The Coroner by Hank Grezlak

A coroner joins a group of cops who have been led by an unrepentant murderer to the site of his victim, and decides to stand up to the town's corrupt sheriff.

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When the snow had melted, they found him.

By the second week in March the weather had grown unseasonably warm and the snow and ice had flowed down from the mountains and drained into pits in the valley, exposing the ravaged grave to the searchers. The man had been missing four months and his remains were found on the slope of a mountain just five miles outside the town where he had lived all his life. From the head of the grave a person could watch the new Wal-Mart's parking lot as it filled up.

It was a warm Sunday morning when they found him. What was left of him - what the bullets, fire and coyotes hadn't already taken as their own - they found between two aging pine trees on an incline a few hundred feet above the mountain's base. The earth was tan where the killer's spade hadn't struck and the grass was tall and brittle, still bent from the weight of the winter's snow. A breeze was blowing fiercely across the face of the mountain. The grass rose up like a porcupine's quills every time the wind howled. The sky above the valley was gun-metal gray and a few dark clouds were stretched out behind the mountains. Against the blackened sky, the white-capped peaks looked lost and frightened.

The searchers paid no attention to the dead man. They stood away from the grave in a semi-circle. Some tilted their heads back to drink water from their squeeze bottles while the inconsistent sun shone on their faces.

"There isn't much left," one of them remarked.

"The guy was short," another said.

"But you could fit him in a grocery sack."

"Well, he was very short."

"My dog would kill for bones like that."

"Why? There isn't any meat on them."

The searchers laughed. They kicked at the ground and gazed at the sky. Someone suggested going out for beers when it was all over. They started talking about spring. The hot sun reflecting off the old mines and baking the town. Wading thigh-high in the deep blue river fly-fishing for trout. They stared north of town, over the pass, to where the river was, where they wanted to be. Like the winter, the dead man was something they would endure.

The sheriff had told the rescue team Saturday night that a person had confessed to the murder and that they would be needed to help recover the body the following day. The searchers went to the Safeway store that night to pack their lunches. Like scouts before a camping trip, they wanted to tell everyone in the store about the confession and hinted at big news. They strutted the aisles like heroes about to embark on a mission. The checkout girls stared at them in bleach-eyed awe.

That had all been forgotten once the bones had come into view. The man had been shot several times and set on fire and buried and then dug up and devoured by coyotes. When they saw what was left of him they gasped and muttered obscenities. If the ghost of the dead man had looked up from his haunting ground he would have seen a row of navy blue jackets rippling in the wind. Grown men frightened before they had even felt his icy touch. But his spirit's purpose, like his life, was lost. The searchers felt no pity. Or sorrow. There was no talk of revenge.

I've been neglected like that all my life, the coroner thought. Only he and the detective captain looked upon the victim with anything more than a passing glance. The coroner stepped toward the grave. He removed an old Polaroid camera from his bag and began taking pictures.

The remains were scattered around the shallow grave. The dirt was very dark from the fire and there were deep grooves where the coyotes had dragged the body from its hiding place.

The front part of the skull, minus the lower jaw, lay off to the side. Resting in the sunken middle of the grave was the lower part of the spine and the pelvic area, stripped of its flesh and burnt misty black. A thigh bone, immaculately white and covered with gnaw marks, was still attached to the pelvic girdle. The coroner found a foot wrapped snugly in a designer hiking boot by one of the pine trees.

"Grizzlies must have gotten hungry," the captain said.

"Coyotes," the coroner corrected.

"Didn't know they could do that."

Well, thought the coroner, not everyone could be a genuine cowboy.

"Sure," he said. "Coyotes are mean. They would have no problem tearing a man apart."

"Any way the kid could have chopped him up?"

"Nope," the coroner said. "You look at that thigh and you can see the gnaw marks."

"I'm just trying to figure this out," the captain said, his hands raised up like a prophet.

The coroner shook his head. Rumors spread too easily through the town and stayed far too long. Twenty years as a cop had taught him that. Whole days of police work could be wasted telling people no. But the people in town, like most Montanans, were a suspicious lot who had been taught since birth to distrust authority. Especially when it came to denials. The rumors never went away, they never died. Instead they were preserved and passed along in the bars like an alternative truth.

There had been more than a few rumors about the missing man, now the dead man, the stack of bones. One had it that he was a con man and had disappeared before the IRS could close in. Another had it that a jealous husband had murdered him. Neither were true.

"This going to need an autopsy?" the captain asked.

"There's nothing to examine," the coroner replied.

"Dental records?"

"Maybe dental records."

"The sheriff hates uncertainty," the captain said.

"The hell with him," the coroner said. "Who else could it be?"

"I know it's him," said the captain. "Problem is, the sheriff wants to be sure it's him."

"Of course he does."

The coroner grumbled under his breath. Everyone had been ordered by the sheriff to keep quiet. The sheriff said that he would issue a press release that night.

"Sunday's a bad day to hold a press conference," the coroner said, smiling.

"Sure, even when you have a confession."

"It would be terrible to hold a press conference and have no one show up."

"What are you going to do with him?" the captain asked.

"Mail him to the crime lab in Missoula, I suppose. Cheaper than driving him there myself."

"Won't it cause a stink?"

"The postal workers will never know," the coroner said.

"Mailed like a box of cookies. That's goddamn harsh."

"He won't mind."

"You miss being a cop?" the captain asked.

The coroner shook his head.

"The constant threat of violence doesn't suit me at this age," he said.

"What's this, thirty?"

"Three months in office and I've already had thirty-five cases."

"That many?"

"Every unattended death."

"Why the hell do they call it an unattended death? Really, who attends a death?"

"The kid back there," the coroner said.

They both turned and looked back at the dead man's son. He stood next to a police officer, wearing a baseball cap over his long hair, chewing gum. His glasses were cloudy from the sweat of the hike. The brown tint of his glasses obscured his eyes. The coroner could not tell what color they were. The officer standing next to the boy watched him intently, the palm of his right hand resting on the butt of his revolver.

The boy had confessed Saturday and had spent the rest of the night in the police station under the watchful eye of a county jailer. Earlier in the week he had run off to Oregon to hide out at his grandmother's. It was the second time since his father had been reported missing that the boy had disappeared. The coroner thought the kid looked normal enough, although he tended to hang in the air rather than stand, like a professional drunk. Nothing gave a hint that he was a killer. He didn't stare on with wide, glassy eyes that glowed with cold-hard fury. His skin was neither pale nor dark; it was colored light tan like the old mine dust that was caked on the houses, collected in the grooves where the bricks met. Neither menace nor heavy guilt emanated from him. Only his downward gaze suggested shame and it was insignificant, as if he had led them to a broken window.

"Are you going to take photos?" the coroner asked. "Better hurry. It might rain."

The captain waved the other detectives over and they came flocking like hungry birds caught swooping out of the wintry sky looking for scraps. They wore surgical gloves and held their hands away from their sides as if hoping to take flight, but they only tottered along the bumpy ground almost falling into the grave with their clipped wings. Shutters clicked and low-level flashes hummed. The plastic bags they used to collect the evidence in fluttered and flapped in the breeze.

The cop watching the kid was fidgeting. He wrinkled his nose as if he smelled something bad. But in the absence of flesh, there was no stench, only the cool scent of pine. The coroner walked over to them. He looked at the town. Beneath the wind's temperamental whine, he could hear the gossiping going on in the crowded check-out lines.

"How're you feeling?" he asked the kid, ignoring the cop.

"Okay."

"That's it?"

The kid looked at him, tugged at the bill of his cap.

"He's been dead four months," he said. "It's not like it's a shock."

"I thought maybe you would cry."

"So did I. I really did."

"Any regrets?"

"One of the search and rescue guys said they wouldn't have found him if I hadn't confessed."

"Those guys don't know much," the coroner said. "Trust me, I've known them my whole life."

"He's dead because of a shirt."

"Say again?"

"A shirt. An old shirt. That's why he's dead."

"Did you tell the captain that?"

The boy looked at him, astonished.

"Last night I told everybody everything. Then I ate pizza and watched some movies."

"What movies?"

"Lethal Weapon 1 & 2 and Die Hard."

"Better than what I watched: Walker, Texas Ranger."

"Yeah, they're cool movies."

"So what happened with the shirt?" the coroner asked.

"He made me iron, even though he knew I wasn't good at it. I was just about done with all his shirts when I burned a big hole in one. He flipped."

The coroner had never liked the dead man. He'd been one of those people who loved to brag about his money, his possessions. This in a town where if you had more than a grand in the bank you were considered well off. The dead man was the kind of guy who would shove his hand in your face, talk faster than you can think and then walk off, drink in hand, and take someone else by the shoulders, all the while wearing a smile too big for his face. The coroner did not miss him. He only mourned his chance to examine the man in a more pristine state.

That was what the coroner enjoyed about his job: finding the truth. The autopsy, with its toxicology reports and tissue samples, unmasked a person's secrets and put death under a microscope. An autopsy was the true burial, the final resting place. Funerals were artificial and for the benefit of the living. Once the morticians were through with a corpse it was less than dead. An autopsy was not subject to silly beliefs or polite summations. It was the dead, alone, unclothed, left to the gently prying eyes and sharp touch of the coroner. And there, in the cold, dark back rooms of mortuaries, surrounded by stainless steel and the hum of refrigerators, the coroner could seize the truth from the dead. Autopsies revealed all: the addictions and abuses, the shortcomings and fetishes, the oncoming rush of disease. Once it was over, and only then, did the coroner feel that he really knew someone. Only when the lies had been silenced and the body slit open could a person be fairly judged.

While the knowledge he gained often gave him a sense of power, the coroner guarded his secrets. The coroner had no interest in injuring anyone's name. Even the bad ones should be allowed to rest. Once the gentle touch of breath and the pounding thump of their hearts fell dead, all they were left was a name as a last remnant of dignity.

The kid stuck his fat purple tongue out to taste a raindrop. The clouds had rolled in bunched together and thick with darkness. The sun had disappeared, as had the small shadows and the mountain peaks no longer radiated and the side of the mountain was overtaken by gray. The coroner knew it would be the last time the kid ever got to taste rain. He would be convicted and sent to Deer Lodge Prison and he would not stick his tongue out at the sky in prison. His body, still clumsy and growing, would either harden into readiness or succumb to submissive fear once inside the prison walls. He was a rich man's son. They would prey upon him there. They would take whatever sense of his self had not already been lost and destroy it.

"Did he hit you?" he asked the kid.

The kid shook his head. "He was a pusher," the kid said.

"A pusher?"

"He liked to shove. He couldn't punch for shit."

"So he was pushing you around that night."

"He didn't push me. He didn't have time to push."

"It would have looked better if he'd had."

"I always knew I was going to kill him," the kid explained, popping a wad of gum into his mouth.

"He never hit you?"

"Naw," the kid said. "Pushing. He liked to push."

The cop standing next to the kid rolled his eyes. He called out to one of the searchers and walked away.

"Why the gun?" the coroner asked. "Why not beat him silly?"

"The gun was laying there. He was always waving it around."

"But nine times? Even six shots I can understand. But nine?"

"What difference does it make? He was dead pretty quick."

They stood there in silence, as outsiders, and watched the burly detectives as they catalogued the evidence. All of them had broad chests that stretched their police jackets and they possessed enormous arms they flexed periodically. They moved around the grave a collective, clumsy mess. Flexing, falling.

"Those guys would never have caught me," the kid said.

"Maybe not," the coroner said.

"The hell with it. I killed him, I've been caught. Everything's in order."

"You don't worry?"

"Kiddy prison isn't that bad."

"The sheriff's going to charge you as an adult."

The kid looked at him. His face grew pale in the gray light. The air smelled salty, of an impending storm. The kid stuck out his arm and pointed at the grave.

"The sheriff promised that if I confessed I would be tried as a juvenile."

"Prosecuting dad-killers gets votes."

"Hell, he just won an election."

"You didn't have a lawyer last night?"

"I wasn't out to duck the truth, for Christ's sake."

"Get yourself a lawyer. Especially if you don't want to wind up in Deer Lodge."

The activity around the grave stopped. The bones were tagged and placed in plastic and then put in a heavy cardboard box. The detectives slunk away from the sight like a wave rolling off a dune back into the ocean's embrace. They ripped off their rubber gloves. The gloves came off with the sound of a whack, all shriveled, and the detectives dropped them carelessly to the ground. The wind came along and blew them across the face of the mountain, lofting them up into the air. They became entangled in the thick branches of the pine trees like ghastly ornaments.

"You want to take a final look?" the coroner asked.

"I don't feel anything," the kid replied.

"Last chance."

"I'm not going to start crying or anything," the kid said.

"Next time you see this stuff, it'll be in the courtroom."

"Do the others cry?"

"What others?"

"Killers."

The coroner had to think about it for a moment.

"They usually have these blank stares. Until they're sentenced. Then they tend to cry or yell."

He supposed that he would have to buy a suit for the kid's trial.

"For what it's worth, crying early on might help you with a jury and the judge."

---

The coroner sat in his living room that evening watching a college basketball game. It wasn't quite sundown and the room was getting very dark. He sat alone in his home on the couch and drank beer with the curtains drawn. The search and rescue guys had invited him out to a bar, but he had declined. Despite being divorced, he preferred to stay in most evenings.

The phone rang. It was the sheriff.

"Did anyone call you?" the sheriff asked.

"No one."

"Remember, keep quiet."

"Have I said anything?"

"You've been working a lot lately," the sheriff said. "It'd be nice if the council approved your pay raise."

"I haven't gotten any calls."

"I don't want those vultures to know a thing until we've got him in court."

He hung up.

The coroner opened another beer and wondered how the kid was faring. They couldn't put him in jail because of new federal regulations that prohibited incarcerating juveniles in the same facility as adults, and the state's juvenile prison was four hours away. That left him in a small, spare, brightly lit office at the police station with only a small sofa to sleep on. He would have to sleep with the lights on and a jailer sitting five feet away from him.

When he was finished with his beer, he found himself staring at the television without really taking in what was going on. The game was over. Something ate at him. He picked up the phone and called the police reporter for the local paper, a young kid who had played football at Montana State. They had talked a lot when the coroner had been on the force.

"Hello?" the reporter answered.

"You know who this is?" the coroner asked.

"Sure."

"I didn't call you."

"Say again?"

"Listen, I've got some great stuff, but I didn't call you, okay?"

"Got it."

The coroner told him everything he knew.

The next morning the coroner arrived at the county courthouse twenty minutes before the hearing was to begin. The kid had a defense lawyer now, and he was going to argue the confession was inadmissible. The foyer was filled with people milling about, talking, sipping coffee and walking out to the front steps to share a smoke. The story was plastered on the front page of the newspaper and everyone was talking about it. The TV people grumbled about news leaks, pissed and moaned about the sheriff.

At the hearing, the kid's lawyer petitioned the judge to have the case heard outside of town. The media coverage was already too intense, he argued, and the town too small to allow for a fair trial. The judge granted the motion. A few people gasped. It sounded like air leaking out of a punctured tire. Cameras clicked and tongues started wagging. The coroner looked for the sheriff and he found him glowering at him from across the courtroom.

The courtroom emptied. People sunk below the line of his vision and dribbled out the double doors, leaving only the sheriff. The coroner did not look away. The sheriff came toward the coroner.

---

The coroner had known the sheriff all his life; he'd gone to Vietnam with the coroner's brother. The sheriff had returned. His brother came back in a body bag. The only thing that survived was a diary detailing the choked existence of a boonierat. The sheriff never saw combat; he'd been an MP in Saigon. When the sheriff returned to town, they had gone off to a bar together to get drunk. The coroner was looking for answers to all the troubling questions his older brother's diary had raised.

The sheriff told him all about Saigon's dark side. Burning pictures of generals with little boys. Covering up for CIA operatives who shot heroin and tortured teenage whores who had been sold like witless steer.

The stories of pain and suffering rolled off the sheriff's tongue that afternoon like crisp dollar bills tossed on the counter to pay for the tab. The sheriff never once lost his grin. Despite the images of blood and the faint echo of screams hot-rodding down the dark tunnel of the alleys, the coroner never heard regret in the sheriff's voice. Through his words, the coroner saw the city at night: steam rising up between the rows of crumbling buildings, spinning and twirling, thick as spider webs. Men and women, American and Vietnamese, all lost in the haze chasing illusions into the dark. And the sheriff went on relentlessly as if he were reciting his glory days at a high school reunion.

It was on that dry afternoon in the bar that the coroner recognized the type of person that the sheriff had become, the type of man his brother had described in the diary as having thrived in the chaos of Vietnam; the twisted powder-kegged bullies who shot at everything in the jungle, who liked to beat anyone who crossed them until the blood fell freely from the end of their batons or the butts of their rifles onto the sweat-scented street.

While they sat in the bar the coroner tried to discuss his brother. He wanted to know if his brother had died for anything, if there was really a war to be won out in the thick tangles of the jungle. All he saw in his dreams was his brother coughing up blood and screaming at the darkness while the enemy watched hidden in the darkness and rain slapped at the thick canopy of trees overhead and snakes came crawling out from beneath the shiny, leathery leaves and built nests in his wounds while his half-dead body trembled and shook to the sound of the rain.

The coroner tried to explain it to the sheriff, but he was drunk and sounded foolish. The sheriff laughed at him and slapped him on the back.

---

The sheriff was staring at him now with the dead eyes of power. He was of medium height and had the heavy build of an old cop and his glasses were shaded the color of a storm. His manner was precise, military.

"You're going to lose your job," the sheriff said in his flat tone.

"What are you talking about?" the coroner replied.

"The leak. You were the leak. I told you before, cross me and I'll cut off your head."

"I'm not the one who turned the kid into a circus freak," the coroner said.

"You think you can go against me?"

The coroner shook his head.

"I've never been with you," he said. "When I left the police department and ran for county coroner, it was a big middle finger to you. Only you were too arrogant and stupid to realize it. But everyone else did."

"You'll pay for your insubordination."

"What are you going to do, punish me like Maria?"

Blood rushed to the ruptured veins in the sheriff's face. The coroner waited for a punch, but none came. Maybe it was her name, the way it called back to the days when the town had been a hellraiser's haven before its blood started running downhill from the retirement home to the hospital and then pooling out on the flat in the cemetery next to the airport. Her name stirred up all the old ghosts and sent them screaming down the courthouse's marble halls.

Maria had been a whore back in the days when the town's mines went day and night and there were always tired miners walking drunk through the streets looking for company. She'd worked out of the massage parlor. The massage parlor was gone, boarded up and covered with graffiti. Maria was gone too, having fled to her family's reservation in Arizona. She'd been one of the coroner's informants. On one occasion, and the last time he ever saw her, she held out on him in front of the sheriff. The sheriff shoved her back into her trailer home and sent her little boy out to sit with the coroner. He pushed her up against a sofa, one hand pressing the small of her back. Then he closed the door. Maria had screamed so loud the coroner winced. Maria's little boy looked back blankly at the trailer.

"Mom's working, huh?" he asked the coroner. He bounced a rubber ball off the concrete walk and lost it beneath the trailer.

When the sheriff emerged, he had his information. The coroner looked back and saw Maria sitting bare-assed on the floor, weeping uncontrollably. Her boy started crying. He ran to her and put his chubby arms around her neck and when she looked up she stared straight at the coroner. He had never seen eyes so scared, so haunted.

Men destroyed, the coroner came to believe that day. Whatever they built, they eventually tore down. Creation was not the result of a noble purpose or divine grace. It was simply an act of man imposing his will on nature that ultimately ended in the ruination of a land or a people.

The coroner couldn't make love to his wife after the incident. She tried arguing with him, insulting him. When he started sleeping out on the sofa, she accused him of having an affair. He said she was right. Then she left and they got divorced.

"Who cares about that whore?" the sheriff asked.

"If you don't," the coroner said, "then you don't have a soul."

"Who cares about that? Who cares about her?"

"I suspect voters might," the coroner said.

Despite the fear of reprisal, he walked out and went home.

---

Months later, after the trial was held in Bozeman and the kid was acquitted, the coroner got a call from the dispatcher late on a Thursday night. The kid was dead.

The coroner drove out to the flat, the long stretch of road leading away from the older uptown. Strip malls and small businesses and car dealerships. The kid had been killed near one of the car dealerships.

The coroner found the body of the kid laying in a pool of blood in the street's shadows just outside a streetlamp's circle of light. He wasn't wearing his glasses. His eyes were wide open. Their sheen was fading as the mountain air dried them out. The coroner looked for the kid's glasses. He couldn't find them.

"He pulled on us," a young officer said.

The coroner glared at him, but the officer acted as if he expected to be believed.

The kid had been shot several times, a few in the back. Some of the bullets had gone clean through. Others had hit bone, ripped out his chest. Bits of tattered flesh and splintered bone poked up through his T-shirt like tiny circus tents. The coroner could only shake his head.

The shift commander gave the coroner the story he figured he would hear: that the kid had been pulled over for suspicion of drunk driving and had pulled a gun - conveniently found next to his body - and then had tried to flee the scene.

"Bullshit," the coroner said. The shift commander walked away.

The sheriff arrived a few minutes later. He got out of his car wearing a smug smile. He walked over to the kid's body and looked down. The coroner took note that he didn't bother to ask any of the officers what had happened.

The sheriff bent at the hips and peered down more closely at the kid's corpse. After a minute he rose back up, apparently satisfied, sniffed the air and then exhaled. Then he walked over to the coroner.

"Well, it took a little longer than I might have hoped, but justice was served," he said.

"Is that what happened here?"

The sheriff sneered.

"What is your fucking problem?" he asked. "That asshole murdered his father and walked on it. He met his justice."

The coroner pointed to the body.

"That might have been an execution, but whatever it was, I don't know that a judge would call it justice."

The sheriff snarled. The coroner looked around. The cops were pretending the argument wasn't happening.

"You've always been soft, just like your brother," the sheriff said.

The coroner felt his blood pressure surge. He wanted to punch him as badly as he ever wanted to punch anyone. But he knew that was what the sheriff wanted.

The coroner leaned in toward the sheriff.

"One of these days, your history is going to catch up with you," he said quietly.

"Fuck you," the sheriff said as the coroner backed away.

---

The coroner started following the sheriff in his free time. It wasn't overt. It wasn't every week. But it was often enough. It wasn't hard finding him. The sheriff went to church every Sunday like most people in town and he drank every Friday night at O'Shea's Bar and Grill. Saturdays he often went out to dinner with his wife and political cronies. The coroner made it a habit to watch his movements, take in what he could, and then, if he decided to make an appearance, make sure the sheriff saw him before leaving, that their eyes met.

The coroner didn't betray any expression in those moments. He kept a blank face. Thought of Maria and the kid. He hoped it bothered the sheriff. That he viewed the coroner as some watchful revenant waiting to make him pay for his sins. If it affected the sheriff, it wasn't obvious. Although over time he wasn't quite as gregarious at dinners and he started showing up at O'Shea's during the week.

---

A year later, in early spring, the coroner got another late-night call. There had been an accident. The sheriff was feared dead.

He went out to the scene, once again out on the flat. The sheriff's car was resting up on a sidewalk, split in two by a lamp post. A pair of medics were tending to a young woman in tight jeans off to the side of the car. She had long, dark hair and her face was bloody and she was crying.

When the coroner approached, the shift commander looked to the other officers for support but they were staring at the sheriff's car. The coroner stopped. What was the point of talking to them? He changed direction and walked over to the car and took the sheriff's pulse. It was as still as the street. He was already getting cold. His head was a bloody knot of broken bones and it swallowed up whatever features he had and it gave him a cartoonish appearance. The inside of the car reeked of alcohol and pot. There was prescription bottle on the floor and little blue pills were spilled all around.

The coroner wondered how the town would take the news. They had put the sheriff on a pedestal simply because he'd survived Vietnam when so many others from town hadn't.

He turned back to the officers. They appeared lost, like children dressed up to play soldier. He barked out some orders and they fought amongst themselves trying to get out of his sight. It was quiet except for the girl's sobbing and the medics trying to calm her.

The coroner guarded the body while waiting for the county attorney. The air was very cool and the street was filled with copper dust. He sat down on the curb and waited patiently. Soon the sheriff would be laid out naked and cold on a table and the coroner would remake him in his own image.