A Faint Cold Fear

  The Heartsdale Medical Center was not nearly as impressive as the name implied. Two stories tall, with the morgue in the basement, the hospital was nothing more than a glorified clinic for the college, which stood on the opposite end of Main Street. As usual, the parking lot was empty but for a few cars. Jeffrey pulled up to the main parking lot in front of the emergency room, bypassing the side entrance Sara normally used. She waited patiently as he backed the car into one of the far spaces.

  He put the car in park but left the engine running. “I need to check in with Frank,” he said, taking out his cell phone. “Do you mind starting without me?”

  “No,” Sara answered, and part of her was relieved to have some time to herself.

  Still, she smiled at Jeffrey before getting out of the car. He had known her for over ten years, and she could sense he understood that something was bothering her. Jeffrey did not like leaving things unresolved. Maybe he was still mad at her about what had happened in the parking deck.

  Sara had not really slept during the drive back to Grant. She had been caught in that limbo between sleep and wakefulness, her mind reeling with the events from yesterday. When she did manage to nod off, Sara dreamed of Lena in the hospital last year. In the kind of horrific twist that only dreams can bring, Sara and Lena had switched places, so that it was Sara on the exam table, her feet in stirrups, her body exposed, as Lena took vaginal swabs and combed Sara’s pubic hair for foreign matter. When the black light flickered on to illuminate semen and other body fluids, Sara’s lower half had lit up as if it were on fire.

  Sara rubbed her arms as she walked across the parking lot, though it was hardly cold. She looked up at the sky, which was dark and forbidding. She whispered, “It’s coming up a storm,” a phrase her Granny Earnshaw had used when they were little. Sara smiled, her tension eased by the image of her grandmother standing at the kitchen door, hands clasped worriedly to her chest, looking out at the coming storm and telling the children to make sure they all had candles before they went to bed that night.

  Inside the emergency room, Sara waved at the night nurse and at Matt DeAndrea, who was filling in for Hare while he was supposed to be on vacation. Not since the summer she started puberty was Sara more glad that her cousin was not around.

  “How’s your mama and them?” Matt said, giving a standard greeting. He seemed suddenly to realize what this would invite, and his face paled.

  “Fine,” Sara said, forcing a smile. “Everybody’s doing just fine. Thanks for asking.”

  Neither of them had much to say after that, so Sara walked along the hallway toward the stairs down to the morgue.

  Sara had never made the comparison between the morgue and Grady Hospital, but having just spent so much time in Atlanta, the similarities were glaringly obvious. The medical center had been renovated a few years back, but downstairs the morgue looked much as it had when it was first built in the 1930s. Light blue tile lined the walls, and the floors were a mixture of green and tan linoleum squares. Overhead, the ceiling was splotched with signs of water damage, the recently repaired white patches a sharp contrast against the graying old plaster. The white noise from the compressor over the freezer and the air-conditioning system made a steady hum, something Sara rarely noticed unless she’d been away for a while.

  Carlos stood against the porcelain table that was bolted to the floor in the center of the room, his arms crossed over his wide chest. He was a nice kid with swarthy Hispanic looks and a thick accent that Sara had taken some time to get used to. He did not talk much, and when he did, he tended to mumble. Carlos did the shit work, literally and figuratively, and he was very well paid, but Sara felt that she did not know much about him. In the many years Carlos had worked there, he had never said anything personal about himself or complained about the work. Even when there was nothing to do, he always found a chore, sweeping the floors or cleaning the freezer. She was surprised to see him just standing at the table when she entered the morgue. He appeared to have been waiting for her.

  “Carlos?” she asked.

  “I am not working for Mr. Brock again,” he said, in a way that let her know he was putting his foot down.

  She was surprised, not just by the length of the sentence but by the passion behind it.

  She asked carefully, “Is there a particular reason why?”

  Carlos kept his eyes straight on hers. “He is very strange, and that is all I will say.”

  Sara felt a wave of relief. She realized she had been scared he was about to quit.

  “All right, Carlos,” she said. “I’m sorry you’re upset.”

  “I am not upset,” he said, though obviously he was.

  “Okay.” Sara nodded, hoping he was finished. The truth was, she’d been taking up for Dan Brock since their first day of elementary school, when Chuck Gaines had pushed him off the monkey bars in a fit of rage that only an eight-year-old (Chuck had been kept back in kindergarten) can get away with.

  Brock was not weird so much as needy, a trait not conducive to the school atmosphere, which operated on the principle of survival of the fittest. Thanks to Cathy and Eddie, Sara had never needed approval from her peers, so it had not bothered her much that she had lived in the netherworld that existed between the popular crowd and the kids who were routinely harassed and tortured. She had always been thought of as the smartest girl in her class, and between her height, her red hair, and her IQ, people had been a little intimidated by her. Brock, on the other hand, had suffered well up until high school, which is how long it took the bullies to realize that no matter how mean they were to him, Brock would always be nice back.

  “Dr. Linton?” Carlos asked. Despite her repeated requests, he had never called her Sara.

  “Yes?”

  He said, “I am sorry about your sister.”

  Sara pressed her lips together, nodding her thanks. “Let’s start with the girl,” Sara told him, thinking it would be best to get the most difficult case out of the way first. “Did you take photos and X rays?”

  He gave a curt nod but did not comment on the state of the body. He had always been professional in this manner, and she appreciated the solemn way he went about his job.

  Sara walked back toward her office, which had a window looking out into the morgue. She sat down at her desk, and even though she had been sitting for the last four and a half hours, it felt good to get off her feet. She picked up the phone and dialed her father’s cell-phone number.

  Cathy answered before the first ring completed. “Sara?”

  “We’re here,” she told her mother, thinking she should have called earlier. Cathy had obviously been worried.

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Not yet,” Sara told her, watching Carlos wheel out a black body bag on the gurney. “How’s Tess?”

  Cathy paused before answering. “Still quiet.”

  Sara watched Carlos unzip the bag and start to maneuver the body onto the porcelain table. Anyone watching would think the procedure barbaric, but the only way for one person to move a dead body onto a table was to manhandle it. Carlos started with the feet, pushing them onto the table, then jerked the rest of the body until it was in place. A plastic bag had been left around the head to help preserve evidence.

  Cathy said, “I’m not mad at you.”

  Sara exhaled, realizing she had been holding her breath. “I’m glad.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Sara did not answer, mostly because she did not agree with what her mother had said.

  “When you were little,” Cathy began, her voice catching, “I always counted on you to keep her out of trouble. You were always the responsible one.”

  Sara took a tissue from the box on her desk and patted underneath her eyes. Carlos was trying to remove the T-shirt, but he could not get it over the head. He looked up at Sara, and she made a cutting motion with her hand. The crime-scene techs had already checked for fiber evidence.

  Cathy said, “It’s not you
r fault. It’s not Jeffrey’s fault. It’s just one of those things that happens, and we’ll all get through it.”

  Yesterday Sara had longed to hear this, but today it did not bring comfort. For the first time in her life, she could not believe her mother.

  “Baby?”

  Sara wiped her eyes. “I have to go, Mama.”

  “All right.” Cathy paused before saying, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” Sara told her, hanging up the phone. She put her head in her hands, trying to clear her mind. She could not think about Tessa while she cut up Ellen Schaffer. Sara would best serve her sister by finding something that would lead to the capture of the man who had stabbed her. An autopsy was an act of violence itself, the ultimate invasion. Every body tells a story. A person’s life and death can be exposed in all their glory and shame simply by looking beneath the skin.

  Sara stood and walked back into the morgue just as Carlos finished cutting away the shirt along the seams so it could be put back together and studied. The material was sprayed with blood, a clean, oblong pattern indicating where the rifle had rested. Sara checked the girl’s toe, noting that it, too, was sprayed with blood. The other foot had been out of range and was clean.

  A girlish bra that would have been better suited for a thirteen-year-old covered the young woman’s breasts. Carlos had opened the clasp and was holding a wad of toilet tissue in his hand.

  “What’s that?” Sara asked, though she could see what it was.

  “She had it in here,” Carlos said, indicating the bra. He put his hand in the other cup and pulled out another wad of tissue.

  “Why would she stuff her bra if she was going to kill herself?” Sara asked, though Carlos never answered her questions.

  They both turned as they heard footsteps on the stairs.

  “Anything?” Jeffrey asked.

  “We just started,” Sara told him. “What did Frank say?”

  “Nothing,” Jeffrey answered, but she could tell that something was going on. Sara did not know why he was being reticent. Carlos had proved himself to be trustworthy. Most of the time, Sara forgot he had a life outside the morgue.

  “Let’s get these off,” Sara said, and she helped Carlos remove the girl’s jeans.

  Jeffrey looked at the underwear, which was of the plain cotton variety, not the kind they had found in Andy Rosen’s apartment.

  Sara asked, “Did you check the drawers in her room?”

  “They’re all different kinds,” he said. “Silk, cotton, thongs.”

  “Thongs?”

  He shrugged.

  Sara moved on. “We found tissue in her bra.”

  Jeffrey raised an eyebrow. “She stuffed her bra?”

  “If she committed suicide, she would know that someone would find her, that a mortician or an ME would examine her body. Why would she do that?”

  “Maybe it was just something she always did? Routine?” Jeffrey suggested, but she could tell he was skeptical.

  Sara said, “The tattoo is an old one. Probably three years. That’s just a best guess, but she didn’t get it recently.”

  Carlos peeled back the underwear, and Sara and Jeffrey noticed another tattoo at the same time. A word was written in what looked like Arabic.

  Jeffrey said, “That wasn’t on Andy’s drawing.”

  “It’s not recent by any means,” Sara noted. “You think he left it off on purpose?”

  “Trust me, he would’ve put it in if he had seen it.”

  “So she wasn’t involved with him,” Sara said, indicating that Carlos should take a photograph of the tattoo. She placed a ruler beside the word for scale. “We’ll have to scan it in and try to find someone who knows what it means.”

  Carlos said, “Shalom.”

  “I’m sorry?” Sara asked, surprised he had spoken.

  “It’s Hebrew,” he said. “It means ‘peace.’ ”

  Sara could not give him the benefit of the doubt. “Are you certain?”

  “I learned it in Hebrew school,” he said. “My mother is Jewish.”

  “Oh,” Sara said, wondering how so many years had passed without her ever learning this information. She glanced at Jeffrey, who was writing something in his notebook. His eyebrows were furrowed, and she wondered what connection he was making.

  She turned, forgetting where she was, and hit her head on the scale above the foot of the table.

  “Crap,” she said, feeling her scalp for damage. She did not look at Jeffrey or Carlos to see their response. Instead she walked to the metal cabinet by the sinks and took out a sterile gown and a pair of gloves.

  She asked Jeffrey, “Can you get my glasses? I think they’re on my desk.”

  He did as she asked, and Sara slipped on the gown, then the gloves. She took another pair from the box and slipped them over the first. Carlos wheeled over the chalkboard Sara had bought from the school. Some of the information he had already gathered was filled in on the board. Blank spaces for organ weights and sizes and various other details would be recorded by Carlos through the course of the procedure. Sara liked to see everything in front of her while she performed an autopsy. Visualizing the facts was easier when they were all written down right there.

  Using her foot, Sara tapped on the Dictaphone and began, “This is the unembalmed, well-developed, well-nourished body of a Caucasian nineteen-year-old female who reportedly shot herself in the head with a Wingmaster twelve-gauge rifle. She has been identified as Ellen Marjory Schaffer by responding officer. Photographs and X rays were taken under my direction. Under the provisions of the Georgia Death Investigation Act, an autopsy is performed in the morgue of the Grant County Medical Examiner’s Office on . . .”

  Jeffrey provided the date, and Sara continued, “Commencing at 20:33 hours, with the assistance of Carlos Quiñonez, forensic technician, and Jeffrey Tolliver, chief of police, Grant County.”

  She stopped, looking at the chalkboard for the right information. “She weighs approximately one hundred twenty-five pounds and measures five feet eight inches. There is extensive damage to the head consistent with a rifle blast.” Sara put her hand on the abdomen. “The body has been refrigerated and is cold to the touch. Rigor mortis is full and generalized to the upper extremities.”

  Sara continued, calling out identifying marks as she used a pair of scissors to cut away the bag that covered Ellen Schaffer’s head. Congealed blood and gray matter clung to the plastic, and bits of scalp remained in gelatinous clumps.

  Carlos told her, “The rest of the scalp is in the freezer.”

  “I’ll look at it afterward,” Sara told him, peeling the bag away from what was left of Ellen Schaffer’s head. Barely more than a bloody stump remained, with fragments of blond hair and teeth lodged in the brain stem. More photographs were taken before Sara picked up the scalpel to begin the internal examination. She felt punch-drunk from lack of sleep as she made the standard Y incision, and she closed her eyes for a moment to get her bearings.

  Every organ was removed and weighed, cataloged and recorded, as Sara called out her findings. The stomach held what must have been Schaffer’s last meal: nut-grain cereal that probably looked much the same as it had in the box.

  Sara clamped off the intestines and handed them to Carlos to do what was called running the gut. He used a hose attached to one of the sinks to wash out the intestinal tract, a sieve below the drain catching what sluiced out. The odor was horrible, and Sara always felt guilty about passing along the job until she got a whiff of the contents.

  She snapped off her gloves and walked to the far side of the morgue where the lightbox was set up. Carlos had snapped in the pre-autopsy X rays, and either lack of sleep or plain stupidity had made Sara forget to look at them earlier. She studied the entire series twice before noticing a familiar shape in the lungs.

  “Jeff,” she said, calling him over.

  He stared at the film on the lightbox several seconds before asking, “Is that a tooth?”

  ?
??We’ll find out soon enough.” Sara double-gloved again before taking the left lung out of the viscera bag. On presentation the pleural tissue was smooth, with no evidence of consolidation. Sara had set the lungs aside to biopsy later, but she did this now using the surgically sharpened bread-loafing knife. “There’s slight blood aspiration,” she told Jeffrey. The tooth was found in the bottom right quadrant of the left lung.

  Jeffrey asked, “Could the shot blast have knocked it down her throat?”

  “She aspirated the tooth,” Sara told him. “She inhaled it into her lungs.”

  Jeffrey rubbed his eyes with his hands. He summed up the inconsistency in plain words. “She was breathing when the tooth was knocked out.”

  TUESDAY

  8

  Lena stifled a yawn as she left the movie theater with Ethan. A few hours ago she had taken a Vicodin, and while it was doing very little to help the pain in her wrist, it was making her sleepy as hell.

  “What are you thinking?” Ethan asked, a line most guys used when they wanted a woman to do all the talking.

  “That this party had better pan out,” she told him, injecting a sense of threat into her voice.

  “I hear you,” he said. “Did that cop do anything else?”

  “No,” Lena replied, though her Caller ID had registered five calls from the station by the time she had gotten back from the coffeehouse. It was only a matter of time before Jeffrey came knocking on her door, and when he did, Lena would have to have some answers for him or suffer the consequences. She had decided during the movie that Chuck would not fire her on Jeffrey’s say-so, but there were worse things the fat fuck could do to her. Chuck loved holding things over Lena’s head, and—as bad as her job was now—he could make it even more miserable.

  Ethan asked, “Did you like the movie?”

  “Not really,” she told him, trying to think about what she would do if Andy’s friend did not come through. She would have to find some time during the day tomorrow to talk to Jill Rosen. Lena had called the woman’s service and left three messages, but the doctor had not phoned back. Lena had to know what Rosen had told Jeffrey. She had even scrounged around in the bottom of her closet and found that damn answering machine in case the doctor called her back tonight while she was gone.