Close to the Bone (2 page)

Or if someone would reach in for her instead.

But the opening did come into view, near as she could tell, as a shade of less than total dark against inky blackness. She thrust first her hand, then her body into the unknown, its deep hues pulsing around her like a living thing.

But one advantage to the digital age is the ubiquitous ready light. No room is truly dark any more – each one has a few, or an array, of tiny red, blue or green lights indicating the presence of a monitor, a tower, a battery back-up, a cellphone dock, a charging station, until the area glows with a faint but usable ambience. Theresa used this to find a light switch.

Once the overhead fluorescents came on – no worries of overexposing a photo, the room hadn’t seen a strip of film in seven years – the cavern appeared as simply the messy, cramped work space of some very busy technicians rather than the lair of a bloody murderer. Unless he had wedged himself into one of the overfull cabinets, and Theresa wasn’t about to embarrass herself by checking. She flicked out the light and subjected herself to the claustrophobic cylinder. Her bravado clicked off as soon as the overhead bulbs did, and she hoped no one would be waiting to greet her on the other side.

No one did, and she moved on, making her way back up the rear hallway.

Truthfully, she might not even be looking for Justin. She hadn’t seen a second person in the deskmen’s office when she’d left that night; in a normal rotation it should have been Justin paired with Darryl, but for all Theresa knew he could have called in sick and someone else had taken his shift, or Darryl had toughed it out solo. Unusual, but not unheard of.

The ME’s office consisted of three floors built in the early fifties, and neither the ventilation nor the decor had been improved since that time. Plans had been finalized for a gleaming new center, but after the housing market imploded and the economy went to hell the project had become lost in budget limbo. Theresa complained along with everyone else but secretly expected to weep the day they had to leave this battered piece of history behind. She spent most of her waking hours here, now with Rachael off at college, and felt as comfortable on this worn linoleum as she did puttering around her own house – so stalking alone around an empty building possibly inhabited by a bloody killer did not strike her as insane. This was not a crime scene or an unsecured area. This was her home.

She heard the EMTs working in the front, destroying the sanctity of her scene while trying to save an already lost life, but still Theresa did not return. The remainder of the first floor consisted of three spaces. The first – the viewing room, a tiled chamber just large enough for a single gurney and large windows, through which the family could identify a loved one – sat empty. The second – the separate autopsy suite for decomposed cases – also appeared undisturbed. Though rarely used, the air there had long since festered into that of a slaughterhouse with even more disgusting overtones; without thinking she held her breath, and not from apprehension. Theresa moved on to the third and final space, the decomp autopsy suite’s accompanying ‘deep freeze’ cooler, kept at minus seventy degrees Fahrenheit. She flicked on the light. Nothing.

She checked in on Darryl and the EMTs on her way back through the front hallway. They were crouching on her bloodied floor – she would have to get exemplars of their shoe prints, though most of the blood had dried and would not stick – and while one had his fingers pressed to the deskman’s neck, the other had clearly given up and was gazing at the word scrawled on the cabinet door. He jumped when Theresa spoke. ‘You’re not planning to transport, are you?’

‘Nah. He’s gone.’

‘Then please don’t move him any more than you can help until I can photograph. And don’t let the cops come in.’

‘What? Hey—’ he began to protest, but she had already moved on.

The Property Department could have housed half a dozen killers lying in wait, but there was nothing Theresa could do about it. She didn’t have keys to the door; no one did, save the Property officer and probably the Medical Examiner himself, in order to protect the personal items, money, jewelry and prescription meds of their temporary residents. She hit the light switch in the reception area: boring furniture that appeared to have been there since the mid-’70s, a Formica-clad countertop and sliding window to the secretary’s desk, a double set of glass doors leading to the visitor parking lot. She checked them. Still locked, deadbolts in place.

Theresa ignored the elevator. It moved only slightly faster than molasses in Antarctica, and any woman over forty needed to work off every possible calorie, so instead she always took the stairs to the upper floors where she spent most of her working hours. Second landing, Records and Customer Services to the right, doctors’ offices and Histology to the left.

No one lay bleeding in the hallway. Theresa even checked the two restrooms, in case Justin had escaped the attacker and run up here to hide – not as silly an idea as it sounded, she consoled herself as she peered through the glass windows of dark offices. If he couldn’t get past the killer to the back hallway and its loading dock door to the outside, and the front doors had been locked with their keyed deadbolt, he would have nowhere else to go but up.

But then he would have nowhere to hide. Unless both Justin and the attacker had the advanced degrees in science necessary to work in one of the labs or were Janice, Queen of the Secretaries, they would not be able to open any of the doors. None were broken, and no drops or smears of blood dotted the carpet. Same for the third floor.

Out of habit or some sort of homing instinct, Theresa pulled her keys from her back pocket and let herself in to the Trace Evidence Department. Once the lights flicked on she could see that nothing had been disturbed. The microscopes waited, shielded by soft plastic coverings; washed glassware dried in a dish rack that Theresa had bought at Walmart; a stack of Manila files needing additions or revisions had fallen over on her desk as if to express annoyance at her inattention; and the whole place smelled of disinfectant, dried blood and burnt coffee. Her home away from home, her corner of the world, her fortress and prison in one, but now she glanced around its cluttered space as if she’d never seen it before, its expanse turned alien and unfamiliar.

More sirens outside the building now. Theresa wondered if the police would search the lot and neighboring buildings, check for the blood trail which Justin or whoever might have left as he ran away. She should probably do that. But the twins of fear and worry pushed her to circle the entire lab, to make sure the floors were clean of blood drops and check the rear two rooms where Don performed his DNA magic.

Nothing.

Finally satisfied, she pulled the rear lab door shut behind her and started down the back staircase, which would let her out between the cooler and the autopsy room.

Except that a man with a gun blocked her path.

He said: ‘Freeze. Police.’

‘I gathered that,’ Theresa told him, ‘from the badge around your neck.’

THREE

H
e seemed to take her outward serenity as something of an affront, but was professional enough to let it go, and within ten minutes Theresa had told him everything she knew. The sergeant – his nameplate said ‘L. Shephard’ – and his crew had cleared the building without locating the missing deskman. They had even checked the basement, a greenish-looking young man reported to Shephard. If the autopsy room could appear in a horror movie then the basement could provide the entire setting for a fifties drive-in. But though the four-inch thick wooden doors with the heavy steel latches appeared intimidating, nothing sat behind them but supplies and old paperwork. Same for the crypts, the individual openings with smaller versions of the same heavy doors where bodies used to be stored on slide-out platforms. All empty now, but still plenty creepy-looking.

The only nightmare-inducing items in the morgue’s basement were the plastic quart containers which looked like take-out soup but which were actually tissue sections of past victims. They would be kept for five years and then destroyed, and were harmless unless someone opened the lids and poured the irritating formalin solution over their skin. Nevertheless the intrepid officers checked each area except the large storage room, unable to get its door open. Theresa had a key but didn’t offer it. The Trace Evidence Department kept the clothing from past victims and evidence from past cases in there and she couldn’t have unauthorized people trooping through and if a cop couldn’t get in then a killer, or Justin, could not possibly have entered.

Theresa sat on the ancient vinyl couches in the reception area while the men roamed the building, upstairs, downstairs, all talking and radioing and sometimes shouting. She found herself flexing her fingers and gritting her teeth, no matter how often Shephard assured her that the deskmen’s office had been undisturbed since the EMTs pronounced Darryl. A cop had been posted at the door to keep all his co-workers out until the scene could be properly processed.

‘Which is me,’ Theresa couldn’t help pointing out to the sergeant for the second time during the past ten minutes. ‘I process. I need to photograph, and then sketch. Please don’t let your men touch anything, including the doors, walls, banisters, because I will have to fingerprint all that and I don’t want to have to eliminate any more than—’

‘I understand,’ Shephard said with what might be mistaken as patience by someone who hadn’t spent as much time around cops as Theresa had. ‘We’re just securing the scene.’

‘You already
have
secured the scene. No killer on premises, guards on the entrances. Secured.’

His eyes narrowed, but not, apparently, at her contrariness. His eye lingered on Theresa’s left pant leg where she had not been able to avoid dipping the cuff in some of Darryl’s blood. ‘Can’t wait to get to work, can you?’

‘I have a lot to do.’ Her voice trembled a bit. Some sort of reaction setting in? Ridiculous … Theresa had no idea how many dead bodies she had encountered by then, but it had to be halfway to five digits.

Just not when she wasn’t expecting to encounter one.

Not when it was someone she
knew
.

He continued to study her, taking in her rumpled BDU pants and heavy sweatshirt, mud-splashed steel-toe boots and braid of mostly reddish hair, messy because she hadn’t redone it after getting out of bed. The only advantage to outdoor night-time scenes was that they took place in the dark, so she hadn’t bothered with the make-up that would have made her forty-four-year-old face look better than just tolerable. But Shephard said only: ‘Darryl Johnson doesn’t summon up a lot of grief from you?’

‘I – um – yes, of course. I just – don’t know what to say.’ Though she did, and it was that Darryl had been kind of a jerk. One of those men who never outgrew the class clown persona. The type that finds it hilarious to be sarcastic, cutting, leering, bigoted and misogynistic every minute of every day. A trial to be around for more than three minutes at a stretch.

But, other than that, not a bad guy … He entered each deceased’s information with reasonable accuracy, built up muscles hefting dead weights from one gurney to another, went home with blood splashed on his own shoes from hanging up the fluid-soaked shirts and pants of victims dead from homicide or accident. He showed up when scheduled, as he had that prior evening. By the time Theresa had sidled out, not more than ten seconds after quitting time, he had already rocked back in his desk chair, observing the evening exodus through a pair of smudged glasses. He’d refrained from the more risqué comments he sometimes tossed her way and simply waved, a comfortable grin on his face. In return she had given only her standard tight-lipped, patently insincere smile, designed to maintain office cordiality without promising even the slightest friendly feeling.

And now he lay in his own blood, not ten feet from where she sat, in a government-operated building dedicated to the pursuit of justice, with locks on the doors. ‘He’s been working here a long time,’ she said, and now her voice really did tremble, enough to make Shephard change the subject. Or maybe he got to what
was
the subject.

‘What can you tell me about the suspect?’

She blinked at him. ‘Nothing. I have no idea who did this.’

‘I meant the other deskman. Justin Warner, you said?’

‘I’m guessing Justin should have been working tonight, but I don’t know that for sure.’

‘According to the schedule by the lockers, it should have been Justin.’

‘But still, he’s not a
suspect
– why would you think Justin did this?’

He gave her a look which might have been pity. ‘We started with two guys, and now one’s dead and the other is not present. It’s a math thing.’

‘So they’ve been working on the same shift together for six weeks without a problem, and suddenly Justin takes it in his head to beat the guy to death?’

‘How long have you been working here?’

The change in topics made her head swim. ‘Twelve years. Almost thirteen.’

‘And what’s the motive for most murders?’

She shifted her weight, which sent the vinyl creaking. ‘Anger.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But Justin never struck me as short-tempered. Darryl, maybe, but not Justin.’

‘Fine. So maybe Darryl attacked Justin and it was self-defense. He panics and runs away. When we find him, we can ask him. What does the word “confess” mean to you?’

‘What I expect it means to everybody else.’

‘Did Justin Warner believe that the victim was keeping something from him? Did he mention any conspiracy-type theories? Believe that the ME’s office had covered something up? Ever express distrust of your administration?’

‘Never.’ Though how would she know? The most likely candidate for those sorts of heart-to-hearts now lay in his own blood on their linoleum.

‘What about someone else? A grieving family member who thinks there’s more to their loved one’s death?’

‘And might want to hold Justin hostage until we reveal the truth? There certainly could be – many families have a hard time accepting certain facts. But I don’t know of any such situations myself.’