“In nearly fifty years, I’ve not once had a patient talk back or file a complaint against me.” He raised an eyebrow. “You know they’ll need someone to take my place when I’m gone.”
Sara laughed, then saw that he wasn’t joking.
“Just a thought,” he told her. “But this brings me to a favor I need to ask.”
“What can I do?”
“I’ve got a case that just came in. It’s very important. It has to hold up.”
“Does it have anything to do with that?” She indicated the dirty envelope on his desk.
“Yes,” he admitted. “I can do all the heavy lifting, but I need to make sure that six months, a year from now, someone’s around to testify.”
“You’ve got dozens of people working under you.”
“Just four at the moment,” he corrected. “Unfortunately, none of them possess the length and breadth of your experience.”
“I don’t—”
“You’re still credentialed. I checked with the state.” He leaned forward. “I’m not a duplicitous man, Sara. You know that about me. So you’ll understand that I’m being brutally honest when I tell you that this is a dying man’s last request. I need you to do this for me. I need you to go to court. I need you to speak directly to a jury and put this man back where he belongs.”
Sara was momentarily at a loss. This was the last thing she’d been expecting. Her apartment looked as if it had been hit by a tornado. She still had Will to deal with. She was dressed more suitably for a pickup softball game than for work. Still, she knew that she didn’t have a choice. “There’s already a suspect?”
“Yes.” He shuffled the papers around and found a yellow file folder.
Sara scanned the preliminary report. There wasn’t much. A dead Jane Doe had been found outside a Dumpster in a fairly upscale part of town. She’d been beaten to death. Her wallet was absent cash. The bruising around her wrists and ankles indicated that she’d been tied up, possibly kidnapped.
Sara looked up at Pete. She had an awful, sinking feeling. “The missing Georgia Tech student?”
“We don’t have positive ID yet, but I’m afraid so.”
“Death penalty case?” Pete nodded. “Is the body here?”
“They brought her in half an hour ago.” Pete looked up at the doorway. “Hello, Mandy.”
“Pete.” Amanda Wagner’s arm was in a sling. She looked worse for the wear, though she still kept up the formalities. “Dr. Linton.”
“Dr. Wagner,” Sara returned. She couldn’t help but look over the woman’s shoulder for Will.
Amanda asked Pete, “Did Vanessa come by?”
“First thing this morning.” He explained to Sara, “The fourth Mrs. Hanson.”
Amanda said, “Dr. Linton, I hope we can avail ourselves of your expertise?”
Sara felt a bit managed. She asked the obvious question. “Is this Will’s case?”
“No. Agent Trent is absolutely not assigned to this case. Which doesn’t explain why I’ve spent the last three hours of my day walking up and down every hallway in a twelve-story office building talking to people who have better things to do than watch us chase our tails.” She paused for a breath. “Pete, when did we get so old?”
“Speak for yourself. I always told you I was going to die young.”
She laughed, but there was a sad edge to the sound.
“I can still remember the first time you came into my morgue.”
“Please, let’s not get maudlin. Try to go out with some dignity.”
He grinned like a cat. There was a moment between them, and Sara wondered if Amanda Wagner had fallen somewhere along the timeline of the many Mrs. Hansons.
The moment passed quickly. Pete stood from his desk. He reached out, bracing himself against the chair. Sara jumped up to help him, but he gently pushed her away. “Not to that point yet, my dear.” He told Amanda, “You can use my office. We’ll go ahead and get started.”
Pete indicated that Sara should leave ahead of him. She pushed open the doors to the morgue, resisting the urge to hold them for Pete. He seemed more diminished in the large tiled room. The office had served as a buffer against his wasted appearance. In the bright lights of the autopsy theater, there was no hiding the obvious.
“A bit cool in here,” Pete mumbled, taking his white lab coat off the hook. He went to the cabinet and handed Sara one of his spares. His name was stitched over the pocket. Sara could’ve wrapped the coat around her body twice. But then, so could Pete.
“Our victim.” He indicated a draped body in the center of the room. Blood had permeated the sheet, which was unusual. Circulation stopped when the heart stopped beating. Blood congealed. Sara couldn’t help but feel some guilty excitement. She relished a difficult case. Working at Grady, dealing with the same types of ailments and injuries over and over again, could become a bit mind-numbing.
Pete said, “We’ve already photographed and X-rayed her. Sent her clothes to the lab. Do you know we used to just cut them off and throw them in a bag? And rape cases.” He laughed. “My God, the science was flawed from the beginning. There was no taking the victim’s word for it. If we didn’t find semen in the suspected attacker’s underwear, then we couldn’t legally sign off on a charge of rape.”
Sara didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t imagine how awful things used to be. Thankfully, she didn’t have to.
Pete looped his braid on top of his head and pulled on an Atlanta Braves baseball hat. He was in his element inside the morgue, visibly more animated. “I remember the first time I talked to an odontologist about bite marks. I was certain we were looking at the future of crime solving. Hair fibers. Carpet fibers.” He chuckled. “If I have one regret about my impending doom, it’s that I won’t live to see the day when we’ve got everyone’s DNA on an iPad, and all we have to do is scan some blood or a piece of tissue and up pops a current location for our bad guy. It’ll end crime as we know it.”
Sara didn’t want to talk about Pete’s impending doom. She busied herself with her hair, tightening the band, tucking it into a surgeon’s cap so she wouldn’t contaminate anything. “How long have you known Amanda?”
“Since dinosaurs walked among us,” he joked. Then, in a more serious tone, he said, “I met her when she started working with Evelyn. They were both a couple of pistols.”
The description struck Sara as odd, as if Amanda and Evelyn had run around Atlanta like two Calamity Janes. “What was she like?”
“She was interesting,” Pete said, which was one of his highest compliments. He looked at Sara’s reflection in the mirror over the sink as he washed his hands. “I know it wasn’t great when you came up in medical school—what were there, a handful of women?”
“If that,” Sara answered. “But this last class was over sixty percent.” She didn’t mention that the ones who weren’t taking time off to have children were mostly funneling themselves into pediatrics or gynecology, the same as they had when Sara was an intern. “How many women were on the force when Amanda joined?”
He squinted as he thought about it. “Less than two hundred out of over a thousand?” Pete stepped back so Sara could wash her hands. “No one thought women should be on the job. It was considered man’s work. There was all kinds of grumbling about how they couldn’t protect themselves, didn’t have the cojones to pull the trigger. The truth was that everyone was secretly terrified they’d be better. Can’t blame ’em.” Pete winked at her. “The last time women were in charge, they outlawed alcohol.”
Sara smiled back at him. “I think we should be forgiven one mistake in almost a hundred years.”
“Perhaps,” he allowed. “You know, you listen to my generation these days, we were all free-loving hippies, but the truth is there were more Amanda Wagners than there were Timothy Learys, especially in this part of the country.” He gave her a twinkling smile. “Not to say it entirely passed us by. I lived in a glorious singles complex off the Chattahoochee. Riverbend. Eve
r hear of it?”
Sara shook her head. She was enjoying Pete’s reminiscing. His cancer was obviously compelling him to put his life in perspective.
“A lot of airline pilots lived there. Stewardesses. Lawyers and doctors and nurses, oh my.” His eyes lit up at the memory. “I had a nice side business selling penicillin to many of the fine Republican men and women currently running our state government.”
Sara used her elbow to turn off the faucet. “Sounds like crazy times.” She had come of age during the AIDS epidemic, when free love started exacting its price.
“Crazy indeed.” Pete handed her some paper towels. “When was Brown v. the Board of Education?”
“The desegregation case?” Sara shrugged. Her high school history class was some time ago. “Fifty-four? Fifty-five?”
Pete said, “It was around that time that the state required white teachers to sign a pledge disavowing integration. They would lose their jobs if they refused.”
Sara had never heard of the pledge, but she wasn’t surprised.
“Duke, Amanda’s father, was away when the pledge was circulating.” Pete blew into a pair of powdered surgical gloves before putting them on. “Miriam, Amanda’s mother, refused to sign the pledge. So her grandfather—a very powerful man. He was a higher-up with Southern Bell—sent her off to Milledgeville.”
Sara felt her lips part in surprise. “He committed his daughter to the state mental hospital?”
“The facility was basically a warehouse back then, mostly for vets and the criminally insane. And women who wouldn’t listen to their fathers.” Pete shook his head. “It broke her. It broke many people.”
Sara tried to do the math. “Was Amanda born yet?”
“She was around four or five, I’d guess. Duke was still in Korea, so his father-in-law was in charge. I gather no one told Duke what was really going on. The minute he was back in Georgia, he grabbed Amanda and signed his wife out of Milledgeville. Never talked to his father-in-law again.” Pete handed Sara a pair of gloves. “Everything seemed fine, and then one day, Miriam went out into the back garden and hanged herself from a tree.”
“That’s awful.” Sara pulled on the surgical gloves. No wonder Amanda was so closed down. She was worse than Will.
“Don’t let it soften you toward her too much,” Pete warned. “She lied to you in my office. She wanted you here for a reason.”
Instead of asking what reason, Sara followed his gaze to the door. Will was there. He stared at Sara in utter shock. She had never seen him look so awful. His eyes were bloodshot. He was rumpled and unshaven. His body swayed from exhaustion. His pain was so obvious that Sara could almost feel her heart breaking.
Her instinct was to go to him, but Faith was there, then Amanda, then Leo Donnelly, and Sara knew that a public display would only make things worse. She could read it in his face. He looked absolutely stricken to find her there.
Sara glared at Pete, making sure he knew that she was furious. Amanda may have lied about this being Will’s case, but Pete was the one who had lured Sara to the morgue. She snapped off the gloves as she walked toward Will. He obviously didn’t want Sara to see him like this. She planned to take him into Pete’s office to explain what had happened and apologize profusely, but Will’s expression stopped her.
Close up, he looked even worse. Sara had to force herself not to put her hands to his face, rest his head on her shoulder. Exhaustion radiated from his body. There was so much pain in his eyes that her heart broke all over again.
She kept her voice low. “Tell me what you need me to do. I can leave. I can stay. Whatever is best for you.”
His breathing was shallow. He gave her such a look of desperation that Sara had to fight to keep herself from crying.
“Tell me what to do,” she begged. “What you need me to do.”
His gaze settled on the gurney. The victim on the table. He mumbled, “Stay,” as he walked into the room.
Sara let out a stuttered breath before she turned around. Faith couldn’t look at her, but Amanda held her gaze. Sara had never understood Will’s mercurial relationship with his boss, but at that moment, she ceased caring. There was not another person on the planet right now whom Sara despised more than Amanda Wagner. She was obviously playing some kind of game with Will, just as it was obvious that Will was losing.
“Let’s begin,” Pete suggested.
Sara stood to Pete’s side, opposite Will and Faith, her arms crossed. She tried to calm her anger. Will had told her to stay. Sara could not guess the reason why, but she didn’t need to add more tension to the room. A woman had been murdered. That should be the focus.
“All right, ladies and gentlemen.” Pete used his foot to tap on the Dictaphone to record the procedure. He called out the usual information—time of day, persons present, and the victim’s tentative identity of Ashleigh Renee Snyder. “ID has yet to be confirmed by family, though of course we’ll follow with dental records, which have already been digitized and sent to the Panthersville Road lab.” He asked Leo Donnelly, “Is the father en route?”
“Squad car’s picking him up from the airport. Should be any minute now.”
“Very good, Detective.” Pete gave him a stern look. “I trust you’re going to keep any wry comments or off-color jokes to yourself?”
Leo held up his hands. “I’m just here for the ID so I can turn over the case.”
“Thank you.”
Without preamble, Pete grabbed the top of the sheet and pulled back the drape. Faith gasped. Her hand went to her mouth. Just as quickly, she forced her arm back down to her side. Her throat worked. She didn’t blink. Faith had never had the stomach for these things, but she seemed determined to hold her own.
Unusually, Sara shared her discomfort. After all these years, she’d thought herself anesthetized to the horrors of violence, but there was something gut-wrenching about the state of the woman’s body. She hadn’t just been killed. She’d been mutilated. Bruises blackened her torso. Tiny red edemas cracked the skin. One of her ribs had punctured through the flesh. Her intestines hung between her legs.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Sara had never been one to believe in the concept of evil. She always thought the word was an excuse—a way to explain away mental illness or depravity. A safe word to hide behind rather than face the truth that human beings were capable of despicable acts. That not much kept us from acting on our baser urges.
Yet, “evil” was the only word that came to mind when Sara looked down at the victim. It wasn’t the bruises, the punctures, even the bite marks that were shocking. It was the methodical slices along the insides of the woman’s arms and legs. It was the crisscross pattern that traced up her hips and torso in an almost ruler-straight line. Her attacker had ripped the flesh the same way you would rip out a seam in a dress.
And then there was her face. Sara could not begin to understand what had been done to her face.
Pete said, “The X-rays show the hyoid bone was broken.”
Sara recognized the familiar bruising around the woman’s neck. “Was she thrown off a building after she was strangled?”
Pete said, “No. She was found outside a one-story building. The intestinal prolapse is likely from premortem external trauma. A blunt object, or a fist. Do these striations look like finger marks to you, perhaps from a closed fist?”
“Yes.” Sara pressed her lips together. The force of the blows must have been tremendous. The killer was obviously fit, probably a large man, and undoubtedly filled with rage. For all the world had changed, there were still men out there who absolutely despised women.
“Dr. Hanson,” Amanda asked, “for the benefit of the tape, what would you estimate is the time of death?”
Pete smiled at the question. “I would guess anywhere between three and five o’clock this morning.”
Faith volunteered, “The witness who saw the green van was out jogging around four-thirty. He doesn’t know the make or model.” Sh
e still couldn’t look at Sara. “We’ve put out an APB, but it’s probably a dead end.”
“Four-thirty this morning certainly works for me,” Pete said. “As you all know, time of death is not an exact science.”
Amanda huffed, “Just like old times.”
“Dr. Linton?” Pete motioned for Sara to join him. “Why don’t you take the left side and I’ll take the right?”
Sara pulled on a fresh pair of gloves. Will stepped back as she made her way around the table. He was being too quiet. He wouldn’t meet her questioning gaze. Sara still felt the need to do something for him, but there was an equally overwhelming pull to do right by the dead woman. Something told her that the latter would aid in the former. This was Will’s case, no matter what lies Amanda had told. He obviously felt some emotional attachment. Sara had never seen anyone look so bereft.
And she understood why Pete wanted to make sure someone he trusted was able to testify. Every inch of the victim’s body screamed for justice. Whoever had attacked and murdered Ashleigh Snyder had not just wanted to hurt her. He’d wanted to destroy her.
Sara felt a subtle shift in her brain as she prepared herself for the procedure. Juries had watched enough CSI to understand the basic tenets of autopsy, but it was the medical examiner’s job to guide them through the science behind each finding. The chain of custody was sacrosanct. All the slide numbers, tissue samples, and trace evidence would be catalogued into the computer. The lot would be sealed with tamper-proof tape that could be opened only inside the GBI lab. Trace evidence and tissue would be profiled for DNA. The DNA would hopefully be matched to a suspect, and the suspect would be arrested based on incontrovertible evidence.
Pete asked Sara, “Shall we begin?”
There were two Mayo trays prepared with identical instruments: wooden probes, tweezers, flexible rulers, vials and slides. Pete’s had a magnifying glass, which he held to his eye as he leaned over the body. Instead of starting at the top of the head, he studied the victim’s hand. As with the legs and torso, the flesh along the inside of her arm, from her wrist to her armpit, was ripped open in a straight line. It continued in a U to her upper torso, then followed down to her hips.
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