The Body Reader (6 page)

CHAPTER 10

T
hey exited the parking ramp in an unmarked vehicle. It was nice to see residents walking and riding bikes, and yet the city felt darker and sadder than Jude remembered. It was hard to believe that a series of blackouts had brought about such change. And yet she shouldn’t have been surprised. Not after what she’d been through.
People do awful things to one another.
The question was, had she lost faith in humanity?

It didn’t take long to arrive at their destination.

Lake of the Isles was located in Minneapolis, northwest of Uptown. Once an area of wealth, it now ranked up there with neighborhoods hit hardest by fires and vandalism, with blocks of mansions reduced to crumbling, burnt-out shells. Before the blackouts, people strolled around the oddly shaped lake in envy of the mansions that overlooked the water. There was no envy now.

“I used to walk around this lake,” Jude said. In that other life. With Eric. Like a couple in a magazine. Like a dream she could only half recall.

Uriah pulled to a stop behind the coroner’s van, cutting the engine. Yellow crime-scene tape had been strung, and a crowd of observers had gathered.

Seat belts unlatched. Doors slammed.

One of the first things Jude noticed was a difference in tone from crime scenes of the past. Where was the hushed reverence? The respect and sorrow? This felt . . . salacious, with people shoving one another, jockeying for a good viewing position while a few cops stood nervously at the perimeter, trying to contain the crowd.

She recognized the coroner—a young woman with black hair that stopped at her chin. Seeing another familiar face gave Jude a jolt. She didn’t like the reminders of her old life.

One of the first officers on the scene—male, about forty—met them. “Kids were walking around the lake and spotted the body. Female, young, probably happened last night. Bystanders fished her out before we could get her in a bag, so the body has been compromised. Crime-scene team is gathering evidence on the shore.”

“Likely cause of death?” Uriah asked.

“Suicide is my uneducated guess.”

Uriah made a faint sound of distress that Jude failed to understand.

The officer pointed with his thumb. “Take a gander.”

The deceased was young, probably not over seventeen. Dressed in a white nightgown, wet and clinging to the nude body beneath. Blue lips, long hair the color of dandelions.

Upon seeing the detectives, the two crime-scene officers backed off to give them full access to the body, one of the team passing out black latex gloves.

Jude tugged on the gloves and crouched next to the dead girl, the world fading as she focused on the body. The officer was right. She hadn’t been in the water long, and she hadn’t been dead long. Except for the blue lips and a hint of creamy eye, she could be sleeping.

Around the girl’s neck was a cheap necklace. Jude turned the pendant over. A heart, engraved with the name Delilah.

“Is that the kind you can get from a machine at a carnival?” Uriah asked.

“I think so.” She remembered using the very type of machine at a tourist stop in northern Minnesota. You put money in the slot and spelled out your name on a keypad. Then, through a glass window, you could watch the engraving. Once done, the necklace dropped into a receptacle to be scooped up.

Jude did a quick visual exam, her gaze moving from the top of the girl’s head to her feet. Acting on impulse, she gently touched the back of the hand nearest her. She had the overwhelming desire to pull the girl into her arms and hug her close. Instead, she grasped her hand very gently.

“What are you doing?” Ashby whispered loudly as he leaned over her shoulder. Gone was all evidence of the panic he’d displayed earlier.

“Holding her hand,” Jude said.

“Why?”

She shrugged. “I want to.”

“Bloody hell.” Words delivered in an exhale as he straightened away from her. “That’s enough.” He gave her a
come here
wave. “Up.”

Jude didn’t move. “We should cover her with a blanket.”

“She’s dead. She can’t feel anything. She can’t feel cold, and she can’t feel sad, and she can’t feel lonely.”

Jude looked up at him. “I know she’s dead, but she’s telling me something.”

Uriah squeezed his eyes shut. Seconds passed. Once he got himself under control, he zeroed back in on her. Behind him, the sky was blue as only a Minnesota sky could be, and off in the distance birds sang so cheerfully Jude could almost see the notes floating in the air.

“You’d better be glad I’m the only one hearing what’s coming out of your mouth right now,” Uriah said.

Their first hour of partnership was getting off to a rocky start. “I don’t think this is a suicide,” Jude said.

“Look.” Uriah crouched next to her. With impatience masked as patience, he pulled a fold of wet fabric aside, revealing a pocket in the nightgown tangled around the body. The girl could have been one of those beautiful marble statues at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. “Rocks,” he said. “Her pockets are full of rocks.”

Jude focused on the girl, experiencing the crime scene from the viewpoint of the person she was now, and not the cop she used to be. In the months since her escape, she’d struggled to ignore the heightened awareness, that bombardment of sight and sounds and odors, because those revved-up senses got in the way of everyday life. Now, though, she realized she was picking up information much in the same way she’d picked up information from Uriah, much in the same way she’d picked up information from her captor. The dead girl had a story to tell, and she was telling it to Jude.

“Not a homicide,” Uriah said. “Not our case.” He stood and circled away from her, then returned. “Not every death is a murder. She filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the lake. Rocks. Lake.”

“I think it was meant to look like a suicide.” Now Jude looked at him, gauging his reaction.

“And how, after a two-minute cursory exam, did you arrive at this theory?”

“She’s telling me things.”

“My God.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Don’t say that kind of nonsense out loud. She’s dead,” he said.
“Dead.”

“Yes, but what she was feeling before she died is written on her face and in her muscles. It’s still here.
I
see it. I can
read
her.”

He let out a snort. “Anything else she’s saying?”

Jude wanted to stroke the girl’s hair in a comforting gesture but restrained herself so as not to disturb evidence. “Fear. She was terrified before she died.” Jude knew and understood that kind of fear. That kind of fear was caused by someone else.

“If she’s telling you so damn much, maybe she’ll give you a full name and address.”

Jude ignored his sarcasm. It didn’t matter. The body was all that mattered. She gently placed the girl’s hand back at her side, then stood up and looked into the distance, to a curve in the lake where the sunshine made a repeated pattern on the surface of the water, to the white sails moving in a skilled dance. The day was beautiful, and that made the death even sadder.

“Your name means
light
,” she told Uriah. An odd and misplaced comment, yet the words were her attempt at momentarily shifting his attention to something else, away from his annoyance, offering a new place for his thoughts to land. She turned. “Do you ever think about that?”

His expression went through several transformations until his shoulders sagged. “Damn it, Jude.” He spoke quietly and calmly. “I can’t begin to grasp what you’ve been through, but you aren’t ready for this. You might never be ready for this. You should go home. The department offered you a severance package. Take it. Why do this when you don’t need to?”

“Why are
you
doing it?”

The wind kicked up, bringing with it the scent of charred wood. He stared at her for a long moment. “It’s all I know how to do.”

“Me too.”

A moment passed as they sized each other up.

“It’s not as crazy as it sounds,” she finally explained, deciding she would share a little bit with him, but only a little. “I didn’t read her dead mind. It’s not anything psychic. I spent three years in solitary confinement. I had no books, no music, no movies, no color. The only thing I had was one evil man’s face and body, and reading him became my entire existence. I lived for his visits, for the stimulation. Every line, every nuance, every muscle contraction, every flicker of thought—I read him. And I can read this girl even though she’s dead. I know that sounds weird, but echoes of her experience are frozen in her face and in her muscles.”

The explanation placated him, and she could see she was making more sense. “Can you read living people?” he asked, searching for confirmation of thoughts formed and unformed. “Can you read me?”

She didn’t think it wise to mention that she’d read him moments earlier when the first responder had spoken the word
suicide
. Jude had seen the quake that Uriah quickly hid. She didn’t tell him she’d read him every time she’d met with him at the police station. She didn’t tell him she knew he was feeling sorry for her all over again right this minute because the full impact of what she’d been through was slowly and continuously sinking in. And maybe that was part of his reluctance to have her around. She was a constant reminder of unspeakable acts and unspeakable pain, all wrapped up in his failure to find her or close the case. “Kindness,” she said. “That’s what I see.”

“Really? Kindness?” The annoyance was back. “That’s a pretty worthless trait.”

“Would you say it’s inaccurate? I’d like to know. While I was in that basement, my brain was rewired, and what I see as one thing might be something else entirely.”

“Kindness is a weakness, especially today, especially for a cop,” he said, not answering her question.

He was right. If she’d only been tougher, stronger . . . “But kindness is a trait we can’t lose.” She frowned, concentrating. “It might be one of the most important parts of being human. Maybe even more important than love.”

He was staring at her again, long and hard, harsh lines between his eyes, almost as if he were trying to read her right back. “I can’t believe we’re standing here having this conversation. You really are certifiable, aren’t you?”

CHAPTER 11

T
hat evening, like so many evenings, Jude rode her motorcycle over streets she’d been up and down a hundred times in her search for the house where she’d been held captive. Not that she wanted to visit the place she’d rather forget, but because she needed to walk through that door and see the man’s rotting corpse on the basement floor.

Confirmation of death.

Five male bodies wound up in the morgue the night of the blackout. None was her guy. So she kept trying to find the house, constantly broadening her search zone. Nothing. Which led her to believe the body was still at the bottom of the stairs, or it had been disposed of in secret.

Or the man was still alive.

She wanted a name. She wanted a rap sheet. Only then would she begin to piece together why he’d abducted her in the first place, because deep down she’d felt that it hadn’t been some obsession or some random act.

In her need for proof of death, she imagined putting up flyers that said,
Have you noticed an ungodly stench coming from your neighbor’s house?
Below that would be tear-off phone numbers. How long would it take for the numbers to be gone? Days? Hours? Because who didn’t have a suspicious neighbor?

She searched for a certain building style because over the years she’d constructed a layout and design in her mind, but the house could have been made of wood or brick or stucco or straw. It could have been one story or two stories. She had no memory of her arrival, and she’d escaped in darkness, not a star in the sky, her mind a tangle, her body so weak she could barely put one foot in front of the other. Taking note of any small landmark hadn’t seemed a priority. Escape, getting home, had been a priority. But now . . .

She didn’t know what the house looked like, but that didn’t stop her. Almost every evening she rode the streets, coming home to mark off sections of the detailed city map she’d taped to the wall of her apartment as she methodically took her search into new, unexplored areas. And every evening she failed to find anything that felt right.

Despite the grimness of her quest, she was encouraged by what she saw riding through neighborhoods touched by the blackouts, and she took a vicarious pride in the signs of returning culture: the street vendors and food trucks, the bohemian cafés, the diners and bars and sidewalk gardens.

Back home for the night, she ran into Will in the hallway.

“How’s the bike running?” he asked.

“No problems.” After selling her the motorcycle, Will had helped her find a class and get a license. He’d also taught her several things about maintenance, but she understood he was using the bike as a way to interact with her. She made a point of being polite, but not overly friendly.

In her apartment, without removing her gun from her belt, she ate a solitary meal of grocery-store sushi. When she was done and her plate rinsed, she washed her face and brushed her teeth. Upon returning to the kitchen, she grabbed a can of cat food from the cupboard for the feral she’d been feeding, tucked a pillow under her arm, and looped a finger under the nylon strap of her rolled sleeping bag. She left her apartment, locking it behind her and pocketing the keys, to head up the narrow stairway to the roof.

Outside, she unrolled the sleeping bag, dropped the pillow, and settled under the night sky.

From the street below came sounds of traffic. In the distance, shouts. A restaurant had opened down the block, and she could smell the grill exhaust.

It was never dark on the roof, and there was rarely a night when she could see many stars. Too many city lights, their number increasing in the fight to stop vandalism, but tonight the moon was visible. Half of it, anyway.

She slipped her gun from the holster and placed it next to her sleeping bag. Then she peeled off the metal top from the can of cat food. Stretching, she placed the can a few feet away, rolled to her back, stared up at the moon, and thought about the girl in the lake.