The Storm King(56)

She’d been so beautiful. He picked up the 8 × 10.

Behind it, there was a more recent photograph.

Despite his medical training and common sense, Nate had somehow convinced himself that those hikers in the headlands had discovered her body. But Lucy’s body was long gone. Her long limbs had wasted and contracted into a stick figure’s parody. Her skull grinned a shocking smile. Her once-white shirt had yellowed and shrunk to only a gesture of modesty. Her lustrous hair had been reduced to something spare and dry and bristling. It wasn’t a body, because after fourteen years, how could it be? She was a skeleton.

Nate’s stomach lurched, but this was why he was here. He had to find out what they knew. Skeletal remains gave the medical examiner less to work with, but they still might have been able to re-create something of Lucy’s final moments. He didn’t need to fumble through the drawers to find the postmortem report, because it was right there, too.



Fracture of hyoid bone.

His eyes speared sentences as he paged for the ME’s concluding remarks.

Colles’ fractures of left and right wrists.

White underwear, partially torn, blood-stained with positive prostate-specific antigen (PSA) reaction in fabric analysis.

He had to force himself to breathe.

Remarks: Decedent’s remains were presented to this office as a homicide victim. Hyoid bone fracture suggests strangulation as cause of death. Hyoid fracture is indicative of manual strangulation, though decedent’s skeletal remains provide insufficient evidence to determine this conclusively. PSA-positive result indicates presence of semen in decedent’s clothing. Paired with dual Colles’ fractures of the wrist, this suggests violent forced intercourse. It is unknown whether intercourse occurred antemortem or postmortem. DNA from samples are too degraded for further analysis. GLPD were notified of these findings immediately upon conclusion of examination.

Nate’s vision went bleary and it took every mote of self-control he possessed to make it back into the office before vomiting into the chief’s trash can.

“What in the—?”

Nate turned away from the bin to see the chief standing in the doorway. The man glanced at the open door to his closet, and his face swelled with fury. “How did—the hell do you think you’re doing! Interfering with an active investigation? Going through confidential documents! I could charge you.”



“He raped her.” Nate coughed the last thing left in his stomach into the trash can. “He raped her then he killed her.”

The chief stooped to bring his face closer to Nate’s. His eyes held a mixture of horror and hunger.

“Who? Who killed her, son?”

“Who?” Nate’s shock turned to fury at the speed of lightning. He sprang from the floor, wrapped his hands around the chief’s neck, lifted him off the ground, and slammed the man against the office’s glass partition. Cracks exploded across the pane as shadows streaked the edges of Nate’s vision. “Why don’t you know? After fourteen years why don’t you know?”

The man became loose in his grip. He clutched the chief’s jaw with one hand while the other grabbed the side of his head. One pulse of movement would shatter his C3 vertebrae to sever the brain’s connection to the diaphragm. Nate ran his hand to the base of the chief’s jaw and left a trail of blood along the bristles of his cheek.

The sight of blood returned Nate to himself. He released the man and stared at his own hands. He’d again clutched his fists tight enough to slice his palms. The blood was his own.

“You didn’t do it.” The chief coughed the words out as he slid down the wall to the floor. His shoulders went slack, and Nate couldn’t tell if this was in defeat or in relief. “You didn’t kill her.”

Nate collapsed to the carpet across from the older man.

He raped her then he killed her.

Nate’s shouting had gotten the attention of the uniformed officer who’d been manning the front desk.

“You all right, boss?” the officer asked. He hadn’t drawn his gun, but his hand was on his holster. His gaze did not waver from Nate.

I never should have come back here.

“It’s fine,” the chief muttered hoarsely. “It’s over.”

Nate leaned against the desk. Every part of him shook.



He raped her then he killed her.

Someone else approached the office door. A man not in a uniform.

Chief Buck staggered to his feet, looked into the hall, and waved the new arrival away. There was something frantic in the chief’s gestures that set off an alarm in Nate’s head.

He got to his feet.

The man was still huge, and wider than Nate remembered him. He seemed to take up the entire hallway. He was powerfully built, but softer around the midsection than he’d once been. An athlete gone to seed. The pate of his head caught the layout of the overhead lights.

Nate’s trembling stopped, and he felt his body center itself into perfect balance. Before his vision dissolved into black and red, he became aware of his own unstoppable charge at Adam Decker.





THIS. THIS IS WHAT LIFE IS.

That was the message Nate’s electric eyes telegraphed to Tom’s as they trampled through canary grass to the welcoming roar of their classmates.

Like many good things, Tom’s euphoria was ephemeral. It lasted only as long as it took for him to notice Lucy, all but elbowing her way through the crowd. She rushed Nate as if he were the last lifeboat on a foundering ship. Nate pulled her tight while he still had an arm around Tom. For a moment it was as if the three of them were wrapped in a single embrace. But not even Nate was strong enough to hold both Tom and Lucy at once.