Deserves to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

It was the least she deserved.

Usually nothing about the morgue got to Pescoli. She could deal with the sight of a dead body, blood, and organs, and the cooler temperature in the room hardly registered. The clinical aspect of it was a comfort, if anything, and the smell, though unpleasant, wasn’t a big deal. Even watching the pathologists work, examining and weighing organs while making notes on computers, was more interesting than troubling to her. She’d been there enough times, most often to collect the fingerprints off dead bodies. Nothing about the tiled room with its refrigerated coffin-like drawers, scales, stainless steel tables with sinks, or mutilated bodies really ever bothered her. She figured the dead were dead. Unfeeling.

It was her job to find out why, and if a crime had been committed, to bring the lowlife who’d perpetrated said crime to justice. Knowing the trauma a victim had gone through burrowed under her skin and increased her determination to nail the son of a bitch who’d committed the crime. Her emotions were often volatile, while her partner exuded a cool, almost icy detachment, but Pescoli wasn’t particularly sensitive to the nuances. She just did her job.

At the moment, her senses were all out of whack. The smell alone was awful, that dead, sickly-sweet odor seeming to cling to her nostrils as she viewed the dead body of their Jane Doe lying faceup, her skin a grayish tone, her hair pushed away from her face, her eyes wide open and seeming to stare straight up at the huge body lift suspended over her gurney. Also, Pescoli couldn’t help but let her gaze wander to the refrigerated drawers. Morbidly, she wondered if Dan Grayson’s body was lying within one.

Her lungs constricted for a moment, but she told herself there was no reason to speculate. Forcing her gaze back to the victim, she tried to concentrate on the case.

Obviously, Jane hadn’t been autopsied yet, no Y slice cut into her torso, no thin line sawed across her forehead and into her skull.

“I assume the autopsy has been scheduled?” asked Alvarez. She was standing at the side of the gurney. Her gaze had moved from the vic to the forensic pathologist who had pulled Jane from her resting spot in the refrigerated drawers lining one wall.

“Tomorrow, right after lunch.”

Pescoli’s already queasy stomach turned. “Ugh.”

Alvarez glanced up at her quickly, obviously wondering at the comment that just slipped out.

Dr. Esmeralda Kendrick didn’t even look up. She was one of those women who was all business. Somewhere in her early thirties, she could have been pretty, but made no effort, at least not for work. Pescoli appreciated that. Everything about Dr. Kendrick was professional. Her manner, her speech, her body language. As usual, her blondish hair was scraped back into a no-nonsense ponytail. She wore no makeup, not even a trace of lipstick, and her blue eyes, behind huge glasses, were serious. Though barely five-three, she managed to appear commanding. She wore scrubs, tennis shoes, a lab coat, and the air of someone who was very busy and d

idn’t like to be interrupted.

The little bit of a tattoo, a shamrock it seemed, peeked from beneath her ponytail, so Pescoli guessed that Dr. Kendrick might not be as straightlaced and cold away from the morgue as she was while doing her job. Maybe.

“You’ve got her personal effects?” Pescoli asked her.

She nodded. “Not much. Just her clothes that have been examined and are laid out and drying, and a pair of earrings. Look like diamonds. Could be cubic z. Not sure yet. Nothing else.”

Pescoli glanced down at the fingers. “Fingernail scrapings?”

“Done at the scene. And an officer came and took prints when the body was brought in,” Kendrick said, looking toward the door which led to an underground parking area where bodies could be brought in discreetly. Across the wide room and through another doorway was a hallway that led to a viewing area, waiting room. Farther along was the staff area, much like the lunchroom at the station.

In the sterile-looking examination room, the feel was decidedly different. An operating room without the intensity, as no anesthesia was being forced into lungs to keep the patient under during surgery, no anxious relatives relegated to a waiting area to hear the outcome of the procedures, no life being saved. No, the lives here had already been lost, sometimes violently.

Pescoli eyed the surroundings, computer monitors, metal cabinets for equipment, scales, and three long stainless steel tables equipped with faucets, hoses, and gutters, the kind that reminded her of working in the cannery as a youth, where the detritus from the berries on the belt merged with the water running in the gutter to unknown drains, or as the gossip mill insisted, was used in wine making. Sticks, bees, rotten fruit, even a snake once, were pushed into the ever present stream of water flushing out the berries to be canned and sold in markets across the country.

The difference was that in the morgue the gutters were primarily for blood.

Observing the dead usually wasn’t a big deal, just part of her job, until today, when the smell kept causing her stomach to roil uneasily and she’d had to fight to keep the nausea at bay.

“So what do we know about her?” Pescoli asked.

“We’ll X-ray the body, look for anything out of the ordinary in the results, of course. There’s not much in the form of distinguishing marks, other than a scar on her right forearm, probably from an accident when she was a kid, and a small tattoo of a flower—a daisy—on her ankle.

“She may have drowned,” Dr. Kendrick said, her eyebrows pulling together thoughtfully. “Again, we won’t be certain until we examine her lungs. There is a little bruising at her throat, but I can’t be certain that the hyoid was crushed. We do know that she wasn’t sexually assaulted, she wasn’t pregnant, and the only serious and outward sign of trauma is her ring finger, which was sliced off cleanly and neatly.”

Pescoli’s gaze went to the hand in question where the stump was visible, then, once more, she looked at the woman’s face. Serene in death. Who are you? she wondered. And what the hell happened ?

Chapter 8

Jessica adjusted the padding around her waist, hips, and torso and stared at her reflection in the mirror she’d purchased at a thrift shop and mounted on the bathroom door. The suit wasn’t comfortable, but necessary, she knew, hiding her otherwise slim frame. She’d already donned the dark contacts and wig, then eyed her reflection in the mirror. Not bad. She added a little more makeup, far more than she ever wore, changing the contour of her lips and eyes, then slid a mouthpiece over her natural teeth, changing her smile before pushing a pair of glasses onto the bridge of her nose. From a distance, the transformation would hide her identity. Close up, if anyone really knew her and was on to her disguises, she might not be able to get away with denying who she really was.

Hopefully, she wouldn’t have to; not until she talked to Cade and decided upon her next move. She struggled into her uniform, a gold-colored dress with a front zipper, gingham trim, and red piping, like something waitresses wore in a 1950s diner, something Nell Jaffe had decided would attract customers. Slowly, she was converting the bland interior of the diner into a copy of something straight out of American Graffiti, a movie she outwardly adored.

After locking the cabin, Jessica drove into town and kept one eye on the rearview mirror. So far, she thought she was safe. But she wasn’t going to let her guard down. She’d been in Grizzly Falls only a few days so she was still on pins and needles, fearing that, at any moment, she would run into him again, that he would find her. Her stomach twisted at the thought and her chest became tight, feelings she battled by breathing slowly and relaxing her muscles, even stretching her fingers rather than holding on to the steering wheel in a death grip.

The falling snow had abated and the plows had been at work, ruts being replaced by smooth roads where pavement was visible in some spots. Even the diner’s lot had been partially cleared. After parking in the rear of the restaurant, she grabbed her backpack and hurried inside where the furnace was working overtime and already the smells of warm coffee and sizzling bacon greeted her.