The Will Trent Series 7-Book Bundle

by Karin Slaughter

  “Hello-hello!” a man’s voice boomed from inside the morgue.

  “That’s Pete,” Evelyn supplied.

  The coroner was pudgy, with a ponytail and beard that looked days past washing—as did his tie-dyed T-shirt and faded, torn blue jeans. His white lab coat was tight through the sleeves. A cigarette dangled from his lip. He stood at the window, showing his yellow teeth. Amanda was not one to believe in vibes, but even with a thick piece of glass between them, she could almost feel the creepiness radiating off Pete Hanson’s body.

  He said, “Deena, my love, you’re looking beautiful as ever this afternoon.”

  Deena laughed even as she rolled her eyes. “Shut up, fool.”

  “Only a fool for you, my dear.”

  Evelyn supplied, “They do this all the time.”

  “Oh.” Amanda tried to pretend she heard white men flirting with black women every day.

  “Come on, Dee.” Pete tapped on the window. “You gonna let me buy you that drink?”

  “Meet me outside at ten-after-never.” She snatched the drapes closed. “Y’all go on in.” She told Amanda, “When you throw up, aim for the floor drain. It’s easier to hose down that way.”

  “Thank you,” Amanda managed.

  She followed Evelyn into the autopsy room. The temperature was as cold as expected, but it was the odor that caught Amanda off guard. It was clean, like Clorox and Pine-Sol mixed with apples; nothing like what she expected.

  There had been two calls during her uniform days wherein she was sent out to take a missing persons report and found that person not far from the house. One had been a man who’d been locked in his trunk. The other had been a child who’d gotten trapped inside an old refrigerator on the family’s shed porch. Each time, Amanda had taken one whiff and called for backup. She did not know what happened to the cases. She was at the station filling out reports by the time the bodies were removed.

  “Who is this elegant lady?” Pete Hanson asked, his eyes on Amanda.

  “This is—”

  “Amanda Wagner,” Amanda told him. “I’m Duke Wagner’s daughter.”

  He paused a beat. “So you are,” he finally said. “Duke’s quite a character, isn’t he?”

  Amanda shrugged. She was bruised enough about her father for one day.

  “Pete.” Evelyn put on her cheery voice again, but her fingers snaked into her hair, giving a telltale sign of her discomfort. “Thanks so much for letting us watch. We were in Lucy’s apartment last Monday. We never met her, but it was quite a shock to learn about the suicide.”

  “Lucy?” Pete’s brow furrowed. “Where did you get that?”

  “It was in Butch’s report,” Amanda supplied. “He ID’d her off her license.”

  Pete walked over to a large, cluttered desk underneath the window. There were piles of papers stacked in a hodgepodge, but he somehow found the right one.

  Smoke drifted from his cigarette as he read the preliminary report. The paper was thin. Amanda recognized Butch Bonnie’s scrawl reversed on the back where he’d turned the carbon paper the wrong way.

  “Bonnie. Not the sharpest tack in the box, but at least it wasn’t that jackass Landry.” Pete put the report back on his desk. “In a case like this, the license ID is a last resort. I generally prefer dental records, fingerprints, or a family member coming in before I feel comfortable signing off on the identity.” He explained, “Learned my lesson in Nam. You don’t send someone home in a body bag unless you know the right family’s waiting on the other end.”

  Amanda found relief in his words. For all his eccentricities, the man was at least good at his job.

  “So.” Pete flicked ash off his cigarette. “What’s Kenny been up to? I haven’t seen him around.”

  “This and that,” Evelyn said. She was watching Pete’s every move—the way he wiped his nose with a tissue from his pocket, the bobbing of his cigarette as he talked. Meanwhile, she pulled so hard at her hair that Amanda was certain she was going to yank some out. “He’s working with Bill on a shed at the house today.” She chewed her lip for a few seconds. “We’re having a barbecue later. You should come.”

  Pete smiled at Amanda. “Will you be there?”

  She got a sinking feeling. It was her lot in life to be attracted to the Kenny Mitchells of the world while the Pete Hansons were the only ones who ever bothered to ask her out. “Maybe,” she managed.

  “Excellent.” He rolled over a metal tray. There were scalpels, scissors, a saw.

  Evelyn stared at the instruments. Her face was pale. “You know, maybe I should give Bill a call. We dashed out without telling him when we’d be back.”

  This wasn’t actually the truth. Evelyn had been clear that they weren’t sure what time they would return. Bill, unsurprisingly, had been very accommodating to his beautiful wife.

  “I should go call,” Evelyn repeated. She practically ran out of the room.

  Which left Amanda alone with Pete.

  He was looking at her, but this time she saw the kindness in his eyes. “She’s a great lady, but this is one of the more challenging spectator sports.”

  Amanda swallowed.

  “Would you like me to take you through the process?”

  “I—” She felt her throat tighten. “Why do you have to do an autopsy if it’s a suicide?”

  Pete considered her question before walking across the room. There was a light box mounted on the wall. He flipped the toggle, and the lights flickered on. “The word ‘autopsy’ means, literally, ‘to see for oneself.’ ” He waved her over. “Come, my dear. Contrary to rumor, I don’t bite.”

  Amanda tried to conceal her trepidation as she joined him. The X-ray showed a skull. The holes where the eyes and nose were supposed to go looked eerily empty.

  “Do you see here?” he asked, pointing to the neck on the X-ray. Pieces of vertebrae flexed apart the way a cat’s paw opened when you pressed the pad. “This bone here is called the hyoid. That’s pronounced ‘hi-oid.’ It’s horseshoe shaped, and free-floats at the anterior midline between the chin and thyroid.” He showed on his own neck. “Here.”

  Amanda nodded, though she wasn’t quite sure she grasped the point of his lecture.

  “The wonderful thing about your neck is that you can move it up and down and side to side. The cartilage helps make that possible. The hyoid itself is fairly fascinating. It’s the only jointless bone in your entire body. Supports your tongue. Jiggles when you move it. Now, as I said, it’s right here—” He pointed to his neck again. “So, if someone is choked with a ligature, you’ll generally find bruising around the hyoid. But here”—he moved his fingers up—“is where you’ll find bruising if someone is hanged, above the hyoid. That’s a classic sign of hanging, actually. I’m sure you’ll see it more than once in your career.”

  “You’re saying she tried to hang herself first?”

  “No.” He pointed to the X-ray of the neck. “See this darker line here that bisects the hyoid?” Amanda nodded. “That indicates a fracture, which tells me she was choked, probably with great force.”

  “Why great force?”

  “Because she’s a young woman. Your hyoid starts out as two pieces. The bone doesn’t fully fuse until around the age of thirty. Feel for yourself.”

  She thought he meant for her to touch his neck. Amanda desperately did not want to touch him. Still, she started to reach out.

  Pete smiled, saying, “I believe you have your own neck.”

  “Oh. Right.” Amanda laughed through her discomfort. She gently touched her fingers to her throat. She palpated the area, feeling things shift back and forth. The noise clicked in her ears.

  Pete said, “You can feel there’s a lot of movement in there. So, you’d have to have significant pressure to fracture the hyoid.”

  He motioned her to follow him over to the body. He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray on the table. Without preamble, he pulled back the sheet, exposing Lucy Bennett’s head and shoulders. “See
these bruises here?”

  Amanda felt her eyes blur, but not on purpose. She blinked, focusing only on the neck. There were deep purple and red marks around the woman’s throat. They reminded her of Roz Levy. “She was choked.”

  “Correct,” Pete agreed. “Her attacker wrapped his hands around her neck and strangled her. See the fingerprints here?”

  Amanda leaned in for a closer look. Now that he’d put the thought into her head, she could see the individual strands of bruises that formed the fingers of a hand.

  “Carotids,” Pete explained. “Arteries. One on each side of the neck. They deliver oxygenated blood to the brain. Very important. No oxygen, no brain.”

  “Right.” Amanda remembered the lesson from her police academy days. They got to watch the men learn how to do choke holds one morning.

  “Now.” Pete wrapped both his hands loosely around the woman’s neck. “See where my hands are?” Amanda nodded again. “See how pressing her carotid arteries in order to strangle her exerts enough force on the front of the neck to fracture the hyoid?” Again, she nodded. “Which tells me that this woman was strangled into unconsciousness.”

  Amanda looked back at the X-ray. “The fall from the roof wouldn’t break the bone?”

  “You’ll see when I open the neck that it’s highly improbable.”

  Amanda could not suppress the shudder that came.

  “You’re really doing quite well.”

  Amanda ignored the compliment. “Could she live with a broken Hy …”

  “Hyoid.”

  “Right. Could she live with that?”

  “Most certainly. A hyoid fracture or break isn’t necessarily fatal. I saw it often in Nam. The officers were trained in hand-to-hand combat, which of course they loved showing off. You hit a man here—” he chopped at his own neck—“with your elbow or even an open hand, and you can stun him or, with enough force, break the bone.” He cupped his hand to his chin like a tweedy college professor. “You feel a very distinctive sensation when you run your fingers along the neck, as if hundreds of bubbles are bursting under the skin. This comes from the air leaking out of the larynx into the tissue planes. In addition to the obvious panic, there’s tremendous pain, bleeding, bruising.” He smiled. “It’s a nasty little injury. Almost totally incapacitating. They’ll just lay there wheezing high up in their throats, praying for someone to help them.”

  “Are they able to scream?”

  “I’d be shocked if they could manage more than a hoarse whisper, but people surprise you sometimes. Everyone is different.”

  Amanda tried to process all this new information. “But what you’re saying is that Lucy Bennett was choked.” She remembered Pete’s earlier terminology. “Strangled to death.”

  He shook his head and shrugged at the same time. “I’ll need to see the lungs. Strangulation causes aspiration pneumonitis—the inhalation of vomit into the lungs. The gastric acids eat into the tissue. This gives us something of a timeline. The more tissue damage, the longer she was alive. Was she strangled into unconsciousness and then thrown off the roof or was she strangled to death and then thrown off the roof?”

  “Why does it matter?” Either way, Lucy had been murdered.

  “When you catch your perpetrator, you’re going to want to know the details of the crime. That way, you can make sure you’ve got the right guy and not some nut looking for a headline in the newspaper.”

  Amanda didn’t see a scenario where she would be catching any perpetrator. She wasn’t even sure why Pete was answering her questions. “But why would the killer give details of the crime? That would just make the case against him stronger.”

  “He won’t realize he’s walking into the trap you set.” Pete told her, “You are a lot smarter than he is. Your perpetrator is a man who cannot control himself.”

  Amanda considered the statement, which didn’t strike her as wholly true. “He was smart enough to try to cover the crime.”

  “Not as smart as you think. Throwing her off the roof was risky. It called attention to the crime. It opened up the possibility of witnesses. Why not leave her in the apartment and let a neighbor report the smell a few days—weeks—later?”

  He was right. Amanda remembered the Manson murders, the way the bodies were posed. “Do you think the killer was sending a message?”

  “Possibly,” Pete allowed. “We can also assume that he knew the victim fairly well.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Pete gripped his hands around the top of the sheet. “Remember to breathe.” He pulled away the covering, exposing the rest of the body.

  Amanda put her hand to her mouth. Nothing rushed up her throat. She didn’t pass out. She wasn’t even woozy. As with Roz Levy’s photos, she expected a violent reaction inside her body but was met instead with steely resolve. That same locking sensation from Techwood ran up Amanda’s spine. Her stomach actually stopped churning. Instead of fainting, she felt her vision sharpen.

  Amanda had never seen another woman entirely nude before. There was something sad about the way her breasts hung to the side. Her stomach was saggy. Her pubic hair was short, as if it had been trimmed, but the hair on her thighs was grotesquely unshaven. Blood and viscera leaked between her legs. Her body had been pummeled. Bruises blackened her stomach and ribs.

  Pete said, “In order to hurt somebody like this, you have to hate them. And hate does not come without familiarity. Just ask my ex-wife. She tried to strangle me once.”

  Amanda glanced up at him. There was no suggestion behind his smile. He wasn’t just creepy, he was downright strange. And polite. Amanda could not recall the last conversation she’d had with a man where she wasn’t constantly interrupted or talked over.

  Pete said, “You could be very good at this.”

  Amanda didn’t know if that was much to write home about. It certainly wasn’t conversation for the dinner table. “Can you tell me anything about the nail polish?”

  He took a latex glove out of his pocket. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  Amanda didn’t want to, but she took the glove. She tried to shove her hand into the stiff latex.

  “Wipe your palm first,” Pete advised.

  Amanda wiped her sweaty hand on her skirt. The glove was still a tight fit, but once she managed to force her fingers into the tips, the rest of her hand easily followed.

  Gently, she reached out for Lucy’s hand. The skin felt cold through the glove, or maybe Amanda was just imagining that. Instead of being limp, the body was stiff.

  “Rigor mortis,” Pete explained. “The skeletal muscles contract, locking the joints. Onset varies depending on temperature and lesser factors. It starts in as little as ten minutes and lasts for up to seventy-two hours.”

  “You can tell how long she’s been dead by how stiff she is.”

  “Precisely,” he confirmed. “By the time I got to our victim yesterday afternoon, she had been dead approximately three to six hours.”

  “That’s quite a window.”

  “Science is not as precise as we’d like to believe.”

  Amanda tried to turn the arm. It wouldn’t move.

  “Don’t worry about being gentle. She can’t feel pain anymore.”

  Amanda heard the sound of her throat working as she swallowed. She wrenched up the arm. There was a loud popping sound that sent a knife into Amanda’s chest.

  “Breathe in and out,” Pete advised. “Remember, it’s just tissue and bone.”

  Amanda swallowed again. The sound echoed in the room. She looked at Lucy Bennett’s fingers. “There’s something under her fingernails.”

  “Very good catch.” He went over to the cabinet in the corner. “We can send it to the lab for analysis.”

  Amanda wished she had Roz Levy’s magnifying glass. It wasn’t grime under the girl’s fingernails. “What do you think it is?”

  “If she fought back, it’s probably skin scratched off her attacker. Let’s hope she managed to draw blood.” Pete was
back with a glass slide and something that looked like an oversized toothpick. “Hold her steady.” Pete scraped the wooden pick under the fingernail. A long piece of skin came out. “If there’s enough blood in this skin tissue, and you find a suspect, we can analyze his blood and see if it’s the same type, whether he’s a secretor or nonsecretor.”

  “We’d need more than blood to convict him.”

  “The FBI is doing amazing work with enzymes right now.” He tapped the skin tissue onto the slide. “In ten years’ time, they’ll have samples from everyone in America stored on thousands of different computers all around the country. All you’ll have to do is send the sample around to each computer and bingo, within months you’ll know your perpetrator’s name and address.”

  “You should tell that to Butch and Rick.” The two homicide detectives would probably laugh in his face. “This is their case.”

  “Is it really?”

  She didn’t bother answering the question. “I guess I don’t have to tell you how much trouble Evelyn and I would be in if they found out we were down here poking around.”

  Pete put the slide on the counter. “You know, the GBI can’t find enough women to meet their quotas. They’re going to lose their federal grants if they don’t fill up the slots by the end of the year.”

  “I work for the Atlanta Police Department.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  Pete obviously didn’t know Duke Wagner as well as everyone else she’d met today. Forget Butch and Rick. Her father would have a canary if he knew Amanda was at the morgue. Touching a dead person. Talking to a hippie about leaving her steady job to be the token woman on the state’s police force.

  In for a penny, she supposed. There was still the reason they’d come here in the first place. Amanda turned the woman’s hand out, exposing the wrist to the light. There they were—the familiar white scars. “She tried to kill herself before.”