The reporters started to dissipate, off to file their stories—though Will was fairly certain that none of them would take responsibility for failing to fact-check their reports before running the specious rumor about the so-called Kidney Killer.
Amanda’s voice was a low grumble that Will could barely make out when she told Faith, “Go.”
Faith didn’t need an explanation, nor did she need backup, but she still grabbed Will by the arm as she walked toward the crowd of reporters. She brushed past Sam, and she must’ve said something to him because the man started following her toward a narrow alley between the hospital and the parking garage.
Sam said, “Caught the dragon off guard, didn’t I?”
Faith indicated Will. “Agent Trent, this is Sam Lawson, professional asshole.”
Sam flashed him a smile. “Pleased to meet you.”
Will didn’t offer a response, and Sam didn’t appear to mind. The reporter was more interested in Faith, and he was looking at her in such a predatory way that Will felt a caveman urge to punch the guy squarely in the jaw.
Sam said, “Damn, Faith, you’re looking really hot.”
“Amanda’s pissed at you.”
“Isn’t she always?”
“You don’t want to be on her bad side, Sam. You remember what happened last time.”
“The great thing about drinking so much is that I don’t.” He was grinning again, looking her up and down. “You look really good, babe. I mean—just fantastic.”
She shook her head, though Will could tell she was softening. He’d never seen her look at a man the way she was looking at Sam Lawson. There was definitely something unresolved between them. Will had never felt more like a third wheel in his life.
Thankfully, Faith seemed to realize she was here for a reason. “Did Rockdale give you Zabel’s sister?”
“Reporters’ sources are confidential,” Sam answered, all but confirming her guess.
Faith asked, “What’s Joelyn’s statement?”
“In a nutshell, she said you guys stood around with your thumbs up your asses for three hours arguing about who would get the case while her sister was dying up in a tree.”
Faith’s lips were a thin white line. Will felt physically ill. Sam must have talked to the sister right after Faith had, which explained why the reporter had been so sure Amanda was in the dark.
Finally, Faith asked, “Did you feed Zabel that information?”
“You know me better than that.”
“Rockdale fed her the information, then you got her on the record.”
He shrugged another confirmation. “I’m a reporter, Faith. I’m just doing my job.”
“That’s a pretty shitty job—ambushing grieving family members, trashing the cops, printing what you know are lies.”
“Now you know why I was a drunk for so many years.”
Faith tucked her hands into her hips, gave a heavy, frustrated sigh. “That’s not what happened with Jackie Zabel.”
“I figured it wasn’t.” Sam took out his notepad and pen. “So give me something else to lead with.”
“You know I can’t—”
“Tell me about the cave. I heard he had a boat battery down there so he could burn them.”
The boat battery was what they called “guilty knowledge,” the sort of information only the killer would know. There were a handful of people who had seen the evidence Charlie Reed had collected belowground, and they all wore badges. At least for now.
Faith said what Will was thinking. “Either Galloway or Fierro is feeding you inside information. They get to screw us over, and you get your front-page story. Win-win, right?”
Sam’s toothy grin confirmed her speculation. Still he said, “Why would I talk to Rockdale when you’re my inside man on this case?”
Will had seen Faith’s temper turn on a dime over the last few weeks, and it was nice to not be on the receiving end of her anger for a change. She told Sam, “I’m not your inside anything, asshole, and your facts are wrong.”
“Set me straight, babe.”
She seemed about to, but sanity caught up with her at the last minute. “The GBI has no official comment on Joelyn Zabel’s statement.”
“Can I quote you on that?”
“Quote this, babe.”
Will followed Faith to the car, but not before flashing a smile at the reporter. He was pretty sure the gesture Faith had made was not something you could put in a newspaper.
CHAPTER NINE
—
Sara had spent the last three and a half years perfecting her denial skills, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that it took a solid hour before she realized what a horrible mistake she had made by offering her services to Amanda Wagner. In that hour, she’d managed to drive home, shower, change her clothes and get all the way to the basement of City Hall East before the truth hit her like a sledgehammer. She had put her hand to the door marked GBI MEDICAL EXAMINER, then stopped, unable to open it. Another city. Another morgue. Another way to miss Jeffrey.
Was it wrong to say that she had loved working with her husband? That she had looked at him over the body of a gunshot victim or drunken driver and felt like her life was complete? It seemed macabre and foolish and all the things that Sara had thought she’d put behind her when she moved to Atlanta, but here she was again, her hand pressed against a door that separated life and death, incapable of opening it.
She leaned her back against the wall, staring at the painted letters on the opaque glass. Wasn’t this where they had brought Jeffrey? Wasn’t Pete Hanson the man who had dissected her husband’s beautiful body? Sara had the coroner’s report somewhere. At the time, it had seemed of vital importance that she have all the information pertaining to his death—the toxicology, the weights and measures of organ, tissue and bone. She had watched Jeffrey die back in Grant County, but this place, this basement under City Hall, was where everything that had made him a human being had been reduced, removed, redacted.
What was it, exactly, that had convinced Sara to bring herself to this place? She thought about the people she had come into contact with over the last few hours: Felix McGhee—the lost look on his pale face, his lower lip trembling as he searched the hospital corridors for his mother, insisting she would never leave him alone. Will Trent offering the child his handkerchief. Sara had thought that her father and Jeffrey were the only two men left on earth who carried them around anymore. And then Amanda Wagner, commenting on the funeral.
Sara had been so sedated the day Jeffrey was buried that she’d barely been able to stand. Her cousin had kept his arm around her waist, literally holding her up so that she could walk to Jeffrey’s grave. Sara had held her hand over the coffin that lay in the ground, her fingers refusing to release the clump of dirt she held. Finally, she had given up, clutching her fist to her chest, wanting to smooth the dirt onto her face, inhale it, climb into the earth with Jeffrey and hold him until her lungs could no longer draw breath.
Sara put her hand in the back pocket of her jeans, felt the letter there. She had folded it so many times that the envelope was tearing at the crease, showing the bright yellow of the legal paper inside. What would she do if one day it suddenly opened? What would she do if she happened to glance down one morning and saw the neat scrawl, the pained explanations or blatant excuses from the woman whose actions had led to Jeffrey’s death?
“Sara Linton!” Pete Hanson boomed as his foot hit the bottom stair. He was wearing a bright Hawaiian shirt, a style she recalled that he favored, and the expression on his face was a mix of delight and curiosity. “To what do I owe this tremendous pleasure?”
She told him the truth. “I managed to worm my way onto one of your cases.”
“Ah, the student taking over for the teacher.”
“I don’t think you’re ready to give all this up.”
He gave her a bawdy wink. “You know I’ve got the heart of a nineteen-year-old.”
Sara recognized the setu
p. “Still keep it in a jar over your desk?”
Pete guffawed as if he was hearing the line for the first time.
Sara thought she should explain herself, offering, “I saw one of the victims at the hospital last night.”
“I heard about her. Torture, assault?”
“Yes.”
“Prognosis?”
“They’re trying to get the infection under control.” Sara didn’t elaborate, but she didn’t need to. Pete saw his share of hospital patients who’d not responded to antibiotic treatment.
“Did you get a rape kit?”
“There wasn’t enough time pre-op, and post—”
“Spoils the chain of evidence,” he provided. Pete was up on his case law. Anna had been doused in Betadine, exposed to countless different environments. Any good defense attorney could find an expert witness who would argue that a rape kit taken after a victim had undergone the rigors of surgery was too contaminated to use as evidence.
Sara told him, “I managed to remove some splinters from under her nails, but I thought the best thing I could offer is a forensic comparison between the two victims.”
“Rather dubious reasoning, but I’m so happy to see you that I’ll overlook your faulty logic.”
She smiled; Pete had always been blunt in that polite, southern way—one of the reasons he made such a great teacher. “Thank you.”
“The pleasure of your company is more than enough reward.” He opened the door, ushering her inside. Sara hesitated, and he pointed out, “Hard to see from the hallway.”
Sara put on what she thought of as her game face as she followed him into the morgue. The smell hit her first. She had always thought the best way to describe it would be cloying, a word that made no sense until you smelled something cloying for yourself. The predominant odor wasn’t from the dead but from the chemicals used around them. Before scalpel touched flesh, the deceased were catalogued, X-rayed, photographed, stripped and washed down with disinfectant. A different cleaner was used to swab the floors, another to wash down the stainless steel tables; yet another chemical cleaned and sterilized the tools of autopsy. Together, they created an unforgettable, overly sweet smell that permeated your skin, lived in the back of your nose so that you didn’t realize it was there until you had been away from it for a while.
Sara followed Pete to the back of the room, feeling caught in his wake. The morgue was as far from the constant hustle of Grady as Grant County was from Grand Central. Unlike the endless treadmill of cases in the ER, an autopsy was a contained question that almost always had an answer. Blood, fluid, organ, tissue—each component contributed a piece to the puzzle. A body could not lie. The dead could not always take their secrets to the grave.
Almost two and a half million people die in America each year. Georgia is responsible for about seventy thousand of these deaths, less than a thousand of which are homicides. By state law, any unattended death—which is to say a person who dies outside of a hospital or nursing home—has to be investigated. Small towns that do not often see violent death, or communities that are so strapped for cash that the local funeral director fills in for the job of coroner, usually let the state handle their criminal cases. The majority of them end up in the Atlanta morgue. Which explained why half the tables were occupied with corpses in various stages of autopsy.
“Snoopy,” Pete said, calling to an elderly black man in scrubs. “This is Dr. Sara Linton. She’s going to be assisting me on the Zabel case. Where are we?”
The man didn’t acknowledge Sara as he told Pete, “X-rays are on the screen. I can bring her out now if you want.”
“Good man.” Pete went to the computer and tapped the keyboard. A series of X-rays came onto the screen. “Technology!” Pete exclaimed, and Sara could not help but be impressed. Back in Grant County, the morgue had been in the basement of the hospital, almost an afterthought. The X-ray machine was designed for living humans, unlike the setup here, where it didn’t really matter how much radiation shot into the dead body. The films were pristine, read on a twenty-four-inch flat-panel monitor instead of a lightbox that flickered enough to cause an epileptic fit. The single porcelain table Sara had used in Grant was no match for the rows of stainless steel gurneys behind her. She could see junior coroners and medical investigators bustling back and forth in the glassed-off hallway running beside the morgue. She realized that she and Pete were alone, the only living beings in the main autopsy suite.
“We cleared out all the other cases when we brought him in,” Pete said, and for a moment, Sara did not understand what he meant.
He pointed to an empty gurney, the last in the row. “This is where I worked on him.”
Sara stared at the empty table, wondering why the image didn’t flash in her head, that horrible vision of the last time she had seen her husband. Instead, all she saw was a clean gurney, the overhead light bouncing off the dull stainless steel. This is where Pete collected the evidence that had led to Jeffrey’s killer. This is where the case broke open, proving without a shadow of a doubt who was involved in his murder.
Standing here now, Sara had expected her memories to overwhelm her, but there was only calmness, a certainty of purpose. Good things were done here. People were helped, even in death. Particularly in death.
Slowly, she turned back to Pete, still not seeing Jeffrey, but feeling him, as if he was in the room with her. Why was that? Why was it that after three and a half years of begging her brain to come up with some sensation that might replicate what it felt like to have Jeffrey with her, being in the morgue had brought him to her in a flash?
Most cops hated sitting in on an autopsy, and Jeffrey was no exception, but he considered his attendance a sign of respect, a promise to the victim that he would do everything he could to bring the killer to justice. That was why he had become a cop—not just to help the innocent, but to punish the criminals who preyed upon them.
In all honesty, that was why Sara had taken the coroner’s job. Jeffrey hadn’t even heard of Grant County the first time she had walked into the morgue under the hospital, examined a victim, helped break a case. Many years ago, Sara had seen violence firsthand, had herself been the victim of a horrific assault. Every Y-incision she made, every sample she collected, every time she testified in court to the horrors she had documented, she had felt a righteous revenge burning in her chest.
“Sara?”
She realized she’d gone quiet. She had to clear her throat before she could tell Pete, “I had Grady send over the films of our Jane Doe from last night. She was able to speak before she went under. We think her name is Anna.”
He clicked through to the file, pulling up Anna’s X-rays onscreen. “Is she conscious?”
“I called the hospital before I got here. She’s still out.”
“Neurologic damage?”
“She pulled through the surgery, which is more than anyone expected. Reflexes are good, pupils are still nonreactive. There’s some swelling in her brain. They’ve got a scan scheduled for later today. It’s the infection that’s the real concern. They’re doing some cultures, trying to figure out the best way to treat it. Sanderson called in the CDC.”
“Oh, my.” Pete was studying the X-ray. “How much hand strength do you think that would take, ripping out the rib?”
“She was starved, dehydrated. I suppose that would’ve made it easier.”
“Tied down—couldn’t have put up much of a fight. But, still … goodness. Reminds me of the third Mrs. Hanson. Vivian was a body builder, you know. Biceps as big around as my leg. Quite a woman.”
“Thank you, Pete. Thank you for taking care of him.”
He gave her another wink. “You earn respect by giving it to others.”
She recognized the dictum from his lectures.
“Snoopy,” Pete pronounced as the man pushed a gurney through the double doors. Jacquelyn Zabel’s head showed above a white sheet, her skin purple with lividity from hanging upside down in the tree. The colo
r was even darker around the woman’s lips, as if someone had smeared a handful of blueberries over her mouth. Sara noticed that the woman had been attractive, with only a few fine lines at the edges of her eyes to show age. Again, she was reminded of Anna, the fact that she, too, was a striking woman.
Pete seemed to be thinking the same thing. “Why is it that the more beautiful the woman, the more horrendous the crime?”
Sara shrugged. It was a phenomenon she’d seen as a coroner back in Grant County. Beautiful women tended to pay a heavier price where homicide was concerned.
“Put her in my spot,” Pete told his assistant.
Sara watched the expressionless way Snoopy approached his job, the methodical care he took as he angled the body toward an empty slot in the row. Pete was in the minority here; most of the people working in the morgue were either African-American or women. It was the same at Grady Hospital, which made sense, because Sara had noticed that the more horrible the job, the more likely a woman or minority was to do it. The irony was not lost on Sara that she was included in this mix.
Snoopy kicked down the brakes on the wheels and started to organize the various scalpels, knives and saws Pete would need over the next few hours. He had just pulled out a pair of large pruning shears that you normally find in the gardening section of a hardware store when Will and Faith walked into the room.
Will seemed nonplussed as they passed by open bodies. Faith, on the other hand, looked worse than she had when Sara had first seen her in the hospital. The woman’s lips were white, and she stared straight ahead as she walked past a man with his face peeled from his skull so the doctor could check for contusions.
“Dr. Linton,” Will began. “Thank you for coming. I know this is supposed to be your day off.”
Sara could only smile and nod, wondering at his formal tone. Will Trent sounded more like a banker with every passing minute. She was still having trouble reconciling the man with his job.
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