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MINKA
“It’s Saturday, May twenty-first, two thousand and twenty-two. I’m Chief Medical Examiner, Minka Mayet, reporting as lead M.E.” Coming to a stop beneath the Copeland City Bay bridge, I slip a pair of gloves over my hands, more careful with the second one when my still-healing shoulder smarts and a bolt of pain shoots through my veins.
It’s not that bad, really. Just a little pinch. A moment of unease—which is legions better than how I felt last month, after its entire reconstruction.
“Doctor Aubree Emeri is assisting,” I continue. “Reporting from the George Stanley, Copeland City.”
I make my introductions for the record and take care not to interrupt the crime scene. My shoes are wrapped in protective booties, and when we’re done here, they’ll go to the lab for analysis along with everything else I collect today.
“Doctor Emeri.” I drop my recorder in the pocket of my thin coat, perfect for a windy May day, and look to my second in charge. My best friend. The second most important person in my life.
The first, of course, being my husband. Detective Archer Malone.
“What do you see?” I ask.
“Torture.” Aubree stands at barely five and a half feet tall, with blonde hair, but purple and pink streaks throughout for extra emphasis on her bubbly personality. She studies our vic with sharp blue eyes and a line digging between her brows. “I see missing digits, Chief.”
Leaning closer, she hums under her breath and takes the lead, just like I hoped she would. “Male, Caucasian. Forty to fifty years old. Somewhat overweight, though not morbidly. Approximately two hundred and thirty pounds. Established facial hair. Beard. But well-kept and short.”
She inches closer to the body strapped to an ornate dining chair, his wrists and ankles bound. His head, drooping lifelessly to the side. Worse, his body is bloated, his clothes, soaked and dripping after his tussle with the Copeland River.
He was dumped, chair and all. But unluckily for his killers, a witness saw the drop and called in the police. Which is how Archer and his partner, Charlie Fletcher, became lead detectives in a brand-new homicide case.
“He’s already bloated,” Aubree parrots my thoughts. “I’ll test for time of death in a moment, but my guess is he’d been held for a few days already. Undergone prolonged torture. It’s possible he died prior to today, perhaps yesterday, but was dumped only recently.”
At the sound of shoes crunching along gravel and pebbled rocks, I glance to my right and catch Archer’s approach. His six feet, three inches of muscle and determination to solve a case. Green eyes that see all—including the grimace on my lips when my shoulder aches—and guns strapped to his body. One on his thigh. Another on his hip.
“You need a minute, Doctor Mayet?” Arch’s soft tone is an attempt, I assume, to not have his question register on the recording I’ll have stored away for eternity. But his enquiry has nothing to do with the corpse eight feet in front of me, and everything to do with the arm I hold in a sling.
Doctor’s orders.
“We can take a break,” he mumbles. “Sit down.”
“I’m completely fine, Detective.” I pat his hand ever so discreetly, as our crime scene populates with patrol cars and looky-loos. Even the media, who will do just about anything to break a story first. “Aubree’s got this. I’m only supervising.”
“And yet,” he rumbles, while in front of us, Aubree slices into our victim’s abdomen and inserts a thermometer. “You’re on record as lead. Don’t make me put you down, Chief.”
An amused smile rolls across my lips as I step away and leave him to stew in his worry.
It’s what he does, after all. He long ago set aside concern for himself, and instead, obsesses on my mortality.
It’s both sweet and tiring. Especially these last few weeks since surgery, when I want nothing more than for things to go back to normal.
“I suggest you canvass the area.” I pass by Fletch, and grin when he looks down at me and winks. “Focus more on finding our bad guy, and less on stressing about me.”
“It’s what he does, Delicious.”
I cringe at the nickname Fletch long ago assigned to me. My reaction is not because of the name specifically, but because it’s now on record for anyone who might need to look into this case.
“Doctor Emeri.” Shaking my head, I continue closer to our vic, but I step carefully and make sure I don’t contaminate her scene. “What do you know that I don’t?”
She pulls the thermometer from our John Doe’s body when it beeps, then she checks the screen and calculates in her head that way we all learned how to do way back in medical school. “Iknowtime of death is tricky to gauge,” she teases. “Iknowthat the water changed things for us. However…” she sets the thermometer back in her bag and takes out a pen and paper instead. Writing numbers down in a fast, sloping scrawl I’m forced to tilt my head to decipher, she does a little bit of old school math, wanting nothing more than to impress me on the job. “He was in the water for approximately five minutes, according to our witness. So setting the water temp aside for a moment, and paying attention to rigor—he’s cold, but no longer stiff—I estimate time of death at approximately thirty-six hours ago.”
“Thirty-six?” Archer moves closer and stops onmycrime scene. His shoes,un-bootied. His arm, touching my good shoulder because of his proximity. “They kept him for a day before dumping him?”
“Looks that way, Detective.”
Aubree chews on the inside of her lip and continues her observations, crouching to get a look at the vic’s lower section. She peels his pants back an inch and peeks inside.
