Brianna decided to get the introductions out of the way so they could get back to the real reason they were here. She gestured toward Kristin first. “Dr. Kristin Alberghetti-Cavanaugh, meet Detective Jackson Muldare. He’s on loan from major crimes.” Kristin smiled a greeting and Jackson nodded in return. “Okay, back to what you started to say,” Brianna finished.
For a second, between the piecemeal bodies and the new detective in her morgue, Kristin momentarily lost the thread of her previous thought. “Which was?”
“When I asked if you’d had any luck with these bodies, you said, and I quote, ‘Funny you should ask.’ What did you mean by that?”
Kristin remembered now. “All right, now bear in mind that this is all just preliminary and other factors might have to be taken into account down the line that could change the results—”
“Spit it out already, Kris,” Brianna interrupted.
“Classy,” Jackson commented under his breath.
Brianna shot the other detective a disapproving look even as she ignored the sarcasm—or attempted to. “The preliminary findings?” she asked impatiently.
“Very preliminary,” Kristin emphasized. “So far, it looks as if we might have bodies from two different eras.”
“Two different eras?” Jackson questioned, a look of confusion furrowing his brow.
Kristin stopped to remove her mask so that they could hear her better. Drawing them over to a gurney parked to the far right, she told the two detectives, “For instance, the body on this gurney—or as much of the body as we could put together so far,” she qualified, because it clearly was not an entire cadaver, “has been dead for about forty years, give or take a couple of years. As has that one—” she pointed to another gurney that contained three-quarters of a skeleton “—and that one.” Kristin gestured toward a gurney holding only enough parts to re-create half a body.
Brianna tried to piece together what the other woman was telling them. “So what you’re saying is that we’re looking for a killer who isn’t killing people anymore.”
But Kristin shook her head. “No. Unfortunately, I’m not saying that.”
Jackson held up his hand, symbolically calling for a time-out. “But you just said that the bodies have been dead for about forty years or so.”
“Those have,” Kristin agreed, then crossed over to a gurney she had just moved aside. “But she hasn’t.”
Now that they looked more closely, it was obvious that the body on this gurney was far less decomposed than the others Kristin had just pointed out to them.
“Is it possible that this one doesn’t belong with the others?” Jackson asked. “You know, someone killed her and just needed a convenient, out-of-the-way place to leave the body, so they dumped her in the abandoned hotel, thinking no one would be the wiser?”
“It’s possible,” Kristin said. “But then how do you explain that one? And that one?” Each time she asked, the medical examiner pointed to another body on a different gurney. “They’ve all been killed in the last year or so.”
This was getting complicated, Brianna thought, frustrated. “Are we talking about a killer who stopped killing, then decided to get back in the game a full generation later?” she asked Kristin.
Kristin sighed. “Frankly, I don’t know what we’re talking about,” she admitted.
Jackson surveyed the ten gurneys. “Is this all of them?” he asked.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Jim Henderson, another one of the MEs, responded.
Jackson and Brianna turned to look at Kristin.
“There’s more?” Jackson asked.
“There’s more,” Kristin answered wearily. “We’ve got them laid out on gurneys in the next room.”
Jackson was almost afraid to ask the medical examiner. “How many?”
“Hard to say,” Kristin answered. “We’ve got a lot of mismatched pieces on the gurneys, but it looks like there’re three to five more bodies. Plus the CSI team still hasn’t finished sifting through all the rubble,” she informed them. “There were bodies hidden in a number of what looked to be the foundation walls.”
The chief medical examiner’s eyes swept over the gurneys that were in the main room with them and she sighed wearily.
“I am going to need a very long shower after this is over. I might even start a brand-new water shortage,” she speculated.
“No one could blame you,” Brianna told her with conviction. She shook her head as she looked at the gurneys. What kind of a loathsome monster did this kind of thing and went on breathing? “Well, keep us posted,” she told Kristin.
“Don’t worry, I will,” Kristin promised. And then, before she got back to work, she added, “You and everybody else who keeps checking up on our progress.” She moved in a little closer to the detectives, lowering her voice. “Between you and me, I’ve never had so many people breathing down my neck in such a short amount of time.”
Brianna smiled sympathetically at her cousin’s wife. “I’d offer to help,” she said, looking around at the various gurneys again, “but I was never any good at jigsaw puzzles.”
Kristin laughed shortly. “Neither was I until I came here. It’s amazing what you find you can do when you have to.”
“What’s your ratio?” Jackson asked. When both the ME and Brianna looked at him with confusion, he explained, “Old bodies to new. How many are there?”
“So far, three new, seven old. But like I said, there are more bodies in the next room. And most likely there are even more on the way,” Kristin added with a grim expression.
“Something to live for,” Jackson murmured cryptically.
As he said that, his cell phone began to vibrate again. He was sorely tempted to shut off his phone, but he knew that he couldn’t do that. Not because he was on the job. He was certain if his superiors wanted to reach him and couldn’t, they’d simply call O’Bannon.
The reason he couldn’t shut off his phone was the off chance that his father or someone at Happy Pines might be trying to get in touch with him. His father had already had one stroke fairly recently. He’d recovered from it
