What remained of the skin around the thighs had melted into the seat, sinew draping like Christmas tinsel down the legs. Crusty remnants of a pair of blue jeans and white underwear were still stuck in place where body fluids had leaked into the material then dried. The top of a white sock circled the left ankle. Though there was scant residual skin on both feet, a split piece of toenail remained on the right big toe. A square of chipped, pink nail polish showed. Sara leaned down, moved in closer. The area around the pubis had extensive damage, but she was fairly certain she was looking at a woman’s genitalia.
She closed her eyes for just a second, unbelievably relieved that the victim was not Hank Norton. It gave her some hope that Lena ‘s involvement in the crime did not run as deep as Jake Valentine believed.
‘Sara?’ Jeffrey asked. There was a slight edge to his voice. ‘You okay?’
‘Yes,’ she told him, giving a slight shake of her head to answer the question that was obvious to everyone but the sheriff.
Valentine said, ‘Pretty bad, huh?’
Sara nodded. ‘Has your coroner seen the body?’
‘Just a quick look-see on the field that night,’ Valentine supplied. ‘Fred says he’s never seen anything like it. Worst case he’s ever had. Oh-‘ He stopped abruptly, as if he’d just remembered something. ‘Once we get the body out, we’ll give Fred a call and get him over to help with the X-rays. The machine’s real temperamental. You might not want to try it on your own.’
‘Fred is your coroner?’ Jeffrey asked.
‘Yep,’ Valentine confirmed. ‘Fred Bart. He’s in the middle of a root canal right now, but he said to just give him a call and he’ll hop on over.’
Sara must have looked confused because Valentine barked a laugh. ‘He’s
doing
the root canal, not getting it. Fred’s the only dentist in town. Does the coroner’s job for fishing money, he says. Real nice guy, but he knows when to let an expert take over.’ Valentine offered a weak smile. ‘Which brings me to thanking you again for doing this, Dr. Linton. I know we haven’t talked about fees yet, but I ran by the bank this morning.’
He pulled out a wad of bills and Sara felt a blush working its way up her neck. She had assumed she was doing this as a favor. There was a difference between getting a check from Grant County and taking cash from Jake Valentine. The thought of money changing hands made her feel cheap.
Valentine counted out some twenties, explaining, ‘We usually pay Fred around two-fifty a pop, but I-‘ He stopped as the opening bars of ‘I Wish I Was in Dixie ‘ chimed from his pants pocket. ‘Sorry about that,’ he apologized, fumbling with the money as he tried to locate his cell phone. He opened the phone with the usual hello, but didn’t say much else as he listened. Only a few seconds passed before his mouth dropped open.
Abruptly, he told the caller, ‘I’ll be right there,’ then ended the call.
Jeffrey exchanged a glance with Sara before asking the sheriff, ‘Something wrong?’
‘I gotta go,’ Valentine told them, suddenly serious. ‘There’s been a bad accident on the highway. Guy I went to school with slid under an eighteen-wheeler.’ He tucked the money back into his pocket, realized what he had done, and offered it to Sara.
‘No,’ she told him, not taking the cash. ‘Thank you.’
Valentine seemed too distracted to be surprised. He pocketed the money again. ‘You mind if I leave you to this?’
Sara let Jeffrey answer. ‘No problem. Is there anything I can do to help?’
‘No,’ Valentine said, a little too quickly, his tone a little too high, as if he was afraid Jeffrey would offer to come along. He seemed to realize this and added, ‘Thank you, though,’ then made a hasty exit, almost jogging to the door.
Jeffrey said, ‘Well, at least we know why he wanted you to do the autopsy.’
Sara looked at the body, calculated the time it would take to dissect the poor creature. ‘We’ll be tied up here for most of the day.’
‘What’s he trying to keep us away from, though?’ They heard the sheriff’s car start, wheels crunching on gravel. Jeffrey said, ‘Either that bastard’s really sharp or really stupid. I can’t figure which.’
‘Policemen aren’t known for their stunning intelligence.’
He cut his eyes at her. ‘You’re feeling better.’
Sara didn’t know how to take the comment. Beyond his obvious sarcasm, the fact was that she
did
feel better. Whether it was from last night’s heavy sleep or yesterday’s outburst, she felt as if she had gotten some sense of herself back. She had walked into the morgue without any hesitation. Her assessment of the body had come like second nature. She had not second-guessed herself or worried about being told she was wrong or stupid or incompetent. She had simply done her job.
He said, ‘If I’d known it was going to help this much, I would’ve rustled up a dead body sooner.’
She laughed because he probably had a point. ‘Some husband you are.’
‘I’m not going to apologize.’
She knew he was talking about yesterday. She also knew from being with him for what seemed like the past million years that the world was not going to come to an end if they were annoyed with each other.
She told him, ‘I’m not going to apologize, either.’
That settled, Jeffrey indicated the burned remains in the SUV. ‘So, it’s not Hank.’
‘No, it’s a woman.’
‘I guess that’s a relief.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But it raises the bigger question-‘
He finished her sentence. ‘Who is she, and how is she connected to Lena?’ He leaned over for a better look at the body. ‘What do you think?’
Sara gave him an honest answer. ‘I think I’d rather be home digging up the patio.’
He glanced back at her. ‘It’s not too late to back out.’
‘You know I can’t do that.’
‘Did you see this?’ he asked, pointing toward the neck. ‘What do you think it is?’
Sara was about to ask what he meant but as she turned the light caught the glint of a thin gold chain seared into the flesh. ‘A necklace of some kind. We really need X-rays.’
‘I could look up Fred Bart in the phone book and give him a call. Try to get an idea of when he’s going to be here.’
Sara knelt down beside the SUV so she could see how the seat was anchored. Fred Bart had obviously handled his share of auto accidents. If Jeffrey was right and Jake Valentine had thrown the autopsy to Sara in order to keep an eye on them, Bart would probably not be too eager to help out. She told Jeffrey, ‘We can go ahead and get her out before he comes.’
‘You’re sure it’s a woman?’
‘Unless I’ve forgotten basic anatomy,’ she answered. ‘Jake didn’t seem too curious about my findings.’
Jeffrey shrugged.
‘Am I imagining things, or did it seem like he didn’t care one way or the other?’ Jeffrey shrugged again, so she continued, ‘Or, maybe he already knows who this is? And if you shrug again-‘
‘I don’t know, Sara. I can’t tell you anything because I just don’t know.’
She stared at him, wondering why she kept forgetting how irritatingly stubborn he could be. Probably for the same reason he kept forgetting how persistent she was.
Sara turned her attention back to the car. ‘Can you look for a large wrench?’ She studied the bolts holding down the seat more closely. ‘On second thought,’ she told him. ‘Look for a torch.’
This was going to be a long day.
TEN
Lena pulled into the teachers’ parking lot at the high school, noticing that her eight-year-old Celica was the best car in the lot. She had once teased Sibyl about the fact that after spending a zillion years working on various college degrees, her professor’s salary at Grant Tech had been just five thousand dollars more a year than what Lena made as a cop. Sibyl had pointed out that Lena ran the risk of getting shot for five thousand dollars less a year than a college professor made and it had stopped being so funny.
It was no secret that Lena hadn’t exactly been a star student at Elawah High. She’d made straight Bs and Cs until high school, or more specifically, until puberty, then everything went downhill from there. She had flunked algebra twice, spending two summers making it up so she could graduate on time. The thought of quitting had never occurred to her, but she knew from Hank that the current dropout rate at Elawah was almost fifty percent. Not many kids saw the point in applied physics when they were pretty much going to end up at the tire plant slinging rubber anyway.
Charlotte Warren’s husband worked at the plant. Of course, she wasn’t Charlotte Warren anymore. Larry Gibson had graduated the same year as Charlotte. When Sibyl had left for college, the two had obviously started seeing each other.
Three kids later and Larry was middle management at the tire plant while Charlotte bided her time teaching. They were well on their way to the American dream except for the fact that, according to the letters Lena had found in Hank’s office, the woman was miserable.
‘What is wrong with me?’ Charlotte had written. ‘Why can’t I be happy?’
Lena couldn’t focus on Charlotte ‘s marital misery now, though. She was here to find out information about Hank and what had caused him to slip back into his old ways. She needed to find out why he had lied to them and what had happened to her mother. Charlotte Warren might know his secrets. You didn’t write about the kind of secrets Charlotte had revealed in her letters to a stranger. Though the last letter Lena found was dated over a month ago, Charlotte had pretty much poured out her heart to Hank. Lena was betting Hank had returned the favor. If she couldn’t get answers from her uncle, then she would get them from his confidant.
There was no guard at the school’s front entrance and Lena was able to walk right in. There was a directory of classrooms on the front wall and Lena found Charlotte Gibson’s easily enough.
Like many rural schools, the building was a one-story structure with plenty of room to grow but no money to make it happen. Ten trailers, or ‘temporary classrooms’ were stacked along the back of the building and overlooking the football field. Lena stood at the open back door and looked at the sorry trailers. They might be calling them temporary, but Lena knew that at least two of them dated from her time as a senior. Some of them were on poured concrete slabs but most of the classrooms were on stilts. Weeds shot up between empty soda cans and wadded-up sheets of paper that students had thrown underneath them. Rickety wooden stairs led to open doors and she wondered if the buildings were air-conditioned. They couldn’t have been more than eight feet by fifteen and knowing the county, the school was packing kids in there like meat. No wonder the dropout rate was so high. Lena had been here for less than five minutes and she was already anxious to leave.
She walked along the concrete walkway that fronted the trailers, thinking it was strange that Charlotte had been slotted back behind the school. Surely she had enough seniority to warrant a real classroom inside the building. Then again, the woman was lucky to have her job. Judging from the letters Lena had found, Hank had been Charlotte ‘s AA sponsor. Up until a year ago, it’d taken the woman a swig of gin just to get out of bed.
‘Do you want to go see the principal?’ a teacher’s voice bellowed from an open door, and Lena cringed, remembering the many times teachers had asked her the same thing. Not that it was a question; if you got them mad enough to ask, you were pretty much going to the office anyway.
The trailer at the very end was Charlotte ‘s, and it looked to be the worst of the lot. The bottom stair had rotted through and someone had placed cinder blocks on the ground to make up the step. The door was open, a screen door hanging crookedly from the jamb. Inside, Lena could see two long rows of desks facing the back of the trailer where Charlotte was bent over a stack of papers. No one else in the classroom.
Lena stood outside the door, watching Charlotte grade papers. Now that she was here, she did not know what to say to the woman. Lena felt as if she’d somehow violated Charlotte by reading her letters. Maybe she had. Charlotte ‘s words were deeply personal, meant only for Hank. If the shoe were on the other foot, if Charlotte had read Lena’s personal letters, Lena would have been furious.
Still, it was clear now that Charlotte knew more about Hank than she’d let on in the library. The two had obviously shared a deep friendship. God knew the woman could keep a secret. Lena was used to getting people to blab their darkest deeds, whether it was stealing a car or murdering a spouse. She had to think of this as an interview for a case rather than something that affected her personally. Jeffrey’s words echoed in her ears:
Make the suspect comfortable, make some small talk, then make her tell the truth.
Lena knocked on the screen door once before she realized it wasn’t attached to anything. It started to fall to the side and she caught it, a shard of wood piercing the fleshy part of her palm.
‘Shit,’ she hissed, letting the screen hit the ground.
‘Splinter?’ Charlotte asked. She had managed to cross the trailer while Lena wrestled with the door.
Lena sucked at her hand, nodding.
‘Come on in,’ Charlotte offered. If she was surprised to see Lena, she didn’t say so.
‘Why do they have you stuck out here?’ Lena asked, walking inside. Bright posters decorated the walls and the room was clean and orderly, but there was no hiding the fact that it was little more than a tin box baking in the sun. The floor was springy under her feet and someone had used a bright silver tape to try to seal up the single-paned windows.
Charlotte pulled the door to and turned on the air-conditioning unit hanging on the wall. She had to raise her voice over the hum of the machine when she offered, ‘You want me to look at your hand?’
Lena sat on the edge of Charlotte ‘s desk and held out her hand.
‘Not too bad,’ Charlotte appraised, squinting at the splinter. She was more relaxed in the classroom than she’d been in the library. She seemed like an adult here, as if she were in her element. ‘I can get that out with a needle if you-‘
Lena jerked her hand back. ‘No, thanks. It’ll work itself out.’
Charlotte smiled, sitting in one of the student desks. ‘Still scared of needles?’