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LINDSAY
Somewhere close by, another man was studying another bullet. But the body that had held this bullet hadn’t survived the impact. Allie Baxter’s cold, dead corpse lay naked on a metal gurney, the flesh around her hairline slipping from her scalp as the medical examiner sawed off the top of her skull.
After dropping his suitcase back at his apartment in Silver Lake, changing into a fresh shirt and making the obligatory pre-autopsy stop for coffee, Lindsay had walked into the deserted LA County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner. For such a long name, the place was depressingly simple – it was the place where dead people kicked around, for a brief period of time, where they were sliced and sawed and sewn back together, before they were either reduced to ash or interred in the ground, or sometimes both.
From the outside, the building itself was quite beautiful – old, rendered with limestones and reds, not quite Spanish architecture, but close. It annoyed him that he couldn’t placethe name for such a building. Lindsay Price liked to think he knew a little of everything.
It was after hours, and he’d had to be buzzed in. A guy dressed in janitorial garb led him through a maze of corridors, down a tiny elevator, and into the partially submerged basement that housed the city’s morgue.
Not all bodies came here, of course. Just the suspicious deaths. There were already too many suspect deaths for the building to accommodate, and large refrigerated shipping containers sat in the parking lot out back, housing the overflow in neatly stacked shelves. Lindsay had spent a lot of time in these walls over his career, and he was always glad to leave.
It was going to be a long night.
The janitor guy pointed to a small room and Lindsay grimaced internally. He’d been in this room only once before – a shady guy, small-time drug-dealing type, had died in his apartment and nobody had noticed the stench of decay for months. It was only when the neighbours started hearing strange noises – what turned out to be swarms of blowflies battering the windows, trapped – that the police knocked his door down and discovered the guy face down at the dinner table, gun still beside his head, as his flesh broke away from his face and started to puddle on the table in front of him, like rancid candle wax. This particular room had been installed with a sophisticated ventilation system meant to draw out gases and odours, but some deaths just insisted on overpowering all your senses, no matter how well the fans extracted the rotten air.
Lindsay had never been able to forget that guy, but he had a feeling this was going to be much worse.
As if on cue, the door opened an inch and a gloved hand came out.
‘Detective,’ a female voice called out. ‘You want to see this?’
Not really, Lindsay thought, steeling himself as he entered the small autopsy suite. He almost gagged when the taste of rotten flesh stuck to his tongue like glue. A smell so bad you could actually taste it in the air. Lindsay mentally calculated how many years until he could retire.
‘Here,’ Kathryn said, handing him a surgical mask. It was lined with scented cotton, unlike regular masks, the eucalyptus smell masking about three per cent of the stench that filled the room like poison. Kathryn was good about things like that. Some other medical examiners were known for their penchant for making cops throw up.
‘Coffee’s outside,’ Lindsay volunteered. ‘Extra hot, extra cream.’
Kathryn nodded, not wasting any time as she began cutting a Y-shaped incision into Allie’s bare chest. The image of the crab came into Lindsay’s mind again, and he wondered if it was still burrowed into her hair.
‘Any idea on cause of death?’ Lindsay asked. Kathryn nodded, lifting her scalpel long enough to gesture to a small vial on the counter behind Lindsay. He turned, grateful to put space between himself and the body, and picked up the small evidence jar carefully.
‘Somebody shot her?’ Lindsay asked.
‘At that angle, she didn’t shoot herself,’ Kathryn replied, resuming her incisions. ‘The decomp’s too advanced for me to tell if she was still alive when she was put in the river, but thebullet was in one of her lungs. So either she drowned in her own blood from being shot, or she drowned shortly afterwards in the water.’
Lindsay nodded. ‘You mind if I call one of my guys in ballistics, get an early report on this bullet?’
Kathryn nodded. ‘Go for it. Miss Baxter and I need some girl time to bond, see if I can’t get any more secrets out of her.’
Kathryn powered up a Stryker saw and brought it down to Allie’s skull. Lindsay’s shock was still fresh. Whenever he’d imagined that skull over the past months, he’d always imagined it lying on a beach somewhere tropical, its owner grinning smugly as she sipped from a cocktail and leaned back on her hand. He’d seen the money in her bank account, watched as withdrawals were made over and over again. He’d genuinely believed that she was alive and sticking the middle finger to every law enforcement agency that existed as she lived on her drug cartel money with her equally corrupt partner.
Lindsay swallowed thickly, adjusting his plastic goggles as bits of skin and skull made a sheen of dust in front of Kathryn’s intensely focused face.
This part was always theworst.
He had to wait, staring at the wall, as Kathryn cut the top of Allie’s skull clean off. How somebody could do that to another human being – even a dead one – was beyond him. Lindsay could reach into a person’s past, into the darkest recesses of their mind, and figure out what they’d done. But he couldn’t reach inside their bodies and figure out how they’d met their maker.
After what seemed like an eternity, the loud whining noise stopped. Kathryn placed the saw on the bench beside her andused two hands to gently wiggle the top of Allie’s skull free. That was the moment Lindsay decided he had about three minutes in him before he needed to puke.
Lindsay made a face under his mask, pocketing the vial that held his precious bullet of evidence. He stripped his gloves off, trying not to look directly at the hideously decomposed brain Kathryn was lifting out of Allie’s open skull.Now. Got to leave, right the fuck now.The worst part of leaving this room was knowing his clothes would still smell like death long after he’d left the building. He should have thought ahead and changed into a less expensive suit.
‘Next time, don’t wear your Armani,’ Kathryn said, apparently reading his mind.
‘I’ll call you from the lab,’ Lindsay replied, swallowing back coffee and stomach acid. ‘Have fun.’
Kathryn snickered.
Lindsay was about to high-tail it when he noticed the two cups of coffee sitting on a filing cabinet in the hallway, probably stone cold by now.
