Samantha Adams: [Silence]
Deborah Taylor: I thought not. Well, to get back to your question, why would bigamy bother me? If anything, it made me feel safer. The bigger the deception on his part, the more inexcusable his crimes against these other women—and, not incidentally, the law of the land—the less chance he would be able to come clean and make an honest man of himself. He would most definitely be hoist with his own petard if he tried. I had rigged the situation admirably. It would have worked. Even after he died, under normal circumstances I would have been able to negotiate deals with MJ and Helen to keep everything quiet. I would be John Taylor’s widow, just as I had been his wife. And in return I would make sure they didn’t suffer financially.
It was perfect until you prevented me from burying my husband. By the way, if anyone finds out that coffin was empty, I’ll be the laughingstock of the town.
Samantha Adams: We told you that we needed to do an autopsy. You needn’t have scheduled the funeral quite so quickly.
Deborah Taylor: People would have wondered why the funeral was delayed. I couldn’t risk that. I needed John safely buried.
Samantha Adams: As it turned out, someone let the cat out of the bag anyway.
Deborah Taylor: Yes, that was unfortunate.
Samantha Adams: Was it you who tipped off the reporter?
Deborah Taylor: Why on earth would I do such a thing? My goal was that no one ever discover the truth. Now my own children are furious at me. They’re not stupid. They know John. They know me. They figure I must have known about the deception, even suspect that I masterminded it.
Samantha Adams: Who else possessed this information other than the three wives?
Deborah Taylor: No one. I’m sure John would never have confided in another soul. By the way, you’ve not yet told me why you sent the body for an autopsy. Isn’t that done only when there’s a suspicious death?
Samantha Adams: Not necessarily. It’s performed when the cause of a sudden death is unclear.
Deborah Taylor: What was unclear about my husband’s death? From what I gather, the medical examiner believes it to be a heart attack.
Samantha Adams: Perhaps. We’ll have to wait on the results of the autopsy.
Deborah Taylor: All right, but patience isn’t one of my virtues.
12
Samantha
IT TAKES TEN LONG DAYS for the toxicology report on John Taylor to come back. It is inconclusive. According to the pathologist, the levels of potassium in his body were high, but then they would be after a heart attack. Nothing else—not a trace of any substance that would explain his death. Jake says the results of the forensic autopsy are also inconclusive, but that he believes enough questions have been raised by the evidence for a verdict of wrongful death to be issued by the coroner at the inquest.
Jake is sitting at his desk with the Taylor reports in front of him, frowning. As precise and neat as Jake is in person, his office is the opposite. Files strewn over the desk and floor, articles cut from Forensic Magazine and Academic Forensic Pathology taped to the walls, a whiteboard with indecipherable scribbles on it, and a decent rendering of a cartoon rodent sniffing suspiciously at a half-erased line drawing of a cadaver.
“The high levels of potassium by themselves would mean nothing,” Jake says without lifting his head. “But when you put them together with the needle puncture and the bruises, that’s when the jury at the inquest will get interested.”
“So what actually killed him? Was it the head injury when he hit the desk?” I clear some papers off a chair and sit down, take out my notebook.
Jake shakes his head. “No. The pathologist believes heart attack. The blow on his head was a nasty one, and could have knocked him out. But it wasn’t what killed him. He was alive when he hit his head. He died some time after that.”
“I thought you said the coroner would probably issue a wrongful death verdict,” I say. “I’m confused.”
“Heart attack it officially is.” He pauses, then picks up one of the papers from his desk. “But there was the hyperkalemia,” he says. “Serum potassium levels, when normal, are between 3.5 and 5.0. The victim’s were 10. Now that can happen with a heart attack. Or the high potassium caused the cardiac dysrhythmia. It could go either way.”
“What’s that—hyperkalemia?”
“Excess potassium.”
“So the pathologist thinks . . . what, exactly?”
“That our good doctor suffered a heart attack. That he banged his head on the corner of the dresser going down, but that what ultimately killed him was the heart attack.”
I shake my head. I feel like I’m being run around in circles.
“Yet you believe the inquest will be wrongful death?”