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“And that is my cue to leave,” she says. “You’ll find me working at the commissary.”
“You found adead womanin the woods?” April’s voice crackles over the line, and I could blame a bad connection, but it’s probably just April. “Less than twelve hours in town, and you’re already out in the forest looking for cases to solve? And you call me a workaholic.”
When I pause, she says, “That was a joke. Mostly. Perhaps sixty percent. The other forty percent of me fears that, if I believed in omens, this would be a very bad one.”
“But we don’t believe in omens, so we’re good.”
“I am also not certain whether to be glad it isn’t the missing architect… or to be more concerned that you’re finding unrelated bodies.” A beat. “Orisit unrelated? Could our missing duo have happened upon this woman and murdered her, lest she report them for some nefarious deed? Or, perhaps, she is the third member of a polyamorous relationship, whom they were meeting for a tryst when things went horribly wrong.”
Part of my sister learning to relax and not work every wakinghour means reading, and she has discovered a passion for mysteries.
“Ready to start?” I say.
“That would depend on you, Casey, as I cannot see the body, much less wield the scalpel, and therefore I am unable to influence the timeline. I should be there.”
I lower my voice. I’m alone with Dalton in the exam room, but I don’t know how far Yolanda went.
“I agree,” I say. “I have suggested that, but at this point, it’s hard to argue for bringing you out to perform a postmortem examination on a woman who isn’t even one of ours.”
“Does that make her less deserving of proper treatment?”
“No, but it does mean she isn’t entitled to that treatment fromus.We’re in the middle of building a town. I only brought her back because I thought she was our missing architect. Now I’m stuck. We considered returning her to where we found her, but we risk leaving trace evidence.”
“You are conducting an examination on a woman despite having just said you can’t investigate her death.”
I put the probe down, clacking it against the stainless-steel tray. “Do you have a better idea, April? If you do, I would love to hear it, particularly if you know a way for me to turn this poor woman’s body over to the Mounties and focus on our own missing people.”
Silence. Dalton is busy prepping and wisely staying out of this.
“Eric and I ran through the options before we called you. Return her to where we found her? That risks having left evidence if she’s discovered. Find another spot where she will be found, so her family can claim her? Again, the risk of leaving evidence. Any way that gets her to the proper authorities puts us—and Haven’s Rock—at risk. The only alternative is to bury her and move on, and that might be the smart solution, but wecan’t do it. Especially if there’s a chance that her murder is connected to our missing people or our build.”
More silence. Then, her voice gentle, “I wasn’t questioning whether you’d thought this through, Casey, though I can see how it might have sounded that way.”
“If you have an ethical objection to assisting in the examination of a woman who might, eventually, need to be quietly buried and never found, then say that, April. I’ll understand.”
“I do not.” Another pause. “I was questioning your assertion that she is not entitled to your investigative efforts, because I would prefer to be there, conducting the procedure. I apologize.”
“I’m being testy. I didn’t expect to be called in to hunt for missing construction crew members, and I certainly didn’t expect to be dealing with a murder victim. The council in Rockton may have made things so much more difficult there, but there are a few things they made easier. Now we need to make the hard choices.”
“Pretty sure we always did,” Dalton says. “If this happened there, they’d have told us to bury her and move on. And we wouldn’t have been able to do it. So we’d be right here, conducting an examination we have no real right to conduct.”
“True enough,” I say. “Let’s get on with it then. We’ll be recording this session, April.” I clear my throat and motion for Dalton to hit the record button. “We have a Caucasian female, approximately forty years of age…”
We don’t need to conduct an autopsy, thankfully. I would have been truly uncomfortable cutting into this poor woman, a procedure that would have made it impossible to ever return her to her loved ones.
April thinks our victim bled out from the leg wound. Without an actual autopsy, she won’t definitively give that as a cause of death, but the evidence strongly supports that conclusion. The body has lost a great deal of blood, with minimal lividity. I know enough anatomy to confirm that the wound on her thigh did sever her femoral artery, which would have led to death if untreated. There is no indication that anyone tried to treat it by stanching blood flow, even with a tourniquet.
Our mystery woman bled out in the forest, where she’d been attacked. Then someone did a quick cleanup job, dressed her, and transported her to that pit.
There’s no easy way of telling which wound was inflicted first, but the one to her abdomen wouldn’t have been fatal. Her killer had paid less attention to it, as well, not bothering to clean it, just zipping up her jacket over it.
Someone stabbed her, twice. Someone cleaned her wound. Someone hid her. Presumably the same person did all three, though I’d never ignore other possibilities—for example that someone found her dead, cleaned her up, and “buried” her in that pit. To reject that possibility would be to reject the reality that not everyone in this forest is mentally sound.
I’d estimate her weight at about one-forty. How far could someone carry her to that pit? We saw no signs that she’d been dragged or hauled, but we’d need to rule out that possibility before concluding she was carried, which means we’d likely be looking at a male killer and a nearby crime scene.
Does that mean I plan to find her killer?
Not unless I stumble across more clues. For now, we can only put her body in a hole in the permafrost, our version of a morgue freezer.
