Killing Me Softly (14 page)

“I don't know. I…I don't know. But this is odd enough to dig into a little more, don't you think?”

“It's probably nothing,” he said.

“Then we'll find out it's nothing and move on. But we need to dig.”

“Into what?”

He clearly thought she was off base, and she resented it. “Look, I have a feeling about this, okay? There's something not right about this body. Let's find someone who was there, strike up a conversation, see if anything seems…off.”

“Find someone who was
where,
Dawnie?”

“The morgue. During the autopsy. When the body
was brought in, when it was released, anything. Bryan, this is important. I'm telling you, I
feel
it.”

“Okay, okay, calm down. Let me make a call.” He leaned over her, reached past her to snag the cell phone off the nightstand and flipped it open.

She covered his hand with hers. “Who can you call? They'll be monitoring Beth and Josh's incoming calls by now. And anyone who hears from you is going to report it, Bryan, not give us any answers.”

“Not Nick.”

She closed her eyes and sighed. “No, not Nick.” Then she nodded. “Okay, go ahead.”

She sat there, waiting while Bryan simultaneously placed calls and tapped keys on her computer, but she couldn't shake the feeling that there was a shadow hovering over her. Or that it was getting closer. She started putting the files back together, stacking them in the picnic cooler that had become their filing cabinet.

Within a couple of minutes Bryan was finished with his phone calls. He came back to the bed where she sat, pawed through the contents of an old evidence box and sat down beside her.

“Mission accomplished?” she asked.

“I got hold of Sara Quinlan's alma maters. Everything's automated these days, so I looked for back copies of various yearbooks from both. That's what took so long on the phone. I had to do a search to see which volumes she was in. And we're in luck. One has to be shipped, so I didn't order it. But the other, the one from Illinois State, can be downloaded directly from
the Net. We'll get an e-mail with a password as soon as the credit card clears.”

“You used a credit card?”

“Don't worry. It's Dad's card. He let me use it so much before I landed my job on the Shadow Falls P.D. that I know the numbers by heart.”

“And what about the computer, Bryan?” she asked. “I mean, what if the cops figure out that you placed the charge? Won't they be able to track us if you get online?”

“What's it going to tell them? Not where we are, because we won't be here anymore. All they'll know is that your computer downloaded an old college yearbook. How is that going to hurt us?”

She nodded slowly, but her throat was dry. All of this was so damn scary. “And what about Nick?” she asked. “What did he have to say?”

“Nick's setting us up to meet the M.E. who was in charge back then. Didn't tell her who we are, of course. She'll probably figure it out when we get there, but…”

“When?” she asked. She'd absently picked up a piece of chrome, shaped like the letter
T,
that she'd found with the evidence, turning it this way and that, and watching the light glint off it.

“Tomorrow morning, if he can talk her into it. Probably at the county morgue.”

“That's risky,” she said. “Cops coming and going all the time…”

“Yeah, but Nick will help us.” He nodded. “What've you got there?”

“Piece of trim off a Thunderbird. Sixty-something—'65, '66.”

He blinked at her, then nodded and smiled. “According to the notes, which I've all but memorized, it took the department three weeks and five car experts to figure that out.”

That made her laugh, though only a little bit. “So?”

“It was found on the road near one of the crime scenes. They don't know if it's related or not. Could have been there for days, for all we know.”

“What made them collect it at all?” she asked.

“They collected everything—even cigarette butts and bottle caps off the ground near the crime scenes. Anything that looked fairly recent.”

“Anyone report seeing a '65 T-Bird near any of the scenes around the time of the crimes?”

He nodded. “One neighbor reported seeing a—lemme see if I can remember the quote—an ‘old car, like something you'd see at a car show,' near the home of victim number five, I think. Said it was red.” He shook his head. “Aside from that statement and this one piece of chrome, there's no classic-car connection.”

“Too bad,” she said. “That's my area of expertise. I might have been more help there than I've been with everything else.”

“You've been a ton of help.”

She took a breath, let it out. “I'm tired.”

“It's late,” he said. “Let's get some rest.”

She nodded and put the cover on the evidence box, then set it on top of the stack inside the cooler and closed the lid. And she didn't look at him, because it was starting to hurt every time she did.

At first she'd thought, deep down and even in spite of herself, that it was inevitable they would eventually be together again. They would work through all the garbage and end up writhing in each other's arms. She'd waited five long years for that, after all.

Now, though, looking at him brought a heavy sadness to her chest. She no longer believed it was inevitable that they would end up in each other's arms. More and more it seemed impossible instead. And her delusions of the night before were nowhere in sight this evening.

She left the cooler where it was and went into the small bathroom, washed up, brushed her teeth, put on her nightshirt and went back into the other room to crawl into bed.

“That was fast,” he said when she settled onto her side with the blankets pulled up over her shoulder.

“Yeah. Night, Bry.” She reached out and snapped off the lamp. There was still another one on, but it was on his side of the room. She ignored it, closed her eyes, covered her head and told herself she was tired enough to fall right to sleep.

It was a lie, but she told it to herself all the same.

T
en o'clock in the morning, and Bryan was sitting in a room in the county morgue, behind a glass door with wire mesh between the panes. He was thinking that mesh wasn't nearly enough between himself and the occasional police uniform moving through the hallway beyond.

Dawn sat across from him, her eyes wide, their movements jerky, as she took in the room. She hadn't slept well last night. Hell, he hadn't, either. All he'd wanted was to crawl into bed with her, pull her into his arms and kiss her the way he'd been dying to kiss her ever since she'd come home.

But he hadn't. Because he didn't think he could touch her and not fall head over heels in love again. And because he wasn't going to let that happen until and unless he knew for sure that she would stay. And because right now, he couldn't even promise her that
he
would stay, and it would be just as cruel if she fell hard for him and then he wound up serving life in prison.

So there was no choice but to keep things between them cool. No sex. No kissing. No passion and no love.

Although, most of the time, there was a tiny voice somewhere deep inside his brain, laughing at him for thinking he had any say in the matter. Those things were already happening in his imagination. In hers, too, he would bet.

He didn't like seeing her uncomfortable and it was clear this place made her antsy. There were six refrigerated “drawers” along one wall, situated in two rows of three. No way to tell if they were occupied, but at least there were no bodies lying around the room. No sheet-draped tables. Only bare, shiny ones. And equipment and cabinets and lights and tools.

Dawn was scared, though. Bryan knew her well enough to know that. There had to be a lot of ghosts in a place like this, and maybe they were finally communicating with her again. She looked about ready to jump off her stool and make a run for the door.

“You okay?” he asked softly. She met his eyes, nodded once.

Nick stood just inside the doorway, leaning back against it as if he would keep anyone from coming in. He'd hustled them in through a rear door, then led them down a single flight of stairs, through a dim hall and straight into this room after meeting them in a pay-parking lot a block away. It had taken him only five minutes to set this up and call Bryan back with the details.

The guy had clout.

Dr. Rita Westcott eyed Nick as if he were Bobby De Niro stepped right off the silver screen just to see her before returning her attention to the computer. “I'm taking a risk, giving you this information.”

“Who, me?” Nick asked in apparent shock. “What risk? Haven't you heard? They reinstated me, Rita, just for this case. You can't get into any trouble for talking to a bona fide cop.”

“And what about a bona fide suspect?” she asked, slanting a much less adoring look at Bryan, one that confirmed his theory that she would recognize him at first glance.

“Person of interest,” Bryan corrected. “We don't say ‘suspect' anymore, Doc.”

The doctor remained stone-faced, then slowly smiled at him, and it even reached her brown eyes, crinkling the lines at their corners even deeper than they already were. “It's a good thing I've always liked you, Kendall.”

It was mutual, but Bryan didn't say so. The woman was old enough to be his grandmother and had the brains of Albert Einstein to the tenth power. She was smart, sharp, serious, irreverent and funny. She ran the M.E.'s offices in several Vermont counties, pretty much only pretending to follow the rules handed down from on high. Which was why Nick had been sure she would help them out.

He hadn't been wrong.

“I pulled up my notes on victim one right after you
called,” she said, hitting a button and calling up a file on the flat-screen monitor. “Just so we're clear, though, I did not perform the autopsy. That was the local coroner, a Shadow Falls doctor by the name of Carrie Overton. She was newly employed at S.F. General, and I believe that was her first job after med school, so I watched over things pretty closely.”

“Understood. And I was there, remember?” Nick said.

She rolled her eyes at him, then returned her attention to the screen. “Sara Quinlan. Twenty-two. Grad student from Chicago. No living relatives—”

“I thought her body was identified by a cousin,” Bryan injected.

Westcott nodded. “Yeah, I was getting to that. Stop interrupting.” She refocused on the screen. “No living relatives we could find any mention of until the cousin came in to claim the body.”

Dawn was still sitting on a tall stool, one leg crossed over the other. Her nervousness faded, Bryan thought, as she began to get drawn into the investigation. She loved solving crimes so much he wondered why he was the one wearing a uniform. Or at least who used to be the one wearing a uniform.

“Notes are fine, Dr. Westcott,” Dawn said. “But personal recollection is so much more interesting. Do you remember her at all?”

“The victim?” Westcott asked.

“No, the cousin.”

Westcott frowned. A door slammed from somewhere
down the hall, and Dawn jumped off the stool and onto her feet with a gasp.

Tipping her head to one side, Westcott said, “Being around the dead makes you nervous.” It wasn't a question.

“Hell, no. I love corpses and morgues. They're my hobby.”

Nick straightened away from the door and reached behind him to close the Venetian blind. “She's got reason to be skittish, Rita. It's not you.” He shot Dawn a look that didn't need words.

“He's right,” she said. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap at you. The truth is, yeah, the dead and I don't…get along all that well. And just now I thought one of them was about to spring out of one of those drawers at me.” She shook her head and managed a self-deprecating smile. “I know how ridiculous that sounds, believe me. I'll be all right.”

She sat back down, recrossing her legs and breathing deeply, but Bryan could tell she was still on edge.

The doctor nodded. Bryan stayed where he was, saying nothing, just listening. “The body was brought here after being autopsied by Dr. Overton at Shadow Falls General. The cousin who showed up claimed it from me, and as I recall, there was nothing unusual about her. Slender build, average height, long dark hair. She looked as if she had a little Mediterranean in her blood. Greek, maybe. Or Italian.”

“Would there have been any footage of her?” Bryan asked. “Security camera, anything like that?”

“We checked all that right after she claimed the body,” the M.E. said. “But she kept her face averted from the security cameras. Did a good enough job at it that we thought it might have been deliberate. She had ID, but we didn't verify it or anything. It would have been easy enough to fake. We were a little lax back then.”

Bryan tipped his head to one side. “Why were you even checking the footage, then? Did you have some reason to believe she wasn't who she said she was?”

Dr. Westcott sighed, nodded, took off her nearly square bifocals and massaged the bridge of her upturned elfin nose. When she lifted her head again, she glanced at Nick.

He gave a nearly imperceptible nod.

Sighing, Westcott said, “We tried to locate the cousin again after the body had been released to her. As I was closing out the case, doing one last look at the autopsy report, as I always do, I found something I'd missed, buried near the end. I felt the cousin should know.”

She looked up as the sounds of traffic passing in the hallway outside increased. Her voice much lower, she said, “The dead girl had given birth four to six weeks prior to her death.”

Bryan snapped his eyes to Dawn's, and he saw her reaction. She blinked in shock, staring right back at him, then looked at Rita Westcott once more and said, “Sara Quinlan had a baby when she was killed?”

“She had given birth before she was killed. Those are the facts,” Westcott said. “We wanted to find her
cousin, her only living relative, and let her know there was a chance there was a living child out there some where, but we couldn't find her. And in fact, we became convinced in short order that there was no such person in existence.”

“Holy shit.” Bryan looked behind him at Nick, only just realizing he'd heard no sounds of surprise from his friend. He studied Nick's face for only a second or two, then said, “You knew about this.”

“Of course I knew. It was my case, and since she was the first victim, I didn't know there would be more. I had to consider that the baby might have been a motive. But it was a dead end. No records of Sara at any hospital, no abandoned babies, no bodies, no clues. A little more digging, and it looked like the chick who claimed the body wasn't who she'd pretended to be. The phone numbers and addresses she gave us were bogus.” He shrugged, shook his head. “At first I thought it had to tie in to the crime. But then more girls died, and we had a serial killer to contend with. The other women didn't have babies or imaginary cousins showing up to claim their remains. Clearly it was unrelated. So we let it go.”

“You let a missing newborn baby go?” Dawn asked, rising slowly from the stool. “How could you do that?”

“We had no proof there had been a
live
birth,” Nick said. “I tried to find out, get some information on the baby, believe me, but it was a dead end. Making it public
would have done nothing for the kid. The press would have gone nuts over the whole thing.”

“So you just let the baby go?”

Nick looked at Bryan as if seeking support, then he looked back at Dawn, and lifted his hands. “I know it seems like something, guys, but believe me, it's not. I've turned this over six ways to Sunday and never found a clue. She didn't want her kid found. Maybe it was stillborn and she buried it somewhere. If that's the case, though, I think we'd have found the body by now—or we never will. I like to think she gave it to someone else to raise.”

“Without a paper trail?” Bryan asked.

He shrugged. “I didn't say I thought she did it legally or even wisely. Just that it's possible. And hell, a high-end attorney can arrange a legal adoption and make it so private no one ever figures it out. Like I said, I never found any suggestion that the baby had anything to do with the killings. I doubt our Strangler even knew she'd had a kid. Or cared.”

“Nick's right,” Dr. Westcott said. “Chances are, she gave the baby away, maybe through private adoption or maybe something far less legal. Either way, I have to agree that it seems unrelated to the murder.”

“Her roommate would have known if she'd had the baby with her,” Dawn said. “How long did Professor Dupree say she'd been living with Sara?”

“A few weeks,” Bryan said.

“So if she'd gotten rid of the baby, then she must have gotten rid of it at least three weeks before her murder.
You said she'd given birth four to six weeks prior. So that gives us a one- to three-week window.”

Bryan nodded. “If we could backtrack, look into who she'd seen, where she'd been, in the time between having the baby and getting a roommate, maybe we could find something.”

Nick rolled his eyes. “It's compelling, I know, but it's a waste of time. It's unrelated to the murders.”

“I know you believe that,” Bryan said, “and I know you're probably right. Hell, it's not that I doubt you, I just—”

Dawn interrupted. “I just don't know how anyone can be one hundred percent sure of that, Nick. Not without more information.”

“Well, you've got nothing better to do. Unless you've stumbled onto a clue I don't know about?” Nick looked from Dawn to Bryan with his brows raised. They shook their heads in unison. “Fine. Then dig into this baby thing a little bit, if it'll ease your minds. But I'm telling you, you're wasting your time. I spent weeks trying to make it part of the case. It wasn't then, and it isn't now. But maybe while you're digging you'll stir up something else that
is
related.”

Rita looked up toward the door as the noise in the hallway suddenly cranked up to a new level. Nick, who stood closest to the door, whirled to peer between the slats of the blind.

“Incoming,” he said. “Get outta sight.
Pronto
.”

Bryan gripped Dawn's hand and pulled her across the room, looking for cover. Thinking fast, he pulled
her up against the wall and yanked a gurney in front of them. “Crouch down.”

She did, and Bryan quickly unfolded the sheet lying on the gurney, draped it over the table so it was hanging to the floor in front, then crouched down beside her.

Rita Westcott hovered, making adjustments to the sheet, even as the door burst open, and several people came flying in, pushing another gurney. Dawn's hand closed around Bryan's. He glanced at her, tried to nod reassuringly and then realized he could see through the white sheet well enough to know when the attendants hefted a body bag off the gurney and dropped it onto an autopsy table. He knew Dawn could see what they were doing, too, because he felt her cringe in reaction.

He squeezed her hand, ran his thumb over the back of it.

“What have we got?” Dr. Westcott asked. “Why didn't you take it to General, or even call it in? I wasn't expecting—”

“Chief ordered radio silence, said to bring her here,” an attendant said.

“But why—”

“Ask him.”

The attendant towed his now-empty gurney out the door and down the hall, following his coworkers, but before the door swung closed behind him, Chief MacNamara strode inside, spotted Nick and said, “Where the
hell
have you been, Di Marco? I've been paging you all morning.”

Nick yanked his cell phone off his belt clip and
looked at it, feigning surprise that it was turned off, though Bryan suspected he'd done it on purpose, not wanting anyone to track him to Bryan.

Shaking his head, Nick said, “Damn thing shuts down when the battery gets low. Hell, I've gotta replace this relic. What'd I miss?”