from me, don’t hesitate to ask.” She takes a card out of her pocket and hands it to him. “That’s my personal cell number on there. Call me anytime,” she says with a suggestive tone. Then she gives Hurley a flirtatious wink and adds, “If you’re nice to me, I just might give you a candy cane.”

I have a few suggestions for what she can do with her candy cane, but I keep them to myself.

“Ahem,” Izzy says, eyeing me with a worried expression. “I suppose we best get to securing the body so we can get it back to the morgue before all this water destroys our evidence. What do you guys say to doing this autopsy today?”

“Fine by me,” I say. After years of employment at the hospital, I’m used to working on the holidays. “You’ll be giving me the perfect excuse for avoiding the remainder of the celebration at my sister’s house. My mother was already having a conniption about all the germs that might be lurking in my sister’s live Christmas tree. When I left for this call, she was bleaching the tree ornaments.” My mother has a few mental quirks, not the least of which are her hypochondria and her OCD. I’m pretty certain that by day’s end she’ll be at home consulting her impressive medical library in search of tree-borne diseases, imagining symptoms to fit.

“I’m fine with it, too,” Hurley says. “I have no plans for the rest of the day and I’d like to get this wrapped up as quickly as possible.”

“Wrapped up?” I echo. “Interesting choice of words, given the holiday.”

Izzy rolls his eyes and heads back to the living room. I follow reluctantly, leaving Candy and Hurley alone in the dining room together. I force myself to focus on the immediate tasks at hand, but part of my mind imagines me holding a giant candy cane with the curved end looped around Hurley’s waist, dragging him away from Candy in vaudeville style.

Izzy and I manage to scoop up the remains of Jack Allen’s body and get it back to the morgue some two hours later. We spend most of that time photographing and documenting the scene as the arson investigators collect their evidence.

Also documenting the scene outside is Alison Miller, Sorenson’s ace reporter and photographer. She is lurking about, snapping shots and talking to anyone who’s willing. I’ve known Alison for years. It was right after our high-school graduation that she went to work for our local paper, which comes out twice a week. I once considered her a friend, but our relationship these days is somewhere between animosity and outright loathing. That’s because she became my chief competition for Hurley’s affections not long ago, until Hurley made it clear he wasn’t interested. Alison didn’t take the rejection well and blamed it on me. I’m probably the only person from whom she won’t try to get a quote.

Candy, the person who seems to be my new competition, doesn’t stay long. While her absence relieves me a little, I can’t help but notice that Hurley still has her card tucked safely inside his jacket pocket. I remind myself that I have no right to be jealous of what—or whom—Hurley does, because we don’t have that kind of relationship. It’s not from a lack of desire, however. There is a definite attraction between us that became evident early on during cases we worked together. But my lingering ambivalence over my marriage—and the tiny fact that I was still married—put a bit of a kibosh on things.

The marriage thing has recently been resolved. After I rejected David’s repeated pleadings to give our marriage another chance, he finally got the message that I was done with him . . . right around the time he met up with Patty, the very attractive and single insurance agent who is handling the claim for our house fire. Now the two of them are an item. My divorce became final two days ago; and along with my freedom, I also received a tidy little settlement of nearly three hundred thousand bucks—my portion of the insurance claim on our house, minus the amount David gave me for the car I totaled some time ago that was in his name. The settlement wasn’t as much as I’d hoped, because David, who handled all our financials, apparently neglected to update our homeowner’s policy two years ago when we added on several hundred square feet of house in an addition off the back. While the house was once estimated to be worth close to a million bucks, in the current housing market, which stinks worse than what’s left of Jack’s house, that value has dropped to around seven hundred grand. And the insurance policy was for the original amount of the purchase, which was only five hundred grand, plus another hundred thousand for the contents. David had at one time offered to let me have a larger portion of the settlement in order to make up for the value of the land, which is now in his name only. However, after listening to him bitch about how much it was going to cost to rebuild and refurnish the place, I decided—in the spirit of idiocy—to settle for an even fifty-fifty split.

Still, my portion of the settlement has made for a nice early Christmas present; and for the first time in months, my bank account is flush while I try to decide how to invest the funds. David is using his half to rebuild the house, albeit a smaller, scaled-down version of the original.

Unfortunately, my newfound freedom doesn’t help my situation with Hurley. Thanks to cuts in the Wisconsin state budget, and a few shady dealings by some cops and evidence techs in Milwaukee, a lot of job titles and duties were eliminated, merged, and otherwise shuffled recently, mine included. Instead of being a deputy coroner, I now bear the hefty title of medicolegal death investigator. Though it sounds fancier, it’s basically the same job I was doing before, except now our office works more closely with the police department: both with the collection and processing of evidence, and with the overall investigation. We each provide oversight to the other. In a way, this is a good thing for me because it means I get to spend more time with Hurley and I can legitimately do what I’ve always done—be nosy and get into everyone else’s business. But because we’re basically serving as watchdogs for one another, it also means there can’t be any hints of fraternization or situations that might cause conflicts of interest. Bottom line, in order to keep my job, I can’t date Hurley. And despite my recent windfall, I want to keep my job. I enjoy it; I’m good at it; and the majority of my money from the divorce settlement needs to be earmarked for retirement.

While I can’t date Hurley, there’s nothing that says I can’t continue to place myself in strategic positions for observation whenever he has to bend over. And I do so as often as I can during our scene processing, admiring the long, lean lines of his back and a pair of buns that look like they could crack open an oyster.

I know these musings aren’t healthy and I’ll have to pick myself up, dust myself off, and get back into the dating scene at some point. It’s not something I look forward to. The one date I’ve had so far turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, and the man is now living and sleeping with my mother.

Speaking of dusting off, I feel and look like a chimneysweep by the time we get Jack’s body back to the morgue. I opt to take a quick shower before heading into the autopsy suite. Stripping down in the shower room, I make the mistake of glancing in the full-length mirror to check out my new tan lines.

In a few days, Hurley and I will be traveling to Daytona Beach to attend a two-day educational seminar on advances in forensics, one of the requirements of my new job description. Though I failed to inherit my mother’s tiny, trim figure, I did get her fair coloring, blue eyes, and blond hair. My normal skin tone is quite pale. Along with my height and my size-12 feet, it earned me the nickname of “Yeti” in high school. Given the warm weather and the sunny beach where we’ll be staying for the seminar, I thought it might be prudent to spend a little time in a tanning bed getting some base color. I know the sun can be dangerous, but the idea of worshipping it a little is irresistible—especially since I’m in the midst of one of Wisconsin’s infamously long, dark, snowy winters. Thanks to daylight saving time, I go to work in the dark and come home in the dark. Every day I check my canine teeth in the mirror, expecting to see that they’ve grown.

So an artificial sun is my only choice and I’ve had two sessions at the tanning bed so far. I got a bit impatient yesterday and set the timer for longer than I should have. As a result, I burned a little, leaving me cherry red instead of tanned. Fortunately, I kept my panties on and draped a small towel over my boobs so my more delicate parts didn’t get hit. I’m not too worried about the red parts, because I know from past experience that they’ll fade to tan in a few days, giving me an approximate two-week window of looking sun-kissed and healthy before giant sheets of my skin start peeling off like a sloughing leper’s.

I planned it all out so that I’d look my best when we hit Florida. However, as I glance into the mirror and examine my backside, I realize I’ve made a fatal miscalculation. The curved tanning bed cradles me pretty tightly. As a result, I have a series of red-and-white stripes down both of my sides—red, where my skin was exposed to the tanning bed; white, where rolls of back fat kept certain areas tucked away and hidden. The end result is laughably hideous. I look like a mutant albino zebra.

Disgusted, I get into the shower and try to block the image from my mind, vowing to get back to the gym. A hugely overweight, semiretired detective by the name of Bob Richmond conned me into doing workouts with him a few weeks ago, but I’ve slacked off a bit as of late while he’s been at home recuperating from a bullet wound. My idea of exercise is walking to the bakery rather than driving, and I’m convinced that the exercise machines at the gym were purloined from a medieval torture chamber.

Fifteen minutes later, I am cleaned of ash and my stripes are safely hidden beneath a set of scrubs. When I arrive in the autopsy room, Izzy informs me that he and Arnie, our lab tech, have already X-rayed the body—including a set of dental films—drawn vitreous samples, and obtained blood from the carotid artery. Hurley and another local cop, by the name of Junior Feller, are standing against the wall by the door. As I approach the table, the song “Bad Boys” from the TV show Cops starts to play. Looking a bit embarrassed, Junior takes out his cell phone and answers it, stopping the music.

“Are you kidding me?” Hurley mutters, with a roll of his eyes.

Junior says into the phone, “Not now, Monica. I’ll call you later.” He pauses and then says, “Yes, I can pick up some eggs on the way home. But it may be a while.” He snaps the phone shut and drops it back into his pocket.

“Seriously, dude?” Hurley says, shaking his head. “You have the theme song for Cops as your ring tone?”

Junior looks sheepish and shrugs. “Monica likes it.”

Monica is his new girlfriend and a committed badge chaser. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she and Junior do it in the back of his cruiser while Junior keeps on his uniform and gun belt.

Izzy and I smile at one another, but say nothing. We turn our attention back to the task at hand. Jack’s body is already laid out on the table and fully exposed. It’s a bizarre sight. His limbs look like giant, burnt chicken wings; his torso is like a charcoal briquette. Yet, his face looks relatively normal.

Izzy starts his superficial exam at Jack’s face, while I take a comb to what’s left of his hair, searching for trace evidence. All I find are chunks of the asbestos insulation, ash, and some bits of ceiling tile. I collect it all on clean white paper and then bag and seal it as evidence.

Izzy steps up on the footstool he has to use in order to reach everything and opens Jack’s mouth to look inside. “There’s no sign of soot in his nostrils or in his mouth,” he says. “That tells me he was likely dead before the fire started. I’ll be able to tell better once I get a look at his lungs, and after Arnie runs the lab tests on the blood he sampled. But I’m guessing Jack’s carbon monoxide level will be zero.”

“Maybe not zero,” I say. “He was a smoker.”

“Good point.” Izzy then explains the situation to the cops. “Smokers tend to maintain a carbon monoxide level anywhere from zero to ten, depending on what they smoke, how long ago they smoked it, and how often they smoke. But if he inhaled smoke from the fire, his level will be much higher than that.”

Izzy peels back Jack’s upper lip, then the lower one. “Hmm, this is interesting,” he says, and both Junior and Hurley step up to the table to take a look. “He has some bruising here on the inside of his lips—something we often see when someone’s been smothered.”

Hurley asks, “Can it be caused by something else?”

Izzy thinks a moment before answering. “Yes, I suppose it could. The weight of the ceiling debris falling on his face might have caused it. But considering the amount of the bruising, I suspect he was still alive, with his heart pumping, when it occurred, and if that was the case, he’d have soot in his mouth. So I can only assume the bruising occurred perimortem, before the fire started and the ceiling came down. It’s also possible he hit his face against the floor or some other object when he fell out of his wheelchair.”

After Izzy snaps some photos, we examine the remainder of Jack’s body surface, both in the room’s normal light and again using our ultraviolet light. Aside from more ceiling debris, we don’t find anything of interest, but we bag and tag what we do find, just in case.

Next Izzy hoses the body down and the resultant gray water runs along channels on the sides of the autopsy table into a special filter and drain. The filter will be examined later for any additional trace evidence.

Izzy steps down from his stool and looks over at Junior and Hurley. “This next part is going to be a bit grim,” he warns. “I need to straighten out his arms and legs.” Izzy instructs me to hold Jack’s shoulder and torso down while he takes hold of the lower part of the arm and pulls. He throws most of his weight into it—a considerable effort despite his height, since Izzy is nearly as wide as he is tall. His face flushes red and his bushy, dark eyebrows draw together and form a V over his nose as he pulls. Finally the arm gives way with a distinct crack. After a short breather, we repeat the procedure on the other side and then move to the hips and legs. By the time we have the body as straight as we’re going to get it, bits of charred flesh have flak. . .