True, the attack at the storage facility could have just been a random crime and not connected. It seemed a fairly extreme coincidence, but those did happen sometimes. Also true, Whitaker could have not found anything either and his belief in her could be misplaced. The only thing Taylor knew for sure was he couldn’t give up until he found her, and they cleared her name.
Of course, that was easier said than done.
Taylor arrived back at his hotel and tried the numbers for Grace Sharp again. There was no answer at the office, so the secretary must have either gone home very early or taken a really late lunch. Although when you’re working for a consultant who wasn’t around, there probably wasn’t a lot to do. It occurred to Taylor that Sharp could be working out of some kind of office sharing location where all the tenants pooled their resources for a Secretary. He’d considered doing something like that when he was working for himself tracking people but never got around to it.
Since the home number also went unanswered, his only option now was to go by the addresses he had for her office and home and hope he could figure something out. He was just about to leave to do just that when his cell phone rang.
“Did you find a lead?” Taylor asked, recognizing the cell number Graf had called him from before.
“Maybe. I’m sorry, but it’s not good news. Some of our officers responded to a report of gunshots and an explosion just over an hour ago. Multiple bodies were found on the scene, including one that roughly matches Agent Whitaker’s description, although there’s enough ... damage that it’s hard to be sure. There was no identification on any of the bodies. I need you to meet me at the medical examiner’s office to see if the woman is Agent Whitaker.”
Taylor’s blood ran cold as he heard the news. While there was a chance it wasn’t her, the fact that Graf thought it might be was enough to send a wave of terror through him. He was out the door, thoughts of tracking down Grace Sharp gone as he rushed to the medical examiner’s office.
Chapter 7
The trip back to the medical examiners' office seemed to take a lot longer than it had just that morning. Taylor spent the entire time in the back of the cab alternately, fearing Whitaker was gone and denying it could be her.
When he arrived at the offices, he wanted to just push past the receptionist at the front and rush back to find Graf, but the security guard upfront would have probably stopped him. Dealing with that would have been enough of a headache that he opted to just sit and wait while she called back. After a few interminably long minutes, the doors to the back of the offices opened, and Graf came through.
“I just want to prepare you it isn’t going to be pretty. They’ve covered her face, since the damage makes it impossible to identify her, but the rest of the body is pretty bad.”
“I’ve seen bodies before,” Taylor said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Okay, I just wanted to prepare you.”
Graf lead him through the winding halls into a medical suite that smelled strongly of disinfectants. In the center of the room was a metal table with a body on top of it. Graf hadn’t been joking about the damage to the body.
As he’d said, the face was covered with a sheet. The woman was still wearing the remains of a light tan suit, and no autopsy had been conducted yet. There were some burns, but most of the damage was cuts and abrasions all along the body. Several missing fingers and the rest were damaged enough that prints were probably not an option. Taylor could see bits of metal sticking out of some of the cuts, which suggested a lot of the damage had been caused by shrapnel.
Taylor looked at the body hard. The suit wasn’t something he recognized that Whitaker wore, but it wasn’t that far off either and she could have bought it after they split. Even with the damage, it was clear the woman had been athletic, and the body seemed to roughly match Whitakers.
Something caught Taylor's eye, and he turned to the medical examiner who was standing off to one side.
“Can we lift up her leg and pull the pant leg up a bit, I think I see something on her right ankle?”
The ME came over and carefully rolled up the pants leg, clearly trying to not damage the skin before his autopsy. As soon as he exposed the skin on the ankle, exposing an area that had managed to go undamaged, Taylor saw what had caught his attention.
He felt a rush of relief paired with frustration as soon as he saw the small tattoo on the woman's ankle.
“That isn’t Whitaker. I’m pretty sure it’s a woman named Grace Sharp, who currently consults for your government.”
“Who? How do you know?”
“I just got a file on her earlier today. She’s roughly the same build as Whitaker with the same hair, but one of her distinguishing marks is a small butterfly tattoo on the back of her right ankle. Of course, that probably isn’t enough to identify the body, but she was helping Whitaker on her investigation before Frieda Wissler’s murder.”
“Can you send me her file?”
“I have to check with Joe Solomon, but I don’t think it will be a problem. It was limited, more informational than anything else. Since she contracted with you guys, you probably have more on
