Little Girl Gone (An Afton Tangler Thriller #1)(39)

“You shouldn’t make promises like that,” Max said. He reached over and turned on the radio. Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” blared out. He curled his lip unhappily and clicked it off as they slewed wildly around a corner.

“We have to give Susan some hope,” Afton said. She held a cup of coffee in her hand and was alternately trying to warm her hands, sip from it, and avoid a catastrophic spill.

“Why?” Max asked. He switched lanes and ended up directly in front of an enormous sixty-foot-long articulated bus. When the driver blasted his horn, Max simply ignored him.

“Because we have hope. We still believe that baby can be found.”

“Maybe,” Max said. They were on their way to meet with the ME about yesterday’s Cannon Falls baby. Neither of them was looking forward to it. In fact, Afton was dreading it.

“Do you think this is really necessary?” she asked. “Wasn’t this Cannon Falls baby case already kicked over to the FBI?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Max said. He had a big plastic Super America travel mug that he was sipping from. Afton figured the coffee had to be stone cold. “But you never know what we might find.”

“You think the two cases are connected?”

“Not really.”

“But you have a hunch.”

“Not exactly,” Max said.

“A twinkle?”

“Whatever.” Max aimed the nose of his car at the opening of an unmarked parking ramp. “Here we are.” They bumped into the darkness and sped past a row of dark blue state cars, then circled up two floors and found a spot.

“I was wondering,” Afton said, “if I could sit in on your session with Richard Darden this afternoon?”

Max kicked open the driver’s side door and frigid air swept in. “Not possible,” he said. When he saw the look of disappointment on Afton’s face, he added, “But I could probably arrange for you to watch the interview from behind a one-way mirror.”


*

CROWDED into an anteroom just outside the morgue, Afton and Max grunted as they struggled with disposable gowns, gloves, and masks, trying to pull them over their street clothes. The morgue attendant, a tiny Hispanic man who seemed to speak in a perpetual hoarse whisper, supervised their transformation.

“Booties,” the attendant rasped. He pointed at Afton’s uncovered loafers and handed her two blue puffs of crinkly paper.

It was, of course, a wise precaution until the medical examiner got a firm handle on the cause of death. Or in case the maniac who’d murdered this poor child had transmitted any sort of communicable disease.

As the two of them shuffled awkwardly into the morgue, Afton gave an involuntary shudder. Cold, clinical surroundings never failed to depress her. And this place had it all—stark metal tables and cabinets, the inevitable sound of running water, unholy plumbing that kinked down into floor grates.

“Good morning, I’m Marie Sansevere.” The medical examiner gave a perfunctory smile as she introduced herself.

Afton noted that Dr. Sansevere had a body that was beyond thin, almost bordering on anorexic. Her green scrubs hung loosely on her spare form and her pale, translucent skin looked as though she’d never seen the sun’s rays, an indulgence Afton still allowed herself. Dr. Sansevere’s short, cropped, Scandinavian white-blond hair was the type seldom seen outside Minnesota or Wisconsin. Afton decided the good doctor was as pale and ethereal as the bodies she worked on.

Once they’d gathered around the autopsy table, Dr. Sansevere said, “You know we only have time for a cursory look this morning?”

“Understood,” Max said.

The baby lay on a waist-high aluminum autopsy table that sloped gently from top to bottom and featured drainage holes much like a kitchen colander.

“This is awful,” Afton whispered to Max. He nodded back.

Dr. Sansevere began with a visual inspection of the body, dictating her observations into an overhead microphone. “Rigor mortis is well developed and livor mortis is dorsally distributed,” she said in a monotone.

Afton and Max followed Dr. Sansevere around the table like a pair of ducklings as she took various swabs and blood samples. Then she put on a pair of magnifying glasses and examined the infant carefully.

“See anything?” Max asked. “Hairs or fibers?”

“A couple,” Dr. Sansevere said. She touched a tweezers to the baby’s right hip and extricated a strand of something. Then she turned off all the lights in the autopsy suite and switched on a black light. She focused the light about six inches from the body and moved it slowly across, then up and down. Where a few areas glowed a ghostly phosphorescent white, she stopped and took smears from those areas.

“What causes that weird glow?” Afton asked.

“Not sure,” Dr. Sansevere said. “Until we run tests.”

“Do you know what the cause of death was?” Afton asked.

“Not until I open her up,” Dr. Sansevere said.

Max grimaced. No way did he have the stomach to stick around for that.

“She looks underweight,” Afton said.

“She is,” Dr. Sansevere said. “This child was malnourished.” She shook her head, took a step back, and pulled off her mask. “A few months ago, I autopsied two children. The mother and the boyfriend, both crack users, had kept them locked in a closet for almost a year. The older one, the five-year-old girl, should have weighed at least sixteen kilos, but she was just under twelve. Died of starvation and pneumonia.” She busied herself with her instruments. “Absolutely inhuman,” she muttered.