On Harrow Hill

With everyone in coveralls, shoe covers, and nitrile gloves, they followed Peale into a hall that smelled of antiseptic. At the end of it was a closed door.

Peale turned to Morgan, his voice tight with anger. “That’s the embalming room with the cadaver-storage unit. When you called, I came down from my office and discovered the damn mess in there. I didn’t touch a thing.”

He led them into a large clinical-looking space, similar to an ME’s autopsy room. The disinfectant odor was stronger here. In the center was a gleaming white embalming table, hooked up to specialized plumbing equipment for irrigation and draining. An operating-room lighting fixture was suspended from the ceiling above it. Glass cabinets lined the walls. The glass door on one of them had been smashed.

What captured Gurney’s attention, however, was the cadaver-storage unit on the other side of the embalming table. Seven feet high and at least that wide and as deep, it resembled a giant safe or industrial walk-in closet. Its door, nearly the full width of the unit, was wide open. Inside, a casket with its lid raised rested on a mortuary trolley, similar to the rolling stretchers used in hospitals. Inside the casket was a bloodstained fabric liner. Gurney could see an area on the edge of the lid where the wood was splintered.

“Damned idiots did that,” said Peale, following Gurney’s gaze. “There’s a latch under the side rail, but they didn’t take the time to find it. They just pried open the lid.”

“They?” said Gurney. “You have reason to believe it was more than one person?”

“That’s obvious, isn’t it? Tate’s body weighed at least a hundred fifty pounds. And the trolley is still where I left it in the unit. Meaning the body was lifted out of the casket and carried out of the building. Damn near impossible for one person.”

Slovak was stroking his chin in a near-parody of thoughtfulness. “Unless he, or she, rolled the casket out to the back door on that trolley thing, pried the top off, dragged the corpse into the trunk of their car, then rolled the trolley back in here.”

Barstow was staring at him. “Why would they take the time to replace the trolley?”

Morgan, who Gurney knew abhorred any conflict he might be called on to resolve, interrupted with a raised hand. “Let’s debate the scenarios later.” He turned to Peale. “Have you seen any signs of forced entry?”

Peale pointed to a doorway off the main room. His sweater sleeve rode up a few inches on his wrist, revealing what appeared to be a gold Cartier watch. “The window in there is open. It was closed the last time I was down here.”

“Closed and locked?”

“Maybe not locked. I’m not sure.”

“Apart from the broken casket and open window, has anything else been disturbed?

“Obviously that,” Peale said, pointing to the smashed glass door of the case on the wall.

“Was something taken?”

For the first time, the haughtiness in Peale’s voice was diluted with something that sounded like fear. “Five surgical scalpels and one bone mallet.”

Barstow spoke up. “Could you describe the mallet?”

“My largest. Ten-inch handle. Lead-weighted head. Narrow-diameter striking surface. Why do you ask?”

“Long story.”

Morgan returned to his own line of questions. “Are you aware of anything else that’s been taken or disturbed?”

Peale pointed to an area on the bare wall between two cabinets. “There are some peculiar scratches over there.”

Morgan and Barstow stepped closer, peering at a horizontal number eight with a vertical line through the middle of it. It appeared to have been scraped into the paint with a sharp-pointed instrument. Barstow pulled out her phone and took a photo.

“Anything else?” asked Morgan.

“No, apart from that, everything is wonderful!”

Morgan’s mouth tightened. He spoke with the forced evenness of a man defusing a bomb. “This would be a good time to turn the room over to Kyra. Her crime-scene team will go over it with a fine-tooth comb. If the intruders left any evidence behind, they’ll find it. In the meantime, I’d like to get a broader picture of the situation—especially the time period between the arrival of Tate’s body and its removal. You mentioned having an office upstairs. That might be a good place to talk, unless you’d rather come next door to headquarters.”

Peale stared at him for a long moment before answering, as if anger at the desecration of his workplace was getting in the way of his ability to think. “My office . . . is fine.”

Gurney, meanwhile, had noted what he suspected was the lens of a discreet security camera mounted atop the hinge bracket of one of the wall cabinets.

He pointed to it. “Is that what I think it is?”

Peale looked up, reluctantly, it seemed. “I’m afraid so.”

11

Danforth Peale’s “office” had little in common with the image the term brought to mind. With the exception of a handsome walnut file cabinet and a laptop computer on a small Hepplewhite table, there was no hint of it being a place where business was conducted, even the genteel business of burying the wealthy dead.