Chapter Thirty-one · Sienna
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
SIENNA
Dr. Marguerite Okonjo is a forensic pathologist in Richmond with twenty-six years and about twelve hundred autopsies behind her, and she took the Teague case on the eighth of November for a flat fee and one condition, which was that nobody involved was to tell her what they hoped she would find.
Grace gave her the file with the run reports in it and nothing else. No theory, no Kesterly, no scale ticket, no fuel card, no motorcycle club, no fifty-one minutes of tape from a fabrication bay in Buchanan.
A death, a preliminary, a medical history, and my two paragraphs.
Grace did that on purpose and explained it to Charity in advance, twice: a finding is only worth what it is worth to a stranger, and the fastest way to make an expensive document worthless is to tell the expert what you are hoping for.
I did not speak to that woman one time. That was Grace’s rule and it was the right rule and it about killed me.
I asked Grace once why a woman with that reputation took a six-thousand-dollar case from a fire department in a county she had never heard of.
Grace said she asked her the same thing, and that Dr. Okonjo said, “Because the family filed the preservation request on the fourth day, and in twenty-six years I have seen that maybe forty times, and every single time it meant somebody was paying attention.”
She had it back in seventeen days.
The findings were four pages and I have read them enough times that I could set them down here from memory, and I am going to give you the two sentences that mattered instead, because the rest of it is anatomy and belongs to Charity.
The panel found a fentanyl analog at a concentration Dr. Okonjo described as *substantially above the range associated with fatality in an opioid-naive adult.
* And it found no other opioid, no metabolites of chronic use, no therapeutic drugs beyond his blood pressure medication, and nothing in the medical record or the tissue to suggest that Hollis Teague had ever taken an opioid in his life.
Her conclusion, in the language of her trade, was that the cause of death was acute fentanyl analog toxicity, and that the manner of death could not be determined from the physical evidence alone.
I read those four pages standing up in Grace’s office in Fincastle on the twenty-fifth of November with Charity Teague sitting in the chair beside me, and Grace read them, all of it, including the anatomy, because Charity had asked for all of it and Grace does not edit a document for a grown woman who has asked.
*Could not be determined.* Not homicide.
She would not say homicide, because a pathologist cannot say homicide from a body when there is no injury and no scene evidence of a struggle, and Marguerite Okonjo has spent twenty-six years not saying things she cannot prove, which is exactly why her report was worth six thousand two hundred and forty dollars.
But the manner of death was no longer cardiac arrhythmia.
It was undetermined.
And undetermined is an open door.
Charity Teague sat in that chair with the pages in her lap for a while after Grace stopped reading.
“So somebody give it to him,” she said.
“That is not what this document says,” Grace said. “This document says he had a lethal quantity of something in him that he had never taken before in his life, and that his heart did not do this on its own.”
“Miz Walsh.” Charity looked up. “I’m not going to say it in a courtroom. I’m asking you in your office.”
Grace took her glasses off.
“Yes,” she said. “Somebody gave it to him.”
And Charity Teague nodded once and folded the four pages in half and put them in her purse, and did not cry in that office, and I have no idea what she did in her truck.
This is what an open door did, in nine days, after four months of every door being shut.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, on receipt of the private findings, moved the state’s own specimens up in the queue.
Not because anybody leaned on them. Because a private board-certified pathologist had produced a finding inconsistent with their preliminary, which is a thing that triggers an internal review automatically, and the review is the expedite.
Sturgill’s file, which he had kept in writing since the seventh of September exactly the way Grace told him to on the ninth, became the county’s contribution to a joint investigation.
Danielle Ford’s office issued a letter on the second of December stating that the Copperhead Motorcycle Club was not a subject or a target of any pending investigation. One paragraph. Nine lines. It does not apologize and it does not explain and it never will.
Grace read it in the chapel with all sixteen of them in the room, twice, because Scout asked her to read it again.
Cutter told me that when she finished the second reading, Rook Walsh put his face in his hands and did not take them away for about a minute, and that nobody in that room said a word to him or looked at him while he did it, and that Dutch Voyles reached over and put one hand flat on his back and left it there.
Eleven months of being told to be boring. It is what it was for, and it is what it bought, and there is not one photograph of any of it.
And Wanda Prather’s memo of the twenty-second of September, the one directing that I not contact Richmond, was rescinded on the fourth of December in a two-sentence email with no explanation and no apology.
That is how it is done here. Nobody was ever wrong. A thing was prudent in September and is no longer necessary in December, and everybody waves at everybody in the parking lot.
I printed it and put it in the file box with the other one, side by side, and I intend to keep both of them until I retire.
The county did not un-pause the station.
Let me be accurate about that, because everybody wants the story to end with a ribbon.
The Kesterly agreement is still paused. It was paused in August and it is paused now and I do not know if it will ever be signed by anybody, and there is fourteen acres at mile marker 178 behind a locked gate with survey ribbon going gray in the saplings.
Nine minutes off the north end. I still want it.
I will want it for the rest of my working life, and some morning I am going to lose somebody at the top of this county in the time it takes to drive there, and I am going to stand in that gravel and know exactly what it cost to say the second half at a barbecue.
I would say it again. Both of those things are true and I have quit trying to make them one thing.
Cutter called me the night the findings came in and let that sit.
“Say it,” I said.
“I’m working out how to.”
“Then work it out, I’ve got all night.”
“You were right.” His voice came down the line flat and careful.
“You were right on the seventh of September at six o’clock in the morning, standing in a bay with a man you’d known your whole life on the floor, and you were right in a way that nobody with any power believed for eighty-one days, and you wrote it down anyway inside of an hour, and then you did every single thing correctly for three months while they took your station and gagged you and put a review on your barn, and you never once did the clever thing. ”
“Grace made me promise.”
“Grace made you promise in September. You kept it in November when it would have worked.” He let that sit.
“Sienna, I mean to say a thing and I’d like you to let me finish it.
Ten years ago I decided you were something to be protected.
And I have spent five months finding out that you are the most dangerous person in this valley, and that the whole time I was protecting you, this county had a weapon in it and did not know. ”
I sat down on my own porch step in the cold with the phone against my ear and the ridge black in front of me.
“That’s the best thing anybody has ever said to me,” I said. “And I want you to know I hated most of the five months.”
“I know it.”
“And Cutter. It didn’t work. That’s the part nobody’s saying tonight because everybody’s relieved.
” I pulled my coat around me. “Undetermined isn’t a charge.
There’s no name. He’s still out there and the windows are still the eighth and the ninth and the twenty-second and the twenty-third, and January’s five weeks off. ”
“I know that too.”
“Then say the toast, because I’m not going to.”
He was quiet a second.
“To an old man who bought four sheets of plate stock he didn’t need,” Cutter said.
“To Hollis,” I said.
And we sat there on two porches nine miles apart and said nothing, and it was the first time in twenty years that anything in my life has felt like a marriage.
The twenty-second of November was a Saturday.
I had been sitting on the window dates since June and I had never once been able to do anything with them except be ready, which is not nothing and does not feel like anything.
But that week I did something I had not done before, and it is the only reason this county’s number is what it is instead of what it might have been.
On the eighteenth, I sent one email.
It went to every person who had come through that class since September.
A hundred and thirteen names by then, on a list Bobby Sowder’s secretary kept in a three-ring binder, because a fire department keeps lists and does not throw anything away, ever, in the history of the world.
It went to the poultry plant’s safety manager and to the school nurse and to Charlene at the Gap store and to Renata and to a man in Ammons Creek with a plywood training board and to eleven Copperheads.
I wrote it eleven times.
I was under a gag on public statements and a thirty-day liability review that had turned into ninety, and I have never been so careful about anything as I was about the difference between a public statement and an operational notice to trained personnel.
Grace and I went through it line by line on a Tuesday night on the phone for an hour and a half.
I could not say a batch was coming. I do not know a batch is coming. Nobody has ever proved to me that a batch is coming and I have been told twice in writing by the Commonwealth of Virginia that the pattern I am looking at is a documented national phenomenon.
So I wrote the only thing I could write, which was true, and general, and addressed to people who had been trained by their county.
It said: *Reminder to all trained responders. Carry your kit this weekend. Check your naloxone expiration. Know your nearest two neighbors who have taken this class. Call 911 first, every time, then act. Nothing further.*
That is the entire text. Grace read it before it went and struck nothing.
And a hundred and thirteen people in Blackthorn County read an email from their EMS supervisor that said carry your kit this weekend, and every single one of them knew exactly what it meant, because they live here and they can count to the twenty-second same as I can.
The first call came in at 9:14 on Saturday night.
It came from a house on the Ruritan road behind mile marker 173, six tenths of a mile off the corridor, about four hundred yards from the trailer I worked on the ninth of August.
And the caller was not a family member and was not a bystander.
It was a woman named Tammy Prine who works second shift at the plant and who took my class on the second of October, and she called it in from a kitchen while she was already doing what I taught her, and the first thing she said to dispatch, before the address, was: “I’ve got one down, I’ve started rescue breathing, and I’ve give her the nasal at nine-twelve.
I’m going to give the second one at nine-fifteen if she don’t come up. ”
I have listened to that recording more times than I will admit. Dispatch had to ask her twice for the address, because she gave them the clinical picture first, in order, the way I teach it, and it did not occur to her to lead with where she was.
The second call came at 9:26, from the Gap.
The third at 9:31, from a truck stopped on the shoulder of Route 11 at the 174 pull-off, from a man who had seen a car sitting wrong and stopped to look, which nobody did in June.
By ten o’clock I was standing in the Wilkes Ford bay with a phone in each hand, and Rae was on the radio.
Amos was already rolling. Every unit and two out of Botetourt were committed, and the calls were still coming, and I had a whiteboard and a marker and eleven years of doing this and no rig of my own to get into.
That is the part I had never once rehearsed. Not the calls. Standing still in a fire bay running a county with a telephone while other people’s hands did the work.
By ten-forty it was fourteen calls.
By eleven-fifteen it was nineteen, spread from the Gap all the way up past Ammons Creek, and both of my rigs were on the road to Roanoke, and I had a mutual aid unit coming out of Wythe that was fifty minutes away, and one paramedic left, and she was me.
Nineteen calls. In June, nine of those people would have died. I have run the arithmetic on that with the actual times and the actual distances and I have run it more than once, sober, and nine is the honest number and it might be low.
It was the twenty-second of November and it was the worst night this county has ever had.
And I want to tell you what happened, and it is not the thing you are expecting.