wasn’t what the ME wanted to hear.
He made a mental note to remind himself to cancel Saturday’s tee-time at the links. He hated playing golf in the rain and he didn’t care who thought he was a pussy.
So there she was, this baldheaded girl on a stainless-steel table. Her eyes stared into the space of the autopsy suite. He turned the overhead light toward her exposed breasts and the hideously large gash in her chest.
He lifted a flap of skin, and water and blood squirted at him.
“Damn it,” he said, taking a step backward, before resuming his exam.
The wound was enormous. It had been cut crudely, not in the fashion that had been suggested by the cops who’d found the body.
He cut a wider incision and reached for the rib spreader.
“Wonder if someone harvested her kidney or something. You know,” the cop who helped transfer the body to the ME’s office had said, “one of those black market deals.”
The ME didn’t think so. If someone had sought the girl’s kidneys, they didn’t do a good job. Both kidneys were in place.
More fluid oozed. It wasn’t blood. It appeared to be bloody water, a kind of watered down Bloody Mary that came from a sprinkler system that had rained on her since she died.
The music playing was a Mariah Carey song, one of those in which the singer contorted her voice to such a degree that to Dr. Jensen’s old-school way of thinking, he could no longer make out the tune. He didn’t play his date-the-song game when Mariah came on the radio.
The rib spreader moved easily. Too easily. Normally, it took some force to pull apart the bones so that the ME could have access to the vital organs. They all waited there, in their protective cage to be plucked out, examined, weighed and photographed like an organic and hideous still life.
Something was wrong. The ribs on the right side of the body had been snapped. Car wreck? Beaten in the chest with a baseball bat?
No bruising to indicate that at all.
Dr. Jensen went inside. Something was missing. Yes, the kidneys were there. He aimed a light toward the right of the dark red cavity that was the girl’s chest. It was empty. Dark. A void.
“I’ll be,” he said out loud, “the cop might be right, after all.”
The girl’s heart was gone.
Chapter Thirty
Even though she lived in the inland region of Washington, Jenna Kenyon knew she was a kind of a geographic snob when it came to her idea of natural beauty. After her parents tried to make a last stand in their marriage by leaving Seattle for her mom’s childhood home in Cherrystone, she reluctantly allowed herself to see some beauty in the arid part of a state split in two by the jagged edge of the Cascade Mountains.
Before she started traveling and actually seeing the “middle” parts of the country, she figured there was no compelling reason to go there.
It just didn’t work out that way.
“Congratulations, Jenna, we want you to be our newest national consultant,” the call from some woman in the personnel offices of the headquarters. “We have a very special assignment for you, my dear.”
Jenna, who was at home when the call came through, motioned to her mother and mouthed the words “I got the job.”
Emily put her arms in the air and mouthed back “wonderful.”
Jenna’s face fell as the woman on the phone detailed the specifics.
“You’ll be the consultant for the Southern region, including Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, and Kentucky.”
“But I applied for the West Coast,” Jenna said, barely concealing her disappointment.
“I know, dear. But we’re trying to lead the way in geographic diversity. Diversity of all kinds is important to being the best we can be.”
At first it almost seemed an offer she could refuse.
Six months into the job, Jenna knew how foolish she’d been. She’d come to appreciate the warmth of the people of the South, a region in which it seemed there were no strangers. She loved the food, too. If eating real- crispy-buttermilk-soaked fried chicken and corn cakes meant an extra lap at the track that was fine with her.
With her mother immersed in the Mandy Crawford case, Shali drove Jenna to the Spokane airport for the flight to Nashville. It was a Friday morning and the next day had a full slate of things that needed her attention.
“I’d like to tell those old ladies in the BZ office that these girls have no interest in being the best sorority in America.”
“When we were at Cascade, we didn’t care either,” Shali said, digging a candy bar from her purse with both hands—while she drove.
“Right. I know.”
“You don’t have to do this much longer.” Shali pulled over at the passenger drop-off zone. A taxi honked and she resisted the urge to raise her middle finger.
Jenna smiled at her best friend. “I know. See you in a couple of weeks. Hey, maybe we’ll have a wedding to plan for the spring.”
Shali looked very interested. “Your mom’s going to finally say yes to Chris?”
“I think so. I
“If she doesn’t I might. He’s old, but he’s kind of hot, don’t you think?”
Jenna rolled her eyes. “Shali, what am I going to do with you?”
Shali grinned and checked her makeup in the mirror. “Same thing as always. Keep an eye on me.”
Jenna hugged her best friend and disappeared into the airport with a smile on her face and the feeling that despite her faults, her inappropriateness, her over-the-top behavior, Shali Patterson was a pretty good friend.
Jenna Kenyon had checked out the Dixon campus online and surfed a little on the Web about the region. Of course, all the images were of summer festivals, baskets of flowers, green lawns, and rose-covered fences. Even in the dead of winter, she could see that the rolling hillsides and massive oaks were the bones of a scenic region. Dixon, a town of 30,000, was halfway between Nashville and Knoxville on Interstate 40.
Jenna was more indie rock than Carrie Underwood, but she let the radio feed her the local flavor as she drove
