Aftershock Read online

  Also by Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell

  First Cut

  Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and

  the Making of a Medical Examiner

  AFTERSHOCK

  A DR. JESSIE TESKA MYSTERY

  JUDY MELINEK AND

  T.J. MITCHELL

  Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell are the New York Times bestselling coauthors of Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner, and the novel First Cut. Dr. Melinek studied at Harvard and UCLA, was a medical examiner in San Francisco for nine years, and today works as a forensic pathologist in Oakland and as CEO of PathologyExpert Inc. T.J. Mitchell, her husband, is a writer with an English degree from Harvard and worked in the film industry before becoming a full-time stay-at-home dad to their children.

  For Jack Briley.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1

  A steel band cover of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” makes for a lousy way to lurch awake. Couple of months back, some clown of a coworker got ahold of my cell phone while I was busy in the autopsy suite, and reprogrammed the ringtone for incoming calls from the Medical Examiner Operations and Investigation Dispatch Communications Center. I keep forgetting to fix it.

  I reached across my bedmate to the only table in the tiny room and managed to squelch it before the plinking got past five or six bars, but that was more than enough to wake him.

  “Time is it?” Anup slurred.

  “Four thirty.”

  “God, Jessie,” he said, and pulled a pillow over his head. I planted a nice warm kiss on the back of his neck.

  Donna Griello from the night shift was on the phone. “Good morning, Dr. Teska,” she said.

  “Okay, Donna,” I whispered. “What do we got and where are we going?”

  * * *

  I didn’t need the GPS navigation from my one extravagance in this world, the BMW 235i that I had brought along when I moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco, because muscle memory took me there. The death scene was right on my old commute—a straight shot from the Outer Richmond District, along the edge of Golden Gate Park, then the wiggle down to SoMa, the broad, flat neighborhood south of Market Street. The blue lights were flashing on the corner of Sixth Street and Folsom, just a couple of blocks shy of the Hall of Justice. I used to perform autopsies in the bowels of the Hall, before the boss, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. James Howe, moved the whole operation to his purpose-built dream morgue, way out in Hunters Point. Along the way, Howe made me his deputy chief. The promotion came with a raise, an office, and a ficus, but I hadn’t sought it and it wasn’t welcome—I was only a year and change on the job and didn’t have the experience to be deputy chief in a big city. Howe needed someone to do it, though. So the gold badge and all its headaches went to me.

  The death scene address Donna had given me over the phone was a construction site. From the outside, I couldn’t tell how big. They’d built a temporary sidewalk covered in plywood, and posted an artist’s rendition of a gleaming glass tower, crusted in niches and crenellations and funky angles, dubbed SoMa Centre.

  I double-parked behind a police car and walked the plankway between a blind fence and a line of pickup trucks with union bumper stickers. The men in them eyed me with either suspicion or practiced blankness while they waited for their job site to reopen. A beat cop kept vigil at the head of the line. He took my name and badge number, logged me in, and lifted the yellow tape. He pointed to a wooden crate. It was full of construction hard hats.

  “Mandatory,” he said.

  “You aren’t wearing one,” I griped.

  “I’m not going in there, either.”

  “Good for you. Give me a light over here.”

  I sorted through the helmets under the cop’s flashlight beam. Sizes large, extra large, medium. I am a woman, five feet five inches, a hundred thirty-four pounds, and not especially husky of skull. I certainly wasn’t husky enough to fill out a helmet spec’d for your average male ironworker, which seemed to be all that was on offer.

  I tried out a medium. Even when I cinched the plastic headband all the way, the hard hat swallowed my sorry little blond noggin.

  “Yeah, laugh it up, Officer,” I said, while he did.

  “Sorry, Doc. You look like a kid playing soldier!”

  “Laugh it up,” I said again, because I wasn’t equipped, at that hour, to be clever.

  Not all the workers were stuck outside in their pickups. A few men in hard hats stood around, waiting for work to get going. They shied away from me, in my MEDICAL EXAMINER windbreaker, polyester slacks, and sensible shoes, like I was the angel of death collecting on a debt.

  I found Donna. She’s hard to miss: more than six feet tall, eyes and beak like a hawk. Her hard hat fit just fine. She was leaning against the medical examiner removals van with Cameron Blake, her partner 2578—our bureaucratic shorthand for death scene investigators—on the night shift. Cam is round-faced and ruddy, half a foot shorter than Donna but just as brawny. He greeted me.

  “Any coffee?” I said.

  “The site superintendent says it’s brewing. First shift is just getting here. That’s how come they found the body. You want to talk to him?”

  “The body?”

  “The superintendent.”

  “Let’s find out what the dead guy has to say first.”

  Donna chuckled in a dark way. “Just you wait and see, Doc.”

  The pair of 2578s led me across the construction site by flashlight. Work lights were coming on, but they left big dark gaps.

  “Who found the body?”

  Donna consulted her clipboard. “Dispatch says a worker named Samuel Urias, opening up after the night shift.”

  The construction site by flashlight was a spooky place, even by my standards. Dirty yellow machines loomed in the beams, and plastic sheeting fluttered from the shadows. Our feet crunched on gravel, then whispered over packed dirt. The only thing that was well lit was a mobile office trailer, on a rise to our left, surrounded by silhouettes in hard hats.

  Donna led us toward a detached flatbed trailer, parked with its landing-gear feet pressing into the dirt. It was loaded with long metal pipes, six or eight inches in diameter, in bundles of twenty or so. The bundles were bound together with tight black bands at either end and had been stacked four high on the flatbed. One of the bands securing the top bundle had snapped. It waved drunkenly in the air—and half a dozen pipes lay tumbled in the dirt.

  Underneath them was a body.

  It was a man. He was on his back. His head and shoulders were crushed under the pipes. He wore a business suit and black wingtip shoes, the left one coming off at the heel. His arms were flung out. I determined his race to be white from his hands, which offered the only visible skin. They were clean and uncalloused, fingernails manicured, wedding band on the left ring finger, a college ring on the right.

  I shined my flashlight at the pipes. They had done a job on him. We walked around the body, looking for a pool of blood. There wasn’t one.

  When I pointed this out, Donna elbowed Cameron and smirked. He
scowled back.

  “What?” I said.

  “I noticed that too,” Donna said. “Cam thinks it’s no big deal.”

  “Can we just get this guy out of here?” Cameron said. “The superintendent is antsy. He’s worried about press, and I don’t blame him.”

  I crouched to take a closer look at that left shoe. The leather above the heel was badly scuffed. Same for the right one. The dead man’s pricey wool dress pants were torn at the hems. My flashlight picked up a faint trail in the dirt running away from his feet. I warned the 2578s to watch their step until the police crime scene unit had photographed the area.

  “What—?” said Cam. “CSI isn’t here. This is an accident scene.”

  “Get them. This is a suspicious death.”

  “Oh, come on...”

  “It’s fishy.” I pointed my flashlight around. “Where’s all the blood from that crush injury? There’s drag marks and damage to the clothing to match. Soft hands, expensive suit. Where’s his hard hat?”

  “Maybe it’s under the pipes.”

  “Maybe. But does this guy look like he belongs on a construction site, after hours? No way I’m assuming this was an accident.”

  “Told you it was staged,” Donna said to Cam.

  “Whatever,” he muttered back. He pulled out his phone, said good morning to the police dispatcher, and asked for the crime scene unit.

  The sky was lightening behind the downtown towers a few blocks away, and more construction workers were starting to trickle in. “We need a perimeter,” I said. “And I want to talk to the man who found the body. Do we have a presumptive ID?”

  “We found this just like you see it, and didn’t run his pockets yet,” Donna said.

  “Let’s wait till crime scene documents everything before we touch him.”

  Donna smiled. “Because this is fishy, right?”

  I couldn’t help smiling back. “You won the bet. Leave Cam alone.” I started toward the lit-up office trailer.

  “Where you going?” Donna said.

  “Coffee.”

  A figure in the small crowd huddling at the trailer saw me coming and met me halfway. He was a late-middle-aged white man with a gray mustache, dressed like a soccer dad in blue jeans and a collared shirt. No tie, no jacket, heavy work boots. He had a fancy hard hat. It said SITE SUPER.

  “Where’s the hearse?” the construction superintendent demanded.

  I introduced myself and told him we were waiting for the police crime scene unit to arrive and document the scene.

  “How long will that take?”

  Fuck if I know, I thought. “It could be a while,” I said.

  “What’s a while? We have work to do here.”

  Bałwan. I grew up outside of Boston, but Polish is my first language. Sort of. My mother is from Poland and my father is a son of a bitch. Mamusia taught me and my brother Tomasz the mother tongue—which Dad doesn’t speak—and the three of us stuck with it inside the four walls of our three-decker flat on Pinkham Street in East Lynn. Mamusia said it was to preserve our heritage. It was also useful for hiding things from the old man.

  Polish has a lot of terms for a son of a bitch. Bałwan was Mamusia’s word for her husband Arthur Teska on a good day. If he had been drinking, he was a sukinsyn. So far, the site superintendent was turning out to be a bałwan, but the day was young.

  “First the police will do their job, then my colleagues and I will do our job, and then you can get back to yours.”

  “But the police are already here, and they aren’t doing anything!”

  “We’re waiting for the homicide division.”

  The superintendent went pale and stammery. “Homicide—? But this isn’t... This is...”

  “This is a death scene. It might be a crime scene. That’s for the police to determine before I can continue my investigation as the medical examiner, and certainly before we can remove or even touch that body.”

  The superintendent said nothing. He dug into his pocket for a phone and walked away, dialing. Not an unusual reaction. People freak out when they hear homicide is coming.

  I dug a hand under the wobbly hard hat to scratch my scalp. It was Anup’s damn shampoo. I had been dating Anup Banerjee for seven, almost eight months. I live in a rental, a tiny back-garden cottage in the Richmond District, half a mile from the continent’s Pacific edge. Cottage does the place too much justice—it’s a converted San Francisco cable car called Mahoney Brothers #45. It was abandoned in the sand dunes at the end of the line after it had outlived its usefulness, until someone jacked the thing up, built a foundation under it, and added box wings for a bedroom and a kitchen and a water closet. Mahoney Brothers #45 covers 372 square feet of the most expensive real estate in the country. Back when I had lived in it alone with my beagle, Bea, it was my very own cozy paradise.

  Anup and I were not quite living together, but he had started spending most nights in Mahoney Brothers #45, and the place is no cozy paradise for two grown adults and a demanding dog. It’s more like sharing a Winnebago. I am not a domestic goddess. Anup is a lawyer by training and a fastidious, detail-oriented person by inclination. I ran out of shampoo; he got more. But it had turned out to be some awful stuff that only a man would buy, and it made my scalp itch.

  I scratched at it. Then I headed up to the over-lit trailer to scare up some coffee.

  * * *

  I couldn’t juggle three cups, so I roped one of the beat cops into helping. He told me that press and camera trucks were already arriving at the gate.

  “And our LT wants us to wrap things up here. The captain’s already riding his ass. That means someone with pull called the captain.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was a complicated and hazardous crime scene, and we’d likely be holding vigil over that body for hours to come. Cam and Donna and I sipped our coffees and waited for the crime scene unit. They didn’t take long. They rearranged our perimeter. They took pictures. We stayed out of the way.

  I was about to mosey up to the trailer for a refill when Cam nudged me and pointed his chin toward the entry gate. A Black man in a blue suit was swapping a fedora for a hard hat. Even at a distance in the dismal predawn light, I could pick out that mustache of his. It scowled.

  “Zasrane to życie,” I muttered. My shit luck. It would appear that the homicide detective assigned to this case was going to be Keith Jones.

  Inspector Jones and I had a history, and not a happy one. The year before, we’d done a case together, a drug overdose that he and his partner wanted to call an accident. I disagreed and tried to certify it as a homicide—but I was overruled by Dr. Howe, my boss. Jones had never forgiven me for putting them through a pile of work over a stupid OD just because I had decided it had to be a murder.

  “Dr. Jessie Teska,” he said. “On a construction site. So I’m gonna guess I’m out here wasting my time with another accident.”

  The crime scene photographer’s camera flashed, illuminating the dead man and the pile of pipes across his head and shoulders. Jones nodded thoughtfully. “Will you look at that,” he said.

  I bit my tongue. “Hello, Keith.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “It’s a suspicious death.”

  “What’s suspicious about a load of pipe falling off a truck?”

  I ran through my initial findings for him: the decedent’s inappropriate attire, damage to the heels of his shoes and pant hems, drag marks in the dirt, the lack of evident bleeding.

  “So what? Maybe he got drunk and tripped and tore his pants. Maybe the blood’s under those pipes.”

  “Maybe the scene’s been tampered with. Maybe it’s a homicide dressed like an accident.”

  “Who is he, anyhow?”

  “We’ll try to get a presumptive ID when crime scene clears us to handle the body.”

&n
bsp; “So you don’t know. Witnesses?”

  “No. One of the workers found him when they opened up the site this morning.”

  “You spoke to this worker?”

  “I figured you’d want to.”

  “That’s what you figured, huh, Doctor. Did you figure maybe he could give you a presumptive ID on this dead person? Get us started, at least?”

  Again I bit my tongue. I didn’t like being dressed down by Jones, especially in front of the 2578s and the precinct cops, but nothing good would come from calling him out. By luck of the draw, it was a case we had to investigate together.

  Jones sighed and massaged his boxy eyebrows. “Okay, then, Deputy Chief Teska. You’ve got the whole circus rolling in, and it’s going to be here for hours. Let’s see what’s what.” He headed off toward the lit-up office trailer.

  I rejoined Cameron and Donna, who were studiously pretending to ignore us by watching the crime scene unit photograph the death scene.

  “How are we going to get those pipes off the body?” I wondered.

  “Can’t be that hard,” Cam said. “I’ll go talk to the superintendent.”

  The pallid sky brightened a little, and I could hear the growl of rush hour rising on all sides of the future home of SoMa Centre. I checked my phone. It was 7:05. Anup would be getting up soon. He’d take Bea out. He had no problem with the dog. I’m her alpha for sure, but Anup is a runner and Bea enjoys chasing him around Golden Gate Park. I thought about calling him, but decided it was better to let him enjoy his last few minutes of sleep. Anup had a nice desk job at the First District Court of Appeal. Never did he have to roll out of bed at 4:30 to sit around a construction site and watch cops take pictures of a mangled corpse.

  Lucky him.

  Cam returned. Behind him, the site superintendent had picked two men out of the crowd by the trailer and marched them over to a giant front loader.

  “We have an issue,” Cam said. Apparently, those two were the only workers on hand qualified to operate the equipment that would safely lift the metal pipes off our dead guy—and they refused to do it. They wanted nothing at all to do with dead bodies, especially if the police were involved. The superintendent was threatening to fire them both if one of them didn’t shift those damn pipes.