AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“The day’s still young,” Elliot replied, pulling into the morgue parking lot. “The news just hit the air last night. Not everyone is as fast as you are. Any faster, and you’d catch up to yesterday and go at it all over again.”
She chuckled, entering the somber building. As always, Elliot’s enthusiasm visibly waned as he walked through the glass doors.
The reception desk was empty, and the morgue was eerily silent. The light was on in the autopsy room, and Kay pushed the stainless-steel door and walked right through. Doc Whitmore looked up from a printout he was reading, holding it too close to his eyes, a sure indication the doctor needed to see the optometrist soon.
“Good morning, Doc.” She walked over and gave the man a quick hug. Something from Mrs. Flannagan’s intense emotion still tugged at her heart, or maybe the fear of what she was about to discover.
“What brings you here so early on a Sunday?” Doc Whitmore asked. “Not that I don’t appreciate the company, because it gets lonely in here talking to myself.”
“I need a favor, off the record,” she asked, just as Elliot was coming into the autopsy room, probably relieved to see both exam tables were empty.
“Sure, anything I can help with, I’d be happy to.” Doc Whitmore looked at her above the rim of his glasses.
“My DNA is in your database, for crime scene exclusions and such.”
“That’s correct.”
“Well, I’d like you to run it through CODIS, and look for familial matches.”
“Oh.” The doctor stood and stared at her through the lenses this time. “What am I looking for?” He tilted his head a little and scratched his hair right above the left ear. “I believe I already know, but I can’t assume. Better said, I shouldn’t.”
“My father. Maybe I can find out who he really was,” she scoffed bitterly. “He wasn’t Gavin Sharp, that’s for damn sure.”
“All right,” he said, and started typing into his CODIS computer. Moments later, the search was running. “I don’t believe it will take that long. You might remember from your days in the FBI, that these databases search by county, then by state. Since he was local, I’d estimate a couple of hours, not more.”
“Thank you, Doc, I appreciate it. And you’ll keep this on the down low?”
“I see no reason why not.”
She placed a quick kiss on his cheek and turned to leave, but he said, “Not so fast, young lady. I got some more results for you two.”
Kay’s mood shifted, leaving the darkness of her troubled past behind. Elliot drew closer, his interest piqued. Doc Whitmore grabbed the remote and clicked it. The TV came to life, displaying a photo of Jenna’s face. A laceration ran across her cheek, from her right temple to almost the tip of her nose.
The medical examiner pointed at the laceration with the tip of his finger. “The trace substance in the laceration on Jenna’s face, that was pink nail polish with glitter. It was the glitter that caught my attention, but then the mass spectrograph found traces of resin, ethyl acetate, benzophenone, and mica. That last one was the glitter. The color was pink, CL two forty-three, that matched the fingernail found at the scene, but didn’t match Jenna’s shade.”
A moment of deep silence engulfed the room. The case wasn’t over yet, and it still wouldn’t be, even if they found and arrested Richard Gaskell. Something else had happened to Jenna while she was up there on Wildfire Ridge.
Kay looked at Elliot, then at Doc Whitmore. “The hair fibers too, and the pink hair clip, those point to a female unsub, and now the nail polish in her wounds. There was a shoeprint too that didn’t match our narrative.”
Doc Whitmore flipped through some images on the screen, until he found the crime scene photo he was looking for. “There, the athletic shoeprint that came after Jenna’s Converse.” The easily recognizable Converse pattern was slightly obscured by another shoeprint, a woman’s size. “It’s a Nike, by the way, a Streetgato, to be exact.”
“It was right there, in front of us, but we wouldn’t see it, because of the rape and the semen,” Kay muttered. Turning to Elliot, she said, “Come on, partner, we have a killer to catch. Any news of those phone records?”
He checked his email quickly. “Nothing yet.”
“Then we have to do this the old-fashioned way. Beat the pavement.”
They were almost at the stainless-steel doors when the CODIS computer chimed. Kay froze in her tracks for a moment, then walked back to the screen.
“We have a match,” Doc Whitmore asked, turning to face her and blocking the screen with his back. His voice was gentle and riddled with concern, like a parent’s. His hand squeezed her shoulder while a frown ridged his forehead. “Are you sure you want to know this?”
Her breath caught. “Yes, Doc, I’m sure. I have to know who he is.”
He stepped aside, allowing her to read the screen. A few feet away, Elliot’s expression was one of steeled support.
She read the information quickly, her eyes rushing across the familiar database fields. “Jonas Solomon Castigan,” she whispered, “that’s who my father really is.”
But the name didn’t tell her the whole story. Reading about him, she realized she’d already known who her father was. A brute. A killer.
