Sara paged through the rest of the photographs. One series captured hands and feet. Another series showed Shay’s open mouth.
Ostensibly, the sequence was meant to confirm a lack of blockage or obstruction to the windpipe, but Sara suspected the dentist had wanted to document the single, upper right quadrant wisdom tooth in the mouth of a thirty-five-year-old woman. It was unusual that only three other wisdom teeth had been removed. Normally, they were pulled in pairs or all at once.
She closed the jpegs.
Sara returned to Faith’s documentation in the main menu. She found Gerald Caterino’s notes on his phone calls with Shay’s parents, Larry and Aimee Van Dorne. The couple had divorced after Shay died. Neither had remarried. Gerald had talked to them separately, one after the other.
Larry reported nothing unusual in his daughter’s life, which wasn’t surprising. Sara had a very close relationship with her own father, but there were some things that she didn’t tell him because his inclination would be to immediately try to fix it.
According to Aimee, Shay had been driving a neighbor’s child to a birthday party when she’d realized that her comb was missing from her purse. First, she had chalked it up to sticky fingers in the teacher’s lounge, but the fact of its disappearance had clearly troubled her. Shay had confessed to her mother she’d been feeling strange recently, as if someone was watching her. First at the grocery store, then outside work, then once when she was running on the treadmill at the gym. The mother had passed it off—what woman didn’t occasionally get that sensation?—but after her daughter had died, Aimee’s mind had immediately returned to the conversation.
Sara made some notes: Found in woods. Suspected head injury (hammer?) Sexual mutilation (?) Ruled (staged as?) an accident. Missing comb. Possible stalking.
Both parents felt there was something unusual about their daughter’s death. Shay was athletic, but not a hiker. She seldom went into the woods. She had left her phone and purse in the trunk of her yellow Fiat 500. Larry admitted that Shay might have been depressed. Aimee disagreed. Their daughter was part of a large social circle, a soprano in the church choir. She had unfinished lesson plans on her desk at home. Her new boyfriend had been at a conference in Atlanta, an hour and a half away.
Sara checked the date of Gerald Caterino’s phone calls. Beckey’s father had waited exactly two weeks after the funeral to get in touch with them. Another three years had passed since then. Sara doubted that Larry and Aimee Van Dorne had moved on. It seemed impossible for any parent to truly recover from the death of a child.
She walked herself through the steps of requesting an exhumation. This was not a conversation she could job out to Amanda. Sara would be the one to cut open their daughter’s body. She would be the one to ask the parents for permission. The discussion would not be easy. There could be religious barriers, but the emotional ones would be even more powerful. Many people considered exhumation to be a desecration. Sara could not disagree. She could reduce herself to tears if she thought about Jeffrey being pulled from the earth.
Primarily, the Van Dornes would want to know what Sara expected to find. Sara wasn’t sure there was an easy way to answer them. Shay Van Dorne’s stomach contents would’ve been vacuumed out during embalming, so it was unlikely Sara would find blue Gatorade. A spinal cord puncture would be self-evident. There could still be signs of deliberate mutilation to her sex organs. During Alexandra McAllister’s autopsy, Sara had noted that the vaginal walls had been scraped with a sharp tool that had created striations in the tissue. Shay Van Dorne could evidence similar damage.
Sara looked up from her laptop.
Tommi Humphrey had been threatened with a knitting needle. They knew that the assailant learned from each attack. He had given up the hammer when he’d murdered Leslie Truong. Maybe he had found a different use for the knitting needle.
She looked back down at her notes.
Found in woods. Suspected head injury (hammer?) Sexual mutilation (?) Ruled (staged as?) an accident. Missing comb. Possible stalking.
The burial vault offered them the possibility of linking Shay to the other crimes. Sara had overseen exhumations before. Embalming was only meant to last a few weeks. The body rapidly decayed once it was in the ground. In some of the cases involving sealed internment, the body had looked as pristine as the day it had gone into the ground. Once, the only evidence that time had passed was a growth of mold on the upper lip.
Sara thought about Jeffrey again. There was no question that he had been brutally murdered. She had watched it happen with her own eyes. How would she feel if his cause of death had been undetermined?
She picked up her phone and texted Amanda—
I want to speak to the Van Dornes and give them as much information as possible, then let them decide how we proceed.
Amanda quickly texted back—
K.
Will schedule meeting ASAP.
Still need files from Brock.
What about Humphrey?
Sara put down her phone. She sat back in her chair. Procrastination was generally reserved for household chores, not work-related tasks. You couldn’t get through medical school by putting off all of the unpleasant things you had to do.
So why was Sara resorting to it now?
She opened the browser on her laptop and typed in Thomasina Tommi Jane Humphrey.
The girl was not on
