“I could tell by the way everyone looked at me that they knew what I had done. They knew it was my fault. I just couldn’t handle it. So I ran, and when I couldn’t live with myself anymore, I decided that not living was a much better choice than living in the hell on earth I had created. I just didn’t have the guts to flat-out do it.”
To admit aloud what he’d done was too much for him, and he felt the despair creeping back. He went to the window, stared out into the black forest. He was shocked when he felt Taylor’s arms around him, holding him from behind.
“Baldwin, what you did? There’s no excuse. You knew in your heart it was Arlen, that he was doing the killing. You stopped a horrible person from committing even more crimes. You have to find a way to forgive yourself. You made a terrible mistake, Baldwin, but you made it for the right reasons. That’s good enough for me.”
The relief washed over him, a waterfall of cascading emotions. He turned in her arms, and before he could stop to think, kissed her deeply. She kissed him back.
He didn’t know how long it had been when they finally came up for air. Taylor was smiling but turned away, suddenly shy. Though every fiber of his being cried out to hold her again, to feel her soft lips on his forever, he knew he couldn’t push.
Taylor sat back down on the couch, but when he moved toward the chair she patted the seat next to her. He joined her with a sigh. Taylor caught the sound and put her hand on his arm.
“I know you’ve been through a lot, but it’s over now. And you’re here. With me. Do you think you can make a go at this? Living your life, I mean.”
Baldwin leaned over and kissed her forehead tenderly. “I think I may have enough reason to, now.”
“Good. ’Cause I’d kinda like you to stick around for a while.” She smiled. “Even though I probably just gave you my cold.”
He kissed her again, slower this time, memorizing the feel of her beneath his hands, then folded her into his arms. “I don’t care if I get pneumonia. I’ll be here for as long as you want.”
“Good. That’s good.”
Taylor suddenly felt too exhausted to keep her eyes open. The emotion of the case, Baldwin’s confession, her feeling like crap, was all catching up with her. She felt safe in his arms, and drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER 60
Bullets were flying in the darkened sky. She heard them whizzing by her head, felt the heat as they ripped through her hair. She saw him go down. She was screaming, clawing at him, trying to get away from the hand that reached up and grabbed her by the throat. She fell beside him. He was dead. She could see the entrance wound, glistening silver in the moonlight. Her hands were slick with blood: It covered all of her, drowning her in its viscous blanket, dragging her down into the weeds as they curled and spread over her body. There was no hope. There was no pain. She gave up her struggle and lay serenely next to the empty soul beside her, waiting for the strangled vines to drag her into the earth to decompose along with him. She raised her hand, only mildly revolted as she watched the flesh fall off the bone. She turned to the skeleton beside her and saw the mandible smile, heard his disembodied voice. And then she was back on solid ground, walking away from David’s body, and she could see Baldwin in the distance, his hand held out, beckoning to her…
“Taylor! Taylor, wake up!” Baldwin was shaking her. She fought her way out of the dream to find him standing over her, eyes wild, hair disheveled. She looked at him vacantly, still caught up in the remnants of the dream.
“I was dreaming,” she murmured.
“No, you were having a nightmare. You were yelling to someone named David, telling him to get down. Are you okay? Who is David?”
Taylor stood up, spilling the afghan and the cat onto the floor.
“What time is it?”
Baldwin looked at his watch. “Almost five in the morning. Taylor, what was the dream about?”
A few hours of sleep had made her feel better. She ignored Baldwin for the moment and wandered into the kitchen. She pulled a Diet Coke from the refrigerator, gulped it down, and grabbed another. Setting it on the counter, she opened the antibiotics and popped three in her mouth.
“Taylor, you’re not going to get better any faster ODing on Keflex.”
“I feel better already. How long was I out?” She made her way back into the living room and collapsed on the couch. Jade jumped into her lap and made a nest, purring heavily. Taylor ran her hand absently along her silky back.
“About five hours. You zonked out so hard, I just let you sleep.”
“Thanks.” She gave him a sad smile. “You know the best thing about not sleeping for the past couple of days? I didn’t have any dreams.”
“What’s up with the dreams? Is David the detective you shot?”
She nodded slowly. “David Martin. Dirty as they come. And I came this close to getting indicted for his murder. Murder, Baldwin. He breaks into my house, attacks me, and I’m the one who nearly takes the fall. I don’t know how he could do that to me. How he could put me in the position he put me in. Trying to bribe me to let him go on his happy little way.” She snorted in disgust, shaking her head.
“There’s more, isn’t there, Taylor?” Baldwin reached over and took her hand. She wanted to pull away, but resisted the urge. It was time to get it off her chest.
“Yeah, well, we were lovers, briefly. No one but Sam knows, though I think Fitz suspects.”
Baldwin felt a pang of jealousy and shoved it aside. The man was dead, for God’s sake. He had no business being jealous of a ghost. But this was a ghost who was haunting his woman’s dreams.
He understood, though. Ghosts visited him as well. Every night since the shooting, the three men who had been shot came and sat on the foot of his bed, watching him. He shook off the memory. “So you dream about him?”
“I dream about his death. Same dream every night since I shot him. He gets shot, goes down, and I go down with him. He’s decomposing, so am I. His skull turns to say something to me, and then I wake up. It’s expanded recently. All the victims I haven’t saved show up, too. This massive field of graves, and they’re all talking to me.”
“What do they say?”
“‘Help me. It’s your fault.’ I thought I heard something different this time. He said, ‘Go on.’ I don’t really know what that means.”
Baldwin sat next to her and took her other hand. “I think it means he’s telling you he doesn’t blame you for shooting him. Were you in love with him?”
Taylor shook her head. “That’s what’s so awful. I wasn’t. I was lonely, and he was there. It didn’t even last very long. It was a casual thing for me, but, yes, he loved me and wanted more. I broke it off, then he approached me to keep my mouth shut about his little venture, and I just snapped. I felt like he’d betrayed more than just my body, you know? He put my whole career on the line. If I turned him in to Internal Affairs, I might have taken the brunt of it. He could have said that I was in on it from the beginning, made it a ‘he said/she said.’ IA doesn’t like to see their cops embroiled in illegal doings, you know? Especially the female cops.
“But the worst of it was the satisfaction I felt when I saw him lying dead on the floor. I felt like he deserved it. And that’s just so wrong.”
“That’s a lot of guilt to be carrying around, Taylor. It wasn’t your fault you had to shoot him. He did attack you. These things happen.”
“‘These things happen,’” she echoed. “That’s what I just don’t get. I don’t know why these things ‘happen.’ Why do they happen?”
“If I could tell you that, Taylor, I would be God. And I’m not.”
She looked at him. “After all you’ve seen, you still believe in God?”
“I never said that. I just don’t understand. But I have a confession to make. Earlier tonight, when I kissed you, I thought I might have a glimmer. When I realized you understood what happened in Virginia, that you didn’t judge me, I felt like I had been forgiven. By whom, I’m not sure. I
wasn’t looking for it, but it’s there. I don’t know what to do with it, and I don’t know if it changes anything, but it’s there.”
Taylor felt tears in her eyes. She had asked for forgiveness a million times, and she never felt as if she’d gotten it. But as she looked at Baldwin, she realized that it had happened a long time ago. She just wasn’t willing to forgive herself.
They both jumped as the phone rang. Taylor lunged for it. “Fitz?”
Baldwin could hear his voice booming through the phone. “How’d ya know it was me?”
“I was hoping. Did you get anything?”
“Yeah, I think we did. Are you coming in?”
She gave Baldwin a smile and squeezed his hand. “We’re on our way.”
THE
SIXTH
DAY
CHAPTER 61
Sam walked out the main doors to the parking lot, only to see Dr. Gerald Peterson hailing her down.
“Hey, Dr. Owens, I came by to check out your burn vic. You got a minute?”
Sam felt a brief rush of annoyance. Peterson was the backup forensic odontologist on contract to Davidson County to do dental identifications. He was a small, graying mouse of a man, interminably cheerful. His pink nose twitched with allergies, and he had a wide smile that rose to watery blue eyes behind round, wire-rimmed John Lennon glasses. He was prone to seersucker, and even this late in the fall sported a salmon stripe with a wadded white linen handkerchief bulging from his breast pocket. The man was nice enough, but he was a little erratic, sometimes impossible to reach for weeks at a time. It was his practice to drop in on Sam at his leisure, citing his booming dental practice as his number one priority. Thankfully she didn’t need his services terribly often. Dr. Michael Tabor was their main guy, and he was almost always available, except for when he was out on major cases, on loan to other jurisdictions.
Sam had called Tabor’s office, found out he was in New York on a case, and had been forced to ring Peterson. He’d been surprisingly quick to respond. It was amazing what a little press coverage could do. Everyone wanted their name in the paper, especially on a case that was rapidly turning into a colossal citywide panic.
“Hey, Gerald. Come on in. I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”
Sam swiped her card, and the security doors unlocked. They entered and made their way through the lobby and the security door, then headed right into the clinical area and through the biovestibule.
Sam stopped and swung open a door, allowing the dentist in before her. The body had been taken to the anthropology laboratory, which was used primarily for the examination of skeletal remains. Just like the main autopsy suite, it had a skylight, but was much smaller, with a single stainless steel table resting against the wall.
The body was housed in the small refrigerator unit in the room. They brought her out and set her on the aluminum table. Sam turned on the large overhead spotlight, and Peterson settled in to work, pausing briefly to pull a clipboard with the National Crime Information Center dental form from his briefcase.
Sam sat back and let him work, helping as needed.
The female they were trying to identify was most likely on a missing persons list. She’d had at least ten thousand dollars of cosmetic work done on her teeth. Veneers, bonding, a well-done root canal, wisdom teeth extractions. Taylor had set Lincoln to work looking for a young female who would have gone missing within the past two months, just to cover all the bases. If there was any chance of finding the identity of this girl, it would be through her dental records.
Dr. Peterson was humming, marking his coded chart, and clucking to himself occasionally. He finally looked up.
“Someone is missing this girl. She’s had a lot of work done, and someone had to pay for it. As young as she is, I’d bet anything on parents.”
“Care to hazard a guess at her age?”
“You really should talk to your anthropologist to be completely accurate, but the lack of wear, the condition of her bone, I’d give it a guess at twenty to twenty-five years old.”
“Yeah, she put it there, too.”
He handed her the dental chart he had completed. “I know it’s a long shot, but eventually that damn NCIC database is gonna make a match. Give this to Taylor, and let’s see how lucky we are.”
“I’ll fax it up there right now. Are you going to be available if I need to get in touch?”
“Of course. I’m always available for your calls.” He gave her a winsome smile, nose twitching, and they walked back to the lobby together.
“Thanks so much for your help, Gerald. I really hope we can find out who this girl is.”
Sam walked him out, then swiped her card and went back inside, stopping in the reception area.
“Kris, could you fax this over to Lincoln Ross in Homicide? Tell him it needs to go in the dental database right away. If by the grace of God something matches, tell him to call me on my cell.”
“Certainly, Dr. Owens. I’ll do it right now.” As she spoke, she was already out of her chair.
“Thank you,” Sam said then headed to her office, saying a prayer as she went.
CHAPTER 62
“Forensic Medical, can I help you?”
“Can I speak to Dr. Owens, please? This is Lincoln Ross with Homicide.”
“I’m not sure exactly where she is, but if you would hold on, I’ll forward you to her cell.” There was a brief moment of silence, then a click as the phone was transferred.
“Yes?”
“Sam? It’s Lincoln. I just finished talking to Taylor. She asked me to give you a call. You are never in a million years going to guess what happened when I ran the dental records.”
“Yeah, sure, Lincoln. You got a match. Now tell me what’s really going on.”
“No, Sam, seriously, we got a match.”
“You’re full of crap.” Sam spun in her chair, watching her office walls fly by.
“I swear by all that’s holy that I have your girl. Her name is Mary Margaret de Rossi.”
“Are you sure it’s her? I mean really, that frickin’ database hasn’t ever made a match. How can we be sure it’s correct?”
“I’m sure. Can you come on over here? Taylor wants to call her parents, but she needs you to make a positive on the records.”
“Hell yeah, I’m on my way.”
CHAPTER 63
An hour later, Sam was staring at Mary Margaret de Rossi’s antemortem radiographs on the computer screen. Her mind was crowded with a future image of the poor girl’s parents, bravely sitting in the family waiting room at her office, waiting to fill out the paperwork. There was no reason to show them the body; it was burned beyond recognition, and Sam didn’t want them to have that image of their daughter.
Mary Margaret’s parents had told Taylor the sad story of their runaway daughter. They had only recently found out that she was alive and living in Nashville. They were so proud she’d gotten her life together, kicked her demons, was in college, and had found her own way back to the real world. They’d forgiven her, and she’d forgiven them.
When she first went missing, several years earlier, they didn’t know she had simply run away from home. They had filed a missing person report with the Atlanta police. The police investigation turned up nothing. Because of her age and background, they chalked it up to a runaway situation and dropped the case. But a year or so ago, a young detective had contacted them. He was looking at all the missing person cases for the past ten years, and asked if they were still looking for their daughter. When they admitted they still didn’t know where she was or if she were alive or dead, the young cop suggested they provide her dental records for him to put in his new database. He had warned them that finding a match was unlikely, but wanted to give it a shot.
He was excited to learn about all the work that had been done on her teeth. Braces in her youth hadn’t fully corrected a large frontal gap, so her parents had spent even more money, ten thousand dollars, to have veneers put on, which even th
ey agreed took their daughter from ugly duckling status to elegant swan. The detective was certain the work done on her teeth would differentiate her radiographs, and give them a better shot at finding a match should her body ever be found.
When Mary Margaret finally contacted her family, they had forgotten to let the detective know she’d been found. The records languished in the system until Lincoln made his triumphant match.
Sam used the slides from the database to make her final confirmation. The veneers were a dead giveaway. The antemortem records showed the gap in the girl’s teeth. The records were a 100 percent match.
Based on Mary Margaret’s distraught parents’ information, Lincoln had called over to Aquinas and found one of the nuns who had been close to her.
Sister Agatha sounded a hundred years old, but despite her quavering voice, she seemed sharp as a tack. Lincoln told her the nature of his call, and the old nun broke down. Lincoln heard her saying a rosary in the background. She finally pulled it together and apologized.
“I am so sorry for that poor girl. I think she’d had a hard life. I didn’t know much about her. She had the look of a young girl who’s seen too much of the world. But she was lovely and studied so hard.”
“You say you don’t know much about her past. Can you tell me what you do know? Her parents are trying to fill in the gaps.”
“Of course. She came to us from the Sisters of the Covenant out in Colorado. Wonderful women, they run a small hospital up there in the mountains. Let me see here, I’ve got her record right in front of me. She was getting straight A’s, the poor lamb. Taking a full load, too, and working in the Student Center. My goodness, it shows here she was also auditing classes over at Vanderbilt last semester. Working so hard. Oh, this is just too much.”
Lieutenant Taylor Jackson Collection, Volume 1 Page 23
