In which we begin to doubt the observational powers of several of the people involved in the investigation.
“Wax replica?” Detective Campbell said dryly, one eyebrow raised. He, Sergeant Riggs, Officers Porter and Jones, the funeral director, and the undertaker stood looking down into Marissa Thomas’s coffin, which contained the very real body of one Marissa Thomas.
“It was last night, I swear!” Officer Jones said. “Mr. Pimms can attest to that!” He gestured at the funeral director, a thin, dour man in his sixties.
“Indeed I can,” Mr. Pimms said. “I can assure you that last night, right as we were about to bury the coffin, Ms. Thomas’s body was not in it. And I can also assure you that we have very high security in this facility, and that no unauthorized person was in here between now and then.”
Detective Riggs noticed the slight emphasis on the word unauthorized, and didn’t know if it meant the director was implying that a funeral home staff member may be involved, or that the police were corrupt. Either way, it was a conversation for later, when others couldn’t overhear.
“Do you have some place we can interview people in private?” he asked.
“There’s a conference room at the end of the hall that should suit your needs. We won’t need it today, but if the… investigation,” he said the word bitterly. “If the investigation takes more time than that, we will have to make alternate arrangements.”
“We should be done with the interviews today,” Sergeant Riggs assured the man. He turned to the undertaker. “Mr. Fredrickson, if we could start with you?”
The little nervous man moved ahead of them and scurried into the conference room. A short, chubby, balding man, he wasn’t what either of them had expected. With his circular wire-rimmed glasses and poorly matching, but very bright, wardrobe, he looked to… nerdy to be an undertaker. Not the tall, thin, black-clad movie version of an undertaker.
But however he didn’t fit the physical description of a ‘typical’ undertaker, Mr. Fredrickson was a very competent one. And Detective Campbell expected no less, since he was employed at one of the priciest funeral homes in the city. He proved just how competent he was over the next hour and forty-five minutes, as he gave them a detailed, step-by-step rundown of everything that happened to Marissa Thomas’s body from the time it arrived to the time he had it ready and set out for the viewing. He referred to a file that contained notes and pictures, giving exact times for each step. The man may look nervous and fidgety, Detective Campbell thought, but he was very on top of his game. He was hit with another wave of paranoid suspicion. Why would someone be so methodical, unless they were going to be questioned?
“Mr. Fredrickson,” he said, as the man wrapped up his story. “Do you keep such detailed notes on every… body?”
“Yes, sir, I do. Ever since there was that scandal down in Arkansas, I don’t want to take any chances. I was even willing to pay for the surveillance videos and the storage tape out of my own pocket, but Mr. Pimms agreed that it was a good idea, even a selling point, so the funeral home installed it. I take my own notes, and am not involved with the tape, so anyone can compare the two and see nothing… untoward was happening to their loved one.” He tapped the file on the desk. “Is there anything else?”
“This is the first we’ve heard of any tape,” Detective Campbell said. “Is it just in your area, or does it cover the entire funeral home?”
“That particular system is just for the prep room. There are some security cameras in the main area, but they’re monitored by an outside security system.”
Detective Campbell and Sergeant Riggs exchanged a glance. This was the first they’d heard of this development. “Thank you, Mr. Fredrickson. We’ll let you know if we have any other questions. Could you send Mr. Pimms in?”
The little man jumped up and dashed out the door, leaving it swaying gently in his wake. A moment later, Mr. Pimms appeared in the doorway, looking somber and composed.
“I’ve made some guesses at what you might want to see,” he said, setting down a stack of DVDs on the table. “Videos from the prep room, as well as what the security company had on the rest of the facility last night. They didn’t see anything, but there was a lot of police activity and apparently some static interference.”
“And they didn’t find that suspicious?” Sergeant Riggs asked.
“Of course they did,” Mr. Pimms said haughtily. “But what were they going to do, call the police? They called the station, who radioed the guards, who said everything was fine, so they just made a note of it. They’re sending a team out today to check over the system.”
“We’ll need to know if they find anything suspicious,” Detective Campbell said.
“Of course,” Mr. Pimms agreed, and rose to leave. “If there is nothing else?”
Detective Campbell and Sergeant Riggs shook their heads, and he walked out the door. For the rest of the morning, they interviewed various funeral home workers, many of whom weren’t even involved in Marissa Thomas’s service, and all of whom said they’d seen nothing suspicious. Apart from the police presence, that is. The only outsiders where the officers on duty. Detective Campbell made the decision to question them at the station, instead of in front of the funeral home staff.
They located Mr. Pimms and thanked him for his time and cooperation, as well as the tapes, and asked him again to be sure to let them know if the security company found anything wrong with the system. He stiffly told them that of course he would and ushered them out of the building.
It was early afternoon by then, and Sergeant Riggs was starving. “Any chance for a lunch break?”
“We can pick something up on the way to have another conversation with Dr. Curtis,” Detective Campbell said. “The times just don’t add up. If we have a tape here showing Mr. Fredrickson working on Marissa Thomas’s body at the same time she says she was moving the body from one cooler to another…”
“Someone is lying,” Sergeant Riggs said.
“Or mistaken. I need to know how sure she was that she was moving a real body. Did she just glance at it, through plastic, was there a sheet or an opaque tarp covering it…?” Detective Campbell paused. “Have we checked on the story of there being an electrical problem at the morgue?”
“Yes, we have,’ Sergeant Riggs said. “And there was, and the records at the morgue indicate three bodies were moved at the time, including Marissa Thomas’s. The problem was fixed, and they just left the bodies where they’d been transferred. No point, really, in moving them back.”
“Anything suspicious about this problem?” Detective Campbell asked.
“Not really,” Sergeant Riggs replied. “It was an old refrigeration unit, had problems in the past, and the motor finally just gave up the ghost. It had a bunch of stuff gumming it up, overheated, and went out.”
“Don’t they do regular maintenance on them?”
“Yeah, but this was near some vent, and it accumulated more debris than the others. I guess it’s possible someone dumped dust back there in the hopes that it would overheat at just the right moment to… to what?”
“I don’t know,” Detective Campbell admitted. “I’m not even willing to bet that these two cases are related, to be honest. I can’t see a connection, even in the wildest of scenarios.”
They got into the car and sat, each trying to connect the two incidents into a single, solid case. Both failed, and with a shrug, Detective Campbell started the car and they drove towards the morgue. Halfway there, Sergeant Riggs suddenly had a thought.
“Okay, say that there was a dummy body at the morgue, when Dr. Curtis moved it, after it’d been picked up by the funeral home. That’s what the morgue thieves stole, so there should be some traces of it at the crime scene, right? I mean at Pearson’s house,” he clarified, suddenly aware that they had at least four crimes scenes. “If they’re not connected, the morgue thieves don’t know they’ve stolen a fake body until they get it out there and start working.”
“True,” Detective Campbell said. “And why, if there were the same people, would they have stolen the wax body? Unless… no, I think it had to be the same people, now that I think about it. Can that be it? The whole reason… except Dr. Stafford’s death doesn’t fit into that. Unless…”
He lapsed into silence again. There was a connection there, maybe, just maybe. He tried again. “Okay, what about this. Let’s change our mindset as to the main crime. Let’s say this has all been about Marissa Thomas’s body. The perp calls and says it’s not going to be picked up, and when the funeral home does, he slips the wax dummy in. But to steal it from the funeral home, he needs the dummy back. With some cosmetic changes, sure, but he’s already done a lot of work to make it life-like, so why not re-use? No, that doesn’t make sense, either. Why not just wait and steal the body from the funeral home? Why would it have been important to make anyone believe she was still in the morgue? That makes no sense.”
“That whole part of the case, whether it’s connected to the crime scene at the Pearson place or not, doesn’t make sense,” Sergeant Riggs said. “Why the dummy at the morgue? The rest of it, okay, I can see – someone tries to steal her body, but when it comes out, they make the switch back. Why they wanted the body, I don’t know, but if we leave it aside for now, the rest does make sense. Except why they needed someone to believe she was still in the morgue. Why a dummy in the morgue?”
Detective Campbell’s brow furrowed, then suddenly cleared. “We’ve been assuming that there was a dummy in the morgue because we’re working under the assumption that Dr. Curtis saw Marissa Thomas’s face when she moved the body. If she didn’t, and is only saying the body was there because there was a body there, it makes perfect sense.” He grinned. “The cooler thing was a coincidence, and bad luck for the killer. If she’d actually seen the face…”
“Killer? How did you make that leap? From where I’m standing, we have corpse-napping and a missing person.”
“Think about it. You have a body you need to stash somewhere temporarily. Where better to stick it than in the place of an already-autopsied body? Then when you can dispose of it, all you need to do is show up as the funeral home, take possession, and away you go. It’s perfect.”
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