The Second Mouse by Archer Mayor Page B

identified as the wife of a prominent local politician, who, as luck would have it, was also a major backer of Medwed’s.”
    She paused again for another sip before resuming. “It was a real mess. What was she doing in the middle of the night far from home? Why had she been on a busy road, on foot, where there were no businesses or residences she might have been visiting? Had she been murdered or did she die of natural causes? It went on and on. Howard did the autopsy himself, it being a high-level case, but later I assisted him with the follow-through because of its complexity and his poor health. That much was acceptable procedure. The hitch cropped up when he discovered the woman was pregnant. That, he kept private. He told me much later that he felt it wasn’t relevant, would only hurt his friend, and that no harm would result from withholding it.”
    “Was he nuts?” Joe exclaimed. “After all those years on the job, he should’ve known better.”
    “I grant you that,” she agreed. “But he was sentimental, having just lost his own wife. The woman in question was fifty years old. She and her husband had always wanted kids but never could. And finally, once the cause of death was ruled a natural, he didn’t see the point. The problem was, it got out anyhow and caused a whole secondary ruckus.”
    “Hold it, hold it,” Joe interrupted. “I know you don’t want to get bogged down in details, but how did it end up a natural?”
    “She was a jogger,” Hillstrom said simply, “named Judy Morgenthau. She was on a new route she’d never tried before, running a little later than usual and thus in the dark, and she suffered a heart attack. We hypothesized that as she reacted to the cardiac event, she stumbled into the road and was hit. After that, she became just a lump in the road, struck again and again and again, eventually becoming unrecognizable. Believe it or not, they actually found the first car that hit her—a man who thought he’d struck a dog and just kept driving. They matched the blood on his bumper to the decedent. The whole thing was very sad.”
    “What happened when news of the pregnancy got out?” Joe asked as the soup arrived.
    “The opposition went wild. They screamed cover-up; they claimed that if this was withheld, then other more important information might well have been, too. They demanded retests and spread rumors that the woman had been on drugs or drunk or had a bullet in her somewhere.” She shook her head, smiling. “It’s all so ridiculous in retrospect. A true tempest in a teapot. It didn’t make the national news; it didn’t change the course of anything. But at the time, it was all anyone could talk about, and it damn near cost Howard Medwed his job.”
    “Why didn’t it?” Joe asked, starting in on his meal.
    “Because I took the heat,” she explained. “I told everyone that I’d been the one who’d both discovered the pregnancy and covered it up. I took a drubbing for it and was properly pilloried behind closed doors, but I wasn’t fired outright, and Dr. Medwed gave me a glowing recommendation for my next job. The opposition didn’t get their man in, Medwed stayed put for another six months, and the office’s reputation was safely handed off to the next generation.”
    Joe thought about all this while Hillstrom halfheartedly poked at her French onion soup.
    “And that’s what Floyd Freeman is holding over you?” he asked eventually. “How did he find out about it?”
    She shrugged. “Who knows? Things like that eventually get out. The price of living in a small world. The point is, he did.”
    “Why don’t you just tell him to drop dead?” Joe suggested.
    “Normally, I would, but therein lies part of the problem. I’ve told him to drop dead ever since he became my boss a few years ago. He doesn’t know what the OCME does, except in the crudest sense, and he doesn’t care. It’s all about the bottom line with him. Initially, before the new