The Games (Private #11)(40)

But now he was intrigued. If they weren’t in search of him, what were they doing in the Hospital Geral? Where were they going?

Against his better judgment, Dr. Castro exited the restroom and strolled down the hall after them, keeping a few nurses and patients between them and him. They took a left and then a right, then boarded an elevator. They were going down, he saw. He ran to the stairs.

He opened the stairwell door in the basement, saw them already out of the elevator and moving away from him. There were fewer people down on the lower level of the hospital. For a second, Castro hesitated. Then he saw where they were going.

Pathology.

The doctor put it all together in an instant. Luna Santos’s body had to be in pathology, awaiting autopsy. He felt a pang of dread but took a breath and calmed himself. He’d made sure the burn was intense. They weren’t going to get much off her except carbonized flesh and singed bone.

Castro stood there several more moments, wishing there was a way he could go to the autopsy and listen to the idiots trying to figure out how and why Luna Santos had died. He supposed he could wander through and…

He shook off this foolishness. These people weren’t at the Hospital Geral for him, and they weren’t going to get anything from Luna’s husk. It was time to go, time to attend to far more important business.

As he began to climb back up the stairs, Dr. Castro figured he had less than three days left to live, and he didn’t want to waste a single, precious moment.





Chapter 45

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

8:00 a.m.

Eighty-Three Hours Before the Olympic Games Open



DR. EMILIO CARDOSO adjusted his belly beneath his scrubs, checked the drawstring that held the bottoms up, and then pressed a scalpel to the charred remains of Luna Santos just above her right ear. He cut through scorched flesh to the brittle bone and sliced over the top of her head to her opposite ear. Pieces of skin and muscle fell away like dead coals and ash.

The general, Acosta, and I watched from the other side of a window in an observation room; an intercom allowed us to communicate with Cardoso. The victim’s husband had asked to be at the autopsy, but the second they’d pulled back the sheets on her body he’d almost fainted. Tavia had taken him to get something to drink.

“She was subjected to tremendous heat,” said Sci, who was assisting the medical examiner at the request of General da Silva.

Cardoso wasn’t happy about Kloppenberg being in his autopsy room, but he nodded. “The skull will be brittle.”

“We’ll tease what’s left off the bone,” Sci said.

Using forceps and scalpels, he and the medical examiner were able to peel back what was left of her scalp to reveal a small hole in the left posterior portion of her skull and a larger exit hole above the right eye socket.

“She was shot from five, maybe six feet away,” Cardoso said.

Sci nodded. “Shooter had to be aiming diagonally at her, and almost level.”

Cardoso said, “Thirty-eight caliber. There’s our cause of death.”

“So why burn her?” I asked.

The pathologist and my forensics chief looked over at me, puzzled. So were General da Silva and Lieutenant Acosta.

“I don’t understand, Jack,” Sci said.

“She’s shot through the back of the head, so why burn her in Santos’s front yard? I mean, the killer wanted the body to be there for a reason. And he burned the body for a reason as well.”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Cardoso said. “My job is to examine, not speculate.”

“But I’m free to speculate,” I said. “Luna’s body was not hidden. It was brought to her home, put there to shock and traumatize Antonio, which says to me her murder was probably personal and designed to exact some kind of revenge.”

“And burning her body?” the lieutenant said. “Same thing?”

“Could be,” I said. “But setting a fire after a murder? That’s what killers do when they’re trying to destroy evidence.”

“Evidence in the car she was in?” General da Silva asked.

“Or on her body,” I said. “And it wasn’t to prevent us from knowing she was shot to death before she was burned, unless the killer actually thought Luna was going to be cremated by the blaze.”

Dr. Cardoso did not seem interested, but Sci got what I was driving at and said, “We’re looking for something on or in her body.”

I nodded. “Unless the fire took it.”

Kloppenberg and Cardoso went back to their work. They cut open Luna’s chest and found her organs cooked by the flames. The medical examiner focused on the weight and size of her heart, liver, and lungs.

Sci started dissecting them on another table. For the next fifteen minutes, fatigue-induced negativity crept in and had me starting to believe we wouldn’t find anything of value.

Then Kloppenberg, who was working on the heart, stiffened. He stepped over to the liver and made a cut and looked at it under a magnifying glass. Then he turned to me and nodded.

“Dr. Cardoso,” Sci said. “Could you take a look at this?”

The medical examiner set his instruments down and crossed the room.

Sci gestured into the heart. “Notice anything missing?”

Cardoso frowned, looked down through the magnifying glass for a few beats before he got it. “There’s no congealed or coagulated blood.”