Devil's Advocate (The X-Files: Origins #2)(38)

The first twenty photos had been taken at the crime scene. A station wagon had hit a tree at very high speed, and the whole front was wrapped around the heavy oak. There was so much damage that it was hard to even tell the make or model of the car. All the tires and windows had been blown apart and the driver had been thrown from the car. A body lay battered on the rocky ground, having rolled away from the car down a slope. Other photos showed Connie on a plastic sheet in the harsh glow of floodlights. The pictures had been taken to document the scene and were clearly not intended to be lurid or exploitive, but they hit Dana like a series of punches. Her lungs clutched, and breath burned to dust in her chest.

She made no comment because speech was simply not possible.

Then Dana turned to the second set of photos. The lighting was different, and the victim lay on a stainless-steel morgue table. There were instruments and drains and machines. The girl’s clothes had been cut away and were heaped at the foot of the table. She lay naked and vulnerable, robbed of every dignity, exposed under the glow of cruel fluorescent lights.

The next forty photos were the step-by-appalling-step of the autopsy.

Dana could feel greasy sweat run down inside her clothes, and the room seemed abnormally bright. How in God’s name had she thought she was ready for this? When she turned to Ethan, she expected him to look as stoic as he said he’d be, but there were tears glittering in the corners of his eyes.

They did not speak to each other. Not one word. Not until they had finished that file and gone on to the next. A Japanese boy, Jeffrey Watanabe, eighteen, and a black girl, Jennifer Hoffer. Along with a white girl, Connie Lucas that made three from Oak Valley.

The next two folders were of the FSK students, Maisie Bell and Chuck Riley, both also white.

Dana went through them and then returned to the photos of Maisie. It was her. It was definitely the girl from her visions. There was a school photo of Maisie, as there was with all the others, but that was her alive. She looked like a different person dead. The body looked … wrong. Not a person at all. Empty. Abandoned.

A wave of sadness hit Dana and she wanted to cry, but she fought the tears back. Even so, the pain was there. Having seen Maisie in the locker room had made the girl totally real to Dana. It was as if she had known her and lost an actual friend.

Maybe that was how it was supposed to feel, she thought. After all, how different was Maisie from herself? Or from Melissa?

She looked at Ethan. “Where’s the file for Todd Harris?”

“Uncle Frank didn’t bring it home yet,” said Ethan. “Maybe it’s too new. I heard him talking about it on the phone, though. I went into the kitchen and listened on the extension.”

“Sneaky,” she said with approval.

Ethan shrugged. “I hate doing that to Uncle Frank, but…” He let the rest hang.

“What did you hear?” asked Dana.

“Todd wasn’t crucified, that’s for sure. I don’t know most of the details but I’m sure Todd’s neck was broken. That’s pretty much all I heard.”

Dana nodded and then something occurred to her. She scanned down a page marked Inventory, looking to see what Maisie had with her when she died, and realized that what she was looking for was the eclipse pendant she had seen during her strange encounter with Maisie. It wasn’t there, though there was a notation: Silver chain, 20 inches. Broken three inches below clasp.

Dana wondered what had happened to the pendant itself. Had they missed it among all the wreckage? No way to know, and she did not think it was a practical idea to go to the crash site and try to be Sherlock Holmes. So she kept digging through the file. There were inventory pages for each of the dead teenagers, and she scanned them, just on the off chance that they might have had similar pendants, but there was nothing like that. So much for a budding theory. There was very little jewelry of any kind, though, even among the girls.

On another page, she found a list of noted Scars, Marks, Tattoos. Nothing there that connected the victims, although there was a notation that the two boys, Jeffrey and Chuck, had indications of tattoos that were materially obscured by trauma. She fished for the autopsy photos of the two boys and peered at them closely, grunted, and showed them to Ethan.

“Look at this.”

“That’s gross,” he said.

“No, it’s just that each of them had tattoos on their upper arms at about the same place. Same size, too. And look there and there? You can see some orange and black.”

“So?”

“So, maybe they had tattoos of an eclipse.”

“Again … so?”

“Maisie was wearing an eclipse pendant when I saw her. They only found a silver chain.”

Ethan began to dismiss it, then stopped and chewed his lip for a moment. “Hmm … since the sheriff’s department only found the chain and not the pendant, and both tattoos were messed up, you think someone’s trying to hide a connection?”

“Maybe,” she said.

He studied her. “You’d make a good cop.”

“We would.”

They searched for more, but there was nothing else that could even remotely connect with an eclipse. So they moved on. There was a page attached to each victim’s report that summarized their blood analysis. She read them over, then showed the pages to Ethan. “See this? It shows that none of the teens had been drinking.”