Save Her Soul (Detective Josie Quinn #9)(8)
Still, it wasn’t like Josie to break down. She’d given dozens of death notifications in her career. The number of grieving children she’d comforted, as well as the children she’d helped rescue from abusive situations, was in the hundreds. She had always maintained a professional demeanor even when every cell in her body yearned to break down and weep. Compartmentalizing was one of her greatest skills. What was happening to her? Why had that case gotten to her? Why was everything getting to her lately?
“Today,” Gretchen went on, “you put the rest of us at risk by going back into the water. Surely you realize that. I just think that under more normal circumstances, you would have thought more clinically about the situation and let that body go.”
“I’m sorry,” Josie said without looking at Gretchen.
They crested the hill, the large brick edifice coming into view. The city morgue was located in the basement of the hospital. Josie didn’t know whether or not the city planners had taken flooding into account when they decided to build the hospital there, but the tall brick building sat high enough over the city that it was well out of the danger zone.
“Boss, I’m always on your side,” Gretchen added. “I’m just saying I’ve noticed a difference in you lately. Hayes got frustrated today. His job is to rescue people. It was tense out there. Everyone’s on edge. We’re all just trying to save lives.”
“I know,” Josie said.
“Anyway,” Gretchen said. “Forget about that guy, okay? What are the odds you’ll have to work with him again—or even see him again after these floods are over? Right now, we’ve got work to do.”
Josie sighed. She swiped a lock of wet hair out of her face. She needed coffee. “Good point,” she conceded.
They pulled up to the Emergency entrance and Gretchen went inside to secure a gurney. Ten minutes later, they were pushing their charge down the dank, gray hallways in the bowels of the hospital toward Dr. Anya Feist’s large exam room. The doors to the morgue slid open as they approached. Dr. Feist and her assistant, Ramon, stood on either side, ushering them through.
“I just got a call,” Dr. Feist said, “Your Evidence Response Team should be here any minute.”
“Great,” Josie replied.
Ramon moved the gurney into the middle of the room, and he and Dr. Feist transferred the tarp onto one of her stainless-steel exam tables with a movable overhead light. “We’ll wait for the ERT so they can take photos,” she said. She looked over toward Josie and smiled as she tucked her shoulder-length silver-blonde hair up into a skull cap. “You had quite the morning, didn’t you? Exciting stuff. I saw the whole thing on the news. They streamed it live.”
“Oh jeez,” Josie muttered. Great. Now her humiliation was on video, preserved for the ages. Another thought occurred to her, making her chest feel tight—not only had she jumped back into the water and put the team in danger, but just about anything could have gone wrong on live television.
Gretchen said, “Good thing it was a successful rescue and recovery.”
Relief flooded Josie when Officer Hummel and his ERT colleague, Officer Jenny Chan, walked in, stopping the conversation in its tracks. All of them gathered around the table that held the rolled tarp. Hummel and Chan unpacked their equipment. Gretchen took her notebook and pen out, ready to take notes as they worked. Chan snapped photographs while Hummel took measurements and notes of his own.
Once they were finished, Dr. Feist asked, “How do you want to do this? Should we cut it open?”
Hummel studied the tarp and looked at Chan. Hummel had been the unofficial head of Denton’s ERT for the past five years, but Chan had come from a bigger department and had seen a lot more crime scenes. She turned to Josie. “How long was this in the water?”
“A few minutes?”
Gretchen said, “Maybe ten minutes. Once it dislodged, the boss got it and we hauled it into the boat pretty fast.”
“There’s a slim chance that we could get prints from the tarp and possibly the tape since it wasn’t in the water very long,” Chan told Hummel. “We’d have to use cyanoacrylate fuming.”
From the corner of the room, Ramon asked, “I’m sorry, what?”
Josie said, “It’s a way of lifting latent fingerprints by using superglue, basically. Fumes react with the cyanoacrylate to make this sticky white film on surfaces so you can see the prints and photograph them.”
“It works on non-porous surfaces, typically,” Chan cut in. “But we still might get something from the tarp or tape, or even both.”
“Right,” Josie agreed. “It would be worth a try.”
Gretchen said, “This was buried. We have no idea how long it was under that house. It could be years. You think you could still get prints?”
Chan shrugged. “Like I said, it’s a slim chance, but Detective Quinn is right. It’s worth trying.”
Hummel said, “Then we’ll try carefully peeling the tape and unraveling the tarp instead of cutting.”
No one protested. Josie and Gretchen stood back and watched while Hummel, Chan, Dr. Feist, and Ramon went to work, trying to keep as much of the tape and tarp intact as they could. Beneath the tarp was a second tarp and more tape. Ramon pushed the gurney flush against the side of the autopsy table as they began removing the next layer. A musty smell tinged with the scent of decay filled the room as they got closer to revealing the body inside the tarps. Finally, after an hour of painstaking work, the tape and tarps were carefully bagged and marked, and Dr. Feist and Ramon arranged the body on the autopsy table.