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A few days ago, I suspect these breasts would have been marked with bright blue veins, eagerly awaiting their chance to provide nourishment. But now, the veins are flat, the life pumping inside them, gone.
“Where the hell is the baby?” The words escape me on a growl. “Why’d he panic and dump her instead of doing the right thing? Now he can never register the birth without throwing up flags.”
“We have to cut her open.” Aubree stands by a tray of instruments. Scalpels. Shears. Forceps. “We have to do it, Doctor Mayet.”
“I know.”
I was on a date tonight. Flowers at my door. A cute dress and sexy heels. A mini crisis at the sound of his knock because I was worried about lovingtoomuch.
But as is always the case, a dead body on my table brings things back into perspective.
“Shit. Alright.” I look toward the recorder already taking down everything we say. “Doctor Minka Mayet, Chief Medical Examiner, and lead M.E. on the Jane Doe case from City Park. Today is February ninth, and it is,” I glance across the room to the clock, “eleven fifty-eight p.m. Assisted by Doctor Aubree Emeri. Let’s start with the Y and proceed from there.”
“Do you want me to cut, Doctor?” Aubree stands on Jane’s right while I come up on the left. “Or will you?”
“I’ll start, but we’ll get it done together.”
Accepting the scalpel when she passes it, I pause and catch her eyes. “Are you fresh enough to work, Doctor Emeri? You were on all day.”
“As were you,” she counters easily. “I’m good to go if you are. Alternatively, we can put her away for a few hours and come back to it after a nap.”
“No nap.”
Wearing fresh gloves and a plastic apron to protect my clothes, I lean over Jane’s chest and make the first incision. Starting on her left side, I make a small cut just below her collarbone, then I work it toward the center of her chest to open her right up.
“Heart is where I’d like to look first. We’ll run the whole checklist and send samples to the lab in case we’ve missed poison, but intuition has me wondering if something went wrong with her heart.”
“I sent blood and hair to Doctor Raquel for a tox screen.” Aubree takes a second scalpel and makes an incision on the right side to meet up with mine. “Well, I sent it to her department. Raquel herself isn’t on shift till eight tomorrow morning.”
“Doesn’t matter who gets it.” When Aubree finishes the Y and pulls her hands away, I grab the separators from our tray and slip them into the cavity we’ve made. “But I’m not sure we’ll find anything.Mayyyybesome kind of sleeping pill or the equivalent. Something to take the edge off her labor pains. And that’s if she was lucky.”
“None of this makes me think of luck.” Aubree swaps her scalpel for shears. “Probably should open up her stomach, too. Extract the placenta. Chances are, we’ll find a lot of answers there.”
“We’ll find DNA,” I allow. “But having it is useless unless we have someone to compare it with. It’ll be up to the detectives to identify Jane before we can do much more.”
“Why does this feel so much more horrible than usual?” Aubree pulls down a pair of protective glasses and takes the bonesaw from our table of torture instruments. “We have bodies in here every single day, so why does this one make me so sad?”
“Because she’s our age,” I murmur in response. “Because she’s young and beautiful and looks so put-together. Because she wasthisclose to becoming a mom, but instead of celebrating a new baby, she was dumped into a prickly bush by some asshole and left to rot.”
I slide my gloved hand into her chest. “She was discarded, and that’s shit.”
ARCHER
“Nothing in missing persons.” I stalk across the war room Fletch and I have created and drop a pile of files on the table. “We’ve run them for ages twenty through thirty-five. Fit, young woman. Approximately five-seven. A hundred and sixty pounds. Brown hair. Green eyes.”
I look across at Fletch and exhale. “I’ve widened the search and called some friends from out of state, but we’ve got no hits so far.” Arms crossed, I walk toward the wall we’ve begun tacking images to. The park. Jane’s face. Her hands. Her stomach.
“Killer left nothing behind. No footprints in the garden. No tire tracks on the grass. He didn’t skid away from the scene, so there’s no rubber on the road. Still waiting on warrants to yank security footage surrounding the park, but fuck, Fletch.” I throw my hands up. “She’s young. She’s beautiful. She’spregnant. How has no one reported her missing?”
“She’d have regular appointments this close to birth.” He writesOB GYNon a post-it and slaps it onto the wall. “Let’s see if we can find her that way. This is a woman who had a calendarfilledwith shit; hair appointments, nails. Muscle tone implies a regular routine at the gym. Her skin showed an all-over tan; says she gets that done artificially. Shehasto be missed by someone.”
Then he stops and glances up. “Unless she never got medical advice about the baby.”
“But she looks kinda upper-class, right? Like you said; nails, hair, thick lips, youthful skin. She’s not like the women over by the bay who live a hard life. Jane Doe enjoys a comfortable environment. Maybe she’s not rich, but she’s not going hungry either. If we put her face on the news, I bet we’ll have her name within the hour. Someone will recognize her.”
“So maybe the only person who knows she’s missing is her baby-daddy.” Turning back to the table, Fletch grabs a pen andclick, click, clicksthe end. “It’s possible he’s our killer, so naturally, he’s not gonna report her missing.”
“Doctors say she’s been dead about six hours. But how long was she laboring before that? How long has she been outta contact with everyone but her killer? Six hours would feel like a lifetime for me if Minka was missing. For you, if Mia couldn’t be found. But for most everyone else, they could go days, maybe even weeks between check-ins. A missed phone call is no big deal. A couple of unread texts. Folks get busy, so maybe Jane’s parents have reached out, but there’s no reason to panic yet. Most wouldn’t jump straight to reporting her missing. They’ll text a few more times and wait for the call back.”
