A Darkness Absolute (Casey Duncan #2)(99)

Anders stops short and says, “Shit,” seeing Roger, now lolling to one side, an arm dangling. He hurries over and checks for a pulse.

“I was just telling Jen that she should have gotten you first. In case there was a chance to fix this.”

“Yeah, no,” Anders says. “I can’t fix dead.”

He gets my glower now but meets it with a quarter smile. “Sorry. But no, he’s been gone for a while.”

When Jen opens her mouth in victory, he shoots her a look and says, “Though she still should have gotten me first. That’s proper protocol, which she’d know if she’d read the handbook I gave her. You want to be militia, Jen? It’s about more than standing guard. It’s following procedure. It’s knowing procedure. And it’s getting off your ass to check your charge once in a while. Whatever shit you’ve been spouting about my guys this week? None had their charge die on them.”

I brace for a sarcastic retort. She just stands there and takes it.

“Can you tell us what happened?” I say, as calmly as I can. “Walk us through it.”

“I got in and talked to Paul—I was taking over from him. He said Roger was fine, and he did seem okay, so I sat down and read. I had my watch set to check him every hour, like the schedule says.”

She waits, as if expecting a head pat. I allow a grudging, “Good. And then?”

“On my first check, he wasn’t breathing. I thought I was mistaken. But I checked his pulse and used the stethoscope, and it was clear that he was gone. Succumbed to his injuries. If it was a natural death, I’d notify Will, as the coroner. But I figured, since the guy didn’t fall on that knife twenty times by himself, that makes it homicide. Which goes to the detective.”

“You would still get me first,” Anders says. “Both as head of the militia and the coroner. Okay?”

She nods.

“Did anyone else come in during your shift?”

She shakes her head, and we dismiss her.

*

Roger does indeed appear to have “succumbed to his injuries.” Naturally, we still check him, and the answer appears to be confirmed when we discover bloody froth in his mouth, which suggests his lungs actually were damaged. We open him up. I leave the cutting to Anders, but as a cop, I was known for my iron-clad stomach, which means I’ve attended enough autopsies that I could practically conduct one myself. Which is what I do here, leading Anders through the steps.

One of Roger’s lungs has collapsed and filled with blood. That’s what killed him. A cut pierced a lung. Which means “succumbing to his injuries” is not the cause of death.

It’s murder.

There’s no way we missed that injury. It doesn’t take twelve hours for a punctured lung to collapse. And we didn’t give Roger nearly enough morphine to sleep through a collapsed lung. But according to Jen, he never even gasped, and when I found him, he looked as if he had indeed passed in his sleep. You can’t fake that level of postmortem peace.

When we check the morphine drip, it’s been cranked up high enough that he’d have slept through another stabbing. Which he did, in a way, as someone inserted a thin blade and slid it into his lung.

The big question was when it happened. There’s only one likely possibility.

We get Paul to the clinic without telling him that Roger has died. I start by asking exactly when Jen took over the watch shift and how the handover occurred.

He tries to say she came by as scheduled, no issues, but I keep pressing and—with Dalton standing there, arms crossed—Paul finally cracks.

“She was late,” he says. “I didn’t want to get her in trouble. I promised I wouldn’t.”

“This is important,” I say, and add a lie with, “We already knew she was late, so you aren’t tattling. You’re clarifying. How late was she?”

“Will told her if she wanted a second shift, she had to get some sleep and come back at three. Three thirty came and went, and I started drifting off.”

“Did you?”

“No way. I stepped outside to get some cold air, and I saw her coming.”

“So you waited for her.”

I phrase it as a statement, and he nods. When I ask how far away she was, he seems confused. I’m trying to establish how long no one was in the room with Roger—I just don’t want Paul realizing that and fudging his answer.

“Was she definitely heading here?” I ask. “Or just wandering after a night out?”

“Oh, okay. She was heading here but taking her sweet time. Even when she saw me waiting, she didn’t kick it in gear. I gave her shit when she finally got here. I told her she was nearly forty-five minutes late, and that’s not how militia act, and it was my duty to report it to Will.”

“But instead you promised to cover for her.”

Paul shifts his weight. I keep pressing until he says, “She felt bad, and she wanted to make it up to me, so she, uh, gave me a hand.”

“Gave you a hand with what?” Dalton says.

We both turn to look at him. It takes a second. Then Dalton says, “Fuck.”

“Nope,” I say. “Just a hand.”

Paul reddens. “I didn’t pay for it. I wouldn’t. I know Isabel hates Jen freelancing. I mean, not that I’d pay for it anyway. But since Jen was offering it free, and I was kind of stressed, I didn’t see any harm in accepting. It was quick.”