The Silent Widow

Nikki looked pained. Trey hung his head.

‘Sorry, Doc. I shouldn’t have said that. Not to you.’

‘Of course you can say it, Trey,’ Nikki said kindly. ‘You miss him. I miss him too. I don’t want you to feel Doug’s name is taboo. He’d have hated that.’

Later, after Trey had gone home, Nikki sat in her office alone for a long time, thinking.

She thought about Doug, and what he’d have made of all this.

She thought about Lisa, about the horror of her death.

She thought about the angry detective, Johnson: She was a whore, sleeping with someone else’s husband.

Nikki understood anger. Since Doug’s death, it had been her constant companion.

Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out the card that the other detective had given her. The civil one. Detective Lou Goodman.

Lou.

How long would it be, she wondered, before she heard from him again?

CHAPTER SIX

The Medical Examiner, Jenny Foyle, replaced the plastic sheeting covering Lisa Flannagan’s body and returned her attention to the two detectives. In her early fifties, with a short, unkempt bob of salt and pepper hair, a stocky frame and a make-up-free face, Jenny was no beauty. But she was smart, intuitive, waspishly funny and astonishingly skilled at her job.

‘So you’re saying only one of these stab wounds killed her?’ Mick Johnson asked.

‘The one to the heart. Yes,’ Jenny confirmed. ‘The others were all superficial. Designed to wound, to hurt, but never intended to kill.’

Lou Goodman raised a groomed eyebrow. ‘All eighty-eight of them?’

Jenny sighed. ‘I’m afraid so.’

Most people preferred Lou Goodman to his partner, probably because Lou was handsome and charming and, unlike Mick Johnson, rarely looked as if the thing he’d most like to do in the entire world was punch you in the face. But not Jenny Foyle. Detective Goodman’s charms were lost on her. A New York Irish girl herself, Jenny had always had a soft spot for Detective Johnson. True, he lacked charm and was no oil painting. But Jenny liked the big man’s permanently stained shirts, his gruff sense of humor and his take-no-prisoners directness. In a city that was all about style over substance, and a department in which political correctness had gone mad, the Medical Examiner had always found Mick to be a breath of fresh air.

‘So she was tortured?’ Mick asked her. ‘That’s basically what you’re saying?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m saying,’ said Jenny. ‘She was tortured. Incapacitated, probably through terror as much as from her physical injuries. Then she was moved. And at a later time, killed. Then she was moved again to the dumping site.’

All three of them paused for a moment to take in the plastic-covered shape that had once been Lisa Flannagan. A gorgeous young girl with her whole life ahead of her, reduced to a mutilated carcass.

Goodman broke the silence first. ‘And you’re confident of this timeline?’

‘I am.’

‘Because …?’

‘Because the rate of healing clearly shows the fatal wound occurred some hours after the first injuries. And because the levels of blood loss at the scene, although substantial, are incompatible with the victim having been stabbed in the heart there,’ Jenny answered matter-of-factly.

‘No sexual assault?’ asked Goodman.

Jenny shook her head. ‘Nope.’

‘And she didn’t fight back?’ Johnson asked quietly.

‘Well,’ Jenny peeled off her latex gloves, allowing herself a small smile. ‘At first I thought she didn’t fight at all. Terrified, as I said. But right at the end of my examination I found a tiny – and I mean tiny – sample of tissue under one of her fingernails.’

Johnson’s brow furrowed. ‘Why so tiny?’ he asked. ‘If she scratched him, fighting for her life, wouldn’t there be more?’