He grinned at her and pointed to his forehead with his free hand. “You’re looking at the worst of it.”
“Campbell?” she said when she could trust herself to not punch him. “Never do that to me again.”
“Try and find the bomb next time, okay, Peng?”
“Come with me,” she said, and dragged Campbell over to where Hope Blackwell was patching up his team. She left Hope with firm instructions on how to treat Campbell (“Don’t be gentle, and anything you’ve got that burns like acid in an open wound? Double up on that.”), and stepped away from the group to call Phil.
Their connection opened, but he didn’t greet her. Instead, she felt a steering wheel under her hands, one foot on the brake, the other on the gas… “Phil?”
“I’m taking Bell home,” he said.
Rachel wasn’t sure if he had meant to add “Like you ordered,” but she had heard that thought nonetheless; Phil was furious.
“No one was hurt,” she told him. “Couple of scratches, at worst.”
Phil’s sense of relief was stronger than hers had been. Rachel had to reach out and steady herself on a nearby mailbox until the surge of his emotion passed. “Thanks for telling me,” he said after a moment.
“Phil—”
“Not right now, Rachel.”
She threw some authority into their link. “Yes, now. How do you think it would have looked for OACET if their resident bomb expert got an FBI forensics team killed?”
“I know!” he shouted. “I know the collective comes first! But you think I want to walk away and let you take the blame?”
“Chain of command, Phil. Doesn’t matter what you do when I’m the one who’s responsible. If there was any fault here, it was mine. I should have been the one to go outside and make the call, not you. But no, I was too busy thinking about shoes.”
Phil’s raw anger filled her, and he broke their link without answering.
“Rachel?”
“What?!”
Hope and Campbell each took a step away from her when she snapped at them, but Hope started grinning. “Brain fight?” she asked.
Rachel nodded. To Campbell, she said, “Walk me through what happened before the bomb went off.”
“Uh,” Campbell said, mildly orange and uncertain. “Everything was business as usual, and then the back room went up. We were all outside at the time, so—”
“Wait.” Rachel threw up a hand to interrupt him. “Was anyone in the store?”
Campbell shook his head.
“Shit!” Rachel whispered as she turned to face the bulk of Gayle Street. She threw her wide scans out and ran them up and down any building with a direct line of sight on the coffee shop.
Campbell picked up on her thinking almost immediately. “Shit!” he agreed, and moved to rejoin his team.
“What?” Hope asked Rachel. “What’s happening?”
“If the bomb wasn’t on a tripwire or was activated manually—”
“Oh!” Hope looked up and around. “Remote… uh, detonation?”
“Yeah,” Rachel said. “So unless the bomb was on a timer—which I doubt, because I would have noticed a timer—someone had enough control to decide when to set it off.”
“You think he waited until everybody was out of the building?”
Shit, Rachel thought to herself. “Hey Campbell!” she shouted to the FBI. “I’ll be right back.” She snatched Hope’s medical bag off of the pavement and started walking. “Come on,” she whispered to Hope. “I have to get you out of here.”
“I can’t leave the scene,” Hope said. “You think cops are the only ones who have to deal with paperwork?”
“I think the guy who set off the bomb didn’t want to hurt anyone in law enforcement,” Rachel said in a low voice as she grabbed Hope’s arm and pulled her into a jog. “And you’re the only person here who isn’t part of that club.”
She had expected the other woman’s colors to go white, but Hope pulled away from Rachel, electric blue with intent and purpose. “No,” she said, searching the street. “I’d know—”
Hope’s colors shifted to greens, an odd combination of sage and an odd almost-orange lime. Rachel had no idea what those colors meant, and she didn’t care; Hope finally relented. “Yeah,” she said. “You’re right. Let’s get out of here.”
Rachel nodded, and the two of them fled into the dark.
FOURTEEN
“EVER SEEN A DEAD BODY before?”
Santino’s conversational colors glazed over in irritation. “I was a beat cop in downtown D.C. There were very few days when I didn’t see a dead body.”
“Liar.”
“Exaggerator,” he clarified. “The guys at the morgue said we went out to collect the garbage every Tuesday and Thursday.”
“That’s morbid.”
“Yup.”
Rachel was trying to ignore the elevator. Until today, she hadn’t appreciated how the elevators at the Consolidated Forensics Laboratory whispered to her. She usually got out on Jason’s floor, but the new autopsy suite was on the fifth; the cab had paused on its way up, asking her without words if she was sure she didn’t want to get out on the third floor?
She wasn’t sure if the elevator had recognized her or if she had unconsciously written a half-assed navigational autoscript for her own convenience, but she was not happy being second-guessed by a machine.
Next-generation technology, she thought. A few extra processors, and it starts getting a high opinion of itself.
The cab did not drop sharply to punish her; she was secretly grateful. She didn’t know what she would do if an elevator suddenly developed sentience. Or a sense of humor.
Or maybe it just has good manners, that little voice in the back of her head chimed in. She pretended to cough and shook her head, hard, to silence it.
The doors pulled apart and they exited on the fifth floor. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had relocated from its old building before Rachel had been sent to the MPD, and Santino assured her the new autopsy suites were spectacular. Almost as good as those in the movies.
Zockinski and Hill were waiting for them at the receptionist’s desk, Hill slightly green around the gills. Rachel was surprised; out of the two detectives, she had assumed that Zockinski would be the one who couldn’t stomach a corpse.
“Are we late?” she asked Hill.
“Right on time,” he said. She smelled mint on his breath, lots of it: Hill had been crunching Altoids to ward off his nausea.
The autopsies had already been conducted on the two officers who were killed on Gayle Street. Zockinski and Hill hadn’t caught their case, but Hill knew the detectives who did and had called in a favor. They had made sure Hill could sit in on a second walkthrough of the findings, with both of the late officers putting in an appearance.
Rachel was the only one of their small group who hadn’t yet attended an official MPD autopsy, so she had to run the usual gauntlet of forms and explaining to the receptionist that yes, she really was with OACET and no, she couldn’t adjust his bank account and make him a billionaire, oh so very funny! She would have enjoyed poking the receptionist apart, but he was her excuse for taking far too long to fill out a simple access request. Instead, she played nice and pretended to flirt while scribbling with Santino’s gel pen.
Ten minutes later, they were following a harried intern across one of the gross pathology rooms towards the autopsy suites. Rachel spotted a flock of visitors passing the windowed wall of the gross room, peering around and over each other to get a glimpse of the pathologist fiddling with the spot laser settings on a microscope. She was mildly shocked: she had known the MPD offered limited tours of the Consolidated Forensics Laboratory to the general public, but she had assumed that these did not include the autopsy suites because, well… autopsies. Rachel poked Santino, and tilted her head towards the tourists.
“Yeah,” he said in a low voice. “You can thank television for turning autopsies into a spectator sport.”
She
was relieved to find that only the smallest of the gross pathology rooms was on display, with the real meat of the organization (so to speak) hidden from view behind a steel-reinforced wall. Rachel sent a deep scan through the wing, and found a long hallway, with rooms off to either side. Most of these were large and spacious, with multiple tables in each. The showpiece was the medical examiners’ operating theater, a large semi-circular room with a few levels of stadium seating on three sides. Out of all of the rooms in this suite, only the autopsy table in the operating theater was unoccupied: it was nearly a week after the bombings and the casualties of Gayle Street were still keeping the medical examiners busy. Rachel half-expected the intern to veer off and deposit them in the theater, but no such luck. He knocked on a door near the end of the hall, and then turned and left as quickly as he could.
The reason for the intern’s quick escape opened the door, a tall woman wearing a layer of antagonistic reds over a deep red core the color of fresh candied apples. The woman saw Zockinski, and her surface colors glazed over and faded to a muted yellow, with the detective’s core of autumn orange wrapped up in a tight ball of red. Even without those cues, Rachel could tell she wanted to be anywhere else but here; the woman slumped in on herself, fingers flicking back and forth against her smartphone as she pretended to have better things to do.
Rachel knew first-hand that Zockinski and Hill could be bullies, but she had assumed they had taken the sum of their anger out on her. It had never crossed her mind that could have also gone after other coworkers.
“Meet Dr. Kowalski,” Zockinski said, his conversational colors moving towards the piercing blues of directed intent, with a point of bright red light aimed at the medical examiner. “She’s an old buddy of ours, aren’t you, Kowalski?”
Rachel put one shoulder under Zockinski’s arm and shoved him out of the way, fullback-style. Zockinski blinked white in mild astonishment as she held out her hand to the medical examiner. “Pleasure to meet you,” she said to the woman, trying to put as much sincerity into her words as she could.
“Yeah, right,” Kowalski snapped, as she left Rachel with her hand dangling in mid-air. “Let’s get this over with.”
“See?” Santino stage-whispered to Rachel. “We’re not the only ones who can be assholes.”
The woman sighed, long and loud, and slid her phone into the back pocket of her pants. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t mean to be cold, but we’re helping the FBI with the Gayle Street victims. It’s been six days and we’re still backlogged. This is a huge waste of my time—it’s not like Officers McElroy and Reeves haven’t already been autopsied. This is going to be a lecture, not a discovery process. If you want something better than that, the original autopsies were conducted in the operating theater and you can watch the videos in high-def.”
“I was on the team that found the crime scene last night,” Rachel said. “I walked the room. I may be able to contribute something.”
The woman’s jaw dropped, OACET’s eye-searing greens and golds surging in her conversational colors; Kowalski might not have recognized Rachel, but she had heard about the discovery. “You’re an Agent?”
Rachel nodded.
Now she held out her hand. “Erin Kowalski, Medical Examiner, Forensic Pathology Unit. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Agent Peng,” she replied as she took Kowalski’s hand. She expected it to be sweaty and limp, but it was rock-hard from a very specialized type of labor. Kowalski was in her mid-thirties, and Rachel had expected the small frown lines at the corners of her eyes, but not the tattoos that shone across the insides of her wrists and wound their way under her lab coat.
Kowalski’s mood was starting to brighten. “I’ve met the other Agent who works here at the CFL a couple of times. Agent Jason Atran, right? Listen, any chance you can get him to come down here and sit in on an autopsy? I’m got some digital imaging ideas I want to run by him, but he never seems to have the time.”
Bonus points for Jason, Rachel thought to herself, but said, “Maybe you can show me how you run your autopsies first?”
“That’s fair,” Kowalski said, smiling at her. Apparently Santino and the detectives had ceased to matter. “Is this your first autopsy?”
“Stateside?” Rachel replied. “Yes.”
“Ah, I see,” Kowalski said, glancing at the detectives. Hill’s core of forest green was wrapped within a seasick green and an ugly orange Rachel associated with scorn. If context had anything to do with that combination, she’d guess that Hill had tossed his lunch during one of Kowalski’s autopsies. Maybe their mutual antagonism had started there.
Or maybe not. Interpreting conversational colors to learn about a person’s past was about as accurate as astrology, and the pictures weren’t nearly as pretty.
“Faster we get started, faster this gets done,” Zockinski said.
Kowalski colored red again. “Follow me,” she said to no one in particular, and led them at a brisk walk into the warren of pathology rooms. She stopped before a bright blue door to hand out disposable respirator masks. While the others were fiddling with the straps, Kowalski leaned in towards Rachel. “Just so you know,” she said to Rachel in a low voice, “women who have experience with autopsies but who are pregnant may still vomit.”
Rachel nodded. Vomiting might actually be a real concern for her. Not because of a chance pregnancy, but because of her weak stomach when in a doctor’s office. Autopsies in Afghanistan had been quick and dirty; she had never been in a formal autopsy suite before, and the clinical setting might send her scurrying for the sink.
Kowalski told them to enter single-file and find space along the back wall. Her directions were followed to the letter, as the room was barely big enough for the two pedestal tables and their occupants, let alone five living persons. Despite her best efforts, Rachel felt a sharp pain against her hip as she slammed into the edge of one of the stainless steel tables; Hill must have spotted the body on the table move when the table jerked, as he turned an entirely new shade of green and swallowed hard.
“Don’t be scared,” Kowalski told Rachel. “They were in the water for nearly two days and they’re not pretty, but they can’t hurt you.”
The two officers were lying naked, one to a table. Kowalski was right: two days in the water hadn’t done them any favors. They had been sealed in their car, true, but those small things which lived in water were infinitely cunning. The eyes were almost always the first to go.
Rachel fell into parade rest and moved her scans up and down the two men on the tables. This was her first autopsy as a cyborg, and it was…
It was fascinating!
Jenny’s diagnostic script had not been designed for use on patients who were already dead. The list of physiological errors kept growing, almost-familiar words forming like a wizard’s spell in her mind. Soft tissue injury occurring in the epidermis, basement membrane, dermis, hypodermis…
She reluctantly turned the diagnostic script off and went back to her environmental scans. The man on the table closest to her was piecemeal from the neck up. He had no face, no top to his skull, and Rachel assumed that it was his brain floating in the jar of preservative beside him. There was a strip of thick black cord running up the center of his sternum, a rough lacing to hide the damage of his autopsy. He had been shot twice, once at close range to the chest, once at really close range to the back. The entry wound on his chest looked like a delicate polka dot next to the cavern of the exit wound beside it. Rachel traced the track of that massive wound through the victim’s body, her mind brushing against cold meat and bone until it found the tabletop beneath.
The man on the far table had been shot in the neck. Cause of death had likely been from blood loss; his jugular might as well have been removed with an ice cream scoop. Other than that, the damage caused by his own autopsy, and the nibblings of those oh-so-finicky fish, the officer might as well have been asleep.
“Officer Reeves,” Kowalski said, standing over the far t
able. Her conversational colors were wearing her own version of Jenny’s professional whites. “Cause of death, gunshot wound to the throat. No other external injuries that predate immersion in the Potomac. Very straightforward case.
“Now,” Kowalski continued, snapping on a pair of surgical gloves. “Officer McElroy is more complex. He has severe cranial cerebral trauma.” Kowalski indicated the shattered pieces of the officer’s skull. “Injury is consistent with a baseball bat or a similar instrument.”
“There was a piece of pipe at the scene,” Rachel said.
“That might do it. The head wound would have killed him eventually, but he didn’t get the opportunity to die slowly. He was shot twice. I’m reasonably confident the first shot was front to back,” Kowalski said, indicating the polka dot. “It was a through-and-through. Perforation of the right lung was the most serious damage caused by this first shot.
Kowalski paused, her colors taking on a slight hue of rain-damp gray. “The second shot was back to front. Based on this second gunshot, the shooter would have needed to be standing over him and aiming down, at approximately a sixty-degree angle. I’m guessing that Officer McElroy was pushing himself up from the ground on his hands.
“This was a man who went down fighting,” Kowalski said, almost sadly.
The five of them pushed through a moment of silence, and then Hill said, “A pro didn’t do this.”
Kowalski snorted. “Are you kidding? These murders are the textbook definition of amateur. Your guy had never fired a gun at another human being before.”
“So,” Zockinski said. “The officers find our guy in the coffee shop. They interrupt him in whatever he’s doing, but he takes down Reeves with a lucky shot to the neck, and then fights with McElroy…” He trailed off as he realized that scenario didn’t quite fit.
“Where’s the head wound come in?” Santino asked.
“Our guy was waiting for them,” Hill said. “Come on.”
Hill practically shoved them out of the autopsy room, then took up a position in the hallway on the other side of the door. “You’re McElroy and you’re Reeves,” he said, pointing at Zockinski first, Rachel next. “Go back inside and come out again.”
Maker Space Page 21
