BLUE MERCY (44 page)

Finn warmed his hands in the pockets of his leather car coat and watched the Mobile Crime Lab shoot the scene. What little there was.

“Watch those tracks there,” he warned the tech. “To your right. We need those.”

Only one trail of prints led from the cul de sac in front of the school to the crime scene at the base of a budding, silver-barked sycamore. The rest of the
white expanse was unmarred except for two parallel paths made by the responding officer, Michelle Luttrell, and the witness who’d made the early-morning discovery. And those paths ran west from the back of the witness’s home in the opposite direction.

Officer Luttrell had done well in preserving the scene, letting no one within fifty feet of the tree. Finn would have preferred it was a hundred. Still, he’d make sure to have a letter entered into Luttrell’s personnel jacket by the end of the week, commending her professionalism on the scene.

She was young and blonde, with a face that looked far too ingenuous for the job. She shivered slightly in her uniform jacket, made bulky from the Kevlar vest she wore underneath, and when she caught Finn’s stare she dropped her uneasy, blue-eyed gaze.

“So you think that came from a person?” she asked, gesturing to the tree.

“I don’t know. ME’s investigator’ll be here soon. He should be able to tell us.”

She nodded. Pensive. “You need me to do anything else, Detective?” she asked.

Finn glanced back at the cul de sac. Four patrol cars and the Mobile Crime Lab’s van lined the narrow drive in front of the columned portico of the private school’s main entrance. He shoved a thumb in the direction of the half dozen Northern District uniforms lingering by their vehicles. “Yeah. You
can keep those knuckleheads off the snow back there. I don’t want my perp’s prints messed up. And tell your witness that I need to talk to him.”

Luttrell headed across the grounds, carefully retracing her own steps. Finn watched her talk to her fellow officers, gesturing at the tracks in the snow. And when an unmarked pulled in, Luttrell waved it to the side, leaned in to speak with the driver.

Finn recognized Kay as she parked the Lumina. When she rounded the hood of the car, she straightened her jacket over the holster strapped to her waist. She looked tiny next to the uniforms, cradling their coffees in disposable cups. She said something clearly humorous, and one of them let loose a deep belly horselaugh that carried across the grounds. Then Finn heard a “yes, ma’am” and they parted for her.

Finn caught the smile she gave them. Over the past year he’d seen the demons of Kay’s past fade, but the memory of them would always be with her. The nightmares had abated, but there were still times, in the dead of night, when he’d hold her sweat-slicked body until she found sleep again.

Some scars even time couldn’t erase.

He watched her sure stride as she crossed the field, the rookie Bobby Curran in tow. Only when she neared did Finn notice her slight limp. There was grime on her suit and a small tear in the knee of her slacks.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“Just brought in Dante Toomey’s main runner,” Kay said.

“You caught that little squirrel?”

“Let me tell you, Quortez Squirl is
not
so little.”

“Well, I hope he ended up looking worse than you. Hey, Hollywood,” he said to Curran, nodding at the rookie’s stained shirt, “and who’d you arrest this morning? Your coffee cup?”

He was sure Curran shot him a look from behind the Oakley wire-framed sunglasses as he drew the edges of his trench coat together.

“So, what have you got?” Kay asked.

“Might be nothing but a school prank,” he said, leading her and Bobby across the field to where the residential yards backed onto the school property. “We have a witness. Says he was letting his cat out. I haven’t talked to him yet, but the responding officer says the guy saw someone at this spot. Looked like they dumped something, then headed back to a white panel van and drove off.”

“Jesus.” Finn heard Curran behind him. “Is that … is that someone’s heart?”

“Very good, Hollywood. You get an A in anatomy.”

Kay squatted several feet from the base of the tree, examining the organ, then lifting her gaze to scan the open fields, the front of the school, and the tracks in the melting snow.

The fist-sized organ glistened dully in the gray light. Smears of blood caked the exterior membrane
and stained the snow around it, and where the aorta and arteries had been severed, the edges appeared to be drying.

Kay was silent as she studied the scene. In the past year of partnering with her on more than a dozen cases, Finn had learned how Kay worked. Respected it. That quiet fierceness. The calculation of every angle in a case, like she was playing a game of chess, moving each piece with obsessive deliberation.

Eventually, she pointed to the dozen or so drops of blood in the snow around it. “He must have dumped it from a container or a bag. What time did the witness see this guy?”

“Five. The school lights aren’t aimed out this far, so it was pretty dark. Wasn’t till daybreak, apparently, that he got curious. I guess he’s a birder. Says he used his binoculars, then came to see what it was.”

“Look at the snow around it,” she said, leaning in closer. “The edge of it. It looks melted.”

“Like it was still warm when he put it here,” Finn finished for her. “Christ, Kay, what is this? Some kind of cult thing? You ever see anything like this before?”

She shook her head, pointed to the trail of prints heading back to the school. “Are those the perp’s?”

“Have to be. The witness walked in from his backyard.”

Kay scrutinized the trail. “Ground’s pretty sloppy here,” she said. “I doubt we’ll get any kind of casting.”

She came back to the heart.

“Maybe it’s from a transplant clinic or something,” Curran suggested.

“No,” Kay said. “Look at the cuts. Those aren’t surgical. This heart was butchered out of someone.”

“Well, how do you know it’s even human, and not some pig’s heart from the school biology lab or something?” Curran asked.

“It’s not a pig’s heart, detectives.”

Officer Luttrell had returned with the witness. “This is Jonathan Durso,” she said.

Durso was a small man, with nervous eyes spaced too close together and set too deep in his narrow face. He pushed a pair of glasses farther up his nose and shifted his weight from one foot to the next, his suede-leather deck shoes soaked from snow.

“Dr. Durso,” the man corrected Luttrell. “And
that
is not from a pig,” he repeated, hugging himself from the cold. “In a porcine heart the left atrial appendage is of comparable size to the right. With this one, the left is appreciably smaller. Also, the shape is wrong.
That,
detectives, is human.”