“Yes,” he admitted. “I can do all the heavy lifting, but I need to make sure that six months, a year from now, someone’s around to testify.”
“You’ve got dozens of people working under you.”
“Just four at the moment,” he corrected. “Unfortunately, none of them possess the length and breadth of your experience.”
“I don’t—”
“You’re still credentialed. I checked with the state.” He leaned forward. “I’m not a duplicitous man, Sara. You know that about me. So you’ll understand that I’m being brutally honest when I tell you that this is a dying man’s last request. I need you to do this for me. I need you to go to court. I need you to speak directly to a jury and put this man back where he belongs.”
Sara was momentarily at a loss. This was the last thing she’d been expecting. Her apartment looked as if it had been hit by a tornado. She still had Will to deal with. She was dressed more suitably for a pickup softball game than for work. Still, she knew that she didn’t have a choice. “There’s already a suspect?”
“Yes.” He shuffled the papers around and found a yellow file folder.
Sara scanned the preliminary report. There wasn’t much. A dead Jane Doe had been found outside a Dumpster in a fairly upscale part of town. She’d been beaten to death. Her wallet was absent cash. The bruising around her wrists and ankles indicated that she’d been tied up, possibly kidnapped.
Sara looked up at Pete. She had an awful, sinking feeling. “The missing Georgia Tech student?”
“We don’t have positive ID yet, but I’m afraid so.”
“Death penalty case?” Pete nodded. “Is the body here?”
“They brought her in half an hour ago.” Pete looked up at the doorway. “Hello, Mandy.”
“Pete.” Amanda Wagner’s arm was in a sling. She looked worse for the wear, though she still kept up the formalities. “Dr. Linton.”
“Dr. Wagner,” Sara returned. She couldn’t help but look over the woman’s shoulder for Will.
Amanda asked Pete, “Did Vanessa come by?”
“First thing this morning.” He explained to Sara, “The fourth Mrs. Hanson.”
Amanda said, “Dr. Linton, I hope we can avail ourselves of your expertise?”
Sara felt a bit managed. She asked the obvious question. “Is this Will’s case?”
“No. Agent Trent is absolutely not assigned to this case. Which doesn’t explain why I’ve spent the last three hours of my day walking up and down every hallway in a twelve-story office building talking to people who have better things to do than watch us chase our tails.” She paused for a breath. “Pete, when did we get so old?”
“Speak for yourself. I always told you I was going to die young.”
She laughed, but there was a sad edge to the sound.
“I can still remember the first time you came into my morgue.”
“Please, let’s not get maudlin. Try to go out with some dignity.”
He grinned like a cat. There was a moment between them, and Sara wondered if Amanda Wagner had fallen somewhere along the timeline of the many Mrs. Hansons.
The moment passed quickly. Pete stood from his desk. He reached out, bracing himself against the chair. Sara jumped up to help him, but he gently pushed her away. “Not to that point yet, my dear.” He told Amanda, “You can use my office. We’ll go ahead and get started.”
Pete indicated that Sara should leave ahead of him. She pushed open the doors to the morgue, resisting the urge to hold them for Pete. He seemed more diminished in the large tiled room. The office had served as a buffer against his wasted appearance. In the bright lights of the autopsy theater, there was no hiding the obvious.
“A bit cool in here,” Pete mumbled, taking his white lab coat off the hook. He went to the cabinet and handed Sara one of his spares. His name was stitched over the pocket. Sara could’ve wrapped the coat around her body twice. But then, so could Pete.
“Our victim.” He indicated a draped body in the center of the room. Blood had permeated the sheet, which was unusual. Circulation stopped when the heart stopped beating. Blood congealed. Sara couldn’t help but feel some guilty excitement. She relished a difficult case. Working at Grady, dealing with the same types of ailments and injuries over and over again, could become a bit mind-numbing.
Pete said, “We’ve already photographed and X-rayed her. Sent her clothes to the lab. Do you know we used to just cut them off and throw them in a bag? And rape cases.” He laughed. “My God, the science was flawed from the beginning. There was no taking the victim’s word for it. If we didn’t find semen in the suspected attacker’s underwear, then we couldn’t legally sign off on a charge of rape.”
Sara didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t imagine how awful things used to be. Thankfully, she didn’t have to.
Pete looped his braid on top of his head and pulled on an Atlanta Braves baseball hat. He was in his element inside the morgue, visibly more animated. “I remember the first time I talked to an odontologist about bite marks. I was certain we were looking at the future of crime solving. Hair fibers. Carpet fibers.” He chuckled. “If I have one regret about my impending doom, it’s that I won’t live to see the day when we’ve got everyone’s DNA on an iPad, and all we have to do is scan some blood or a piece of tissue and up pops a current location for our bad guy. It’ll end crime as we know it.”
Sara didn’t want to talk about Pete’s impending doom. She busied herself with her hair, tightening the band, tucking it into a surgeon’s cap so she wouldn’t contaminate anything. “How long have you known Amanda?”
“Since dinosaurs walked among us,” he joked. Then, in a more serious tone, he said, “I met her when she started working with Evelyn. They were both a couple of pistols.”
The description struck Sara as odd, as if Amanda and Evelyn had run around Atlanta like two Calamity Janes. “What was she like?”
“She was interesting,” Pete said, which was one of his highest compliments. He looked at Sara’s reflection in the mirror over the sink as he washed his hands. “I know it wasn’t great when you came up in medical school— what were there, a handful of women?”
“If that,” Sara answered. “But this last class was over sixty percent.” She didn’t mention that the ones who weren’t taking time off to have children were mostly funneling themselves into pediatrics or gynecology, the same as they had when Sara was an intern. “How many women were on the force when Amanda joined?”
He squinted as he thought about it. “Less than two hundred out of over a thousand?” Pete stepped back so Sara could wash her hands. “No one thought women should be on the job. It was considered man’s work. There was all kinds of grumbling about how they couldn’t protect themselves, didn’t have the
Sara smiled back at him. “I think we should be forgiven one mistake in almost a hundred years.”
“Perhaps,” he allowed. “You know, you listen to my generation these days, we were all free-loving hippies, but the truth is there were more Amanda Wagners than there were Timothy Learys, especially in this part of the country.” He gave her a twinkling smile. “Not to say it entirely passed us by. I lived in a glorious singles complex off the Chattahoochee. Riverbend. Ever hear of it?”
Sara shook her head. She was enjoying Pete’s reminiscing. His cancer was obviously compelling him to put his life in perspective.
“A lot of airline pilots lived there. Stewardesses. Lawyers and doctors and nurses, oh my.” His eyes lit up at the memory. “I had a nice side business selling penicillin to many of the fine Republican men and women currently running our state government.”
Sara used her elbow to turn off the faucet. “Sounds like crazy times.” She had come of age during the AIDS epidemic, when free love started exacting its price.
“Crazy indeed.” Pete handed her some paper towels. “When was
“The desegregation case?” Sara shrugged. Her high school history class was some time ago. “Fifty-four? Fifty-five?”
Pete said, “It was around that time that the state required white teachers to sign a pledge disavowing integration. They would lose their jobs if they refused.”
Sara had never heard of the pledge, but she wasn’t surprised.
“Duke, Amanda’s father, was away when the pledge was circulating.” Pete blew into a pair of powdered
