Free The Mourning Sexton by Michael Baron

those childhood photos and whatever dirt he might be able to dig up on the defendants.
    He shook his head.
    Digging for dirt.
    As if he were some knight errant preparing to battle an evil empire instead of just another personal injury lawyer scrabbling for purchase in a one-car accident case.
    This is your brave new world,
he told himself.
A world where you hope an expert will tell you that the nice young woman survived long enough to experience the anguish of her own death. Welcome.
    He glanced over at the house. The living room shades were pulled back on a gloomy tableau. Shifrin sat on the threadbare couch and stared at the wall across the room, at the framed photographs of his dead wife and his dead child.
    Hirsch put the car in gear and pulled away.

CHAPTER 8

    D r. Henry Granger was over at the window again, squinting at an X-ray he was holding up to the light.
    Hirsch watched, intrigued. He was seated at the round table in the sunny breakfast room of Dr. Granger's two-story colonial in suburban Webster Groves. The room was as snug and cheerful as the doctor himself, who was in his seventies now—a spry man with ruddy cheeks, a shock of white hair, and clear blue eyes. The only hint of time's unkindness was the tremor in his hands.
    Hirsch took another sip of the fresh coffee that Mrs. Granger had insisted upon brewing when she'd returned from the grocery store and found the two of them in the breakfast room. She was in the den now, listening to the Brandenburg Concertos on the stereo as she knitted a sweater for one of her grandchildren. All six of those grandchildren were in the family portrait that hung on the breakfast room wall. In the photograph, she and Granger were seated on a loveseat, surrounded by their adult children and spouses and grandchildren, who ranged in age from elementary school to college. It was a vision of domestic happiness that underscored the wreckage of his own life. There were no family portraits in his apartment.
    “Intact,” the doctor mumbled as he studied the X-ray. “No question.”
    With his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose and a cardigan sweater buttoned over his blue dress shirt, Henry Granger could have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting of a Vermont country doctor. Actually, though, the first twenty-five years of his career more closely resembled a Charles Addams cartoon. He spent those years cutting up corpses in the subbasement morgue of one of the city's major hospitals. As the hospital's chief pathologist, he occasionally testified in criminal cases, and in the process developed a yen for the courtroom. He spent the final decade of his career as a plaintiff's expert witness and earned big fees testifying in a wide assortment of injury and death cases.
    They'd met years ago when Granger served as a medical expert in a case Hirsch was defending. He'd been a formidable opponent—intelligent, well-organized, articulate, unflappable, good courtroom demeanor. When Hirsch decided, after his lunch meeting with Marvin Guttner, that he needed to retain a medical expert with a background in pathology, Granger was his first choice. The doctor had been retired for several years, but he was intrigued enough by the request from an old adversary to agree to meet him. The timing was good, since Granger and his wife were leaving at the end of next week to spend a month in Tucson with their eldest daughter and her family.
    Now he was holding up another X-ray to the sunlight. This one appeared to be a front shot of the head and upper torso. The doctor was thorough, no question about that.
    Hirsch had assumed that Granger would be able to review the file in ten minutes. After all, the accident report (including witness statements) was just six pages long, the medical examiner's report was another two pages (plus six X-rays, three morgue photos, and a half page of lab results), and there was no autopsy report.
    But Granger was still at it after, Hirsch checked his watch,