Will looked back up.
Sara was shining a light into the mouth. She dragged the footstool back over. From the higher vantage point, she could see directly into the back of the throat. She pressed down the jaw, opening the mouth as far as it would go. Then she used the magnifying glass to look inside.
For the recording, she explained, “I’m looking at the upper right quadrant. A piece of latex or vinyl is lodged between the last molar and her wisdom tooth.”
Gary had picked up on the change in demeanor. He asked, “Is that weird?”
She talked around the question. “Wisdom teeth generally come in during your late teens or early twenties. Most of the time, they’re misaligned. They can crowd the other teeth and cause significant pain. They’re normally removed in pairs or all at once, so it’s remarkable that a thirty-five-year-old woman only has one wisdom tooth remaining.”
Sara stepped down from the stool. The glance she gave Will told him something was terribly wrong. She spread out the photographs from the Dougall County coroner. She found what she was looking for. “The latex wasn’t there when the coroner took the mouth photos.”
Gary said, “The embalmer would wear gloves, right? Because of disease?”
“Yes.” She told Gary, “I need the forceps.”
Sara returned to Shay’s body. She angled the overhead light. She stuck the long tweezers into Shay’s mouth. The latex stretched as she tried to pull it out. Then the jaw started to slip.
“Steady the jaw,” she told Gary. “It’s really snagged in there.”
Gary cupped his fingers on either side of the chin and forced open the mouth as wide as it would go.
Sara tried again, pulling at the latex. The material was thin, almost translucent.
Her phone started ringing. The sound was muffled in her back pocket.
She turned to Will, frowning. “Could you get that? It could be—”
Sara didn’t want to say Delilah Humphrey’s name on the recording.
Will fished the phone out of her back pocket. He showed her the screen.
Sara told Gary, “I’m going to take this in the hall.”
Will followed her out of the room. She kept her gloved hands in the air. She couldn’t touch the phone.
She told him, “You can hear this.”
Will tapped the speaker icon on the screen, then held the phone close to her mouth.
Sara said, “Mrs. Humphrey?”
There was static. Will thought they’d let too many rings go by, but the timer was still counting up on the screen.
Sara said, “Mrs. Humphrey, it’s Dr. Linton. Are you there?”
More static, but a woman’s voice said, “What’s up, Doc?”
Shock flashed in Sara’s eyes. “Tommi?”
“You got her.” Tommi’s voice was deeper than Will had imagined. He had thought of the woman as timid, broken. The voice on the other end of the line was as hard as steel.
Sara said, “I’m sorry to bother you.”
“‘It’s possible you were right about the photo.’” Tommi was quoting Sara’s email. “I told you it wasn’t Daryl Nesbitt eight years ago.”
Sara pressed together her lips. Will could tell she hadn’t gotten this far, that texting her own mother, emailing Delilah, had been the only steps she had walked herself through.
“Tommi,” Sara said. “I need to know if you’ve remembered anything.”
“What would I remember?” The steel turned into a razor. “Why would I remember?”
“I know this is hard.”
“Yeah, I know you know.”
Sara nodded before Will could think about how to ask the question. She had told Tommi about her own rape.
“Tommi—”
Tommi interrupted her with a long, pained sigh. Will could imagine cigarette smoke coming out of her mouth.
She told Sara, “I can’t have kids.”
Sara’s eyes found Will’s again. She held onto his gaze. “I’m so sorry.”
Will realized she was speaking to him.
He shook his head. She didn’t ever need to apologize for that.
Tommi said, “I wanted to be happy, you know? I looked at you, and I thought, ‘If Dr. Linton can be happy, then I can be happy.’”
Sara didn’t insult her with platitudes. “It’s hard.”
More silence. Will heard a lighter clicking. A mouth sucking in smoke, blowing it out.
Tommi said, “I don’t know how to be with a man unless he’s hurting me.”
The revelation came out in a rush. Will could see that Sara was doing the same thing he was doing—slowing it down, trying to find a way around the certainty in the woman’s voice.
Sara slowly shook her head. She couldn’t find a way. She could only feel devastated.
Tommi asked, “Are you that way, too?”
Sara looked up at Will again. She said, “Sometimes.”
Tommi blew out a long stream of smoke.
She inhaled again.
She said, “He told me it was my fault. That’s what I remember. That it was my fault.”
Sara’s mouth opened. She took a breath. “Did he tell you why?”
Tommi paused again to smoke, going through the deep inhale, the slow exhale. “He said that he saw me, and he wanted me, and he knew that I was too stuck up to give him the time of day, so he had to make me.”
Sara said, “Tommi, you know it’s not your fault.”
“Yeah, we need to stop asking rape victims what they did wrong and start asking men why they rape.”
There was a sing-song quality to her voice, as if she’d heard the mantra in a self-help group.
Sara said, “I know you can’t logic away that feeling. You’re always going to have moments when you blame yourself.”
“Is that what you do?”
“Sometimes,” Sara admitted. “But not all the time.”
“All the time is my time,” Tommi said. “All the fucking time.”
“Tommi—”
“He cried,” she said. “That’s what I remember most. He cried like a fucking baby. Like, down on his knees, just wailing and rocking himself like a little kid.”
Will felt the air leave his lungs. Sweat beaded up at the back of his neck.
Just yesterday, he had seen a man cry that same way.
On his knees. Rocking himself. Sobbing like a child.
Will had been standing in Gerald Caterino’s murder closet. The father’s
