“Steve, I . . .”
“Maggie. Listen to me. I came into this with my eyes wide open. I understand. You always say it’s murder being a homicide detective, but I think it applies to partners, too. And this isn’t me complaining. It’s called being empathetic.”
This was Steve to a tee—the unerring ability to lift her burden with a single well-placed pick-me-up.
Put under a spotlight, she felt bad about letting him down, especially because this was the second time this week that she’d pulled the plug on their plans. Not only that, now that she thought more about it, Steve had promised homemade lasagna and a movie of her choosing.
“Thanks,” she said, “for not dragging me over hot coals. I know I get sidetracked with work, and I know I’m not always the best communicator when it comes to my personal life. I know I’m the opposite end of perfect. It’s just that I don’t want you thinking . . .” She paused, not wanting to use a weak phrase and give him the wrong idea.
Their relationship was still relatively new, still in the discovery stage where one insensitive sentence could blow up in their faces. Sometimes, keeping the peace meant avoiding verbal triggers.
The first words that immediately sprang to mind were I don’t want you thinking . . . I don’t care, but that wasn’t right.
Although Maggie did care about Steve, she wasn’t yet at the point where she wanted him to know she did, or how deeply.
Years ago, Maggie had torn herself out of a destructive relationship that had almost ruined her emotionally, and since then she’d vowed never again to enter into another on a whim, or get in too deep before she’d tested the waters.
Sometimes, she thought that each passing lover had paid the price for one man’s faults, with her being too withdrawn, too cold, and too reluctant to commit. At times, being deliberately awkward in a bid to save herself from potential heartache. It had taken Maggie a while to realize that this kind of lifestyle had done more harm than good, damaging her more than the destructive relationship had, and turning her into someone she wasn’t. And Maggie didn’t want to live that way. She wanted to be herself in all relationships, more so in the one that mattered the most. So when Steve came along, she’d made a pledge to herself to be less closed, less inflexible, and less inconsiderate of her lover’s feelings.
It was great in theory, but not always entirely practical.
The second words that came to mind were I don’t want you thinking . . . my work is more important, because she couldn’t deny that it was. Maggie had been a homicide detective long before Steve had entered the picture, and would no doubt remain in her role long after he’d gone. To diminish its importance would be akin to Steve saying that surfing didn’t play an important role in his life, when they both knew that it did.
“I don’t think anything,” Steve said before she could make up her mind. “I knew all about your unusual working hours from the get-go. And I’m fine with it. Honestly. If we’re being brutally honest here, I have to admit, your unwavering dedication to the badge is one of the things I admire about you.”
Admire, not love—Maggie released a quiet sigh of relief.
“If it’s any consolation,” he said, “Spart enjoyed your half of the lasagna. He lapped up every morsel like it was his last meal on earth.”
Maggie found herself smiling.
Spartacus was Steve’s eight-year-old red-wheaten Rhodesian ridgeback, fond of chasing Frisbees and tripping Maggie up. During the last six months, Maggie had gotten close to the dog—animals hold no prejudices—and rarely passed on the chance to go for a run with him around the golf course near Steve’s place.
“Maybe we can make up for lost time this evening?” Steve suggested. “If you like, we can grab takeout and catch a movie.”
“Sounds great. But can we play it by ear? I’m not sure how this case will pan out yet.”
“Absolutely. Just let me know either way. I’ve a few things lined up today myself that I need to take care of. It would be good to see you later, though.”
“In that case, I’ll make every effort.”
They said their goodbyes, and Maggie drew a deep breath before heading into the ME’s office.
“Thought I’d hang out here,” Loomis said as she pushed through the glass doors and pulled off her sunglasses. He was loitering at the reception counter, his pallor as pale as the decor.
Off to one side, in one of the lobby’s sitting areas, a family was patiently waiting to hear about the death of a loved one, each member wearing the same hard mask of shock painted in grief.
“Coward,” she whispered to Loomis as she signed the visitor’s book.
“You know the saying, Novak,” he whispered back. “There are old cops and there are bold cops. But there are no old bold cops.”
Maggie handed him back his phone. “Remind me. I need a new one.”
“My spare is back at base,” he said. “Use that until you get fixed up.”
“You mean the one that cuts out all the time? So generous.”
“It’s in my nature.”
The receptionist informed them that Dr. Elkin was in Building Three, and they headed along a curving corridor to the back of the office suite.
For odor control reasons, the District Nine Medical Examiner’s Office was split into three buildings separated by courtyards. The first building housed the administration hub and the offices where associates could interact with families and law enforcement in everyday surroundings. The second building contained the autopsy suites that included three huge walk-in coolers and a main examination room large enough to house the deceased victims of a small-scale disaster. And Building Three—otherwise known as the decomp morgue—was a self-contained facility in back, in which bodies in advanced stages of decomposition could be examined in an environmentally controlled setting.
Compared with the administration building, the air inside the decomp morgue was frigid, and Maggie half expected to see her breath as they made their way to the examination room. On the ride over, a tension had begun to grip her at the thought of seeing Rita’s burned body again, and now it had become a tight belt around her chest, affecting her breathing. Up to a point, the passing hours, combined with a lot of mental wrangling, had subdued her initial shock over the identity of the burned body. She’d accepted that her childhood friend had been murdered. But what she still found hard to come to terms with was that Rita had survived the house fire on Oak Street twenty years ago. She was determined to uncover exactly what had happened that fateful night.
The sooner she was through this, the better.
As they entered the last room, Maury Elkin put down the tablet computer he was working on, and waved them over.
Loomis once said that Elkin reminded him of Forest Whitaker. But apart from a droopy eyelid, Maggie couldn’t see the resemblance. At first sight, the single most noticeable thing about the chief medical examiner was his coloring. Maury Elkin was two tone, his predominantly dark skin dappled with irregular lighter patches. When meeting new people, he shrugged off his patchwork appearance, saying that his mother tie dyed him when he was a baby. But the truth was, Elkin had a pigment-destroying skin condition known as vitiligo.
“Definitely homicide,” he said, cutting right to the chase. “Just what you need on a sunny Sunday morning.”
Elkin stood underneath a big surgical lamp suspended from the ceiling, dark ashy marks on his surgical scrubs. The charred corpse lay on a gurney next to him, the burned flesh appearing blacker and somehow scarier in the unflattering light. The limb positioning was different, too. During his examination, Elkin had laid the arms at the sides, and in so doing he had revealed a face, or what little there was left of it.
Maggie heard Loomis release a quiet expletive.
Her own belly flip-flopped.
Heat had fused skin to skin, then melted it away as the flames had begun to feed off fat. What remained were slivers of seared flesh draped over a sooty skull. Facial features reduced to mere bumps.
No nose, no ears, no eyelids, no lips to speak of. Just big staring eyeballs, as opaque as frosted glass.
Maggie felt the breath catch in her throat.
“No doubt about it,” Elkin said as they gathered around the corpse, “burning to death is just about the least glamorous way to go.” He pointed with a gloved finger. “First, the skin fries and peels off. Then the deeper dermal layer shrinks and splits, allowing fat to exude. And that’s when the real interesting chemistry starts. Clothing acts like a wick, pulling the soft fat into the flames and creating an exothermic reaction. With enough wick material, a human body can burn like a candle for hours. And given enough time, the muscles dry out, pulling up the limbs into what we call the pugilistic stance.” He demonstrated by making fists and posing like a boxer.
“Thanks for the graphic breakdown, Doc,” Loomis said, swallowing loudly. “No disrespect, but if you ever get to finish that horror novel you’re writing, remind me not to read it.”
Elkin relaxed his pose. “I’m in shock, Ed. I didn’t think you could read.”
“Exclusively short words. No more than three syllables. Preferably on pink paper. Yeah, it’s been known to happen.”
“Why didn’t the whole body burn?” Maggie asked, finding her voice. It sounded slightly distant, scratchy.
“Insufficient wick material,” Elkin said. “Even with the accelerant—”
“Gasoline?” Loomis interjected.
“Correct. The fire burned itself out before it grabbed hold. Not that it makes any difference to the death diagnosis.” He handed Loomis the tablet computer from the end of the gurney. “Your victim died from a single GSW, resulting in traumatic aortic rupture.”
Loomis blinked at the touch screen. “Gunshot wound?”
“What were you expecting, Ed—strangulation?” He winked at Maggie. Elkin jabbed his thumb into the plastic apron covering his belly. “The bullet entered her abdomen right about here,” he said, “nicking her aorta on the way through. Cause of death—exsanguination.”
“In other words, she bled out.” Loomis offered Maggie the tablet. She shook her head. He handed it back to Elkin.
“Was she still alive when she was set on fire?” Maggie asked. The thought sent a cold tremor vibrating through her.
“It doesn’t look like it,” he said. “I found no presence of soot in the trachea or mixed with the mucus in the distal airways. To be certain, I’ve sent a blood sample to the lab for screening, but I’m not expecting it to come back showing an elevated carboxyhemoglobin level. In my opinion, the fire happened postmortem.”
“To destroy the body and any evidence,” Loomis said.
“How long did it take for her to bleed out?” Maggie said.
Elkin shrugged, his plastic apron rustling. “It’s hard to say precisely. My professional guess is, probably less than a minute.”
Long enough, Maggie thought, for Dana to realize she had been fatally wounded, to stare death in the face while her killer doused her in gasoline, knowing that her fiery end was imminent.
What did you think in those final moments?
“As you know,” Elkin continued, dragging her thoughts back to the present, “the survival rate for most people shot once in the abdomen is fairly good. Providing the bullet doesn’t hit a major organ, gunshot victims can usually live long enough to seek medical assistance. In this case, and for her sake, the bullet nicking the aorta was a stroke of luck.”
Loomis tilted his head back slightly, regarding Elkin down the length of his nose. “What are you saying exactly, Doc?”
“That by shooting the victim once in the midriff, it’s possible the killer intended to incapacitate her, not to kill her right away. Nicking the aorta was a mistake.”
Loomis turned to Maggie, his jaw tight. “He wanted her alive when he set her on fire, Novak. Makes it personal. No way this killer didn’t know Dana.”
Otherwise, she knew, the killer would have shot Dana in the chest or the head, and multiple times. Emptying the revolver into Dana to ensure she was dead. But Elkin’s observations told a different story. The killer had wanted Dana incapacitated but alive when he lit the match, wanted her to suffer. “Thankfully,” Elkin said, “the exsanguination saved her from unbearable pain.”
“We didn’t find any pooled blood at the crime scene,” Maggie said. “Or any trace on the trail leading there.”
“Well, it’s possible the exsanguination was confined internally. I found a significant amount of blood within the abdominal cavity, indicating a fast bleed. But that doesn’t tell us where she was shot and died. Let me show you the x-rays.”
All at once, Maggie was beginning to feel uncharacteristically nauseous.
“You okay?” Loomis whispered as Elkin wheeled a portable x-ray cart from its base in the corner.
Maggie flashed a cool smile. “I’m crashing, is all. Up all night and no breakfast. Need a sugar fix.”
He nodded. “Soon as we’re done here.”
“We need to speak with the husband.”
“And we will. Right after we’ve refueled.”
Elkin powered up the portable unit. The large screen, positioned in portrait mode, lit up, showing an x-ray of a human torso, specifically the hollow area between the pelvis and the rib cage, the jagged spinal column running down the middle.
“Ed, you’ve been shot, right?”
Loomis touched a hand to his right side, just below his ribs. “A through-and-through. Bled like crazy. Didn’t feel a thing at first. Hurt like hell afterward.”
“That’s because you’re all skin and bone.”
“You mean rock-hard muscle.” Loomis punched his own belly as if to confirm it.
Elkin found Loomis’s defensiveness amusing. “All I’m saying is, when you’re on the slim side, unlike me, it’s easier for projectiles to pass all the way through. But in enough quantity, belly fat can act like Kevlar. The thicker the fat layer, the more energy it can absorb. Brown fat especially slows down anything trying to penetrate it. A long time ago, when I worked in the ER, there was this gunshot victim that came through. A five-hundred-pound male with twenty-six bullet wounds in his gut.”
Loomis made a wow sound.
“He was the victim of a machine-gun attack. We had to use three gurneys strapped together and six men to wheel him in. Quite a sight to behold. More than two dozen bullets and not one of them made it to any of his organs.” Elkin gestured toward the blackened corpse. “In comparison, your victim’s wafer thin. But I did measure approximately four inches of belly fat. Enough to catch and slow a bullet shot at distance.” He pulled up another x-ray, this time a close-up of the bullet. “See how far the slug penetrated? It’s gone almost the whole way through. Given the thickness of the belly fat, its penetration is consistent with a close-range shooting.”
Maggie said, “How close?”
“My guess is, the killer had the muzzle pressed against the victim’s abdomen when he shot her.”
In other words, he’d looked Dana in the eye as he’d pulled the trigger. Maggie’s shiver came back.
Loomis peered at the screen. “Looks like a nine mil,” he said. “We didn’t find a casing at the crime scene. Maybe he picked it up.”
Sometimes, it happened. And more frequently these days. Shooters collected their spent cartridges to prevent forensic investigators from finding telltale clues. Salts in sweat left residue on casings, and heat from firing the cartridge etched the fingerprint into the metal. Modern forensics could pull those prints, and those involved in repeat gun crimes were aware of it.
“I’ve sent the slug to Firearms for analysis,” Elkin said. “We’ve had a quiet few weeks, so I’m hopeful for a quick turnaround.”
Maggie knew that if the gun had been used in a previous felony, the match would be flagged up. Any profile information already on record could help them narrow down potential suspects. She made a mental note to cash in a favor with her contact at the ballistics lab, see if she could hurry the report along.
“What about identifying features?” Maggie asked.
Although she was certain of the victim’s identity, it never did any harm to verify it, especially in light of any legal disputes that might arise later in their investigation.
Elkin showed them an image on the tablet. It was a picture of a nude woman lying facedown on a metal plinth, her skin deeply pink and mottled with splashes of purple, her limbs burned black, and her torso outlined in a dark fringe—a ribbon of charred flesh running all around her, ending in the back of her blackened skull.
It was the reverse view of Dana Cullen.
“As you can see,” he said, zooming in on the image, “the victim has no tattoos or significant scarring on the area of the body that survived the fire.”
“What’re the chances of pulling something out of the burned side?” Loomis asked.
“Less than zero.”
“What about fingerprints?” Maggie said, thinking about accessing Dana’s phone.
“Again, not possible. There’s too little tissue left.” Elkin touched a button on the x-ray unit, and the image on the screen switched to an array of a few dozen thumbnail images of x-rays. He sought one out and tapped it. The image expanded to fill the screen. It looked like five broken twigs. “This is the only internal identifying feature I was able to find. You’re looking at the victim’s left hand. As you can see, the little finger is missing its distal phalanx.”
“She lost it when she was young,” Maggie said. “Any other breaks?”
“Not that I’ve found. No previous fractures and no surgical implants. Some signs of early osteoarthritis, though, but nothing major. Judging from general plate degeneration and joint wear and tear, I’m placing the victim’s age between late thirties and early forties.” He tapped back to the thumbnail array and brought up an x-ray of the skull.
The imaginary belt around Maggie’s chest tightened a little more. Although the image contained no skin or hair, or any other facial features for that matter, the skull’s hollow stare was unsettling, as though it demanded attention.
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