Hope's Peak (Harper and Lane #1)(28)

“The press is after our asses. And they’ll get them, too, if we can’t deliver a culprit,” Morelli says.

Harper watches Mike peel back the girl’s skin to explore her innards. A familiar gaminess rises from the opened cadaver; the smell of dead, lifeless meat exposed to the air is not something you get used to. But it is something you can grow to stomach, ignoring it so you don’t vomit.

She looks at the captain—he’s aged in a matter of days. His eyelids hang loose, face drawn in, body sagging with exhaustion. Some of it, she knows, due in no small part to the stress of those files. Of putting his trust in her hands and hoping she does the right thing with what she finds. “Have you slept, sir?”

He smiles. It’s weak and there’s nothing in it, a truly empty gesture. “Not much.”

Mike examines the girl’s cold heart and Harper thinks: I won’t tonight.

“Can I have a word in private?” she asks, opening the door to the corridor outside. Morelli follows her out. “Sorry, I didn’t want Mike and Kara to hear.”

“Spit it out, Detective.”

“It’s the files, sir. There’s no way of protecting the men who have covered this up all these years. Stu and myself will be presenting our findings and recommending prosecution,” Harper tells him. “This could reflect badly on you, too. I thought you should know that.”

Morelli runs a hand over his face. “When bodies started showing up again, I brought you into the fold, did I not?”

“Yes sir. But if you’d presented your evidence earlier, the deaths of those two young women might’ve been avoided.”

Morelli rubs at the tired corners of his eyes. “What do you want me to say, Detective? You think I don’t know all that?”

“Sir . . .”

Morelli shakes his head. “Another time. Right now, we have a killer to apprehend. After, when the dust has settled, we can start pointing fingers at the men who have protected this town for three decades, okay? It’s easy playing the righteous card when your hands are nice and clean. Well, mine were dirty before I had a chance to start, so spare me your condemnation,” he says, storming off.



The captain’s car peels out of the parking lot. Albie and Harper let him go on ahead, not wanting to tail him the whole way. Albie starts the engine. “Doesn’t always get me like that,” he says defensively.

“Everyone gets a bit queasy now and then,” Harper says. She hasn’t felt ill at the sight of a dead body since her first corpse back when she was a newbie. Even then, she got through the experience without spewing her guts up. Albie still looks green around the gills. “You realize you’ve gotta find a way of soldiering through it, though, right?”

“I know. I find fresh air helps,” he says.

“Of course,” she says, still replaying her conversation with Morelli.

Albie backs the car out. “It’s not the smell or anything. It’s just . . . I find it hard to watch.”

“I hear you,” Harper says. “I’ve got to admit it’s never bothered me. I know the smell is there, and it’s god-awful, but I just block it out.”

It’s not just the smell . . . it’s the dehumanizing of the process. Watching another human being rendered down and filleted, little more than meat. Watching an autopsy makes you confront all the sick reality beneath the surface. An elderly woman, her wrinkled skin peeled back, the coroner’s scalpel slicing down to the bone. A young boy, so full of life and potential, stripped down to parts.

“Lucky.”

Yeah, till later, when I can’t stop thinking about them.

They head back to the station, the last of the daylight sitting out on the edges of the world, hanging in a reddish haze behind the trees. On the East Coast, the dusk is royal blue, like mist rolling out on a lake at night.

“When we get back, I’ve got something for you. CSU found a phone on her. It’s got water damage. I want you to try and get in there, see what you can pull from it.”

He cocks an eyebrow. “Not sure if I’ll be able to get anything.”

“Just give it a shot, okay? Don’t make me have to go to the asshole phone company and request their data,” Harper says.

“I can try, boss,” Albie says. He checks the mirror, changes lanes. Flexes his hands on the wheel. “You drove down to Chalmer, didn’t you?” he asks.

Harper shifts in the passenger seat. “Dead end,” she says, dismissing it. “Waste of the gas driving there.”

Albie shakes his head. “Ain’t that the way, huh?”

“I don’t suppose you’ve had luck tracking sales of DXM.”

“Not when every Tom, Dick, and Harry can go online and order it. It’s not like ketamine, which we can trace, to an extent. This crap is everywhere.”

“And readily available . . . any luck following up on Alma’s friends?” Harper asks.

“Nope. They were all pretty normal. No boyfriends that anyone knows of.”

Harper sighs. “Damn.”

“Hopefully we turn up a name for girl number three,” Albie says.

Harper thinks: girl eleven.

“Yeah. It’d be real nice to catch whoever’s behind this and put this case to bed,” Harper says. “Trouble is, I don’t think we’ll be that lucky.”