No Mercy. John Burley

was ringing. ‘Coroner’s Office,’ Tanya answered. ‘How can I help you?’

      Ben gathered the photos and returned them to the olive file marked simply ‘John Doe’. ‘Do you want to see the body?’ he offered.

      ‘Not really,’ Sam replied. ‘But they tell me it’s part of my job.’

      ‘I thought you had detectives to take care of this stuff.’

      ‘Oh, he’ll be by soon enough,’ Sam answered. ‘Carl Schroeder. Good man. Fifteen years on the force. He’s questioning the boy’s father right now. It’s his case.’

      ‘Okay. Then, if you don’t mind me asking, what are you doing here?’

      Sam stood up slowly. He was such a pleasant man that you forgot how physically intimidating his size could be until he was standing directly in front of you. ‘I’m the chief,’ he said. ‘I have an overriding responsibility to protect the citizens of this county that goes well beyond any single investigation. What happened yesterday …’ He seemed to mull it over in his mind, searching for the right sentiment. ‘What happened yesterday offends me, Ben – and I aim to take a special interest.’

      At that moment, Ben was very glad to be on the right side of the law. ‘I see.’ He nodded seriously, then gestured toward the open door and the autopsy room just beyond. ‘Well, … this way, Chief.’

      The two men filed out of the tiny office and made their way toward a lonely shape lying patiently on a steel table in the next room.

       Chapter 9

      Eleven a.m., Coroner’s Office. Ben sat in his small office and waited. Chief Garston had received a call from Detective Schroeder that he was on his way to the CO with the boy’s father. That had been ten minutes ago. It was not a long drive.

      Sam had gone out to stand on the front steps of the building. Reporters had been gathering since 9:30 a.m., and they were expecting a statement from the chief regarding the results of the autopsy and the early progress of the investigation. Sam hoped his appearance would draw their attention while Detective Schroeder ushered Mr Tanner into the CO through the back door. It wasn’t a flawless plan, but it was the best one they had.

      Ben could hear Tanya fielding calls at the front desk. The phone had not stopped ringing since Ben’s arrival, and he simply wished it would stop. Then again, he considered, the silence might be worse. He sat at his desk and tried to focus on something – anything – except for the covered figure in the next room.

      Sam Garston, he considered, was an interesting man. His formidable physical characteristics and dogged devotion to his job suggested a no-nonsense approach to life. It was undoubtedly one of the reasons for his continued success throughout the course of his career. But there was also a different side to him, one that Ben had come to witness on at least one occasion previously.

      Two years ago Ben had had the unfortunate responsibility of performing an autopsy on a four-month-old infant from Pleasant Hill. The child had come from a nice, hardworking middle-class family from a suburban neighborhood just north of Steubenville. The father wrote for the sports section of the local newspaper, and the mother took care of their daughter during the day while simultaneously managing to run a small online resale business from their home. One Friday evening they’d hired a babysitter so they could catch a movie at the local cineplex and dinner at a popular Italian restaurant afterward. When they’d come home that evening, the babysitter was watching television in the family room and the child was asleep in the upstairs bedroom. They’d popped in to check on her, paid the sitter, and the father had driven the teenager home. When he returned, he’d found his wife waiting patiently for him in their bed, naked under the covers. They had made love, and had fallen to sleep amid a discussion about their plans for the upcoming weekend. All of this had been documented in their statement to investigators the following day. When they went into the little girl’s room the following morning, the child was dead.

      On the surface, it sounded like a case of SIDS – sudden infant death syndrome, a term used to describe an unexplained infant death (what used to be called a ‘crib death’) during the first year of life. The autopsy, however, had identified retinal hemorrhages – small areas of bleeding in the back of the eyes. The postmortem had also discovered multiple subdural hematomas, a type of brain injury commonly seen with shaken baby syndrome. Ben had contacted the investigating detective with these preliminary findings, and both the parents and the babysitter had been brought to the police station for further questioning. Most of the focus had been on the teenager, who adamantly denied shaking the infant the night before. The child, she reported, had been sleeping when she arrived. An hour later, she’d gotten her up for a feed and to change her diaper. The infant slept through most of it, showing little interest in the bottle. The detectives interrogated the girl for several hours at the station. They had reasoned and bargained with her. They’d lied to her about factitious evidence proving the case against her, eventually scaring her into tears. Throughout everything, however, she had stuck to her story.

      Sam had stopped by Ben’s house that night with the investigating detectives. The girl’s story was convincingly consistent, they informed him. She was either innocent or an exceptionally good liar – which left one or both of the parents as the only remaining suspects. The detectives wanted to know how hard they should press the parents, and whether the evidence from the autopsy suggested one more than the other as a likely culprit. The mother and father were already traumatized, Sam noted, and they didn’t want to go after them unnecessarily. It was a fragile situation.

      Of the two detectives accompanying Sam that evening, one of them – a small, wiry man named Harvey Nickelback – had not exactly been in agreement with the cautious approach Sam had asked them to take.

      ‘I don’t see why we have to pussyfoot around this,’ he’d objected vociferously, tracing the outline of his thin mustache between his right thumb and index finger. ‘This kid had retinal hemorrhages and a head full of blood. That’s pretty convincing evidence for child abuse, as far as I’m concerned.’

      ‘That’s why the case is under investigation,’ Sam had replied. ‘If this death was due to shaken baby syndrome, then whoever did it will go to prison.’

      ‘All right, then,’ Nickelback agreed ardently.

      ‘But we have to be careful,’ Sam continued. ‘I don’t want to go after these parents with everything we’ve got until we’re fairly certain that we’re going after the right people. Keep in mind that they’ve just lost their only child. They’re in a world of pain right now.’

      ‘Or guilt,’ the detective countered.

      ‘Probably both. But we only have one chance to do this right.’

      That was the thing that had impressed Ben the most about Sam: the delicacy with which he had handled the situation. He’d never mentioned it, but Ben thought that perhaps Sam had had an instinct about the case – somehow sensing that things didn’t quite fit together in the way that they should, although he probably would’ve been hard-pressed to explain why. In the face of nearly overwhelming evidence, he had asked the detectives to wait, to suspend their judgment a bit longer. In the end, it had been the right thing to do. The forensic chemist’s report that had landed on Ben’s desk the following week had identified high levels of glutaric acid in the infant’s organs, particularly in the brain and muscles. The abnormal levels raised suspicion for the possibility of a rare metabolic disorder, glutaric acidemia type 1, in which the body has difficulty breaking down various amino acids. The accumulation of the metabolic by-products, the report went on to explain, often results in multiple clinical manifestations, including mental retardation, alterations in muscle strength and tone, and hemorrhages in the brain and eyes that can be mistaken for child abuse. That explained the retinal hemorrhages and subdural hematomas Ben had discovered on autopsy. The forensic chemist’s findings had changed everything, for it became clear that the infant had not been the victim