Too Much Blood Read online

  Also by Jane Bennett Munro

  Murder under the Microscope

  Published by iUniverse, Inc.

  Jane Bennett Munro

  author of Murder under the Microscope

  a 2012 IPPY Award winner

  Too Much

  Blood

  A Toni Day Mystery

  iUniverse, Inc.

  Bloomington

  Too Much Blood

  A Toni Day Mystery

  Copyright © 2012 Jane Bennett Munro

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

  iUniverse

  1663 Liberty Drive

  Bloomington, IN 47403

  www.iuniverse.com

  1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

  Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

  Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

  ISBN: 978-1-4759-2918-8 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-4759-2919-5 (e)

  iUniverse rev. date: 7/11/2012

  Contents

  Introduction

  Friday, December 12

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Saturday, December 13

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Sunday, December 14

  Chapter 10

  Monday, December 15

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Tuesday, December 16

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Wednesday, December 17

  Chapter 16

  Thursday, December 18

  Chapter 17

  Friday, December 19

  Chapter 18

  Saturday, December 20

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Sunday, December 21

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Monday, December 22

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Tuesday, December 23

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Wednesday, December 24

  Chapter 31

  Thursday, December 25

  Chapter 32

  Friday, December 26

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Saturday, December 27

  Chapter 35

  Sunday, December 28

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  For my Poo sisters: Rhonda, Teala, and Lita, with love

  Introduction

  The inspiration for this novel, as with the previous one, comes from thirty-plus years as a pathologist in a small rural town. This is a work of fiction: all the characters in it are figments of my imagination, and any resemblance to any real persons is coincidental.

  Some of the places in it are real; however, Perrine Memorial Hospital, Southern Idaho Community College, and the Intermountain Cancer Center are completely fictitious, as are all the characters. The Twin Falls Bank and Trust building is real, but the bank itself no longer exists.

  My heartfelt thanks goes to my dear friend, Dr. Semih Erhan, who would not let me give up. Without his incessant encouragement, my first novel would never have seen the light of day.

  Thanks are in order for many other people as well:

  To Janet Reid of FinePrint Literary Management, whose advice has been invaluable. She read several versions of my first novel, and although she ultimately rejected it, without her input Toni Day wouldn’t be the kick-ass character she is.

  To Dennis Chambers, formerly of the Twin Falls Police, currently County Coroner, for information on police procedure and introducing me to the police lab; I’m still using the book he gave me twenty years ago.

  To my good friend Marilyn Paul, Twin Falls County Public Defender, for getting me into the courtroom and giving me essential information on courtroom procedure.

  To my BFF, Rhonda Wong, who read the first draft and pointed out all my egregious errors.

  Finally, to all those people at iUniverse, without whom this book would not exist: Jamie Mitchell, the check-in coordinator who got me started; George Nedeff, editorial consultant and my go-to guy for questions; Christine Moore, my editor from whom I learned so much; Shawn Waggener, publishing services associate, who guided me through the actual publication process; Daisy Morgan, who provided me with books for book signings; Dayne Newquist, senior marketing consultant, who advised me on ways to market my book; and Kelly Ferguson, senior marketing services representative, who hooked me up with my publicist, Jessica Kiefer at Bohlsen PR, who has done a terrific job at getting the word out; and Brittani Hensel, who guided this clueless senior citizen through the bewildering maze of Facebook and Twitter, et al., and taught me how to blog effectively.

  Any anachronisms, medical misstatements, or other errors are entirely mine.

  Friday, December 12

  Chapter 1

  There’s a sucker born every minute.

  —Phineas T. Barnum

  The phone rang.

  Normally this would be no big deal. But I’m a pathologist, and it was one o’clock in the morning. And I was on call.

  For a moment, I felt completely disoriented. My husband, Hal, picked up the phone. I tensed. Phone calls in the wee hours are never anything good.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” he snapped and handed the phone to me.

  Shit. Couldn’t it be a wrong number, just this once?

  “Hello?” I croaked. My voice wasn’t awake yet either.

  I heard the deep voice of Roland Perkins, local funeral home owner and county coroner, and my heart sank. This could only mean one thing.

  “Hello there, Dr. Day.”

  I’ve known Rollie for thirteen years and have done numerous autopsies in his establishment, Parkside Funeral Home; yet he still insists on calling me either “Doctor” or “young lady” when he knows I prefer to be called Toni.

  “For God’s sake, Rollie, you’re calling at one in the morning. Couldn’t you call me Toni just this once? What’s up—as if I didn’t know?”

  “Well, I don’t know how you would know,” he said. “We just found him an hour ago.”

  “Found who?”

  “T
he estimable Jay Braithwaite Burke, Esquire, sitting in his car in the middle of the interstate, without a mark on him. He was even wearing a seat belt.”

  “Dead?” I realized as soon as I said it what a stupid question that was. Of course he was dead, or Rollie wouldn’t be calling.

  “Of course he’s dead,” said Rollie. “That’s why I’m calling. I need an autopsy. When do you think you can do it, Doctor?”

  “Since you saw fit to wake me at this ungodly hour, do I assume you want me to jump right out of bed and do it now?” I knew the answer to that, but I figured it wouldn’t do any harm to let Rollie know that he really didn’t need to call me in the middle of the night for an autopsy, again. Still, I knew it wouldn’t make any difference this time when it hadn’t for the last thirteen years.

  Sure, I knew he had to schedule services around it, but did he really think I was going to go downstairs, get my purse, and haul out the damn Day-Timer to see if I could squeeze it into my busy schedule and give him a definite time? Hell no. I was going to just go right back to sleep and deal with it tomorrow, same as he was.

  “No, no, it doesn’t have to be done now. I just need to know because we have services tomorrow, and I need to work around them.”

  “I’ll have to let you know. Until I get to work, I won’t know myself what kind of a day I’ll have.”

  That’s the usual, pointless kind of conversation we have in the wee hours of the morning, where no decisions are made and people lose sleep for nothing. Actually, Hal and I lose sleep for nothing. After all, the cops who found the body were awake, and Rollie was awake, so why shouldn’t the pathologist also be awake? And why should Rollie care that my husband was awake when his wife was too?

  We said our good-byes and hung up. I looked at Hal. I knew exactly what he was about to say, because he always said it. He might as well have a sticker made up, to plaster across his forehead for these occasions.

  “Why the hell do those guys think they have to call you in the middle of the night for an autopsy you’re not going to do until the next day? The guy’s dead, for God’s sake! Now I’m not going to be able to get back to sleep for hours!”

  Join the club, I thought. I knew he’d be snoring again long before I got back to sleep. He always was, damn him. His anger had every bit as much to do with keeping me awake as the phone call did—maybe more—and I wished he would just keep it to himself and shut the fuck up about it. It wasn’t going to change anything except the speed of my getting back to sleep any time soon.

  And the more I thought about that, the madder I got.

  The name Jay Braithwaite Burke calls to mind (to my mind, anyway) a portly, red-faced, sixtyish individual with a mane of silver hair and a vest with a pocket watch and chain adorned with a Phi Beta Kappa key. He would have a sonorous voice with a Southern accent, and as he spoke, he would hook his thumbs in his vest pockets, stick his belly out, and rock back on his heels.

  That pretty much described the grandfather, now deceased, of the Jay Braithwaite Burke that we knew.

  Our Jay—a small, beige man of about forty, with a slouch and a caved-in chest, thick spectacles that made his pale blue eyes look huge, and sparse, wispy, colorless hair—had a large hooked nose that dominated his otherwise unremarkable face and actually looked out of place there. The Nose was one of two things that Jay had inherited from his grandfather that, along with his concave chest, made him look rather like a buzzard in profile.

  The other thing Jay inherited from his grandfather was The Voice. Plummy and rich, it vibrated with evangelical zeal when addressing his favorite subject, money, and his favorite audience, clueless doctors with lots of it to invest.

  Our Jay had quite a long history with the doctors of Perrine Memorial Hospital, where I worked. He had managed to talk nearly the entire medical staff into giving up their nice, safe profit-sharing plans to invest in a hedge fund guaranteed to earn at least ten percent per year. Jay’s magical hedge fund, elegantly named Sentinel Elite Advantage, had been one of the numerous feeder funds for a much larger and more elegantly named fund, Fairfield Greenwich Sentry, which had investors all over the United States and Europe, and allegedly included English and French royalty as well as the Russian Mafia and some South American drug cartels. It had turned out to be a Ponzi scheme, and all his investors had lost their shirts. They also wound up owing years of back taxes, interest, and penalties to the IRS.

  A physician in California, who ended up owing the IRS nearly a million dollars, promptly sued Jay Braithwaite Burke. Jay Braithwaite Burke promptly declared bankruptcy and left Idaho. He didn’t take his family with him. They were still here, dealing with the fallout.

  He also left us with unanswerable questions. Was he really bankrupt? Did he vanish to escape taxes and liability from lawsuits or a prison sentence, or to escape the wrath of the drug lords and Russian Mafiosi, who take a dim view of anyone messing about in their investments?

  Or all three?

  And why had he left his wife and family hanging out to dry?

  And where did he go?

  Nobody knew.

  Not until he showed up two months later, sitting in his cream-colored Mercedes in the middle of the median on I-84 on that snowy December night.

  I got up early and went to my aerobics class to work off some of my wrath. Hal was still in bed when I got back. I’d just walked in the door and started the obligatory pet-greeting rites with our dogs—Killer, the hundred-pound German shepherd, and Geraldine, the ten-pound terrier mix with the coloring and disposition of a tiny Rottweiler—when the phone rang. I raced them across the room to catch it before it woke Hal, but I was too late. I heard his voice as I picked up the receiver.

  “For God’s sake, Elliott, do you realize what time it is?”

  “Yes, I do, Shapiro. But I don’t want to talk to you. I need to talk to your wife, the pathologist.”

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Do you know one esteemed attorney, name of Jay Braithwaite Burke, Esquire?”

  “I know he’s dead,” I said as I handed out Milk Bones. “Rollie wasted no time in letting me know he needed an autopsy.”

  “Yeah, he called at one o’clock in the morning,” Hal said. “I just got back to sleep.”

  Big fat lie, I thought.

  “What I’m saying is, did you know him when he was alive?” Elliott asked. “Do you realize who Jay Braithwaite Burke is?”

  Well, of course we did. Our favorite person, he wasn’t.

  Even though I’d been the only member of the medical staff not to get roped into Jay Braithwaite Burke’s investment scheme, the effects on the rest of the medical staff had had an adverse effect on the fortunes of a private, doctor-owned hospital like Perrine Memorial. This in turn had had an adverse effect on Hal’s and my bottom line, even when the economy was good.

  And the economy was sucking right now.

  There would be no shortage of persons who might have wished Jay Braithwaite Burke dead.

  Including Hal and me.

  Chapter 2

  We are not amused.

  —Queen Victoria

  “Of course I know who he is,” I told Elliott. “Why are you calling me about him before breakfast?”

  “Because you’re doing the autopsy today,” Elliott said. “A lot of people stood to gain by his death, and they’re going to be royally pissed off about it if this turns out to be a freakin’ homicide. Everything’ll be held up until it’s solved. So the sooner you know what killed him and the sooner you tell me, the better.”

  “Gain what?” I asked. “I thought he was bankrupt. Are you telling me he wasn’t?”

  “Supposedly he was, but his will mentions several sources of money, some of them offshore. Bankruptcy wouldn’t affect those funds. Neither would a lawsuit.”

  “Wouldn’t his wif
e know about those?”

  “I have no idea,” Elliott said. “He was in the middle of a divorce and was having an affair with his secretary.”

  “And I suppose those offshore accounts won’t be part of the divorce either?”

  “Right.”

  “So who inherits what?”

  “Maybe nobody,” Elliott said. “You and I both know that if there’s anything left in all those offshore accounts, the IRS will probably grab it all.”

  Too true, I thought. The IRS was pretty damn grabby, in my personal opinion, but that’s another story altogether. “But can the IRS tax an offshore account? I thought that was the whole point of having it offshore.”

  “It is,” Elliott said. “But the minute his wife tries to bring any of it into the country, it instantly becomes taxable. She puts it into a domestic bank account, and the IRS can attach it and empty it out until they have all that’s owed to them.”

  Well, that just gave me the heebies and the jeebies. “So what are the terms of his will?”

  “I can’t divulge that. Confidentiality.”

  “The police are going to have to know,” I objected. “So they’ll know who to suspect.”

  “Then they can get a freakin’ subpoena, just like everybody else.”

  The instant I hung up, the phone rang again.

  “Toni? Bernie Kincaid. How are you today?”

  Speak of the devil and he calls you on the phone. Bernie Kincaid was a detective lieutenant with the Twin Falls Police Department.

  “Hi, Bernie. I’m just fine. May I assume you’re not calling just to say hello?”

  “Always the smartass, aren’t you? You may assume that. You want to try for Double Jeopardy?”

  “Okay. Jay Braithwaite Burke.”

  “Bingo. When are you doing the autopsy? Pete and I would like to be there.”