seeing no evidence. Aorta has minimal atherosclerosis.” I look up as the doors to the autopsy room swing open. “Nothing whatsoever to indicate she died from anything cardiac-related, in my opinion.” I hear familiar voices as George walks back in.
I recognize Benton’s calm, mellow baritone, and my mood is lifted by the sight of him in creased khaki pants and a green polo shirt, lean and handsome. His silver hair is slicked back, probably from sweating in a van with no air-conditioning, and it doesn’t matter that we are in a stark autopsy room that smells like death or that my white gown and gloves are bloody and Kathleen Lawler is opened up, her sectioned organs in a bucket on the floor beneath the table.
I’m happy to see Benton, but our being in a morgue in the middle of an autopsy isn’t why I don’t want him close, and then Lucy appears, slender and foreboding in a black flight suit, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders and streaked rose gold in the overhead lights. Both of them stay where they are, on the other side of the room.
“You need to stay over there,” I tell them anyway, and I sense from Benton’s demeanor that something is wrong. “We don’t know what she’s been exposed to, but a tox death is first on our list. Where’s Marino?”
“He didn’t want to come in. Probably for the same reason you don’t want us getting close,” Benton says, and something absolutely is wrong.
I can see it on his face, in the tense way he is standing and the imperviousness of his face. His eyes are locked on mine, and he looks quietly agitated, the way he gets when he is intensely worried.
“Dawn Kincaid’s in a coma,” he then says.
An alarm begins to sound at the back of my thoughts.
“I got the latest update when we landed, and they’re saying that she’s brain-dead but they’re not entirely sure.” He projects his voice so Colin and I can hear him. “You know how that is. They’re never really sure even when they are. Whatever’s the cause, it’s very suspicious,” he adds, and I envision Jaime Berger’s face last night right before I left her apartment.
She looked sleepy, and her pupils were dilated.
“But all indications are that the oxygen was cut off from her brain for too long,” Benton says, as I hear Jaime’s speech before I left her around one a.m., talking thickly and slurring her words. “By the time they got to her in her cell, she’d stopped breathing, and while they’ve kept her alive, she’s gone.”
I remember the take-out bag I carried into the apartment and where it came from, handed to me by a stranger, and I accepted it without thinking.
I start to say, “I thought she was fine. Just an asthma attack—”
“Limited information at the time, and this is being kept extremely hushed,” Benton interrupts. “The initial thought was an asthma attack, but very quickly her symptoms became severe, and attending staff at Butler tried a single dose of epinephrine, assuming anaphylaxis, but there was no improvement. She couldn’t talk or breathe. There’s a concern she was poisoned somehow.”
I envision the woman wearing the lighted helmet leaning her bicycle against the lamppost.
“No one can begin to imagine how she could have gotten hold of anything poisonous at Butler,” Benton is saying from the other side of the room.
A delivery woman handing me the bag of sushi, and I vaguely recall something felt wrong but I ignored the feeling because so much felt wrong yesterday. Everything that happened from the time Benton drove me to the airport in Boston yesterday, the entire day felt wrong, and then the rest of it plays out in my memory. Jaime walking into her apartment after Marino and I had been talking for the better part of an hour. She didn’t seem aware she had ordered sushi, and I didn’t question it.
I put down the scalpel. “Has anybody talked to Jaime today? Because I haven’t, and she’s not called here.”
Nobody answers.
“She was supposed to stop by the lab today. I left her a message, and she’s not called back.” I pull off my hair cover and the disposable gown. “What about Marino? Does anybody know if he’s talked to her? He was going to call her.”
“He tried while he was driving us here and didn’t get an answer,” Lucy says, and the look on her face indicates she realizes why I’m asking.
I throw my soiled clothing into the trash and peel off my gloves. “Call nine-one-one, and maybe you can get hold of Sammy Chang, and he can meet us,” I tell Colin. “Make sure they send an ambulance.” I give him the address.
25
Two police cruisers and Sammy Chang’s white SUV are parked in front of the eight-story brick building, but there are no emergency lights or flashers, no sign of tragedy or disaster. I don’t hear sirens nearby or in the distance, just the sound of the cargo van’s big engine and its new windshield wipers thudding. It is stuffy and stifling with the windows up, the blower circulating hot, humid air, the rain so heavy it sounds like a car wash. Thunder rumbles and cracks, the old city shrouded in fog.
Chang and two Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan officers are huddled out of the weather under the overhang at the top of the steps by the same front door that buzzed open for me as a delivery woman on a bicycle appeared seemingly out of nowhere like a phantom last night. Lucy, Benton, Marino, and I emerge from the van into the rain and wind, and I look around again for an ambulance, not seeing or hearing one, and I’m not happy, because I asked. As a precaution I want a rescue squad. To save time if there is time left and anything to save. Rain splashes on the steamy brick walkway, the sound of the downpour loud like clapping hands.
“Police. Anybody home? Police!” an officer announces, as he holds the intercom button. “Yeah, she’s not answering.” He steps back and looks around as rain falls harder. “We need to figure out another way. Every damn day now.” He looks up at the moiling dark sky and billowing curtains of water. “As usual, left my slicker in the car.”
“It won’t last long. Will be over by the time we come back out,” the other officer says.
“Well, I hope we don’t get hail. I’ve already had one car messed up that way. Looked like someone went after it with a high-heel shoe.”
“What’s a New York prosecutor doing down here anyway? She on vacation? A lot of permanent residents in this building, but they leave in the summer, some of them renting their places by the week. She here short-term or what?”
“Did anybody call for an ambulance?” I ask loudly, as wind rocks giant live oak trees and Spanish moss whips like gray swags, like frayed dirty rags. “It would be a good idea to have an ambulance here,” I add, as the two officers and Chang watch the four of us roll up on them with the urgency of the storm that is thundering closer, almost overhead, the hard rain sizzling on the walkway and the street and pouring off the gabled overhang.
“I’m wondering if there’s a leasing office,” one of the officers says. “They’ll have a key.”
“Not one in this building, I don’t think.”
“Most of these older places don’t have one on site,” Chang says. “Or we can try some of the neighbors, maybe …”
Then Marino is pushing past everyone, almost shoving the uniformed officers out of the way, keys in hand.
“Whoa. Easy, partner. Who are you?”
I’m distractedly aware of Chang explaining who we are and why we’re here as Marino unlocks the door, and I’m vaguely mindful of my sopping-wet black field clothes and boots. I comb back my dripping hair with my fingers as I hear
