“There’s a buzzer.” His eyes darted toward the desk. Will let him go. The kid reached underneath the desk and found the button. The rear set of doors arced open.
Light green tiled walls. Dark green linoleum floor. Chemical smells. Bright lights. Low ceiling. About the size of a school classroom. There was a body at the front of the room. Elderly man. Wrinkled skin. White tufts of hair. A cloth covered his genitals. Tubes went out of his neck and connected him to a machine with a canister.
The walk-in freezer was in the back. Large, stainless steel door. Reinforced glass window. Amanda was already there. Her hand hovered over a green, lighted button to open the door.
Will traversed the room. This was the second time today he’d walked toward an unknown, thinking that he was going to find Angie’s body. His vision sharpened. His ears picked up every sound.
The freezer door made a heavy clicking sound. Cold air seeped out from around the edges. An automatic arm opened the door at a glacial pace. Will had worked in a grocery store once. The walk-in where they kept the frozen foods was not dissimilar. Shelves on each side. Six tiers evenly spaced floor-to-ceiling. About fifteen feet deep, maybe ten feet high. Instead of bags of peas on the shelves, there were black body bags.
Four on one side. Four on the other.
“Fuck me.” Belcamino ripped a clipboard off the wall. He ran into the freezer. He checked the labels on the bags against the list. He was on the last body when he stopped. “There’s no tag.”
Will started to go inside. Sara caught him by the wrist. “You know you can’t be the one to find her.”
He had found her. He had figured out why the car was at the funeral home. He had led them into the basement. He couldn’t stop now. The bag was less than ten feet away. The shelves were tight. Angie’s nose would be less than half a foot from the corpse above her. She was claustrophobic. She was terrified of tight spaces.
“Will.” Sara’s hand moved to his arm. “You need to let them take care of her, okay? Let Charlie do his job. He has to take photographs. The bag needs to be preserved for fingerprints. There could be trace evidence on the floor. We have to do this the right way, or we’ll never be able to find out why she was left here.”
He knew all of this was true, but he couldn’t move.
“Come on.” She pulled at his arm.
He stepped back, then back again.
Charlie opened his duffel. He slipped on a pair of shoe protectors, then gloves. He put a fresh card in his camera. He checked the batteries, confirmed the date and time.
He started outside the freezer, slowly working his way in. He photographed the bag from every angle, kneeling down, leaning over the other bodies. He used his ruler for scale. He left marked cards on items of interest. It felt like an hour had passed before he finally told Ray Belcamino, “Get a gurney. The space is too tight. We’ll need to move her so we can open the bag.”
Belcamino disappeared into another room. He returned with a gurney. A white sheet was folded on the center. He kicked the wheels straight and forced the gurney up the small ramp that led to the freezer.
Charlie handed him a pair of gloves.
Obviously, moving bodies was a job that Belcamino had done on his own before. He muscled the black bag onto the gurney like he was moving a rolled carpet. Will had to look away, because he was going to hit the kid if he had to watch him a second longer.
He heard the gurney being rolled out, the freezer door shutting with a thunk.
Amanda said, “Thank you, Mr. Belcamino. You can wait upstairs.”
Belcamino offered no protest as he left the room.
Charlie took more photographs. He dragged over a step stool that was against the wall. He stood over the bag and took more photos. He used the ruler again to document scale.
Will stared at the contours of the black bag. He couldn’t make sense of what was underneath. And then he realized that the body was on its side, that whoever had taken it from the trunk had left it in the same position in which it had died.
Angie always slept on her side, close to him but not touching him. Sometimes at night, her breath would tickle his ear and he would have to turn over so that he could go to sleep.
“Faith?” Charlie held out an extra pair of gloves. The fingers dangled in the air for a second before Faith finally took them.
Her hands were obviously sweating. She struggled to pull on the gloves. Her jaw was clamped tight. She hated dead bodies. She hated being in the morgue. She hated autopsies.
She grabbed the zipper and started to pull.
The sound was like a rip. Something tearing apart. Something breaking. The body was turned away from them. Will saw dark hair. Brown, the same color as Angie’s. The woman’s bare shoulder was revealed. The curve of her spine. The arc of her hip. Her legs were bent. Her hands were between her knees. Her toes were curled, the feet sickled.
Faith gagged. The smell was noxious, putrid. The body had been in the trunk for hours in the broiling sun. Heat had accelerated the decomposition. The skin was desiccated. The human body was made up of the same fiber and tissue as any other mammal. Both had the same reaction to heat, which was to release fluids.
Charlie spread open the bag. A trickle of blood turned orange by cholesterol splattered onto the floor.
Faith gagged again. She put the back of her hand under her nose. She squeezed her eyes closed. She was standing on the opposite side of the gurney. She had seen the face. She shook her head. “I can’t tell if it’s her. She’s just—”
“Beaten,” Charlie said.
Will looked at her back, blackened with patches that looked like soot. The same pattern was on her legs. On the soles of her feet.
“Bleach,” Sara said. The odor steamed off the bag.
“She wasn’t scrubbed clean, though. It looks like the bleach was poured. Almost sloshed.”
“Her clothes are gone,” Amanda noted. “Someone was worried about trace evidence.”
Faith said, “She was somewhere other than the car.”
“Her face looks like someone took a bat to her.” Charlie did a cursory examination. “Contusions and lacerations on the face and neck. Fingernail scrapes. It looks like bones were broken.” He knelt down with the camera, zooming in on the head, neck, chest, torso. “Multiple stab wounds.” He asked Will. “Does she have any identifying marks? Tattoos?”
Will shook his head.
Then he remembered.
Time moved in double frame, as if someone had pressed the fast-forward on his life. Will was pulling away from Sara. He was walking around the gurney. He was pushing Charlie aside. He was looking at the body, the deep black bruises, the cuts, the mottled skin, and there it was: a single mole on her breast. Was it in the same place? Why couldn’t he remember where the mole was supposed to be?
He found himself on his knees. He looked at her face.
Bloated. Unrecognizable.
Her head was swollen to twice its size, black and red marks crisscrossing her face. Her lips were leaking fluid. Her nose was twisted to the side. More like a Halloween mask than a face.
Was it Angie?
Did it feel like Angie?
The numbness inside of Will had never really gone away. He felt nothing looking at this woman. He noticed the things he would notice on any case. Domestic homicide. Battery. Assault. Mouth open. Teeth broken. Lips chapped and swollen like too-ripe fruit. Her eyelids were thick, the consistency of wet bread. Blue veins and red arteries shot through almost translucent skin. Her cheek had been sliced with a very sharp knife or a razor. The skin flapped back, hanging open like a page in a book. He saw tissue, sinew, stark white of bone.
He looked at her hands. They were balled together between her bent knees. The heat had curled her fingers. Decomposition had cracked open the skin. Clear liquid seeped out from the joints of her knuckles. The ring around her finger had broken apart.
Angie’s wedding ring.
Green plastic with a bright yellow sunflower. Will
had wasted three quarters on a bubble gum machine before the ring had come out. The dare had been that Angie would marry him if it took less than four quarters. She never backed down from a dare. She had married him. She had lasted ten days before he came home from work and found that all of her clothes were gone.
Will opened his mouth. He breathed in and out.
Amanda asked, “Will?”
Will shook his head. This wasn’t right. Someone had planted the ring. He would know instinctively if this was Angie. He stood up. He said, “It’s not her.”
Faith asked, “What about the ring?”
Will kept shaking his head. More looks were being exchanged. They clearly thought he was in denial, but they were wrong. Maybe when he was outside looking at the bloodied car, hearing Amanda run down the evidence, he had let himself think it might be Angie, but now that he was in the same room with this body, this stranger, he was certain that she was still alive.
It was what Sara said. He did not feel the hollowness. He did not feel an absence of the heart.
Charlie said, “I have a mobile fingerprint scanner.”
“Her finger pads are cracked open. It’ll be hard to get a print.”
“We can still try, but we’ll have to go upstairs to get a signal.”
“She’s in full rigor.”
Will looked at the woman’s face again. It was like trying to read a book. He could see pieces but not the whole. The eyelashes were clumped together. The lip was torn apart. The jaw was set, roped like a cable on a suspension bridge. Rigor mortis. The coagulation of muscle proteins. It started in the eyelids, neck, jaw. All the muscles of the body stiffened, fixing the corpse in place.
Faith asked, “That means she’s been dead for three to four hours?”
“Longer,” Sara said, but she didn’t say how much longer.
Amanda asked, “How do we get fingerprints when her hands are curled?”
“You’ll have to break the fingers.”
“Would it be easier if she were on her back?”
“I’ll need help turning her.”
Will walked away from them to the other side of the room. The elderly man was still lying on the gurney. Will tried to figure out the machines. Yellow fluid lurched around inside the canister. An orange tube came out of the bottom. There was some kind of pump working. He heard the motor turning, the shhh of a bellow moving air. One liquid being pushed out. Another liquid being pushed in. He followed the tube to the man’s carotid. The liquid passed through a heavy gauge needle. There was another tube dropped over the side of the table, resting on the rusted edge of a floor drain.
Snap.
Like a twig being broken.
Snap.
Will kept his back to them. He didn’t want to know who broke open the fingers.
Snap.
“Okay,” Charlie said. “I think that’s good.”
“Her fingers are a mess,” Sara said. “I don’t think the scanner will be able to pick up the ridges.”
“Try,” Amanda told them.
There was a rustling sound, a click, three rapid beeps. The mobile fingerprint scanner. Biometrics. There was an injection molded dock with a 30-pin iPhone connector. The dock had a silver pad. The pad scanned the fingerprint. An app on the phone processed the scan into a 256-bit grayscale, 508 dpi image, then transmitted the data to the GBI’s Live Scan servers, where the print was compared against the hundreds of thousands of prints stored in the system.
The only thing required was the dock and a phone with a signal.
Charlie was holding both in his hands as he walked toward the vestibule. He told Will, “It’s iffy because of the damage, but we might be able to get a hit.”
Will didn’t know why this information was directed specifically to him. He looked at his watch. Violent crimes tended to peak around 10:00 PM. The servers would be processing thousands of requests. Even on a slow day, the results could take anywhere from five minutes to twenty-four hours, and then the GBI required that the prints had to be peer reviewed by a group of human beings who could reach a consensus on whether or not the computer match met the threshold for a legal level of certainty.
Faith said, “Sara?”
Something about her tone of voice made Will turn around.
Faith was standing at the foot of the gurney. She was looking down. The dead woman’s feet were raised off the table, frozen by rigor mortis. Her hands between her knees had opened her legs and her open legs gave a clear view of what was between them.
Rape, Will thought. The woman who could not be Angie had not just been strangled and beaten and stabbed. Sara was going to tell him that she had been raped.
“Will?” Sara waited for him to look at her. “Did Angie ever have a child?”
He couldn’t understand the question.
Sara said, “She has an episiotomy scar.”
Will had never heard the word before. “From an assault?”
“From having a baby.”
He shook his head. Angie had been pregnant before, but not by Will. “She had an abortion eight years ago.”
Faith said, “That’s not how you get the scar.”
Sara said, “It’s a surgical incision made in the perineum during a vaginal birth.”
Faith translated, “They cut you open down there so the baby can come out.”
Will still didn’t understand. It was like looking at the dead woman’s face. He recognized the words, but not the sense.
Sara asked, “Does your chest feel tight?”
Will looked down. He was rubbing his chest again.
Faith said, “He wasn’t feeling well before.”
“You’re wrong,” Will said. “I don’t think it’s her.”
Sara was pushing him backward. The double doors opened. They stuttered closed. They were in the vestibule. Will was sitting at the metal desk. All three of them were hovering over him like in his worst kind of nightmare.
Sara said, “Take some deep breaths for me.”
Amanda said, “I have some Xanax.” There was an enamel pill case in her hand. Pink base, roses on the lid. It was the sort of thing an old lady would use for her sniffing salts.
Sara said, “Put this under your tongue.”
Will complied without even thinking. The pill tasted bitter. He could feel it melting under his tongue. Saliva filled his mouth. He had to swallow.
“It’ll take a few minutes.” Sara started rubbing his back like he was a kid at the hospital. Will didn’t like it. He hated being fussed over.
He leaned over, putting his head between his knees, pretending like he was dizzy. Sara rubbed his back some more. He palmed the pill.
“Just breathe.” Sara’s fingers went to his wrist. She was taking his pulse. “You’re okay.”
Will sat up.
Sara was watching his every move. Amanda still held the open pill case in her hand. Faith had disappeared.
Sara asked, “Okay?”
“I don’t think it’s her,” Will repeated, but if anything, saying the words a second time made him question whether or not they were true. “She never had a baby.”
“She did,” Amanda said. Will watched her mouth move. Her lipstick was smudged. “Twenty-seven years ago, Angie disappeared from her foster placement. Three months later, she showed up at the hospital. She was in labor. She delivered a girl. She left before social services could arrive.”
The news should’ve hit him like a lightning strike, but nothing about Angie could surprise him anymore.
Sara asked, “How old was she?”
“Sixteen.”
1989.
Will was stuck at the children’s home. No one wanted a teenage boy around, especially one who was taller than all of his teachers. Angie was living with a couple who took in kids for a living. They had anywhere from eight to fifteen kids at a time stacked into bunk beds four to a room.
Will asked Amanda, “How did you find out about this?”
“The same way I find out a
bout everything.” Amanda’s voice was hard. They never talked about the fact that she had followed Will from infancy, that throughout his life, she had been the invisible hand that had redirected him whenever he got off course. Had she corrected Angie, too, steering her away from Will?
He asked, “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything.” Amanda dropped the pill case back into her pocket. “Angie disappeared. She abandoned her child. None of this should surprise you.”
Sara asked, “Did the baby survive?”
“Yes. I never found out what happened to her. She was lost in the system.”
Their marriage application.
Angie had filled out the form. They were sitting outside the probate office. The sunflower ring was already on her finger. Angie had read the questions aloud. “Over the age of sixteen? Sure. Ever been married before? Not that you know of. Father’s name? Who the fuck knows. Mother’s name? Doesn’t matter. Related to the intended spouse—uh-oh.” Her pen scratched the paper as she scribbled in the answers. “Children? Not me, baby.” She had laughed her deep, husky laugh. “Not that I know of anyway . . .”
Amanda said, “The daughter was born in January. She would be twenty-seven now. Delilah Palmer is twenty-two.”
Sara cleared her throat. “Do you know who the father is?”
Amanda said, “It’s not Will.”
Will wondered if that was true. That time in the basement. They hadn’t used a condom. Angie wasn’t on the pill. Then again, Will wasn’t the only boy she took into the basement.
Sara’s fingers were on his wrist again. “Your pulse is still thready.”
Will pulled away his hand. He stood up. He looked at the closed double doors. He did not need to see the body again to know the truth.
The sunflower ring. The car. The blood.
Her ring. Her car. Her blood.
Her baby.
Angie would abandon a baby. For some inexplicable reason, Will accepted this as proof above everything else. Angie did not have the capacity or the desire to care for something every single day for the rest of her life. Self-survival, not empathy, had always been her guiding principle. Will had seen it last Saturday and he could easily see it happening twenty-seven years ago. Angie went to the hospital. She’d had the baby. She’d left as soon as possible.
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