To buy time I have to let him think I’m dead. To do that, I need a body. On average, twenty-four people die a day in Montana. The number of males around my age averages about two to three per day.
According to the Montana Gazette, Christopher Dunleavy, age thirty, was found unresponsive two days ago and taken to Missoula Memorial Hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival from a prescription-drug overdose. Authorities say they’re trying to contact family members. Translation: his body is sitting in the hospital morgue waiting for someone to make burial arrangements.
The social media profile I found for him shows someone that doesn’t resemble me facially but has a similar body type—close enough for what I have planned.
I dial the hospital and have the switchboard connect me to the morgue.
“Cold storage,” says a friendly woman.
“Hello, I’m calling from Hudson Creek sheriff’s office. Do you still have Christopher Dunleavy’s remains?”
“Yes. Still waiting on next of kin. What’s up?”
“There’s been a wrinkle. I think the state crime lab wants to have a look.”
“Says who?”
“Mead, I believe.” Better to throw her name around.
“She doesn’t trust our forensic examiner?”
“No. No. There might be a criminal element. Trying to identify the source of the pills.”
“Oh, got it.”
“Yeah. Anyway, DEA has asked for an examination.”
“Just have someone come sign for it and they can do as they please.”
After laying the groundwork for taking the body, I have to actually pull it off. Sadly, I can’t just drive up to the hospital in my SUV and have them load the body in the back.
Fortunately, in Helena I find a truck rental company with a new high-top black van—exactly the kind of thing you’d expect a government agency to use.
I put the vehicle on my credit card, assuming that by the time police check those records I’ll be dead or Clark captured.
When I arrive at the hospital, my hands are clammy and I’m not quite sure if I’m up to pulling it off. I’ve hastily bought a dark-blue windbreaker so I look like some kind of officious person. My cover story is going to be that I am a federal examiner brought in by the DEA—if they even ask.
I park in back near the loading zone. As I walk toward the rear entrance, I spot a young cop on break leaning against his car, smoking a cigarette. Immediately I become apprehensive, but then I get an inspiration.
“Excuse me,” I call out.
“Yes, sir?”
Perfect, a cop with good manners. “Do you know where the morgue is? I’m picking up a body for the state crime lab.”
He points to a set of doors. “I think it’s through the entrance and to the right. I don’t work this place often. I’m just waiting for my partner to check on a witness.”
“Well, if you have a second, could you help me out? I got to load the thing. I could use someone to hold open the doors. My partner’s wife went into labor in Bozeman, and he had to head there.”
“Sure thing,” he says, dropping the cigarette. “As long as I don’t have to touch anything.”
“Thanks, Officer . . . Patel,” I reply, after seeing his name tag. “I’m Bill Doff.” I give him the name of my high school algebra teacher.
“Nick,” he says, shaking my hand.
As we walk inside, I make sure the small talk isn’t professional and call attention to an attractive nurse who passes us in the hallway.
“It’s why I like hanging out here,” says Nick.
When we get to the front desk, we’re greeted by the same friendly voice I spoke to on the phone.
“Hello, we’re here to pick up Christopher Dunleavy. I believe somebody called?”
“Oh, you’re from the state lab?” She gives Nick a smile, implying that he might be a more frequent visitor than he let on.
“Yes.”
She slides over a form on a clipboard. “Just fill this out.”
I bluff my way through the boxes and put Mead’s name in the field for requesting official.
She looks it over and nods. “I’ll just need a transfer form.”
A what? I was afraid there would be some kind of paperwork I didn’t know about.
“Right.” I hesitate. “Mead didn’t send me over with one.”
I’m about to ask to see what one looks like so I can try to forge it at a FedEx office, but the clerk relents. Probably because I have a police officer standing next to me—which clearly means I’m an official person doing official things.
“That’s okay, just fax it over ASAP. I’ll have an orderly load the body on a gurney and bring it out back in ten minutes.”
“Wonderful.”
Fifteen minutes later I’m driving away with a stolen corpse. I make one more stop at a medical supplier to get whatever I can legally obtain, then steal the rest from a parked ambulance using my secret door-opening trick.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
FATALITY
Christopher Dunleavy’s dead eyes stare out at me from behind the wheel of my Explorer. There’s a little more color in his skin. There should be—I pumped two pints of my blood into his body. I was already running low from my previous accident and not sure if I should have spared even that much.
But to make the thing work, it’s absolutely critical that the medical examiner who shows up on the scene to pronounce the body dead doesn’t see immediate signs of lividity. To minimize those, I put heparin, a blood thinner, in my donor blood and used a syringe to inject the liquid into his body, then massaged the surrounding area.
As I did this, I kept the heater running at full blast and put pocket warmers around his neck and under his armpits, so when they check for a temperature he’ll seem recently dead, instead of freshly sprung from a hospital freezer.
It’s a sloppy job, and I know it. If I can confuse the initial examination, I’ll be fine until Mead or whoever cuts open poor Christopher and sees all my shoddy craftsmanship.
To fit him into the driver’s seat, I had to loosen up his limbs, which had already stiffened from rigor mortis. A syringe filled with muriatic acid injected into the major muscle groups decalcified the filaments enough to make him fairly pliable.
The final result is a semi-stiff corpse sitting in my Explorer with his hands poised around Gus’s shotgun, ready to pull the trigger and blow off his face—which also proves easier said than done.
Besides the emotional difficulty of literally defacing another human being, I become aware of the practical problem. How could I pull the trigger and make it look like he did it? If the door was open and I stood there, it would leave a rather odd blood splatter with a missing section. The same if I sat in the passenger side.
I consider trying to wire up something through the brake pedal but settle on reaching a garbage bag–wrapped arm through the window and manually pulling the trigger.
I’m sure a competent forensic technician would notice something amiss, but again, I just need a few days, not an unsolved mystery that lasts for years.
I toyed with the idea of setting Christopher on fire as well. While that would certainly complicate a forensic examination, it might make Clark too suspicious. If news reports said the body was burned beyond recognition, I’m sure he’d suspect something is up.
I have to give him exactly what he asked for.
I toiled late last night trying to make Christopher look fresh and planting all the identifying pieces of evidence so it would seem pretty clear-cut who was in the car. I dressed him in my clothes and put my wallet in his pocket.
As I tied my shoes on his feet, I became aware of all the subtle things I was probably getting wrong—like doing the knot upside down. I did my best to fix all those details and spent an hour obsessing over everything, trying to make certain that it wouldn’t be immediately obvious.
In the end, I had to just settle and tell myself that it would be enough to convince first responders and make the news with enough information for Clark to draw the conclusion I want.