Mint Death

MINT DEATH JILL QUINT, MD FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST BOOK FOURTEEN ALEC PECHE Copyright © 2023 by ALEC PECHE All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’d like to thank Grace for giving me ideas for this story. I’d like to thank Ellen Falk for her editing. My manuscript was a nightmare before she fixed it. While my imagination is endless, my knowledge of grammar sadly is not. Alec March 2023 CONTENTS Mint Death Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 About the Author Also by ALEC PECHE MINT DEATH Ed Thomas was standing in front of the cutter. He was an employee of the United States Treasury’s Bureau of Printing and Engraving in Washington D.C. The cutter was taking sheets of twenty-dollar bills and cutting them into single notes. The machine did all the work; he was there just to stop it if it got jammed or wasn’t otherwise properly working. He’d been doing this exact job for fifteen years. He’d awoken with a little feeling of being off, but brushed it off and went to work. Now he was feeling dizzy and that sensation proceeded to get worse. So he hit the stop button on the machine as he needed to sit down, and he couldn’t sit down without turning the machine off first. He hit the off button and before he knew it, collapsed to the floor. His teammates looked over when they saw the machine stop. They wore ear plugs on the job to protect their hearing, so the hum of machinery was a little less noisy once the cutter came to a halt, though it took them a while to notice. The first person who looked over didn’t see Ed anywhere and assumed he had stopped the machine for an emergency bathroom break as that occasionally happened. When the machine hadn’t restarted ten minutes later, someone went looking for Ed. “Oh my God, Ed, did you fall?” Aaron said, shaking his arm. When there was no response he shouted, “Someone call 911.” Others rushed to join Aaron, while the call was made to emergency services. There was a complex protocol to let emergency responders inside the building. With millions of dollars of cash lying around, an armed security escort was required. Every employee at every stage of the money-printing process was required to stand at their station and make sure that no one left with newly printed bills. It slowed the responders arriving at Ed’s side by perhaps a minute, but it didn’t matter. Ed had died five minutes ago. CHAPTER 1 Jill Quint, MD, forensic pathologist and vintner, was in her kitchen drinking coffee and reading email. Her new husband, Nathan Conroy, would be asleep for a few more hours as he wasn’t the morning person that she was. It was raining outside, which was an event to always be celebrated in California. The ever-present drought had been the weather news for at least half of her forty-five years. She would accomplish no work on her vineyard until the afternoon, when the rain was projected to stop. By then Nathan would be at work and she could daydream about her tasting room, which she was going to start building as soon as the permits were approved by the county. Her phone rang, and the caller ID read “Washington DC.” There was a national election in another month and she and everybody else was getting hit with spam calls about candidates. She wondered if this was one of those? She sighed and connected the call. “Hello.” “Hello? I would like to speak to Dr. Jill Quint.” Oh gosh, this was going to be a spam call. “Yes, this is Dr. Quint,” Jill said in a clipped voice. She hoped it portrayed her annoyance with the caller. “My name is Melanie Thomas. My father died on the job yesterday. The police seem to think he had a heart attack. They won’t listen to me when I tell them that my dad was getting threats.” Jill felt bad. She had been rude in the way she answered the phone and was abrupt with the potential client. She sat up straight, grabbed her pen and paper that were next to her and started to take notes and ask questions. “Ms. Thomas, I’m so sorry for your loss. How old was your father? And did he have a heart condition?” “He was fifty-two and he had no history of heart disease. My grandfather is still alive and well.” “Would you know if the local coroner has completed the autopsy on your father?” “I don’t know. The police are not telling me much.” “You said your father was getting threats. What kind of threats? Were they over the telephone? Did he receive threatening emails? Did someone knock on his door and threaten him?” “He was getting letters in the mail.” “Do you have copies of the letters? What did the sender want him to do? Where did he die?” “My father was found dead at work. He operates the cutting machine at the US Bureau of Printing and Engraving. As sheets of new dollar bills come through his machine, it cuts them into individual bills. His co-workers said that they noticed the lack of sound which meant the machine was turned off. They thought dad needed an emergency bathroom break as that would be the only reason to turn the machine off unscheduled. When he didn’t return after ten minutes, they went looking for him and found him dead on the floor. They called emergency services, but it was too late. Dad was