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The middle two drawers on the back wall were unmarked, which led me to believe they must be empty. I started with Trish Keller, who was in the top left-hand drawer. Lucky for me and my stunted growth, the top drawer came out at chest height, so I didn’t need to find a stepladder to get a good look at the body.
She was sheathed in an opaque white bag, which I unzipped to reveal her naked, blue-gray body. Nolan made a small noise, but Brigit leaned over my shoulder to get a better view.
“Ew,” she said, summarizing my own feelings with perfect brevity.
“Just think, Bri, you could have looked like this too if I hadn’t intervened.”
“Thanks.”
I’d been teasing, but her gratitude sounded genuine. When she’d first been turned, she wanted to kill me for it. Now she seemed legitimately thankful.
“Nolan, can you find me the chart for Trish Keller?” I pointed to the door where several metal clipboards were sorted into their own divider slots next to the magnetic swipe pad. There were six slots and only four folders, confirming my suspicion about the empty drawers.
He came back and tried to hand me the clipboard, but I was too busy scanning Trish’s body for any sign of partially healed vampire bites or other supernatural residue.
“Whatcha lookin’ for?” he asked.
“See if there’s anything unusual in her blood work. Elevated levels of adrenaline. Higher than usual concentrations of hormones. A higher than usual amount of testosterone.” As I listed each telltale sign of shapeshifter blood, Nolan replied in the negative. Trish’s blood was clean, with the exception of high blood alcohol and traces of cocaine.
Maybe it was naïve, but I figured girls at Ivy League schools were less likely to have hard drugs in their systems. College was certainly different than I gleaned from watching Animal House and Road Trip, if doing lines of blow was more common than doing keg stands. If Gabriel wasn’t responsible for Trish’s death, maybe her party lifestyle had contributed to her murder. It was definitely something to consider.
I zipped her bag and continued the search, next checking Angie Ferris, who was rooming downstairs from Trish. Same thing, no signs of bites or violence, nothing weird in her blood. By the time we’d pulled out Misty’s body I was giving up hope of finding proof that would clear Gabriel. These girls had died of something natural. Sure, it was still murder, but their killer didn’t appear to be anything more than a normal, messed-up human.
We stowed Misty’s body, and I was about to call it a night, when I looked at Jane Doe’s locker above Misty’s. Why was this girl in here with them? The other three made sense, because they were a part of an ongoing investigation, but what about the unknown?
“Nolan, grab Jane Doe’s chart for me, please.”
He didn’t ask any questions, just went to grab the clipboard as I opened the final cabinet and pulled the sliding tray out.
The first thing I noticed was potentially more disturbing than anything we’d seen with the other girls thus far. It wasn’t anything about the condition of her body—she looked like most dead girls do. You know…pasty, cold, generally corpsey. What creeped me out about Jane Doe was something much more mundane.
I knew her.
I didn’t know her name, but the mousy brown hair and the chubby roundness of her features came screaming back to me. We’d locked eyes across a dim office, right before she’d jumped out a third-floor window at the museum earlier that week. But I knew perfectly well the fall hadn’t killed her. I’d checked for a body.
Yet this was the same girl.
“Nothin’ in the blood,” Nolan told me before I asked.
“I don’t want to know about her blood.”
“Whatcha wanna know?”
“What’s her date of death?”
“Uhh.” He paged through the sheets until he found what he was looking for. “Says she died ’bout two weeks ’go.”
“No.” I shook my head and took the clipboard from him. “That can’t be right. I saw this girl a few days ago, and she was very alive then.” But he wasn’t mistaken. The Medical Examiner clearly believed her body had been dead for over two weeks. It had only been found the previous day, however.
“If she’s been dead for two weeks, shouldn’t she, like, be rotting or something?” Brigit queried.
She had a good point. There should be more decomposition happening, but the girl appeared to be well-preserved. Curiouser and curiouser. Then I remembered something else about her from the night we’d encountered one another.
Since Nolan was now the one standing closest to the body, I asked, “Can you unzip the bag so I can see her shoulder?”
He pursed his lips and wrinkled his nose but didn’t argue with me.
If this was the same girl I’d encountered at the museum, she should show some sign of the gunshot I’d landed on her shoulder. I needed to know if it really was the same girl and not my mind playing tricks on me.
