A Faint Cold Fear (20 page)

'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 your 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 Quinonez, 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

EIGHT

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.

Lena looked up at the sky, taking a deep breath to try to clear her mind. She needed somebody to talk this out with, but there was no one she could trust.

'Nice night,' Ethan said, probably thinking she was enjoying the stars. 'Full moon.'

'It's going to rain tomorrow,' she told him, clenching and unclenching her hand. A nasty bluish black bruise circled her wrist where Ethan had grabbed her, and Lena was pretty sure something was damaged. The bone ached when she held her hand to the side, and the swelling had made it difficult for her to button the cuff of her shirt. She had kept her wrist wrapped until Ethan had knocked on the door, but Lena would be damned if she'd let him know she was hurting.

The problem was, Lena did not get paid until next Monday. If she went to the emergency room for an X ray, the fifty-dollar co-pay her insurance required would wipe out her checking account. She figured that no bones were broken, because she could still move her hand. If it was still hurting Monday, Lena would do something about it then. She was right-handed anyway, and besides, she had lived with worse pain than this for longer than a couple of days. It was almost reassuring; a reminder that she was alive.

As if he could sense what she was thinking, Ethan asked, 'How's your wrist?'

'Fine.'

'I'm sorry I did that. I just' he seemed to look for the right words 'I didn't want you to leave.'

'Nice way to show it.'

'I'm sorry I hurt you.'

'Whatever,' she mumbled. Somehow talking about it made her wrist throb more. Before she left her room, Lena had put another Vicodin and an eight-hundred-milligram Motrin in her pocket in case the pain got worse. While Ethan was looking at a group of kids in the student-union parking lot, she dry-swallowed the Motrin, coughing when it Went down the wrong way.

Ethan asked, 'Are you okay?'

'Fine,' she managed, patting her hand to her chest.

'Are you getting a cold?'

'No,' she answered, coughing again. 'When does this party start?'

'It should be revving up about now.' He headed toward a path between two bushes. Lena knew that it was a shortcut through the forest to the dorms on the west side of the campus, but she didn't want to walk it at night, even in full moonlight.

Ethan turned when she didn't follow, saying, 'This way is faster.'

For obvious reasons Lena was reluctant to follow anyone into a dark, secluded area. On the surface Ethan seemed to regret hurting her, but she had already discovered how mercurial his temper could be.

'Come on,' Ethan said, trying to joke. 'You're not still scared of me, are you?'

'Fuck you,' she said, forcing her feet to move. She tucked her hand into her back pocket, hoping it looked like a casual move. Her fingertips brushed against a four-inch pocketknife, and she felt safer knowing it was there.

He slowed down so he could walk beside her, asking, 'Have you worked here long?'

'No.'

'How long?'

'A few months.'

'Do you like your job?'

'It's a job.'

He seemed to get the message, walking on. He dropped back again a few minutes later, though. She could see the shadow of his face but not read his expression. He sounded sincere when he said, 'I'm sorry you didn't like the movie.'

'It's not your fault,' Lena said, though he had chosen the subtitled French film.

'I thought you'd be into that kind of thing.'

She wondered if anyone in the history of the world had ever been more wrong. 'If I want to read, I'll get a book.'

'Do you read much?'

'Not much,' she said, though lately she had been sucked in by some of the sappy romances in the school library. Lena had taken to hiding the books behind the newspaper rack so no one would check them out before she finished them. She would slit her own throat before she let Nan Thomas find out what kind of trash she was reading.

'What about movies?' Ethan asked, undeterred.

'What sorts of movies do you like?'

She tried not to sound too annoyed. 'I don't know, Ethan. The kinds that make sense.'

He finally got the message and shut up. Lena watched the ground, trying not to trip. She had opted for her cowboy boots tonight, and she wasn't used to walking in a shoe that had a heel even a low one.

She was wearing jeans with a dark green button-down shirt and had put on a little eyeliner as a concession to going out in the real world. She had left her hair down just to tell Ethan what she thought of his opinion.

Ethan was in baggy jeans, but he was still wearing a black long-sleeved T-shirt that covered his arms.

Lena knew that it wasn't the same shirt from before, because she could smell the laundry detergent on it with just a hint of what smelled like musk cologne.

Industrial-looking steel-toed work boots completed the ensemble, and Lena thought if she lost him in the woods, she would be able to track him by the deep impression the soles left in the soil.

A few minutes later, they were in the clearing behind the men's dorms. Grant Tech was pretty old-fashioned, and only one of the dorms was co-ed, but, this being a college, students had found a way around the rules, and everyone knew that Mike Burke, the professor in charge of the men's dorms, was deaf as a post and not likely to hear girls sneaking in and out at all hours.

Lena thought they must have.stolen his hearing aids and thrown him into a closet tonight. The music coming from the building was so loud that the ground pulsed beneath her feet.

'Dr. Burke's at his mother's for the week,' Ethan explained, flashing a smile. 'He left a number in case we need him.'

'This is your dorm?'

He nodded, walking toward the building.

She stopped him, raising her voice over the music to tell him, 'Just treat me like your date in there, okay?'

'That's what you are, right?'

She gave him a look that she hoped answered his question.

'Right.' He started walking again, and Lena followed.

She cringed at the noise as they got closer to the dorm, which had every light burning, including the ones in the dormer rooms upstairs that were restricted to the housemaster. The music was somewhere between a European dance-party mix and acid jazz with a little rap thrown in, and Lena felt like her ears would start bleeding at any moment from the high decibel level.

Lena asked, 'Aren't they worried about security coming?'

Ethan smiled at this, and Lena conceded the point with a frown. Most mornings when she showed up for work, whoever had been on the evening before was still in the cot in (he back room, a blanket tucked under his chin and drool on the pillow from a long night's sleep. She knew from the schedule that Fletcher was on duty tonight. Of all the night men, he was the worst. In the short time Lena had been at the college, Fletcher hadn't noted one incident on his log. Of course, a lot of nighttime crimes either were unreported or went unnoticed under cover of darkness.

Lena had read in an informational pamphlet that fewer than 5 percent of all women who were raped on college campuses reported their attacks to the police. She looked up at the dorm building, wondering if someone was being assaulted right now.

'Hey, Green!' A young man who was slightly taller and stockier than Ethan came up and pounded his fist into Ethan's shoulder. Ethan returned the pounding and they exchanged a complicated handshake that called for everything but a do-si-do around the dance floor.

'Lena,' Ethan said, his voice straining to be heard over the music. 'This is Paul.'

Lena tried her best smile, wondering if this was Andy Rosen's friend.

Paul looked her up and down, as if to assess her fuck-ability.

She did the same back, letting him know he did not meet her standards. He was pretty bland-looking in that way teenage boys can be when they're trapped between adulthood and adolescence. He wore a yellow sun visor with the bill backward, a shock of close-cropped bleached-blond hair sticking up at the crown.

He had a child's pacifier and a bunch of charms that looked like they were from the Hello, Kitty collection hanging from a green metal chain around his neck. He saw her notice and put the pacifier in his mouth, smacking loudly.

'Yo,' Ethan said, punching Paul's shoulder, acting a bit territorial. 'Where's Scooter?'

'Inside,' Paul said. 'Probably trying to get them to stop playin' this nigga shit.' He postured, throwing his hands around with the song.

Lena bristled at his use of the word but tried not to show it. She must not have done a good job, though, because Paul asked, 'You down with the brothers?' in a heavy dialect that only a racist pig would use.

'Shut up, man,' Ethan said, punching him a lot harder than he had before. Paul laughed, but he fell back into a crowd of people walking toward the woods, catcalling racial slurs until he was far enough away for the music to drown out what he was saying.

Ethan's fists were clenched, the muscles along his shoulders rippling under his shirt. 'Fucking asshole,' he spit.

'Why don't you just calm down?' Lena said, but her heart was thumping in her chest when Ethan turned to her. His anger pierced her like a laser, and she put her hand into her back pocket, touching the knife like a talisman.

Ethan said, 'Don't listen to him, okay? He's an idiot.'

'Yeah,' Lena agreed, trying to diffuse the situation, 'he is.'

Ethan gave her a rueful look, like it was very important for her to believe him, before heading toward the dorm.

The front door was open, a couple of students standing just inside. Lena could not tell what sex they were, but she imagined that if she hung around a couple of seconds more, she would see for herself. She walked past them, averting her eyes, trying to pin down a peculiar odor in the air. She knew the smell of pot well enough after working in a school for seven months, but this was nothing like that.

At the entrance a long central hallway with a stairway connected the three floors, with two perpendicular hallways branching off each side giving access to the rooms and the bathrooms. The dorm had the same layout as every other student dorm on campus.

The unit Lena lived in was very similar, but for the fact that every room in the faculty dorm had a small suite with its own bathroom and a sitting area that doubled as a kitchenette. Here students were packed two to a room with communal bathrooms at the end of each hall.

The closer Ethan and Lena got to the end of one hallway, the better able she was to guess what at least two of the odors in the air were: piss and vomit.

'I just need to stop in here,' Ethan said, pausing outside a doorway that had a HAZARDOUS WASTE sticker on the outside. 'Do you mind?'

'I'll wait out here,' Lena told him, leaning against the wall.

He shrugged, sticking his key into the lock and jiggling the door so it would open. Lena did not know why he bothered to lock it. Most of the kids on campus knew that if you shook the knobs hard enough the doors popped open on their own. Half the thefts Lena was called out on showed no sign of forced entry.

'Right back,' he said before going in and closing the door.

She looked at the message board on the outside of his door as she waited. There was a corkboard on one half and a dry-erase board on the other. The cork had several notes thumbtacked to it that Lena was not curious enough to unfold and read. On the white board, someone had written, 'Ethan gives good head' alongside a drawing that looked like a deformed monkey holding either a baseball bat or an erect penis in his three-fingered hand.

Lena sighed, wondering what the fuck she was doing here. Maybe she should just go to the station tomorrow and talk to Jeffrey. There had to be a way to convince him that she was not involved in this case.

She should just go home right now, pour herself a drink, and try to get some sleep, so that when the morning came, her head would be clear and she could plan a course of action. Or maybe she should stay and talk to Andy's friend, so that at least she had something to offer Jeffrey to show she was acting in good faith.

'Sorry,' Ethan said as he returned, looking much the same as he had when he went into the room. She wondered what he had been doing in there, but not enough to ask. He had probably assumed she would go into the room with him, where he could seduce her with his boyish charms. Lena hoped she did not look as dumb as he thought she was.

'Aw, crap,' he said, wiping the message board with the sleeve of his shirt. 'That's just the guys playing around.'

'Right,' she said, bored.

'Honest,' he persisted. 'I stopped doing that in high school.'