“Then I’ll come back. I’ve lived with—with not knowing what happened to my mother for almost thirty-nine years. I can live with it a little longer. Look, Gin, I don’t expect this to make sense to you. But for as far back as I can remember, I’ve felt like my life was dragging me around. I want to change that. I want to feel like I can choose how it affects me.” He swallowed. “I want to see if I can find some fucking peace.”
“Jake—” Gin’s voice threatened to break. “You make it sound like this is more than a temporary separation. Like you’re—” She couldn’t bring herself to say the words you’re breaking up with me.
“I’m sorry,” Jake said quietly, but he didn’t meet her eyes. “I wish I could do better by you. That I could be what you need. But I can’t—not now.”
Gin choked back a sob, frantic to find the words to change his mind, when headlights flashed across their legs as a car made the turn. No—not a car, but a police SUV. Tuck had arrived.
“Please, don’t leave like this,” she pleaded. “Take some time to think about it, to—”
“I just want you to know that I love you,” Jake said with an air of sad finality. “Always have. Always will. Until the day they put me in the ground.”
Gin backed away, tears nearly blinding her—and then she was running, running as fast as she could away from the pain of losing him.
Toward the house, her family, the future she couldn’t yet imagine.
* * *
Gin managed to get her emotions under control by the time she walked into the house. She heard voices in the kitchen—Cherie excitedly telling her father all about the afternoon she’d spent with Gin and Richard.
“He was going to make me do putt-putt!” Cherie exclaimed merrily.
Richard laughed. “I was actually going to let her use my lucky putting iron,” he said.
“But we did Barbie hospital instead. Vice President Barbie broke her arm! And Doctor Barbie fixed her!” Cherie’s voice trailed into a huge yawn, and Tuck gathered her against him in a hug. At nearly fourteen, she was too big for him to carry, but she loved to snuggle against her father. Given her developmental delays, it was sometimes hard to remember that Cherie was on the verge of puberty.
“Hello, Gin,” Tuck said evenly. “Those were some mighty fine cookies you ladies made.”
“I helped,” Cherie said sleepily.
“I know you did, punkin. Okay, let’s let these fine folks get some sleep, just like you’re going to the minute we get home.”
“Not tired,” Cherie mumbled as her eyelids drifted closed.
Richard walked them to the door, and Gin could hear the two men talking. She started to help her mother clear the dishes, but Madeleine stopped her. “Are you all right? Of course you’re not all right. Look at you, honey.”
She held out her arms, and Gin walked into them and allowed her mother to hold her. “He’s moving to Tionesta,” she mumbled against her mother’s shoulder. “At least until the retreat center has been completed.” She explained that he was seeking counseling to deal with his mother’s death.
Madeleine nodded. “And the death of his father last year. Don’t forget that. He’s had a lot to cope with. Honey … this might not be forever. In fact, maybe it will end up even better than before, once he’s worked through these issues.”
“Maybe,” Gin snuffled, but her heart wasn’t in it.
Richard walked back into the room. “Cute kid,” he said heartily. “She can come back any—aw, hey, sweetie, are you okay?”
Gin pulled away from Madeleine and wiped her eyes. She didn’t think she could bear any more kindness just now. “I’m fine,” she mumbled. “I want you guys to know that I really appreciate you letting me stay here.”
“This is your home,” Richard said. “Always will be.”
11
On Thursday morning, Gin left early to try to beat the worst of the northbound traffic. She made excellent time and arrived early enough to treat herself to an espresso and a biscotti on the Strip before heading back to the morgue for the autopsy.
Stephen and Harvey Chozick, the chief medical examiner, were chatting in the break room. Gin set down the white pasteboard box, tied with a bright yellow ribbon, that she’d purchased at the bakery.
“Try some—they’re from Nina’s Biscotti,” she said, untying the bow and lifting the lid. “Best in the city.”
“I take back everything I ever said about you, Sullivan.” Bruce came into the break room and helped himself to a chocolate-drizzled pastry. Spotting his partner in the hall, he called, “Saw you pull up in Kennedy’s car this morning. Guess you were taking advantage of the benefits part of your friendship last night eh?”
“Detective Stillman, please keep the locker room humor out of my office,” Chozick said wearily.
“This is the break room,” Bruce pointed out around a mouthful of crumbs.
“Since everyone’s here, let’s get started,” Chozick said, ignoring him. “I’m sitting in on this one, given the likelihood of media scrutiny. We’ll want to make sure we cross every T and dot every I.”
They scrubbed and gloved up, and trooped into the morgue. The body looked quite different laid out on the steel surface than it had two days earlier in the black plastic garbage bag. It had been washed by the autopsy technicians and looked much less jarring. The man’s graying hair had been combed away from his face, and it was easy to guess that he’d been a striking man, with a strong jaw and pronounced cheekbones.
One week earlier, they’d been in this very same room, examining the body of Jake’s mother. It felt like a lifetime ago, and Gin forced herself not to think about Jake, a hundred and thirty miles away on the job site. She took a step forward, better to follow along as Stephen began recording his observations.
He made a thorough visual examination of the exterior of the body, confirming that embalming had taken place by the hole made by the trocar. He noted nothing extraordinary until he came to the wrists. When Stephen probed the ragged right stump, something inside Gin skidded. Not quite a jolt, more like a … memory.
She gazed, transfixed, at the damaged, abraded flesh and mangled tissues, trying to understand the almost nauseating flash of emotion that had flashed through her and just as quickly, dissipated. Something about the past. Something about …
She blinked, an image transposing itself for a split second over what was right in front of her—a dusty, sepia-toned memory from the past; and Gin suddenly knew exactly what it was and why it had come back just now. It was the eerie similarity between the body in front of her and one she’d encountered in her first days in Srebrenica, when everything she confronted was unfamiliar, shocking, confounding.
In time she would learn to discipline herself against the horror, to put clinical distance between herself and the pits filled with bones, to treat the task as a series of quantifiable steps, nothing more. But that day she’d been supervising two young men dressed in white coveralls and blue gloves who were gingerly bagging body parts at her direction, when they’d cleared a new area and come across skeletal remains that were nearly intact. It was the shock of seeing the remains of a man positioned as if he’d just been napping, his clothes dirty but whole, his arms cradling his head—except that his hands had been hacked off. She had let loose a cry and stumbled, twisting her ankle on a clod of dirt and nearly fell. She’d tried to brush it off as mere surprise, but in the young men’s eyes was a dull familiarity just short of sympathy.
It was far from the last time she’d see such unimaginable cruelty, but it was the first, and while she thought she’d healed from the trauma of the mission, her reaction just now was proof that it still haunted her, deep in her unconscious mind.
“Gin?” Stephen prompted, concern in his voice. She blinked and shook her head.
“Sorry, I … sorry.”
“No problem. I was just saying that these multiple parallel lacerations suggest a series of hacking blows,” Stephen said, pointing to the jagged, m
utilated flesh above the severed edges of the skin. “I note crushing of the carpal bones and the carpal tunnel itself.”
“Looks like someone threw up in there,” Bruce said.
Ignoring him, Stephen probed gently with a small steel instrument; following his movements intently, Gin’s concentration returned, and she relaxed slightly.
“Muscles are densely packed here, and given the damage it is difficult to identify … but I think this is the extensor carpi ulnaris. And on the other side here, the abductor policis longus. There is extensive damage to the tendons, the ligaments, the medial nerve.” He looked up at Gin.
“I concur,” Gin said stiffly. She was determined not to let her colleagues see how shaken she was. “Also, see the plastic deformation of the bone—I think it’s too pronounced for ante- or even perimortem amputation.”
“English, please,” Bruce demanded.
“Living bone has a certain degree of elasticity,” Stephen explained, pointing at the splintered bone protruding from the arm. “After death, the bone dries out. Trauma to living bone generally leads to an irregular or radiating ‘butterfly’ type of fracture, rather than jagged edges like these. So we would conclude that this injury happened after death.”
“But what about the blood? When I saw him at the scene, before you guys cleaned him up, I thought I saw dried blood on the, uh, where it got chopped off. And people don’t bleed after they’re dead, especially if they’ve been embalmed.”
“What you saw was probably a dried mixture of embalming fluid and bloody residue. That’s why we drew our conclusions from the condition of the bone, not the absence of blood,” Gin said.
“Still, the bone wouldn’t dry out right away,” Bruce said. “So can you tell how long this guy was dead by the way the bone broke?”
“Not really, unfortunately,” Gin said, warming to the subject as she regained her composure. “There are many factors that contribute to the rate of drying of the bone. In an earthen grave, that includes soil moisture, of course, as well as the water table, precipitation history, the mineral content of the soil, and other things. We can deduce that this amputation occurred after a significant amount of time had passed—weeks, at least, to dry to this extent, and that would probably not have been at the site where the body was discovered, because of the proximity to water and the dampness of the soil.”
“So you’re saying our dude had to be somewhere else—like a nice dry coffin—for at least a few weeks.”
“I can’t make such a specific conclusion, but that’s the general idea, yes.”
“Any idea what was used to chop that hand off?”
“I would say something heavy, with a sharp blade. With a blunt-edged weapon, we’d see more of a depressed fracture; we would expect to see bone fragments driven inward. But the splintering is more uniform, and the skin laceration was fairly clean.”
“So an axe, then.”
“I wouldn’t be that specific. Cartilage can occasionally retain tool marks, which can tell you if a blade was serrated, for instance. And sometimes microscopic examination of bone can reveal striation or gouge marks. But in this case there’s simply too much damage.”
Bruce shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder why we even bother to get you guys in here, at your pay grade. I could have guessed everything you’ve said so far—some guy used something to hack off this dead guy’s hands, and he made a hell of a mess in the process.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Bruce,” Stephen said sarcastically. “And we’re not done disappointing you yet.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Stephen walked to the head of the table, where he used his metal probe to part the lips, revealing even white teeth beneath.
“Identification through dental records isn’t going to be possible,” he said. “The deceased had full implants.”
“Aw, hell,” Bruce said. Gin almost felt sorry for him.
“That’s rather unusual,” Chozick said. “Estimating his age at between thirty-five and fifty-five, he would have been quite young to get them. Most people lose a tooth or two eventually—to injury, decay and gum disease, illness—but complete edentulism occurs rarely outside of the geriatric population.”
“How did you guess his age? Not that a twenty-year range is any help.”
“True,” Chozick said. “Without odontological and osteological methodology—determining age through teeth and bones—I’m really just making a visual assessment.”
“I agree with you, and I’ll go a bit further,” Gin said. “He has a significant amount of gray in his hair. Also, the skin tells us a lot. Over time, the four Ds—deterioration, deflation, discoloration, and descent—show evidence of age. We can’t really do much with color at this point, but I see lines and evidence of sun damage on the face and neck that occurred over time. Other changes include the hollowness under the eyes, the sagging of the eyelid, the loss of fatty tissue in the cheeks, the sagging of the jaw—as well as the effects of sarcopenia, or the loss of muscle mass. I’d actually estimate his age at between forty-five and fifty-five.”
“How about that, Stephen,” Bruce said. “She beat you by ten years. Okay, so we’ve got a middle-aged guy who lost all his teeth early. Great.”
“I do have one other … thought,” Gin said cautiously. “You see the unusually large forehead, jaw, and nose, and possible skull bossing—the protuberance of this bony ridge below the brow? I think he may have suffered from acromegaly, which is a disorder characterized by excess growth hormone after the growth plates have closed. We would expect to see unusually large hands, which we can’t confirm, of course, but these craniofacial abnormalities would be consistent with such a diagnosis.”
“What happens to people who have it?”
“To be honest, it’s often diagnosed in middle age, because people aren’t even aware of it. Symptoms include headaches and vision problems, so sometimes that causes people to seek help. Joint pain, too. And if it’s not treated, it can also lead to complications—high blood pressure, sleep apnea, type two diabetes.”
“Nothing that would have killed him, in other words. And there’s no way to use this condition in any of our search databases, especially if they don’t even know they have it.” Bruce looked at his watch. “Well, this has been a truly epic waste of my time.”
“Sorry we couldn’t be of more help,” Stephen called after him as he headed for the door. “Sometimes the dead are just assholes that way.”
At Gin’s startled expression, Stephen shrugged. “What can I say? I think he’s starting to rub off on me.”
* * *
On her way out, Gin decided to drop in on the forensic lab to visit Katie. She found the young technician bent over her microscope, classical guitar music playing softly in the background.
“Gin! How did the autopsy go?”
Gin gave her a brief summary, including her suspicion that the dead man suffered from acromegaly.
“I did notice those facial anomalies, but honestly, I just though he had what my mom always called ‘strong features.’” Katie shrugged. “I actually thought he must have been handsome. I mean, for an old guy.”
Gin laughed. “I won’t tell Liam.”
“God, that sounded a little creepy, didn’t it?” Katie took off her glasses and stretched. “I think I’ve been spending too much time in the lab.”
“You guys have been pretty busy, huh?”
“Well, honestly, we would have been anyway—we’ve lost two techs in the last few months. One went to grad school and the other’s wife got transferred. And with Paula, some smells make her puke, so I’ve tried to take on some of her work too.” She smiled brightly. “I hope someday I’ll be able to call in the favor. You know, if I ever get married and have kids.”
“That’s planning in advance! Are things … moving that fast, with Liam?”
Katie’s cheeks turned pink. “Oh, no, nothing like that. I mean, it’s still early. But … I like him a lot.”
&
nbsp; Gin didn’t want to embarrass her further, so she changed the subject. “Thanks again for being so understanding when Tuck got called in. I know you had a long afternoon ahead of you.”
“Not too bad,” Katie said. “We were done by four. Honestly, I wish Chief Baxter hadn’t transferred. He was a lot easier to work with than certain other detectives I won’t mention.”
“County’s loss is our gain, I suppose,” Gin said diplomatically.
“It just doesn’t seem fair. I mean, not that it’s any of my business, but…” Katie looked worried. “Things are getting weird around here with that probe, and some people have suggested that Tuck might have been involved. Which is ridiculous, because, I mean, if Captain Wheeler thought he was crooked there’s no way she’d transfer him. I mean, we tend to keep our head down in the lab, so you know it’s bad when the gossip reaches all the way in here.”
“This isn’t really any of my business…” Gin said cautiously.
“Every bit as much your business as mine,” Katie said. “Besides, this is just between us.”
“I’m just wondering if Tuck really has a reason to worry,” Gin blurted. “He’s said a few things—nothing specific, just that he left County due to a difference of opinion.” That wasn’t quite right, but Gin couldn’t remember the exact words he’d used. “Or a misunderstanding or … but he definitely gave me the impression that he hadn’t done anything to merit a demotion.”
“Maybe it was just a personality thing,” Katie said. “I shouldn’t be implying—I mean, he could have rubbed someone the wrong way.”
“I guess. I mean, I’m only asking because it has a direct bearing on my work.” It was the truth … just not the complete truth. But Gin wasn’t about to tell Katie about the complicated attraction between her and the chief of police.
“Honestly, I don’t know who’s behind it,” Katie said. She glanced out her office door, making sure there was no one in the hallway. “But Liam’s got some theories.”
“Oh…?”
“He’s convinced things are coming to a head with the IA investigation. Did you hear that Captain Wheeler’s doing a press conference later today?”
In the Darkest Hour Page 10