Genesis (17 page)

"Reporter's sources are confidential," Sam answered, all but confirming
her guess.

Faith asked, "What's Joelyn's statement?"

"In a nutshell, she said you guys stood around with your thumbs
up your asses for three hours arguing about who would get the case
while her sister was dying up in a tree."

Faith's lips were a thin white line. Will felt physically ill. Sam
must have talked to the sister right after Faith had, which explained
why the reporter had been so sure Amanda was in the dark.

Finally, Faith asked, "Did you feed Zabel that information?"

"You know me better than that."

"Rockdale fed her the information, then you got her on the
record."

He shrugged another confirmation. "I'm a reporter, Faith. I'm
just doing my job."

"That's a pretty shitty job—ambushing grieving family members,
trashing the cops, printing what you know are lies."

"Now you know why I was a drunk for so many years."

Faith tucked her hands into her hips, gave a heavy, frustrated sigh.
"That's not what happened with Jackie Zabel."

"I figured it wasn't." Sam took out his notepad and pen. "So give
me something else to lead with."

"You know I can't—"

"Tell me about the cave. I heard he had a boat battery down there
so he could burn them."

The boat battery was what they called "guilty knowledge," the
sort of information only the killer would know. There were a handful
of people who had seen the evidence Charlie Reed had collected
below ground, and they all wore badges. At least for now.

Faith said what Will was thinking. "Either Galloway or Fierro is
feeding you inside information. They get to screw us over, and you
get your front-page story. Win-win, right?"

Sam's toothy grin confirmed her speculation. Still, he said, "Why
would I talk to Rockdale when you're my inside man on this case?"

Will had seen Faith's temper turn on a dime over the last few
weeks, and it was nice to not be on the receiving end of her anger for
a change. She told Sam, "I'm not your inside anything, asshole, and
your facts are wrong."

"Set me straight, babe."

She seemed about to, but sanity caught up with her at the last
minute. "The GBI has no official comment on Joelyn Zabel's statement."

"Can I quote you on that?"

"Quote this, babe."

Will followed Faith to the car, but not before flashing a smile at
the reporter. He was pretty sure the gesture Faith had made was not
something you could put in a newspaper.

S
ARA HAD SPENT THE LAST THREE AND A HALF YEARS PERFECTING
her denial skills, so it shouldn't have come as a surprise that it
took a solid hour before she realized what a horrible mistake she had
made by offering her services to Amanda Wagner. In that hour, she'd
managed to drive home, shower, change her clothes and get all the
way to the basement of City Hall East before the truth hit her like
a sledgehammer. She had put her hand to the door marked
GBI
MEDICAL EXAMINER
, then stopped, unable to open it. Another city.
Another morgue. Another way to miss Jeffrey.

Was it wrong to say that she had loved working with her husband?
That she had looked at him over the body of a gunshot victim
or drunken driver and felt like her life was complete? It seemed
macabre and foolish and all the things that Sara had thought she'd put
behind her when she moved to Atlanta, but here she was again, her
hand pressed against a door that separated life and death, incapable of
opening it.

She leaned her back against the wall, staring at the painted letters
on the opaque glass. Wasn't this where they had brought Jeffrey?
Wasn't Pete Hanson the man who had dissected her husband's beautiful
body? Sara had the coroner's report somewhere. At the time, it
had seemed of vital importance that she have all the information pertaining
to his death—the toxicology, the weights and measures of
organ, tissue and bone. She had watched Jeffrey die back in Grant
County, but this place, this basement under City Hall, is where
everything that had made him a human being had been reduced, removed,
redacted.

What was it, exactly, that had convinced Sara to bring herself to
this place? She thought about the people she had come into contact
with over the last few hours: Felix McGhee—the lost look on his
pale face, his lower lip trembling as he searched the hospital corridors
for his mother, insisting she would never leave him alone. Will Trent
offering the child his handkerchief. Sara had thought that her father
and Jeffrey were the only two men left on earth who carried them
around anymore. And then Amanda Wagner, commenting on the
funeral.

Sara had been so sedated the day Jeffrey was buried that she'd
barely been able to stand. Her cousin had kept his arm around her
waist, literally holding her up so that she could walk to Jeffrey's
grave. Sara had held her hand over the coffin that lay in the ground,
her fingers refusing to release the clump of dirt she held. Finally, she
had given up, clutching her fist to her chest, wanting to smooth the
dirt onto her face, inhale it, climb into the earth with Jeffrey and
hold him until her lungs could no longer draw breath.

Sara put her hand in the back pocket of her jeans, felt the letter
there. She had folded it so many times that the envelope was tearing
at the crease, showing the bright yellow of the legal paper inside.
What would she do if one day, it suddenly opened? What would she
do if she happened to glance down one morning and saw the neat
scrawl, the pained explanations or blatant excuses from the woman
whose actions had led to Jeffrey's death?

"Sara Linton!" Pete Hanson boomed as his foot hit the bottom
stair. He was wearing a bright Hawaiian shirt, a style she recalled that
he favored, and the expression on his face was a mix of pleasure and
curiosity. "To what do I owe this tremendous pleasure?"

She told him the truth. "I managed to worm my way onto one of
your cases."

"Ah, the student taking over for the teacher."

"I don't think you're ready to give all this up."

He gave her a bawdy wink. "You know I've got the heart of a
nineteen-year-old."

Sara recognized the setup. "Still keep it in a jar over your desk?"

Pete guffawed as if he was hearing the line for the first time.

Sara thought she should explain herself, offering, "I saw one of
the victims at the hospital last night."

"I heard about her. Torture, assault?"

"Yes."

"Prognosis?"

"They're trying to get the infection under control." Sara didn't
elaborate, but she didn't need to. Pete saw his share of hospital patients
who'd not responded to antibiotic treatment.

"Did you get a rape kit?"

"There wasn't enough time pre-op, and post—"

"Spoils the chain of evidence," he provided. Pete was up on his
case law. Anna had been doused in Betadine, exposed to countless
different environments. Any good defense attorney could find an expert
witness who would argue that a rape kit taken after a victim
had undergone the rigors of surgery was too contaminated to use as
evidence.

Sara told him, "I managed to remove some splinters from under
her nails, but I thought the best thing I could offer is a forensic comparison
between the two victims."

"Rather dubious reasoning, but I'm so happy to see you that I'll
overlook your faulty logic."

She smiled; Pete had always been blunt in that polite, southern
way—one of the reasons he made such a great teacher. "Thank you."

"The pleasure of your company is more than enough reward." He
opened the door, ushering her inside. Sara hesitated, and he pointed
out, "Hard to see from the hallway."

Sara put on what she thought of as her game face as she followed
him into the morgue. The smell hit her first. She had always thought
the best way to describe it would be cloying, a word that made no
sense until you smelled something cloying for yourself. The predominant
odor wasn't from the dead, but from the chemicals used around
them. Before scalpel touched flesh, the deceased were catalogued,
X-rayed, photographed, stripped and washed down with disinfectant.
A different cleaner was used to swab the floors, another to wash
down the stainless steel tables; yet another chemical cleaned and sterilized
the tools of autopsy. Together, they created an unforgettable,
overly sweet smell that permeated your skin, lived in the back of
your nose so that you didn't realize it was there until you had been
away from it for a while.

Sara followed Pete to the back of the room, feeling caught in his
wake. The morgue was as far from the constant hustle of Grady as
Grant County was from Grand Central. Unlike the endless treadmill
of cases in the ER, an autopsy was a contained question that almost
always had an answer. Blood, fluid, organ, tissue—each component
contributed a piece to the puzzle. A body could not lie. The dead
could not always take their secrets to the grave.

Almost two and a half million people die in America each year.
Georgia is responsible for about seventy thousand of these deaths,
less than a thousand of which are homicides. By state law, any unattended
death—which is to say a person who dies outside of a hospital
or nursing home—has to be investigated. Small towns that do not
often see violent death, or communities that are so strapped for cash
that the local funeral director fills in for the job of coroner, usually
let the state handle their criminal cases. The majority of them end up
in the Atlanta morgue. Which explained why half the tables were occupied
with corpses in various stages of autopsy.

"Snoopy," Pete said, calling to an elderly black man in scrubs.
"This is Dr. Sara Linton. She's going to be assisting me on the Zabel
case. Where are we?"

The man didn't acknowledge Sara as he told Pete, "X-rays are on
the screen. I can bring her out now if you want."

"Good man." Pete went to the computer and tapped the keyboard.
A series of X-rays came onto the screen. "Technology!" Pete
exclaimed, and Sara could not help but be impressed. Back in Grant
County, the morgue had been in the basement of the hospital, almost
an afterthought. The X-ray machine was designed for living humans,
unlike the setup here, where it didn't really matter how much radiation
shot into the dead body. The films were pristine, read on a
twenty-four-inch flat panel monitor instead of a lightbox that flickered
enough to cause an epileptic fit. The single, porcelain table Sara
had used in Grant was no match for the rows of stainless steel gurneys
behind her. She could see junior coroners and medical investigators
bustling back and forth in the glassed-off hallway running beside the
morgue. She realized that she and Pete were alone, the only living
beings in the main autopsy suite.

"We cleared out all the other cases when we brought him in," Pete
said, and for a moment, Sara did not understand what he meant.

He pointed to an empty gurney, the last in the row. "This is
where I worked on him."

Sara stared at the empty table, wondering why the image didn't
flash in her head, that horrible vision of the last time she had seen her
husband. Instead, all she saw was a clean gurney, the overhead light
bouncing off the dull stainless steel. This is where Pete collected the
evidence that had led to Jeffrey's killer. This is where the case broke
open, proving without a shadow of a doubt who was involved in his
murder.

Standing here now, Sara had expected her memories to overwhelm
her, but there was only calmness, a certainty of purpose.
Good things were done here. People were helped, even in death.
Particularly in death.

Slowly, she turned back to Pete, still not seeing Jeffrey, but feeling
him, as if he was in the room with her. Why was that? Why was
it that after three and a half years of begging her brain to come up
with some sensation that might replicate what it felt like to have
Jeffrey with her, being in the morgue had brought him to her in a
flash?

Most cops hated sitting in on an autopsy, and Jeffrey was no exception,
but he considered his attendance a sign of respect, a promise
to the victim that he would do everything he could to bring the killer
to justice. That was why he had become a cop—not just to help the
innocent, but to punish the criminals who preyed upon them.

In all honesty, that was why Sara had taken the coroner's job.
Jeffrey hadn't even heard of Grant County the first time she had
walked into the morgue under the hospital, examined a victim,
helped break a case. Many years ago, Sara had seen violence firsthand,
had herself been the victim of a horrific assault. Every Y-incision
she made, every sample she collected, every time she testified in court
to the horrors she had documented, she had felt a righteous revenge
burning in her chest.

"Sara?"

She realized she'd gone quiet. She had to clear her throat before
she could tell Pete, "I had Grady send over the films of our Jane Doe
from last night. She was able to speak before she went under. We
think her name is Anna."

He clicked through to the file, pulling up Anna's X-rays on
screen. "Is she conscious?"

"I called the hospital before I got here. She's still out."

"Neurologic damage?"

"She pulled through the surgery, which is more than anyone expected.
Reflexes are good, pupils are still nonreactive. There's some
swelling in her brain. They've got a scan scheduled for later today. It's
the infection that's the real concern. They're doing some cultures, trying
to figure out the best way to treat it. Sanderson called in the CDC."

"Oh, my." Pete was studying the X-ray. "How much hand
strength do you think that would take, ripping out the rib?"

"She was starved, dehydrated. I suppose that would've made it
easier."

"Tied down—couldn't have put up much of a fight. But, still . . .
goodness. Reminds me of the third Mrs. Hanson. Vivian was a body
builder, you know. Biceps as big around as my leg. Quite a woman."

"Thank you, Pete. Thank you for taking care of him."

He gave her another wink. "You earn respect by giving it to others."

She recognized the dictum from his lectures.

"Snoopy," Pete pronounced as the man pushed a gurney through
the double doors. Jacquelyn Zabel's head showed above a white
sheet, her skin purple with lividity from hanging upside down in the
tree. The color was even darker around the woman's lips, as if someone
had smeared a handful of blueberries over her mouth. Sara noticed
that the woman had been attractive, with only a few fine lines at
the edge of her eyes to show age. Again, she was reminded of Anna,
the fact that she, too, was a striking woman.

Pete seemed to be thinking the same thing. "Why is it that the
more beautiful the woman, the more horrendous the crime?"

Sara shrugged. It was a phenomenon she'd seen as a coroner back
in Grant County. Beautiful women tended to pay a heavier price
where homicide was concerned.

"Put her in my spot," Pete told his assistant.

Sara watched the expressionless way Snoopy approached his job,
the methodical care he took as he angled the body toward an empty
slot in the row. Pete was in the minority here; most of the people
working in the morgue were either African-American or women. It
was the same at Grady Hospital, which made sense, because Sara had
noticed that the more horrible the job, the more likely a woman or
minority was to do it. The irony was not lost on Sara that she was included
in this mix.

Snoopy kicked down the brakes on the wheels and started to organize
the various scalpels, knives and saws Pete would need over the
next few hours. He had just pulled out a pair of large pruning shears
that you normally find in the gardening section of a hardware store
when Will and Faith walked into the room.

Will seemed nonplussed as they passed by open bodies. Faith, on
the other hand, looked worse than she had when Sara had first seen
her in the hospital. The woman's lips were white, and she stared
straight ahead as she walked past a man with his face peeled from his
skull so the doctor could check for contusions.

"Dr. Linton," Will began. "Thank you for coming. I know this is
supposed to be your day off."

Sara could only smile and nod, wondering at his formal tone. Will
Trent sounded more like a banker with every passing minute. She
was still having trouble reconciling the man with his job.