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First Cousin, Twice Removed
by John H. Dirckx

At four a.m. the birds started waking up. Willy Kennebaugh, who had been dozing fitfully through much of the night, also jolted abruptly awake. Somewhere in the house a creaking of wood and a muffled thump had thrown him into a sudden sweat of almost superstitious terror.

The sounds had come not from the direction of his mother's room but from the main staircase leading up from the front hall. Having lived in this house all his forty-four years, Kennebaugh was well familiar with every nocturnal snap and groan of its ancient timbers. For five minutes he lay motionless, perspiring ice water from scalp to toenails, and heard no further noises. At length he mustered enough courage to sit up on the side of his bed and pull on his slippers in the dark.

Uppermost in his mind was the fear that some of the vagrants from the colony in the woods at the bottom of the hill had gotten bored with carousing on wine and whooping like savages in the middle of the night and had decided to launch an assault on the nearest house. This was an abiding dread of long standing that returned nightly to beset his timid soul as the shadows began to fall.

Kennebaugh shuffled along the shadowy passage toward the head of the stairs. After arriving there he peered with elaborate caution around the worn newel post. A faint glow of breaking day, straggling through the grubby, uncurtained window on the landing, showed him a vague motionless shape huddled there. With mounting horror, his heart slamming in his throat like a truck engine missing on two cylinders, he started down the stairs.

It seemed to him like hours before the EMTs arrived. Then they swarmed into the house, deployed a mountain of paraphernalia, and carried out a series of lifesaving maneuvers with maddening slowness, while Kennebaugh kept hovering and getting in their way. Finally they assured him, with crisp and impersonal tokens of sympathy, that his mother had expired and that further efforts at resuscitation would be futile.

Nick Stamaty had barely settled himself behind his desk in the coroner's office when the first call of the day was passed on to him by a secretary. Fire and Rescue was calling to report the death, at home, of Iris Kennebaugh, widow, age sixty-four, around four a.m. that morning. "Too late for homicide and too early for suicide," quipped Stamaty. "No signs of foul play?"

"No, sir, we're just making a formal report. Deceased was on a couple of heart medicines and the next of kin is the one who called us." Stamaty took down the information, entered it in the departmental computer, and got on with the next item on his agenda, which was to boot up the espresso machine.

Several cups later, in the middle of the afternoon, he received another call about Iris Kennebaugh. This one came from Petra Bothnerby, of Neighbors and Bothnerby Funeral Homes, Inc. Ms. Bothnerby was obviously in a terrible dither, her usually beguiling Scandinavian accent so muddy this afternoon as to render her words almost unintelligible. At length Stamaty got the message that, in the case of Mrs. Kennebaugh at least, four a.m. hadn't been too late for murder at all.

He instructed the undertaker, quite unnecessarily, to cease and desist from embalming the body, summoned the mortuary squad to transfer it from the funeral parlor to the coroner's mortuary, and alerted the forensic pathologist, Dr. Valentine. Then he called the Department of Public Safety.

At five p.m. that day four men convened at the mortuary for the postmortem examination of the remains of Iris Kennebaugh. Stamaty and Detective Sergeant Cyrus Auburn, deep in conversation, paced the parking lot, enjoying the magnificent spring weather, until Dr. Valentine drove up. When they all went inside they found that Julius, the attendant, had positioned the body on the stainless steel table and laid out the instruments.

Valentine, sixtyish with a waxed mustache, pulled on gown and rubber gloves and plunged into business with more energy than most people can muster at the beginning of the workday. With a magnifying glass in one hand and a millimeter rule in the other, he went carefully over the exterior of the body, dictating his findings to a pedal-activated recording machine.

As often happens within a few hours after death, the decedent had the ageless and inscrutable appearance of an image carved in marble or ivory by a master hand, rather than of someone who had once walked and talked, loved and suffered. Of principal interest was a clean bullet hole in the upper abdomen, surrounded by the unmistakable surface charring and powder tattooing characteristic of a point-blank gunshot wound. Dr. Valentine took several photographs before gently inserting a probe to explore the tract bored by the projectile and determine its direction of travel.

"The wound is in the midline of the epigastrium," he told the machine as well as his live audience, "eight and one-half centimeters below the xiphoid. It appears to have been made by a medium-

caliber bullet fired from below at a distance of less than ten centimeters from the skin surface and at an angle of approximately forty-five degrees from the vertical."

Since the deceased's somewhat threadbare two-piece flannel pajamas showed no corresponding hole and no evident traces of powder, the assumption was that the gun had been fired at her bare midriff, between pajama tops and bottoms.

By this time, Auburn and Stamaty were eager to get to the scene of the death, interview the decedent's son, search for a weapon, and resolve the fundamental question whether this was suicide or homicide. But they stood by patiently while Valentine proceeded in his brisk but meticulous fashion to carry out each step of the forensic autopsy, preserving specimens of organs and fluids for laboratory study…

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