The Guest Room(78)

“Now that you have her—her body—will you be able to figure out who she really is?” he asked the detective.

“Maybe. But not likely. Not from this,” he said, waving his hand over the sheet. “Those guys we busted earlier this week? They’re the clues to who she really is. Where she’s from. They know where their friends got her.”

“So…they…did this to her.”

“Yes. They did. At least that’s what common sense would suggest.”

“God. So awful. So sad,” Richard found himself murmuring. He looked around the windowless room, at the half-open refrigerated locker from which the body had been removed so he could ID it. In an adjacent room—a room with brilliant white walls, bright surgical lighting, and a sloping autopsy table with drains for the fluids that flowed from the cadavers as their mysteries were plumbed with scissors and bone saws and jugular tubes—he heard a radio. He heard a song. Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” He’d watched his father-in-law dance with Kristin to that song at their wedding. It wasn’t Sinatra himself, of course, but the live band had done a beautiful cover. He hoped someday he would dance to that song at Melissa’s wedding. He tried to imagine her at twenty-five, but couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

“So, those guys in jail,” he asked the detective, “are they talking?”

The detective shook his head. “A few are already back on the street. And they all have very good lawyers.”

“But they will? Eventually?”

“Talk? Hard to say.”

“Are they all this violent?”

“Some are. Some are just businessmen. But these dudes—the ones who most likely did this? I would say they’re not real big advocates for the sanctity of human life. Why?”

“Just asking.”

“Tell me. Go ahead.”

“Well, this all began in my house. The people who did this—they know that. They know where I live. And seeing what they did to this girl scares me. It makes me worry about my family. I have a wife. I have a nine-year-old daughter.”

The detective seemed to ponder this. Then he raised his brows, and when he did his eyes went a little exophthalmic. “My gut tells me they don’t have a whole lot of interest in you or your family. I mean, they might. As you said, some of them have anger management issues. And maybe if they thought you were protecting one of their girls they’d come for you. Maybe if they thought you were a witness to something. But it’s not like you’re hiding one of their girls in your guest room. It’s not like one’s hanging around your sunroom.”

“No. I don’t even have a sunroom.”

“There you go.”

Harry started to pull the sheet back over the corpse, but Richard stopped him. “Everything okay?” the pathologist asked.

“Yeah. It is. I just thought I should see her face a few seconds more. Pay my respects, I guess.” He tried to craft a similar face in his head for her father. Someone who would have wanted to walk her down an aisle and dance with her at her wedding.

“Okay.”

Her eyes were open, more blue than he had remembered. Cornflower blue. Her hair was the same almost alabaster blond. The skin, from so much time in the water, was inhumanly white and looked almost gelatinous. Blubbery, he thought. Blubbery.

“Would you pull the sheet down?” he asked.

“Really?” The pathologist sounded dubious.

“Just to her collarbone. I want…I want to see.”

“No, you don’t.” This was the detective. Richard looked up at him. He was shaking his head ever so slightly.

“I feel an obligation.”

“An obligation?”

“Yeah. I know. It’s crazy. But somewhere she has family. Or, I guess, had family.”

The pathologist glanced at the detective, and the detective shrugged. So Harry pulled the sheet down almost to the woman’s breasts, and Richard’s first thought—perhaps because they had told him how she’d been killed, perhaps because he knew, more or less, what was coming—was wonder that the head had remained attached to the body. He saw only the spinal cord and a single rope of muscle between her collarbone and her jaw. It was like a Halloween skeleton.

“Those are posterior neck muscles,” the pathologist was saying, pointing with two fingers. “They severed the carotid artery and the jugular vein, which is all it would have taken to kill her. But then they cut all the way through the larynx. And then some. There would have been more tissue left, but it washed away.”

“So they killed her the way she killed one of them?”

“Apparently,” the detective said. “But later this morning we’ll do an autopsy and confirm that’s the cause of death. It probably was. No evidence of bullet wounds. But these guys will check. Do a toxicology report. The usual.”

Harry pulled the sheet back over the girl and leaned against a Formica counter.

“What happens to her body after that?” Richard asked.

This time it was the detective who looked at Harry. The pathologist arched his eyebrows and coughed once into his elbow. “Autumn allergies,” he said, apologizing. “No idea why they get to me even in here.” Then: “We’ll keep her on ice for a bit. Just in case.”