by L. K. Hill
“The day crew got the call," Shaun said. "They’ve already worked the scene and by now the body will be on its way to the morgue. I thought you should know.”
“Did they find anything in this one’s mouth?”
“I…don’t know. Sorry. Didn’t think to ask. There is something strange, though. Her face has been mutilated. To the point of not being able to identify her. We'll need to use dental records. It's like he tried to obscure her identity."
"Strange. He hasn't done that with any of the others."
"No, but everything else says it's him. You can look for yourself when you come in tonight."
"You don't want me in now?"
"No. Get some more sleep and I'll see you tonight. The body's been transported and the case will keep until then."
Gabe clicked off the phone and fell back onto his pillows.
Kyra. He turned his phone on again to check for messages. None. He told himself not to worry. As long as she wasn't in Abstreuse, she wasn't in danger. Still, she said she'd call when she returned. If she decided to stay longer—which he'd be all for—she would call, wouldn't she?
He'd been glad to hear she would be taking a short vacation from the Mire to see her family. He hadn't counted on being so anxious to have her back in the city. His real fear was that she'd return and head back into the Mire without telling him. No. She wouldn't do that. She'd promised.
Gabe rubbed his eyes. He prayed when he woke for work this evening, he would have a message from her.
*******
“I know it’s important, Detective,” the ME snapped as he led Gabe down the stone steps and into the basement of the city morgue. “I now have twelve bodies—twelve! —that need autopsying in the next couple of days. You do understand the concept of decomposition?”
Gabe rolled his eyes. “Of course,” he said patiently. “As I said before, this will only take a moment.”
The ME, who’d repeated the arguments for why he was too busy to show Gabe the latest victim’s body three times in the past fifteen minutes, muttered under his breath as they proceeded down the corridor.
Gabe glanced at Cora, who walked beside him. She needed some info for one of her cases from the health department, which stood next door to the morgue. They’d decided to come together. First to the morgue, then next door, then back to the precinct.
Gabe couldn’t fathom what information Cora would need from the health department that she needed to get in person. He hadn’t asked. He suspected she probably could have gotten it over the phone—anything could be easily emailed or faxed—but came along for his sake.
As they walked the cold, chemically-scented corridor, Gabe pretended not to notice the sidelong glances Cora threw his way.
“Have you heard from—” she glanced warily at the ME, walking three feet ahead of them, “—your CI yet?”
Gabe shook his head. “No.”
“Wasn't she supposed to be back last night?”
He nodded. “That’s what I understood. Maybe she got back later than she planned. I thought I’d have a message from her when I woke up, but nothing.”
“I doubt it’s anything to worry about, Gabe. Maybe she fell into bed before calling. Travel can be exhausting. And she's still healing.”
“Yeah maybe,” Gabe said doubtfully. If Kyra returned when she’d planned to, she’d had plenty of time to sleep and call him by now.
“Come on, Gabe,” Cora said quietly, obviously not fooled by his forced nonchalance. “She went to see her family. Haven’t your parents ever talked you into staying at a function longer than planned?”
Gabe chuckled. His mom excelled at it. Especially if she had any chance of setting him up with a nice woman. Cora was right.
Yet, when he'd awakened a few hours ago and found no messages or texts waiting for him, a niggling worry burrowed into the back of his head, refusing to budge. He’d done his best to ignore it all morning, telling himself Kyra was fine and would call him. Eventually. He needed to focus on his work.
“What, Tyke didn’t want to come along to babysit me too?”
Cora grinned. Then her smiled faded. “No. He said he had something else to do. Have you noticed how preoccupied he’s been lately?”
Gabe frowned. Normally it would be Tyke coming up with excuses to accompany Gabe, not Cora. Yet, Gabe had seen little of his best friend in the past few weeks. Gabe wasn't judging. Tyke's workload equaled—if not surpassed—Gabe's. Plus, a family waited for him at home. Cora had a family too. Her husband was a corporate executive of some kind, and her kids were teenagers. They required significantly less management than Tyke’s grade-school-aged girls. “I’m sure he’s just busy,” Gabe said.
“I suppose,” Cora said doubtfully.
“You think he isn’t okay?” Gabe asked.
She shook her head. “I’m not saying that. He’s acting strangely. With everything going on, maybe he doesn’t want to share because he doesn’t want to distract from your worries.”
Gabe frowned and made a mental note to corner Tyke and make him talk.
Ahead of them, the ME pushed open a swinging door with a square window and led them into a massive, peach-tiled room. Freezers lined one wall—not the kind that held food. Cabinets lined the other. Gabe knew they stored all kinds of medical supplies. Ominous-looking floor drains completed the chilly feel of the room. It held enough space to do three or four autopsies at a time. Gabe never saw more than two performed at once.
The ME, still glaring as though Gabe had stomped on his foot, trudged to one of the freezers and checked the label on it against the clipboard he carried. He yanked open the door and pulled out the metal slab holding the body Gabe needed to see.
Gabe’s stomach lurched, taking in the raw hamburger remnants of her face. It looked like the face—but not the rest of the body—had been struck by a train.
The vic’s dark blond hair fell below her shoulders. He’d seen as much in the crime scene photos Bailey already furnished. The hair looked strikingly similar to Kyra’s real hair. Great. Just what he needed to dispel his worry. He pushed it away.
“And you think she has something in her mouth?” The ME asked.
“I can’t be sure,” Gabe shook his head. “The last vic did, so I need to know either way with this one. This killer is actively evolving. If there’s a second key, it may be part of his new MO. If not, the last body is special for some reason.”
The ME raised an eyebrow when Gabe mentioned evolving, looking intrigued. He snapped on vinyl gloves, his face marginally less grouchy. Gabe and Cora waited as he struggled to open the gory mess of the mouth. A tearing sound commenced and bloody fibers snapped back, flicking blood on his gloves and as high as his forearms.
Cora groaned. Gabe’s stomach churned harder. He waited patiently as the ME used his fingers to search the woman’s mouth. “Nothing in the oral cavity,” he said.
“Hmm,” Gabe grunted. Theoretically it made the previous vic special, because of the key. Yet this vic was the only one whose identity the killer tried to hide. Assuming that was the reason for the facial mutilation.
“Something wrong?” Cora asked.
Gabe raised an eyebrow at her before realizing she'd addressed the ME, not him. The ME still peered into the victim's mouth, but now he was frowning.
“I, um, notice something strange at the back of the throat." Still holding the mouth open, he reached across to pick up a large pair of tweezers. “It may be a growth of some sort I’ll identify during autopsy. Or something is pushing the tissue up.”
Gabe stepped toward the table. “Like a foreign object?”
“Perhaps. If it is one, it’s been jammed quite far down her throat.” He paused, looking frustrated. His gaze went to the tray again, where a small black cylinder that could only have been a flashlight sat. “Detective," he said. "Perhaps you can put on gloves and assist me.” His pointed look said Gabe had no choice since he’d already interrupted the man’s day.
Gabe wiggled hi
s hands into white vinyl gloves and held the vic’s mouth open, while the ME held the light in one hand and the tweezers in the other. Gabe did his best to ignore the sounds coming from the body. Everything from dull thuds to moist sucking noises as the ME probed around. After what seemed an eternity of the ME’s brow creasing with effort, something pulled free.
His face relaxed. “Aw. Here we are. What do you know, detective? A key.”
He held it up for Cora and Gabe’s inspection. Much like the one in the previous victim’s mouth, this looked to be a generic house key, which might have been copied at any local key place and could possibly open any door in the city.
Except for one thing. A stripe of green paint across the head.
Gabe backed away from the body. He didn’t feel air going in and out of his lungs, despite his heaving chest. No, no it couldn’t be. He studied the vic again. The height and weight were right. The hair held the exact same shade. A chasm opened in his chest, sucked all his organs in and blotted out the daylight streaming in through the basement window.
Cora turned to him in surprise. “Gabe, what’s wrong?”
He backed away from the table, nearly putting his hands to his mouth before realizing blood from the vic’s face covered them.
“Gabe!” Cora clapped her hands in front of his face and he jumped, looking at her. Terror danced across her features. “What?”
The ME studied him with concern as well.
Gabe turned away from them. He couldn’t have spoken if his life depended on it. On the floor beside the nearest cabinet sat a small waste bin with a thin liner. Gabe fell to his knees in front of it and vomited.
Wiping his mouth, he looked at the corpse again. It drew his gaze like a magnet. He staggered to his feet and stared at the hands.
Always. He wanted to take her hand, but couldn't bring himself to do it. Why couldn't he do it?
He spun and bulled through the door so aggressively, it hit the wall outside and rebounded. Before it closed, he caught Cora’s voice.
“Will you put it in an evidence bag for us and send it to the lab? Thank you.”
The door shut and Gabe vaguely registered the sound of it opening again as he staggered down the hall. No way he'd make it up the stone steps, so he staggered past them to where a window—cut out of the upper part of the wall because they were in the basement—stood open. He breathed the fresher air from outside and rested his forehead against the cold stone wall. Neither helped.
A hand on his shoulder made him jump. He whirled so fast he nearly hit Cora in the face. She didn’t seem to notice.
“Gabe. What? Talk to me.”
His breaths came in sobs.
Cora stared at him, looking horrified. Turning, she stared back down the hall toward the autopsy room, as though the answers floated in the air around the door. She turned to him again, still flabbergasted, growing more horrified by the minute. As if she stood on the cusp of figuring something out, but couldn’t quite connect the dots. Perhaps she didn’t want to.
“Gabe—”
“That’s my key.” He had no idea where his voice came from or why it sounded so steady, if ragged.
Cora frowned. “Your…what?”
“The strip of green paint. I put it there. To differentiate it from other keys. Years ago.”
“Gabe, how would the killer have gotten it off your key ring?”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t on my key ring. I use it as a spare now.”
Cora’s eyes widened. “Are you saying this killer got into your house?”
Gabe shook his head, running a hand through his hair. He still couldn’t breathe. Why hadn’t he passed out yet? “No.”
Cora threw her hands up. “You gotta help me out here, Gabe.”
He shut his eyes. “I gave it to Kyra.”
Cora’s face dropped into stillness.
“In case she ever needed a safe place to go, and I wasn’t home.”
Cora's eyes narrowed. “Are you saying…? That can’t be….” She whirled and marched back to the door of the autopsy room, peering in through the square window. Her silence said it all. If she'd come up with any argument for the woman on the slab not being Kyra, she'd have said so. She could only have seen what Gabe did. The build. The hair. Cora spoke, her voice soft, yet firm. “We have Kyra’s DNA on file, right? We would have collected it when we started her CI file?”
Gabe tried to nod, not sure he actually did. Cora nodded as though he had. She disappeared into the autopsy room.
Gabe slide down the wall onto his butt. His chest felt like a bullet had torn through it. Worse. He'd always feared this would happen. He'd warned her…how many times? Yet he couldn't have prepared for the actuality. It felt unreal. How could that be her on that slab?
Damn you, Kyra. Damn you for doing this to me.
First Dillon’s case. Hammond. Now Kyra…. He pulled his knees into his chest, put his head down, and sobbed.
*******
Half an hour later, Gabe sat on the curb outside the precinct. He couldn’t bring himself to go inside. He felt too numb. Thoughts of the station made him claustrophobic. Cora, her health department errand forgotten, drove him back. She’d dragged him out of his car, sat him down, then disappeared into the station. No doubt to tell Shaun what happened. She’d made no calls that he’d seen since their horrific realization at the morgue.
It took longer than Gabe would have thought for someone to come sit beside him. Perhaps it had only been minutes, where to him it felt like days. A second presence walked up beside them.
“Gabe,” Tyke’s voice, from right beside him, sounded gentle. He mirrored Gabe's stance, sitting on the curb. “I’m so sorry.”
Gabe couldn’t look his best friend in the eyes. Instead, he studied the hole in the knee of Tyke’s tattered jeans.
Shaun squatted in front of Gabe. Gabe raised his eyes to find Cora standing beside him.
Shaun looked upset. “Gabe, you need to deal with this. No more work today. You should go home and sleep. Process.”
Gabe didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t try.
“Is there any chance it’s not her?” Shaun addressed Cora.
Cora shook her head slowly. “I don’t see how,” she said softly. “Same hair. Same build. Even her clothing. Baggy black sweats. Exactly what Kyra wears when she’s in disguise in the Mire. What are the chances of anyone else looking exactly like her? Kyra was supposed to check in twenty-four hours ago.”
“What can we do?" Tyke asked softly.
“Nothing to do,” Gabe said darkly. When had life become such a trade off? He'd become a cop to help people. To fight against what he'd endured when Dillon vanished. Helping people was a pyrrhic victory, it seemed. Maybe Gabe would finally bury his brother, while a killer buried dozens in a warehouse in the Mire. Kyra had tried to save her brother, and now…. What a twisted pair they made. The detective who, after twenty-five years, still hadn't put his brother to rest. And the woman who'd died trying to find hers.
Shaun sighed. “I called the ME and had him send DNA to the lab with priority. They’re pretty backed up with other priorities, so it’ll be at least twelve to twenty-four hours before we get confirmation."
Gabe thought Shaun might be hinting that perhaps the DNA would prove it wasn’t Kyra. He noted none of them actually said it. They’d been on the job too long to believe in such a big coincidence.
When Gabe didn’t respond, Shaun straightened his legs. “Will you stay with him a while?”
“Of course,” Tyke said.
Shaun and Cora melted slowly back toward the station. Gabe’s emptiness swallowed him. He didn't try to fight it. The world around him became a faraway bubble, floating on the horizon of his mind. He didn’t know how to begin to chase it.
The sun had shifted a few degrees in the sky when a loud bang brought his head around. Cora burst through the door to the station. She stared at them significantly before trotting toward them.
Tyke stood. “Wha
t?”
“Gabe, it’s not her.”
Gabe stared up at her, uncomprehending.
Tyke glanced nervously between the two of them. “How do you know Cora? The lab can’t be back yet.”
“Because of her scar. She has that word, remember? Carved into her stomach. We saw it the night she OD’d.
Tyke gasped. “I completely forgot about that.”
Cora shook her head. “Me too. All of us did. There’s too damn much going on lately. It occurred to me a few minutes ago and I ran to tell Shaun. He called the ME and made him go check.”
Reality came crashing into Gabe's ears. For the first time in hours, he remembered who he was. His feet and backside felt like stone. He leaned forward, but didn’t think he could stand. “It's not there?”
Cora opened her mouth, hesitated.
“Cora,” Tyke said with exasperation.
Her expression turned apologetic. “No, it’s not. Not exactly. It’s not her, Gabe. I promise.”
Unmitigated relief crashed into Gabe's chest. He dropped his face into his hands. His entire body felt like jelly. Rolling onto his back, he allowed the bright blue sky to blind him with its brilliance.
“Why didn’t you just say yes?” Tyke murmured.
“Because it gets weirder.”
Gabe vaguely registered that she hadn’t continued. Probably waiting for him to recover. He couldn’t right away. It wasn’t Kyra. She still lived. Probably. Why the hell hadn’t she called him? Five full minutes passed before he sat up again.
Cora and Tyke still stood there, looking both patient ad worried.
“Okay,” Gabe said. “How does it get weirder?”
“The ME faxed this picture.”
He hadn’t noticed the piece of paper in her hand before. He took it when she offered. Tyke sat beside him again to see.
The ME had snapped a picture of the victim’s abdomen. To prove, no doubt, that it wasn’t Kyra. Yeah, the picture definitely made things weirder. Kyra had the word ‘whore’ carved into her stomach. It was an old injury; just raised, white scar tissue now. This woman definitely wasn't Kyra, yet a scar did mar her abdomen. The word ‘whore’ glared up from the victim's stomach. It looked fresh, bloody, with no scar tissue in sight.
