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He made his way over to the tent, the afternoon sun warming his face. Despite being November, it was like a spring day in Los Angeles, much different to chilly Virginia, where he’d been hours earlier. He didn’t walk too quickly as he approached the plastic tent the medical examiner had erected. Nobody needed to see what he was about to see a moment sooner than was absolutely necessary.
He was already on good terms with Kathryn Donovan, the city’s Chief Medical Examiner, having worked many cases together over the years he’d served with the FBI’s organised crime division in LA. Squatting beside the body, she greeted him with a raise of her eyebrows, the rest of her pale face obscured by the surgical mask tied tightly to her head.
‘I figured you’d be at the morgue by now,’ Lindsay said by way of greeting.
Dr Donovan tilted her head, stripping her gloves and mask off and dropping them into a makeshift trash can as she stood. ‘That for me?’ she asked, practically prising the lukewarm coffee from Lindsay’s hand and pouring a slug into her mouth. Lindsay watched, amused, as she made a face and let the liquid pour back out of her pursed lips and into the cup.
‘That’s terrible,’ she said, handing the now useless brew back to Lindsay as she motioned an assistant for fresh gloves. She snapped hers on before handing a pair to Lindsay. No face mask? he wanted to ask her, but didn’t dare. He tossed his beloved Starbucks cup in the trash and pulled his own set of gloves on, finally looking head-on at the long-lost body of Alexandra Baxter.
It wasn’t a pretty sight.
‘Guess she’s not been sunning herself in the Virgin Islands like we thought,’ Lindsay mused, standing near enough to Kathryn that their shoulders almost touched. It was close quarters in a small tent like this.
‘Nope,’ Kathryn said beside him. ‘And by the way, the only reason we’re not back at the morgue already is because we’ve been waiting on you. So thank you. I now get to spend all day and all night with this delightfully perplexing young woman.’
Lindsay was grateful for the small talk. It distracted from the grisly image at his feet.
Allie had been a pretty girl in life, but death had stripped that beauty away. Her long red hair was missing large chunks, and her face looked as if it had melted like a candle left in the midday sun. Features flattened, merging into one another, lips pulled back over teeth that looked entirely inhuman from the damage the water and elements had done. The clothes that still clung to her body had fused with her skin, and one of her feet was gone. Somebody might’ve removed it prior to her death, but more likely the fish or some sudden impact would have taken it clean off underwater.
Lindsay had seen bodies pulled from the water before. They often looked intact until you touched them and flesh started to come away in your gloved hands. Water and dead bodies didn’t mix well, and nobody ever wanted to attend them. Fishing suicides out of the LA River was something they made rookies do.
But this wasn’t suicide.
This was a cop.
A cop who had mysteriously come into possession of tens of thousands of dollars six months ago, and promptly disappeared.
‘Sorry,’ Lindsay said. ‘You know the drill. Federal case, they make me walk the crime scene before the body’s allowed to leave.’
Kathryn nodded, crouching again beside the body and motioning for Lindsay to do the same. Reluctantly, he squatted on his haunches, feeling the burn in his thighs from his weight training that morning. 6 a.m. now seemed like it had been years ago.
‘You okay there?’ Kathryn said, side-eyeing the way Lindsay’s legs were trembling.
He nodded. ‘Thanks for sticking around, Katie. I owe you hot coffee on the way back to the office.’
‘Huh,’ she said. ‘You owe me dinner at the Roosevelt and a night of mind-blowing sex, at the very least.’
Lindsay stifled the urge to laugh, only for the fact that there was a dead body about five inches from his leather shoe. He’d never slept with Kathryn. She was as dry-witted as they came, as inappropriate as a foulmouthed teenage girl looking to get a reaction out of her parents. She possessed no filter. The thing about her job, though, was that she didn’t need one. It wasn’t as if the dead could take offence, much less speak back.
Luckily, she was damned good at her job. Lindsay had long since suspected that her sarcastic, inappropriate comments were a way of trying to lighten the heavy film of death that covered her existence.
Kathryn launched into a long spiel of clinical observations and hypotheses about the body. She lifted one of Allie’s arms – gently, so it didn’t detach from her bloated corpse – and showed Lindsay just how advanced decomposition was.
Allie had been submerged, or floating along currents, for what looked like several months. It was a miracle she’d remained intact, what with the water and the weather, not to mention the sea creatures that were all looking for a free meal. As if on cue, a tiny crab crawled out of a neat hole in Allie’s chest and darted along her collarbone before disappearing underneath her ragged red hair.
Lindsay’s stomach turned at the thought the crab had just been eating whatever was left inside her.
After they’d examined the body, Kathryn and Lindsay walked the scene in a grid, starting on the shore and ending up barefoot and wading out into the shallows.
There was nothing, of course. Nothing to signal what had happened, or where. Allie could have been dumped in the water hundreds of miles away, or a few hundred feet. If this had been Florida, Lindsay’s last port of call, gators would have found Allie long before any human did. The sneaky fuckers found bodies and stashed them deep underwater, in small caves or under logs, macabre keepsakes until their hunger stirred again and they decided to eat their catch.
But they weren’t in Florida, and Allie Baxter had not been made into swamp feed, and now it was up to Lindsay to figure out how this young fellow officer had found her watery grave.
CHAPTER FOUR
MARIANA
‘Guillermo,’ I said.
