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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.
