Chapter 30
Detective Barr left the courthouse and drove to the hospital. Along the way he took a call from Teddy Hammer, who told him everything that happened after he was kicked out of the courtroom.
At the hospital, Barr met Dr. Wilkes and followed her to a small conference room where the table was covered with various items collected from the hospital room occupied by Eleanor Barnett.
Nurse Loretta Goodwin and an orderly had arranged the items in some order and prepared an inventory.
Barr carefully photographed everything, then recorded it all with a video.
There was a disposable aluminum platter with eleven chocolate brownies and some crumbs.
From the looks of it, Eleanor was not a fan of chocolate.
There were three floral arrangements from the same local florist, all with cards from the law offices of Simon Latch.
The flowers were wilted and needed to be tossed.
There were four get-well cards from four different people.
And there were two decorative boxes for carryout from the Vietnamese restaurant Tan Lu’s.
Inside one box were two Saigon ginger cookies.
The other identical box held nine of them.
The restaurant’s name and logo were printed on two sides of each box.
Barr was careful not to touch any of the items. Loretta and the orderly were wearing nitrile exam gloves.
He said, “Okay, I’m going to play it safe and wait until I get a search warrant before I take these items. Until then, I ask you to box it all up and store it in a cool place. The food will only continue to deteriorate.”
“For how long?” asked Dr. Wilkes.
“Not long.”
At 2 P.M. Thursday afternoon, December 31, the body of Eleanor Barnett was placed into a cheap metal casket, loaded into the Cupit & Moke hearse, and driven two hours to the state crime lab in Richmond.
It was placed on a rack in the morgue, along with six other bodies, to await an autopsy in a few days.
It was a holiday weekend and the medical examiner was out of town.
For Simon, it was the worst New Year’s holiday of his life.
He roamed his locked office talking to himself, replaying each day of December, trying to piece together conversations and meetings and movements.
He wanted desperately to plunge into the internet and dig for information about autopsies, but he was afraid to touch it.
Everything left a trail. He recalled an infamous case from California in which a husband was the suspect in his wife’s disappearance.
An expert was hired by the police to dig into hubby’s internet activities, and he found visits to such sites as “How To Dispose Of A Human Body,” and “Killing With No Evidence Left Behind,” and “Phantom Murders.” Hubby was now doing life with no parole.
Every email, every website, every text message might become fair game at some awful point in the future. So he stayed with the gambling and sports sites, with which he was well acquainted.
But what was he afraid of? He’d done nothing wrong.
He wanted to see his kids but Paula was in a foul mood.
If she only knew. His mood was a hundred times darker than hers so he stayed away from the house.
When the office walls closed in he retreated to Chub’s where he played video poker for hours as Valerie brought one drink after another.
With his inhibitions on the wane, he said what the hell and started betting on bowl games.
A hundred bucks a pop. He won his first five in a row and upped the ante.
He awoke on Saturday, January 2, with a hangover and cursed himself for being such a loser.
As a penance, he packed a lunch and plenty of water and drove two hours to the south end of the Shenandoah National Park.
The temperature was dropping and snow was forecast, and snow was what he wanted.
He hit the trails, hiking for hours as he went deeper into the park.
When they first fell in love, he and Paula had spent hours on the same trails, often hiking until dark when they pitched a trail tent and slept naked together in the same sleeping bag.
To keep their backpacks light, they carried little food, just jerky and canned meats, and after three days of hiking and sex they emerged famished and pounds lighter.
Their destination was always the same barbecue joint in the town of Staunton.
The snow finally began falling midafternoon, and Simon turned around. Everything ached, from the pounding inside his head to the soles of his feet, but he didn’t care. The hike had cleared his mind, if only for a few hours.