Long Shadows (Amos Decker, #7)(23)

And then…

He opened his eyes, rose, and walked over to the window. The ocean view was inspiring: vast, sprawling, infinite, smooth, yet somehow chaotic, clunky, unpredictable to him. After he’d lost his wife and child, Decker had only wanted to be left alone. Part of him still felt that way. Yet part of him was terrified of having no one left, either. Sometimes it was just him…and his mind.

My ever-changing mind. Just like the rest of my life. Always fluid, never stable. And according to the good folks at the Cognitive Institute, the ride is going to get a lot bumpier.

Later, his phone buzzed. He didn’t recognize the number and it wasn’t in his contacts because no name came up.

“Decker,” he said.

“Agent Decker, this is Helen Jacobs. I’m the medical examiner?”

“I remember you, Ms. Jacobs. So, Draymont’s gun?”

“Had not been fired. But there’s something else.”

“What?”

“He was killed by two gunshot wounds to the heart, I confirmed that.”

“But?” prompted Decker.

“But I also found what looks to be a wad of cash crammed down his throat.”





Chapter 15



DECKER ROUSED WHITE FROM HER room and they drove over to the medical examiner’s office, a one-story, low-slung concrete building that was so ugly it seemed unjust to bring someone’s remains here to be legally cut up.

Helen Jacobs met them at the front door. She had on a long white lab coat, and her hair was done up in a bun and covered with a blue surgical cap.

White said, “Did you contact Agent Andrews as well?”

“Yes. But he didn’t answer, so I left a message.”

“Let’s go,” said Decker impatiently.

Jacobs led them down a long corridor with scuffed white walls, cheap laminate flooring, and feeble fluorescent light. She unlocked one door with her security card and ushered them in.

This room was outfitted with stainless steel tables, sinks, and lots of drains, Stryker saws, scalpels and other medical instruments, a tool that looked like a crowbar, organ scales, iPads resting on rolling tables, and mikes dangling from the ceiling so the medical examiners could record in real time their thoughts and findings.

Against one wall were the rollout beds behind closed cabinet doors: the wall of death, as Decker always saw it.

The electric blue had hit him as soon as Jacobs had unlocked the door. He noticed White noticing him, but the look he gave the woman caused her to glance sharply away.

On one dissecting table was Alan Draymont. He’d already been cut up, though the incision that had sliced a Y-shape across the front of his torso had not yet been sewn back up. Exposed were the man’s innards. Decker saw that his organs had already been removed and then repacked inside the body cavity in viscera bags.

His scalp had been cut away and draped over his face; the skull had been cut open, and the brain removed.

Jacobs used a gloved hand to pull the skin back, reconstituting the man’s face.

She used forceps to open the mouth wide and then directed a light inside the opening.

“You can see it now. I didn’t want to remove it until you got here.”

The two agents, White on tiptoes, bent over for a look.

“You sure it was done postmortem?” he said.

“Pretty sure, yes.”

He glanced at her. “Pretty sure?”

“The gunshots to the chest clearly killed him. The loss of blood shows that his heart was beating normally when that happened. There were no signs on the body of restraint, defensive wounds, or a struggle, though.”

Decker’s mind leapt ahead of her words. “Meaning a man getting a wad of cash shoved down his throat is going to at least struggle against it.”

“It would be like he was choking to death,” added White. “He’d fight, or they’d have to restrain him first.”

Jacobs said, “And he’d have gag reflex and there would be evidence of that in his larynx and on his tongue and other indicia. None of that is present, only the abrasions one would find by ramming an object like this down someone’s throat after they were dead.”

Decker eyed White and said, “Some sort of message? Punishment or revenge?”

“That would make Draymont the target and not the judge,” said White.

“Who’s to say he wasn’t?”

“And they had to kill the judge because…?”

“She came downstairs, saw what was happening, and was attacked. She fled upstairs, where they finished her off.” He stopped. “But then why the note and blindfold left with the judge?”

“Maybe that was just meant to throw us off,” suggested White.

Decker said to Jacobs, “Get the wad out of his mouth.”

She used another set of forceps to accomplish this and the money slowly emerged from the dead man’s mouth, the last thing that would ever pass through that portal.

She laid it on a clean cloth on a side table.

Decker put on a pair of latex gloves he pulled from a box and gingerly started to unfold the money.

“That doesn’t look like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or Andrew Jackson,” noted White as she peered around him.

The currency had the images of a white-bearded man looking out and a dark-bearded man staring to the left.