“I told you, the metaphor didn’t work,” he said. “You need distance. You need perspective. You need a mental break. It’s been months of grinding up against jagged edges—”
“That sounds like something dirty that you’d do to a metal band,” I said with a frown.
“Just … trust me?” Scott said. “A little break. Something to get your mind off things. Refocus, recharge.”
“I’ll … think about it,” I said as we started to taxi. A voice came on after a dinging sound, the flight attendant starting to announce our departure. The safety instructions started on a video screen overhead as I stared at the back of the seat in front of me.
“That’s all I ask,” Scott said. “Just some thought.”
We settled into silence as the safety instructions went on and I tuned them out. They passed in both an eyeblink and yet torturously slowly, somehow simultaneously. Once they were finished, I felt the plane throttle up to high speed and the nose came up, pushing me lightly against the back of the seat.
A few seconds later I felt us leave the ground, a weightless sensation that felt like it applied only to me. And for that moment, it almost seemed like I could leave all those problems that had been weighing me down behind me on the ground.
Chapter 8
The morgue smelled like death. The air was freezing cold as it poured out of the overhead ducts, the interior ceiling of the place looking like one of those warehouse-chic restaurants with the exposed vents and whatnot. The rest of the morgue was done in cool colors, mostly blue tones with stainless steel.
The medical examiner was a woman, and she was bored. I could tell by way she was playing a game on her iPhone, popping her gum like one of those annoying secretaries in an eighties movie. She stopped when we walked in, and I noticed as the pink bubble deflated between her lips that she had a little stud just above her chin and a couple of piercings in each eyebrow. Her hair was a wicked red that clashed with the gum.
“Can I help you?” She put on a smile for us, and it wasn’t blatantly fake. More cool, professional. She looked like she might have been my age, actually.
“Yeah,” I said, and flashed her my badge. The best thing about it was that I was cleared to carry my gun on airplanes, so I hadn’t had to worry about picking up my pistol and reloading it after the flight at the baggage claim; I just grabbed my carry-on and went. “I’m here to identify a body.”
“Hmmm, I’m gonna guess Charlene Nealon,” she said, and the gum disappeared into the back of her mouth. “Did you sign in at the front desk?”
“Yeah,” I said, and glanced at the double doors leading into the next room.
She stood and revealed a band t-shirt under her white lab coat, which was immaculate. “I’m Lauren, by the way. Follow me.”
Scott gave me a look that showed his surprise at the slightly unconventional medical examiner we were dealing with, but we followed.
“They found her under the footbridge that leads from Treasure Island to the mall,” Lauren said, like I should know where that was. She didn’t go too fast—not that she could have outwalked two metas—but she didn’t look back to see if we were behind her, either. She brushed through the double doors and the smell of the morgue got heavier. I didn’t gag, but I felt the urge. “Skull was busted open, bruising around her throat like she’d been throttled. Laceration on her abdomen.” She glanced back at me. “It’s not pretty. I’ve seen worse, but it’s not going to be for the weak of stomach.”
I bristled a little that she didn’t look at Scott as she said it. “I’ve seen dead bodies before, thanks.”
“Just giving you a warning,” she said with a shrug then looked to Scott. “You too. If you give me a couple minutes, I could put a sheet around the back of her head so you don’t have to see the—”
“It’s fine,” I said, a little tense. “We can handle it.”
“If you say so.” Her eyes flared in a way that told me—when coupled with her tone—she thought we were both going to be dry-heaving on her floor in a matter of moments. She led us over to a wall of stainless steel drawers and scanned for a second until she found the one she was looking for. She slid it open and then pulled the table out with nothing more than a squeal. The outline of a body was visible beneath a white sheet. “So, are you here just to identify? Because generally I don’t get FBI agents from Minneapolis in here to check out local homicide vics.”
“She’s my aunt,” I said, glancing at Lauren. “I’ll need to know some details on—”
“I can give you the report,” Lauren said. Her tone was muted, as if it was her way of being sympathetic for my loss. “No toxicology results yet, though, and the forensics will be a few days.”
“We can expedite that,” Scott said. Though I’m sure he was trying to be helpful, I saw Lauren blanch subtly at that, and watched her expression harden. Probably a territorial thing.
“Okay,” she said, indifferent. “Here she is.” Her fingers were clenched around the top of the sheet. “You sure you want to see her in all her gory glory? I cleaned her up, but she died of massive blunt force trauma to the skull and there’s only so much—”
“Just show me,” I said. She did, lifting the sheet and folding it back under Charlie’s collarbones.
And it was Charlie; that much there wasn’t any doubt about. I tried to keep my eyes on her face, stopping them from looking any farther down than her ears. Her head rested low on the steel table, impossibly, unnaturally low for any normal person who had a fully-formed skull. It was blatantly obvious even without doing anything more than glancing that Charlie no longer had a fully-formed skull, though. At least the back half was missing, maybe more.
I looked away from her and ran my tongue up, inadvertently making a clicking noise against the back of my teeth. It felt horribly inappropriate given the circumstances. “Did they … uh … did her killer … take the back of her … uh …” The smell of death, of rot and stink, filled my nose. It was almost overwhelming.
“The back of her skull? Nope,” Lauren said and, unprompted, covered Charlie back up. I watched my aunt’s blank, pallid face disappear beneath a sheet of white that was only a few shades off from the same tone as her flesh. Considering how tanned and vibrant Charlie had been in life, it was a dramatic change. “Not sure how much you want to know, but we have the pieces of it—and her brains. They’re all accounted for, just not—ummm—I couldn’t put her back together. That’s really more a mortician’s area of expertise.” She looked a little abashed at this admission.
“Good God,” Scott breathed from next to me. I didn’t look at him because I didn’t want to see if he was affected the way I was.
“Have you had any other bodies come through like this?” It was the only thing that came to my mind. I kept my eyes anchored on Lauren, refusing to even look at the sheet that covered the body.
“Nope,” Lauren said as she slid the body back into the drawer and locked it. “Lots of homicides lately, but nothing like this. You see this kind of thing in high-speed car accidents or in suicides, if they jump from really high. Saw a guy one time that got murdered with a candlestick across the back of his head. Like Colonel Mustard got him in the drawing room or something. It did some nasty damage. But someone slammed into a wall like this? Nah. Whoever did it had to be hella strong.”
I put my hands over my face, rubbing my skin, not caring what Lauren thought of me at this point. “And the bruising around the neck?”
“Happened before death,” she said. “She was probably hanging by the neck for a little bit. Usually if there’s bruising happening at the time of death or near it, contusions don’t form. By her bruising, someone had her good and tight before she got her head caved in. It might have even resulted in her death absent the trauma to her skull.”
I looked at the morgue drawer, the stainless steel glowering back at me in the faint glare of the fluorescent lights. I could see the outline of the three of us staring at it. I had no love lost for Charlie, but she ha
dn’t deserved to die like this.
“You want that postmortem report?” Lauren asked, and she popped her gum so absently I doubted she even knew she did it.
“Yeah,” I said, turning away from the drawer my aunt was lying dead inside, missing half her skull. “Why don’t you get that for us?”
“Sure,” she said, and looked back at us as she turned to leave. “I’m afraid I have to ask you to come with me. I can’t leave anyone alone in here.”
“Why not?” Scott asked with a note of amusement that was belied by how waxy he looked. His usually ruddy complexion was ashen. “They’re already dead.”
“Exactly,” Lauren said, like that explained everything. “Necrophiliacs are everywhere.”
There was a moment of silence after that. “You’re joking, right?” Scott asked, his jaw hanging loose.
Lauren shrugged like it didn’t matter. “Follow me, please.”
“Come on,” Scott said, and he put his hand on my shoulder to steer me out. I wasn’t exactly having trouble getting going under my own power, but it felt good anyway. I let him guide me gently along, a comforting weight that was different than the one that was on my shoulders the rest of the time—the weight of responsibility.
Chapter 9
I read the autopsy report while Scott drove us to our hotel. Our rental was a mid-sized SUV, which Scott kept reasonably steady save for when some maniac cab driver cut in front of us with inches to spare before a traffic light. Scott let fly an obscene gesture and then a helpful dose of profanity that caused me to look up at him for a moment before I returned to my reading. The AC was blowing full power and the dashboard thermometer told us it was over a hundred degrees outside.
“Anything interesting?” He eased the car into a gentle turn onto a boulevard marked Spring Mountain Road. He was following the GPS on his phone, which was resting in the cup holder in the black plastic center console between us.
“Not much more than she already told us,” I said, thumbing to the last page and skimming. When I was done, I shut the thin booklet. “It kept telling me to refer to the enclosed pictures while describing the wreckage of her body, but thankfully she left those out.”
Scott grunted and didn’t say anything. The buildings were growing taller around us, casino towers sticking high into the air, impressive facades with more industrial-looking buildings behind them. There was minimal foot traffic here, just a few people now and again who looked like casino employees heading toward bus stops after their shifts.
I could see the Las Vegas Strip ahead of us, a grey stone footbridge at the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard crossing over the street ahead. It was slanted diagonally away from us, toward the mall. Palm trees lined either side of the road and the mall’s facade was a square-tiled oddity that just looked out of place.
The crowds grew thicker as we drew closer to the strip. As we approached the footbridge, I sent Scott a look that made clear my expectations. I wondered if he’d see it the same way as he slowed the car down and pulled off to the side of the road. I guess he had.
I opened the door and stepped out into the sweltering heat. I felt like my body had been balled up and shoved into an oven. The air was dry, so dry I felt like I couldn’t even sweat at first. I stood there, half-wishing I could climb back into the sweet, cool SUV before I slammed the door, sealing my decision behind me.
There was a cop standing next to the yellow tape that surrounded the crime scene. I didn’t see a cruiser anywhere in sight, and I wondered how long this poor bastard had been standing out here in this hell. I flashed my badge at him and he nodded as I ducked low under the tape.
“Howdy,” he said, thumbs in his belt like an aw-shucks cowboy or something. He was wearing a khaki cop uniform, with black shades that made him look super-cool. He even had a crew-cut haircut that made him look like he’d just gotten out of the military.
“Officer Nash,” I said, reading his badge from a little ways away. I saw his eyebrows move up in surprise that I called him by his name. “I’m Agent Nealon, this is Agent Byerly. FBI.”
“Ma’am,” he said, deferring enough that I caught a whiff of ex-military from him. I wondered if he’d served overseas; if he had, this slightly-above-one-hundred-degrees heat was probably like a warm bath to him compared to Iraq or Afghanistan.
“They got you standing out here all day?” I asked. The crime scene tape had been stretched around a splotchy break in the wall beneath the overpass where skull had met concrete, and both had yielded some before concrete won the battle.
“Just a couple hours of my shift, ma’am,” he said, and I glanced back to see him at attention, hands off his belt. “They wouldn’t leave anyone out here all day, but we had a request from your Agent Li to keep it cordoned off until you’d had a chance to look around.”
“Did you?” I hadn’t known Li had done that. I was a little surprised, actually; he and I didn’t really get along that well.
“Yes, ma’am,” Nash said, all business.
“Well, I’m here now,” I said, staring at that spot on the wall. “So you can go.”
I sensed his hesitation without even looking. “Are you sure, ma’am? If you’d like, I could—”
“It’s fine,” I said. I stared at the dark markings where dried blood—and other organic residue—caked the spot where the wall had cracked. It had shattered outward in a roughly circular pattern, and I imagined Charlie pinned against it like it was her own version of a halo. “Get yourself some water.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Officer Nash said and retreated. His steps were precise, a military cadence, as he walked back toward the escalator that led up the footbridge. I lost sight of him as he went up.
“Why are we here?” Scott said from behind me as I stared again at the broken wall where my aunt had had her brains splattered. “We’re not detectives, Sienna. We’re not criminologists. There’s not a lot of hope we’re going to connect the dots and solve this murder.”
“How do you know?” I asked, staring at the place where Charlie’s life had ended. Unexpectedly. Abruptly. “The report said it looked like she’d run after being lacerated on the abdomen.” I stared at the people moving along the strip ahead. “Shouldn’t there be surveillance camera footage?” I cursed the fact that I’d sent Officer Nash on his merry way before asking.
“This has got to be one of the most heavily trafficked roadways in the US,” Scott said. “You’d think there’d be something.”
“Why cut her and then bludgeon her?” I asked. I looked back from the strip to the broken wall. “Totally overmatched her, lifted her off her feet—that has to be a meta.”
“Well, she was a meta,” Scott said, “so wouldn’t it make sense if she was running with a meta crowd?”
“That wasn’t Charlie’s style,” I said, and I looked around absently as I felt the beads of sweat start on my upper lip. “She liked to be the toughest one in the room; it gave her an advantage. She preyed on weakness, she didn’t admire strength.” I looked at her splatter marks, and realized the blood had sprayed outward in its own circular pattern. “When she was overmatched, she’d run. So she got cut and she ran. But they caught her and killed her anyway.” I tapped my fingers against my chin. “Is it possible …?” I let my voice trail off.
“You’re thinking she got caught up in the extinction?” Scott asked.
“That medical examiner said they’d been busy lately,” I said and wiped the sweat off my upper lip. The heat was starting to make my back itch, but there wasn’t much I could do about that at the moment.
“Look at you, following up on leads and suggesting patterns,” Scott said, “like a regular Sherlock.”
“Sherlock would already have it figured out by now,” I said and finally turned away from the wall. I couldn’t look at it anymore. My face melted into a cringe. I wasn’t close to tears, but the sight of it … hurt, for some reason. Sickened me.
“Come on,” Scott said, and put his hand on my shoulder again. I started
back toward the car and he walked beside me. “I’ll call the LVMPD and see if I can track down some video for this … this …” He was lost for words.
“Call it what it is,” I said as I shrugged his hand off my shoulder when we broke at the car; I headed to my side and he to the driver’s. “It was a slaughter. Pure and simple.” I glanced back one last time at the bloody, broken wall where my aunt had been crowned into the afterlife. “Whoever did this, Charlie never stood a chance against them.”
Chapter 10
We were sharing a suite at the Palazzo, which was not as awkward as it sounded. Scott, because he was a gentleman (or possibly because he feared death), had volunteered to sleep on the couch. I was undecided about whether I would take him up on that or let him sleep in the bed. If he’d worn as much cologne as he used to, it would have been the couch for sure. Now that he’d learned some moderation, I was torn.
We’d stowed our baggage and nipped downstairs to the Palazzo’s promenade for dinner at a steakhouse that looked entirely too fancy. They didn’t balk at the fact I was wearing jeans under my blazer, though, and I didn’t balk when they handed me a menu that included a rib eye that cost more than fifty dollars.
I did, however, consider putting the menu down and leaving. But I didn’t. Because it wasn’t like I couldn’t pay for it out of my own pocket if I needed to. I didn’t spend money on anything else, and my housing was paid for, after all.
“Nice of the Agency to splurge for dinner,” Scott said with a smile, glancing over the leather-bound menu. His voice made him sound pensive, but I suspect he was closer to drooling. We hadn’t had lunch, and it was close to seven o’clock our time. “Living first class on the taxpayer’s dime.”
“We’ve never gotten a cent of taxpayer money,” I said, probably a little defensively. As putative head of the Agency, it was probably my responsibility to defend budgetary decisions. Which we didn’t really worry about, since Congress never asked about our budget and we never asked them for money. “Ariadne didn’t say anything about a budget for this trip, so …”
Destiny: The Girl in the Box #9 Page 4
