Girls Like Us(34)

“Please stop calling me that.”

“Calling you what?”

“Kid. I’m fucking twenty-eight years old.”

Lee raises his hands. “Sorry,” he says quietly. “Nell. Got it.”

He looks wounded, and I feel embarrassed to have snapped. He opens the door to the exam room and ushers me inside. “Thanks,” I mutter as I pass him. He nods, silent.

Over the course of my career at the Bureau, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to pathologists and coroners and crime lab techs. Rarely, though, am I present for autopsies. By the time my unit has been called in, the bodies are cold. Even when new bodies hit the ground during the course of the investigation, we typically hang back from the autopsies themselves, giving the uniforms and techs the space they need to do their jobs. Only after the autopsy do we rush in and get in everybody’s way.

Lee has probably been to more autopsies than I have. Someone from the crime scene always has to go, just to confirm that the body on the table is, in fact, the correct one. This is the kind of scut work that typically gets handed off to rookies and suckers, while the more senior detectives just wait for the postmortem report. Given that Lee is a bit of both, I imagine he’s done more than his fair share.

No matter how many autopsies you’ve witnessed, it’s hard to numb yourself to them. This one in particular has me on edge. Maybe because the girl looks so much like my mother. Or maybe because I know my father was involved with the case, maybe more intimately than anyone but me suspects. Whatever it is, every nerve in my body crackles like a live wire. As we enter the room, nausea washes over me. I bury my nose in the neck of my sweater, trying to stifle my gag reflex.

The smell hits you first. The distinct mix of death and cleaning agents will cause even the most iron-clad stomach to flip-flop. The rooms are typically windowless and dark, lit only by the unforgiving glare of overhead lighting. There are often stains on the floor and sinks, which you try not to focus on but can’t ignore. The tables themselves are ridged on one side, like the drainage end of a butcher’s block. Along one wall is a stainless-steel workspace for dissection, appropriately termed a grossing station. It has a ventilated hood like an industrial oven. In some of the bigger and more state-of-the-art facilities, like the one Nikki Prentice runs in the city, there are whole gross rooms. I’ve seen some worse facilities in my day, but this one is on the low end of the spectrum. The room is small and poorly ventilated. There isn’t any of the fancy new technology I’ve grown accustomed to: digital imaging and video conferencing, for example. Overhead, a persistent drip from some unseen crack in the wall sounds like a metronome. I wonder when it was this place last got an influx of funding.

The sounds are what you remember once you leave. The whine and sputter of drills as they cut through flesh and bone. Under that, music. A lot of pathologists and techs play music while they work. I know one in New York who listens to salsa; another in Key West who plays Jimmy Buffett’s Son of a Son of a Sailor on repeat. I get that it’s their job. I also get that, for some, the music brings joy into an otherwise grim space or, at least, drowns out the whine of the bone saws. For me, it creates a cognitive dissonance that shakes me to my core. After the Key West job, I’ve never been able to hear “Cheeseburger in Paradise” without wanting to throw up.

Milkowski is playing classical. Moonlight Sonata, which at least feels appropriately somber. It echoes from a small speaker in the corner of the room, barely audible over the slap of our footsteps on the tiled floor. She wears a white lab coat, latex gloves, and a mask over her mouth. When we enter the room, she is standing on a stool so as to get a better look at the vic’s torso. In her hand is a smallish saw.

She looks up and sees us by the door. “Detectives, come on in. I was wondering when you’d get here.”

“Sorry we’re late. Had a stop to make on the way,” Lee says without further explanation.

Milkowski pulls her mask down, revealing a thin, no-nonsense smile. “That’s fine. Just about wrapping up here.”

“Nice work on the ID,” Lee says. He holds up the DNA sample he took from Elena. “We swabbed the sister to confirm.”

“Leave it there.” Milkowski points to a gleaming countertop that looks as though it’s been recently rinsed. She peers at us expectantly until we gather around the table.

“Adriana Marques, eighteen-year-old female. Five feet six inches, looked to be about one hundred twenty pounds or so. Her jaw was broken two years ago, hence the metal plate. She’s young but has not had an easy life.” She points to her skull. “She has a predominantly healed hairline fracture here. Her right pointer finger was broken in two places and did not heal properly. Both are old injuries, unrelated to cause of death.”

“And cause of death?”

“One shot, close range, to the head. It’s a clean shot, well placed. She died instantly.”

“Sounds professional.”

“Whoever killed her is experienced with firearms. A less confident shooter would aim for the body. I would hypothesize, too, that the vic knew her assailant, or at least trusted that person enough to allow them to approach her. You don’t shoot someone in the head unless you are in close enough range to do so effectively.”

“Could have been a john,” I say. “Someone she’d seen before or saw regularly. Someone she trusted.” What I don’t say is this: it could’ve been my father.