by Radclyffe
“The difference between cause and manner being?” Jay asked as she watched.
“The cause of death is whatever disease or biological incident led to cessation of life—overwhelming sepsis, heart failure, massive stroke, blood loss. The manner of death, at least in this state, is one of six—homicide, suicide, accidental, therapeutic misadventure, natural causes, and undetermined.”
Jay worked her way through the mental exercise. “So just assuming that our…subject…actually did die of an overdose, her cause of death would probably be respiratory failure, and the manner of death would be accidental, assuming she didn’t intend to die.”
“Very good. Just remember, the most obvious answer is not always the correct one.”
“I’ve already learned to tell the difference between zebras and otherwise.”
“You’ll be dealing with an entirely different zoo now.”
“No kidding,” Jay said, hoping she wouldn’t be bringing any of the local wildlife home on her.
“Ready for you, Doc,” Darrell called.
“Let’s get a look at the body while Darrell works the room,” Olivia said. “Suit up, Doctor.”
Jay checked her gloves just to be sure they were intact. In her years of surgical training, she’d punctured dozens of gloves during a particularly difficult dissection or when suturing, and she’d never particularly worried about it. Somehow, the specter of death felt far more dangerous than working with living patients, even those who were seriously infected and contagious. Just another way her world had flipped, and day was night and night was day.
Olivia stopped a foot from the body, and Jay paused beside her.
“The first step in every examination is to look,” Olivia said.
“No different than in the trauma unit.”
“Agreed,” Olivia said.
The body of a young Caucasian female lay curled on her side, her hands pillowed beneath her head as if she had lain down to take a nap. Her shoulder-length brown hair was tangled but fairly clean looking, as were her black knit miniskirt and lacy off-white T-style top. Her legs were bare and, rather than being drawn up into a fetal position as was common when asleep or falling into a drugged coma, were splayed and fully extended. A sandal matching the one on the girl’s right foot lay a few feet from the body. Kicked off when she seized, maybe? Jay frowned. “The position doesn’t look at all natural. I’ve never seen anyone lie down exactly like that. If she seized from an overdose, I’d expect some sign of fluid on or under the body. Don’t see any.”
“No,” Olivia said, “neither do I.” She shone her light over the body from head to toe, slowing over the eyes, the lips, and what was visible of the hands and feet. “What else do you see?”
“What I don’t see,” Jay said, “is any blood around the nose or mouth or anywhere else on the body, for that matter. No obvious trauma of any kind. Her skirt is zipped in the back and”—she knelt, taking care not to touch anything, even the floor, and angled her head—“she’s wearing panties.” She straightened with difficulty, careful not to put her cane down and disturb anything near the body. “She’s also wearing a tank top. Suggests she wasn’t assaulted, but doesn’t rule it out.” Jay scanned around the room. “I don’t see anything that looks like a coat, but maybe she didn’t have one.”
Darrell moved like a shadow behind them, and as he passed, he muttered, “Pretty good eye for a newbie.”
“Go on,” Olivia said.
“I’m not sure what else I should be seeing.”
“Fair enough.” Olivia handed Jay a tablet and pressed the on button. She tapped an icon. “This is the on-scene report. Bobbi will be taking care of most of the standard metadata, gathering it from the police and whatever witnesses she can find. Date, time of day, ambient temperature…here and here. Darrell will do the same for general contents of the room. You and I will focus on the body.”
“Is this the part where I get to be the scribe?”
“Actually, I believe that would be scribbler.”
Jay’s head jerked up, looking for a sign of amusement, but Olivia had already turned her attention back to the body. But Olivia had remembered, had even teased her a little. An unexpected wave of heat flowed through her, as pleasant as it was confusing. Jay pushed it aside and pulled the stylus from the small loop on the side of the tablet. “Okay. Your scribbler awaits.”
A stillness came over Olivia as she began to speak, her voice thoughtful, precise. Jay checked boxes, entered observations, said nothing, recognizing Olivia had moved into another space where all her senses were attuned to what she was observing. The entire process was intriguing.
“Look at the body again,” Olivia said as she crouched by the girl’s side. “Take your time. There are no right or wrong answers. Tell me what else you see. What you deduce from that.”
Jay took a breath, forced herself not to jump to conclusions. Tried to open herself to what was there before her. “She doesn’t look like a drug addict.”
“Tell me why,” Olivia said softly.
“She’s not malnourished, her hair is clean, her fingernails still have remnants of polish here and there.” Jay moved closer, bent her good knee, squatted awkwardly. “Can I borrow your light?”
Olivia handed it to her.
Jay did as Olivia had done, shining the light over the body, slowly, from head to toe. “There’s some kind of bruise over her rib cage—you can see it where her top is pulled up. Discoloration extending down onto her flank. Looks like it might go all the way to her hip beneath her skirt.”
“Lividity.”
Jay paused, dredging up old information from medical school. “I thought…I thought that was due to blood settling in dependent tissues.”
“It is.”
“Then why is this on the side that’s facing upward?”
“Darrell?” Olivia asked, quite certain Darrell had been listening to everything they’d been discussing.
He suddenly appeared right beside Jay. “Because somebody moved her.”
“So she didn’t die here?” Jay said.
“Not necessarily,” Darrell went on. “Could’ve been one of the EMTs or any of the police. Hell, could’ve been someone going through her clothes earlier, just looking for whatever fun stuff she’d taken.”
“Did you see anything that suggests she’d been dragged in?” Olivia asked him.
“No. I’ve got standard and infrareds of the floor and outside in the hall too. We might see something on them, but she could have been carried and we wouldn’t pick that up.”
“Any sign of a needle?” Olivia asked.
Darrell scoffed. “Only about a hundred. The CSIs are bagging everything. I don’t envy them running the scene.”
“Let’s get a liver temperature before we move her.”
“You got it.” Darrell opened his kit.
Olivia touched the body for the first time, gently flexing an arm. “Lividity is well established. She’s been dead for some time, but there’s no animal activity. She hasn’t been here very long.”
“No needle marks on her forearms,” Jay said.
“No needles in the immediate vicinity,” Olivia noted.
Bobbi appeared in the doorway. “No name, nobody saw her come in. There are a couple of kids stoned in a room on the first floor. They can’t remember when they got here, but she wasn’t with them.”
“Thanks, Bobbi.” Olivia straightened. “So we have an unidentified female, death under unexplained circumstances, possible OD. She’s one of ours.”
“What do you think?” Jay said, feeling the excitement of solving a puzzle despite thinking the dead would never call to her.
“I don’t think anything, Jay. I only have questions to be answered.”
“Yes, Obi-Wan,” Jay murmured.
Darrell barked a laugh. Olivia regarded her with one elegant brow arched. “Why don’t you help me turn the body.”
Chapter Six
Detective Lieutenant Rebecca Frye’s ce
ll phone vibrated in her pocket as she walked down the steps from the courthouse at Sixth and Market. She stepped out of the way of a group of tweens and the harried-looking older guy trying to shepherd them all inside—must be a field trip of some kind—and checked the readout on her cell. She recognized the number and swiped to answer. “Frye. What’s up?”
JT Sloan replied, “Maybe nothing—but we pulled a few snippets you might be interested in.”
Rebecca started walking again, deciphering Sloan’s message while headed around the corner to the parking lot. Her cyber chief never trusted a phone line, and she was used to Sloan’s cryptic verbal shorthand. The gist of this message was clear—Sloan had gotten a hit on a wiretap. They had only one major tap running, the one they’d set up on Zamora, and that had been dry for weeks. They were nearing the point when the DA would pull the warrant for it. Since they’d broken up Zamora’s prostitution ring and derailed his trafficking of young women from Eastern Europe, Zamora had scaled back on his high-profile activities. Rebecca had no doubt Zamora’s operation was still running drugs and girls and probably producing porn, but he’d clamped down on chatter from his people, upped security around his home and offices, and the streets were quiet. No doubt his enforcers were discouraging anyone from passing on info to the police. Even the best CIs were reluctant to risk bodily harm for a few bucks. Times like this she missed Sandy Sullivan working the streets. Sandy was turning out to be a solid cop, and she’d been a solid CI too. She’d been able to cut through the tangle of rumors always hovering over the streets like a spider’s web and tease out the bits of chatter that turned into a lead.
Frye grimaced. Sandy was safer now, and that was what mattered. “Something I should see?”
“You ought to drop around,” Sloan said.
Rebecca keyed her department vehicle, a nondescript gray Ford sedan, and slid in. “Fifteen minutes.”
“See you then.”
Rebecca tossed the phone onto the passenger seat and pulled around a slow-moving horse-drawn carriage on Fifth occupied by a pair of intrepid early spring tourists hunched in their too-light jackets. The rain had stopped and skies were clearing, but the temperature wasn’t going to top out much above fifty. Brisk weather in an open-air carriage.
The possibility of having a thread to pull that might unravel a weakness in Kratos Zamora’s highly sophisticated network made all the weeks of scratching for leads and coming up empty fade into the background. She and her team had known they were playing the long game—Zamora ran a legitimate import business in addition to being the head of a shadow enterprise with ties to prostitution, pornography, human trafficking, drugs, and gambling. The team had come close to snaring him after breaking up an operation that brought girls in from Eastern Europe and funneled them into a high-class prostitution ring, but Kratos had slithered free and let his brother Gregor, the muscle not the brains of the operation, take the fall. Gregor had died in prison soon after his arrest, and Rebecca would have bet her last dime Kratos had ordered the hit. Even family didn’t get between Kratos and the bottom line.
With Kratos upping security and muzzling all the small-time operators he employed, Rebecca and the rest of the High Profile Crimes Unit had been reduced to long-distance surveillance. And hoping for a lucky break. Maybe they finally had one.
Zamora’s main offices occupied a top floor in an exclusive high-rise overlooking the harbor. Sloan had set up her tap location a block away in an apartment with a clear sight line to Zamora’s glitzy office and an internal floating feed from the phone company switch to calls going in or out of his location. They had to filter through a lot of junk, but Sloan’s cyber sleuths were used to it. Every job had its tedium, and in this case, the payoff would be worth it.
Rebecca parked two blocks north of Sloan’s location and walked the rest of the way, just being cautious. Zamora almost certainly had eyes on his building, and his guys would recognize her if they saw her on the street, since she’d been the one to lock up Kratos’s brother Gregor.
As a brisk breeze tossed bits of trash around the sidewalk, she was glad she’d listened to her wife and worn a topcoat. She almost never wore more than a blazer, even in the winter, but Catherine was slowly breaking her of that habit. Subtly civilizing her. Smiling to herself, she climbed the brick stairs of an unassuming brownstone, one just like half a dozen others on the inner-city residential blocks that surrounded the new waterfront developments, and once inside, took the stairs to the fourth-floor apartment where Sloan and her cyber cops had set up operations.
When she knocked on the door to the street-facing apartment, a woman with a cap of sleek dark curls, honey-gold skin, striking green eyes, and a hint of playfulness in her smile opened the door for Rebecca to enter. In her form-fitting jeans and a T-shirt with a rock band logo, she’d easily pass for a tenant to anyone she passed in the hall or leaving the building. As she shut the door, she said, “Hi, Loo.”
“Sergeant,” Rebecca replied to the newest member of Sloan’s cyber division. Bianca Cormey had transferred in from Fraud after hearing Sloan give a presentation to the department about the rise in hacking, from both within and outside the country, and what Sloan’s freshly minted civilian-police blended unit was designed to do. Bianca had ten years’ experience working computers, tracking credit-card phishing schemes, and digging out hidden bank accounts. She’d told Sloan she was looking for a detail where she could go after high-profile criminals instead of low-level hacks, and Sloan had offered her a place in the HPCU.
Sloan, in her standard white T-shirt and dark jeans, sat in a wooden swivel desk chair working a keyboard in front of a bank of monitors as big as Rebecca’s TV. Rebecca tossed her coat over the back of a leather sofa that had seen better days and dropped into a chair next to Sloan.
“What you got for me?” Rebecca asked.
“Minute.” Sloan barely registered Rebecca’s presence, typical for her when she was on the hunt. Her dark gaze scanned from monitor to monitor, her fingers typing faster than Rebecca could follow.
A series of digital sound bars flowed onto the screens and Rebecca’s pulse kicked up a notch. She’d never known Sloan to be wrong about a cyber lead.
“Okay,” Sloan said, leaning back with a satisfied cat-versus-canary expression. “Bianca pulled this out from Zamora’s office line early this morning, and we’ve been working to authenticate the speakers.”
“Is it him?”
“Patience,” Sloan said, clearly enjoying her show. “One of his boys finally got sloppy and called his office line.”
Sloan hit a key, and after a brief run of static, a surprisingly clear voice came out of the speakers.
“Carlos? What is it?”
Sloan paused the recording. “Voiceprint clearly matches Zamora.”
“Nice,” Rebecca murmured. He sounded impatient, a little annoyed at having his morning interrupted. Not worried.
Sloan resumed the playback.
“Sorry, Boss. Thought you should know the Spics are trying to jam us up, maybe put the feds on us. They dumped a scag whore full of bird in our territor—”
“I’m afraid I have another call,” Zamora said tersely. “Someone will be in touch.”
The call went dead. The whole conversation lasted less than a minute, a miniscule sound bite in the hundreds of calls going in and out of Zamora’s offices all day long. Rebecca looked at Bianca.
“What do you make of that, Sergeant?”
Bianca straightened, a close approximation of standing at attention. Frye had that effect on everyone—she was the boss everyone wanted and loathed to disappoint. The best of the best, a cop’s cop. “I wouldn’t want to be Carlos right about now. He’s a capo, a holdover from Zamora’s father’s regime.”
Rebecca smiled. “Old dog, no new tricks. So he forgot about the ban on phone calls.”
“Probably,” Bianca said. “Or someone said they had a big problem and he wanted to make an impression with the big boss.”
Sloa
n grunted. “He did that, all right.”
“So…translation?” Rebecca said.
“The Spic reference is probably the Salvadorans. They’re pretty well established on the East Coast now. And they’re always looking to expand.”
“Yes,” Rebecca said. “Dell ran into them in Massachusetts not that long ago. Probably from the branch down here.” She glanced at Sloan. “Are they trying to move in on Zamora?”
“They’re trying to eliminate everyone,” Sloan said.
“We ought to talk to OC,” Bianca said, “find out who the players are.”
“If the Salvadorans are trying to move in on Zamora, he may retaliate quickly to make a statement,” Rebecca said. “Keep on this here. We’ll needed to work the streets a little harder—find out where the border skirmishes are shaping up. What’s the situation with this bird thing Carlos mentioned?”
Bianca frowned. “Never heard of it.”
“Sounds like a new drug,” Sloan put in.
“Let’s contact the narcs, find out what they know about it.” Rebecca stood. “I’ll see what I can find out about this dead girl. We might be looking at a turf war here.”
*
“Don’t put your hands underneath the body,” Olivia said, “or anywhere else you can’t see. There could be anything under there—from rats to needles to some fragile bit of evidence.”
“Right,” Jay muttered, trying not to think about what the rats might be doing. She carefully lifted the girl’s arm, which was unexpectedly supple. “No rigor. I forget the time period for that—if I ever actually knew it.”
“That will depend to some extent on the ambient temperature as well as her general muscle mass and level of activity just before death. What does her body temp tell you?”