Hardy Detective Agency featuring Hardy Boys Fan Fiction

Frank and Joe took all this in as they approached, heartsick at the prospect that the remains presently being unearthed belonged to Calvin, Sandra and Andrew Hunter.

Chief De Groot noticed the young investigators approaching, his expression grim; eyes downcast and pensive.

“Thanks for coming down,” he managed to say, and wasted no time confirming what they’d feared all along: “Clothes match the description of your missing couple. We just pulled out a wallet from the pockets of one of them…I.D. says it belongs to one Calvin Stuart Hunter.”

Frank inhaled sharply. Joe felt his shoulders slump in defeat.

So that was it. They could see the ‘graves’ several yards ahead still, but couldn’t yet see inside them. On the other hand, the sight of the decaying bodies probably wasn’t such a great idea, anyway.

“Chief,” Frank suddenly piped up, “what about the baby? Their son, Andrew…has there been a recovery?”

De Groot shot a look back at the graves. “No sign of that yet. Just the adults. Could be in a different location…”

A new, disquieting thought crossed Joe’s mind. “Do you think…scavengers might have…dug…and carried it off?”

“It’s possible,” De Groot said with a slight frown, then rubbed the back of his neck. “We know this particular area was disturbed by the hunting dog, but the owner claims he piled the dirt back on when he saw a hand coming up with the dog’s digging efforts. Those graves are about two feet deep. Probably the most the killer or killers were able to manage since the ground was still pretty hard from the winter freeze. Most cadaver dogs won’t be able to sniff out something buried much deeper than that in a general sweep of the area, never mind predators. It’s fortunate that dog was out here in the end, I guess. We might’ve never found ’em.”

“Glad he’s looking on the bright side,” Joe muttered sarcastically under his breath.

“I’ll be getting in touch with the family shortly,” De Groot said, ignoring Joe’s comment.

“No,” Frank interjected, “no…I’d rather do it myself. I promised them I would.”

“Suit yourself,” De Groot answered, and almost looked relieved that he didn’t have to be the one to bring bad news to the affected families.

“Chief,” Joe spoke up, “any cause of death been determined yet?”

“Nothing yet. They’re about to get the bodies out of here for autopsy. But the clothes do appear to be bloodstained. I expect we’ll find evidence of some sort of violent trauma, sad to say.”

For a moment, Frank wanted to point out that this discovery obviously discredited any theory that Calvin Hunter was a bored or unfaithful spouse capable of murdering Sandra and his infant son. But he thought better of bringing it up.

“I think we’re done here, Joe,” he said to his brother. “Chief, please call us the minute you get the autopsy results, or if you turn up the body of the baby.”

“Will do,” the other man replied. “And I just want to say I’m real sorry for what happened to your friends and all. We’ll do everything we can to get the folks who did this.”

“And so will we,” Frank said with conviction. “We’ll talk later.”

The brothers climbed back into the car, and Frank decided he would make the call right then on his cell phone. He honestly didn’t know what he was going to say. As if echoing his thoughts, Joe said: “How are we going to break it to them that we’ve found Cal and Sandy, but not the baby?”

“Yeah, I know,” Frank murmured. “And if baby Andrew isn’t here, then where is he?”

***

Officer Suze Figueroa knew that after the Area Detectives took over, her role in the discovery of the ‘Jane Doe’ in the filthy room was pretty much finished. She and partner Norm Bennis would file their report at the end of their tour, as they were first on the scene. Not that it was any big case, of course. From the drug paraphernalia scattered around the room, everything pointed towards a drug overdose. No signs of violence to the body or any sort of struggle were evident. But my, how she wanted to be in on the investigation, just for the hell of it! Not for the first time, she felt she could do so much more if she was a detective. Handing over the reins to someone else made her feel almost cheated.

Not so long ago, in an unusual but not unprecedented move, she and several other patrol cops had been made acting detectives for a brief period to cover the work load of a severely incapacitated detective corps. In that time, she and Bennis had stumbled upon a series of seemingly random deaths that turned out to be the work of a serial killer. In that newly elevated (but temporary) status, they were expected to do all the work of a detective, and Suze had loved almost every minute of the investigation that ensued.

It had been hard to resume her normal beat cop role once the regular detectives were able to return to the active duty roster.

But surely there would be nothing wrong having a few words with the medical examiner handling the ‘Jane Doe’ autopsy, even if Suze wasn’t a detective assigned to the case…

She wished right then that Nancy Drew was in her Area. In the CPD, there were 25 Districts, and each were divided into five separate detective Areas. Suze, being assigned to the First District - also known as ’Central’ - was in Area Four. She had asked around, and found out Nancy Drew had been working out of District 19 - also known as ‘Belmont’ - which meant she was an Area Three detective. Different Areas; different case assignments.

Suze had a feeling, though, that Nancy wouldn’t mind discussing a case if she happened to ask about it. It was then she remembered Nancy saying something about ‘stepping away’ from her duties for a while the afternoon they’d met at The Furlough. Suze fleetingly wondered what that was all about, and silently hoped all was going well with Nancy, whatever it may be.

Thinking back to the sight of the dead body and the room, Suze recalled being glad they’d been called to check it out before their lunch break, which generally happened at the mid-point of their tour. Not that she got queasy easily, but the stench had been pretty bad…plus all the bugs that had managed to find a way in there, in spite of the cool late-Winter temperatures…It was obvious the body had been there for a few days.

She came to a decision. She’d skip her usual one beer at the end of her tour and pay a quick visit to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s on West Harrison. Maybe even Bennis would want to tag along. It was odd, really, but there was just something about that Jane Doe that got under Suze’s skin…

When Suze arrived at the Medical Examiners’ building after her tour, the post-mortem on the ‘Jane Doe’ was already underway. Dr. Shawn Redding was conducting the external examination of the remains, making comments about his findings into a microphone as he worked.

Bennis had begged off, deciding instead to proceed with his usual routine of sharing a few beers with his colleagues, so Suze was alone on this trip.

Dr. Redding stopped what he was doing when Suze entered the lab.

“Can I help you, officer?” he asked uninterestedly.

“I’m Suze Figueroa. I just wanted to observe,” she replied, somewhat uncertainly.

“Any particular reason, Suze Fig-where-o-ah?”

“Well, me and my partner were FOS,” Suze responded, meaning First On Scene.

“So?”

“So, I just wanted to follow up,” Suze said.

Dr. Redding, a 40-ish man with rimless glasses sitting crookedly on a nose with a noticeably deviated septum and a face with angular features, looked up at her for a few moments. “You’ve never seen an autopsy before, or something? Don’t you have anything better to do? I’ll be very busy. I’m not going to have time to answer any puerile questions.”

Suze tried not to sound indignant. “No, I’ve observed a few autopsies, doctor; I was just here to see if you turned up anything…unusual.”

“You’re not a detective; you don’t need to be here.”

“Look, can I watch, or not?” Suze countered, letting her exasperation get the better of her.

“I‘m not going to get sick, or make childish comments. Plus, I need to head for home in an hour, anyway.”

“You can watch,” he grudgingly replied after a pause. “Just don’t get in my way. And don’t touch anything, for God’s sake, alright?”

Suze gave a curt nod, and positioned herself in the room well away from Dr. Redding’s working area, but would still allow her a view of the proceedings.

“Have we gotten an ID on the body yet?” Suze asked.

“I thought you weren’t going to ask any questions,” Dr. Redding snapped.

“I said I wasn’t going to ask any childish questions,” Suze shot back.

“We got a hit off AFIS,” he said, meaning the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. “Her name’s Natalia Murray.”

“So she had priors,” Suze mused thoughtfully.

“If you’re going to keep talking like this, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he said, fixing his gaze steady on her.

Suze shut her mouth and bit back a curt reply. This was perhaps the least helpful examiner she’d ever met. Probably thinks I’m less than dirt since I’m just a patrol cop and not a detective, she thought angrily. She folded her arms and instead tried to pay attention Dr. Redding as he added vocal notes to the autopsy recording about his findings.

He commented on the presence of a species of winter gnats on the clothes and body, and called a name Suze couldn’t hope to spell. “They appear to be Trichocera regelationis,” he said, “but I’ll need a forensic entomologist to be certain.” He put aside a sample of one specimen of the insect in a small test tube and stoppered it.

“No blowflies?” Suze asked, then quickly remembered Dr. Redding had wanted no questions.

“Not in the winter,” he said, surprising Suze that he even bothered to answer. “Might find a few yet, because blowflies tend to move to indoor places when it gets cold…our girl was found inside…but they’d mostly have concentrated on the facial region…These insects are mostly attracted to bodily fluids like blood. They can help us determine if there’s been a break in the skin from a stab wound, say, or if there’s been rape. The insects will congregate in those areas of trauma.”

“Can you tell how long she’s been dead?”

“Considering the rate of decay, my early estimate is three to four days,” Dr. Redding said, moving about the corpse, getting ready to start making the customary ‘Y’-incision. “But I’ll know more once I analyse things like stomach contents. The bugs, of course, will probably also come in handy.”

His scalpel sliced neatly though the dead flesh.

Suze at once wanted to look away, but knew no further harm was being done to the person that was once a young woman named Natalia Murray. She realised that now that he was actually working, Dr. Redding’s tongue was loose, and he was more willing to speak about what he was doing. Maybe he’d finally been convinced she wasn’t here as some sort of joke or prank.

She watched with interest as internal organs were removed and weighed, and how carefully everything was documented by Dr. Redding.

“The body was found with the usual trappings of a drug addict, no?”

Suze barely realised he was addressing her. “Uh, that’s right. Why do you ask?”

“Some studies have found that certain insects have shown a faster rate of growth after feeding on decaying tissue that had traces of substances like cocaine...wouldn‘t want to make the mistake of using the rate of development in some of these insects to gauge the length of time the body’s been lying around without confirming the presence of drugs.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” Suze said.

“We can use the stages of development of insects to tell us approximately how long someone’s been dead. It’s called forensic entomology.”

“Yes, I know that,” Suze said, “that’s why I asked about blowflies.”

“Right…Getting back to what I was saying: If that rate of growth for the insects has somehow been expedited due to the ingestion of cocaine, say, then we’d have to make sure we knew exactly how much the drugs affected this accelerated growth rate.”

“Are you going to request a toxicology report, then?”

“No.”

“Why not? I thought you just said you’d need to know for sure about the presence of drugs accumulated in the decaying tissues-”

“That’s if I was going to be using these insects as the sole basis for my determination of time since death,” Dr. Redding said. “Which I’m not. Tox screens are costly, you know.”

Oh, I know, Suze thought sullenly, thinking back with distaste to the cases she’d worked as an acting detective. She and Norm had been called to the carpet for requesting the expensive tests for what the Department deemed was a waste of resources. She folded her arms again, mentally berating herself for coming in the first place. This would just be another routine autopsy on a woman whose lifestyle had caught up with her. What a waste!

“Hmm…” Dr. Redding gave a surprised murmur.

“What?” Suze asked, alert once again.

“It appears our Miss Murray recently gave birth.”

“Really?!” Suze exclaimed. “How can you tell?”

“She’s had an episiotomy…I can still tell the incision hadn’t completely healed at the time of death.”

Suze was considering this silently.

“An episiotomy is when -” Dr. Redding began to explain.

“I know what an episiotomy is,” Suze said with impatience, a grimace on her face. “My Ob/Gyn made it sound so…innocuous… ‘A surgical incision to help facilitate childbirth’ is how it was put to me when I was going to give birth to my son, JJ.”

“Not an inaccurate description of the procedure,” Dr. Redding commented.

“Your bedside manner stinks, Dr. Redding,” Suze said, annoyed he showed little to no empathy towards what for her had been an unpleasant experience.

“In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t need to be pleasant when it comes to my ‘patients’, Officer Figueroa.”

“OK, fine, whatever,” Suze said gritting her teeth, deciding to let Dr. Redding’s obviously intrinsic lack of compassion drop, “but the question now is this: if Natalia Murray recently gave birth, then where’s the baby?”

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Disclaimer

The Hardy Boys belong to Simon and Schuster and the Stratemeyer Foundation. The Hardy Boys Fan Fiction authors of the Hardy Detective Agency have just borrowed them for an adventure or two. The authors promise to put the boys back when they are done with them. The authors do claim copyright to the original characters in this story. Please do not borrow original characters without express permission of the authors.