Tighter Wind the Giant Coils: Who Shot Mason Cooper?

By Greg Bachman

How do Jacksonville homicide detectives determine the killer of the city's most prominent cardiothoracic surgeon when it turns out, surprisingly, nearly everyone associated with the doctor is a sociopath? It's 1995, and superficially, Dr. Mason Cooper would appear to have it all--a beautiful wife, a successful career, and a sterling community reputation. So when his body is discovered under the dock of his estate home along the St. Johns River, it seems there would be few suspects. Not so. Is it his stately and sophisticated wife, Lydia, who has conspired to kill Mason? Or is it his mistress and coworker, Kendra Taylor, bent on revenge? Or is it Presbyterian Hospital's newly hired cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Lance Barton, whose reputation Cooper meant to destroy? Or is it Presbyterian's CEO, Brad Spence, who is determined to wrest control of Cooper's practice and consolidate his power at the hospital? Or is it Dr. Robert Edwards, the anesthesiologist who has been the object of Cooper's relentless bullying since arriving in Jacksonville the year before? Finally, it's about Dr. Jacob Fleckert, Jacksonville's renowned forensic pathologist, who had discerned the killer's identity, but he has his own reasons for not disclosing what he knows to his detective friend. Secrets abound as nearly everyone has a hidden past, and nearly everyone has at least one motive--money, sex, or revenge--for wanting Cooper dead. Interwoven into the story are true historical notes and personages of Jacksonville and that area of northeastern Florida in 1995, an area that is really more Deep South than typical Florida. It is a story that has enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing the who how and why until the very end, and it is certain to have the reader going back to find the missed clues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662476945

Book preview

cover.jpg

Tighter Wind the Giant Coils

Who Shot Mason Cooper?

Greg Bachman

Copyright © 2022 Greg Bachman

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-7687-7 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-7694-5 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

Epilogue

About the Author

All the main characters are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

I would like to give thanks to a few people who made this novel possible. Thanks to Rick Bartholomew for the wonderful illustrations. Thanks to Lacey Perez, who started as my typist but ended by also being my proofreader and fact-checker as well as adding some ideas of her own to the story. Thanks to my niece Kathleen Hunt Brown for editing. And thanks to my wife, Robbie, for her support, patience, and understanding.

1

The body was found four days later. Although when discovered, his time of death hadn't been ascertained. One hand breached the tannic-acid opaqueness of the St. Johns River.

The body was past the point of rigor mortis, and it had died, but not all the cells within. Billions of microbes had continued to feast away in those four days, clostridium and other anaerobes, now unhindered by an immune system that otherwise would have held them in check. They feasted away on the body, creating carbon dioxide and eventually enough buoyancy to bring that part of the body to the surface.

It was the neighborhood kids who found him. The river had always been an irresistible lure for the kids. Despite their parents' admonishments (There are water moccasins down there, An alligator could snatch you), the kids were always down at the river's edge.

Too much fascination. They were catching crabs on the shoreline, wading barefoot in the murky water, feeling for freshwater clams, or seining off the docks for shrimp. The kids along the riverbanks behind the San Marco homes were like a bunch of feral cats.

But it was while seining off the Coopers' estate's dock (something else their parents had forbidden) that they found the body. There under his own dock, a dock he had initially built illegally, eight hundred feet out into the St. Johns River. A twist of irony for sure, but the gods love irony.

The kids had run off to tell their parents what they had seen. The adults had confirmed it, and after police had arrived, a cluster of neighbors congregated on the riverbank. (Bad news travels fast.)

The hand undulating in the gentle river was swollen, and the plainly putrid smell. After the sheriff's officers arrived, it took several tries to finally grapple the body and bring it out from under the dock.

Everyone knew though. It must be Dr. Mason Cooper. The neighbors had heard he was missing. But didn't Dr. Cooper sometimes go out to his house on Cumberland Island or go away on weekend trips, disappearing and unreachable for days? Surely he had in the past.

It would be a coroner's nightmare. Nothing worse than an autopsy on a floater. The combination of days of decomposition and the added purification from the water resulted in a nasty, smelly, bloated corpse.

Along with the onlookers, there stood on shore an intense man with a half-smoked cigar. The man liked cigars. He was the county coroner and medical examiner for Duval County. He was also the chief forensic pathologist at Jacksonville's Presbyterian hospital. Many hats. Originally from New York, Dr. Jacob Fleckert was renowned locally and nationally. Yes, known locally for his brash television interviews but known nationally for his help in solving the Kylee Braydon murder in Los Angeles and helping to identify the Fountain Square Killer in Indianapolis.

Stocky and big-bellied with huge forearms, Dr. Fleckert was an intimidating visage. But in a world of similar men, it was his keen insights that garnered respect from local law enforcement. The Jacksonville police knew him as one of their own.

Pull the body to shore, Kyle! Body's decayed! If you pull the body onto the decking, you're liable to lose a limb! Fleckert yelled, watching intently from shore.

Neighbors now turned away from the ghastly sight and the thought of seeing a limb torn loose from the bloated body. A bit too much to handle.

Kyle, a blond-haired lanky sheriff's deputy who looked every bit the surfer he was in his spare time, was now in waist-deep water with three other deputies. Together, they had dragged the body alongside the deck from where it had been found in deeper water. All four were wearing masks to try to stifle the stench, but even so, the trooper on the back left had removed his mask twice to retch.

It's horrible, Doc. Gonna be Cooper, isn't it? Kyle yelled back, trudging through the water with a gloved hand under one armpit of the body, looking up at Fleckert.

Likely, said Fleckert.

Dr. Mason Cooper. Cardiothoracic surgeon. Fleckert had only had association with the man a few times, but in typical native New Yorker manner, Fleckert had sized the man up quickly. A Southern gentleman on the surface with a certain polite civility but mixed with haughtiness. A man who had benefited from his inherited family prominence and station in life. A man used to obeisance.

All of which grated against Fleckert's own upbringing and no-nonsense directness.

His most memorable acquaintance with the man had been over this very dock, thought Fleckert.

After Dr. Cooper had refurbished this house on the St. Johns—a sprawling, rolling expanse of a mansion with eighteen-foot windows looking out over the water—Cooper had decided he needed to extend his dock. A new yacht was the reason. His Sea Ray Sundancer, a real statement yacht for the preeminent heart surgeon in town.

The gently sloping depth of the St. Johns River required a longer deck walkway to reach draftable depths for Cooper's new boat. Eight hundred feet was needed, not the four hundred feet that was Cooper's original deck length. The problem was, without a special zoning permit, the maximum deck length allowed within Duval County was four hundred feet. In typical entitled fashion, however, Cooper had pilings seven hundred feet out into the St. Johns before neighbors complained.

Miraculously, Cooper had only had to delay construction one week until the county commission issued a late permit allowing the extension. One month later, prior to lights being installed, three men in a ProCraft bass boat traveling after dark and going about thirty miles per hour passed beneath the uncharacteristically long deck, killing all three men. As the county coroner, Fleckert's job had been nothing much more than properly identifying the bodies, as the cause of death had been apparent. Cooper escaped culpability thanks to the belated deck zoning modification.

To Fleckert, Dr. Cooper seemed unfazed by the whole affair, although he made a much more solemn appearance with the local television news station.

That was Fleckert's second acquaintance with Cooper. The only other time was for an autopsy on a patient of Cooper's who had a malposition of the venous filter that had migrated to the patient's heart. A known complication in Cooper's words. The man hadn't been the least bit upset.

Now this was his third acquaintance. A final one, and a riddle to solve. Fleckert was a man who, at age fifty-eight, had seen a lot as a forensic pathologist. In those thirty years, he was seldom surprised anymore. He realized now, however, that he was surprised—not surprised that Cooper was found dead. A man in his business somewhat assumed missing equaled death, much like a cop assumed criminality. No, it was the who and how, because Fleckert was a man who inherently, after this long, could sense when a murder had happened.

2

Emily Barton stood at the kitchen sink, looking out the back window to the forest beyond the backyard, half lost in thought, half wondering where her two boys were back there.

She never thought she'd be living here. Switzerland, Europe, okay, but not Switzerland, Florida, on the very outskirts of Jacksonville, redneck central. But her husband liked the seclusion of several acres and loved the huge Southern pines, where the trees were as big around as a coffee table and towered a hundred feet high. He loved country living, having grown up on an Indiana farm. But Emily was the quintessential big-city girl, Chicago. And while Indianapolis had been manageable, Jacksonville definitely felt like a foreign country.

Certainly Switzerland was pretty, with its pristine countryside along the wide expanse of the St. Johns River, with osprey and bald eagle nests among the pines. There were shades of green everywhere with bright spots of sunlight shining down through the forest canopy. It was a place where you smelled the earth rising up.

And the house they had rented four months ago after moving from Indianapolis was new and even had an in-law suite for her mom if she came to visit.

But it was definitely a different culture. When Lance had told her that they were moving to Florida, she had imagined white sand beaches and palm trees, but Jacksonville wasn't really close to the ocean. Most of the city was inland, and this far north, palm trees were supplanted by southern pines and oaks dripping in Spanish moss. This was not really Florida. It was more the Deep South. Locals even jokingly referred to Jacksonville as the capital of South Georgia. The first time she'd met her new neighbor, the neighbor had called Emily a Yankee, and not in a nice way either. Lynyrd Skynyrd, the rough-edged Southern rock band, had owned a cabin just down the road, and old-timers here still referred to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression, pronounced Nah-tharn Ah-gresh-un.

Emily caught herself daydreaming and refocused on catching sight of the boys. Identical twins, eleven years old going on twenty. They were clones of their father, so similar in appearance to him that it was as if they had sprung from her body at birth without any genetic contribution from her. They had tousled brown hair, blue eyes, and were well formed and full of energy. They bewildered Emily with their innate wildness. They had taken to the forested areas around their new home with a type of vengeance. It seemed they were immediately in their natural element, building lean-to forts, designing snares, and climbing trees. Lance had bought them pellet guns which they quickly mastered and used to start killing squirrels.

Emily had scolded them. Hunting for food is one thing, but senseless killing is not okay, she had said. The next day, Emily found the twins cooking gutted and skinned squirrels on the outdoor grill. (It's lunch, Mom!)

Emily had been a psychology major, and Lance had been premed, both at Northwestern and both sophomores at the time. It was a blind date that her roommate had devised, and reluctantly, she went through with it. She had been smitten. Lance was so unlike anyone she had dated before, and it wasn't the physical attraction that captivated her. Although Lance was almost model good-looking. It was his simple directness, a directness that knew no hesitation of forethought because whatever he said would be heartfelt and without intentions. And his laugh. Emily loved his honest full-throated laugh and the ease at which it came. She was the one who'd asked for a second date! They'd married shortly after his acceptance to medical school, and one year later, not planned, she was pregnant with the twins.

There were rough years. Medical school. Loans. Long hours for Lance. But the worst was the birth of the twins. She had nearly died. She didn't understand even now, but Lance did, and he still did not like to talk about that day. Emily had been in and out of consciousness a lot of the time, but what happened during one of those lapses meant no more children. She'd needed an emergency hysterectomy because part of her placenta had grown into her uterine wall, causing her to nearly bleed to death. Even after the hysterectomy, her clinical course had been critical. Something Lance had said about her coagulation products not working properly. Afterward, they had cried and had held each other, and when she was well enough, they took the boys home.

Lance took so much time off from medical school classes while Emily recovered that the school threatened to expel him. As far as it was known, Lance was the only medical student to have ever called the medical school dean an asshole to his face. But in the end, Lance hadn't needed to quit or even repeat a year of medical school. What followed after medical school was another eight years in Indianapolis for general surgery and cardiothoracic surgery training.

The years in training were long, and on reaching their midthirties, Emily and Lance Barton were under financial strain. There were no savings in the bank, no substantial assets, and the student loans from medical school were still there, hanging over their heads. They had only been able to make minimum payments on their loans, and now they had the additional financial worry of getting the boys into good schools and saving for their college educations.

Lance had exemplary recommendations from fellowship, but many cardiothoracic groups required buying-in periods of employment. Like lawyers working their way into partnership positions, these buy-ins could take years, years that neither Lance nor Emily wanted before finding a better financial foothold. So when Lance found this position at Jacksonville Presbyterian, he was thrilled.

An immediate salaried position at $700,000 per year, with benefits and no buy-in. Office space and staff at the hospital's expense and a guaranteed two-year contract with assurances of continued employment after the standard two-year provisionary status. There were even incentive clauses, meaning that Lance might make additional income above his salary.

Best of all, Lance would have the benefit of the other cardiothoracic surgeons already on staff, one of which was assigned as his provisional mentor. Standard stuff. Dr. Mason Cooper.

Emily and Lance Barton were finally on the road to stability, and it was a good feeling, a feeling of a great burden lifting.

Presbyterian's chief medical officer, Dr. William Blanton, had helped Lance through the paperwork tangles of starting his practice. He helped Lance obtain his Florida license and his hospital credentialing. The Presbyterian office staff had helped Emily meet some of the other doctors' wives and had also helped to set up meetings with realtors. Lance and Emily eventually decided to rent for now.

Suddenly, Emily saw the boys through the back window. She dropped the dish rag she had been using and rushed through the back door.

"Put that snake down. Now!"

Jack, the older by five minutes, had stopped at hearing his mother's voice and now stood at the edge of the forest beyond the backyard, holding a four-foot-long snake, having grasped the writhing snake behind its head.

It's okay, Mom, he said, laughing. See, red and black, a friend of Jack. It was a reference to identifying a king snake from the similar looking poisonous snake. Jace, his brother, stepped out from behind, the only difference in the boys' appearance being the directional parting of their hair.

Yeah, Mom. Remember? said Jace plaintively, shrugging his shoulders. It's red and yeller will kill a feller. It's not a coral snake, Mom.

3

Lance Barton is asking for another meeting. This time, he'd like you there. It was a late Monday morning, and Dr. William Blanton, chief medical officer for Presbyterian, was finally able to track down Brad Spence, the hospital's CEO, who was just arriving to his office.

Jacksonville Presbyterian had always had the reputation of being the best hospital in town. Yes, there were other hospitals (St. Johns and Duval County), but they were on the northside, and if you had your druthers, you went to Presbyterian. In other words, if you had good insurance or money. That's why United Health Corporation had made their first foray into the Florida market in the early 1990s by buying the previously nonprofit Presbyterian, the preeminent hospital in a city nearing a million in one of the fastest growing areas of the country. And while much of Florida was populated with older retirees, Jacksonville was a working-class city with scattered naval facilities, the largest being Mayport, where the aircraft carrier group John. F. Kennedy was stationed.

Younger patients meant paying patients and insured patients. Not Medicaid or Medicare.

Presbyterian had on average 5,200 emergency room visits each month, more than two thousand surgical cases each month, and averaged 280 births each month in labor and delivery. Brad Spence could name every statistical category for Presbyterian in his sleep. How much was spent in salaries, how much profit was generated, how much was spent on pharmaceuticals, and how much Presbyterian charged. Numbers were his forte, and he knew the line-item expenses and charges of each hospital department. He knew which department made or lost money and how much on any given month, going back to the first month UHC had named him CEO and moved him from Atlanta, where he had previously been chief operating officer of the suburban Eastland Medical Center. That had been three years ago. Brad Spence was thirty-four years old and UHC's youngest CEO.

Brad Spence knew numbers, for sure, but for a man who had worked in hospitals nearly ten years, he really didn't know medicine. Honestly, he didn't care that much about his lack of medical knowledge. In this day, he reasoned, it was almost better to be able to disassociate the business side of medicine from the nuts and bolts of patient care. He felt he was the analogous captain of the ship, and he had engineers in the boiler room to make sure the engines kept running. His job was to steer the ship, but he didn't need to know the mechanics of how the ship stayed afloat or ran. That was Blanton's job.

Is he settling in? Getting more cases, I hope, said Spence.

Getting cases, yes, said Blanton. But you and I knew it would be like this, and I think he's starting to realize it too. We've got to reassure him that administration has his back and things will straighten out over time.

Dr. Blanton, chief medical officer at Presbyterian, was a surgeon who no longer operated. Thirty years practicing as a general surgeon had been enough. He was a pragmatic man, so when UHC offered him the chief medical officer position, Blanton took it. He would miss operating; however, it meant no more nights operating on emergency bowel obstructions, ruptured spleens, and gunshot wounds either. Blanton was tough, no-nonsense, and straight and hard as his jawline. Old-school. He had cut his teeth, a term he would sometimes use, in a different time, doing his surgical residency in Chicago, in a system where the long hours and demands meant he was the only one of four surgical residents to finish. The other eight in his year had washed out. Sixty-six percent attrition. There were no limits on working hours back then. You worked until they told you that you could sleep. Then you got up and worked again. No day off after being on call and having worked all night. No whining allowed. It had been a brutal residency, but when he had survived his five years of training, he was a seriously good surgeon, and Blanton knew it.

Although he was careful not to show it, inwardly, he was disdainful of this new breed of surgeons coming out of training. Green. Untested. Sloppy technique. While the technology and pharmacology aspects of medicine had vastly improved during his thirty-five years as a physician, surgical training had not in Blanton's view. There were surgeons coming out now who feared the prospect of having to do an open gallbladder surgery, who had never done a gastric resection, and had never even seen a Billroth. Neophyte surgeons who took five hours to do a Whipple. Ridiculous.

But Blanton had an innate sense of the difference between bullshit and the real McCoy, as he would say. And when he met Lance Barton, he recognized one of his own. Lance Barton, their newly trained cardiac surgeon, would be Presbyterian's first and only employed cardiothoracic surgeon, and Blanton was certain he would be a good one. It wasn't his sterling recommendations from training. It was the way Barton related case experiences with Blanton the first time they met without the usual bullshit braggadocio. Barton was good, Blanton had no doubt.

Of course, things will straighten out, said Spence. He's going to have the referrals of fifty-nine internists and most of the referrals from Northeastern Cardiology Associates. He will also have the referrals from Southside Family Practice starting next month too. We're finalizing their merger this week.

Since operating in North Florida, UHC had invested in Presbyterian of Jacksonville, buying up many physician practices, part of its long-term plan of asset stabilization.

Doc, he's going to be the busiest surgeon in town.

Yes, he's working, and he's busy. But you know what I mean. It's the OR scheduling. It's not having the right scrubs or the right anesthesia coverage. He gets all the shit times and staff. Basically, it's Cooper.

Fucking Cooper. Thorn in my side. Did you know he's now trying to renegotiate his group's call pay? It already amounts to an illegal kickback. What he wants now is outright extortion.

What's he asking? said Blanton.

He wants $2,500 per night, plus the billings. Even with Barton taking heart call every fourth, it'll be six hundred eighty thousand a year, Spence said, figuring the numbers in his head instinctively. And does he share it with his two partners, Wade and Schilling? Of course not. The guy is a dick.

He's good, said Blanton, genuinely appreciative of a good surgeon. Probably one of the slickest cardiovascular surgeons in the state, and he stays current. I've watched him operate. Did you know he's doing sixty percent of his bypass cases off pump now? Nobody else comes close.

He's a fucking greedy SOB, is what he is. Spence sighed and looked at his watch. When does Barton want to meet? I can meet anytime this afternoon. I want to get this in-house CV practice established. Enough with Cooper.

I'll check with Lance, but it's going to be late, probably not until after six o'clock. Scheduling screwed him again. He couldn't get a start today until after Schilling is done with his cases.

Shit. After six p.m.? Seriously? Another fucking wasted evening, Spence thought. Fine. Managing doctors is like herding cats, thought Spence. Like to shoot a few.

Dr. Blanton walked out of Spence's office discouraged. He had always been a well-respected colleague, one of the go-to surgeons in the years he had practiced, but lately, he had heard rumors of how the other doctors talked, maligning him since he had become part of the hospital's administration.

Doc Blanton has turned green was what the other doctors were saying now, and that was about as big of an insult as you could get. No one even thought anymore how unusual it was for Dr. Blanton to be known simply as Doc. After all, he was constantly surrounded by doctors, but for his entire career, patients, friends, and even colleagues rarely called him by his given name. Always Doc. Probably because it was hard to see Blanton as anything other than the consummate physician, a one-faceted man. He'd never resented only being called Doc. He didn't even think about it. But being called green, did they really think he was that?

Blanton knew green wasn't what people at Presbyterian associated with envy or greed. He knew green was the color that was associated with the hospital. Green was the color of the marble stone edifice of the Presbyterian entrance and also the beautiful green inlaid mosaic marble leading to Presbyterian's front doors. Italian marble imported how many years ago? Longer than he had been here at Presbyterian, Doc Blanton knew.

Green was the color of the hospital's interior too. There were thirty-foot dark green walls in the hospital foyer to contrast the huge painted murals of doctors and nurses caring for Presbyterian's patients.

An impressive entrance, and one meant to inspire trust and confidence. Presbyterian. The mecca of health care in this part of the world.

But being green also meant you were now part of Presbyterian's administration, and being green meant you could no longer be fully trusted by your physician colleagues. Being green meant you were now just another administrator, and to a large degree that you had switched sides from your profession as a physician to one as another oppressive hospital operative.

*****

As it would happen, at that very moment, Dr. Mason Cooper was also meeting with someone. Carla Jennings, RN, Presbyterian's operating room supervisor.

Forty-five-year-old Carla Jennings had the unenviable job of running Presbyterian's operating room schedule. She was responsible for booking surgical cases, matching the staff appropriately for the day's surgeries, coordinating with anesthesia, and making out staff call schedules. In other words, Carla Jennings had the job of making sure the operating room ran smoothly, and Carla had been doing it for the last eight years.

Five foot three, with brittle shoulder-length hair and a decently good figure for her age, Carla was smart and organized. Lines around her mouth betrayed her closet smoking habit, and her often harried appearance had more to do with her troubled teenage son than her job requirements. Carla Jennings was that person in any business that rose to the point of directing others because the job required it, and there were few who were good enough.

It was Dr. Mason Cooper who was in her OR office at the moment, having come over from his own office.

Carla, what are we doing with staffing today? Is Schilling going to have Jean as his scrub? He's been calling me this morning, saying he only has Monte right now.

Dr. Cooper, I put Jean on float today so she could help the new surgeon, Barton, this afternoon. Otherwise, Jean would be out at five o'clock.

But, Carla, darling. Cooper sat down in the OR office on the empty chair beside her. Dr. Schilling always needs two scrubs. Jean and Monte, you know that. It's always been like that. He's in so much better of a mood with both Jean and Monte, and faster too.

Carla Jennings looked at Mason Cooper. She loved the man, really. It was Dr. Mason Cooper who had saved the life of the man she loved most—her father. He had a ruptured aortic aneurysm at age sixty-five. He had arrived at the emergency room just four years ago with terrible abdominal pain and a barely palpable pulse. It normally had a 50 percent mortality with complications of stroke, renal failure, or myocardial infarction, all common even if the patient survived. She knew. She was an OR nurse. Dr. Cooper had not only saved her dad's life that day but had seen him every day afterward until he was discharged, even directing all his ICU care. Her dad had been one of the lucky ones, but Carla Jennings knew luck had been just a small part of the reason.

And Cooper was the ultimate gentleman. He cared for the staff, always inviting the OR staff to his annual party bashes at Halloween and for his birthday. And Cooper contributed generously to the staff's Christmas bonuses that the surgeons had always historically funded.

No denying he was handsome. Trim and tall with silvered hair, Cooper's bronzed face had a firm jawline with a cleft chin and piercing blue-gray eyes. He was a man who exuded confidence and intelligence and a man used to getting what he wanted.

I would have to give Dr. Barton Steph as his scrub. You know how Steph is. She shakes and drops things. She hasn't done hearts in probably eight years. Carla looked down and folded her hands in her lap. She was pleading her case, but she also knew Dr. Cooper would eventually get what he wanted.

Steph will be fine, Carla. Dr. Cooper took Carla's hands from her lap and held them until Carla looked up again. Really, it will be fine. Dr. Barton is very well trained, and I am here mentoring him.

Cooper rose and walked from the OR office. Carla hesitated, but eventually, she walked out of the office and went to the large ten-foot-long surgical case board in the main hallway. She slowly took down the magnetic strip with Jean Thompson's name on it and replaced it with Stephanie Wilson's name.

4

It was a grisly task, first getting the body to shore, then lifting it into the body bag. The skin was slippery and tearing in places. There was no ambulance for this person. Even though the mortuary knew it would be a big payday later on, they insisted on two body bags before the body was loaded into the hearse to take to Presbyterian's morgue.

The crowd had been shooed away and the area cordoned off now by yellow police tape stretching across the north end of the Cooper estate from the cypress trees at the water's edge to the hickory on the bank near the fence line.

Dr. Jacob Fleckert was still watching the progression of the body from the water to the body bag to the hearse. He had already called ahead to Presbyterian and spoken with the morgue assistant, Hogan. It was Hogan who had assured Fleckert he would have the body transferred to the morgue's cooler—a bank of four slab tables that slid in and out of the morgue's giant freezer.

Thomas Riley, a homicide detective with the Jacksonville Police Department, had arrived by the time Deputy Kyle and the other deputies had reached shore with the body. He stood next to Fleckert.

Homicide?

Fleckert didn't turn to face Riley. Familiarity dictated no need for introduction. They knew each other well. We'll see. Ask me tomorrow.

That means yes? Dr. Cooper, right? Missing person's report went out today, but I thought he was probably off out of town. He has a place out on Cumberland somewhere, evidently. Fleckert hadn't said anything. Besides, who would want Cooper dead? What a great guy. Did I ever tell you he operated on my uncle? Saved his life. Hell of a surgeon. Who would want Cooper dead? Riley repeated.

Fleckert looked down at his