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He walked over and planted a kiss on the top of her head. The smell of him and the warmth of his body made her dizzy. In a voice still thick with sleep, he asked, “Homicide?”
She stood up and faced him, smoothing his thick, dark locks down on his head. “We don’t know yet,” she said. She gave him a quick recap of the evening. As she spoke, his hazel eyes grew more alert. She could see him making calculations in his head.
He said, “She was somewhere between seven in the morning and when she died. If she wasn’t in rigor yet, that means she died a couple of hours before her body was found.”
“Right,” said Josie. “Either someone took her, killed her, brought her back and dumped her body on the creek bank, or she went with someone, they dropped her back off at the creek bank and she fell to her death.”
“From what you’ve told me about the scene—the purse standing straight up, the missing glove—she didn’t fall.”
“That’s what I think, but we won’t know until Dr. Feist does the autopsy.”
Noah brushed her cheek with his fingers and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Josie wanted very much to lay aside her sadness over Sharon Eddy for a while by taking refuge in her husband’s body. She leaned into him, resting her head under his chin. Her lips touched the hollow of his throat. He wrapped his arms around her. She whispered, “I’m on the morning shift tomorrow and you’re not in until the afternoon.”
“Yes,” he breathed into her hair. His hands crept down her back, every touch setting her skin tingling.
“Which means we really won’t be alone together until this time tomorrow night,” Josie added.
His mouth found hers, kissing her slowly and deeply. When he was finished, he said into her ear, “Let’s go upstairs and make the most of the time we’ve got right now.”
A few hours later, they were showered, dressed, and downstairs, ready to join Trinity and Drake for breakfast. Afterward, Josie reported to work. Mettner had made no progress with the Sharon Eddy case. He hadn’t gotten into Sharon’s phone yet. It was password-protected so they needed to use the GrayKey to access its contents. Hummel had started the process, but it was still pulling information from the phone. The geo-fence results had come in. At six forty-three in the morning Sharon Eddy’s phone put her at the end of the Hempstead Trail, about sixty feet before the residential street started. Then nothing. Either she or someone else had turned her phone off. The only smart device that had come close to Sharon Eddy’s phone in the time frames they’d requested—early morning and within a three-hour range of when her body was found—was Jeanne Wack’s cell phone. Wack had found Sharon and immediately called 911. The license plate readers hadn’t hit on any vehicles that seemed to warrant further investigation. By late Saturday morning, Josie was urging Mettner to go home and get some sleep when Dr. Feist called her cell phone. Her voice sounded high and strange.
“Josie. Could you come to the morgue, please?”
Although Josie considered them more than just colleagues or acquaintances, Dr. Feist rarely called her anything but Detective or Detective Quinn. “Doc, what’s going on?”
From across the desks, Mettner stared at her, his brow furrowed.
There was a beat of silence. Then, “I’m not in trouble, if that’s what you’re worried about. I just—please come to the morgue.”
Josie was already on her feet. “We’ll be there in ten.”
“No,” Dr. Feist blurted. She took in a shuddering breath. “I mean, when you say ‘we,’ you mean—”
“Mettner and me.”
“No, please. Gretchen. Can you bring Gretchen instead?”
Gretchen wasn’t due in until later that afternoon, but Josie was sure she could get her to meet them at the morgue. “Yes,” Josie said. “I’ll call her. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
SIX
Denton’s city morgue was located in the windowless basement of Denton Memorial Hospital near the end of a long hall of abandoned patient rooms that now held only dust and old equipment. The hall itself was a putrid color combination of yellowed floor tiles and grimy gray walls. As they approached the suite of rooms that served as Dr. Feist’s domain, the smell of decomposition and death mixed with stringent chemicals enveloped them. Josie and Gretchen had become inured to it over the years.
“What are we walking into here?” Gretchen asked as they neared the autopsy room.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Josie mumbled.
In the center of the large exam room were two stainless-steel autopsy tables. On one of them rested Sharon Eddy’s body, a sheet drawn up to her chin. Next to her, Dr. Feist paced, her movements short and jerky. One of her arms hugged her middle while the other fisted her skullcap, holding it beneath her chin. Her silver-blonde hair had come loose from its bun, swishing at her shoulders as she moved.
Gretchen said, “Doc?”
She stopped walking. “Thank you for coming.”
Josie had rarely seen Anya Feist anything but calm and collected. There had been one case early on in Josie’s tenure as a detective that had brought the entire town to its knees. The remains of nearly a hundred bodies had been recovered after Josie cracked it. They’d had outside help from the FBI, but still, Dr. Feist had been tasked with a great deal of work. It was the most tragic and horrific case Josie had ever seen, and in the months afterward, Anya had admitted to Josie just how badly the case had gotten to her. The stress had been so bad that she had lost weight, becoming gaunt and sickly. That was the worst Josie had ever seen her.
Until today.
Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Worry lines creased her face, which was pale to the point of being nearly translucent. A large blue vein in her right temple pulsed rapidly. Her lower lip trembled.
