Page 58 of Chosen Path
CHAPTERTWENTY-NINE
Molly was gesturing with great energy as she tried to convince Officer Booth that they now had sufficient evidence to report Corrine’s death as suspicious. The police officer listened intently, but her expression gave no hint as to whether she was at all swayed.
Bodhi caught Ed’s eye. “This could go on for a while. If you need to get back to the arrangements for Mr. Lundgren, we can lock up in here and let ourselves out.”
The funeral director checked his watch, then frowned. “I’m afraid I’ll have to take you up on that. The barber should be here any minute to give Nikolas his final trim.”
“I understand. Thanks for all your help.”
“It was my pleasure. Like I said, I read about the work you did in Canada. It’s an honor to meet you.” Ed turned as if to leave, then hesitated and turned back. “You really think someone killed her?”
“It just a theory. To test it, at a minimum, I’d need to do serological testing, maybe some tissue testing at the suspected injection site. To be really sure, I’d want a radioimmunoassay to confirm the presence and levels of insulin in her cerebrospinal fluid and the vitreous humor.”
Ed raised his eyebrows. “From her eyeball?”
“Yep. It’s the gold standard, if I recall correctly. But, of course, if we can’t do an autopsy, we’ll never be able to say with perfect confidence whether she was murdered.”
Ed chewed his bottom lip. He looked for all the world like a man trying not to say something that he desperately wanted to say. Bodhi waited, watching Ed’s battle with himself with an expectant, open expression.
Finally, Ed blurted, “What Doctor Hart said before, about Hope being Laura Gardener’s health care agent—is that true?”
“It is.”
Ed shook his head frantically. “I didn’t know, I swear. I asked Kara, the older daughter, because I thought she was in charge. Nobody ever told me otherwise.”
“It sounds like it was an honest mistake.”
Ed didn’t seem to find any comfort in that assessment. “The thing is, Mrs. Gardener’s death was really similar to this one. Like eerily similar. She died sitting up, wearing her nightgown. You don’t think ….’” He trailed off and shook his head. “Anyway, I’d better go.”
He eased open the storage room door and slipped outside. Bodhi turned back to Molly and Officer Booth. Their conversation had, if anything, grown more animated and showed no signs of wrapping up any time soon.
He cleared his throat. “Do either of you know where the restroom is here?”
Officer Booth paused mid-monologue to answer him. “Sure. Go back to the stairs we came up. Remember that hall I went down to get Ed. Follow that. It’ll end in a ’T.’ Ed’s office and the reception are to the right. To the left, there’s a prep room that Mike, the village barber, and Lindsey, the makeup artist, use to do the corpses’ hair and makeup. Just past that, there’s a bathroom.”
“Perfect. Thanks.”
It was perfect. It wassoperfect that he wondered whether Officer Booth knew what he planned to do.
He opened the door and walked to the end of the hall with a purposeful stride. He was a man who had somewhere to be. A man on a mission. A man who possibly looked like a barber. He followed the hall to the T and hung a left. He stopped in front of the first door. A small placard denoted it as the ‘green room.’ He gave the door two quick raps, then twisted it open.
He was prepared to apologize if the cosmetologist was already at work on Nikolas Lundgren, but the room was empty. Except for the corpse. The overhead lights were on and the room was bright. Nikolas Lundgren’s waxy face left no doubt that Lindsay hadn’t been here yet.
Bodhi pulled out his phone and found the camera app. He hurried over to the corpse and looked down at the man’s face.
“May you be at ease,” he said aloud to the dead man.
He was grateful that Nikolas wasn’t being buried in a suit with a jacket. Instead he was wearing a long-sleeved, button-down collar shirt in a woven loden green. It looked soft and slightly worn, as though it had been a particular favorite during his lifetime.
He lifted the man’s right side to pull aside his sleeve. Even when embalmed, a dead body was swollen and stiff. Rather than wrestle uncooperative limbs into sleeves and pant legs, funeral directors or their staff would cut the clothing down the back and then artfully drape the fabric around the corpse. So gaining access to Mr. Lundgren’s right shoulder was trivially easy.
Finding the injection site was more difficult. But after several minutes of careful examination, a faint bruise led him to not one, but two, syringe holes in the same approximate area of the arm where he’d spotted the wound on Corrine’s arm. He snapped two pictures, increased the magnification, and snapped two more. Would it hold up in court? No. Was it enough to open an investigation? Maybe.
He rearranged the shirt sleeve around the man’s arm as best he could. Then he crossed the small room with a few long, determined strides and slipped out the door and into the hallway. A middle-aged woman carrying a hard-sided case stopped short when she saw him.
“Oh!”
“You must be Lindsay,” Bodhi said.
