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It’s not until I open the door of my cruiser I hear her call my name.
“I’m going to have a talk with Pops about the possibility of hiring a chef,” she states, a faint smile on her lips.
I lean my arm on the door and grin back.
“I’m glad.”
“And Rick?”
“Right here.”
“I just want you to know I appreciate you.”
I smile at the words, but as I get behind the wheel and drive away, it’s the look on her face that stays with me.
Her expression was open, intrigued, and slightly vulnerable.
Chapter 9
Rick
* * *
“Detective Althof, happy you could join us.”
Despite donning my go-to face mask lathered in VapoRub, the unpleasant smells associated with the morgue filter through.
It’s not often I attend an autopsy—I avoid them when I can—but in this particular case, where the body hopefully holds answers to a lot of questions on my list, I figured I should probably be here.
Honestly, the visuals don’t bother me; the deceased human body is nothing more than a source of potential evidence to be examined. But the smells associated with death are something I’ve never been able to get used to. Hence the VapoRub mask.
Unfortunately, it’s not foolproof when a body is particularly pungent, as this one appears to be.
“Dr. Richter, I’m glad you were able to accommodate us on such short notice,” I return.
“You were in luck; my scheduled golf game got cancelled this morning because of the damn rain.”
The rain started Monday night and hasn’t let up yet. Mid-October is typically when we enter the wetter fall season. Not my favorite time of year—I’d prefer snow over rain—but the weather is something I can’t control, so I try my best to ignore it.
It’s only been two days since we found the body and I haven’t made any tracks on this case yet. Technically, I don’t even know if there is a case, which is part of the problem.
The fingerprints Buck Wilson took during his preliminary examination of the body at the scene matched ones we lifted from Douglas Severin’s truck, but we didn’t get any hits running them through AFIS. It was enough for me to feel one-hundred-percent confident the victim is Severin, but one could argue the fingerprints only prove whoever it is was inside the truck at some point. Before I can contact the only living relative I was able to locate for Severin—an eighty-three-year-old aunt living in a nursing home in Medical Lake, Washington—to ask questions about the only nephew she has, it would be nice to have some concrete evidence, like dental records or DNA.
“Do you mind if I record any findings?” I ask, pulling out my phone.
“Fine by me,” Buck responds, as the other man shrugs. “And feel free to move in closer.”
I only get as close as I need to be to make sure the voice recorder app on my phone picks up the running commentary between the two men as they begin their examinations.
Three and a half long hours later, the preliminary consensus is foul play, with the cause of death blunt-force trauma to the head. The wait is for the samples collected and the clothes he was wearing to be processed by the lab, before a final report can be released, but at least now I know I’m not wasting my time on this case.
Even better, I got a positive ID on the victim through a knee implant discovered during the autopsy. The implant provided us with a brand and serial number, which was easily traced through a database to a knee replacement surgery performed four years ago on one Douglas Randall Severin at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, Washington.
I have a victim, I have a cause of death, but I don’t know where the man was murdered. According to Tom Richter, there was evidence the victim didn’t die immediately but bled out, likely as a result of his head injury. Since very little blood was found at the scene on Lizard Mountain, it would imply Severin was murdered elsewhere.
“Care to join us for a bite to eat?” Richter offers as he pulls off his gloves and blood-covered gown.
Nothing fazes these guys, but I’m going to need a hot shower and a good scrub to get the stench off me before I can even consider eating.
