Theresa placed one foot on the two-by-four, preparing to make the leap to solid ground. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and Jillian’s parents will win custody.”
“I told you-they’re not going to ask for it. They may not even know Jillian is dead, unless Evan told them. I certainly didn’t.”
“They’ll be told. They’re the official next of kin, so they’ll have to at least be informed of Cara’s guardianship.”
Drew frowned. “But Evan is already the guardian. Isn’t he?”
The two-by-four bent under Theresa’s weight. It would hold her for a quick leap, but if she tried to balance on it for any length of time, it would bow too deeply, and she would fall to the frozen ice below.
“Not exactly,” she admitted.
CHAPTER 10
MONDAY, MARCH 8
Theresa picked at the red tape stuck to her fingertips. She had sealed up no less than fourteen bags from the victim of an early-morning shooting, including two pairs of pants and four shirts of varying thicknesses. This by no means represented the record. Layering remained the best way to stay warm through a Cleveland winter, and those who spent many hours out of doors, like drug dealers, had to dress for the weather.
She tossed the last of the tape into the wastebasket, exited the amphitheater without watching where she was going, and bumped into the corner of a gurney parked in the hallway, sending it, with its occupant, sliding into Chris Cavanaugh. The Cleveland police department’s star hostage negotiator and all-around great guy, if you read his book jackets.
“That’s a hell of a greeting,” he told her. Even the dim light in the hallway couldn’t mitigate the dimples, the twinkling eyes, the gloss of each dark hair receding from his forehead.
“What are you doing here?”
“That’s a hell of greeting too. I’m sorry you couldn’t make lunch on Wednesday. Maybe another time.”
She didn’t respond, but he had already turned his head, watching through the open autopsy room door as two dieners swung a heavyset man onto a stainless-steel table in one well-practiced heave. The man appeared to be about forty, with a tattoo on one arm and a round, seeping hole in his chest.
“What are you doing here?” she asked again, but gently this time, guessing that she didn’t want to hear the answer any more than he wanted to say it.
He continued to watch the activity around the dead man. “We had a domestic standoff this morning. It didn’t end well.”
A snotty comment about his formerly perfect no-bloodshed record would probably put an end to the sporadic lunch invitations, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She thought about asking why he had come to attend the autopsy, but he would probably point out that detectives attended the autopsies of the cases they worked, so why not?
Besides, she thought she knew why he had come. “That’s going to happen, you know,” was all she could think of to say. “Things going bad.”
“I know.” He smiled and for a moment she could fool herself into thinking that she had cheered him up. The fact that she hadn’t was made apparent by his brisk tone when he said he supposed he shouldn’t keep her from her work and strode into the brightly lit autopsy suite as if counting on momentum to get him over the threshold.
Pride or guilt? She couldn’t tell.
And she didn’t care, right? The next door along the hallway led to the stairwell, and she climbed one flight to Christine Johnson’s office.
The young pathologist had inherited the cubbyhole from a predecessor and wasted no time in filling its walls with medical texts and photos of her younger siblings. Theresa would have leaned on the writing counter-the office had room for only one chair-but it already swayed from the collection of knives, guns, and blunt instruments spilling over from a cardboard box. She leaned on the doorjamb instead. “I love what you’ve done with the place.”
The doctor sat back in her chair and ran long fingers through her raven hair. “It has twenty-year-old carpeting and no window, but at least I don’t have to share it. I don’t share well.”
“Really? You seem so sweet to me.”
“You haven’t ticked me off yet.” Christine didn’t smile when she said this, either.
“I’ll keep that in mind. I need to ask you about a case.”
“The kid? I have something for you, by the way-here are the wood flakes I pulled out of his head wound.”
Theresa took the tiny envelope, feeling the fold of glassine paper inside it. “So the killer hit him with a wood object? Like a baseball bat?”
“I doubt it, the wound had some irregularities. But all I can really say is that it’s wood, and you’ll have to figure out the rest. Sign here and it’s yours.”
Theresa signed the evidence form. “Actually I wanted to know about Jillian Perry. White female, came in late Friday?”
For such a pretty face, Christine’s could produce a scowl that would have stopped an army of advancing Huns. Perhaps Theresa had finally ticked her off.
“Her,” the pathologist seethed.
“What about her?”
“She’s driving me crazy, that’s what. Insane. I sped up the tox results, looked at everything, histology sections, skin samples, history. Everything.”
“Okaaay…and?”
“And I can’t figure out why she’s dead.”
“She didn’t freeze to death?”
“She might have.”
“Or OD?”
“She might have. You can have a seat on my ammo locker, there.”
Theresa sat on a small khaki-colored box next to the wall. With a handle on the top, it didn’t make for the most comfortable seating, but she’d been on her feet all morning. “I don’t think I’ve ever worked a freezing death before. Though I could have-if it’s not a homicide, I don’t pay much attention.”
“I’ve seen a few, usually the homeless or drug addicts who tried to stay outside too long. Jillian Perry shows some of the signs of it, the bluish-white skin, slightly reduced lividity. It would have taken only a few hours-right next to the lake, which would put moisture and wind in the air and speed it up. She was slender and not warmly dressed; that would speed it up too. Were the branches around her broken as if she was stumbling around?”
“Not really. I think she took the same path into the woods that we did. I noticed two broken branches that had ice on the broken parts, so it wasn’t the cop or Frank who broke them. Nothing else within sight.”
“She didn’t have bruises, scratches, or tears in her clothes either, so she probably sat down before the disorientation set in. After that her heart would have stopped. Was she frozen to the ground when you found her?”
“She was pretty stiff. It’s not like we had to chip her away or anything, but then several days had passed. The temperature rose and fell a few degrees.”
“True.”
The doctor drummed her fingernails, coated in a chocolate color that nearly matched her skin, on a copy of
The drumming stopped. “A few things bother me.”
Theresa leaned forward, pressing her shoulders toward her knees. The handle of the ammo box deepened its impression into her buttocks.
“Freezing is, by nature, not an obvious diagnosis. You don’t have any hard-core proof of it as a cause of death. Kind of like drowning-if you find someone in the water and no other signs, you assume they drowned. You might find
