Here is a free sample of Currying Death for your reading pleasure!
Chapter 1
Kenzie was bent over her computer finishing up her notes and reports on the death of an elderly man, Casey Earl, when Dr. Cook approached her desk. He walked with a sense of purpose but did not have a stack of paperwork in his hands, so Kenzie straightened up expectantly. She brushed a few dark curls away from her face.
“What’s up?”
“Feel like attending a death scene?”
“Sure,” Kenzie agreed. She saved and closed her documents and started to tidy her desk. “What have we got?”
“Man found dead in his apartment. Paramedics were called to the scene. Nothing they could do; he’d been lying there dead for some time.”
Kenzie nodded. Probably not anything too unusual about it. Someone who had died in his sleep, maybe a heart attack or stroke.
“How long is ‘for some time’?” she asked cautiously. It could be anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks, and she wanted to be prepared for what she would find.
“Sometime today,” Dr. Cook told her with an understanding grin. It always threw her for a loop when he smiled like that. He had the face of a movie star, not an experienced pathologist. Most of the time, she didn’t really see his good looks anymore. They had worked together for a few months while Dr. Wiltshire was on medical leave and, once she’d worked over a few dead bodies with him, her consciousness of his appearance had faded. She didn’t notice it unless he did something like smile at her in that relaxed, understanding way.
Whew. Zachary was lucky she didn’t believe in office romances.
“Nice and fresh,” Kenzie approved. “That’s good. Looks like natural causes?”
Cook pursed his lips. “I will leave that up to you to determine; I would not want to bias you in any way.”
Of course not. Kenzie nodded her agreement. “I’ll let Carlos know we’ve got a transport. He and George can stand by for when I am done.”
“I already paged him. He should be there by the time you’re ready for him.”
“Great.” Kenzie opened her mouth to ask for the address when a text arrived on her phone. When she swiped the screen to reveal it, she saw it was the information she needed. He must have sent it as he had approached her desk, but it had taken a minute to arrive. She read the address and nodded. “Okay, thanks. I’ll get on this.”
If it was pretty clear that it was a natural death, Kenzie should have the death scene cleared and the body back at the medical examiner’s office within a couple of hours.
* * *
Kenzie parked her “baby,” a cherry red convertible, in front of the apartment building, ignoring the tow-away zone. The parking permit hanging from her rearview mirror identifying her as being from the medical examiner’s office would prevent her car from being impounded. At least, it should. She popped the trunk to retrieve her small scene-of-death kit. She would be quickly in and out. The body would not need to be autopsied immediately. It might not require an autopsy at all if the man happened to be elderly and his doctor informed her that he had a history of heart disease or was being treated for some other potentially fatal condition.
There was an elevator to the third floor. A good size for transport. Everything looked like it would fall into place, and they would not have any difficulties. She walked down the hall to apartment 302 and found the door standing open. Peering in, she could see the paramedics standing in the living room chatting while waiting for her arrival. She nodded and stepped in. She was not familiar with the paramedics, so she introduced herself. They would not expect a stranger to walk in off the street but, sometimes, people got overly curious and stepped into death scenes without authorization.
“Dr. Kenzie Kirsch,” she advised them, holding out her hand. “Assistant Medical Examiner.”
“Oh, doctor.” The female paramedic shook her hand. “Thank you for getting here so quickly. Sometimes we have to hang out for hours.”
Roxboro was a small town, so they really shouldn’t have to wait a significant amount of time at any death scene. Except that being a small town meant that there were a limited number of people who could do the job and, if there were several deaths to attend to in a day, there might be a delay in getting to one of them. But that rarely happened. But Kenzie didn’t know the paramedic, who might have moved there from the city, where it was more likely that she would have to wait for a death scene investigator to arrive.
“Great, well, if you would like me to—” Kenzie stopped herself and studied the two other people in the room. A young man and woman in their late twenties or early thirties. The man’s children? Grandchildren? Maybe one of them was a nursing care provider or aide? “Hi. I’m sorry. I’m Dr. Kenzie Kirsch. Medical examiner’s office. Are you the ones who discovered the body?”
They both nodded.
“I’m Rachel Evans,” the young woman introduced herself. She hugged herself tightly. “This is kind of weird. I’m a nurse practitioner.”
“Mr. Robertson’s care worker?” Kenzie asked expectantly.
“No.” She shook her head vigorously, her eyes widening. “No, I was his girlfriend.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Kenzie’s cheeks heated. How much younger than Robertson was his girlfriend? She didn’t like putting her foot in her mouth like that. She should know better than to make assumptions. “I just assumed when you said you were a nurse…”
“No.” The pretty blonde was flushing as well. “I should have told you. I don’t know why I said I was a nurse before I told you about our relationship. I just mean, that’s what is so weird. I deal with sick people, deal with death all the time, but I feel like… I don’t know. It was just so surprising to find him like that.”
Kenzie nodded understandingly. “It’s not the same when it is someone you know. If he wasn’t in your care, you didn’t think of him that way. Had he been ill for a long time? Actually—” Kenzie held up her hand to prevent Rachel from answering the question. “Let me examine the body and the scene before you say anything. I don’t want to be influenced by anything else.” She turned to face the other person in the room, the young man. “And are you…?”
She didn’t want to put her foot in it again by asking him if he were Mr. Robertson’s son, so she left the sentence hanging, waiting for him to complete it.
“I’m his roommate.”
“Oh, okay.” Kenzie felt uneasy as she looked toward the bedroom. If the girlfriend and the roommate were both in their early thirties, then she might have been wrong in her assumption that the man who had died had been elderly like Casey Earl, whose file she had just closed, or even middle-aged. He was probably around their age. “What did you say your name was?”
“Alex Collins.”
“Okay. If you would just stay out here…” Neither of them appeared to be inclined to follow her into the bedroom. “Which room is it?”
“Last one at the end of the hall.”
Chapter 2
Kenzie nodded and stepped away to examine the body. She didn’t want to be influenced by anything else they might have to say. One of the paramedics, the woman, trailed along behind her. Always best if there were two witnesses to corroborate each other’s testimony if there were ever any questions as to what had taken place at the death scene.
Kenzie went through the door standing open at the end of the hall. The room was warm, the blinds drawn, like he had still been sleeping, maybe feeling sick. Or maybe he was a shift worker. He could be a medical professional like his girlfriend, someone she had met on the job.
Robertson was still in the bed. The paramedics had not moved the body to the floor to examine him or to do CPR. They knew a dead man when they saw one. Robertson lay as if asleep, partially on his side. He was a young man, like his girlfriend and roommate.
It was a queen-size bed that took up most of the small room. There was already a faint odor of death. He had been there most of the day, if she had to guess just by the stuffiness of the room. She moved closer to him, pulling on gloves. In the artificial lighting, his skin seemed to have a yellowish cast. He was overweight, puffy and bloated, his belly hanging out from under the t-shirt he had worn to bed. Someone who had not, at first glance, taken good care of himself.
Kenzie touched his neck to confirm death. His flesh was waxy. Rigor had set in. Nothing about the body suggested that it had been moved after death. Kenzie looked slowly around the room. There were several pill bottles on the side table, which she examined one at a time. A statin for high cholesterol. An SSRI antidepressant. Xanax for anxiety. All prescribed by the same doctor.
Kenzie pulled evidence bags out of her scene-of-death kit and sealed each one individually. She looked through the drawer of the side table to see if there was anything more. She found over-the-counter remedies. Antacids, allergy pills, painkillers, cold and sinus. The same as she would find in practically any bedroom or bathroom cabinet. She bagged each one.
Pulling out her phone, Kenzie looked up the prescribing physician online and called his office.
“Dr. Brandon is with a patient at the moment,” the receptionist advised. “Did you want to set up an appointment?”
“This is Dr. Kirsch from the medical examiner’s office. I need to talk to him about the death of one of his patients.”
“Oh, dear!” the receptionist sounded concerned. “I’m sorry to hear that. I will have him call you back. Can I get your number? And the name of the patient so he can review the file before calling you?”
“Patient’s name is Scott Robertson.” Kenzie gave her phone number. “If I could get him to call me back as soon as possible. I am at the death scene right now, and I don’t want to release it until after I have talked to Dr. Brandon.”
“I’ll try to have him call you before his next patient. We do have a busy practice…”
“I understand that. And hopefully, he does not have the ME’s office calling him about too many of them. It is quite important that he take the time to call me back.”
“I will let him know.”
Kenzie sighed. “Thank you.”
There wasn’t much else for her to do. She would do a full examination of Robertson in the morgue, but it appeared that he had not been in good health and there were no preliminary indications that it was anything other than a natural death.
The room was not exactly neat, but there was no sign of any violence there, either. No sign of a struggle. Robertson was in bed, where he had likely been since the night before. There were no visible injuries. His laptop sat on his desk, along with his phone and a few other items that any self-respecting burglar would have taken.
As she looked around the room, there was a noise in the closet. Kenzie froze, her heart racing.
Was there someone in there? Even though she had been thinking of a burglar, there was no sign of any burglary. If it had been burgled, why would the thief have stayed in the room for hours to risk discovery by the girlfriend or roommate? Obviously, he couldn’t show himself once they had shown up, and then the paramedics had come, and then Kenzie, so there hadn’t been any time in which someone could sneak out since the time the body was discovered.
Kenzie had heard of cases where a burglar had fallen asleep in the middle of his burglary and been discovered at the scene. She looked at the bed, but there was no sign that anyone had been sleeping there other than Robertson. She didn’t think that a burglar would have lain down next to a corpse. But then, she wouldn’t have thought they would lie down at all, much less fall asleep in the midst of a burglary.
“Is somebody there?” she asked in a loud voice.
The paramedic, who had followed her to the bedroom but was stationed outside the door due to the lack of space inside the room, stuck her head in the door.
“Did you call me?”
“No, there’s… I think there’s someone in the closet.”
The paramedic looked at the door, closed most of the way but still slightly ajar. She turned and shouted back to the others in the living room. “Is there anyone else in the apartment?”
Kenzie could hear Rachel and Alex coming down the hall toward them, arguing about something. It sounded like an old argument, something they had hashed over many times before and barely had the energy to get mad about now.
“You know she isn’t allowed in there! You’re supposed to keep track of her,” Rachel insisted.
“I do. Who left the door open? It wasn’t me.”
“You’re not supposed to let her roam everywhere.”
Alex marched into the bedroom, forcing Kenzie to step back so that she was squeezed against the bed. He paid no attention to her and walked over to the closet door, pulling it open with a whoosh.
“Cuddles!” He snapped. “Get out of there! You know you’re not supposed to be in there!”
Kenzie couldn’t help grinning as he bent over to push things around the bottom of the closet, coming out with an armful of fluff.
“This is Cuddles,” Alex said unnecessarily. The fluffy tricolor cat glared at Kenzie, ears folded back. “Sorry. She’s not supposed to be in here; she must have snuck in while we were calling the paramedics. We were both kind of in a panic. We weren’t expecting… something like this.”
Now that he had retrieved the cat, he stopped and stared at Robertson’s body on the bed. His cheeks turned pink and he swore.
“I didn’t mean to just barge in here like that. I kind of forgot myself… I’m sorry.” He shook his head.
“If you could just step out with Cuddles, that would be great. We don’t want her contaminating the scene or getting in the way.”
“I told you!” Rachel was saying in the hall. “If you’re going to have a cat, you need to keep it shut in your room. It can’t just be wandering all over the apartment. I told you before that she aggravates Scott’s allergies!”
She suddenly went quiet.
“Well, she isn’t going to aggravate them anymore, is she?” Alex sighed. “I am sorry. I said that. Neither of us was watching her when we went to call the ambulance and answered the door. She just snuck in. It was unintentional. Normally, she couldn’t get into Scott’s room; that was why she was so curious about it.”
“She shouldn’t have the run of the apartment. You shouldn’t have even gotten the cat while he was living here. It’s common courtesy. You talk to the people in the household before you bring an animal in. Scott would never have agreed to a cat. His allergies were so bad.”
So Cuddles was the reason for the antihistamines in the side table. Kenzie felt sorry for Robertson, who had not been in good health, to have had this additional trial to deal with. Not just the allergy, but the ongoing fight with his roommate about it and the contention between his girlfriend and his roommate. It wouldn’t have been easy for him to deal with on top of his illness.
“Why don’t we go back out to the living room,” she suggested. “It is going to be a while before I can transport the body. I may as well ask a few questions while I am waiting.”
I hope you enjoyed this sample of
Currying Death
By P.D. Workman
